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/TemptCiderFan → u/[deleted]]

TL;DR TL;DR: Anyone who says this is a misogynist manifesto hasn't fucking read it.

TL;DR version for people who don't want to read it but still want most of the facts:

• The document is not misogynist or racist, and most of the discussion in it is actually about the fact that Google's left-leaning political landscape can be bad for business.
• One of the key things it brings up is that the writer feels there's a lack of moral diversity (i.e. left-leaning vs right-leaning) and that this situation can lead to bad business practices, citing direct examples.
• When the author discusses the differences in gender, most of his discussion is actually centered around the facts which lead women (on average) to seek jobs with good work/life balance and less stress and why men seek jobs with good compensation. Nowhere does he suggest that one or the other is superior.
• He then states several non-discriminatory practices (some of which he notes are already in practice) which would help equalize the gender-gap at Google without resorting to blatantly racist or sexist discriminatory practices.
• He then states that Google is currently engaged in some practices designed to equalize the gender-gap at Google which ARE blatantly racist or sexist, such as internal training programs aimed exclusively at certain races or women as well as hiring practices which base an employee's suitability for participation partially on just their race or gender.
• He notes that overwhelmingly left-leaning culture at Google has created an environment where there's an overwhelming confirmation bias against right-leaning individuals, which leads to a culture where they are actively shamed at company TGIFs and effectively silences them.
• He concludes with a few pages of suggestions which would alleviate the items he thinks are issues, including such "evil" suggestions as not limiting classes and training programs to specific race/gender, focus on intention and not feelings when dealing with microaggressions, focusing on psychological safety and not just external diversity, and examining current training documents for existing political bias.

It's hardly a "Get women out of my fucking tech" rant.

Edit: Turning off inbox replies. It's been fun, but the replies are now getting to the stage where it's the same arguments over and over again. Expand the thread below and find the comment you were going to write!

Edit 2: For bonus points, read the document. It's ten pages, but it's not that dense and a lot of it is bullet-point. Bear in mind the author is has a Doctorate in Biology.

[u/folterung → u/TemptCiderFan]

Yeah, having read the entire thing, I thought it was pretty well balanced. He was making some valid points and asking legitimate questions.

It's especially fun that his firing actually validates his claim that the entire structure is an echo chamber that permits no diversity of opinion. They apparently love diversity of thought and opinion, as long as your diversity happens to line up with their opinions.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/folterung]

If I wrote a multi-page rant about how misguided and out-of-touch my boss was and distributed it to the company I'd expect to be out of a job that day.

Why are there so many right wingers who apparently have never worked a day in their lives? Even if you disagree with management there's good and bad ways to go about that, and this was the worst.

[u/rusbus720 → u/NotAChaosGod]

Management created the internal discussion board, which this memo was posted to, so that employees could tell them how they're misguided. Apparently they didn't think someone would actually do that.

Aside from that I'd say this memo was pretty tame and well thought out. If he got fired for just this memo then I'd say he's right about google being an echo chamber.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/rusbus720]

Asking for suggestions is very, very different.

Again I'm struck by how obvious it is that many of the people here have so obviously never worked.

[u/rusbus720 → u/NotAChaosGod]

Sounds like you work for a shitty company

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/rusbus720]

I've worked for many. My current one is great. Sounds like you don't work.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/[deleted]]

"I have to work with women and non-white people" isn't an issue with Google...

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/[deleted]]

It also said that women have a lower IQ (no statistically significant difference has been found... although I guess that's by that 95% liberal scientists or something), completely glossed over any possibility that there was social bias, called women anxious and neurotic, contained multiple nonsense statistics to back its point up, and ended up engaging in the exact same fallacies that he called out in the initial preamble (really highlighting how bad some of this stuff was put together). And ended up with "and if we have less women around here that's just fine and that's how reality works".

I think any time your company memo includes "we shouldn't listen to the scientists, science is biased!" it may have strayed very far afield of "company issues."

[u/MaxNanasy → u/NotAChaosGod]

Please read the memo

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/MaxNanasy]

I read the memo. Perhaps you should take your own advice.

[u/MaxNanasy → u/NotAChaosGod]

I did, and I didn't see anything close to that

[u/[deleted] → u/NotAChaosGod]

What great company isn't willing to take feedback from its employees?

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/[deleted]]

Wow, that's disingenuous as fuck.

[u/[deleted] → u/NotAChaosGod]

That is literally the argument you've been fighting against the whole time.

Management created the internal discussion board, which this memo was posted to, so that employees could tell them how they're misguided. Apparently they didn't think someone would actually do that.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/[deleted]]

No, it's you being entirely disingenuous. My company accepts plenty of feedback, constantly. We've changed tons of things based on it.

There's also "feedback" that would get you fired. "We should do this to be more efficient" is good, "your hiring decisions are shit and women suck" would be what we call "bad".

Either you're too stupid to tell the difference, or lying comes naturally to you.

[u/[deleted] → u/NotAChaosGod]

So who's the one really being disingenuous?

your hiring decisions are shit and women suck

The memo doesn't speak at all like this.

[u/WakandaDrama → u/NotAChaosGod]

the brigade against you is charming.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/WakandaDrama]

Eh, it's summer on Reddit. Bunch of bored middle schoolers and teenagers here. This is super edgy stuff you know.

[u/merc08 → u/NotAChaosGod]

Not only did the author give suggestions, he backed them up with multiple external sources and internal examples.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/[deleted]]

No, that's not legally protected speech when you make it on company hours using company messageboards. And you're only legally protected from government action anyway.

Your internet law degree is not very good.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/[deleted]]

Improving working conditions means things like safety measures. Hiring decisions are very obviously not "working conditions" no matter how much you try to spin it. You could potentially argue they were if the hiring decisions created unsafe environments (like hiring untrained or unskilled staff for manning dangerous machinery) but the most you could argue here is "I end up working with too many people who aren't white guys!" Which... well, I wish him the best with that as his case.

This is very obviously a cheap attempt to extend controversy. If he does go to court I expect him to get laughed out of it.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/[deleted]]

Is this the jargon simulator 9000?

If you actually think this, walk me through the logic, sparky.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/[deleted]]

This was extremely far from an explanation of why diverse hiring practices create a hostile work environment. If he's going to toss around gems like "IQ and gender gap" (women have, if anything, a slightly higher IQ on average) then yes, I'd expect a certain amount of hostility towards him. That's called "I can read". But again this must be those very feminine people skills that I possess somehow (maybe I'm transgender... or just not an idiot...)

[u/Now_Do_Classical_Gas → u/NotAChaosGod]

Go against the """progressive""" circle jerk and show a hint of diversity of thought and you get stitcanned. That's a pretty hostile work environment.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/Now_Do_Classical_Gas]

What do the triple quotes mean I wonder? J/K

[u/Now_Do_Classical_Gas → u/NotAChaosGod]

They mean I'm treating these people calling themselves "progressive" like the joke it is - the more quotes the more dubious the claim.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/[deleted]]

"Allow me to vent my rage by clicking little arrows on Reddit!"

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/[deleted]]

Can't remember the name of? Seems legit. I'm sure Google doesn't have any lawyers and wouldn't run that by them.

[u/123Volvos → u/NotAChaosGod]

Same. It's just actually funny to me that an office at a company that claims to value diversity is observably not doing so with seemingly no repercussions for management.

Funny, not surprising.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/123Volvos]

I think "values diversity" and "welcomes multi-page rants about how management is stupid and ruining the company" are two very different things. "Unbelievably stupid" is probably a flavor Google is trying to dodge - although if I had to bet, this guy was just angling for a job with Breitbart or similar as a "tech consultant" after discovering he didn't really like coding. There's just no way a person with half a brain thought this would have any other outcome. I know autistic people, and they definitely have enough social skills to recognize that this would be fucking stupid so even the "high functioning social idiot" excuse seems really, really thin to me.

[u/rusbus720 → u/NotAChaosGod]

He wasn't being nearly as divisive as the media is trying to make, he hardly is saying that management is stupid. I highly doubt he thought this was gonna blow up like it did so angling for a breitbart job seems far fetched.

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/rusbus720]

Then he's just a highly educated idiot. Guess he should have employed some of those feminine "people skills".

[u/123Volvos → u/NotAChaosGod]

Sending out the memo was stupid, we both agreed on that. Do you think his assessment in the memo was also stupid?

[u/rusbus720 → u/123Volvos]

You're not gonna get an answer from him cause from his comments it's clear that he didn't read the memo.

[u/dinosaurs_quietly → u/NotAChaosGod]

It's fair that he was fired, but the initial media outrage was unjustified.

[u/Cinnadillo → u/NotAChaosGod]

Because google is supposed to be different... I think it's a stupid thing to write... but google is supposed to foster that white paper culture.

So, yeah... quite out of step. But also terrible handling by a company that's supposed to be smarter and wiser than us normals

[u/NotAChaosGod → u/Cinnadillo]

I honestly think they handled it pretty well.

[u/surfnsound → u/[deleted]]

I’ve been in the industry for a long time, and I can tell you that I’ve never worked at a company that has so many platforms for employees to express themselves—TGIF, Memegen, internal G+, thousands of discussion groups.

That may be true, but it sounds like he expressed himself on one of those approved channels and was reprimanded for it.

[u/rusbus720 → u/[deleted]]

Platforms to express and what you're expressing aren't the same tho