
Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer over his now viral memo - SirLJ
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/it-may-be-illegal-for-google-to-punish-engineer-over-anti-diversity-memo-commentary.html
======
marcoperaza
The author's arguments have been completely misrepresented. He pointed out
widely-believed and sometimes scientifically-established differences in the
_DISTRIBUTION OF_ traits in men and women. He said that those differences make
attempts to achieve numerical parity misguided, discriminatory, and harmful.
What is his conclusion about how we should behave? "Treat people as
individuals, not as just another member of their group." Wow, what a monster.

The reaction to the memo is really the most damning thing about the whole
affair. Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own
purity of thought. They've just proved the author's point.

A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion,
and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to
question its points of dogma.

~~~
onli
I got people in my circle that seriously called for him to be fired. People I
know as being intelligent, even a university professor. Either those people
are more warped than I have ever known, and you are right about the dogma. Or
they did not read the memo.

It is really shocking to see the misrepresentation of the intent of the memo.
I normally stay out of discussion about those topics, it's too dangerous - but
that development is just unacceptable.

~~~
ubernostrum
It's very simple: if you believe that others' fitness or qualification for
their jobs, based on flimsy (at best) evo-psych arguments, is a topic that you
can legitimately put forward for public debate and discussion, then I believe
your fitness or qualification for your job, based on whatever I pull out of my
ass, is a topic that can legitimately be put forward for public debate and
discussion.

In other words: don't dish it out if you can't take it.

~~~
onli
I think the spirit of the memo even in that section is perfectly acceptable.

> _Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following
> ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the
> distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part
> due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t
> see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these
> differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women,
> so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level
> distributions._

It is also not an extremist position to take, it's the scientific consensus.
See
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw)
for an example stating the same thing with almost the same words. And that's
not coming from someone unqualified.

~~~
ubernostrum
The "scientific consensus" is that women are inherently genetically hard-coded
to not be as good at or interested in computer programming?

Because... no. Nobody's demonstrated that. What people have demonstrated are
small average differences in performance on certain kinds of test tasks, and
then Google dude and you decide that's "scientific consensus" for whatever
conclusions you'd like to draw from it.

~~~
onli
> _The "scientific consensus" is that women are inherently genetically hard-
> coded to not be as good at or interested in computer programming?_

I did not say that, did I? The scientific consensus is that there are
biological differences that have an influence on job fit and job choices. But
we are talking statistics here, there are always people from the other sex
that are a good fit for a specific work.

Did you watch the video I linked?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw)
. Really, watch it.

Also, the Google memo explicitly did not say that women should not be coders.
If you think that, this is the warped media representation of the memo you are
talking about, not its actual content.

~~~
ubernostrum
_Also, the Google memo explicitly did not say that women should not be
coders._

Sure. The author just wrote it as a purely informative note about biology and
genetics, and intended it to have absolutely no relationship to hiring or
evaluation in any way, shape or form.

Hint: people don't write up this kind of thing if they think it shouldn't
affect hiring and evaluation.

~~~
onli
I know it is bad style, but I still have to sincerely doubt that you actually
read the memo. The author explicitly states what his goals were (a change in
which pro-diversity methods to apply, end of positive discrimination, being
aware that 50-50 is an unreasonable goal if biological differences exist,
focusing on what is right for google instead of what gender ideology dictates,
which includes raising diversity though, because that's good for google). I'll
end this discussion here, you are either unwilling to read or unwilling to
understand the memo, as well as the video I linked.

~~~
ubernostrum
It is terrible style for you and Googlebro to keep asserting a 50/50 quota
that _nobody else ever said was the goal_ while insisting that it's your
critics who are misrepresenting what was said.

It is also terrible style to be so bad at math as to claim or imply that the
tiny observed differences on skills tests would produce the gigantic skew in
gender ratio we observe. But hey, just piling up more evidence that he was
unqualified for the job anyway, and should be replaced by someone with icky
girlskills like, you know, actually being able to research something and think
critically about it.

------
jackvalentine
I read his memo (There is a copy on Gizmodo) and while I saw a lot of what I
could educatedly guess looked like flaws in logic or even flaws in his reading
of the research I've been unable to find someone who has put the effort in to
debunk it thoroughly.

Rather all I've been able to find is the equivalent of _how dare he say these
things_.

Does anyone have a link to a good debunking of the whole thesis?

~~~
kevinburke
There are a few, and I'd suggest you look further, for starters scroll up
here: [https://twitter.com/GlennF](https://twitter.com/GlennF). Arguments
about gender differences in CS should address the large decline in women's
participation around 1984, the relatively better gender balance in other
engineering/science majors, or the better gender balance for CS degrees
granted in other countries.

Annie Lowrey and others argued institutional effects far outweigh biological
or IQ effects; basically, there's a much larger environment of harassment and
bias, and Google has so many other levers in its control that the arguments
advanced in the paper aren't really salient or important to the situation at
Google.

Other folks have argued the vast majority of engineers at Google are doing the
equivalent of string concatenation; it's not exactly a difficult or demanding
job.

I think one reason people have been so angry about this is that women in the
tech industry generally deal with much more harassment and bias than men do,
see for example elephantinthevalley.com. To argue these are the biggest issues
requires looking past everything in that survey, and implicitly declaring it
not that important or salient. Imagine going to Flint, Michigan and arguing
that a lack of charter schools are the community's biggest problem; you're
going to get some bad reactions.

People also tend not to like it when you suggest they're dumb or inferior.

~~~
lisper
I think it is telling that the only actual reference you provided was to a
live Twitter feed. Twitter is not the right venue for _any_ kind of
substantive debate about anything, let alone one where the opening salvo is a
ten-page document.

~~~
RodericDay
Twitter is an excellent venue for discussion. It's one thing to complain that
you don't like it, and another to pretend it's widely agreed upon as an
invalid source.

~~~
lisper
> Twitter is an excellent venue for discussion.

I didn't say it wasn't. Is said it was a bad venue for _substantive debate_.
It's a fine venue for banal chitchat and voicing unsubstantiated opinions,
which is what makes it so popular because that's a lot easier and more fun
than actually diving into the depths of an issue.

~~~
RodericDay
Absurd. It's a fantastic venue for substantive debate, technical political and
mediatic. You're speaking confidently about something you're ignorant about.

~~~
stagbeetle
Can you supply examples?

Twitter, by virtue of being Twitter, is not a good medium for substantive
debate. The forum is the most populated one in the entire world. It is amazing
for equalizing influence and allowing democratic propagation of information
(which would otherwise be under the control of media firms), but this also
means the bar for voicing one's opinion is in the Mariana's Trench. Anyone can
butt in an derail the debate.

Twitter moderation is also very clearly biased in one direction (if you were
to simply compare how often each side's individual account's are banned) and
thus not an open medium where those debating can speak freely without
consequence.

There's also the greater scheme of digital communications which are notorious
for not being in anyway productive.

Debate online just simply does not work with the way human communication
biologically evolved.

------
lisper
Link to the original memo:

[https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-
Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf)

------
omot
I'm going to invoke Occam's razor here. Let's simplify diversity and just look
at height. Let's assume men that are short and men that are tall are
biologically equivalent, meaning biological trait that might surface are
evenly distributed. Now let's inject 100 men with varying height into the
general population, and... Uh oh there's a skew in leadership position and
income. Taller men have better positions and have higher income.

People who are taller all have tall coworkers. They work for a boss that's a
little bit taller than them. Some of them start thinking that you know this is
probably just natural, men who are shorter are just biologically unsuited to
be a leader. They aren't aggresive enough and they just don't have as much
drive, it's probably just written in their DNA.

The short men no matter how much they perform or how brilliant they are always
seem to be sidelined for promotion. Some of them make it pretty far but
they're performing 50x compared to their peers, and theyre always sidelined
when it comes to executive promotions. Other executives think: "this guy is
brilliant but what would people think about us... We better promote the other
less brilliant tall guy. We could retain investor confidence."

Some of them break out and try to start a company. They can't get any funding,
and no one wants to join their company. People think its a company run by a
short guy, this guy is brilliant but he's not going to do well in the long
term, so they end up joining start ups that have tall guys.

This network effects over a million times.

Now let's take people's perception, and assume people perceive men and women
exactly the same. The catch here is that women are one standard deviation
shorter than men. Just from height you'll see a discrepancy between men and
women representation in leadership positions.

Let's end height discrimination first.

I believe this is a simpler explanation of the discrepancies in
representation.

------
PrimalDual
Reading the manifesto felt like going through a less eloquent regurgitation of
Jordan Peterson's content. So far I have been unable to disprove Peterson's
points and his thoughts process is a very robust way to vet ideas. I a very
curious to see if anyone can seriously debunk him.

Edit: Clarified that I meant peterson's points and not the manifesto.

~~~
adjkant
It should be noted that for many of his scientific claims, not being able to
disprove them says nothing. Being able to prove them is the standard of
science. If you take a look at a significant number of peer reviewed studies,
I think you will struggle to find any version of his points backed up.

As for his thought process, it seems to be well agreed that his argument very
strongly lacks a tight argument and seemed to base itself mostly off of
creating stereotypes around gender and political opinions and then proceeding
to use those to loosely reason for his points. Neither the stereotypes or his
reasoning are very sound.

~~~
PrimalDual
I was talking about Jordan Peterson's content not the manifesto itself. I see
now how it would be confusing though.

------
snotrockets
But allowing it, in the first place, is also no legally sound:
[https://medium.com/@scurphey/googles-response-to-
employee-s-...](https://medium.com/@scurphey/googles-response-to-employee-s-
anti-diversity-manifesto-ignores-workplace-discrimination-law-97c7c729cf86)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Clearly, Google must neither fire nor not fire the employee.

~~~
snotrockets
No, they must fire him. As long as Google don't act, they are complicit; very
few would believe their recruiters when they'll talk about D&I, yet keep such
bigots on the payroll.

It's just going to cost them more to fire him now that the trashfire is
blowing full. They have nobody to blame but their own selves.

~~~
bassman9000
Complicit of what? Wrongthink?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Complicit in creating a toxic work environment where women feel their
abilities are under constant suspicion and they are not valued as team
members.

------
nibstwo
It is interesting how aggressively people cite science to back their politics
(on both "sides"). IQ distribution by gender is inconclusive. There is
structurally valid and statistically significant science backing a higher beta
normal distribution for male IQ than female IQ. There are similar studies
attempting and failing to reproduce this. I think this is an issue like
whether caffiene is healthy (or does it cause cancer? both?). Confounding is
strong here (men do more school? are smarter? hormones? DNA? patriarchy? all
of them?). I support this because it challenges the irrational tone on
diversity of genetics. Why is that better? Isn't diversity of thought better?
Are our thoughts simply a product of our skin colour and gender? What does
that say about free will or moral development? About progress itself? Don't
discriminate, don't hire based on gender or skin colour, do understand the
science, don't take anything considered progress at face value, do question
everything, don't allow people to bully you for your opinion, do assume that
people will judge your actions instead of your intentions, do risk being fired
for what you believe, don't be surprised when you get fired.

------
hkmurakami
Punishment will happen through less overt means, most likely through (1)
slower (or lack of) raises and promotions than the person otherwise would have
received, or (2) undesirable team placements.

~~~
frozenport
Probably much more direct, including personal threats.

------
mrbonner
What if he wrote this piece to avoid being fired for something else in the
first place? Like incompetence for example. Looks like they cannot fire him
for any pre-existing reasons now.

------
elialbert
scott alexander at slate star codex absolutely kills it with a statistical
analysis that supports the memo writer's opinion.

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-
exagger...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-
differences/)

he's also very balanced about his conclusions imho.

------
notreallythough
California is an at-will state, so they could also just fire him for any or no
reason.

Someone spreading 10-page manifestos internally is generally toxic no matter
which opinion they share. It essentially screams "I know better than any
manager I could have possibly discussed this with privately." To boot, this
manifesto isn't even tactical.

~~~
stale2002
"so they could also just fire him for any or no reason."

Not really. There are tons of things that it would be illegal to fire someone
for.

For example, you can't fire someone for trying to start a union. You can't
fire someone because of their race. You can't fire someone because they have
workplace complaints.

The crux of the argument is that Google may have "punish an employee for
communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions", which
is illegal.

Also, "California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees
to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of
action."

Furthermore, "It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for
challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be
discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not
actually prohibited by the discrimination laws".

These are some interesting argument that I hadn't heard until now. It will be
for the courts to decide who is right. But it certainly is not as clear cut as
you make it seem.

~~~
notreallythough
prove it

------
yuhong
It is probably worth mentioning that I dislike anti-discrimination laws. A
good compromise is to probably limit them to manual labor and the like.

