1. It's not wrong to fire him. Google is a private company and can fire somebody for being out of line with the company's philosophy. If everyone hates him at work, it's probably going to hinder performance overall. Firing him just proves his point about intolerance of ideological diversity, however. He doesn't seem too distraught and surely knew it was coming.

2. This is the more pressing issue. Holy ****, people find THIS offensive and racist/sexist? This is what should be more concerning. There's a very strong anti-science ideology which is very deeply entrenched in society and we should all be concerned. Evolution denial is a tiny fringe, climate change denial slightly larger, but denial of basic facts about differences in innate ability, gender, and ethnicity are not only widely held but held to a basically religious extent. They have far reaching policy implications for government and enterprise which can lead to even more injustice, social tension, and inefficiency.

I mean the dude is literally spending 1/4th of the memo proposing how to get more women in tech and people crucify him because it's ways that don't fit their ridiculous and inconsistent narrative.

Please tell me exactly why this memo is incorrect or sexist. Read each citation carefully. At no point does he say that any individual woman is not confronted with discrimination and/or sexism, he only comments on aggregate trends. Also don't you live in some former soviet republic? Extremely different culture, the memo is basically out the window for you anyway.

Rent a house for the weekend in somewhere like Conway, NH or on the coast somewhere. Bro out.

Chuck E. Cheese

Paint Ball and grilling?

He doesn't have to drink, but there's no reason others can't - they just have to not get drunk.

This.

Vrbo a place with a pool table/pool/etc. Go golfing? Dinner out. Cook fancy lad dinner in.

Bro out.

On an unrelated topic, my yoga instructor rubbed my neck down tonight during class. Then she put her butt in an area where my hand would brush it while my eyes were closed.

Do you think she wants to **** me?

JK. I'm not that guy. Though the above did happen.

My first reaction when reading googlememo was that this is what jdock might sound like if he had the ability to express his thoughts clearly (or if you buy his excuse, he able, but is too busy multitasking while posting to make the minimal effort required). I didn't find it offensive or find significant fault with it, but it was obvious that others would.

I this it is likely that the dude who wrote it was fully prepared for possible firing. Without knowing his personal situation, it's hard to say how wise or unwise that was. But it seems this guy was smart enough to put probable termination in his EV calculation. And for some reason he decided that he value of expressing his viewpoint was greater.

I was actually impressed with Google when the didn't snap fire him. I thought that it was great that despite the fact that this guy had an unpopular viewpoint, they were just going to let him express it. Then they fired him, and my optimism disappeared.

Obviously, google is just making a business decision here. I'd like to think that if I owned google, I'd wouldn't have fired him, but that's a lot easier for me to say when I'm not a stakeholder. It's just unfortunate that even an attempt at discussing this stuff is considered so offensive.

If you want a useful response to your question, just get Holliday over here. This is firmly in his area of expertise.

There's probably a SJW in the algorithm. There's certainly no Bayesian reason why Google would list a bunch of African American Inventors based on a search for American Inventors.

I am in Germany.

And I am fuming.......

I just opened again his text and .... Where should I start that he is freaking wrong? I will start with place where I opened it:

- "In addition to the Left’s affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females."

See this forum. No one wanted to protect me as M05 wanted to make me cry (and I don't cry about it. I am just stating the facts. Thank God I can protect myself. ) A bunch of people run to protect M05 from me.

Even in physical interactions in life. My experience is that no one has ever any tendency to protect neither me no other women around me.

- Then all his statements to "women are on average more cooperative, prone to anxiety, looking for work-life balance, show higher interest in people....." He implies that that are things that cause the gender -gap. Hell NO!

Example out of my career: I had a talk with my boss about a promotion. We wrote together a list of things that I have to accomplish to get this promotion. At the end of the year I have done everything. The boss announces who is going to get promoted. IT IS A DUDE! IT IS A FREAKING DUDE! I had to threaten to leave the company to get this promotion. The dude didn't even ask for it. I had to go for throats for every step in my career. Things just fall into guy's laps.

And it is so not my lesser drive for higher status.

It is incredibly sexist and wrong to imply that certain female's qualities are responsible for the work place discrimination.

I listened to one interview with Oprah, when she describes the situation when she asked for a raise in her early career and got as a response something along the lines: "What for do you need it. Bob has a family, he has to pay mortgage. Do you have a family? Do you have a mortgage?". I am in another country (and no, not in eastern block ) , 30 years later in a different industry, but I had to go through completely identical situation.

GRRRRRRRRRRR. Don't get me started.

This manifesto dude......
The most enraging for me in it is the implication that that the gender gap is somehow women's fault, that there are women's qualities that are responsible for it. It is wrong. Because even if I show as male behavior as the alpha alpha alpha alpha male, I still get discriminated against.

I think I see the problem. Maybe instead of trying to dominate your colleagues like some feral dog you should try smiling more

Bolded: There are about 3.5 billion women on the planet. Can you see why this in no way invalidates the main points of the manifesto and is utterly irrelevant? I worked in fintech after msc in a small office with 3 other people at a 100 person firm. We had some autonomy and could just pick who to interview/hire since we were too small to have an HR dpt. One colleague explicitly said we're not going to bother interviewing any females unless they're over 35 even though it's a junior position for people who just finished a grad degree. I asked him about this. He cited 2 reasons: 1. pregnancy risk, 2. Not as good at learning how to work with our software. Does this mean that all disparities in fintech employment are the result of sexism and not biological gender differences? And what about differences manifesting in adulthood that were the result of upbringing/culture? literally all just from explicit sexism? That's extremely myopic and ******ed.

Underlined: Incorrect. He cites alternative reasons for why the gap exists, but there is no implication of "fault" as you put it or that women don't "deserve" to be in tech as ideologue reporters claim. In fact, he proposes alternative solutions for closing the gap which are both more fair and potentially more effective than the current measures (diversity hires, affrimative action, quotas).

Indeed, there is an implication that sexism is not the sole cause of the tech gap (even he admits that it's certainly at least part of it), but this is the part that you and thousands of other science deniers, have an issue with. Labelling this implication as itself sexist or hateful is intellectually dishonest and also wrong.


It's not solely restricted to this context. We as humans don't want to believe that we are still ultimately animals. When taken in aggregate, it is not only our physical traits that are either influenced or even outright determined by genetic factors we were simply born with and are entirely out of our control, but even our thoughts, emotions, life decisions, and behavioural proclivities are at least partially influenced by who we were born as. People make the mistake of applying aggregrate trends to their own experiences and forming limiting beliefs about themselves, which is disempowering and scary. I'm guilty of it myself. But if you just step back and realize that making judgements about individuals based on aggregate trends with non-zero volatility and n = in the millions is really stupid and you stop worrying about it. But some people in the high middle of the IQ distribution consistently fail to do the 2nd part, and thus just convert to the weird sjw religion and try to silence facts about aggregate trends.

Actually, intersectionalists have no problem accepting this genetic determinism when it comes to bodyweight/bf% and sexual orientation and identification, but as soon as it extends to aptitude for certain vocations, cognitive ability, or criminal/behavioural proclivities, they stick their heads in the sand and aggressively lash out when confronted with any evidence to the contrary. In the case of ethnicity, even the proposition that cultural factors unique to that ethnicity bear some influence on differences in observed behavioural proclivities and not the result of discrimination or inequality is literal heresy and "hatespeech" to the intersectionalist. Can't even call them leftists or liberals anymore, they're some kind of new beast. But I digress...


A more articulate explanation about why you are wrong, but you won't watch it.

.

Yeah maybe give out more hugs and cuddles!

ETA: @lapka, but I guess Evo should do it too.

This is actually illegal in Europe#1

http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom.../121220_en.htm

I thought and am still thinking about this....

You have hit a pretty difficult spot in my personality. I tried this and then I end-up in a manifesto situation. It is like I can't win no matter which mode of behavior I choose. It is clearly also not only in the job.

I mean if I smile and try just be pretty and sexy and connect in this way, I get a response, but it is not what I want in job. In a job situation the dudes won't ever accept someone whom they see as woman in a sense " would be hot to bang her" as their boss and so I just didn't get any promotions but few other proposals by playing the feminine card.

Funnily enough I was told I was way too soft and colloquial with my high school students and need to be far more harsh and commanding. I kinda just acted like the teacher I would've liked as a 16-18 year old, only really used positive reinforcement, and did virtually no chastising of failing students who didn't really want to be there unless they started infecting bystanders. So less metaphorical hugs and cuddles.

I was honestly trying to give this a listen but my dude has a voice for the silent film era.

Lapka, I was teasing you.

Evo.....


My experience, although not aggregate, shows that the statement "Women's lesser drive for higher status is responsible for gender gap" is wrong. Women might have on average less drive for higher status. But if they have high drive for higher status they still get discriminated against.

And the dude's speculation on an aggregate experience of women on average in the work place..... It is like him speculating on how painful on average is to give birth.

I know..... but you have hit the spot about which I seriously thought and am thinking a lot.

1.) No, the experience of one observation does NOT invalidate the statement about 3.5 billion living people and tens (hundreds?) of billions of deceased throughout history. We can't make policy decisions based on individual experience. We use aggregate trends. You may have very well been denied your promotion due to sexism; the memo makes no suggestion that you were not. It only makes the suggestion that among millions of working women, some are not highly ranked because of an innate lower desire for status and explicit sexism is not the sole cause. Thus if we observe a larger portion of men than women in high status positions, some portion of this is because of explicit (or even nebulously defined systematic/unconscious) sexism, and some portion is simply just innate biological or cultural differences, some of which are immutable. The implication is that using aggregate wage or % breakdowns of people in high status positions as evidence of ubiquitous sexism that must be stamped out being the sole reason for this is foolish; it means there are other things that may be outside of the control of policy makers.

We are free to disagree on the amount which is due to sexism vs biological differences vs cultural differences, of course, but suppressing ANY suggestion that biological differences may even be a variable worthy of consideration is morally and factually wrong. Additionally, it actually *dampens* the ability of policy makers to re-mediate any existing disparities. Because the only approach you can take to solve this disparity if you accept the proposition that sexism is the only reason for these disparities are the policy measures currently being pursued... which aren't actually working! Do they want to solve this problem or do they want to convince everyone there's a society wide conspiracy against women keeping them out of tech or high level positions generally? At least in the case of google, their revealed preference is alternative two, not one.


2.) It's not speculation. You didn't read the memo carefully. Or you are reading one of the versions with the sources and charts deliberately removed by journalists to weaken the credibility of the content (Gizmodo guilty).

Re: It's not speculation:

https://hbr.org/2015/09/explaining-g...ces-at-the-top

This is especially funny to me because when I made an argument that maybe women have a higher drive for higher status I was deemed a sexist on 2p2.

I'm pretty sure that Google's reason for firing this guy and for having discriminatory hiring processes are purely financial. Being able to say "we have X% minorities employed" and saying "we don't accept sexism" simply makes them more popular with their target audience. These things don't say anything about the views on sexism/political correctness of the owners.

last one then I'll shut up and stop ****ting up the lc thread with stuff most of you don't care about. I don't think lapka's going to think too deeply beyond her personal experience because it was too impactful for her.


http://www.zdnet.com/article/github-...t-communicate/


95% of github open source contributors are male. There's no compensation. Is this because of sexism? Maybe just maybe fellas like to write code more and ladies like to get on linkedin/phones and spend hours trying to figure out who the best candidate for high level CFO job is?

Okay that's true. They may have also lost a lot of good employees who found his speech offensive and quit as a result.