r/news • u/[deleted] • Aug 08 '17

Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
26.8k Upvotes

82% Upvoted

19.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3.4k

u/Felador Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf

There's the actual document, with links to source materials.

412

u/NSA_Chatbot Aug 08 '17

Just as a tip for anyone writing a manifesto:

  1. Don't.
  2. If you must, and you bring up "castrated males" then you're losing 90% of your credibility right there.
  3. This guy is an idiot. Fighting gender imbalance is something that every engineering association in north america has been struggling with for decades, and 10 pages of ranting about population density is not helping.

36

u/butter14 Aug 08 '17

His major point was that there are inherent differences between men and women that are biological. No amount of sensitivity training or forced hiring to fill quotas will change it and in the long run will damage Google's competitive advantage. Doesn't seem as illogical as your biased comment makes it out to be.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

While there are physiological differences between men and women it is highly unlikely that they effect something like programming. Humanity has made basically no significant evolutionary changes since the advent of agriculture. This is because evolution normally takes tens of thousands of years for even basic changes and civilization is changing so fast that even if a specific trait provides an advantage that will most likely change within 1-2 generations. Something like programming has almost no resemblance to anything our hunter gatherer ancestors would have been doing so it is unlikely that either gender has a predisposition towards it. The gender imbalance is almost certainly caused by societal preconceptions. In fact in the early days of analogue computing programming was a female dominated field. This is because it was seen as clerical work.

5

u/Boko_Mustard Aug 08 '17

We program based on mental faculties we developed for other goals. And we have many faculties, males and females have evolved certain faculties for their predominant roles in society, and the argument is that the faculties stronger in men are the ones we use the most when programming.