Google Employee behind Anti-Diversity Memo Is “Exploring All Possible Legal Remedies”

[Semantics]

Can you reasonably come up with even an idea that tries to explain this graph?

The end of affirmative action, you see that drop in most STEM fields not just women but with minorities as well, with the end to affirmative action. It's not that women aren't interested they are discouraged, think of how many women are active in [H] a very boys-club area. Affirmative action swayed those into actually going for it, don't think women are discouraged just walk down a boy and girls toy's aisle how women are portrayed teaches young women who they should be. In the end when they become little-shit teenagers who want to be youtube famous, blame society for making them think famous is a career.

 

[MikeTrike]

 

[capt_cope]

"A firm grip on reality" but you liken someone considering there are differences between the sexes to chemtrails? Really? REALLY? Then you try to argue this guy's statements about performance of people hired for reasons other than performance/ability aren't work related?

How many logical fallacies did you commit just now?

Really.
How exactly does the performance of people hired for reasons other than performance/ability relate to his performance or ability to complete the job he was hired for again?
Since my post clearly confused you let me simplify my stance: Publicly announcing ANY opinion at the workplace that is not related to your work is stupid. People who choose to do so deserve whatever consequences their employer throws at them.

 

[M76]

Is this evidence?

That's only proof that math is sexist! And we should lower the score requirement for women, so the graphs are at least equal. If women score higher that's not a problem of course.

 

[M76]

It's not a typo. It's reflective of what too many people do: they find a study that confirms their pre-existing bias and then they think they're an expert on the topic.

I spent thousands of hours reading hundreds of studies on the genetic and environmental variance that produces variation in intelligence in graduate school and stay current on the topic. The fact is that even if you could meaningfully distill "intelligence" down to a single number (which is a dubious proposition at best), we do not entirely understand why some people are smarter than others. There are of course factors that can have major impact (eating lead paint chips will make you dumb), but there are no studies that are free of methodological issues that indicate 'men are smarter than women.' The issue is simply too complex for such a simple statement to be accurate. Google "missing heritability" - it is in fact one of the great unsolved problems in biology. There are studies that indicate men, in general, perform better on certain cognitive tests, and other studies that indicate women, in general perform better on certain cognitive tests. But those are hitting at levels of nuance that are simply not relevant at the level of a general population and arguably not even in highly specialized jobs, and probably only explain why men are likely to achieve outlier-level greatness at some tasks while women are likely to achieve outlier-level greatness at other tasks. IOW, these statistics have zero relevance to every day life, and are not much more meaningful than an intellectual exercise in probability.

Sorry folks, a bell curve that says what you want it to say doesn't make it so...

Of course you can't distill intelligence of a person down to a specific number. But you can get a measure of intelligence of a group by performing tests on large numbers of people from that group. Again for the n+1th time. You (and I don't mean just you, but all who sign up for diversity politics) cannot differentiate between an individual and the groups that individual belongs to. Every person should be measured and judged by their own worth, and not by the worth of any group they belong to.

No, the proposal is not that man are smarter than women. The proposal is that distribution of intelligence in men and women are different. Don't try to misrepresent what's been said. And this difference in distribution coupled with social factors (women choosing other careers more frequently) results in the 1 to 9 difference between genders in high level tech jobs. And diversity hire policies can mask this discrepancy but at the cost of creating tension and resentment between the sexes, and reducing the quality of the product. If you value race and gender more than actual useful knowledge when hiring then it's inevitable. If you want to have equal representation solve the problems causing less women to go into those fields. The only way you'll have equal representation is if at least as many but preferably more women than men go into tech. And unless you want to take away the freedom from women to choose their careers you can't change this overnight.

You have a room of candidates where 90% are men and 10% are women. And the announcer says ok from now on we only hire 50% women and 50% men. What does that result in? The 90% will absolutely hate the 10%. I don't know how can you be so blind not to see that these policies that are designed to raise gender diversity in the short term are actually hurting to the very group you try to help.

 

[ND40oz]

This chart says that women are on average less likely to do as well on math. It doesn't say they aren't capable. But when you compare apples to apples (Women taking the same classes as their male counterparts) they do equally as well on average. It's a fact that most women don't pursue upper level math which would help in these scores.

It's how you interpret the data.

If you're just looking at the chart, than you could certainly interpret the data that way. But, it would be better to look at the entire paper/blog/whatever you want to call it. The facts presented are that women are pursuing upper level math courses more than their male counterparts, at least at the high school level.

http://www.aei.org/publication/2016...gh-school-boys-are-better-at-math-than-girls/

4. For 2016 SAT test-takers, high school girls had superior overall academic high school records compared to boys: females represented 56% of the students in the top 10 percent of their graduating classes (Table 11), 60% of the students graduating with an A+ grade point average were female (Table 12), and high school girls graduated with a higher overall average GPA of 3.45 compared to a 3.30 average GPA for their male counterparts (Table 12).

5. High school girls were over-represented in advanced AP/Honors math classes (55%) compared to boys (45%), and also in advanced AP/Honors science classes by 56% to 44% (Tables 14 and 15).

5. For those high school students taking four years of high school mathematics, girls were over-represented (53%) compared to boys (47%), and more of the students studying natural sciences for four years were female students (55%) than male (45%), see Table 15.

Bottom Line: Even though female high school students are better prepared academically than their male classmates on many different measures of academic success, both overall and for mathematics specifically, female high school students score significantly lower on the SAT math test, and the +30-point differences in test scores favoring males has persisted for several generations and exists across all ethnic groups. At the high-end of math performance, high school males significantly outperformed their female peers on the 2016 SAT math test by a ratio of 1.60-to-1 for scores between 700 and 800 (and 1.84-to-1 adjusted for the number of test-takers), and that outcome for superior male math performance on the high end of the distribution has persisted for more than four decades.

 

[mope54]

You have a room of candidates where 90% are men and 10% are women. And the announcer says ok from now on we only hire 50% women and 50% men. What does that result in? The 90% will absolutely hate the 10%. I don't know how can you be so blind not to see that these policies that are designed to raise gender diversity in the short term are actually hurting to the very group you try to help.

Interesting...isn't it more likely that a small percentage of the 90% would prefer the rest of the candidates to be from an inferior sub-class? The only ones who would hate this kind of policy would be the ones threatened by the inferior sub-class--that is, inferior sub-class members themselves.

So the expected hierarchy of your hypothetical situation would look like this:
a small percentage of high performing males--couldn't care less about the rest as their performance will clearly place them in the hire pool
a small percentage of high performing females--couldn't care less about the rest as their performance will clearly place them in the hire pool
a large percentage of sub-par performing males--threatened by the policy since their aptitude wouldn't clearly place them in the hire pool
a large percentage of sub-par performing females--threatened by the policy since their aptitude wouldn't clearly place them in the hire pool

Conclusion: the outrage we witness on these forums is coming from the sub-par performing males who can't hold their own against high performing males.

 

[M76]

If you're just looking at the chart, than you could certainly interpret the data that way. But, it would be better to look at the entire paper/blog/whatever you want to call it. The facts presented are that women are pursuing upper level math courses more than their male counterparts, at least at the high school level.

http://www.aei.org/publication/2016...gh-school-boys-are-better-at-math-than-girls/

And that's a good thing. Now we only need to dispense with the victim narrative and the lies about tech fields so these girls are actually willing to go into tech.
It's not surprising that in high school girls perform better at math on average. Because as I said earlier there are more male dunces. You don't need to be a genius to understand high school math. So these numbers line up perfectly with the chart I inserted a few pages back.

 

[JustReason]

Interesting...
a small percentage of high performing males--couldn't care less about the rest as their performance will clearly place them in the hire pool

Sorry didn't want to quote the whole thing so you could see that this practice of mirroring populataions or increasing diversity actual does not make this line true. That is the big issue.

 

[mope54]

Sorry didn't want to quote the whole thing so you could see that this practice of mirroring populataions or increasing diversity actual does not make this line true. That is the big issue.

Please explain your reasoning.

The hypothetical he provided was a room of candidates, 90% being men, 10% being women, and a hiring quota of a 50/50 mix.

100 candidates: 90 men, 10 women
Somewhere between 1 through 10 men are automatically safe. That means at most 80 men are left outside the guaranteed hiring pool.

Now compare that to a standard bell curve.

This is all bullshit anyway, but it's fun to use someone's half-assed arguments and demonstrate how wrong they are on their own terms.

But explain your reasoning because just saying something isn't true doesn't make it so.

 

[M76]

Interesting...isn't it more likely that a small percentage of the 90% would prefer the rest of the candidates to be from an inferior sub-class? The only ones who would hate this kind of policy would be the ones threatened by the inferior sub-class--that is, inferior sub-class members themselves.

So the expected hierarchy of your hypothetical situation would look like this:
a small percentage of high performing males--couldn't care less about the rest as their performance will clearly place them in the hire pool
a small percentage of high performing females--couldn't care less about the rest as their performance will clearly place them in the hire pool
a large percentage of sub-par performing males--threatened by the policy since their aptitude wouldn't clearly place them in the hire pool
a large percentage of sub-par performing females--threatened by the policy since their aptitude wouldn't clearly place them in the hire pool

Conclusion: the outrage we witness on these forums is coming from the sub-par performing males who can't hold their own against high performing males.

That's how things would work in an environment without diversity hire policies.

If diversity hire is a policy. Average performing members from the preferred racial / gender groups are placed above high performing members of the non-preferred groups.

There is nothing wrong with hiring for diversity if the candidates are equally performing. However when the number of candidates is much lower from one group, they're sacrificing performance.

Just trough a practical example imagine two groups of random people. One group contains 10 and the other group contains 2 candidates. You want to hire 4 new employees. But policy says that you must hire the exact same amount of people from each group. So that means by definition that you must hire the 2 people from the latter group regardless of their performance to meet quotas. So then you can't honestly say that the 4 people you hired will always be the best from that 12 who applied.

PS: stop calling women inferior you sexist pig. I never said that women are in an inferior sub class. They are a group with less diversity of performance than men, and a smaller group than men. So by numbers alone there will be less high performing individuals in that class. That's all, everything else is in your head.

 

[Gigus Fire]

The end of affirmative action, you see that drop in most STEM fields not just women but with minorities as well, with the end to affirmative action. It's not that women aren't interested they are discouraged, think of how many women are active in [H] a very boys-club area. Affirmative action swayed those into actually going for it, don't think women are discouraged just walk down a boy and girls toy's aisle how women are portrayed teaches young women who they should be. In the end when they become little-shit teenagers who want to be youtube famous, blame society for making them think famous is a career.

Sorry, but can you point to when affirmative action was canceled? To my knowledge, affirmative action is still going strong: https://www.infoplease.com/spot/timeline-affirmative-action-milestones#1980

 

[D4rkn3ss]

just saw it

 

[Nytegard]

One thing that I was wondering about. One of the arguments that's been constantly brought up was that in the early 1990s, women composed 37% of CS degrees in the early 80s, and now it's down to 16%.

Sounds horrible, right? The question I have to ask though is that, is it really a drop in women getting degrees, or an increase in men getting CS degrees.

What I mean, is take adventure games for the computer. In the 80s through early 90s, they were a top selling genre of the PC, and then the genre died. But it really was less the genre died than other genres became a lot more popular. A top selling adventure game (and thus top selling PC game) would sell 100k-200k copies in the late 80s. I believe it was either Ron Gilbert or Tim Schaeffer (sorry, I don't have the source on this at the moment) who stated that it wasn't that adventure games sold less and that's why the genre died. It was that the sales figures just stagnated while other genres skyrocketed in popularity.

While not exactly CS: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp

The early 2000s had the highest bachelor degrees, but more people went into these fields as time went on. Perhaps it was just more men thinking it was a more viable career path, and they did it for the money?

 

[groebuck]

It's a sad statement of current affairs when people see no issue in believing that your opinions should not be shared.

Opinons are one thing. When you epxress things that are illegal in the workplace then you are crossing a line. He took offense to diversity training and wrote a lengthy memo expressing his opjection to it and it's concepts. I have taken diversity training a few times at work. I often sit in the training wonder "who the hell does not know this stuff?" I now know. When you publicly express opinions that are illegal and do so in the context of the company you work for - you can and should be fired. He exposed Google to so many potential law suits, just on that alone he should be fired. You don't have to agree with Diversity and Equal Opportunity, you can be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic...whatever. Hate what you want to hate but when you express that as a representative of the company you work for, expect to be fired.

 

[lolfail9001]

When you publicly express opinions that are illegal

Uhm, what was illegal in that particular memo to begin with?

Hate what you want to hate but when you express that as a representative of the company you work for, expect to be fired.

In case you did not know, that memo was never intended to be public to begin with.

 

[atp1916]

Meh. I think you deserve to be fired if you're stupid enough to make your opinions public (unless it's your opinion on your ability to meet the next deadline) at work.

Pretty much this. It was never worth it, especially in the workplace.

 

[groebuck]

Uhm, what was illegal in that particular memo to begin with?

In case you did not know, that memo was never intended to be public to begin with.

It violated EOC laws. It calls in to question any and every candidate he ever particapted in a peer review or interview. And I know it was internal but it was open to everyone at the company. Expecting it would not get out was ridiculous. Smart people should know, never put in print something you don't want the world to know.

 

[M76]

It violated EOC laws. .

Can you point out where it violated any of that? If anything diversity politics is violating equality of opportunity.
It's hard to say you're violating law by expressing an opinion. If you act on it, then that's another thing, but this is thought crime at best.

 

[groebuck]

Sex Discrimination & Work Situations
The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.

 

[groebuck]

Just by expressing his "opinion" he fostered a hostile work environment. What woman at google is going to want to work with him? How do you even say you are an equal opportunity employer when you have senior level engineers writing dissertations about how woman are inferior and circulating it publicly?

 

[dr.stevil]

Google fucking sucks!


Can't wait for them to go the way of Yahoo

 

[lolfail9001]

It calls in to question any and every candidate he ever particapted in a peer review or interview.

That's kind of.. equal treatment?

The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.

So, what that has to do with memo? Because so far the only thing that comes to mind are Google policies listed within that memo.

Smart people should know, never put in print something you don't want the world to know.

Well, i have that feeling he does not mind world knowing where Google is heading right now.

What woman at google is going to want to work with him?

The one that wants to hammer the point that she is not some weakling that got into Google on the back of diversity hiring? Or are you implying that every woman in Google is incompetent housewife, you sexist bigot /s?

How do you even say you are an equal opportunity employer when you have senior level engineers writing dissertations about how woman are inferior and circulating it publicly?

How do you even say you are an equal opportunity employer when you have internal programs limited to a certain gender and senior level engineers writing dissertations that claim you have such programs for circulation with the company?

 

[Jagger100]

The end of affirmative action, you see that drop in most STEM fields not just women but with minorities as well, with the end to affirmative action. It's not that women aren't interested they are discouraged, think of how many women are active in [H] a very boys-club area. Affirmative action swayed those into actually going for it, don't think women are discouraged just walk down a boy and girls toy's aisle how women are portrayed teaches young women who they should be. In the end when they become little-shit teenagers who want to be youtube famous, blame society for making them think famous is a career.

Define boy's club?

 

[Armenius]

Sex Discrimination & Work Situations
The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.

So you're saying Mr. Damore is a whistleblower exposing illegal practices performed inside Google? I like it.

 

[thejokker]

It's not a typo. It's reflective of what too many people do: they find a study that confirms their pre-existing bias and then they think they're an expert on the topic.

I spent thousands of hours reading hundreds of studies on the genetic and environmental variance that produces variation in intelligence in graduate school and stay current on the topic. The fact is that even if you could meaningfully distill "intelligence" down to a single number (which is a dubious proposition at best), we do not entirely understand why some people are smarter than others. There are of course factors that can have major impact (eating lead paint chips will make you dumb), but there are no studies that are free of methodological issues that indicate 'men are smarter than women.' The issue is simply too complex for such a simple statement to be accurate. Google "missing heritability" - it is in fact one of the great unsolved problems in biology. There are studies that indicate men, in general, perform better on certain cognitive tests, and other studies that indicate women, in general perform better on certain cognitive tests. But those are hitting at levels of nuance that are simply not relevant at the level of a general population and arguably not even in highly specialized jobs, and probably only explain why men are likely to achieve outlier-level greatness at some tasks while women are likely to achieve outlier-level greatness at other tasks. IOW, these statistics have zero relevance to every day life, and are not much more meaningful than an intellectual exercise in probability.

Sorry folks, a bell curve that says what you want it to say doesn't make it so...

In 60's vernacular: a cop out... You seem to be implying that such things can never really be understood and to some extent that is true. True knowledge of such a complicated matter cannot never be reached but... with effort, objective rationality and intuition it can be approached. While Damore's manifesto suggests conclusions that are not absolute (exceptions abound) neither is it wrong. Similarly statistical analysis and bell curves can be manipulated but sometimes they can allow us to approach the unknowable. As per Einstein: it's all relative.

If you are going to attack Damon's manifesto as being sexist and without sufficient scientific basis you "must" also do the same for the feminist perspective that inspired his response. How do you resolve the dialectical conflict? By suppressing the anti-thesis? By "firing" a valid perspective? That slippery slope leads to totalitarianism...

 

[Gigus Fire]

Sex Discrimination & Work Situations
The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.

I don't really get this.
Google actively discriminates when it comes to getting females positions and females management positions.
Case and point is that there's 20% females working at google and 80% male when it comes to tech jobs.
for the last few years, it's been 18% female and 82% male in terms of computer science graduates.
Therefore they already have more females than the average representation of cs graduates for the past 10 years.
Then they come out with statements such as "co-founder Larry Page said that Google had been focused on recruiting more women "forever" to ensure that the company didn't end up all male."

Clearly that have a loaded bias which is discriminating against men based on gender.

 

[thejokker]

"Mathematical acumen" is a continuously variable phenotype. That's the language experts use to describe a trait that is expressed in a population along a continuum. Height is continuously variable. You're not either short or tall, you're 4'10", 4'11", 5', etc. That's called a continuum. You're not either good at math or bad at math, you have a specific, measurable ability to 'do math.'

The rule in biology is that continuously variable phenotypes are determined by the interaction of multiple genes with each other, and the interaction of those genes with the environment. This is as close to truth as biology knowledge currently exists, and it's what I and every other biology professor teach in Biology 101.

And the more complex the trait is, the more genes are responsible for it, and the larger the role of the environment is in determining it. That makes it increasingly difficult to figure out which genes are responsible for the trait, and which environmental variables are relevant.

We have a MUCH better understanding of why people are the height they are. We know for a fact that men are more likely to be taller than women from the level of the genes involved to the environmental factors involved to even the evolutionary pressures that ultimately drive this difference.

We are nowhere near that level of understanding of how genetics affects such a broad, nebulous concept as "math skill."

I apologize for speaking disrespectfully but the bottom line is that expertise matters and it's pretty clear the Google employee and a lot of people in this thread defending him are not experts on the topic. I am. You are incorrect, and if you want to educate yourself, take introductory biology at a local college.

One should not presume themselves to be an expert and presume others are not. That is a personal flaw of arrogant elitists. If you are an expert most will recognize it without fanfare...

 

[dr.stevil]

Meanwhile at google

 

[thejokker]

Just by expressing his "opinion" he fostered a hostile work environment. What woman at google is going to want to work with him? How do you even say you are an equal opportunity employer when you have senior level engineers writing dissertations about how woman are inferior and circulating it publicly?

I think you are missing the point. How is it not a hostile work environment when a company decides "Men need not apply" for job openings in order to hire more women? How is it not sexist to hire less qualified women because there are already too many men? Feminists have convinced people like you that it is ok to hire based upon sex rather than merit. A person's sex should be irrelevant. The percentage of women (or men) should be relevant.

That men are more interested in technical matters and women less so is a valid possibility that should not be dismissed simply because it contradicts the feminist narrative. It should not be rejected and policies that are sexist and discriminatory against men should not be enacted simply to appease (quoting the feminist Camila Paglia) "damaged women harboring bitter grudges against men".

 

[Gigus Fire]

I think you are missing the point. How is it not a hostile work environment when a company decides "Men need not apply" for job openings in order to hire more women? How is it not sexist to hire less qualified women because there are already too many men? Feminists have convinced people like you that it is ok to hire based upon sex rather than merit. A person's sex should be irrelevant. The percentage of women (or men) should be relevant.

That men are more interested in technical matters and women less so is a valid possibility that should not be dismissed simply because it contradicts the feminist narrative. It should not be rejected and policies that are sexist and discriminatory against men should not be enacted simply to appease (quoting the feminist Camila Paglia) "damaged women harboring bitter grudges against men".

The test should be as follows:
Replace "Men" in the "Men need not apply" with anything else.
Do you have a problem with Women need not apply? Blacks need not apply? Asians need not apply? Jews need not apply? Old people need not apply? Straights need not apply? Gays need not apply?
If you do, then it's wrong to say "X need not apply" because your discriminating against a certain group of people and we already have anti-discrimination laws. The fact that they're getting away with this without huge lawsuits is really a big surprise. You've been brainwashed to think that it's ok to discriminate against men.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Is this evidence?

This is evidence that more males take an interest in the subject and thus study it and do better, not evidence that women are less capable at learning and performing well at mathematical subjects.

It would be more interesting to filter these data by later field of study, but I don't know of any data like that.

Compare the math abilities of women and men who have both taken an interest in and studied mathematics. You know, math majors, computer science majors and engineering majors.

 

[lolfail9001]

This is evidence that more males take an interest in the subject and thus study it and do better, not evidence that women are less capable at learning and performing well at mathematical subjects.

You see, the trick here is that this graph is put in context of women actually studying harder overall.

Compare the math abilities of women and men who have both taken an interest in and studied mathematics. You know, math majors, computer science majors and engineering majors.

And how are you going to do that?

 

[dr.stevil]

I think you are missing the point. How is it not a hostile work environment when a company decides "Men need not apply" for job openings in order to hire more women? How is it not sexist to hire less qualified women because there are already too many men? Feminists have convinced people like you that it is ok to hire based upon sex rather than merit. A person's sex should be irrelevant. The percentage of women (or men) should be relevant.

That men are more interested in technical matters and women less so is a valid possibility that should not be dismissed simply because it contradicts the feminist narrative. It should not be rejected and policies that are sexist and discriminatory against men should not be enacted simply to appease (quoting the feminist Camila Paglia) "damaged women harboring bitter grudges against men".

Thats the problem with identity politics, in a nut shell.

I like the idea of blind hiring practices. Race/sex/etc quotas only serve to discriminate people further

 

[stealthballer123]

Piss off majority of your coworkers and you will get fired.

This ain't complicated.

 

[thejokker]

I personally stopped using Chrome and Google long ago because of their embrace of radical racist and sexist policies. I use Firefox and Edge as an alternative and use the Bing search engine. I encourage other like minded individuals to do the same...

 

[dr.stevil]

I personally stopped using Chrome and Google long ago because of their embrace of radical racist and sexist policies. I use Firefox and Edge as an alternative and use the Bing search engine. I encourage other like minded individuals to do the same...

duckduckgo FTW!

and likewise.

 

[thejokker]

Piss off majority of your coworkers and you will get fired.

This ain't complicated.

Stand up to feminist sexism and you get fired...

Resist!!

 

[lolfail9001]

Piss off majority of your coworkers and you will get fired.

This ain't complicated.

Sure, but you'd expect that Corporation of Evil would not be as filled with crybabies as it turned out to be, eh?

 

[thejokker]

duckduckgo FTW!

and likewise.

Thanks for the tip... Duck Duck Go installed and ready for testing...