One thing that is interesting/potentially missed in this article is that Liz Fong-Jones has actually publicly stated her intent to leave Google as of last week. She stated that she was looking for offers just after the emails about the drone program leaked out to the press last Thursday, shortly before Google announced their intention to withdraw from the program. She stated there was some line to her leaving, but didn't detail what that was. It could've been over the drone program, due to the timing, but it could've just as well been related to her activism in diversity.
I'm not sure if this comment has a particular point, to be honest, just felt like a missing piece that the only Google employee they quoted is already a soon-to-be-former employee.
it's amusing to me that projects related to national defense are considered evil to these people but google's core business of mining and selling user data for advertisements isn't.
This seems like a false equivalence to me. While ad tech may be morally bad, by many people's standards (including mine) helping the US government kill people by remote control is far worse.
According to US military doctrine adopted under GW Bush and continued under Obama and Trump, the entire world--including allied countries with extradition treates!--is a battlefield[0]. The US has literally given itself license to attack and kill anyone we consider a threat anywhere on planet Earth without due process. That is reason enough to not contribute to a project making drone killing easier.
what if your contributions to the project reduced collateral damage and increased the odds of hitting the right target? or are you making the argument that all military action is wrong?
This is interesting to me as well. I’m not sure where these people draw their ideological lines.
Letting sugar sell to kids and overweight people is ok, when sugar kills people.[0] Or that google sells data to the NSA and other governments. [1]
It’s usually possible to dislike multiple things and support or protest multiple causes. But if you are quitting or trying to change corporate governance, those are exclusive decisions. So it’s hard to tell the reasoning behind these people’s morals.
> Or that google sells data to the NSA and other governments. [1]
That's a strange way of putting it. If the government compels you to comply with a non-trivial request, you are entitled to compensation to cover your costs.
This is kind of my point though, Google is entitled to compete for and win defense contracts. I’m not arguing that and I agree that Google is entitled to payment for their costs.
But is that more important than end-state diversity? To these protesters, yes. But I don’t understand their priorities or at least the rationale behind them. This is a very important issue to them, and it seems odd.
These boards have a duty to understand the company holistically.
Agreed. This is a good argument for limiting participation on multiple boards. 'One director, one board' would encourage more board focus on the companies they direct, and also open up more board seats generally for greater diversity in corporate governance.
Inflated executive pay is a problem. Tieing executive pay to diversity goals is two problems.
Diversity is great, but I get the feeling that most corporate diversity initiatives willfully or inadvertently combat heterdox perspectives. And the irony isn't lost on me that the principal stated benefit of race and gender diversity is that it proxies for viewpoint diversity. But this is just my opinion--I'm happy to entertain any data that confirms or refutes this sentiment.
My cynical view is that executive stock is usually set at whatever level is necessary to signal to stockholders that the executive's own self-interest will place the interests of shareholders above the interests of employees, customers, or society in general.
I wouldn't call them "crows" exactly, some of it is well meaning, but they are definitely being selfish about promoting their causes with disregard to the damage they might do to their employer.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think employees in a free market are allowed to negotiate their working conditions based on whatever they think is important to them and they are also constitutionally protected in their ability to organise.
Are you suggesting they somehow are obligated to work for Google or should not be able to negotiate however they see fit, or not voice their grievances?
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I'd like to suggest that "People shouldn't do X" should not automatically be interpreted as "People shouldn't be allowed to do X".
We could save ourselves so much grief if high schools offered courses on the Hermeneutics of Online Discourse. People are so bad at interpreting each other.
I'm aware of that distinction, but even the former case isn't legitimate. Of course employees should negotiate against what they perceive is unfairness. Not just legally, but culturally. If Google employees believe that many of their peers are not compensated fairly and that executives are biased in their compensation, they ought to speak out.
Why shouldn't they? To not disrupt the echelons of upper management? is that the tech industry now, run like a 1940s oil company?
They should entertain the possibility that they're mistaken and consider contrary arguments, instead of (for example) slandering the person making those arguments and pressuring management to fire him.
what makes you think they did not? Do you think people generally speak out lightly against the guys who sign their paychecks?
Maybe you should entertain the possibility that they, as employees who are aware of what's going on internally and have their own employment at stake have made this decision after deliberation?
Lots of personal experience with far-left Googlers and other far left-wing folks in and out of the tech industry. Like their right-wing equivalents, they have an agenda to act on and they're not about to respond rationally to evidence one way or another, as evidenced by the Google memo fiasco. Yes, I'm aware this is a huge generalization, but I'm strapped for time so I'll leave the nuanced, longform version for your imagination.
EDIT: Tried to change the wording to make this less likely to trigger a flame war.
Damore and company are ardent about policing what is mostly discrimination to Asian hires. Google would be wiser to fix holes in the talent pipeline going back to middle school than punish a generation for the shortcomings of their parents.
Google has far higher proportion of non-Americans than black people (let alone limiting to American and women). It's not even a close comparison. This sort of extreme ignorance is the sort of problem that D&I initiatives are struggling against.
Are you sure about that? Perhaps it's a tool to help overcome implicit bias against women and people of color -- bias that makes the current system less meritocratic, insofar as hiring managers may mistakenly (and perhaps even unintentionally) think such candidates are less qualified than they actually are.
One of the most important principles at the executive level is seniority, not meritocracy. McKinsey research (among others) has repeatedly shown that higher diversity correlates with higher performance.
This is not surprising. If roles up the corporate ladder are filled based on status and networks, talented people from disadvantaged or novel backgrounds lose out. In this case increasing diversity disrupts old networks and has a corrective function.
So you're saying that meritocracy is good but neglected, and diversity often has more meritocracy as a consequence...
Why not focus directly on meritocracy in the first place?
In particular, the conversation in IT, which is probably among the most meritocratic fields (no certifications required, most learning material available for free online), is focused on employees, not executives, so I'd say it possible that focusing on diversity has no, or even negative, effect on meritocracy.
>Why not focus directly on meritocracy in the first place?
Because it's not clear how you 'access' meritocracy directly. For example, if many talented people have not great access to the software industry because the barrier to entry is relatively high (which is still I think a reasonable assumption), then you'll need to find a way to improve the discovery of those people.
And I also don't agree that the industry is very meritocratic, especially in the valley. There's lots of insider networking going on, the big companies hire overwhelmingly out of established institutions (I'd be surprised if Google has many employees without certifications) etc..
It's very good at marketing itself as meritocratic, hip and young, but it's rarely been my own experience at least.
> then you'll need to find a way to improve the discovery of those people.
Exactly. Isn’t that already a big part of the “gender equality” efforts? We could do the same for meritocracy directly.
> And I also don't agree that the industry is very meritocratic,
I never said that. Just that’s it’s more meritocratic than most other (high-paying, professional) industries, because the barriers to entry are lower... I mean, when was the last time a college dropout self-taught doctor became a billionaire, or the last billion dollar hedge fund that was started in a garage?
> the original, condemnatory use of the term in 1958 by Michael Young in his work "The Rise of the Meritocracy", who was satirizing the ostensibly merit-based Tripartite System of education practiced in the United Kingdom at the time.
> It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.
#1 is just the origins that dont have bearing on the modern use and #2 is a fiction book so what are you saying? you would rather have hiring based on what you look like? no thanks
""Those concerns came to the fore after another engineer, James Damore, wrote a 3,000-word memo assailing the firm’s affirmative action policies and suggesting women are biologically less-qualified than men for tech jobs.""
he didnt suggest that at all, badly written articles like this are why this problem even happens
The issue is that if you try to objectively voice your opinion on this saying that medias are misrepresenting the Memo in order to fit a narrative, you are automatically seen as anti-progress anti-women-in-tech.
This is not just limited to this case. Try to bring a rational, pro-gun opinion to a debate? You're a monster who wants to shoot kids. Try to bring a rational, anti-gun opinion to an opposite debate? You're a gun grabber.
Opposing view on homosexuality? Abortion? Religion? Get out of here, you don't fit the status quo.
I've found that the most 'tolerant' people are in fact quite the opposite, and the echo chamber that is the current state of affairs isn't helping.
Nobody wants to hear the opposing viewpoint, they all just want their views confirmed, and to be seen doing "the right thing" by a specific group of people.
Any time there is a "right at all costs" ideology, I assure you, mistakes like these will grow to seem utterly insignificant at an astonishing pace. Now the demand to tie financial compensation directly to the ideology. Selective hiring to ideology AND gender. That IS bad.
Elsewhere on the internet you find that using outright violence against individuals is acceptable in service of this ideology (or you know, just search "antifa" on youtube, to see that whatever these people are, they have zero interest in bringing us a more peaceful planet). I assure you, this will get worse, far worse, before it gets better.
And the irony is, that the base instinct that causes racism is the same as the instinct that drives these efforts. People wanting to feel better about themselves, without, of course, actually doing anything for it. "Action", by attacking others, nothing else.
The ideologies always start with a core of people that are actually admirable. But at some point they decide to grow their movement, and feel the need to include every brutish idiot moron they can to achieve their aims. From that point forward, however, their aims are nothing more than entertaining brutish morons. Worse than that, this forces their opponents to do the same, or face getting beaten up or worse.
"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."
"On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. ... Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things ... Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average"
He is clearly using softer language to make his point, but he spends multiple paragraphs explaining why biological reasons are behind the lack of women in tech.... which boils down to "men are biologically better suited for tech work."
It isn't a bad characterization to say that is saying women are biologically less qualified than men for tech jobs.
I would summarize those two quotes as saying something more like "women may be biologically less inclined to want a job in tech and therefore expecting a 50% representation of women is unrealistic".
My reading of the memo, way back when it broke, was that his argument was more about differences in interest/inclination rather than ability.
I dispute that the difference in interest, if it exists, is biological. There are so many societal factors that come into play here from early age, and they all influence the outcome. It's an unfair world from the start.
I didn't say that. The "if it exists" I wrote came from "women may be biologically" from the parent. I'm disputing the statement that it's biological. The burden of proof is on whoever is making that claim.
why else would you write "if it exists" if you already knew a difference existed? you would just say that you dont believe its biological in that case, so it seems like youre trying to go backwards and deny your own words here
Supposing there's a 1955 Cadillac Series 62 Coupe in the middle of Antartica, which most likely there isn't, it didn't fall there from space.
I have no particular stakes on this discussion besides this one, I just dropped by to say this: I don't see any problem with the construction of that statement. At least as an informal or "folk" logic argument.
Please note that I'm taking this position (or any other) myself. I'm merely trying to clarify what I think Damore's memo said. While I think it's entirely fair to say he's wrong, I think it's deeply unfair to mischaracterize what he wrote as so many have done.
Averages say nothing about individuals. Do you avoid hiring black people due to higher criminal background rates in the US?
If the pressure in the US is on average higher for males to focus on career, then that will influence overall percentages in top competitive careers. It doesn't at all imply that the women in the top are unqualified, it just explaining why they make up a smaller percentage.
Talking about averages is not "softer language". It's not related to making generalizations at all.
None of the things you quoted mean that women are less qualified. What was meant is that women are generally not as interested in this type of work as men are, hence the disparity in numbers. Two very different things.
That is quite a jump you're making. Interest != qualification and looking for work-life balance != lack of qualification.
I think that it is a bad characterization to make that leap of logic. Just considering the statements that you've chosen, I see nothing that says anything about whether either sex is more qualified, only statements about the sex distribution in tech.
Is there something that more directly relates to qualifications inside of his essay? I have not read it.
He also said "Populations have significant overlap." and "Reducing people to their group identity and assuming the average is representative ignores this overlap (this is bad and I don't endorse that)"
This text was in a diagram caption that (along with the embedded hyperlinks) was stripped out of the version that most people saw.
No, he claimed that men are more likely to choose to enter technical fields, due to a combination of both biological and societal reasons.
This is not a pedantic distinction. Your summary states that Damore uses biology to say that women are worse at performing in tech roles, whereas the memo was focused on women entering or not entering the field as a whole (though to be fair many news outlets promulgated the same incorrect summary).
Furthermore it also seems to erroneously imply that Damore claimed that biology is the exclusive reason for low rates of women in tech, which is not the case.
“I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership”
Maybe it’s a little more nuanced than “suggesting women are biologically less-qualified than men for tech jobs." But it’s not a gross oversimplification.
If the industry is structured in such a way that certain groups who are qualified have less interest in participating, then there is a problem in that industry.
It could be that the industry is off-putting to certain groups of people. You're certainly right that this is a possibility. However, it could also be that some people actually just aren't all that interested in certain careers. A holistic point of view on this topic would take into account all factors rather than fixating on just one.
How about looking at more blue collar industries and see if your theory holds up. Say auto mechanics...I doubt there's a "problem" in that industry that keep more women from becoming mechanics. I can't tell you why most women are not that interested in cars, let alone working on them, but I know that it's true. The same could be said for garbage collectors, oil rig workers, etc.
I've worked in tech all of my adult life and I rarely see women in this field. The few that have come through my places of work usually stay to get some basic computer experience and then move on to whatever they wanted to do in the first place. I have yet to meet a woman that has the same passion for all things tech that I and a lot of my male friends have.
But let's say you're right...how would you propose that tech companies generate more interest that would appeal to women? I mean we all know women love to USE technology, apps, games, etc., but how can we get them to crossover to the side of creating, maintaining and supporting these things?
yea men and women are biologically different and have different interests so they choose to do different things
why must everyone confuse abilities with interests? women can do the job but they choose not to. they also choose not to be mechanics or construction workers but nobody whines about that do they?
It's an easy mistake to make, he says in the memo that differences in both preference and abilities (emphasis mine) are partially due to biological causes.
Sometimes it is but the person was complaining about the wording "3,000-word memo assailing the firm’s affirmative action policies and suggesting women are biologically less-qualified than men for tech jobs" and I think everyone can agree it assails the affirmative action policies. To quote the memo itself "I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership". Saying the difference in abilities being in part biological could lead a reasonable person to think he is saying that women are less qualified biologically.
Speaking about statistical averages, not individuals.
There are more men who can lift 50 pounds over their heads than women. It does not mean that a woman cannot be hired for a job that requires her to lift 50 pounds over her head. It means that there will be a smaller pool of candidates so expecting a 50/50 hiring is stupid.
Saying that women as a population are less able to do tech jobs seems functionally very similar to the original characterization of "suggesting women are biologically less-qualified than men for tech jobs".
yea, thats not what was said, taking a single word "abilities" out of context.
why are you not able to see the whole thing and how it shows that men and women are clearly interested in different things on average? why is that even controversial?
"As a corollary, if Googlers are only from the top of the curve, then this may cause us to have more men than other, less selective, tech companies." It's not tech in general but he says that women are less likely to be suited for a job at Google.
Edit: I dug up the Gizmodo article from 2017. This is the first public posting of the memo from what I read (in case the PDF I linked to above was edited seeing as it has 1.1 in the file name). I still can't find the phrase you're quoting: https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...
you keep quoting things out of context here, did you bother reading the entire thing? men have more at the extremes (more dumber and smarter) than women so only picking the smartest will lead to more men than women, here's the whole section ====>
Higher variance among men
Among most psychological characteristics, including IQ, populations of men have higher variance than women even when the average is the same: there are more men on both the top and the bottom of the curve.
This may lead to more male CEOs and geniuses, but also more homeless males and school dropouts. This has likely evolved because individual males can have many children and are biologically disposable: populations are reproductively constrained by the number of its women, not men. The historically higher variance of outcome can also be seen in our genetics; we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. As a corollary, if Googlers are only from the top of the curve, then this may cause us to have more men than other, less selective, tech companies.
That ellipsis in Damore’s quote is “preferences and”. If your interpretation depends on throwing away all of the context of the article (especially all of the nuance about population averages vs individuals) and parsing it down to a single word (“abilities”), then your interpretation is most likely incorrect.
There's obviously zero biological differences between men and women, the differences are all sociological. For that reason I demand gender equality in the NFL at middle linebacker and in the olympic 100 meter dash. The only explanation for the fact that no female has ever made the olympic finals in the 100 meter dash is discrimination.
Let's link it to political diversity - Google clearly has a far stronger bias against conservatives than it does women or African Americans or the transgendered.
Political demographics data would dispute that statement. Those groups you listed, especially in combination, are highly correlated with liberal voting.
Is that something we should ignore? If white males correlate highly with conservative voting, relative to these other groups.. then, oh look, now we have hiring quotas that, in practice, divides strongly along political ideology whether you look at that way or not.
Why do you think they call it "identity politics"? Because effectively aligning groups you've defined towards a political side, then applying all sorts of rules and policies in terms of those groups leads to... political power.
I mean, I don't think they accidentally implied a spectrum of "political diversity" with 'conservatives' on one side and minorities on the other. The implication, clearly, is that the presence of these in the workplace is primarily the result of liberal political bias.
I think they were trying to make the point that there isn't any discrimination along the lines of race or sexual orientation at Google, but instead along the lines of political affiliation, so that's where Google should focus it's diversity efforts.
That's not the point. The point is there is an identifiable group that is underrepresented within Google. It doesn't matter why, it doesn't matter who, it doesn't matter if it's "political". All that matters is that it is clearly discriminatory.
Well before we take care of "conservatives" we should definitely take care of the quotas for the anarchists, socialists, georgists, monarchists, and nihilists who are far too under represented at Google.
We'll get around to the conservatives some time in never.
Do you honestly think that all conservatives have low IQ's? This kind of argument seems so counterproductive. For whatever it's worth, i've met a lot of highly intelligent people who happen to have different political beliefs than mine. They shouldn't have reduced opportunity, just because they are conservative.
There certainly are conservatives with high IQs, but if you draw the distribution of IQs among conservatives and compare it with the distribution of IQs for people who are not, you will find a far larger mass in the distribution of non-conservatives with high IQs to the right of 120. This will lead to the underrepresentation of conservatives in companies whose hiring practices prefer high IQ candidates.
Careful, a lot of those same graphs apply to currently specially-favored diversity demographics. But whatever the case, at least be consistent. If all you care about is diversity, not intelligence, bring in all those conservatives too, low IQ or not. The low IQ ones will be especially grateful for the leg up in life.
The difference is that political leanings don't come up during interviews, so any prior on conservatives' IQs won't skew hiring. Sex and race are visible, so the interviewers' priors on their IQs will skew hiring, hurting the chances of people in disadvantaged sexes and genders who do have high IQs. That is what implicit bias training aims to counter.
Separately, there is the issue of correcting the education of people with low IQs, but that is a problem whose solution lies outside the hiring funnel.
It can be dressed up in a number of ways, but the fact is that Google is biased against conservatives, as evidenced by the ratios not matching that of the general public. The same argument that is used to justify and measure diversity hires of other segments of the population.
If the real reason is to avoid overlooking those of high-inteligence, a blind screening process could be employed rather than diversity quotas.
> It can be dressed up in a number of ways, but the fact is that Google is biased against conservatives, as evidenced by the ratios not matching that of the general public.
That is not evidence of bias. If Google is looking for high IQ employees, and Google hires high IQ conservatives at a lower rate than high IQ non-conservatives, that would be evidence of bias. Unlike with race and gender, there is no mechanism for doing that, so it makes no sense.
> a blind screening process could be employed rather than diversity quotas.
No big company is advocating diversity quotas. It's difficult to make diversity quotas match ability by group with a quota, so using a diversity quota will lead to an arbitrage opportunity for competitors, who can hire better employees for less and lay off expensive employees who are worse.
The big companies are using bias training to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity afforded by other companies failing to hire disadvantaged groups according to ability.
Separately, some big companies are attacking the education issue for disadvantaged groups by targeting education resources into underdeveloped communities, opening up a larger candidate pool in the future.
> Being a woman, being African American or being transgendered aren't political ideologies, nor are they mutually opposed to conservative beliefs.
That's true and a great point - the top tech companies discriminate against African American conservatives, transgender conservatives, and female conservatives too!
I think you're missing the point. The issue is about disenfranchisement, barriers to employment, systemic power dynamics, historic (and current) laws biased against groups, etc.
Those in the conservative party do not have a barrier to employment. There is no systemic power structure against them. There are no laws that hold them back.
This country has a deep and obvious history of racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, etc.
Being a conservative (or any political leaning) is not and should not be considered a Protected Class.
You're basically couching your anti-conservative and anti-white viewpoints in flowery language.
What laws are currently applying barriers to employment and disenfranchisement?
We're literally commenting on a thread about one of the worlds biggest and richest tech companies applying barriers to white male employment (and by extension, if you look at the demographics of voting.. conservatives).
You think it's ok because you view it as a redress of past sins. But whose? Anyone alive today?
And what country does not have a history of those isms you've mentioned? That is excuse to install racist policies to tip scale against people simply based on their race or sex today.. in 2018?
So... I'm a white dude, and I 100% think I could get a job at Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc and that none of these policies would hold me back. Why are you so afraid of these policies? If you're good you'll still get the job.
I'm not anti-white. I'm white myself? I just recognize that being white has done me well in this country in tons of ways.
There's plenty of state level (and some federal) laws holding back people from successful employment opportunities. Lots of people get great training and experience in the armed services for example! Oh, I'm sorry, you're transgendered and come from a small town where often the armed services is one of the few paths out? Well, no experience for you there! No GI bill training either.
The historical effects of redlining for real estate is still affecting current generations of people as well, making financial situations harder for families which provides less opportunity.
Married couples often have greater economic stability. I couldn't get married to another guy in most states until recently. The day same-sex marriage happened didn't automatically undo the years where that wasn't possible or recognized.
Maternity leave in the US is atrocious compared to other countries.
These companies are hiring huge amounts of people overall, and I'm really not worried about them preferring to hire underrepresented people when they have the opportunity. I'd still get the job. Why are you worried about it?
they wouldn't do this because it would expose their anti-white anti-Christian anti-men toxic policy of racism, which is ironically called "diversity" -- anything but.
I remember back in the dot com days when google was just a bunch of white boxes, everyone used Altavista and/or yahoo, and men and women of all races worked together in harmony under the pretense of professionalism and I sadden that an entire generation of millennium seem to be growing up not knowing how nice it once was. I remember one job with a Japanese manager, a women executive, a korean analyst, a black manager, and me -- a white guy, who was the best at perl and pulled all nighters to make sure the ERP loading scripts never failed and doing conference calls together at midnight on a Sunday with everyone.
When I read "conservatives" say stuff like this, it makes me think they need some more experience with real oppression so they actually know what they're talking about.
Let's start with a simple data check: What % of conservatives are murdered each year for their political orientation, and how what % of gay people each year are murdered for their sexual orientation?
These articles twist words. How come teams composed entirely of women on them are called "diverse"? I do not think this word means what they think it means.
Liberals have fought for decades to make race and sex a non-issue. They won: today's conservatives are decidedly liberal when we compare them to the thinking of conservatives from the 40s and 50s. No one can dare to say in public the kind of stuff that was regularly said. Few even think it. Mixed beaches. Interracial marriages. Women go to college and graduate at greater rates than men.
But now the pendulum has swung in a direction that makes many liberals uneasy (including Bill Maher, Sam Harris, David Pakman and so on). Now, we can unironically say things like an all-women team is "diverse", that failing to mention race is racist, that it's impossible to be sexist against men or racist against whites, that ignoring the effect of race based quota policies on asians is not racist, that men should shut up in the #MeToo movement, and white people should be in the back in the BLM movement.
Things usually start far earlier in life. Little boys are funneled more towards maths and programming, little girls are not. So by the time it comes to Google hiring, trying to solve the problem with quotas is only going to make things worse. Take it from a female ex-googler who did the hiring: https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech-le...
But beyond this, liberals need to speak up and keep fighting the left for what they've been fighting for all this time: judging people by their character and ability, not the sex or the color of their skin. Standing up for facts and reality. If we don't stand up for truth and reason and policies that lift all boats, we are going to go into a world where reason and rationality goes out the window.
Don't get me wrong, there are tons of issues on the right (evolution is a myth, global warming is a hoax, hillary clinton has a body double, michelle obama is a man, and other irredeemable stuff). But on the left we have a growing brand of arbitrary political craziness we should keep in check too.
I don't feel the diversity should be sought for its own sake. The best applicant should be hired every single time - although I do feel that it is okay to consider diversity as a tie-breaker when choosing between equally qualified candidates.
On the opposite side: people not hiring the best candidate, in order to prevent diversity, should be fired. Just hire the best person.
It is really hard to measure why people are or aren't hired. Why do I have product managers that can't write a complete sentence or even use a consistent vocabulary? Were they the best choices? I don't think so, but there is a lot of factors that go into e decision.
Is a female candidate of the age and life situation that she’s likely to become pregnant soon less suitable? After all, she might be about to take extended maternity leave! Better not risk it.
Is the candidate with a strong foreign accent less suitable? Maybe the project managers will struggle to communicate as effectively. Not worth the bother.
Is the candidate who lacks a degree worse? They seemed good in the interviews, but maybe there are holes in their knowledge. Why bother?
That gay guy was a bit flamboyant. The sales bros might not be into it. Pass.
That view rapidly invites monoculture. It’s easier to hire people who are similar to yourself. In reality, diversity is in itself a desirable attribute for a team to have. Teams with a variety of backgrounds have different experience that contributes to solving problems in different ways. They will know things that you don’t, and your products will be better for that contribution.
The best person is defined as the one that has the best capability to contribute. None of the items you mentioned affects this factor (aside from the first, but making a decision based on that is illegal).
> I don't feel the diversity should be sought for its own sake. The best applicant should be hired every single time - although I do feel that it is okay to consider diversity as a tie-breaker when choosing between equally qualified candidates.
That would be ideal, but that's not how hiring works. If it was, we'd have a far more diverse workforce.
On the first day of hiring 101, they teach you that people tend to hire others who are like themselves; it's just instinct. I've had recruiters bring me candidates who all were the same race and gender as I am, and within about 5 years of my age. I didn't even realize it until I thought about that principle.
But even more than that, people hire others that they know, and the people we know are dictated by the established social structure. Thus the structure is self-reinforcing, unless you actively do something to stop it, you perpetuate it. Upper middle-class white guys generally don't know many black or Latino people; they know other guys like themselves from growing up, from college, etc., so that's who they do business with.
Steve Ballmer got his job because he knew Bill Gates at Harvard; what was the chance that Gates' classmate was going to be black or Latino, or that his buddy would be a woman? Dropbox initially got an intro to YC because Drew Houston had been big brother in an MIT fraternity to another YC founder.[0] How diverse is that fraternity? There's zero chance of the big brother being female; is the chance much higher of being black or Latino? Drew did a great job, but how many Drews are out there that never got the chance? Given that white guys are ~33% of the U.S. population but the overwhelming number of founders, CEOs, etc., I'd guess most 'Drews' never get an opportunity. (Worldwide the number is far greater, of course.)
Nobody bothers to define what "diversity" even is. Skin color and gender? Is that it? After civil wars and decades of social unrest to prove that your appearance has nothing to do with your skills, talents, motivations, and competence; are we really back to saying we need a certain quota of each group?
Diversity needs to be a visible attribute (the more visible the better), and as far away as possible from "white", "straight" and "men". (I'm sarcastic in case this needs to be said).
In an ideal world, diversity would be about diversity of thought more than visible diversity. But that doesn't seem to matter at all nowadays. To the contrary, if you don't agree with the dominant thoughts of the day you will be fired for "Cultural unfitness".
> In an ideal world, diversity would be about diversity of thought more than visible diversity. ...
I agree, that would be ideal. Unfortunately, the world in which we live and in which Google operates discriminates based on visible attributes. There's no real genetic basis to the idea of 'black'; consider that a child of a black and white parent considered 'black' because of a visible property, their skin color. Consider that people from a wide range of geographical locations and backgrounds are all lumped together as 'black' with nothing else in common but a visible attribute (and it's a poorly defined attribute, covering a wide range of hues).
If we want a meritocracy and opportunity for all, and if we want to maximize talent in our workplaces, we need to counteract the discrimination that's actually happening and not act as if we are in another world.
> If we want a meritocracy and opportunity for all, and if we want to maximize talent in our workplaces, we need to counteract the discrimination that's actually happening and not act as if we are in another world.
This is at odds with history. Our society has been trending toward equality since before the civil rights era, and the philosophy that drove the change was individualism--a _rejection_ of identity politics. It's the only philosophy that has ever effectively reduced racism. "Fighting racism with racism" has only ever triggered tribalistic reflexes which increase racism (hence the uptick in right-wing identity politics following the mainstreaming of left-wing identity politics). Racism in any form for any reason is deplorable, and it isn't an effective way to reduce anti-minority racism.
What is the basis if any of this, other than its repetition by a few? Is this really the proposed solution?: Do nothing while waiting for 'history' to 'trend'?
Things don't happen because a magical force named "history" is "trending"; they happen because people do things. In the U.S., desegregation, voting rights, women's rights, and much more happened as a result of decades of strategic, concentrated efforts by groups of people. People gave their lives and worked their entire careers for those things; many died without seeing much progress.
The parent is an excuse to do nothing. And doing nothing is consigning millions to suffering every day. How many African-Americans lived and died under the brutality of slavery and segregation waiting for "history" to do something? What good does it do them that eventually it 'trended'? There are African-American children filling underfunded schools now, and even if they overcome the odds they are facing daunting college costs; what will you offer them? 'Trends'? For their grandchildren?
Nobody is saying do nothing. That's the point, things are changing for the better, and it's because of treating people as individuals rather than members of a group.
The fact is that life is unfair, both natural and societal. The best we can do is ensure equal opportunity as much as possible so anyone from any place and background can get a shot at achieving the life they want. This is fundamentally only possible if we stop putting people into arbitrary buckets based on some attribute (physical or otherwise), and instead only look at them as the 1 in 7+ billion unique character they are.
The only way forward is to stop group-based identity politics completely, and then and only then, will we as society transcend this tribalistic trap we're caught within.
> The only way forward is to stop group-based identity politics completely
I agree, that would be ideal. How do you propose to accomplish it? And failing that, which you almost certainly will in any conceivable timeframe, what is plan B?
Plan B is the problem we need to solve.
> things are changing for the better
Maybe, but the project is a complete failure unless success is measured in centuries. It's 2018 and discrimination against anyone who isn't white-skinned, male, and in narrower circles, Christian, is still overwhelming. White guys make up 33% of the U.S. population but absolutely dominate business, politics, tech -- as you look around TV, the news, etc., remember that an even distribution would be 1/3 white guys and observe how incredibly skewed it is.
So what do you say to someone of another gender, race, or ethnicity, who wants a career, a life? 'Things are changing for the better! Your great-grandchildren will have more opportunity!'? Be aware that's stereotypical language of privilege - when it's not your problem, it's easy to say, 'wait'. We need to act, now.
This will be my last reply because you're stuck in an idealogical bubble and I hope you can break out of it someday.
You're stating that you agree in stopping identity politics but you're also stating that it's impossible to achieve, and under that assumption you will always fail to achieve it. It's possible to accomplish as I already said, by simple forgetting everything about group identity. That's it. Treat people like individuals and nothing else. The tiny minority that will still make a big deal about it will wither away slowly and have insignificant effect on anyone else.
But as your last 2 paragraphs show, you're unable to do that and still keep looking through a group lens. There is not really much discrimination at all, but it will always seem like it as long as you use arbitrary groupings, like saying "white guys" when that could cover people from half the countries on the planet. There is no such thing as an "even" distribution because you made an random group based on something uncontrollable like skin color, and then decided that the world should match without even pausing to consider that there are millions of factors that make up the individual, and that localized family and societal cultures make a large impact on what someone will choose to do with their life.
Stop thinking in groups (especially on any physical characteristic). The only way forward is to treat everyone like the unique character they are, with their entire life as their background with their own unique interests, talents, and motivations. That's the answer to both your questions. If you want to act and change for the better, just do that.
Presumably the "magical force" is revolting against identity politics of all kinds. The more our society has embraced the idea that individuals shouldn't be judged on the basis of superficial attributes, the better it has become. So it would seem the "solution" is to continue the course that appears to be working--that is, to oppose racism and prejudice; not to double-down on it.
Make the process fair and the outcome will be fair, whatever it looks like. Unfortunately that doesn't have the same marketing power as "diversity" today.
That's not the only definition of "fair". I agree with you, but a lot of people see fair as having equal representation of each sub-group according by their overall percentage of the population.
Those people are fundamentally confused because they only look at group identity rather than individuals.
And if we look at groups for fairness, then we must also look at groups for responsibility, and that leads to tremendous suffering. Are you ready to be responsible for whatever your "group" does?
> After civil wars and decades of social unrest to prove that your appearance has nothing to do with your skills, talents, motivations, and competence
Many haven't people have not gotten that memo, and especially today racial, religious, national, and other discrimination are widespread and on the rise.
Are they? Or is that just that tiny percentage of the population making the out-sized noise that they always have, aided by the volatility of (social) media? The vast majority of people are perfectly reasonable and definitely not the raging bigots that the media seems to portray as infesting every city and company.
Either way, the only way to stop discrimination is to remove it completely, not to offset one kind for another.
Yes, there is data that supports it, for example from the SPLC. Also, we can see parties and leaders that openly promote racial, ethnic and religious hatred are being elected throughout Europe and in the U.S.
> the only way to stop discrimination is to remove it completely
How will this be done? I believe it's impossible, and therefore, as in most real world situations, we have to find less than ideal solutions.
All this argument about "women in tech" actually gives cover to the underlying exploitative premise: that you have bust your butt in college and then go work for corporate America.
I say, our society by and large expects women to be primary caregivers to children, and it expects men to be working longer hours. If you doubt this, try doing the reverse and see how the stay-at-home dad and the career mom of a toddler is treated by people.
This is the actual root of the issue. If you want to solve it, get the courts to give equal custody to men in divorces, for instance. Dads who leave and don't stick around contribute to the issue.
And yes, I'm serious. Men were historically treated as far more expendable by society than women. They were shipped off to wars, went on adventures, they took risks and became homeless or dead. It makes evolutionary sense: women can have children with one man at a time, but a few men can repopulate the whole next generation.
Why are we automatically assuming that the goal should be for more women to join corporate America and work long hours?
For that matter, why should people not be criticized for sticking their kids in a public school and their parents in a nursing home instead of taking care of them?
I probably don't need to point out what bad things can happen when political thought is denuded to the idea that 'anything against the status-quo is seen as a step in the right direction'.
And so it starts. No longer will jobs pay based on your skills, what you offer the company.... we've moved past that onto more "politically correct things". Let's start paying people based on need instead, how could that go wrong?
I wonder why the push to diversity hasn't affected other sectors of the economy that have equally huge gaps in 'diversity'?
- Airline pilots are 90% white men
- Airline stewards tend to be predominantly female. Maybe Jetblue should publish a diversity report on its cabin crews?
- Nursing seems to attract mostly attract individuals with XX Chromosomes. Why isn't Stanford Hospital pushing for executive compensation to be tied to diversity among its nursing staff?
- Traders at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are predominantly male -- unlikely to change in the next 10 years no matter what programs are launched or how much money is spent
Google spent $265m on diversity, Intel pledged $300m in 2015, Yale pledged $50m to diversify its faculty - Columbia, not to be outdone is spending $100m.
All these programs and many more like them going back to the 80's have been spectacular failures... it seems this media fueled social justice movement only makes money for diversity consultants and the new field of "DE&I Program Leaders" which have emerged out of nowhere...
I suspect it's because techies are better at Internet publicity than non-techies, so tech industry gets the most Internet-driven pressure, and Internet is taking about the world.
Please read the article you linked. You'll learn a lot.
It talks a lot about how entrenched racism and sexism has resisted traditional diversity efforts, and recommends more-successful approaches for the future.
Example:
> Five years after a company implements a college recruitment program targeting female employees, the share of white women, black women, Hispanic women, and Asian-American women in its management rises by about 10%, on average. A program focused on minority recruitment increases the proportion of black male managers by 8% and black female managers by 9%.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadI'm not sure if this comment has a particular point, to be honest, just felt like a missing piece that the only Google employee they quoted is already a soon-to-be-former employee.
According to US military doctrine adopted under GW Bush and continued under Obama and Trump, the entire world--including allied countries with extradition treates!--is a battlefield[0]. The US has literally given itself license to attack and kill anyone we consider a threat anywhere on planet Earth without due process. That is reason enough to not contribute to a project making drone killing easier.
0. https://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Wars-Battlefield-Jeremy-Scahill...
Letting sugar sell to kids and overweight people is ok, when sugar kills people.[0] Or that google sells data to the NSA and other governments. [1]
It’s usually possible to dislike multiple things and support or protest multiple causes. But if you are quitting or trying to change corporate governance, those are exclusive decisions. So it’s hard to tell the reasoning behind these people’s morals.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24493081/ [1] https://gizmodo.com/confirmed-nsa-paid-google-microsoft-othe...
That's a strange way of putting it. If the government compels you to comply with a non-trivial request, you are entitled to compensation to cover your costs.
This is kind of my point though, Google is entitled to compete for and win defense contracts. I’m not arguing that and I agree that Google is entitled to payment for their costs.
But is that more important than end-state diversity? To these protesters, yes. But I don’t understand their priorities or at least the rationale behind them. This is a very important issue to them, and it seems odd.
The massive rise in executive pay over the past 30 years amounts pretty much to a giant consumer-funded welfare program for corporate management.
Maybe it could be tied to user satisfaction? If it was, maybe they wouldn't have scrapped Google Reader.
Companies should be run by boards with experience. These boards have a duty to understand the company holistically.
Unfortunately diversity police and compensation consulting committees seem to be the future of executive pay -- what a sad state of affairs.
Agreed. This is a good argument for limiting participation on multiple boards. 'One director, one board' would encourage more board focus on the companies they direct, and also open up more board seats generally for greater diversity in corporate governance.
Diversity is great, but I get the feeling that most corporate diversity initiatives willfully or inadvertently combat heterdox perspectives. And the irony isn't lost on me that the principal stated benefit of race and gender diversity is that it proxies for viewpoint diversity. But this is just my opinion--I'm happy to entertain any data that confirms or refutes this sentiment.
"Cria cuervos y te sacaran los ojos."
Are you suggesting they somehow are obligated to work for Google or should not be able to negotiate however they see fit, or not voice their grievances?
We could save ourselves so much grief if high schools offered courses on the Hermeneutics of Online Discourse. People are so bad at interpreting each other.
Why shouldn't they? To not disrupt the echelons of upper management? is that the tech industry now, run like a 1940s oil company?
Maybe you should entertain the possibility that they, as employees who are aware of what's going on internally and have their own employment at stake have made this decision after deliberation?
Lots of personal experience with far-left Googlers and other far left-wing folks in and out of the tech industry. Like their right-wing equivalents, they have an agenda to act on and they're not about to respond rationally to evidence one way or another, as evidenced by the Google memo fiasco. Yes, I'm aware this is a huge generalization, but I'm strapped for time so I'll leave the nuanced, longform version for your imagination.
EDIT: Tried to change the wording to make this less likely to trigger a flame war.
This is not surprising. If roles up the corporate ladder are filled based on status and networks, talented people from disadvantaged or novel backgrounds lose out. In this case increasing diversity disrupts old networks and has a corrective function.
Why not focus directly on meritocracy in the first place?
In particular, the conversation in IT, which is probably among the most meritocratic fields (no certifications required, most learning material available for free online), is focused on employees, not executives, so I'd say it possible that focusing on diversity has no, or even negative, effect on meritocracy.
Because it's not clear how you 'access' meritocracy directly. For example, if many talented people have not great access to the software industry because the barrier to entry is relatively high (which is still I think a reasonable assumption), then you'll need to find a way to improve the discovery of those people.
And I also don't agree that the industry is very meritocratic, especially in the valley. There's lots of insider networking going on, the big companies hire overwhelmingly out of established institutions (I'd be surprised if Google has many employees without certifications) etc..
It's very good at marketing itself as meritocratic, hip and young, but it's rarely been my own experience at least.
Exactly. Isn’t that already a big part of the “gender equality” efforts? We could do the same for meritocracy directly.
> And I also don't agree that the industry is very meritocratic,
I never said that. Just that’s it’s more meritocratic than most other (high-paying, professional) industries, because the barriers to entry are lower... I mean, when was the last time a college dropout self-taught doctor became a billionaire, or the last billion dollar hedge fund that was started in a garage?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Early_definitions
> the original, condemnatory use of the term in 1958 by Michael Young in his work "The Rise of the Meritocracy", who was satirizing the ostensibly merit-based Tripartite System of education practiced in the United Kingdom at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
> It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.
he didnt suggest that at all, badly written articles like this are why this problem even happens
The issue is that if you try to objectively voice your opinion on this saying that medias are misrepresenting the Memo in order to fit a narrative, you are automatically seen as anti-progress anti-women-in-tech.
Opposing view on homosexuality? Abortion? Religion? Get out of here, you don't fit the status quo.
I've found that the most 'tolerant' people are in fact quite the opposite, and the echo chamber that is the current state of affairs isn't helping.
Nobody wants to hear the opposing viewpoint, they all just want their views confirmed, and to be seen doing "the right thing" by a specific group of people.
When you have a narrative to push, you keep telling lies. Not surprising to see this repeated over and over again. Instead, they could just link to Damore's memo: https://www.quotev.com/story/9922506/James-Damores-Diversity...
Elsewhere on the internet you find that using outright violence against individuals is acceptable in service of this ideology (or you know, just search "antifa" on youtube, to see that whatever these people are, they have zero interest in bringing us a more peaceful planet). I assure you, this will get worse, far worse, before it gets better.
And the irony is, that the base instinct that causes racism is the same as the instinct that drives these efforts. People wanting to feel better about themselves, without, of course, actually doing anything for it. "Action", by attacking others, nothing else.
The ideologies always start with a core of people that are actually admirable. But at some point they decide to grow their movement, and feel the need to include every brutish idiot moron they can to achieve their aims. From that point forward, however, their aims are nothing more than entertaining brutish morons. Worse than that, this forces their opponents to do the same, or face getting beaten up or worse.
"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."
"On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. ... Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things ... Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average"
He is clearly using softer language to make his point, but he spends multiple paragraphs explaining why biological reasons are behind the lack of women in tech.... which boils down to "men are biologically better suited for tech work."
It isn't a bad characterization to say that is saying women are biologically less qualified than men for tech jobs.
My reading of the memo, way back when it broke, was that his argument was more about differences in interest/inclination rather than ability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_education#H...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_education#C...
I have no particular stakes on this discussion besides this one, I just dropped by to say this: I don't see any problem with the construction of that statement. At least as an informal or "folk" logic argument.
how do you know either things and why does the first mean the other is not possible?
also your example is using "from space" which is obviously fictional compared to "biological" which there is plenty of evidence for
If the pressure in the US is on average higher for males to focus on career, then that will influence overall percentages in top competitive careers. It doesn't at all imply that the women in the top are unqualified, it just explaining why they make up a smaller percentage.
Talking about averages is not "softer language". It's not related to making generalizations at all.
Are you qualified to paint a house? Are you interested in painting a house? Are those the same exact sentences?
I think that it is a bad characterization to make that leap of logic. Just considering the statements that you've chosen, I see nothing that says anything about whether either sex is more qualified, only statements about the sex distribution in tech.
Is there something that more directly relates to qualifications inside of his essay? I have not read it.
At no point the memo is stating that women are less capable than men.
This text was in a diagram caption that (along with the embedded hyperlinks) was stripped out of the version that most people saw.
This is not a pedantic distinction. Your summary states that Damore uses biology to say that women are worse at performing in tech roles, whereas the memo was focused on women entering or not entering the field as a whole (though to be fair many news outlets promulgated the same incorrect summary).
Furthermore it also seems to erroneously imply that Damore claimed that biology is the exclusive reason for low rates of women in tech, which is not the case.
Maybe it’s a little more nuanced than “suggesting women are biologically less-qualified than men for tech jobs." But it’s not a gross oversimplification.
If the industry is structured in such a way that certain groups who are qualified have less interest in participating, then there is a problem in that industry.
I've worked in tech all of my adult life and I rarely see women in this field. The few that have come through my places of work usually stay to get some basic computer experience and then move on to whatever they wanted to do in the first place. I have yet to meet a woman that has the same passion for all things tech that I and a lot of my male friends have.
But let's say you're right...how would you propose that tech companies generate more interest that would appeal to women? I mean we all know women love to USE technology, apps, games, etc., but how can we get them to crossover to the side of creating, maintaining and supporting these things?
interests are completely different from qualifications
everyone is qualified to work at mcdonalds or drive a garbage truck or work in construction but most people arent interested in doing that
No; it says: "distribution of ... abilities"
why must everyone confuse abilities with interests? women can do the job but they choose not to. they also choose not to be mechanics or construction workers but nobody whines about that do they?
There are more men who can lift 50 pounds over their heads than women. It does not mean that a woman cannot be hired for a job that requires her to lift 50 pounds over her head. It means that there will be a smaller pool of candidates so expecting a 50/50 hiring is stupid.
why are you not able to see the whole thing and how it shows that men and women are clearly interested in different things on average? why is that even controversial?
> the distribution of ... abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes
The parent:
> No he is not ["saying that women are less qualified biologically"].
Unless Damore claims that this distribution makes women worse tech workers, then the parent comment's claim remains unsubstantiated.
Edit: I dug up the Gizmodo article from 2017. This is the first public posting of the memo from what I read (in case the PDF I linked to above was edited seeing as it has 1.1 in the file name). I still can't find the phrase you're quoting: https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...
Higher variance among men
Among most psychological characteristics, including IQ, populations of men have higher variance than women even when the average is the same: there are more men on both the top and the bottom of the curve.
This may lead to more male CEOs and geniuses, but also more homeless males and school dropouts. This has likely evolved because individual males can have many children and are biologically disposable: populations are reproductively constrained by the number of its women, not men. The historically higher variance of outcome can also be seen in our genetics; we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. As a corollary, if Googlers are only from the top of the curve, then this may cause us to have more men than other, less selective, tech companies.
Is that something we should ignore? If white males correlate highly with conservative voting, relative to these other groups.. then, oh look, now we have hiring quotas that, in practice, divides strongly along political ideology whether you look at that way or not.
Why do you think they call it "identity politics"? Because effectively aligning groups you've defined towards a political side, then applying all sorts of rules and policies in terms of those groups leads to... political power.
We'll get around to the conservatives some time in never.
Damore conveniently made a plot for illustration.
Separately, there is the issue of correcting the education of people with low IQs, but that is a problem whose solution lies outside the hiring funnel.
If the real reason is to avoid overlooking those of high-inteligence, a blind screening process could be employed rather than diversity quotas.
> It can be dressed up in a number of ways, but the fact is that Google is biased against conservatives, as evidenced by the ratios not matching that of the general public.
That is not evidence of bias. If Google is looking for high IQ employees, and Google hires high IQ conservatives at a lower rate than high IQ non-conservatives, that would be evidence of bias. Unlike with race and gender, there is no mechanism for doing that, so it makes no sense.
> a blind screening process could be employed rather than diversity quotas.
No big company is advocating diversity quotas. It's difficult to make diversity quotas match ability by group with a quota, so using a diversity quota will lead to an arbitrage opportunity for competitors, who can hire better employees for less and lay off expensive employees who are worse.
The big companies are using bias training to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity afforded by other companies failing to hire disadvantaged groups according to ability.
Separately, some big companies are attacking the education issue for disadvantaged groups by targeting education resources into underdeveloped communities, opening up a larger candidate pool in the future.
Except for accents, choice of clothing, different speech patterns, etc.
I can easily pick if someone is from Austin (overwhelmingly liberal) vs another part of Texas just by the accent.
That's true and a great point - the top tech companies discriminate against African American conservatives, transgender conservatives, and female conservatives too!
Perhaps even more so!
Those in the conservative party do not have a barrier to employment. There is no systemic power structure against them. There are no laws that hold them back.
This country has a deep and obvious history of racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, etc.
Being a conservative (or any political leaning) is not and should not be considered a Protected Class.
What laws are currently applying barriers to employment and disenfranchisement?
We're literally commenting on a thread about one of the worlds biggest and richest tech companies applying barriers to white male employment (and by extension, if you look at the demographics of voting.. conservatives).
You think it's ok because you view it as a redress of past sins. But whose? Anyone alive today?
And what country does not have a history of those isms you've mentioned? That is excuse to install racist policies to tip scale against people simply based on their race or sex today.. in 2018?
I'm not anti-white. I'm white myself? I just recognize that being white has done me well in this country in tons of ways.
There's plenty of state level (and some federal) laws holding back people from successful employment opportunities. Lots of people get great training and experience in the armed services for example! Oh, I'm sorry, you're transgendered and come from a small town where often the armed services is one of the few paths out? Well, no experience for you there! No GI bill training either.
The historical effects of redlining for real estate is still affecting current generations of people as well, making financial situations harder for families which provides less opportunity.
Married couples often have greater economic stability. I couldn't get married to another guy in most states until recently. The day same-sex marriage happened didn't automatically undo the years where that wasn't possible or recognized.
Maternity leave in the US is atrocious compared to other countries.
These companies are hiring huge amounts of people overall, and I'm really not worried about them preferring to hire underrepresented people when they have the opportunity. I'd still get the job. Why are you worried about it?
Of course they do - at least at top California tech companies.
Show me the top tech companies lining up to hire Damore.
What percentage of gay people are discriminated against at top tech companies in California vs what percentage of conservatives?
https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/06/what-are-c...
Liberals have fought for decades to make race and sex a non-issue. They won: today's conservatives are decidedly liberal when we compare them to the thinking of conservatives from the 40s and 50s. No one can dare to say in public the kind of stuff that was regularly said. Few even think it. Mixed beaches. Interracial marriages. Women go to college and graduate at greater rates than men.
But now the pendulum has swung in a direction that makes many liberals uneasy (including Bill Maher, Sam Harris, David Pakman and so on). Now, we can unironically say things like an all-women team is "diverse", that failing to mention race is racist, that it's impossible to be sexist against men or racist against whites, that ignoring the effect of race based quota policies on asians is not racist, that men should shut up in the #MeToo movement, and white people should be in the back in the BLM movement.
Things usually start far earlier in life. Little boys are funneled more towards maths and programming, little girls are not. So by the time it comes to Google hiring, trying to solve the problem with quotas is only going to make things worse. Take it from a female ex-googler who did the hiring: https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech-le...
But beyond this, liberals need to speak up and keep fighting the left for what they've been fighting for all this time: judging people by their character and ability, not the sex or the color of their skin. Standing up for facts and reality. If we don't stand up for truth and reason and policies that lift all boats, we are going to go into a world where reason and rationality goes out the window.
Don't get me wrong, there are tons of issues on the right (evolution is a myth, global warming is a hoax, hillary clinton has a body double, michelle obama is a man, and other irredeemable stuff). But on the left we have a growing brand of arbitrary political craziness we should keep in check too.
On the opposite side: people not hiring the best candidate, in order to prevent diversity, should be fired. Just hire the best person.
Is a female candidate of the age and life situation that she’s likely to become pregnant soon less suitable? After all, she might be about to take extended maternity leave! Better not risk it.
Is the candidate with a strong foreign accent less suitable? Maybe the project managers will struggle to communicate as effectively. Not worth the bother.
Is the candidate who lacks a degree worse? They seemed good in the interviews, but maybe there are holes in their knowledge. Why bother?
That gay guy was a bit flamboyant. The sales bros might not be into it. Pass.
That view rapidly invites monoculture. It’s easier to hire people who are similar to yourself. In reality, diversity is in itself a desirable attribute for a team to have. Teams with a variety of backgrounds have different experience that contributes to solving problems in different ways. They will know things that you don’t, and your products will be better for that contribution.
That would be ideal, but that's not how hiring works. If it was, we'd have a far more diverse workforce.
On the first day of hiring 101, they teach you that people tend to hire others who are like themselves; it's just instinct. I've had recruiters bring me candidates who all were the same race and gender as I am, and within about 5 years of my age. I didn't even realize it until I thought about that principle.
But even more than that, people hire others that they know, and the people we know are dictated by the established social structure. Thus the structure is self-reinforcing, unless you actively do something to stop it, you perpetuate it. Upper middle-class white guys generally don't know many black or Latino people; they know other guys like themselves from growing up, from college, etc., so that's who they do business with.
Steve Ballmer got his job because he knew Bill Gates at Harvard; what was the chance that Gates' classmate was going to be black or Latino, or that his buddy would be a woman? Dropbox initially got an intro to YC because Drew Houston had been big brother in an MIT fraternity to another YC founder.[0] How diverse is that fraternity? There's zero chance of the big brother being female; is the chance much higher of being black or Latino? Drew did a great job, but how many Drews are out there that never got the chance? Given that white guys are ~33% of the U.S. population but the overwhelming number of founders, CEOs, etc., I'd guess most 'Drews' never get an opportunity. (Worldwide the number is far greater, of course.)
[0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/congratsdropbox/
This madness needs to stop.
In an ideal world, diversity would be about diversity of thought more than visible diversity. But that doesn't seem to matter at all nowadays. To the contrary, if you don't agree with the dominant thoughts of the day you will be fired for "Cultural unfitness".
I agree, that would be ideal. Unfortunately, the world in which we live and in which Google operates discriminates based on visible attributes. There's no real genetic basis to the idea of 'black'; consider that a child of a black and white parent considered 'black' because of a visible property, their skin color. Consider that people from a wide range of geographical locations and backgrounds are all lumped together as 'black' with nothing else in common but a visible attribute (and it's a poorly defined attribute, covering a wide range of hues).
If we want a meritocracy and opportunity for all, and if we want to maximize talent in our workplaces, we need to counteract the discrimination that's actually happening and not act as if we are in another world.
This is at odds with history. Our society has been trending toward equality since before the civil rights era, and the philosophy that drove the change was individualism--a _rejection_ of identity politics. It's the only philosophy that has ever effectively reduced racism. "Fighting racism with racism" has only ever triggered tribalistic reflexes which increase racism (hence the uptick in right-wing identity politics following the mainstreaming of left-wing identity politics). Racism in any form for any reason is deplorable, and it isn't an effective way to reduce anti-minority racism.
Things don't happen because a magical force named "history" is "trending"; they happen because people do things. In the U.S., desegregation, voting rights, women's rights, and much more happened as a result of decades of strategic, concentrated efforts by groups of people. People gave their lives and worked their entire careers for those things; many died without seeing much progress.
The parent is an excuse to do nothing. And doing nothing is consigning millions to suffering every day. How many African-Americans lived and died under the brutality of slavery and segregation waiting for "history" to do something? What good does it do them that eventually it 'trended'? There are African-American children filling underfunded schools now, and even if they overcome the odds they are facing daunting college costs; what will you offer them? 'Trends'? For their grandchildren?
The fact is that life is unfair, both natural and societal. The best we can do is ensure equal opportunity as much as possible so anyone from any place and background can get a shot at achieving the life they want. This is fundamentally only possible if we stop putting people into arbitrary buckets based on some attribute (physical or otherwise), and instead only look at them as the 1 in 7+ billion unique character they are.
The only way forward is to stop group-based identity politics completely, and then and only then, will we as society transcend this tribalistic trap we're caught within.
I agree, that would be ideal. How do you propose to accomplish it? And failing that, which you almost certainly will in any conceivable timeframe, what is plan B?
Plan B is the problem we need to solve.
> things are changing for the better
Maybe, but the project is a complete failure unless success is measured in centuries. It's 2018 and discrimination against anyone who isn't white-skinned, male, and in narrower circles, Christian, is still overwhelming. White guys make up 33% of the U.S. population but absolutely dominate business, politics, tech -- as you look around TV, the news, etc., remember that an even distribution would be 1/3 white guys and observe how incredibly skewed it is.
So what do you say to someone of another gender, race, or ethnicity, who wants a career, a life? 'Things are changing for the better! Your great-grandchildren will have more opportunity!'? Be aware that's stereotypical language of privilege - when it's not your problem, it's easy to say, 'wait'. We need to act, now.
You're stating that you agree in stopping identity politics but you're also stating that it's impossible to achieve, and under that assumption you will always fail to achieve it. It's possible to accomplish as I already said, by simple forgetting everything about group identity. That's it. Treat people like individuals and nothing else. The tiny minority that will still make a big deal about it will wither away slowly and have insignificant effect on anyone else.
But as your last 2 paragraphs show, you're unable to do that and still keep looking through a group lens. There is not really much discrimination at all, but it will always seem like it as long as you use arbitrary groupings, like saying "white guys" when that could cover people from half the countries on the planet. There is no such thing as an "even" distribution because you made an random group based on something uncontrollable like skin color, and then decided that the world should match without even pausing to consider that there are millions of factors that make up the individual, and that localized family and societal cultures make a large impact on what someone will choose to do with their life.
Stop thinking in groups (especially on any physical characteristic). The only way forward is to treat everyone like the unique character they are, with their entire life as their background with their own unique interests, talents, and motivations. That's the answer to both your questions. If you want to act and change for the better, just do that.
And if we look at groups for fairness, then we must also look at groups for responsibility, and that leads to tremendous suffering. Are you ready to be responsible for whatever your "group" does?
Many haven't people have not gotten that memo, and especially today racial, religious, national, and other discrimination are widespread and on the rise.
Either way, the only way to stop discrimination is to remove it completely, not to offset one kind for another.
Yes, there is data that supports it, for example from the SPLC. Also, we can see parties and leaders that openly promote racial, ethnic and religious hatred are being elected throughout Europe and in the U.S.
> the only way to stop discrimination is to remove it completely
How will this be done? I believe it's impossible, and therefore, as in most real world situations, we have to find less than ideal solutions.
All this argument about "women in tech" actually gives cover to the underlying exploitative premise: that you have bust your butt in college and then go work for corporate America.
I say, our society by and large expects women to be primary caregivers to children, and it expects men to be working longer hours. If you doubt this, try doing the reverse and see how the stay-at-home dad and the career mom of a toddler is treated by people.
This is the actual root of the issue. If you want to solve it, get the courts to give equal custody to men in divorces, for instance. Dads who leave and don't stick around contribute to the issue.
http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286&from=hn
And yes, I'm serious. Men were historically treated as far more expendable by society than women. They were shipped off to wars, went on adventures, they took risks and became homeless or dead. It makes evolutionary sense: women can have children with one man at a time, but a few men can repopulate the whole next generation.
Why are we automatically assuming that the goal should be for more women to join corporate America and work long hours?
For that matter, why should people not be criticized for sticking their kids in a public school and their parents in a nursing home instead of taking care of them?
I probably don't need to point out what bad things can happen when political thought is denuded to the idea that 'anything against the status-quo is seen as a step in the right direction'.
- Airline pilots are 90% white men
- Airline stewards tend to be predominantly female. Maybe Jetblue should publish a diversity report on its cabin crews?
- Nursing seems to attract mostly attract individuals with XX Chromosomes. Why isn't Stanford Hospital pushing for executive compensation to be tied to diversity among its nursing staff?
- Traders at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are predominantly male -- unlikely to change in the next 10 years no matter what programs are launched or how much money is spent
etc. etc. etc.
Silicon Valley seems unique in its headline grabbing push in this regard, despite decades of failed experiments: https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail ...
Google spent $265m on diversity, Intel pledged $300m in 2015, Yale pledged $50m to diversify its faculty - Columbia, not to be outdone is spending $100m.
All these programs and many more like them going back to the 80's have been spectacular failures... it seems this media fueled social justice movement only makes money for diversity consultants and the new field of "DE&I Program Leaders" which have emerged out of nowhere...
https://skift.com/2018/04/20/airlines-need-to-work-harder-to...
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/transportation/218401-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2018/mar/06/ineq...
> Silicon Valley seems unique in its headline grabbing push in this regard, despite decades of failed experiments: https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail ...
Please read the article you linked. You'll learn a lot. It talks a lot about how entrenched racism and sexism has resisted traditional diversity efforts, and recommends more-successful approaches for the future.
Example:
> Five years after a company implements a college recruitment program targeting female employees, the share of white women, black women, Hispanic women, and Asian-American women in its management rises by about 10%, on average. A program focused on minority recruitment increases the proportion of black male managers by 8% and black female managers by 9%.