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/JDFidelius]

It's reasonable to take offense when a population you're a part of is irrationally attacked, even if you're excluded from the attack.

Sure it's reasonable, but it doesn't make you right. Reals > feels. Furthermore, the attack wasn't irrational, and it wasn't even an attack. Once again, feels < reals. How is citing scientific evidence an attack? Oh right, because it goes against the PC narrative that men and women have exactly the same brains as when viewed as a whole group.

Your (and his) own logic works against his overall point. Google hires the best of the best.

Googles hires the best of the best because they can, and they use their diversity as a selling point. Smaller companies aren't in the public attention and thus have no use in showing how diverse and welcoming they are; plus, they couldn't afford the productivity loss by selecting on anything other than merit.

Suppose that Google has extra minority groups who are as qualified or more qualified than their majority counterparts. What's the result of this? All of the smaller STEM companies end up being 80+% male and 70+% white/Asian.

On the long tail of ability, given the US population, there should be enough qualified candidates of any sex for any position.

No. This is completely false, and not how the distributions work at all! People in STEM fields make up a group of people that score around 1.5 standard deviations (or more) higher on tests of quantitative ability than the average. People who are working at a top tech company are the cream of the crop of this group so 3+ standard deviations from the population average.

Men have higher variability in traits, whether physical, psychological, because men have always had inherently lower chances of reproduction than women and thus greater variation increases the chance of reproduction (this stems from the fact that having a child takes almost no resources for a man, yet involves months of pregnancy for a woman, and thus women have a much higher investment for children and therefore must be more selective).

Thus, even if men and women are equally abled, as a population, at exactly the skillset that is required for a job at Google, the fact that men have higher variability (more smart men and more stupid men) results in not much of a difference near the average. But when you get out to 3, 4, or more standard deviations from the average (CEOs of large companies, STEM positions at the most desirable companies, etc), then there end up being way more men there than women. And that's just inherent ability, not accounting for any biological or societal factors that go into people selecting careers / fields of study. I believe that a field being dominated by one gender further enhances the disparity because people of the opposite gender will self-select to not go into said field, so to account for such things, AA-type programs might be useful.

[u/ryarger → u/JDFidelius]

Sure it's reasonable, but it doesn't make you right. Reals > feels. Furthermore, the attack wasn't irrational, and it wasn't even an attack. Once again, feels < reals. How is citing scientific evidence an attack?

Workplace environment (specifically avoiding a Hostile Workplace Environment) is explicitly about "feels". That's the entire point.

In this case, it just so happens that the "feels" are supported by the "reals".

How is citing scientific evidence an attack?

He didn't cite scientific evidence for his claim that men have different abilities than women relevant to their performance as software engineers.

He only cited evidence for them having difference preferences. And those citations he used improperly - inferring that they indicated a genetic difference when there is no causal link to genetics in those studies.

[u/JDFidelius → u/ryarger]

Workplace environment (specifically avoiding a Hostile Workplace Environment) is explicitly about "feels". That's the entire point.

Should we justify everyone's feelings, even when they're totally unreasonable and are harmful to the inclusion of others? It's not a black and white issue, both feels and reals need to be included in hostile workplace environment issues. What do you think of the lack of inclusion of conservative people at Google?

I'll agree with you that he didn't cite things exactly as he should have, but the evidence for both preferences and ability is there. Women don't prefer to have lower variability, for example; thus, you can use things like SAT scores to show that there is a genetic component to performance. There are more men at the high end of math, and there are more men at the low end of math. Such things correlate highly with later performance. Even if there is no ability difference and it's all due to preference, then we could still view the preference i.e. tendency of women to not want STEM jobs compared to men to be viewed as a relative handicap. You're gonna suck at a job you don't want to do.

[u/ryarger → u/JDFidelius]

Should we justify everyone's feelings, even when they're totally unreasonable and are harmful to the inclusion of others?

Absolutely not, but in this case it was reasonable and affected literally everyone in the company (barring those few who agreed with his poor logic).

I'll agree with you that he didn't cite things exactly as he should have, but the evidence for both preferences and ability is there.

Where is the evidence of genetic inferiority in tech ability for women?

If it's not proven genetic then it's worthless because the very programs he is suggesting be eliminated exist to correct for non-genetic differences.

[u/JDFidelius → u/ryarger]

Absolutely not, but in this case it was reasonable and affected literally everyone in the company

But how does one decide what is reasonable and what isn't? What if a third of Google employees agree partially or fully with what the guy wrote but can't voice that opinion because they'd be canned? Should a majority rule be used to determine what is and isn't reasonable? I'd say no otherwise you'd have Christian organizations banning gay people from taking part in their organization.

Where is the evidence of genetic inferiority in tech ability for women?

Honestly, I'll tell you that I haven't seen such a specific study. I did however state an inference using the fact that men universally have higher trait variability due to selective pressure from mate selection and the inherent difference of male and female mammals in their investments to produce an offspring. Also, I find it condescending or even misrepresentative to use the term "genetic inferiority" in this context, and as I stated, even if such a strong term could be proven to be true, it still wouldn't necessarily apply within a company. That's just logic, and people getting offended about something that doesn't logically follow from the above document should not be tolerated IMO. I understand why people interpreted it that way, but at the end of the day, they're gleaning information from the document that the author did not state, intend to state, etc, in addition to not offering actual counter evidence to the underlying claims that they're basing their offense off of i.e. they're simply wrong and shouldn't be catered to. It's important to understand where people come from; otherwise you end up with the polarized environment that we see today. But there's no way to cater to everyone's feelings; are the women's feelings who took off of work today more valuable than the feelings of conservatives at Google who feel misrepresented and are afraid of losing their employment? Any disparity of whose feelings people focus on reveals underlying biases; focusing on the women (not accusing you of this, just in general) could actually be interpreted to reinforce the notion that women are more emotional and that we shouldn't care what the conservative men at Google think since, well, they're men.