7 ms·

How I wish Sundar Pichai had responded to James Damore's memo about diversity

56 points by curtis 9y ago

axaxs 9y ago
Absolutely agreed. Regardless of the outcome, I do wish this would have been a turning point, a discussion, a 300 comment long back and forth from both sides like we see on lkml at times. Instead, it was a swift firing and attempt to sweep it under the rug. The fact that people actually took off work because they were 'offended' probably paints an even worse picture for reason in the Valley.
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  Not like it's exclusive to the valley. Like, you'll find it in NYC. I know a girl who could get arrested and smile about it, but will have a meltdown if you say that men and women aren't identically distributed populations of blank slates. For this reason I don't think all the people who stayed home were fake-offended or scare-quote offended. Some just haven't hit certain developmental milestones, of the sort where you can think about population distributions, probabilities, or think about the universe without an evil genius rewriting everything to fit your fractally wrong worldview.
  - siidooloo 9y ago
    So people who disagree with you "haven't hit certain developmental milestones"?
    - axaxs 9y ago
      Because anyone who shuts down and screams in response to a well thought out document, no matter how ridiculous, is not a well formed adult.
      - brailsafe 9y ago
        At the very least it's a childish reaction.
      - SamReidHughes 9y ago
        You know, I really don't think that's fair. You've got [The Document] -> [What people read or misread from the document, what they infer in other's motives, others' mental framework, etc] -> [Reaction]. I know if I thought everybody thought I was stupid because of my race, or gender, or some other crap like that, because "Science," and they were forming expectations by it and were wrong but there was nothing I could do about it... it would really suck, and I might want to stay home. (It would be stupid to stay home, because there's a perfectly good golf course across the street from HQ, but I digress...) The magnitude of their reaction is very understandable.
      - SamReidHughes 9y ago
        Also, while my response focused on one example I personally experienced, to discredit claims about fake-taking-offense, it's not necessarily the case that others are staying home solely because people hold beliefs. There's also, presumably, a general atmosphere of drama to avoid, stress and the like. So it's not merely a document.
    - SamReidHughes 9y ago
      It's not a matter of disagreement. It's the ability to process statements about population distributions, be they true or false, without being insulted by them. If you (a woman, let's say) hear Chris say, "fewer women are able to be good engineers than men," and treat that the same as, "You are not a good engineer," then you're wrong about what was said and what was meant. You'd be lacking the ability to perform a basic act of reading comprehension in certain contexts. Relatedly, many people can't think about population distributions in a sensible way in any context. Another is the inability to handle a statement like "There might be a smaller proportion of men suitable for engineering because of biology." Clearly there's some chance it's true, but plenty of people will say there's no chance that the proportions aren't identical by gender. Which is an absolutely crazy thing to think, because there's like, some chance you're wrong.
      - danso 9y ago
        > If you (a woman, let's say) hear Chris say, "fewer women are able to be good engineers than men," and treat that the same as, "You are not a good engineer," But Damore didn't say either of those things.
        yorwba 9y ago
        Indeed, and yet I have seen lots of comments on HN that interpreted him as saying something indistinguishable from those things.
        danso 9y ago
        On the other hand, I've seen folks from the pro-Damore crowd who think that when someone accuses Damore of something he didn't literally say, then that person did not read his memo or was being maliciously misleading. That mindset is not particularly more intellectual or rational than not having read the full memo. If a politician says: I'm not a liberal, and all of my best friends are conservatives, but I'm going to vote in support of abortion rights and universal healthcare -- are constituents being obtuse if they perceive that their representative is in fact a liberal?
  - danso 9y ago
    > I know a girl who could get arrested and smile about it, but will have a meltdown if you say that men and women aren't identically distributed populations of blank slates. Huh? What was she arrested for? And this girl (high school? junior high?) is representative of NYC? edit: And is she someone who could possibly hired by Google? If not, why would your observed reactions of her be a useful reference in judging whether people at Google were "fake-offended"?
    - SamReidHughes 9y ago
      Protesting. She's around 30. She could totally be hired by Google, not for engineering, but could have been a great engineer too if that's what she was interested in doing, she's got better IQ and math ability than most engineers I've worked with. I'll rate her 100% representative.
      - danso 9y ago
        At the age of 30 she is not literally a girl. So I'm assuming you mean she's as immature and/or intellectually limited as if she were a female child. And that's because she smiles while being arrested for disrupting the peace/resisting arrest+disobeying police (people aren't arrested on allegations of, or arraigned or charges of "protesting")? Does that make this smiling arrested man a "boy"? http://t.co/9QAI4voo1M http://t.co/9QAI4voo1M I don't think everyone would agree that someone's opinion of or behavior towards law enforcement implies something useful about their rationality (or lack of) when it comes to gender issues. But giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming this person truly is an immature fool, why would you think that someone you know in a personal capacity grants you insight to mindsets the Google Mountain View employees whom you don't know at all, or to their reasoning for hating Damore's memo? Just because I know some Asians who are fucking terrible at PHP doesn't bestow me with special insight about Facebook (powered in part by its high proportion of Asian programmers) service outages and security fuckups.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 9y ago
mc32 9y ago
He's not firing his buddy at a 15-person company. Regardless of whether he made the right or wrong call, Pichai, could not for one moment "be candid". Whatever he said, or did, would become public and whatever he did as head of a very large and well known consumer-facing company, would reverberate beyond the company [and would be parsed for meaning and perh lawsuits] The only wiggle room he had was to play it down a bit, maybe waffle and delay till his team could formulate a more nuanced response. Agree or disagree these sorts of things can turn into PR fiascos --perhaps some of it their own doing because of how they market themselves --Walmart, another consumer facing company, markets itself differently and would have more wiggle room --probably lots more. But no, a Google can't publish a "we screwed up" mea culpa style response that a brash start-up can.
- danso 9y ago
  Likewise, Google faces proportionally more negative publicity and backlash when firing a disgruntled/outspoken employee, so we can't automatically assume that the CEO's response was reflexive or capricious, rather than the "right" -- or somewhere on the continuum of least harmful decision. But deciding to wait is not nothing nor a neutral decision. People in Silicon Valley of all places should know that.
  - mc32 9y ago
    I don't know. Bureaucracies are big and cumbersome and make it difficult for things to pivot on a dime. It takes time for companies like Google to settle on decisions --important ones. People who work there would know (what's their joke 'deprecated, not ready'?) That they/he made such a swift decision is extraordinary --he could have waited some time --it's not like they would suddenly have people huffing and frothing with pitchforks at the ready inciting a rash decision. I'm sure they have some prepared statements for these things. They could have issued an interim prepared statement to stall a bit. Either way they lose money. So it's about finding a least uncomfortable balance. I mean, it's one guy --he said some controversial and not so controversial things. It's not like someone jumped from the top of one of the buildings or something. Or the stock plunged 40% in a matter of a week.
rectang 9y ago
During the 1960s in the US, it became culturally taboo to express explicit racism. Perhaps we are undergoing a similar transition now.
kelukelugames 9y ago
I worked at Redfin previously and the CEO Glen was amazing at PR. He said "You don't get to position yourself in the market. The market positions you." Then he made a joke about how he wished he could make himself tall and good looking just by claiming so. It's a self deprecating joke because he's not tall. If someone writes they value diversity then it does not prove they do. It's a persuasion tactic. The most obvious example is "I'm not racist, but..." Pay attention to what comes after the "but".
- tnone 9y ago
  Now apply your last paragraph to the people who tell us their efforts will increase diversity. For that matter, apply it to the people who complain about how a memo makes them feel unsafe while their co-workers are making open threats of violence on Twitter against the people who think it's pretty reasonably stated. Up is down, echochambers are diverse, exclusion is inclusive, and open hostility is welcoming. We shall make tech a better place by screaming from the rooftops how atrocious of a place it is and how it's the fault of the bulk of the people working in it. Why isn't it working, I wonder? If only we could put our finger on it.
- brailsafe 9y ago
  That's the point. The sensationalist articles and quick reactions don't seem to be paying much attention to what comes after the "but". Actually I'd say there isn't a "but", rather a "here's a sensible approach to addressing and thinking about this problem". If someone said "I'm not racist. I disagree with people being discriminated against based on the color of their skin" would you call them racist?
danso 9y ago
> I have not yet made a decision about how to respond to James Damore's memo about diversity at Google. I am going to wait for the outrage to subside, for the various members of the Twitter mob to lay down their metaphorical pitchforks and return to their homes...And this little bit of extra time will allow for hurt feelings and outrage to subside, and that will in turn allow us all to approach the issue with cooler heads and sounder judgment. That last part in particular seems patronizing. It implies that people who wanted Damore to be punished did/could not reach that conclusion if they had exercised rational thinking and reasonable judgment. So the OP seems to be begging the question here, because the memo he believes Google's CEO should have written is the kind of memo the CEO would write if he thought the anti-Damore crowd to be irrational and over-emotional.
- flukus 9y ago
  > It implies that people who wanted Damore to be punished did/could not reach that conclusion if they had exercised rational thinking and reasonable judgment. If one thing has become painfully obvious it's that most people calling for his head did not read the memo at all (the evidence is in this thread). Others only read it after the media had framed it how they want. Others misinterpreted it, possibly intentionally. Others still think he deserved to be fired because he CC'd it to the whole company. That is not acting in a calm and rational manner.
  - danso 9y ago
    On what empirical basis is it "painfully obvious", without using circular reasoning or omniscient mind-reading, that the people who support Damore did read and properly interpret his memo, and did so without being irrationally affected by preconditioned biases about the state or importance of workplace diversity? More importantly, why should we assume the Google folks at which "the buck stops" made their punitive decision out of the same hysteria that purportedly infects the anti-Damore crowd? Correlation does not equal causation.
    - yorwba 9y ago
      It also painfully obvious that most people who support Damore also didn't read and properly interpret the memo. This is all the more reason to not fire him during the ongoing shouting match. It signals that an outraged mob can force Google to terminate an employee, even if this isn't what happened and Google just calmly evaluated their options.
innocentoldguy 9y ago
I agree with the content of this article. I have read James Demore's memo, and found it to be an accurate depiction of the differences between the drives of men and women. To pretend these things don't exist, and to burn people like Damore at the stake for pointing out the obvious, is to embrace ignorance. In my opinion, Sundar Pichai handled this poorly.
- nocoder 9y ago
  Are there any peer reviewed scientific articles that prove those assertions. I found James article vague on definition of terms and not quoting enough research. Not to mention the fact that extrapolating from broad population averages to a specific set of people who are not representative of the population will make the evidence for the population inapplicable to the sample in question. Having said that, I don't think firing and lynching was the right response, it just encouraged extremists on all sides.
  - imron 9y ago
    > Not to mention the fact that extrapolating from broad population averages to a specific set of people who are not representative of the population will make the evidence for the population inapplicable to the sample in question James had a chart showing and stating exactly that in the original memo! [0] Gizmodo thoughtfully decided to exclude this chart when they made the memo public. 0: https://diversitymemo-static.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/population-overlap_2x.png https://diversitymemo-static.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/popu...
  - innocentoldguy 9y ago
    @nocoder - He cited his work. Why don't you actually read it and find out? As he has mentioned in several interviews, people have stripped his citations, so make sure you find the original.
  - innocentoldguy 9y ago
    @nocoder - Also, because I'm not a fan of Wikipedia as a source, here is a scientific paper on the gender differences between men and women that includes many sources itself, which should satisfy your curiosity on the subject. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/#!po=42.5000 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/#!po=42... Here is a poll conducted by Indeed.com that also demonstrates the differences outlined by Demore in his memo. http://blog.indeed.com/2016/07/18/do-millennial-men-women-want-same-things-job/ http://blog.indeed.com/2016/07/18/do-millennial-men-women-wa... Do you need more examples?
pcurve 9y ago
Too wordy. It would've been sufficient to stop at "I have not yet made a decision about how to respond to James Damore's memo about diversity at Google. I am going to wait for the outrage to subside".
idibidiart 9y ago
Sexism is not free speech. It's immoral and constitutes hate speech toward more than half the population of this planet. Libertarians who say any speech should be allowed do not relate to the fact that what you say in words can and will be expressed by yourself and others in their actions. Condescension towards --and unjust treatment of-- women, and the feminine in general, is a consequence of the same sexist thoughts expressed by Damore. You can't be both for it and against it. Our speech and actions both originate from our thoughts.
- Stratoscope 9y ago
  Do you have some examples of hate speech from the memo?
  - idibidiart 9y ago
    The whole premise that women are less represented in tech because of biological differences as opposed to deeply ingrained gender bias.
    - brailsafe 9y ago
      Go on
      - idibidiart 9y ago
        "Go on" is the main trick I used in making IRC chatter bots back in the 90s... as in when my pattern matching fails to find a sentient thing to say.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        brailsafe 9y ago
        Very similar trick my chatter bot is using here but it hasn't found a sentient thing to respond to :-)
sinorising 9y ago
What happened to James Damore is no lynching- of any type. He made statements that impact his relationship with his coworkers. If he doesn't like Google's policies, QUIT. Get a job at a place Damore finds fit. What the author is really saying is: I wish Sundar Pichai recognize - That being fired is humiliating (Empathy) - That Damore is a "victim" (Diversity) - That the employer can fire anyone at anytime BUT you should discuss it with each-other, tolerate, cooperate (Inclusion) These are things even Damore himself wouldn't approve. "...modern-day Internet lynching..." Lynching, a practice primarily used by white men to terrorize black citizens
tnone 9y ago
I see the tolerant flagging brigade is here to push for a statement for reason, compassion and holding corporations to account, which we all know are their most deeply held values...
sinorising 9y ago
White guy got fired for insulting female coworkers. Not the first time.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  It is not even a direct insult (general statement that recruitment bar was lowered) and is a relatively verifiable statement within Google in many ways. It is telling if a company does not want this looked into. It is a PR disaster if true. Shareholders could see that as mismanagement by hiring inferior employees. If it is false, then it will probably bring no extra glory.

56 points by curtis 9y ago

Absolutely agreed. Regardless of the outcome, I do wish this would have been a turning point, a discussion, a 300 comment long back and forth from both sides like we see on lkml at times. Instead, it was a swift firing and attempt to sweep it under the rug. The fact that people actually took off work because they were 'offended' probably paints an even worse picture for reason in the Valley.

SamReidHughes 9y ago
Not like it's exclusive to the valley. Like, you'll find it in NYC. I know a girl who could get arrested and smile about it, but will have a meltdown if you say that men and women aren't identically distributed populations of blank slates. For this reason I don't think all the people who stayed home were fake-offended or scare-quote offended. Some just haven't hit certain developmental milestones, of the sort where you can think about population distributions, probabilities, or think about the universe without an evil genius rewriting everything to fit your fractally wrong worldview.
- siidooloo 9y ago
  So people who disagree with you "haven't hit certain developmental milestones"?
  - axaxs 9y ago
    Because anyone who shuts down and screams in response to a well thought out document, no matter how ridiculous, is not a well formed adult.
    - brailsafe 9y ago
      At the very least it's a childish reaction.
    - SamReidHughes 9y ago
      You know, I really don't think that's fair. You've got [The Document] -> [What people read or misread from the document, what they infer in other's motives, others' mental framework, etc] -> [Reaction]. I know if I thought everybody thought I was stupid because of my race, or gender, or some other crap like that, because "Science," and they were forming expectations by it and were wrong but there was nothing I could do about it... it would really suck, and I might want to stay home. (It would be stupid to stay home, because there's a perfectly good golf course across the street from HQ, but I digress...) The magnitude of their reaction is very understandable.
    - SamReidHughes 9y ago
      Also, while my response focused on one example I personally experienced, to discredit claims about fake-taking-offense, it's not necessarily the case that others are staying home solely because people hold beliefs. There's also, presumably, a general atmosphere of drama to avoid, stress and the like. So it's not merely a document.
  - SamReidHughes 9y ago
    It's not a matter of disagreement. It's the ability to process statements about population distributions, be they true or false, without being insulted by them. If you (a woman, let's say) hear Chris say, "fewer women are able to be good engineers than men," and treat that the same as, "You are not a good engineer," then you're wrong about what was said and what was meant. You'd be lacking the ability to perform a basic act of reading comprehension in certain contexts. Relatedly, many people can't think about population distributions in a sensible way in any context. Another is the inability to handle a statement like "There might be a smaller proportion of men suitable for engineering because of biology." Clearly there's some chance it's true, but plenty of people will say there's no chance that the proportions aren't identical by gender. Which is an absolutely crazy thing to think, because there's like, some chance you're wrong.
    - danso 9y ago
      > If you (a woman, let's say) hear Chris say, "fewer women are able to be good engineers than men," and treat that the same as, "You are not a good engineer," But Damore didn't say either of those things.
      - yorwba 9y ago
        Indeed, and yet I have seen lots of comments on HN that interpreted him as saying something indistinguishable from those things.
        danso 9y ago
        On the other hand, I've seen folks from the pro-Damore crowd who think that when someone accuses Damore of something he didn't literally say, then that person did not read his memo or was being maliciously misleading. That mindset is not particularly more intellectual or rational than not having read the full memo. If a politician says: I'm not a liberal, and all of my best friends are conservatives, but I'm going to vote in support of abortion rights and universal healthcare -- are constituents being obtuse if they perceive that their representative is in fact a liberal?
- danso 9y ago
  > I know a girl who could get arrested and smile about it, but will have a meltdown if you say that men and women aren't identically distributed populations of blank slates. Huh? What was she arrested for? And this girl (high school? junior high?) is representative of NYC? edit: And is she someone who could possibly hired by Google? If not, why would your observed reactions of her be a useful reference in judging whether people at Google were "fake-offended"?
  - SamReidHughes 9y ago
    Protesting. She's around 30. She could totally be hired by Google, not for engineering, but could have been a great engineer too if that's what she was interested in doing, she's got better IQ and math ability than most engineers I've worked with. I'll rate her 100% representative.
    - danso 9y ago
      At the age of 30 she is not literally a girl. So I'm assuming you mean she's as immature and/or intellectually limited as if she were a female child. And that's because she smiles while being arrested for disrupting the peace/resisting arrest+disobeying police (people aren't arrested on allegations of, or arraigned or charges of "protesting")? Does that make this smiling arrested man a "boy"? http://t.co/9QAI4voo1M http://t.co/9QAI4voo1M I don't think everyone would agree that someone's opinion of or behavior towards law enforcement implies something useful about their rationality (or lack of) when it comes to gender issues. But giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming this person truly is an immature fool, why would you think that someone you know in a personal capacity grants you insight to mindsets the Google Mountain View employees whom you don't know at all, or to their reasoning for hating Damore's memo? Just because I know some Asians who are fucking terrible at PHP doesn't bestow me with special insight about Facebook (powered in part by its high proportion of Asian programmers) service outages and security fuckups.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 9y ago

mc32 9y ago

He's not firing his buddy at a 15-person company. Regardless of whether he made the right or wrong call, Pichai, could not for one moment "be candid". Whatever he said, or did, would become public and whatever he did as head of a very large and well known consumer-facing company, would reverberate beyond the company [and would be parsed for meaning and perh lawsuits] The only wiggle room he had was to play it down a bit, maybe waffle and delay till his team could formulate a more nuanced response. Agree or disagree these sorts of things can turn into PR fiascos --perhaps some of it their own doing because of how they market themselves --Walmart, another consumer facing company, markets itself differently and would have more wiggle room --probably lots more. But no, a Google can't publish a "we screwed up" mea culpa style response that a brash start-up can.

danso 9y ago
Likewise, Google faces proportionally more negative publicity and backlash when firing a disgruntled/outspoken employee, so we can't automatically assume that the CEO's response was reflexive or capricious, rather than the "right" -- or somewhere on the continuum of least harmful decision. But deciding to wait is not nothing nor a neutral decision. People in Silicon Valley of all places should know that.
- mc32 9y ago
  I don't know. Bureaucracies are big and cumbersome and make it difficult for things to pivot on a dime. It takes time for companies like Google to settle on decisions --important ones. People who work there would know (what's their joke 'deprecated, not ready'?) That they/he made such a swift decision is extraordinary --he could have waited some time --it's not like they would suddenly have people huffing and frothing with pitchforks at the ready inciting a rash decision. I'm sure they have some prepared statements for these things. They could have issued an interim prepared statement to stall a bit. Either way they lose money. So it's about finding a least uncomfortable balance. I mean, it's one guy --he said some controversial and not so controversial things. It's not like someone jumped from the top of one of the buildings or something. Or the stock plunged 40% in a matter of a week.

rectang 9y ago

During the 1960s in the US, it became culturally taboo to express explicit racism. Perhaps we are undergoing a similar transition now.

kelukelugames 9y ago

I worked at Redfin previously and the CEO Glen was amazing at PR. He said "You don't get to position yourself in the market. The market positions you." Then he made a joke about how he wished he could make himself tall and good looking just by claiming so. It's a self deprecating joke because he's not tall. If someone writes they value diversity then it does not prove they do. It's a persuasion tactic. The most obvious example is "I'm not racist, but..." Pay attention to what comes after the "but".

tnone 9y ago
Now apply your last paragraph to the people who tell us their efforts will increase diversity. For that matter, apply it to the people who complain about how a memo makes them feel unsafe while their co-workers are making open threats of violence on Twitter against the people who think it's pretty reasonably stated. Up is down, echochambers are diverse, exclusion is inclusive, and open hostility is welcoming. We shall make tech a better place by screaming from the rooftops how atrocious of a place it is and how it's the fault of the bulk of the people working in it. Why isn't it working, I wonder? If only we could put our finger on it.
brailsafe 9y ago
That's the point. The sensationalist articles and quick reactions don't seem to be paying much attention to what comes after the "but". Actually I'd say there isn't a "but", rather a "here's a sensible approach to addressing and thinking about this problem". If someone said "I'm not racist. I disagree with people being discriminated against based on the color of their skin" would you call them racist?

danso 9y ago

> I have not yet made a decision about how to respond to James Damore's memo about diversity at Google. I am going to wait for the outrage to subside, for the various members of the Twitter mob to lay down their metaphorical pitchforks and return to their homes...And this little bit of extra time will allow for hurt feelings and outrage to subside, and that will in turn allow us all to approach the issue with cooler heads and sounder judgment. That last part in particular seems patronizing. It implies that people who wanted Damore to be punished did/could not reach that conclusion if they had exercised rational thinking and reasonable judgment. So the OP seems to be begging the question here, because the memo he believes Google's CEO should have written is the kind of memo the CEO would write if he thought the anti-Damore crowd to be irrational and over-emotional.

flukus 9y ago
> It implies that people who wanted Damore to be punished did/could not reach that conclusion if they had exercised rational thinking and reasonable judgment. If one thing has become painfully obvious it's that most people calling for his head did not read the memo at all (the evidence is in this thread). Others only read it after the media had framed it how they want. Others misinterpreted it, possibly intentionally. Others still think he deserved to be fired because he CC'd it to the whole company. That is not acting in a calm and rational manner.
- danso 9y ago
  On what empirical basis is it "painfully obvious", without using circular reasoning or omniscient mind-reading, that the people who support Damore did read and properly interpret his memo, and did so without being irrationally affected by preconditioned biases about the state or importance of workplace diversity? More importantly, why should we assume the Google folks at which "the buck stops" made their punitive decision out of the same hysteria that purportedly infects the anti-Damore crowd? Correlation does not equal causation.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    It also painfully obvious that most people who support Damore also didn't read and properly interpret the memo. This is all the more reason to not fire him during the ongoing shouting match. It signals that an outraged mob can force Google to terminate an employee, even if this isn't what happened and Google just calmly evaluated their options.

innocentoldguy 9y ago

I agree with the content of this article. I have read James Demore's memo, and found it to be an accurate depiction of the differences between the drives of men and women. To pretend these things don't exist, and to burn people like Damore at the stake for pointing out the obvious, is to embrace ignorance. In my opinion, Sundar Pichai handled this poorly.

nocoder 9y ago
Are there any peer reviewed scientific articles that prove those assertions. I found James article vague on definition of terms and not quoting enough research. Not to mention the fact that extrapolating from broad population averages to a specific set of people who are not representative of the population will make the evidence for the population inapplicable to the sample in question. Having said that, I don't think firing and lynching was the right response, it just encouraged extremists on all sides.
- imron 9y ago
  > Not to mention the fact that extrapolating from broad population averages to a specific set of people who are not representative of the population will make the evidence for the population inapplicable to the sample in question James had a chart showing and stating exactly that in the original memo! [0] Gizmodo thoughtfully decided to exclude this chart when they made the memo public. 0: https://diversitymemo-static.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/population-overlap_2x.png https://diversitymemo-static.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/popu...
- innocentoldguy 9y ago
  @nocoder - He cited his work. Why don't you actually read it and find out? As he has mentioned in several interviews, people have stripped his citations, so make sure you find the original.
- innocentoldguy 9y ago
  @nocoder - Also, because I'm not a fan of Wikipedia as a source, here is a scientific paper on the gender differences between men and women that includes many sources itself, which should satisfy your curiosity on the subject. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/#!po=42.5000 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/#!po=42... Here is a poll conducted by Indeed.com that also demonstrates the differences outlined by Demore in his memo. http://blog.indeed.com/2016/07/18/do-millennial-men-women-want-same-things-job/ http://blog.indeed.com/2016/07/18/do-millennial-men-women-wa... Do you need more examples?

pcurve 9y ago

Too wordy. It would've been sufficient to stop at "I have not yet made a decision about how to respond to James Damore's memo about diversity at Google. I am going to wait for the outrage to subside".

idibidiart 9y ago

Sexism is not free speech. It's immoral and constitutes hate speech toward more than half the population of this planet. Libertarians who say any speech should be allowed do not relate to the fact that what you say in words can and will be expressed by yourself and others in their actions. Condescension towards --and unjust treatment of-- women, and the feminine in general, is a consequence of the same sexist thoughts expressed by Damore. You can't be both for it and against it. Our speech and actions both originate from our thoughts.

Stratoscope 9y ago
Do you have some examples of hate speech from the memo?
- idibidiart 9y ago
  The whole premise that women are less represented in tech because of biological differences as opposed to deeply ingrained gender bias.
  - brailsafe 9y ago
    Go on
    - idibidiart 9y ago
      "Go on" is the main trick I used in making IRC chatter bots back in the 90s... as in when my pattern matching fails to find a sentient thing to say.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - brailsafe 9y ago
        Very similar trick my chatter bot is using here but it hasn't found a sentient thing to respond to :-)

sinorising 9y ago

What happened to James Damore is no lynching- of any type. He made statements that impact his relationship with his coworkers. If he doesn't like Google's policies, QUIT. Get a job at a place Damore finds fit. What the author is really saying is: I wish Sundar Pichai recognize - That being fired is humiliating (Empathy) - That Damore is a "victim" (Diversity) - That the employer can fire anyone at anytime BUT you should discuss it with each-other, tolerate, cooperate (Inclusion) These are things even Damore himself wouldn't approve. "...modern-day Internet lynching..." Lynching, a practice primarily used by white men to terrorize black citizens

tnone 9y ago

I see the tolerant flagging brigade is here to push for a statement for reason, compassion and holding corporations to account, which we all know are their most deeply held values...

sinorising 9y ago

White guy got fired for insulting female coworkers. Not the first time.

AstralStorm 9y ago
It is not even a direct insult (general statement that recruitment bar was lowered) and is a relatively verifiable statement within Google in many ways. It is telling if a company does not want this looked into. It is a PR disaster if true. Shareholders could see that as mismanagement by hiring inferior employees. If it is false, then it will probably bring no extra glory.