4 ms·

I seem to recall a certain young engineer who wondered about this publicly not long ago, without concealing his identity. It impacted his career.

by psyc 9y ago

mikejb 9y ago
He said worse than that, IIRC. But his lawsuit will maybe bring more clarity on what he really thinks vs. what might have been mis-written or mis-read in various versions of 'the memo'.
- Idontknowmyuser 9y ago
  what did he say worse than that?
  - ejstronge 9y ago
    His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks[1]. I could find more questionable positions but have attached a copy of the memo below. Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things. We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this). More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics. Another point he raised was that Google's hiring initiatives 'lower the bar' for their targeted groups. Google has created several discriminatory practices: [...] Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversitymemo-static.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversity...
    - throwaway613834 9y ago
      > His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks Could you please point to the exact sentence that says this? Because I did a quick search for "biolog" and I did not find a single passage that proposed what you wrote. What I did ̶s̶a̶y̶ find is sentences like "women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men" which say nothing about women being less capable of performing any software-associated tasks.
      - ejstronge 9y ago
        > Could you please point to the exact sentence that says this? Because I did a quick search for "biolog" and I did not find a single passage that proposed what you wrote. What I did say is sentences like "women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men" which say nothing about women being less capable of performing any software-associated tasks. From his article: On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because...
        throwaway613834 9y ago
        > > On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because... How do you conclude "women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks" from merely that sentence?
        ejstronge 9y ago
        It's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.
        throwaway613834 9y ago
        > It's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this. Indeed, I have read the article in its entirely before. And I didn't remember such a passage (my memory isn't great), so I went back and Ctrl-F'd to try to find it and still didn't find it. Then I read on in each instance and saw that, just as I remembered, he was talking about preferences everywhere I found. So, yeah, I've already done everything you're saying, and that's why I think your claim is baseless, but I acknowledge maybe I'm still missing something. So instead of telling me to RTFA, it would behoove you to just spend 5 seconds pasting the full passage you are concluding this from. It isn't any harder to copy-paste the relevant portion of the passage than to comment about why you're refusing to do so when it actually exists. It's only harder when it doesn't exist.
  - mikejb 9y ago
    One example would be: > Google has created several discriminatory practices: - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate To me, that translates to: "Google creates programs that lower the bar for hiring "diverse" people. This directly implies to me that at least some "diverse" people who got hired got hired primarily because of their gender/race/whatever. Now, I work in a team with 3 female software engineers (out of ~10). According to his conclusions, probably at least one of them didn't pass the mustard, and only got the job because of her gender.
- psyc 9y ago
  There is a tragic ambiguity in the memo. There is a line that says women may not be suitable for all tech jobs. There is another that clearly says it's tech that isn't suitable to women, and can change to accommodate them. His opponents are sure he meant the former, and his supporters are sure he meant the latter. Still others believe that any hint of biological essentialism whatsoever must not be tolerated. So it is quite difficult to determine to anyone's satisfaction whether what he wrote was 'worse'.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- interfixus 9y ago
  So now lawsuits concern themselves with what a man really thinks?
  - psyc 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
    - throwaway613834 9y ago
      Something I've wondered: how is this reconciled with the notion of "ignorance of the law isn't a defense"? If you do something that's a crime but have no idea that it's a crime (and had no intention to commit one) then you can generally still get convicted because that's not a defense, right? So where does the guilty mind come into play?
    - interfixus 9y ago
      Yes, the serious crime indeed of having an opinion.
mmanfrin 9y ago
He didn't 'wonder about this publicly', he wrote an argument insisting that women were less capable of doing engineering. Don't sugar coat his words, he is not a martyr.

I seem to recall a certain young engineer who wondered about this publicly not long ago, without concealing his identity. It impacted his career.

by psyc 9y ago

I seem to recall a certain young engineer who wondered about this publicly not long ago, without concealing his identity. It impacted his career.

mikejb 9y ago

He said worse than that, IIRC. But his lawsuit will maybe bring more clarity on what he really thinks vs. what might have been mis-written or mis-read in various versions of 'the memo'.

Idontknowmyuser 9y ago
what did he say worse than that?
- ejstronge 9y ago
  His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks[1]. I could find more questionable positions but have attached a copy of the memo below. Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things. We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this). More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics. Another point he raised was that Google's hiring initiatives 'lower the bar' for their targeted groups. Google has created several discriminatory practices: [...] Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversitymemo-static.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversity...
  - throwaway613834 9y ago
    > His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks Could you please point to the exact sentence that says this? Because I did a quick search for "biolog" and I did not find a single passage that proposed what you wrote. What I did ̶s̶a̶y̶ find is sentences like "women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men" which say nothing about women being less capable of performing any software-associated tasks.
    - ejstronge 9y ago
      > Could you please point to the exact sentence that says this? Because I did a quick search for "biolog" and I did not find a single passage that proposed what you wrote. What I did say is sentences like "women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men" which say nothing about women being less capable of performing any software-associated tasks. From his article: On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because...
      - throwaway613834 9y ago
        > > On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because... How do you conclude "women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks" from merely that sentence?
        ejstronge 9y ago
        It's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.
        throwaway613834 9y ago
        > It's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this. Indeed, I have read the article in its entirely before. And I didn't remember such a passage (my memory isn't great), so I went back and Ctrl-F'd to try to find it and still didn't find it. Then I read on in each instance and saw that, just as I remembered, he was talking about preferences everywhere I found. So, yeah, I've already done everything you're saying, and that's why I think your claim is baseless, but I acknowledge maybe I'm still missing something. So instead of telling me to RTFA, it would behoove you to just spend 5 seconds pasting the full passage you are concluding this from. It isn't any harder to copy-paste the relevant portion of the passage than to comment about why you're refusing to do so when it actually exists. It's only harder when it doesn't exist.
- mikejb 9y ago
  One example would be: > Google has created several discriminatory practices: - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate To me, that translates to: "Google creates programs that lower the bar for hiring "diverse" people. This directly implies to me that at least some "diverse" people who got hired got hired primarily because of their gender/race/whatever. Now, I work in a team with 3 female software engineers (out of ~10). According to his conclusions, probably at least one of them didn't pass the mustard, and only got the job because of her gender.
psyc 9y ago
There is a tragic ambiguity in the memo. There is a line that says women may not be suitable for all tech jobs. There is another that clearly says it's tech that isn't suitable to women, and can change to accommodate them. His opponents are sure he meant the former, and his supporters are sure he meant the latter. Still others believe that any hint of biological essentialism whatsoever must not be tolerated. So it is quite difficult to determine to anyone's satisfaction whether what he wrote was 'worse'.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
interfixus 9y ago
So now lawsuits concern themselves with what a man really thinks?
- psyc 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
  - throwaway613834 9y ago
    Something I've wondered: how is this reconciled with the notion of "ignorance of the law isn't a defense"? If you do something that's a crime but have no idea that it's a crime (and had no intention to commit one) then you can generally still get convicted because that's not a defense, right? So where does the guilty mind come into play?
  - interfixus 9y ago
    Yes, the serious crime indeed of having an opinion.

mmanfrin 9y ago

He didn't 'wonder about this publicly', he wrote an argument insisting that women were less capable of doing engineering. Don't sugar coat his words, he is not a martyr.