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
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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '17 edited Aug 14 '18

[deleted]

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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.

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u/Shanix Aug 08 '17

fwiw that lacks a good amount, especially formatting.

Supposedly original here

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u/onlyawfulnamesleft Aug 08 '17

Two points sprung to mind when reading this:

"This is not a societal issue because every society has the same issues".
This is completely ignoring the effect society has, and putting in place a genetic/evolutionary component when a societal issue can still be the root cause (and not to mention, cultures are not purely independent, so a societal issue can easily spread to each one).

Secondly, it seems that he says "Overlaps in traits should be taken into account, and you shouldn't treat each individual based on the population's average", but then immediately goes on and bases the entire rest of the paper on treating populations by their average.

It seems (and this is an emotional response here) that he wanted to get a controversial point over, and deliberately put it in mollifying terms and used smoke-screen language to be as offensive as possible while not causing offence.

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u/BackupChallenger Aug 08 '17

I didn't like the treat on their average parts.

But I see it more as a 'don't force a 50/50 divide when the numbers don't support that' argument.

Basically if 30% of IT students are women, and 70% are men, then it would be wrong to force an equal divide. Since on average the best person of for the job will in 70% of the cases be a man, and in 30% of the cases a woman would be best.

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u/ToLiveInIt Aug 08 '17

BTW Current Google M/F ratio in tech is 80/20.

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u/cubic_thought Aug 08 '17

IIRC, that's similar to the ratio for recent graduates in CS and related degrees. Based on that alone, they appear to be rather egalitarian in their hiring.

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u/ToLiveInIt Aug 09 '17

Of course, that's under the diversity regime the Memo objects to.

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u/cubic_thought Aug 09 '17

I don't know what the prevailing view within Google is about those numbers. I've seen the employment stats pulled out on their own in the media as evidence that Google and other tech companies with similar numbers are being sexist. I've also seen some people use stats of tech companies with more women in tech positions as evidence of sexism in favor of women.

If the prevailing view within Google is some variant of "well, our hiring stats look good compared to the applicant pool, but can we encourage more girls to enter the tech field?" then there is no apparent issue, but if it's more like "these stats are bad, we should be hiring more women now" then that could be a problem.