Was Google right to fire this employee for questioning their diversity programs?

It’s not a matter of whether he was right or wrong (however that may be defined.

Unless he was under a specific employment contract or part of a union, he was likely an employee at will — and can be bounced for almost any reason.

According to the California Labor Code, California is an at-will employment state. Under the at-will presumption, a California employer, absent an agreement or statutory or public policy exception to the contrary, may terminate an employee for any reason at any time.

They don’t need a cause and don’t to explain a termination.

Personally, I think companies should be required to respect the right to free speech.
So, no, I think Google was wrong to fire the cunt.
Just like other companies were wrong to fire employees because they voted for Obama.

I do not think that what this guy had to say was as terrible as the media soundbytes are making it out to be, but he caused a PR nightmare for the company and probably made a lot of his coworkers feel unwelcome with this memo – so yes, I think firing him was the right call.

You should check out my question about this guy too – I would value your input there.

How about folks just focus on work when at work and keep their personal and political diatribes to themselves?

Hell yes. This jerk needed to be axed.

He made the brand look bad. Terms of employment often state that if an employee makes the brand look bad, they can be reasonably terminated.

I think he was on point about the political culture and actually respectfull about it. It was an internal memo. This pissed me off enough that I dumped all of my Google shares today.

No, I do not think he should have been fired but that’s the risk you take when you’re a cog in the corporate wheel. The squeaky wheel gets greased. I’m pretty damn liberal but the liberal far left is annoying as fuck.

What he did was not merely question their diversity programs. He could have easily just gone to HR with his complaints. Instead he decided to circulate throughout the company a long document claiming that some of his coworkers don’t deserve to work with him, and reinforcing dated gender stereotypes that are actively harmful to women.

I think he brought up some interesting points that are worthy of discussion and I’m sad to see that the discussion is being squelched in favor of just getting up in arms about what he said. But if he didn’t want to piss people off and make women feel unwelcome at Google, there are a lot of more diplomatic ways he could have gone about this.

They should be allowed to hire whom they want. They should be allowed to fire whom they want.
By the way, the observation about males having a higher drive for status is objectively correct. It is true across the primate spectrum and all the legislation/ social politics is on earth won’t change that.

I am so confused. This is the first I heard of this. I don’t understand why this guy wrote this long essay.

He was pointing out how the political climate was toxic and what to do about it. He should have been promoted and not fired. He actually gave a shit beyond the standard 9–5. I did not read anything that “reinforced negative gender stereotypes”

Can’t wait to see this tomorrow on.my desktop so I can read it.

From the admittedly quick scan that I gave to the thing it seems that the key is on the 6th and 7th pages where he discusses “the harm” of Google’s biases.

On that basis, if he’s factually correct – which I have not the means, patience or inclination to research – then he’s bringing up a topic that should be discussed within the company. And if he was fired for that reason, that is, because he made those biases public (as if anyone didn’t know!) and discussed dirty laundry in public, then that was a bad move on the part of management. By firing him they emphasize and double down on the bias, and expose their weakness.

I think that in the context of corporate policies and management strategy everything should be open to question – but maybe not in public. It may be the fact that this went public that caused management to fire the author. By itself there seems to be nothing offensive, derogatory or badly intended.
——
Oh, and to correct one statement that @Tropical_Willie made about at-will firing: No company can fire “for any reason at all”. There are still reasons which, if given, can be grounds for a lawsuit in employment discrimination. For example, Google certainly can’t fire a person for sexual orientation, race, gender, marital status, ethnicity or religion. So it’s incorrect to say “for any reason at all”, but it would be fine to say “for no particular reason” or “for reasons which are not obvious – as long as they are not illegally discriminatory”.

A simple statement would be forgivable but a 3000 word rant isn’t.

Yes, kick the douche to the curb.

I think it was a mistake to fire the man, and the smart move would be to bring the guy back with the understanding that it would now be a top prority of the company to prove through its actions the fallacy of the guy’s argument. Were it my decision, I would announce the implementation of a multi mlillion dollar scholarship fund for eligible girls and women and name the program for the guy who wrote and circulated the paper.

Google’s reaction will surely be criticized for what it is, the pussy expedient toward placating women. This man effectively threw down the gauntlet, and rather than tossing him out the door, Google missed the PR bonanza in the opportunity to tell him “this is bullshit and we’re gonna prove it. And we will take great comfort in anticipation of the fact that you might be here and compelled to witness it”.

Maybe you missed the part where he called women neurotic.

Well…many studies have shown women ARE more neurotic, or maybe they just show it more than many males because they tend to talk more about their fears, anxieties and worries. There simply ARE many differences between men and women, physically, emotionally, and in how their brains process information and in brain structure/chemistry itself. Like it or not, science is science.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/201402/brain-differences-between-genders

I don’t like the idea of firing someone for merely expressing their point of view. At the same time, I’m not sure that’s the whole of why he was fired. The way he went about expressing his views and the negative publicity it caused the company come into play as well. I guess in other words, I agree with @Mariah‘s perspective, and she worded it better than I could.

I also am not sure I believe the author’s claim that this document was intended to inspire an honest, intellectual inquiry into difficult but socially significant questions. It seems more like a bunch of different ideas shoved hastily together under several broad topics, so that they might seem individually heavier because of their combined weight. No topic is well supported or developed, and each topic is distraction for the others. Taken individually, presented in deliberate, thoughtful ways, I think each topic might bring about meaningful, critical discussions. But they’re all quite meaty on their own, and the way they’re tangled together, the memo doesn’t lend itself such discussions because it isn’t one itself.

… Of course, bad writing also isn’t a reason for firing (at least, for his job). I just have a hard time believing the document’s stated purpose. From my very removed perspective, it seems more like a disgruntled employee trying to show that he’s somehow better than the company or the company’s cultural norms. I dunno. I guess this is what I get for having worked in a college writing center. Maybe now I just have an overinflated sense of my own editing abilities.

I guess in short… I don’t think a company is “right” for firing an employee merely for questioning policies, even though they may be legally entitled to do so… I’m also all for challenging social norms, knowing that “rocking the boat,” whatever the boat, comes with some amount of risk—for better or worse.

But I do think presentation matters, and given the way the author apparently presented his grievances, I don’t feel especially sympathetic.

(I did have a draft of this where I go into an example of the “bad writing” I think I see, but it seemed tedious and off the point of the question. I just feel weird leaving an unsupported critique of the memo, hence this little blurb trying to explain it away.)

Not sure if you folks have dealt with this shit in the tech sector of “BROS”.. What was once Woz in a garage is now frat boys that can cobble together some jQuery from a stack site.

It is very much a extension of a frat at a lot of these companies.

This is something that is happening daily and reported on but since it is google the media cares instead of it being a few blog posts.

Browse Hacker News and you will see that it is these uppity women that are destroying the white male power structure. Oh and it is your fault you won’t fuck the losers so they whine on /r/redpill.

You have asked two questions, which I will attempt to answer separately.

1. Was this guy in the wrong?

By this, I take it you are asking whether or not the memo is accurate and/or well reasoned. And the answer is: “no, it is not.” The problems start right from the beginning when Damore confuses principles and positions with biases. “Compassion for the weak” is not a bias. Neither is “respect for the strong/authority.” These are principles or values. Similarly, neither “disparities are due to injustices” nor “disparities are natural and just” are biases. They are claims that people take on as positions or viewpoints.

The next section is also poorly reasoned. As has been repeatedly hashed out in the professional philosophical literature in the areas of moral and political philosophy, that something is universal in no way entails that it is not socially constructed. Laws are socially constructed, yet there are laws found in every extant human culture. Social constructions can become universal in a variety of ways, including mere age. New cultures come from old cultures, and societies rarely form themselves without any reference to the past.

Now, Damore correctly notes that facts about groups do not tell us anything about particular individuals within that group, but he fails to take heed of his own warning when he goes on to base his arguments on the wrong comparison class. “Men” and “women” are not the relevant groups here. “Men in tech” and “women in tech” are. Whether or not women are more extroverted (or whatever) than men in the aggregate is irrelevant if women in tech are no more extroverted (or whatever) than men in tech.

So even if we accept Damore’s outdated essentialism—something we have no reason to do—his argument fails on its own terms. We don’t even have to assess his putative facts to recognize that his argument is bad. This isn’t to dismiss @Mariah‘s point that some of his concerns might nevertheless be well worth considering. That an argument is bad does not entail that its conclusion is false, and it certainly does not entail that the issue is not worth investigating. But what Damore has written is simply not persuasive to the rational mind.

2. Was Google appropriate in firing him for this memo?

First, let us note that “appropriate” is not the same thing as “right.” That is, we can think that it was appropriate for Google to fire him without thinking that it would have been wrong not to fire him. Second, let us remember that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. But in any case, Damore was not fired simply for holding or expressing a particular set of views. Other employees expressed their support for several of his conclusions on the same forum for which this memo was originally written, and none of them were fired.

Damore was fired for violating Google’s code of conduct. Because like it or not, how you say something matters—both in corporate culture and the world at large. It’s one thing to say “maybe there are biological reasons for why Google does not employ equal numbers of women as men.” It’s another to say “here are facts about women that make them less qualified for employment at Google.” Unfortunately, Damore is much closer to the latter than the former. Sure, he qualifies some of what he says in important ways. But he then ignores his own qualifications while proceeding with his argument. Not only is that bad argumentative writing, it happens in this case to be a violation of company policy.

Interestingly, a former Google engineer made a similar point in a different way here. Zunger’s argument in point (2) of his essay is more or less that Damore proved himself unqualified for his job in writing this memo by revealing that he does not share Google’s vision of what engineering is. You can apply for a coaching job with the New York Yankees, but you can’t be surprised that they don’t hire you if you tell them your approach to the game is to make sure the Boston Red Sox win as many games as possible.

(Zunger makes his claim in broader terms than this, which is a problem with his own essay. But his perspective on the matter is still worth taking into account.)

@Mariah That charge of women being neurotic is always tossed up in defense of gender imbalance regardless of the setting or workplace. Fireman or fighter pilot, it’s the tired horse trotted first out of the barn every time, and to dwell on it merely gives the impression that the author was fired for lack of elegance in his presentation. As I said, I believe it’s a mistake to fix on whether Google had the right to fire the man. He was fired because that was deemed the quick and simple solution to a burgeoning public relations nightmare. But as a solution, it is about as sophisticated as the writing responsible for it. Going after the author for whatever reason merely grants the guy heroic status as martyr to “the cause” and deflects but briefly from the real issue——the validity of his argument.

I gotta wonder if that essay was written for a school project and brought back to life later. It’s an insane amount of work for a commentary on the diversity program.

Does anyone know what specifically caused him to write such a thing?

Diversity programs where employees go through training and exercises usually are CYA more than anything, in case there is a lawsuit, and probably also hoping to teach a little something too, and improve corporate culture. Diversity at the ivory tower level is evaluated by HR to make sure things are shaking out in a just way. They look at stats regarding minority pay, position, etc, and try to ensure a group isn’t being treated unfairly.

Back to the CYA, employees are supposed to participate, and then go back to their jobs, and be nice to everyone regardless of race, religion, or ethnic background. That’s it. Managers are to be cognizant of biases to hopefully overcome them.

Or, maybe I am completely missing something. Did this employee work in HR?

I don’t think I would say the employee deserved to be fired, but it’s not surprising, and it’s not something I’d say the employee can say was wrongful. It sucks that voicing an opinion can get you fired, but simply it can.

Memos like this are actually not uncommon in larger companies where it is encouraged to suggest ways to improve performance and corporate culture. @Mariah I did not miss where he called women neurotic, I did not agree with that either. Men are pretty neurotic too and I think we show it less for cultural reasons. I have however not read any studies that show this either way. Regardless he was wrong to bring it up, it’s divisive. I also found the memo to be a little unsophisticated but… the point was valid. Reality should not be ignored in corporate culture and policy. He did not argue to “keep women out” but rather to accept that on the whole Google will be populated by people with the drive and interest in working there and that it will favor certain demographics. The discussion should turn to why this is the case instead of trying to force a square peg into a round hole which is the gist of many diversity programs.

Diversity programs are less about forcing a square peg into a round hole and more about trying to introduce square pegs to the concept of holes, since they’ve historically been excluded from them and it might not have ever even occurred to them that going into a hole was something they could do. We don’t even know if the pegs are actually naturally square, or if they’ve just been carved that way in generations past, and we’re not gonna find out until we give them a chance to check out holes and see what they’re like. Banning square-peg-only hole tours, as this guy wants, would actively harm the ability for this to happen. Square-peg-only hole tours also don’t seem harmful to me given that there are already plenty of hole tours that are open to both square and round pegs.

That analogy might’ve gotten away from me….anyway….

The whole idea that “women in general are naturally less suited for programming than men in general” is not fact! There’s no way to prove it, because there is no such thing as a social vacuum – we cannot get rid of this uncontrolled variable!

Furthermore, it’s actively harmful to perpetuate it as an idea. There’s a phenomenon called “stereotype threat” in which people tend to perform worse at tasks when you remind them that according to stereotypes, they ought to be bad at that task. For example, if you hand a math exam out to two groups of women, and to one of the groups you make a joke right before about how “girls can’t do math,” the women who were in the group that heard the joke perform significantly worse than the women who didn’t.

Anyway, guy’s gonna sue Google now, if that makes you happy: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/9/16117616/google-engineer-diversity-memo-files-complaint-damore

As an antidote to the “bro” mentality @johnpowell speaks of, I’d like to share this camp my good friend started and runs.

Progress is made one death at a time.

@cookieman is right. Would I have fired him? No. Would I have talked to him about towing the line on the company’s diversity policies if he wished to continue working there? Yes.

He is entitled to his own opinions but not to publish them invoking the company’s name.

I don’t think he is really calling out the programming ability of Women, just the desire to do so. No amount of corporate policy is going to change that outside of special incentives and accomodations.

Socialization affects what people grow up to enjoy, not just what they grow up to be good at.

What bearing does socialization have on corporate culture outside of open hiring practices. That works the other way too so why don’t we see special programs to get males into female dominated fields like nursing?

@ARE_you_kidding_me There are special programs to get males into nursing.

My point was that it is also not a fact to claim that women naturally, biologically don’t enjoy programming just as it’s not a fact to claim that women naturally, biologically aren’t good at programming.

No, but it is a fact that Innate temperament and personality is the most critical factor IMO. A free spirited, artistic person that requires creative space, flexibility and freedom to explore and work unfettered by protocol is not going to enjoy the mundane task work involved in being an accountant. Socialization does play a role, no doubt, but nature is stronger. The real question is how many people, in general, are in fields that are not a good fit for them because of the lure of lucrative earnings opposed to natural inclination and ability?

A whole helluva a lot, no doubt, of both genders.

@Coloma Prove that women are more likely to naturally be “free-spirited, artistic people” and that they aren’t just that way because of the societies they’re raised in, please, before calling it fact.

Ok, why the massive disparity between gender in certain professions and not others? Why the need for special programs and incentives? Why do we get a more even spread in other fields like accounting, culinary or psychology? It’s as if nobody is even willing to even entertain trends of natural desire in doing certain tasks.

It can come down to something as stupid as computing toys being marketed towards boys.

@Mariah I didn’t say ” women”, I said that IMO, innate personalty style and interests related to individual interest is the biggest predisposing factor for both genders. An outdoorsey type is not going to find reward at a desk job, be that make or female. I am saying that everyone of each gender has natural inclinations, strengths and weaknesses and I don’t believe we can claim it is all about bias.

Yes, of course personality affects interests. But that doesn’t matter in this debate unless we are implying that women are more likely than men to have an innate personality that doesn’t lend itself to programming.

What if that is the case though. I don’t think it is for coding either but for other aspects of what we choose for work? Without even considering that as a possibility how will we ever find out the truth?

Without getting women try programming how will we find out whether they enjoy it and are good at it?

I don’t agree with the idea that we need to silence this guy and his ideas and that they shouldn’t be up for discussion, but I strongly disagree with his premise that encouraging women to try tech is a misguided or discriminatory effort.

Who said anything about that? Nothing wrong with encouraging women, we are talking about a toxic PC culture where ideas and suggestions that don’t fit the narrative are met with open hostility. This is not actually about gender differences. It’s about the inability to even have a conversation discussing the possibility of it.

My point is that we won’t find out the “truth” about whether women are differently suited for employment in programming, as you questioned, unless we give them a try in the field.

I’m getting tired. Someone else can take up the helm for me for awhile, please. I have code to write. Maybe women underperform in coding jobs because they spend their working hours defending their abilities to people who don’t believe they can do their jobs.

Who the fuck said they underperform? They don’t.

Bottom line, women are perfectly capable of choosing what career fields they want, who says anyone, HAS to be exposed to something and forced to try it if they don’t have a natural interest? Maybe SOME women under perform because they don’t like their jobs and would rather be doing something else? That’s a pretty common factor for a lot of people that hate their jobs. Hard to be motivated when you don’t like what you’re doing.

I’m a woman that hates math and hates being confined in an office environment. Has nothing to do with not being exposed, and everything to do with not being interested. Sure, maybe I could become a math whiz if I really applied myself but I am not interested and I don’t want to, anymore than I want to become an accountant or a mechanic. It’s not about exposure, it’s about ones natural inclinations and to force men or women into fields they are not interested in to ramp up gender numbers is ridiculous.

How do you develop a natural interest in something without ever being exposed to it? Nobody’s talking about forcing women into CS. We’re trying to make it available to them as an option.

Fuck me, I need to step out of this for real.

@ARE_you_kidding_me No one is saying that we cannot consider the possibility that biological factors are responsible (or partially responsible) for the gender ratios of various professions. But here’s an idea: remove all of the various social barriers first and see what happens. After all, it’s something we should be doing anyway.

“Who said anything about that?”

Damore did.

“Who the fuck said they underperform?”

Arguably, there is a subtext to Damore’s memo that implies this. While he did not explicitly say as much, he said it in the context of an industry where the same claims he is using to support a conclusion about gender ratios are used to support conclusions about women in tech more generally. Furthermore, the general logical sloppiness of the memo allows for this reading to be drawn from it (since the same fallacy that leads him to his explicit conclusion could be used to draw this implicit conclusion from the same premises).

But @Mariah may have been responding to something else entirely, whether it be a general impression in the air or the results of implicit bias. And there’s always the trolls, of course.

@Coloma “who says anyone, HAS to be exposed to something and forced to try it if they don’t have a natural interest?”

Literally no one, so this seems to be a straw man. Or maybe you just didn’t understand what @Mariah was saying? Nothing about “hey, ladies, did you know this was an option for you?” constitutes forcing someone into the field. If you think that merely telling someone about the tech field and letting them know that they could potentially have a career in it is an objectionable level of intrusion, you need to recalibrate your sensitivity sensors.

It is an option, has been for a very long time. There has been active encouragement, yet we see low numbers. The question should be “why” and not “how do we fix this” figure out “why” and then see if it even needs fixing. I certainly did not read any subtext that suggests women are inferior programmers. To get that out of the memo you either need to either believe it or believe that a majority of others believe it as well. Either way it’s a sign of insecurity on the part of the reader. I’ll give you that damore was sloppy and sophmoric in his memo but since he was actually fired and not simply brushed off is a sign of a toxic culture where you should fear speaking up. This is very bad, often systemic and is not something I expected from a company like Google. If they just wanted him gone for other reasons this was a chicken shit way to get rid of him.

Do me a favor AYKM and look at the picture at the top of this link that I posted earlier: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

Women’s participation in CS was rising at a rate congruent with many other fields until the 80’s. What do you think happened then? Did women who have naturally logical personalities stop being born?

Yes, it has always been an option, but women have not been guided in that direction.

Could it simply be that the field itself has grown more lucrative, demanding and competitive? Is this not attractive to men who are chasing status? Why must it be that women were “steered away from it” Why the hostility for even suggesting that could be a possibility

Then perhaps we should work on the social problem that men are socialized to feel that their value and self-worth is tied to their status. Addressing these sorts of gender inequalities is at the core of feminism.

Chalking up inequalities to unavoidable biology is just an excuse not to address them.

@Mariah and @SavoirFaire Okay…let me re-phrase that. I think girls ARE exposed to the mindset that they can do anything they so choose or set their mind to and has this has been pretty mainstream for decades now. I knew this as a kid in the 60’s, was encouraged to pursue whatever interested me. My natural interests were in the arts and animal sciences, veterinary medicine. I think it’s diminishing to claim that girls/women are not already, very aware, they have multiple choices and as to why there are not more women in tech, well..I still believe it has much more to do with lack of interest than conditioning or lack of exposure.

As to why the numbers have fallen since the 80’s, well, that’s anyones guess, but may very well be due to what @ARE you kidding me mentions. I have never been interested in highly competitive fields, having to forcefully market myself, many are not, male or female.
Again, temperament and individual interest is key, much more so than exposure or sexism IMO. Why don’t we see more male pre-school teachers and men working in flower shops, dress shops, and men working as wedding coordinators, is it lack or exposure, sexism or individual interest and choice?

@Coloma
What sort of toys did you have?

Yes, I was certainly told that I could do anything I wanted, growing up. But I was hardly even aware of the existence of computer science as a field until late in high school, by which time, many of my male peers had already been programming for 5 years. I felt WAY behind when I started the program in college, and nearly dropped out of it because of those feelings of inadequacy. These feelings persist even now into my career as a software engineer.

If you read on in the article that had that graph, they will explain that personal computers came out in the ‘80’s, around the time that the line on the graph started to decline, and were marketed towards men and boys. Correlation does not prove causation but it’s a possibility.

Why don’t more men work in flower shops and dress shops? Don’t you think the social stigma surrounding men being interested in “girly things” like flowers and dresses is pretty strong? Might that be a factor? Do you think men are biologically programmed not to like the color pink?

Aren’t law and medicine also competitive, high-status fields? The graph @Mariah linked to includes those occupations [edit: majors] as well. According to the graph, the number of women majoring in those fields continued to climb as representation in computer science dropped, and both are much closer to 50/50 representation today.

“Addressing these sorts of gender inequalities is at the core of feminism.”

Feminism is not addressing this though, at least not when it comes to men. It’s an aimless, sometimes toxic movement without structure at the moment. It claims egalitarianism but it is often one sided.

Chalking up inequalities to unavoidable biology is just an excuse not to address them “chalking it up to biology” is not the deal, it is again the inability to even suggest this could be part of the equation.

@ragingloli My favorite toys were model horses and art supplies. My daughter, as well, was never into baby dolls, and was into and exposed to art, nature and science. She chose a career in the medical field but her true calling is as an artist, but art doesnt pay the bills.Hher bf is in tech.

@Mariah I was and remain an unconventional female and am an NT personality. Not all logical NT types are going to go for tech work. The extroverted NT version, myself, are much more likely to be involved in the arts, entertainment, and entreprenurial pursuits.We are the inventors and the introverted NTs are more likely to be fund in systems/data analysis, mechanical and software engineers, mathematicians and career scientists, but, there is no, perfect, one size fits all.

All NTs are natural analyzers regardless of profession.
Feminism is about CHOICE, and a woman can choose whatever she so desires, be that technology or the more traditional path of being a mom. @ARE_you_kidding_me Yep, agreed, the inability to even suggest that there are some hardwired differences between the sexes, like it or not.

@Coloma, I think you misunderstand my position. I agree feminism is about choice and that there is no shame in choosing any particular life path. In order to choose programming, though, women have to be aware of programming. I believe, and people who run diversity initiatives believe, that more women would be choosing programming if more women were aware of or tried programming. We try to increase awareness by running events such as women’s programming classes. That’s it. I’m not trying to force anyone into being a programmer.

I think what bothers me the most about this is the fact that STEM is seen as the be-all end-all, the highest achievable field, the pinnacle, the summit, what alone represents how far feminism has come. Those of us in the non-STEM fields continue to be ignored.

Anyway, I’ve been reading this thread so I’m not going to just repeat what all others have said. I don’t at all disagree with Damore’s suggestion that those with conservative views should not be shunned or excluded, nor with the idea that there are prevailing politics at tech companies that allow for this exclusion to occur (I don’t work in tech, clearly, but I know many people who do, and live with a Yelp employee and a former Google employee, so I’m privy to a lot of it). I also don’t object to the idea that a lack of women in STEM may not be due only to sexism and oppressive structures, but also potentially due to innate differences that preclude some women from joining STEM fields.

So yes, it’s worth it to have the conversation, which means that we may discover discriminatory structures that need to be eradicated and/or we may discover innate differences that can’t be eliminated. But certainly we should not exclude anyone who is capable of doing the work well, whether woman or man. So assuming that woman will be more neurotic and thus less capable is wrong. Let anyone who is qualified attempt the work—let those who don’t succeed move onto something else. But don’t exclude based on gender or other immutable characteristics. Avoid discrimination in hiring, but ultimately find the right person for the right job. If that results in skewed gender representation, so be it. I feel the same about the political views: don’t exclude conservatives, but if it so happens that there are more liberals at tech companies, so be it.

@Mariah I get it, but my point is, I think girls are aware that computer programming is an option. Maybe not so much a couple decades ago but for the last several, absolutely. I also knew someone, a male, that was working in computer programming in the late 1970’s way before it became a more well known profession, so not a new field by any means.

@DominicY Well said, I concur.

@DominicY I also concur.
Allowing the very institutions that are responsible for keeping society open and rational to become toxic is a monumental failure.

@Coloma, most girls are aware that computer programming is a career that exists. Do they know what it is? Do they have any idea what the process of writing a computer program is like? Is their impression of it just what they see in the movies: teenage hacker boy sitting alone in a dark room (which is nothing what the job is actually like)? Will that impression ever change if they aren’t introduced to it in a more practical way: a class, a role model?

Is there ANY harm that comes from trying to increase awareness? Why is it wrong to go to a little extra effort to introduce women to a field they’ve historically been excluded from?

@Mariah Nothing wrong with that at all but not any more or less important than introducing a girl to the prospect of medicine or aeronautics or Physics or any other, traditionally, male dominated professions and vice versa.
Our female ranch vet here brings her little boy along on some of her calls, he watched his mom castrate our calf here last week. A female large animal vet is still not as mainstream as a male, neither are female mechanics, race car drivers and a multitude of other professions. Stay at home dads are still not fully supported either.

Point is, pick your poison, there’s plenty to go around. My take is to focus on your own choices and stop shouldering the inequities of the world. Nobody has ever succeeded at that yet. Focus on all the progress that has been made instead of the small percentage of non-progress still at large.

Well, I tried to read it all, but it wasn’t that tight. It seemed rather rambling and repeating to me.
I’ll take @Mariah‘s word that it was circulated throughout the company instead of being sent to only those who might seriously consider it, be it HR or upper management. That was the wrong thing to do. I think he confused his job with Facebook. He even commented on the number of “likes” he has received on his ideas from anonymous people!

This one paragraph seemed to completely overturn everything he was saying. He spoke at length about the biological differences in temperaments between men and women, and yet in this one paragraph he says if men are allowed to be more “feminine” they’ll runnoft to do jobs usually done by women. According to his rant, biologically “men” don’t want to do jobs usually done by women.

And I notice the absence of a clear paragraph that states the same thing about women only in reverse.

He should have run it by someone else before he just unloaded. I would view it as bad judgement, and grounds for termination.

He tried to red-pill Google. But Google chose the blue pill. :(

I agreed and disagreed with parts of what he had written.

The title seemed rather provocative—corporations hate being criticised at the best of time, despite any pretence of wanting feedback.

The topic he tackled is a complicated and difficult one without any obvious academic consensus—yet he clearly took a side, and was unjustifiably assertive with some of his claims.

The appeal to moderation also bothered me. The truth isn’t some balance of liberalism and conservatism. That came across as a very politically parochial view.

I think the biggest problem with firing him is that he’ll now become a cause célèbre of certain political elements. The move may even have been calculated by him, and perhaps he felt he could make a lucrative career change by being fired for this.

Well..anyone that sells their soul to the corporate world gets what they deserve. LOL

Yes, firing him was an appropriate response. The purpose of these diversity initiatives is to get the EEOC off their backs. It isn’t to actually make the place more diverse. Corporations like Google employ extreme pipeline hiring tactics, targeting a very small number of schools, eschewing bright and talented candidates solely because of where they are, or were, enrolled. They already hire from established networks for their best, most high-potential jobs.

This practice is occasionally noticed by the EEOC and a corporation like Google gets the EEOC off their backs by creating a diversity quota. Google fulfilled their diversity quota 5 years ago by hiring minority and female candidates to fill their low potential, low-pay jobs. Naturaly, currently more than 60 women mull class-action lawsuit against Google over sexism and low pay. Only after they fulfilled the quota, they started the diversity initiative and began publically sharing their annual EEO-reports. Notice Google’s annual EEO-Report hasn’t changed since the initative began 5 years ago. Token employees are put in the non-tech line of work.

James Damore completely missed the real purpose of the initiative and created an unnecessary PR nightmare. A nightmare Google did everything to prevent from happening. Firing him is a light response in comparison to what he did to Google.

I don’t know about that @kenwor. Has there been follow up by the EEO in response to it? He didn’t mention any specifics.

@kenwor That’s an interesting take, and I find your argument compelling.

@Dutchess_III Don’t expect much from the EEOC. EEOC’s reasonable cause rate is a rarity.

@Kropotkin Thanks.

I don’t expect a single thing from them.

“The question should be ‘why’ and not ‘how do we fix this’. Figure out ‘why’ and then see if it even needs fixing.”

This only makes sense if we accept Damore’s framing of the issue, which I’m not convinced we should do. On his framing, Google assumes that gender gaps are problems in and of themselves and that outreach programs are designed to close them regardless of what their explanations are. But in discussing this question with a friend of mine who works at Google, he says this is a mistake. Google’s view (insofar as a corporation can have a view) is that there are social barriers preventing more women from pursuing a career in tech, and the purpose of their outreach programs is to lessen and overcome those barriers.

Now, there could be a whole separate discussion about whether these barriers really exist. But if someone is of the opinion that they do, it makes sense for them to say “let’s remove these barriers, and only then can we say that whatever remaining gaps exist are not causes for concern.” Note that this means that Google can actually divorce the question of gender gaps from policy. For them, it would be perfectly reasonable to frame this in terms of “eliminating known problems (which may or may not eliminate gender gaps, but would make it harder to argue that any remaining gender gaps are objectionable).”

“I certainly did not read any subtext that suggests women are inferior programmers.”

Neither did I. Then again, neither of us are exactly in the ideal dialectical position to notice it.

“To get that out of the memo you either need to either believe it or believe that a majority of others believe it as well. Either way it’s a sign of insecurity on the part of the reader.”

This strikes me as a rather weak rhetorical move. It would be just as easy to argue that not seeing the subtext is evidence that we are too biased or privileged to recognize that it is there. It might even be easier to argue this way, in fact, given that there’s a whole lot of evidence that people tend to do exactly that (see, for instance, the excellent book Strangers to Ourselves, which summarizes some of the more important aspects of what we know on this subject).

“I’ll give you that damore was sloppy and sophmoric in his memo”

Great, so we agree on the answer to at least one of your questions.

“but since he was actually fired and not simply brushed off is a sign of a toxic culture where you should fear speaking up.”

In light of the fact that other Google employees have expressed similar opinions in different ways or have been explicit about their support for Damore’s general point of view, this strikes me as a rather large non sequitur. Given the information we have, it appears that merely speaking up is not what got Damore fired.

“Could it simply be that the field itself has grown more lucrative, demanding and competitive? Is this not attractive to men who are chasing status?”

Is it not also attractive to women—or anyone else—chasing money? Or a challenge? Status isn’t the only reason someone might want a lucrative, demanding, and competitive job.

“Why must it be that women were ‘steered away from it’?”

No one has said that it must be—at least not in any deductive sense. The most I’ve seen is an assertion that many women have in fact experienced being steered away from the field. So it’s a mistake to think of this in terms of “people see a gender gap and conclude that women must be getting steered away from tech.” It’s more like some asks “hey, why is there a gender gap” and a bunch of women say “um, one possible reason is that a lot of us have been steered away during our lifetimes.” I have watched women get steered away from jobs in tech. This is a thing that actually happens. I don’t need to deduce what I know from experience.

“Why the hostility for even suggesting that could be a possibility?”

I don’t think there’s been any hostility here. If you’re talking about somewhere else on the internet, I can’t help you there. Flame wars can erupt over anything.

“Feminism is not addressing this though, at least not when it comes to men.”

Feminism has been addressing men’s issues since its inception. Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men before she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Lucy Stone, a leading suffragette and abolitionist, continued to support the Fifteenth Amendment (which gave the vote to black men, but not to women) even when it became apparent that women were going to be left behind in the aftermath of its passage. When Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton established their newspaper, they affirmed the importance of men’s rights in their motto and devoted sections to men’s issues. The National Organization of Women advocated for including women in the draft decades before it became a staple issue of MRA trolls. Feminist websites routinely cover men’s issues (including issues like male sex abuse or harmful stereotypes about men). Just because you aren’t aware of something (and choose to focus on what 13 year olds write on Tumblr as opposed to what leading feminist scholars write in political and philosophical journals) doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

@Coloma “I think girls ARE exposed to the mindset that they can do anything they so choose or set their mind to and has this has been pretty mainstream for decades now.”

Sure, but specific tends to override general. The general idea that women can do anything has been around for a long time. But that idea only goes so far if you have people in front of you saying “well, except for that.” Being aware that tech exists as a job opportunity generally is not the same as being confident that it is a job opportunity for them specifically. My high school girlfriend is now an engineer, but she was opposed every step of the way. Her guidance counselor told her she didn’t have much chance of getting into a top engineering program. Her classmates suggested she was just there to find a smart guy to marry. Her professors told her to specialize in something that didn’t require as much math. She new it was an option, received the support of an outreach program, and was still actively discouraged by many of the people around her. That takes a toll regardless of her ability to fight through it all.

@DominicY I also concur with what you wrote. But I must point out that it doesn’t really address any of the things that have proved controversial in this discussion. Other than your small text—which I am obviously going to agree with—you’ve basically just enumerated the elements of Damore’s memo that we haven’t been debating.

An nteresting perspective, from this

“Maybe you should get fired for being bad at data analysis, not for having an unpopular view.

There are a lot of things that one could say in response to the Google memo. My chosen response will be to point out that the author fails to assess data correctly, fails to ask clarifying questions of his data, and fails to seek the correct data to answer the underlying question at hand. In an organization that thrives on evidence-based decision-making, those flaws in reasoning alone are enough to fire someone. Not for the reasons Google cited (being offensive or voicing an unpopular view) but because he clearly does not have the basic skills required to objectively and critically assess the data that he is presented with when trying to solve a problem.

For example, one can observe that fewer women are in high-powered roles that require long hours because they report that they prefer more work-life balance. But in the absence of a citation on the growing body of evidence that work-life balance for women actually means work at home — work at work balance, you draw bad conclusions from incomplete data. The fact that men can rely on the unpaid labor of women to project manage their houses and the lives of their children cannot be ignored. This is especially evident in data showing that it is when women have children that their career trajectories diverge from those of women without children and men (with or without kids). Any peer reviewer would point out this glaring lack of contextual data and send the paper back to the author for editing.

As another example, he notes that women have higher levels of stress as a fact but does not address where that stress comes from. As a matter of fact, black people in the US also report higher levels of stress than white people. It is incorrect and erroneous to suggest that we are biologically predisposed to having lower stress thresholds and thus cannot manage stressful jobs. There is a massive body of evidence that notes women and people of color in the US live vastly more stressful lives because of external stressors we face that white men do not.

Another example: we know that women are discouraged in STEM fields. They are ridiculed, belittled, interrupted, and proactively held back in career advancement for speaking more (an activity which is cited as a desired trait in men), disagreeing, or asserting their leadership. We also know there is a disturbing amount of straight up sexual harassment in these fields. To suggest that women don’t go into these fields out of choice ignores this data and is a stupid conclusion drawn from a shallow read of data.

Ignoring these bodies of data is cherry-picking one’s facts. So to a lazy person, a person predisposed to believe that women are biologically designed for certain roles, or a person who hasn’t had access to the kind of training that would teach them to ask probing questions of the conclusions in the document, this paper appears to be a strongly written evidence-based memo. What it is in reality is a steaming pile of shit only thinly hiding behind the veneer of data literacy.

Perhaps this little boy didn’t get fired for having an unpopular view but for demonstrating on a surprisingly public stage how poor his reasoning skills are.”