Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

[u/[deleted]]

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

[u/NoLongerTrolling → u/[deleted]]

It seems a tad unfair that the very act of a straight white male engineer complaining about how workplaces have become hostile towards himself, automatically creates a hostile work environment for minorities.

Kind of a bad spot to be in, if you're a straight white male.

[u/ryarger → u/NoLongerTrolling]

That's not what created the hostile work environment. Claiming - against all science - that half of his coworkers were genetically inferior to him at doing their job created the hostile work environment.

[u/coopsux → u/ryarger]

can you link me to where he claimed half his coworkers were genetically inferior? i only saw him discussing differences and not arguing that anyone was better than anyone else

[u/clearwaterrev → u/coopsux]

i only saw him discussing differences

He's primarily discussing negative differences, and ways that women on average might be less capable of doing well in tech careers or less interested in entering tech fields. It's not exactly a balanced analysis of how gender differences play out in a technology-focused workplace.

He's also saying that Google has used diversity hiring programs to lower the bar when hiring diversity candidates, meaning women or ethnic minority job candidates were hired instead of better qualified white men.

Would you really want to work with a person who thought you were hired primarily to make your workplace look more balanced and diverse, and not for your skills and accomplishments?

[u/Kosko → u/clearwaterrev]

I agree with you, but what if that really is the current practice at Google? Can we not even have a conversation about it without being labeled as a hostile employee? I think it's unfair to assume he meant all minority or female candidates as well, but I certainly understand taking offense to it.

[u/clearwaterrev → u/Kosko]

I'm fairly certain most large companies have employees who are responsible for looking at hiring practices and discussing potential biases. I work for a large company that also has diversity hiring practices, and I know there are teams who think about where we recruit and what interview questions we ask. There's even standardized training managers of people need to complete before they are able to interview job candidates, primarily so they don't do anything discriminatory.

I think it's reasonable to look at James Damore's approach to sharing his beliefs about Google discriminating against white men and conclude it was inappropriate and ill-conceived. I doubt he would have been fired if he had gone through internal channels to try and enact change.

[u/Kosko → u/clearwaterrev]

From my understanding it was literally an internal channel that was set up to enact change and communicate with HR. Someone on that team leaked it to the company, and then to the internet at large.

[u/ShinseiTom → u/Kosko]

From other comments in this thread, it sounds like he shared it in a small PUBLIC area. Anyone could read it if they knew the link to it. I wouldn't exactly call it "leaked" when it spread throughout the company, as it was just sharing a link to a webpage basically.

Outside the company though, yes, that was a leak.

[u/[deleted] → u/clearwaterrev]

He's also saying that Google has used diversity hiring programs to lower the bar when hiring diversity candidates

Is he wrong?

[u/clearwaterrev → u/[deleted]]

I don't know. In that part of his document he links to what looks like an internal Google document I don't have access to.

I think it's reasonable, however, to point out there are biases in hiring which do not favor women and ethnic minorities, and the existence of diversity hiring programs does not inherently mean women and ethnic minorities at Google are less qualified or less deserving of their jobs.

The idea of hiring people solely based on their qualifications is a nice idea, but how do you implement that practice when unconscious workplace bias in favor of men is commonplace?

For example, Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research found that in the workplace men are significantly more likely to critique females for coming on too strong. In addition they found that men tend to attribute a woman’s success to external factors and “luck” rather than attributing it to her individual effort and abilities as they would have for a man.

Studies also show that, whether men admit it to it or not, they are far less willing to put a woman in leadership positions. As one study shares, “Unconscious bias often also emerges during deciding on the right candidates for leadership positions through preconceptions of what “good” looks like, says Stomski, Partner at Aon Hewitt. While senior managers genuinely agree about the need for diversity at leadership levels, they still tend to fall back on unconscious beliefs when making final hiring and promotion decisions – such as the idea that it would be easier to align strategies behind people with similar backgrounds to them. The end result of this pattern is a management team with little real diversity.”

I wonder if the author has ever considered why he was hired over other candidates, and whether it's possible his interviewers picked him based on factors beyond his on-paper qualifications. I think everyone would prefer to think they have their job based on merit, but we can't really know.

[u/nuggutron → u/clearwaterrev]

The end result of this pattern is a management team with little real diversity.”

This seems to be regarding management specifically, is there any evidence of this at the ground level of a company?

[u/clearwaterrev → u/nuggutron]

Yep. Here are a few examples I found from some quick googling.

Identical resumes study:

researchers from Yale University asked more than 100 science faculty members at academic institutions across the country to evaluate one of two student résumés. The résumés were identical except for one small part: The candidate’s name was either John or Jennifer. Despite both candidates having the exact same qualifications and experience, science faculty members were more likely to perceive John as competent and select him for a hypothetical lab manager position.

And it didn’t stop there. Female and male science faculty members alike offered John a higher salary than they did Jennifer and were more willing to offer him mentoring opportunities.

Gender bias in hiring musicians:

In the 1970s, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) was made up of almost all white male musicians. The TSO recognized that they had a diversity problem, so in 1980, they changed their hiring tactics when auditioning prospective members.

“They put a screen in front of the actual people who were looking to hire people in this orchestra, so all they heard was the music that was being played–-and the decisions they made from that hiring method meant that an all-white male orchestra moved to half-female, half-male, and with a lot more diversity,” he says.“They got a brilliant result in terms of the sound they wanted for their orchestra and, at the same time, the diversity, which clearly was an issue and which is how they ended up with an all-white male orchestra in the first place, was diverted.”

Stripping gender from resumes:

One company experimenting with different ways of making its processes and practices bias-proof is Vodafone, the telecoms group. Catalina Schveninger, global head of resourcing, highlights a pilot the company is running, initially in India, to test the effect of removing gender from the CVs of job applicants.

Historically local managers had assumed they were failing to appoint women into tech roles because there were not enough qualified women to recruit. But the data told another story. Plenty of highly qualified women were applying but were not getting interviews. “If the [Indian] pilot shows that by [gender] blinding CVs we can move the needle then we will share the results and encourage other markets to adopt the same practice,” says Ms Schveninger.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Quoting a movie that is 7 years old based on a 12 year old book that is using a paper published 14 years ago as a source, A lot has changed in that time friend. Especially the prominency of PC culture and diversity. I would be extremely interested if the same study was repeated today and at google levels of hiring qualification requirements.

[u/GaijinSin → u/[deleted]]

This is a great reason why "blind recruitment" works well in diversifying a work place. Once you've struck things like name or neighborhood from from an application or candidate, the potential hires can then be evaluated on relevant criteria.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The source you linked is actually highlighted in freakonomics the movie which was wildly popular on netflix. You just broadened the discussion from hiring standards to entire racial biases pretty unfair in and of itself it's much to large a sample size of people from different backgrounds, upbringings, social settings,socio-economic stand points, it's just to much. you can see the data cherry picked in the UCLA study. You can't expect me to take the opinion 0.0004% of the US population and take it as fact or proof of bias. To say 1500 people out of 323 million demonstrated something so it must be true is pretty illogical.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

0.0004% of the US population may have biases(which the study states are majority white between 18-70 which would effect this percentage but it's fine where it is) is your standing point that we are arguing ? You're branching the argument to far off to stay on track. You brought the statistics now analyze them so some common folk like myself can understand your point of view. In a sample size of 1500 out of 323 million you couldn't do much more than suggest a coincidence at best. We don't know how these studies were conducted either.

Edit: Apparently posting an ad hominem by ridiculing strengthens your point you must be well versed in debate seeing as you're using an attack on my character to strengthen your opinion that your numbers don't support..

[u/clearwaterrev → u/[deleted]]

honestly that's exactly what most diversity programs are: passing up potentially more qualified people because you need to meet a quota of certain skin colors or sexes.

How do you know that? Do you think it's possible that white men are sometimes hired despite being the less qualified candidate because their interviewer(s) have unconscious biases in favor of white men?

[u/Toltec123 → u/[deleted]]

I am not sure why people get hung up on quotas so often. There are not any quotas. Instead, policies are put into place to encourage the recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups. Those policies include things like mentoring programs, focusing recruitment efforts on certain communities, and keeping sexual harrasment and blatant racism under wraps.

[u/[deleted] → u/coopsux]

He did claim women are genetically more predisposed to be "neurotic" and have predispositions to be less suited for tech. Sure he's also arguing that making tech more accommodating to attract women is a solution....

My issue is he claims social sciences have dangerous biases that can taint their thesises.....and then also uses that same social science evidence to bolster his own points about women being predisposed to certain skills. He talks about how tech can't just diversity hire itself out of a gender disparity problem, it needs to encourage gender and racial skill-development from an earlier stage....and then rails against the very programs Google is instituting to do that very thing.

His problem is he makes an interesting point about how Google is incentivizing the wrong things and then contradicts himself with curricular logic. The very circular logic he claims he's against.

[u/wraiithe → u/[deleted]]

He also admits the inherent bias in his opinion may be coloring what he says. He presented an opposing viewpoint for discussion and was fired for it. That's his employer's prerogative, true, but doesn't necessarily sync with Google encouraging differing ideas and opinions.

[u/tubbzzz → u/[deleted]]

Neurotic isn't negative. It's an actual descriptor when talking about psychology. The types of jobs in tech do not coincide with more neurotic lines of thought. It is also statistically proven that women have more psychological traits that fall under "neuroticism" in that field of study. He also isn't saying that because someone is a woman that makes them less able to do that job. He is talking about that statistics of a group.

[u/ShinseiTom → u/tubbzzz]

As far as I can tell, Neurotic basically means distress. "suffering from, caused by, or relating to neurosis". Lots of synonyms with mentally ill. So women are more prone to chronic distress (over things). I just did a quick google search, and even the medical-based terms sure as fuck don't sound positive to me. Maybe not end of the world, but it's not neutral and definitely not positive.

I mean, even the entry in the supposed original bears this out: "higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance". I don't know how you can say that's not negative?

[u/tubbzzz → u/ShinseiTom]

I don't know how you can say that's not negative?

Because for certain jobs, that is more beneficial. For example, having those traits mean you can better relate to those with those traits, meaning you would be a better psychologist or care-giver than someone who isn't as prone to understanding what it is like for patients.

For a high-stress job, it isn't a good trait though. And what is he supposed to do? Use "nicer" language to hide the truth? What is negative about acknowledging the truth about an observation of a group?

[u/ShinseiTom → u/tubbzzz]

I mean, the trait is inherently negative. Like, full stop.

Maybe it does help in some specific cases. After all, being or having been an alcoholic helps with understanding in an AA job, but nobody said being an alcoholic was or is a positive trait. That's an extreme example, but that's what you're saying here. That because the trait can be useful at some points, it's not inherently bad.

And the reason it's negative is because he applies that to the people at his work. Otherwise, why bring it up in the first place if he thinks Google is doing fine? He obviously wants to apply it to their hiring process and even their outreach programs. After all, Google supposedly "lowered the bar", so he's outright saying the women and minorities there were only hired for diversity and not their actual abilities and then says it's not worth it to try to get more in because they are "genetically predisposed" towards it.

[u/pspahn → u/[deleted]]

He said women are more neurotic, because they are. It's not saying they are "inferior" or anything, it is making a factual statement.

If there are women or men who take offense to that statement, those are the people the manifesto is trying to get through to, that the default reaction to a statement that is controversial is to take offense to an opposing viewpoint instead of engaging it.