Google employee now free to work for Cleveland Plain-Dealer

[RickStain]

This has caused quite the kerfuffle online:

Google Fires Engineer Who Wrote Memo Questioning Women in Tech

Short version: Man posts 10-page paper discussing diversity in tech on Google's internal networks. Depending on who you ask, he may have been valiantly defending the science of biological differences between sexes to try to show better ways Google could implement diversity. Or he might have been championing outdated phrenology-level evo-psych as a thin fig leaf for his "women aren't as good at this stuff and shouldn't be here" mythology.

Either way, he gone.

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

Long version: Google Manifesto

 

[User 11148]

This has caused quite the kerfuffle online:

Google Fires Engineer Who Wrote Memo Questioning Women in Tech

Short version: Man posts 10-page paper discussing diversity in tech on Google's internal networks. Depending on who you ask, he may have been valiantly defending the science of biological differences between sexes to try to show better ways Google could implement diversity. Or he might have been championing outdated phrenology-level evo-psych as a thin fig leaf for his "women aren't as good at this stuff and shouldn't be here" mythology.

Either way, he gone.

Give the actual document a read and tell me what you think.

 

[RickStain]

Give the actual document a read and tell me what you think.

Meaning is contextual

 

[User 11148]

Meaning is contextual

I think he was arguing that robots are bad and a threat to our future prosperity. I could be wrong, but how would anyone know?

 

[RickStain]

I think he was arguing that robots are bad and a threat to our future prosperity. I could be wrong, but how would anyone know?

You have to find your own truth.

 

[User 11148]

The headline ... "Blah Blah Blah Questioning Women in Tech" ... is just too perfect. Really, all we need is a Lena Dunham tweet for the po-mo types to go all-in.

 

[Buck]

I'm not sure he's good enough for the Plain Dealer.

 

[RickStain]

The headline ... "Blah Blah Blah Questioning Women in Tech" ... is just too perfect. Really, all we need is a Lena Dunham tweet for the po-mo types to go all-in.

Regardless of the moral implications, his science is bad.

 

[dixiehack]

I think he was arguing that robots are bad and a threat to our future prosperity. I could be wrong, but how would anyone know?

Would pay all the moneys for a robot president right about now.

 

[RickStain]

The headline ... "Blah Blah Blah Questioning Women in Tech" ... is just too perfect. Really, all we need is a Lena Dunham tweet for the po-mo types to go all-in.

I've still never in my life seen anyone but conservative men reference Lena Dunham

 

[User 11148]

Regardless of the moral implications, his science is bad.

What science?

 

[RickStain]

What science?

His

 

[User 11148]

How about a for-instance?

 

[LongTimeListener]

We have to follow this one dweeb on two threads now?

 

[User 11148]

Hey, that's DOCTOR dweeb to you.

 

[Fly]

LOL

 

[RickStain]

How about a for-instance?

That one thing he said in the first 10 pages

 

[Neutral Corner]

This is getting held up as a political correctness issue, which isn't the whole story. He has a right to his opinion but he ran into two problems. Google is already doing a dance with the Department of Labor over paying their female employees less than the men, so they are pretty sensitive to women's issues at the moment. Add in that Google's culture includes the assessment of your job performance by your co-workers in your annual evaluation for pay increases. A lot of women looked at this and said "I wouldn't want this crazy prejudiced mother****er to have one single word of input into my review."

 

[LongTimeListener]

This was very illuminating. I'm moving farther to the middle after reading it.

The Google Memo: Four Scientists Respond - Quillette

tl;dr When it comes to the science, the guy was right.

If different groups have minds that are precisely equivalent in every respect, then those minds are functionally interchangeable, and diversity would be irrelevant to corporate competitiveness. For example, take sex differences. The usual rationale for gender diversity in corporate teams is that a balanced, 50/50 sex ratio will keep a team from being dominated by either masculine or feminine styles of thinking, feeling, and communicating. Each sex will counter-balance the other’s quirks. (That makes sense to me, by the way, and is one reason why evolutionary psychologists often value gender diversity in research teams.) But if there are no sex differences in these psychological quirks, counter-balancing would be irrelevant. A 100% female team would function exactly the same as a 50/50 team, which would function the same as a 100% male team. If men are no different from women, then the sex ratio in a team doesn’t matter at any rational business level, and there is no reason to promote gender diversity as a competitive advantage.

And from the only female panelist:

Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.

Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex. It is only because a group of individuals have chosen to interpret them that way, and to subsequently deny the science around them, that we have to have this conversation at a public level. Some of these ideas have been published in neuroscientific journals—despite having faulty study methodology—because they’ve been deemed socially pleasing and “progressive.” As a result, there’s so much misinformation out there now that people genuinely don’t know what to believe.