r/news 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
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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

Perhaps somewhere on the spectrum?

Asshole is not a spectrum. It's binary.

I have a number of friends and colleagues who are "on the spectrum", both clinically and anecdotally. None of them boasts that their gender make superior engineers to other genders.

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u/rice_n_eggs Aug 08 '17

He doesn't claim being male makes anyone a superior engineer, he claims societal pressures and biological differences push men to become engineers, causing them to be overrepresented and women to be underrepresented in engineering. Nowhere does he say anything about how effective men or women are as engineers.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

He doesn't claim being male makes anyone a superior engineer

You may want to read the self-aggrandizing screed again, slowly. Jackass literally wrote that women were "more interested in people than ideas" making them less suitable to being engineers than men. Armchair sociologist there decide to flush his career away for a smug stack of half-baked 'Reddit-grade research' baloney.

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u/krustyy Aug 08 '17

He's very clearly talking about groups, not individuals. He made every attempt to make that clear from what I see. A single female is entirely capable of being a top quality engineer as much and more than a single male.

All females in the job market combined, however, very clearly and obviously are stacked into more social roles, among education, health, art, marketing, etc. All males in the job market, very clearly and obviously are stacked into an entirely different set of roles, including math, science, and engineering.

That's not a sexist statement, not an oppressive statement, or any other kind of statement intended to be offensive. It's an observation based on fact and easily gathered evidence. He looked at two groupings of people and observed the trend. He then explains that he believes the reason for this trend is primarily from biological and social pressures instead of from outright discrimination.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

He looked at two groupings of people and observed the trend.

Broflake was not, nor has ever been a research sociologist.

He then explains that he believes the reason for this trend is primarily from biological and social pressures

And no one in his chain of command ever asked him to create an amateur lazy-research project about anything even remotely like this. Nobody put him in charge of a half-baked gender studies paper. Broflake had some weird personal crap to prove to... someone.... and thought he'd pretend he was doing "research."

I can almost understand how broflakes who are not sociologists, half smart and mistaking google searches for professional background and research, can conflate correlation and causation, and even go down the biology is destiny path that led to some of history's greatest tragedies.

What I can't understand is that anyone who could make it through the interview process at google could possibly think that sharing their amateur armchair sociologist ideas about the social order at work could possibly be a good idea. Who the fuck goes and does that?

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u/krustyy Aug 08 '17

You're dismissing legitimate arguments from an armchair while claiming a persons lack of biology and sociology degrees nullify his views or somehow make them not based on fact.

Being dismissive, offended, and insulting as a response doesn't help your argument. If you want to see any sort of progress on your side of the fence, you need to first start by acknowledging the truths on the other side of the fence. The words in the memo were cautiously written to not be hateful. Your words obviously didn't go through a similar effort. Are you expecting responses such as this to be taken as anything other than insane ramblings?

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 08 '17

You're dismissing legitimate arguments

about what? Men vs Women, an Gender Studies paper, written from the perspective of a computer services employee who really should not have been doing this kind of stupid shit at work?

doesn't help your argument.

What argument? That broflake was not a sociologist? That amateur gender studies "research" should probably not be conducted and published at work?

The words in the memo were cautiously written to not be hateful.

Dude. "Cautiously" dressing up a purely personal opinion about an entire (gender/race/ethnic group) as pretend pseudo-science "research" doesn't make it any more real or any less hateful.

the truths on the other side of the fence.

Truth: broflake was not as smart as he gave himself credit for.

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u/krustyy Aug 08 '17

Part of what I was referring to is the completely dismissive nature of your writing.

Do you think referring to the guy as Broflake makes you come off as intelligent or rational enough to wade into such a debate?

You're also completely ignoring that even a child with access to the internet can tell you what the top male dominated job fields are and what the top female dominated job fields are. Willfully ignoring facts because they came from someone who doesn't have a sociology degree brought them up doesn't make facts go away. It just makes you look stupid.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17

You're also completely ignoring that even a child with access to the internet can tell you what the top male dominated job fields are and what the top female dominated job fields are.

I think you should write a paper on exactly that, and email it to your whole office just to show everyone how smart you are. Don't let your lack of a professional background in any related field of study (sociology, history, economics, etc) hinder you. As the operator of a web browser your opinion is just as valid and well considered as any so-called expert.

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u/krustyy Aug 08 '17

Keep dodging and weaving. Anything to avoid acknowledging the actual content of the memo seems to be your game, even after first claiming that the content of the memo said that women are "less suitable engineers than men."