10 ms·

James Damore was fired for misogyny, which is not a valued viewpoint anywhere on the mainstream political spectrum.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
BadassFractal 7y ago
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manifesto-isnt-sexist-or-anti-diversity-its-science/article35903359/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manife...
tracker1 7y ago
Pointing out that statistical variance between female and male hiring is influenced by behavioral differences with men and women isn't misogyny. In a free society, where men and women are encouraged to take whatever career they want, men and women tend to choose careers in differing ratios. Unless you think women should be forced against their will to be software developers?
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  It's a smokescreen because it ignores the history of computer science and software engineering. Which is to say statistically, pre-1984 there were a lot of women getting into computer science and the field in general had a much larger proportion of female software engineers. [1] This directly debunks the claims that women avoid software development for biological reasons unless they suddenly had a massive biological shift in 1984. It's a silly argument often used as a way of painting all women as somehow being less technologically inclined and one I am no stranger to. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
  - tracker1 7y ago
    pre-1984 most people in computer science were coming from adjacent professional fields and cross-trained. The computer programs in colleges weren't able to keep up with early and even current demands and that's a lot of the differences. If you look at Scandinavian countries where equality of opportunity are enshrined in their culture, there's a broad variance of career choices between men and women as a whole. Aside: I do feel that at least some of the differences can be attributed to the toy marketing which put the girl toys in the "pink aisle" and the computer games with the "boy toys" ... this has shaped a lot of culture and I think we're seeing things starting to normalize. But even of those women that I've worked with in software more than half move towards testing and management or out of the field within 3-5 years post-college. The culture for software crafting tends to be one of strong negotiation and opinion, which tends to be unnatural for many women. I would like to see more education/training programs for women to get better and more comfortable with asserting and injecting opinion in a group setting. I think that would help, it still won't increase the natural variance, but it would probably keep more women in the development side of the coin. All of the statements about "men" or "women" above are generalities, there are broad exceptions to everything said. There's a difference between outliers at under 20% and the norm.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    It absolutely does not debunk the claim that women are innately less inclined to go into tech. Pre 1984, many professions like law, medicine, and more either were not accessible to women or were not viewed as socially acceptable. This resulted in displacement of women from these fields into other ones, like computing. Increased gender equality, especially in the 90s, led to more women going into fields like law, medicine, publishing, and more. Since double majors are rare, this increase of women in those fields necessarily comes with a reduction in women in other fields. Counterintuitively, the higher rates of women in computing during the 1970s and early 1980s can be viewed as the product of sexism that existed in much of society. This pattern holds true globally. The greater amount of gender equality a country has, the lower the share of women in engineering and technology. While I am not pleased by lower diversity in computing as a result of this, I cannot bring myself to condemn the fact that women are freer to choose careers even if the result is less women in CS.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - belorn 7y ago
    Earlier today there were an article looking at gender ratios in professions between 1950 and 2015. Some professions flipped between being male and female dominated several times, and this without massive biological shift of both women and men, and multiple times. A theory that tries to explain gender segregation need to explain why profession flip and sometimes oscillate between male and female dominance, why the gender equality paradox in places like Sweden where 85% of both women and men work in gender segregated work places, and why even within the same work place women and men tend to gender segregate even within the same profession (such as teachers gender segregating based on teaching subject). A really old but fairly accepted theory is that a person feel more safe and confident when in the dominant group. People will thus have preference to such places. The theory is pretty good in explaining why people gender segregate but not why professions flip between male and female dominance. A common theory to explain that is than gender roles pushes men towards high income professions and socially punish those that don't, creating a preference for men but not women to prioritize high income professions over professions that offer other benefits.
curtis 7y ago
Damore was fired because a shocking number of people apparently have a fundamental reading comprehension problem. This article in The Atlantic is the best one I've seen on the issue: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-most-common-error-in-coverage-of-the-google-memo/536181/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-mos....
manfredo 7y ago
Damore was fired for the words that others stuffed into his mouth, not the words that he actually wrote. Most critics of the memo state that it: * Claimed that female engineers are less capable than male engineers because of biology. * Claimed that women and URM engineers at Google were hired despite not being qualified for the work. * That the memo is "anti-diversity". None of these were correct. The memo's arguments on biology were about male vs. female preferences. That is, men and women's rates of making career choices, not the effectiveness of men and women in the same career. Similarly, the memo did write that google's affirmative hiring processes "lower the bar by reducing the false negative rate" which is an accurate description of the company's diversity hiring initiatives (but most news outlets stripped out the words, "by reducing the false negative rate" leading readers to a false conclusion). And lastly, Damore laid of 5 bullet points outlining discriminatory policies that he argued should be abolished but also laid out 9 bullet points for non-discriminatory ways to promote diversity. I have seen very few publications that agree with his firing that actually base their arguments on what was written in the memo. The fact that the memo circulated within Google for a month, but Damore was fired one business day after it was leaked to the media strongly suggests that it was the media coverage that resulted in Damore's firing and not the content of the memo itself. I'm actually sympathetic to both Google and Damore in this situation. Damore's firing sucked for him, but the slanted (and at times, outright false) coverage put Google in a situation where not firing him would be a PR nightmare.
- lkjhdcba 7y ago
  Damore did not get fired for the debunked evopsych nonsense. He got fired by stating the following assumptions: 1) Google does "diversity programs" to increase their number of female employees 2) These programs involve "lowering the bar" to help female applicants get into the company True, he does not explicitly state that: 3) Therefore, current female applicants are likely to be less competent at their job than current male ones But I fail to see how this isn't an obvious implication from 1) and 2). This is akin to people "merely asking" about the origin of the IQ gap between blacks and whites and acting shocked when accused of racism. Note that he also played the same game with the following reasoning: 1) Women have higher degrees of neuroticism, leading to anxiety in high-stress situations 2) High-level positions are often ripe with stress Again, he does not explicitly state that: 3) Therefore, female employees are less likely to be fit for high-level positions But the implication is still clear as day. Defending yourself behind "but that's not what I said" doesn't work: people are not stupid and can connect the dots, even if they aren't willing to take your reasoning apart in order to show you why they think you're acting in bad faith. The "but it's all statistical, I wasn't talking about female Googlers" isn't a valid defense either: if I were to argue that men are more likely to be rapists than women (statistically true) and therefore companies should abstain from hiring men (or at the very least, quarantine them to be safe and avoid "false negatives") in order to reduce workplace rape, men would rightfully feel insulted and write me off as crazy. "You're more likely to be a rapist" is a lesser insult than "You're a rapist" but it's still one, and hiding behind the adverb "statistically" doesn't change that.
reitanqild 7y ago
And therein lies the problem: there was no misonogy there. It seems it was either an honest misguided attempt to help or an honest well guided attempt to help (I leave it to you to judge) that was shot down. It is ironic that the same people who'd happily blame all men, happily blame all white people except themselves etc are so dead set on claiming that everyone else is something *ist. Many of us aren't. I've put effort into the issue myself to help women get jobs in tech. For no other reason than wanting to help them - and maybe the company. More than once. But I'm so tired of being told I'm a racist and what not. By people like on PyCon, the super privileged woman who got two devs fired over hearsay while posting far worse stuff on Twitter herself. I guess it is this mindless stupid hypocrisy we react to. Am I privileged? You bet! Compared to 94% of the people in the world I'm privileged. Does that mean I should be ok with being picked on by ten times more privileged people working for Google? My answer is no. By the time someone joins Google or other similar companies they can safely stop calling other people privileged whatever race and gender those others have. Edit: except, on a case-by-case basis for their colleagues, certain politicians and movie stars and other exceptions :-)
dekhn 7y ago
The technical term that Google used was "fired for promoting harmful gender stereotypes" which is more subtle than misogyny. It's not clear to me that James Damore was misogynistic, but rather did a very poor job of articulating his belief that women and men are different, that those differences could help explain why there are highly skewed gender ratios in tech, and then tried to justify this by citing a wide range of psychology literature, much of which is (IMO) questionable. He didn't help his case by using terms that trigger people, like neuroticism, which have a specific meaning in psychological literature (remember, he got kicked out of Harvard's Systems Bio program, so he presumably had some exposure to biological/medical literature) but a very different connotation in popular culture. What amazes me about this document (which continues to polarize people) is how many different ways it's been interpreted. People impute their own beliefs onto his language.
- repolfx 7y ago
  The reality is Damore did an excellent job of articulating his beliefs. He wrote carefully, politely, cited his sources, used precise language, repeatedly clarified that he actually agreed with Google's goals but not their methods, and correctly anticipated how people might try to mischaracterise what he wrote. I've seen much much worse essays than that one. The whole idea he lacks "emotional intelligence" is just a sop to people who went on the attack because he's an ideological enemy. His intelligence is just fine, he simply is less tolerant of unintellectual nonsense masquerading as morality than most people are. And why should he not be? Damore challenged Google to rational debate and too many Googler's completely failed. The lack of intelligence isn't on Damores side.
qzygr 7y ago
Nice troll bait, 10/10.
- josteink 7y ago
  No troll. I’m just pointing out that google only seems to promote one kind of politics, and it’s clearly causing polarization.
robocat 7y ago
Ironically, if he is an outlier, then firing him reduced diversity! Should we care about people with low EQ? (Not saying he has low EQ - seemed more like a witch hunt to me).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manifesto-isnt-sexist-or-anti-diversity-its-science/article35903359/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manife...

tracker1 7y ago

Pointing out that statistical variance between female and male hiring is influenced by behavioral differences with men and women isn't misogyny. In a free society, where men and women are encouraged to take whatever career they want, men and women tend to choose careers in differing ratios. Unless you think women should be forced against their will to be software developers?

fzeroracer 7y ago
It's a smokescreen because it ignores the history of computer science and software engineering. Which is to say statistically, pre-1984 there were a lot of women getting into computer science and the field in general had a much larger proportion of female software engineers. [1] This directly debunks the claims that women avoid software development for biological reasons unless they suddenly had a massive biological shift in 1984. It's a silly argument often used as a way of painting all women as somehow being less technologically inclined and one I am no stranger to. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
- tracker1 7y ago
  pre-1984 most people in computer science were coming from adjacent professional fields and cross-trained. The computer programs in colleges weren't able to keep up with early and even current demands and that's a lot of the differences. If you look at Scandinavian countries where equality of opportunity are enshrined in their culture, there's a broad variance of career choices between men and women as a whole. Aside: I do feel that at least some of the differences can be attributed to the toy marketing which put the girl toys in the "pink aisle" and the computer games with the "boy toys" ... this has shaped a lot of culture and I think we're seeing things starting to normalize. But even of those women that I've worked with in software more than half move towards testing and management or out of the field within 3-5 years post-college. The culture for software crafting tends to be one of strong negotiation and opinion, which tends to be unnatural for many women. I would like to see more education/training programs for women to get better and more comfortable with asserting and injecting opinion in a group setting. I think that would help, it still won't increase the natural variance, but it would probably keep more women in the development side of the coin. All of the statements about "men" or "women" above are generalities, there are broad exceptions to everything said. There's a difference between outliers at under 20% and the norm.
- manfredo 7y ago
  It absolutely does not debunk the claim that women are innately less inclined to go into tech. Pre 1984, many professions like law, medicine, and more either were not accessible to women or were not viewed as socially acceptable. This resulted in displacement of women from these fields into other ones, like computing. Increased gender equality, especially in the 90s, led to more women going into fields like law, medicine, publishing, and more. Since double majors are rare, this increase of women in those fields necessarily comes with a reduction in women in other fields. Counterintuitively, the higher rates of women in computing during the 1970s and early 1980s can be viewed as the product of sexism that existed in much of society. This pattern holds true globally. The greater amount of gender equality a country has, the lower the share of women in engineering and technology. While I am not pleased by lower diversity in computing as a result of this, I cannot bring myself to condemn the fact that women are freer to choose careers even if the result is less women in CS.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- belorn 7y ago
  Earlier today there were an article looking at gender ratios in professions between 1950 and 2015. Some professions flipped between being male and female dominated several times, and this without massive biological shift of both women and men, and multiple times. A theory that tries to explain gender segregation need to explain why profession flip and sometimes oscillate between male and female dominance, why the gender equality paradox in places like Sweden where 85% of both women and men work in gender segregated work places, and why even within the same work place women and men tend to gender segregate even within the same profession (such as teachers gender segregating based on teaching subject). A really old but fairly accepted theory is that a person feel more safe and confident when in the dominant group. People will thus have preference to such places. The theory is pretty good in explaining why people gender segregate but not why professions flip between male and female dominance. A common theory to explain that is than gender roles pushes men towards high income professions and socially punish those that don't, creating a preference for men but not women to prioritize high income professions over professions that offer other benefits.

curtis 7y ago

Damore was fired because a shocking number of people apparently have a fundamental reading comprehension problem. This article in The Atlantic is the best one I've seen on the issue: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-most-common-error-in-coverage-of-the-google-memo/536181/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-mos....

manfredo 7y ago

Damore was fired for the words that others stuffed into his mouth, not the words that he actually wrote. Most critics of the memo state that it: * Claimed that female engineers are less capable than male engineers because of biology. * Claimed that women and URM engineers at Google were hired despite not being qualified for the work. * That the memo is "anti-diversity". None of these were correct. The memo's arguments on biology were about male vs. female preferences. That is, men and women's rates of making career choices, not the effectiveness of men and women in the same career. Similarly, the memo did write that google's affirmative hiring processes "lower the bar by reducing the false negative rate" which is an accurate description of the company's diversity hiring initiatives (but most news outlets stripped out the words, "by reducing the false negative rate" leading readers to a false conclusion). And lastly, Damore laid of 5 bullet points outlining discriminatory policies that he argued should be abolished but also laid out 9 bullet points for non-discriminatory ways to promote diversity. I have seen very few publications that agree with his firing that actually base their arguments on what was written in the memo. The fact that the memo circulated within Google for a month, but Damore was fired one business day after it was leaked to the media strongly suggests that it was the media coverage that resulted in Damore's firing and not the content of the memo itself. I'm actually sympathetic to both Google and Damore in this situation. Damore's firing sucked for him, but the slanted (and at times, outright false) coverage put Google in a situation where not firing him would be a PR nightmare.

lkjhdcba 7y ago
Damore did not get fired for the debunked evopsych nonsense. He got fired by stating the following assumptions: 1) Google does "diversity programs" to increase their number of female employees 2) These programs involve "lowering the bar" to help female applicants get into the company True, he does not explicitly state that: 3) Therefore, current female applicants are likely to be less competent at their job than current male ones But I fail to see how this isn't an obvious implication from 1) and 2). This is akin to people "merely asking" about the origin of the IQ gap between blacks and whites and acting shocked when accused of racism. Note that he also played the same game with the following reasoning: 1) Women have higher degrees of neuroticism, leading to anxiety in high-stress situations 2) High-level positions are often ripe with stress Again, he does not explicitly state that: 3) Therefore, female employees are less likely to be fit for high-level positions But the implication is still clear as day. Defending yourself behind "but that's not what I said" doesn't work: people are not stupid and can connect the dots, even if they aren't willing to take your reasoning apart in order to show you why they think you're acting in bad faith. The "but it's all statistical, I wasn't talking about female Googlers" isn't a valid defense either: if I were to argue that men are more likely to be rapists than women (statistically true) and therefore companies should abstain from hiring men (or at the very least, quarantine them to be safe and avoid "false negatives") in order to reduce workplace rape, men would rightfully feel insulted and write me off as crazy. "You're more likely to be a rapist" is a lesser insult than "You're a rapist" but it's still one, and hiding behind the adverb "statistically" doesn't change that.

reitanqild 7y ago

And therein lies the problem: there was no misonogy there. It seems it was either an honest misguided attempt to help or an honest well guided attempt to help (I leave it to you to judge) that was shot down. It is ironic that the same people who'd happily blame all men, happily blame all white people except themselves etc are so dead set on claiming that everyone else is something *ist. Many of us aren't. I've put effort into the issue myself to help women get jobs in tech. For no other reason than wanting to help them - and maybe the company. More than once. But I'm so tired of being told I'm a racist and what not. By people like on PyCon, the super privileged woman who got two devs fired over hearsay while posting far worse stuff on Twitter herself. I guess it is this mindless stupid hypocrisy we react to. Am I privileged? You bet! Compared to 94% of the people in the world I'm privileged. Does that mean I should be ok with being picked on by ten times more privileged people working for Google? My answer is no. By the time someone joins Google or other similar companies they can safely stop calling other people privileged whatever race and gender those others have. Edit: except, on a case-by-case basis for their colleagues, certain politicians and movie stars and other exceptions :-)

dekhn 7y ago

The technical term that Google used was "fired for promoting harmful gender stereotypes" which is more subtle than misogyny. It's not clear to me that James Damore was misogynistic, but rather did a very poor job of articulating his belief that women and men are different, that those differences could help explain why there are highly skewed gender ratios in tech, and then tried to justify this by citing a wide range of psychology literature, much of which is (IMO) questionable. He didn't help his case by using terms that trigger people, like neuroticism, which have a specific meaning in psychological literature (remember, he got kicked out of Harvard's Systems Bio program, so he presumably had some exposure to biological/medical literature) but a very different connotation in popular culture. What amazes me about this document (which continues to polarize people) is how many different ways it's been interpreted. People impute their own beliefs onto his language.

repolfx 7y ago
The reality is Damore did an excellent job of articulating his beliefs. He wrote carefully, politely, cited his sources, used precise language, repeatedly clarified that he actually agreed with Google's goals but not their methods, and correctly anticipated how people might try to mischaracterise what he wrote. I've seen much much worse essays than that one. The whole idea he lacks "emotional intelligence" is just a sop to people who went on the attack because he's an ideological enemy. His intelligence is just fine, he simply is less tolerant of unintellectual nonsense masquerading as morality than most people are. And why should he not be? Damore challenged Google to rational debate and too many Googler's completely failed. The lack of intelligence isn't on Damores side.

qzygr 7y ago

Nice troll bait, 10/10.

josteink 7y ago
No troll. I’m just pointing out that google only seems to promote one kind of politics, and it’s clearly causing polarization.

robocat 7y ago

Ironically, if he is an outlier, then firing him reduced diversity! Should we care about people with low EQ? (Not saying he has low EQ - seemed more like a witch hunt to me).