The first thing everyone needs to know about this is what the case was about, because it implicates one of the most powerful and least known rights tech company employees have.
According to Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA, employees can't generally be disciplined for exercising the rights provided under Section 7 of the NLRA. These rights are commonly understood to be about unionizing (ie, you can't be fired for trying reasonably to organize a union), but are actually broader: the NLRA protects an employee right to almost arbitrary "concerted action" to improve working conditions.
Damore was terminated by Google for authoring his anti-diversity memo. During the time he was authoring and distributing internal copies of the memo, he worked with (apparently) a bunch of other engineers at Google that shared many of his viewpoints (the memo covers a lot of ground). He was terminated after the memo, an artifact of his concerted effort to change aspects of how Google was managed, was published. He and his lawyer mounted an 8(a)(1) complaint.
As a starting point --- people with real-world experience or understanding of the NLRA should correct me where I'm wrong --- NLRA complaints get filed with the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB adjudicates claims internally. If a complaint is found valid, the NLRB will try to convince the employer to settle with the employee; if that goes nowhere, the NLRB will itself effectively sue the company. If the complaint is found invalid, the NLRB will inform the complainant that NLRB is done with the case.
Most of these cases (there are tens of thousands annually as you'd expect) are handled by grunts in DC. Novel or high-profile cases are escalated to a special department in the NLRB called the Advice Division. This particular case was not only escalated but apparently handled personally by the director of the division, an NLRB lawyer who'd been with the board since 1988.
The NLRB turned down Damore's complaint. I think he could theoretically still sue in civil court? I don't think that's commonly done? Either way, his complaint was denied.
The basis for the complaint is super simple and kind of obvious in retrospect: employers in the US are required by federal and usually state law to avoid discrimination against protected classes. To the extent that Damore's memo was about organizing against discrimination of conservative viewpoints --- a phenomenon that is almost certainly real in SFBA tech! --- it was protected. But to the extent that it attempted to organize around changes to Google management that might (might) themselves violate EEO laws (for instance, any kind of official recognition that men are better suited to software development at Google than women), they were not. You can't use the NLRA to organize in opposition to federal employment law. Wa-waa.
As it turns out, this was apparently super-apparent to Google legal and Google HR, who fired Damore precisely by the book, exclusively for promoting stereotypes about women and advocating for the inclusion of those stereotypes into Google's management processes.
I think an important thing to consider --- I'm no lawyer and am probably wrong about lots of this stuff --- is that if the memo had been exclusively about how SFBA tech discriminates against conservatives and could in a number of ways be made more accommodating to them, Damore would had been protected from retaliation. The Advice Memo says as much!
So for someone like me, who believes very strongly in both the importance of employee organizing rights (I think tech should organize into professional associations; "unions lite") and who believes strongly in the absolute innate equivalence in aptitude for our profession between men and women, this is the best possible outcome. There's a lot to take heart in here; we do in fact have the right to organize that we've been saying we have.
> But to the extent that it attempted to organize around changes to Google management that might (might) themselves violate EEO laws (for instance, any kind of official recognition that men are better suited to software development at Google than women), they were not.
Was he trying to do that, though? As I understand it, he was protesting policies that sought to actively promote diversity. EEO laws require no such active promotion, afaik. He fell all over himself to be clear that he was not saying that Google should prefer hiring men, or that they should restrict women to specific roles within the company. He was questioning Google's active efforts to specifically recruit women above the background level that would otherwise apply. Whether or not this is a good idea is certainly up for debate, but it does not, to my knowledge, violate EEO laws to merely not actively and specifically target women for recruitment.
> who believes strongly in the absolute innate equivalence in aptitude for our profession between men and women
Curious, why do you believe in that? Have you evaluated the evidence and come to that conclusion, or is it a priori for you?
He was terminated at Google's discretion under at-will employment, the same standard that might allow you to be fired for coming to work with blue hair. He sought relief under an exception to at-will, the NLRA, which protects concerted action to improve working conditions. The NLRB determined that because the substance of his action involved requests that Google might reasonably determine would be problematic under EEO law, that whether or not Damore's actions were unlawful, Google was within its rights as a US employer to terminate him.
It might help to pivot away from EEO law and to some other regulatory regime we work under. For instance, you could attempt to organize around reworking the way your company complies with the HITECH laws. What you'd be doing would certainly not be unlawful! Nevertheless, despite that fact and the fact that the NLRA generally protects employee organization, the fact that your employer has a legal obligation to comply with HITECH would mean that the NLRB gives them substantial extra deference in whether or not they can fire you for doing that.
On the other hand, if you were to organize around, I don't know, closed-door offices instead of open-offices, no such extra deference would apply.
(Re: my beliefs: I provided them as a cards-on-the-table disclaimer, not an invitation to litigate them; they're the least interesting part of this story).
IMHO, the Advice Memo's conclusion is summarized by this sentence:
> Damore's statements about immutable traits linked to sex — such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution — were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding his effort to cloak his comments with “scientific” references and analysis and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers.
I find this disturbing.
I don't know whether Damore's assertions are scientifically accurate, but the NLRB appears to be saying that it doesn't matter. Stating an unpleasant truth would constitute discrimination "notwithstanding scientific references and analysis".
> > were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding his effort to cloak his comments with “scientific” references and analysis and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers.
> I find this disturbing.
I find this very disturbing as well. The only way that even the most ardent opponents of Damore's memo can come to a "discriminatory" and "harassment" interpretation, is to disregard a literal, face-value reading of the memo and impute motivations to him. So basically, any employee commentary on an employer's policies with regards to the EEO's goals can be held to be "discriminatory" and "harassment" because it "sounds bad" and "sounds like" it's against EEO's goals, even if that can't be demonstrated on a factual basis.
You will fall in line, and you don't even dare sound like you're secretly against us. How is that not "thought-crime?"
You can call it that if you want; then, in the US, you can be fired for "thought crime". The only thing at issue here is that you can't be fired in retaliation for workplace organizing --- but that protection doesn't apply if what you're organizing about pertains to an area where the NLRB gives deference to employers.
There's a case history in the Advice Memo. They didn't make this up just for Google.
that protection doesn't apply if what you're organizing about pertains to an area where the NLRB gives deference to employers.
Those precedents exist to prevent employees from organizing active resistance to the NLRB's goals. If you read Damore's memo at face value, he's proposing modifying the way in which Google pursues those goals, taking differences in preferences into account. Strangely enough, Google and YouTube executives have spoken in public and have basically taken James Damore's memo's position and advocated the same kind of action he proposes in the memo.
It seems like HR and "diversity officers" have effectively become the "political officers" of the 21st century left of collectivist grievance politics. Employers are required to have certain policies, and the NLRB can conveniently "defer" to them when they are effectively supporting the NLRB's power. The problem is that many of the nouns involved in this kind of regulation are fairly nebulous. This situation shows that such accusations can be made on the basis of "feels" and it doesn't even matter if it comes down to factual readings of communication or interpretations of science.
Effectively, an "everyone is exactly equal" ideological nonsense science has now been instantiated into de-facto law in the US through regulatory action, and the NLRB has furthermore supported the notion that you can be fired for disagreeing with it.
>> It seems like HR and "diversity officers" have effectively become the "political officers" of the 21st century left of collectivist grievance politics.
That's contradicted by the reported behaviour of HR in cases of sexual harassment of women engineers by their male colleagues, as for example in the case of Susan Fowler, the Uber engineer who left the company because of harassment and a discriminatory culture. I quote from the relevant post on her website:
When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to.
One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn't be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been "given an option".
The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that I was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem.
Less than a week after this absurd meeting, my manager scheduled a 1:1 with me, and told me we needed to have a difficult conversation. He told me I was on very thin ice for reporting his manager to HR. California is an at-will employment state, he said, which means we can fire you if you ever do this again.
> There's a case history in the Advice Memo. They didn't make this up just for Google.
There is indeed a case history, and it is very informative with regards to, as you put it, the Board's deference to employers. The Advice memo states "Where an employee's conduct significantly disrupts work processes, creates a hostile work environment, or constitutes racial or sexual discrimination or harassment, the Board has found it unprotected even if it involves concerted activities regarding working conditions. For example, in /Avondale Industries/, the Board held that the employer lawfully discharged a union activist for insubordination based on her unfounded assertion that her foreman was a Klansman; the employer was justifiably concerned about the disruption her remark would cause in the workplace among her fellow African-American employees."
Said case acknowledges that "Foreman Toledo has numerous tattoos on his body, including a swastika on his forearm"! Nonetheless, the Board found in that case that it was the employee's remark that would cause disruption in the workplace, apparently because she accused her foreman of being a Klansman (which she claims he told a group of employees) instead of a Nazi.
I find it bizarre that you basically concede the ground that it is similar to a thought crime and feel no need to defend your stance that his memo should be classified as "anti-diversity." Or is saying "you can call it a thought crime if you want" authorizing his use of this language, from a position of moral authority?
This amorphous right commenters on this thread seem to think Damore had not to be fired, he didn't have. That's what employment at will means.
You don't even know whether I think his termination was reasonable. All you know is that I believe --- and so does the NLRB in this instance --- he did not enjoy special protections against unreasonable termination.
What I find especially funny about this is that Damore is a conservative, lobbying for more protections for conservatives in the workplace. But employment at will isn't just a conservative value --- it's a signpost conservative value, one of the basic principles on which we organize our market economy. It is, in conservative thought circles, one of the pillars on which American entrepreneurship rests, and a reason that the US excels over Europe in commercial dynamism.
Damore is in this instance a conservative the same way the nihilists in The Big Lebowski were nihilistic. But he gave up his toe! He expected a million dollars!
But employment at will isn't just a conservative value --- it's a signpost conservative value, one of the basic principles on which we organize our market economy.
What went on with James Damore has nothing to do with the "good workings" of the employment marketplace. Rather, it's the abuse of at-will employment by groups to push political agendas through coercion.
Damore is in this instance a conservative the same way the nihilists in The Big Lebowski were nihilistic.
Before the precipitating events, James Damore counted himself a "Classical Liberal." From what I can tell, he may have leaned Libertarian. Honestly, if you were in his shoes, would you think you were treated fairly? I think your answer would be that you wouldn't have been in his shoes. You would have advised James Damore to keep his head down and his mouth shut. The necessity of such a stance is a sign that there's some form of at least mild oppression.
Given a chance, would you stick to your nihilist guns and turn down a billion dollars?
Damore was fired only after the memo went public. Afterwards, there was no way that Damore could do his job as a Google software engineer. No team would take him: the optics would be terrible.
If you can't do your job, you don't get to keep it.
Rather, it's the abuse of at-will employment by groups to push political agendas through coercion. [...] a sign that there's some form of at least mild oppression.
Never mind funny movie nihilism, a few more iterations in this thread and you'll type yourself into espousing what are starting to sound like some of the core tenets of Marxism. And they say internet forum discussions never changed anyone's position!
I'm not conceding to be on your "amorphous right," but the amorphous left seems to put words in everyone's mouth. I haven't seen anyone in this thread say that they are certain that Google broke the law in this case - since they are a private organization. What I have seen a lot of is people reframing and mischaracterizing the memo as "anti-diversity," "sexual harassment," "pseudoscience," etc. I don't need to know if you think his termination was reasonable because I'm not arguing that you were. However, you were arguing that he was cloaking hate speech as science - as you stated, "...were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding his effort to cloak his comments with “scientific” references..." This part is very worthy of debate!
> The only way that even the most ardent opponents of Damore's memo can come to a "discriminatory" and "harassment" interpretation, is to disregard a literal, face-value reading of the memo and impute motivations to him.
Motivation isn't what defines harassment; effect on others is what is relevant to harassment; not only is imputing a motive not necessary to finding harassment in the act of presenting the memo as he did, it isn't relevant to that conclusion.
Motivation isn't what defines harassment; effect on others is what is relevant to harassment
So this is why hysterical ideologues have latched onto "harassment." It basically short-circuits due process and the necessity of proof. It also scores huge emotional points. It's the perfect vehicle for moral panics and witch-hunts and mob behaviors. Is it any wonder, then, that it is now exploited for political gain?
> So this is why hysterical ideologues have latched onto "harassment."
Another reason: because the effect you have on other people is hugely relevant in how people come together as a culture or society (or don’t!), and trying to ignore it leads to pathological behavior.
> It basically short-circuits due process and the necessity of proof.
No, it doesn't. Like many torts (and a few crimes) the things that have to be proven for harassment may not (there are several different patterns that qualify as harassment) include any particular mental state on the part of the alleged harrasser, but it still requires probing the elements of the offense and isn't any differently situated than other civil wrongs when it comes to due process.
Is there legal backing to your assertion, or is that just your opinion? Clearly that can’t be true either. Otherwise, I can claim that socks and sandals are offending me, and it becomes your problem to modify your attire, not my problem to tolerate it.
I'll correct what I said above; either purpose or effect can be a decisive component of harassment; effect is more commonly used because it is easier to demonstrate, and the chararcterization of Damore’s memo as harassment has consistently been based on the claimed effect of contributing to an “intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment”, not a characterization of purpose.
The regulatory definition is at 29 CFR § 1604.11(a), reading, in relevant part: “(a) Harassment on the basis of sex is a violation of section 703 of title VII. Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when [...] such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment.” (Note that while the first sentence refers to harassment on the basis of sex, the second only directly refers to sexual harassment; the same principles, though, are consistently applied to sex/gender-based harassment—and to harassment based on any other characteristic protected against discrimination by Title VII.)
> Otherwise, I can claim that socks and sandals are offending me, and it becomes your problem to modify your attire, not my problem to tolerate it.
That's not the case because the standard applied for job as tile environment harassment is a hybrid objective/subjective standard in which it must be shown both that the victim was actually offended and that a reasonable person in their position would be offended.
Given that there's nothing criminal in any of the allegations, I don't see how _crime_ is even applicable in your label.
Maybe a better question might be how is that not "thought-firing?"
Your questions and concerns would be alarming and frightening to me if Damore had received a criminal indictment. He didn't, so I'm much less concerned about the case.
Your questions and concerns would be alarming and frightening to me if Damore had received a criminal indictment. He didn't, so I'm much less concerned about the case.
That's the old canard about how, "it isn't the government." Google isn't the government, but they have incredibly broad power over modern media. Speech isn't free if it becomes open season on you by powerful entities for exercising it. The fact that Google and YouTube are such extreme ideological echo chambers calls to question their stewardship of so much power in our society.
Google (at least in this case) wasn't acting in their capacity as a power-broker over wider internet speech and discourse.
They were acting in their capacity as an employer. Their power over society as an employer is much more limited and doesn't concern me.
If you want to have a conversation over whether twitter and Google as companies have enough power that their actions should be judged in a 1A context that's fine. We can have that conversation. But it's not the one that's being had in this thread or this discussion.
The fact that so many of Google's employees could demonstrate the degree of ideological hysteria which they demonstrated greatly concerns me, and has a direct bearing on the 1A context.
It does not, because there's no 1A issue as the first amendment does not grant you any protections from your employer.
Now, as I said before, if you want to have a discussion about whether Twitter and Google and other modern media companies should have some 1A responsibilities in their role as gatekeepers to online speech, that's a discussion that's entirely separate† from Twitter and Google's responsibilities to their employees.
†I would still argue that, despite their relative power over online discussions, Twitter and Google as private entities are not bound by the first amendment in any capacity—nor should they be.
Privates entities aren't required to provide you a soapbox.
It does not, because there's no 1A issue as the first amendment does not grant you any protections from your employer.
I was clearly referring to the greater issue with regards to Google's general power in our culture and what the attitude within Google which was revealed in this event might mean. Not only did you state that you did not want to have that discussion, but then you just tried to shove words in my mouth as if I were trying to have your different discussion and advocating an unsupportable point.
Privates entities aren't required to provide you a soapbox.
Private entities shouldn't be allowed to knock down everyone else's soapbox, which is precisely what Google's market power allows them to more or less do.
> The fact that Google and YouTube are such extreme ideological echo chambers calls to question their stewardship of so much power in our society
Ridiculous nonsense.
Google and YouTube happily allow conservative, alt-right, fringe-right, pretty much any content on their platform. Fox News, Breitbart, Alex Jones, Milo etc all have channels on YouTube.
And there is zero evidence that Google is deliberately prioritising "left wing" content over other types.
>> You will fall in line, and you don't even dare sound like you're secretly against us. How is that not "thought-crime?"
Well, to begin with because nobody said it's a crime, rather a valid reason for his employment to fire him.
Second, "thought-crime" refers to the rules of a society with a certain type of government (an imaginary one, in Orwell's book). Google is not a society, it's a private company and you can't really think of its internal rules as defining crime, or being laws etc.
Second, "thought-crime" refers to the rules of a society with a certain type of government (an imaginary one, in Orwell's book)
You know full well that it has come to mean a certain form of deliberately suppressing dissent through coercive means.
Google is not a society, it's a private company and you can't really think of its internal rules as defining crime, or being laws etc.
But our society is a society. Apparently, Google is full of ideologues who I wouldn't expect to have any qualms about unnerving forms of social engineering society, to make it fit their particular political agenda.
It doesn't matter not because the NLRB is settling the science for itself, but because the NLRB doesn't want to intervene in cases where employers enforce anti-harassment policies. There's a case history about this, cited in the memo.
Remember, the presumption at law is that Google has the right to fire employees for virtually no reason (conservatives should find this congenial). Damore was attempting to avail himself of an exception to that rule.
You're right, the NLRB isn't settling the science. It's saying that discussion of the science renders otherwise protected speech unprotected ("so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be
unprotected"), and effectively removing workers' legal right to engage in science-based discussion of whether a 50/50 gender ratio is the appropriate goal.
Damore has basically 3 points in his memo, in increasing order of disputability:
1) Conservatives are discriminated against at Google, which is a problem for working conditions
2) Google pushes an aggressive voluntary affirmative action policy which aims to hire women and underrepresented minorities at rates much higher than they appear in the relevant sector of the workforce, and the way this is pushed internally is a problem for working conditions
3) The reason women are underrepresented in the tech job market is biology
Notice that 3) has nothing to do with working conditions, it's just an elaboration on why 2) upsets Damore so much; it could have been left out and he would have been covered under the exemption, while still making his point about working conditions and hiring policies.
People within Google are totally free to disagree about whether a 50/50 gender ratio is an appropriate goal, and they are protected under this law as far as protesting those goals as they relate to working conditions. But the ruling says that the specific arguments you bring into play may still be in violation of company policy, and such arguments are not automatically protected by virtue of being connected to a working conditions complaint. Especially when they could be construed as hurting a company's ability to abide by laws regarding hostile work environments.
There's probably room for disagreement about the correct interpretation of the law, but I don't see it as a matter of removing the right to discuss freely, it's merely a tight technical interpretation of where the at-will exemption ends.
Why do you separate 2 and 3? Point 3 is Damore's detailed criticism of point 2. He's arguing (clumsily) that the goals of the policies in point 2 conflict with certain scientific research.
Because in the course of making point 3, he violated Google's anti-harassment policies, and the NLRB defers to companies as to the reasonableness of their anti-harassment policies, because a different federal law that NLRB does not manage requires companies to have anti-harassment policies.
If he'd been arguing for better office furniture and Google claimed to fire him over violations of an anti-harassment policy, the NLRB would almost certainly not defer to Google. But he wasn't arguing for better office furniture; he was arguing about biological differences between men and women and how they might impact the distribution of male and female engineers at Google.
For just asking a question? If even entertaining a thought with regards to science, if it doesn't "seem nice" through some narrow ideological lens, has become a crime, then we're already at the level of Lysenkoism.
he was arguing about biological differences between men and women and how they might impact the distribution of male and female engineers at Google.
And why in the world should that be a "thought crime?" There are biological differences that make the population of Asian NBA pros much smaller than otherwise, and the population of high level Kenyan marathon competitors higher than otherwise.
Keep in mind that this ruling doesn't say it's a crime. It merely says, it's not covered by an exemption to the at-will employment rules that let a company fire you for any reason.
If my boss doesn't like the fact that I put horseradish on my nachos, they can fire me for that. It's only exceptional cases where I'm protected from arbitrary and nasty and capricious actions.
Also, put horseradish on your nachos, it's a good thing.
>There are biological differences that make the population of Asian NBA pros much smaller than otherwise, and the population of high level Kenyan marathon competitors higher than otherwise.
Those are great examples because nobody is totally sure of those things either.
Those are great examples because nobody is totally sure of those things either.
As an Asian man let me say this: Stop pandering! It's quite obvious that height is a huge advantage in the NBA. (Also note that biological differences are not necessarily genetic, because I have a guess that you are going to cite diet next.)
I have sympathy for what you're saying here; I think it would be a totally valid interpretation of the law to say that point 3), however clumsy it may have been, was made in support of point 2), and therefore under protection.
But the way this played out, the board ruled the other way, and I think this is a clear warning to future employees seeking protection under this rule: the NLRB will interpret things as tightly as possible, and be very deferential to employer's internal policies even if they hinder the ability to back up a labor conditions complaint with arguments.
Whether that's okay or not is a political fight, and I see how there's a slippery slope here that could theoretically be used to squash many legitimate labor complaints - if a company imposed rules against making people feel politically uncomfortable, would they be able to fire people for wanting to unionize and backing that up with political arguments that might offend capitalists? I'd be surprised if the board didn't act in that case.
But let's be honest. Damore was trying to score a backdoor win through a legal exception that pretty clearly was not in spirit carved out to protect people in situations like his. That's why I also expect him to fail in any CA civil suit, though I'm less certain about that one, political views are more protected in CA than elsewhere.
Just to be clear, I'm not personally in favor of Damore's firing over this memo, it sounds like Google tends to encourage vigorous internal debate about this sort of thing except when it goes public (as witnessed by the inaction until the memo was leaked and the outcry began). Despite his poor sense of what the response would be, I think he was engaging in good-faith argument, at first, at least, pre-Goolag and that nonsense. From what I hear, people on the left are pretty offensive and vitriolic on internal boards at Google without being disciplined [0], so I'd have loved to see management manage the situation and internally broker some peace between the offended parties rather than turn the thing into a classic alt-right recruiting talk-point by firing him. But I'm very much in favor of a company's right to fire anyone, for almost any reason, and I'm glad that was not interfered with here.
[0] Edit: from the memorandum, a Google employee was reprimanded for responding harshly to Damore over email: '“You’re a misogynist and a terrible human. I will
keep hounding you until one of us is fired. F[*] you.” The employee was issued a
final warning for sending this email. '
But the ruling says that the specific arguments you bring into play may still be in violation of company policy, and such arguments are not automatically protected by virtue of being connected to a working conditions complaint.
In effect, the ruling ratifies a particular squishy, ideological interpretation of science.
Actually, it flags Damore's interpretation of science as squishy and ideological. Which, let's be fair, it totally is, because he's no scientist and he has a very limited understanding of the sources he quotes in support of his views.
Scientific debate doesn't take place in Google forums through Google memos, any more than it happens in HN comments, so what was Damore's point of providing references to back his position, other than a misguided attempt to appear "scientifick"?
Actually, it flags Damore's interpretation of science as squishy and ideological.
The 55-country study he cited has effectively one of the highest P-values in social science of recent years. It's widely considered in psychology to be an important result. Denying this is basically parroting intellectual dishonesty on the level of Global Warming denialism. The Big-5 personality traits he cited are the strongest results in psychology outside of the effect of General Intelligence.
The NLRB is basically saying that it's now open season on anyone who cites scientific studies, based on whether anyone on the internet finds it offensive.
>> The 55-country study he cited has effectively one of the highest P-values in
social science of recent years. It's widely considered in psychology to be an
important result. Denying this is basically parroting intellectual dishonesty
on the level of Global Warming denialism.
Of course it is not and I take umbrage at the offensive undertone of your
comment ("parroting"? Really?). Psychology is not climate science, it's
currently going through a widely publicised reproducibility crisis and in any
case, the reliance on p-values has been criticised widely by experts in
fields as varied as economics, medicine and of course the humanities. The big-5 model itself has been the subject of much criticism, from inside the field (and the wikipedia article you reference has a big section devoted to that criticism).
More improtantly however, Damore did a lot more than name-drop the big-5 in
his memo. The memo is peppered with references to sources from varied fields,
from psychology and sociology, to biology, evolutionary psychology,
anthropology, economics, statistics and so on.
The problem of course is that Damore is not an expert in any of those fields-
much less an expert in all of them. Which tells us that, most of the time,
when he says that some paper he's referencing is backing his views, he simply
hasn't got a clue what he's talking about and the paper may very well be
claiming exactly the opposite than what Damore is saying.
Damore's memo is indulging in cargo-cult science. He references stuff he
half-understands in the hopes to do what scientists do. Except he doesn't even
understand what scientists do and why they reference others' work: which is to
say, not to win a debate and show you're right on the internets, but to
contribute new knowledge by building on the knowledge already contributed by
others.
To have any respect for science and consider Damore's memo anything else than
pseudo-scientific claptrap is a contradiction. To call that garbage "science"
is offensive to the work of scientists. That is an even bigger reason to be
angry at an idiot like that, without even going to what he was trying to say
with his "sai-ent-tifickal" way.
Of course it is not and I take umbrage at the offensive undertone of your comment ("parroting"? Really?). Psychology is not climate science, it's currently going through a widely publicised reproducibility crisis and in any case, the reliance on p-values has been criticised widely by experts in fields as varied as economics, medicine and of course the humanities. The big-5 model itself has been the subject of much criticism, from inside the field (and the wikipedia article you reference has a big section devoted to that criticism).
So you're admitting that James Damore is referencing legitimate scientific sources. It's just that you're claiming the whole field isn't valid. Then you go on to make unsubstantiated claims that his interpretations are wrong, but you produce no specifics. That sounds a lot like what climate science deniers do.
I re-read the comment several times. What I get out of it, is that he notes that Big-5 has been criticized. That's what's supposed to happen in science. Bringing up that something is criticized in science is a classic climate denier tactic! (Also, given the controversial subject matter, one would expect that.) He also mentions his credentials. Then he engages in name calling. ("cargo-cult.") I'm sorry, but exactly where in that comment does he actually substantiate anything? After several readings, it still looks like he doesn't.
He's citing "legitimate scientific sources" but he doesn't understand them, so his citations are meaningless.
Where am I claiming that "the whole field isn't valid"? I said there's a reproducibility crisis and that the reliance on p-values has been criticised in various fields.
I made no claim that his interpretations are "wrong". I said that his interpretations are most likely wrong because he's not a psychologist and he doesn't understand the field. That's what you expect from non-experts who pretend to know what they're talking about, to be talking nonsense.
>> That sounds a lot like what climate science deniers do.
It's funny how you are trying to defame Damore and then take offense at the perceived insult. And all the appeals to authority can be used against you - you are not an expert in those fields, so you cannot claim Damore is wrong.
At least provide some citations or examples before you use such childish phrases as "sai-ent-tifickal". You sound really terrible when arguing like that.
stcredzero, I enjoy vigorous debate (I'm an academic) and in the past I've benefited tremendously from engaging opposing viewpoints. That's nothing like what I got from our conversation, which is instead becoming more and more embarassing for both of us, the more it grows. My apologies but it is evident to me there can be no productive debate between us and therefore I will now stop replying to you.
which is instead becoming more and more embarassing for both of us, the more it grows
Your argument just came down to: "I don't lend any credence to psychology/sociology, therefore I'm right to label it all pseudoscience." Also, since you're not supplying particulars, your mention of your background just amounts to argument by authority. Unless one grants that, I don't see that you really have a supported position. The rest is all heated assertion on your part. I will happily leave it to 3rd party readers to decide who is being intellectually honest here.
There seem to be a plague of pseudo-academics under the "Postmodernist" flag, which claim their own "alternative facts" and "alternative logic." In such an environment, skepticism and asking for substantiation of positions is quite understandable.
If, on the other hand, you'd like to actually substantiate something, then it would seem this would be beneficial and educational. (One thing we've seen from Postmodernist "fake academics" is that they are actually embarrassed when people are given a link to their work.)
It's open season on everyone in virtually every American workplace. Why won't you acknowledge this? You're a reasonable guy. We've had dinner together!
What's happening here isn't a shift. What you're demanding is a new special protection for "people who can defend their position scientifically".
It's open season on everyone in virtually every American workplace. Why won't you acknowledge this?
Oh, but I do acknowledge this. I would like to call attention to it. I thank you for your support.
What's happening here isn't a shift.
In the old days, one could cite such studies. The reactions and the consequences are indeed a shift in society. An outrageously authoritarian shift.
What you're demanding is a new special protection for "people who can defend their position scientifically".
Funny, but the NLRB was once a new special protection. The witch-hunts back then had took a different direction. I would grant that your interpretation of what's been discussed and apparently needed as a special protection. It does seem to me that our current society apparently needs special protection for things that used to be ok and which are still vital to the workings of our democratic society. Things like:
Peacefully donating to political PACs.
Peacefully having a mainstream political opinion. (Like being a Republican or a Libertarian)
Civilly stating an opinion.
Peacefully gathering to express political views.
At-will employment is now being used as a political tool against the category of people who are "Classical Liberals" and everyone to the right of that. It is different yet very similar in many regards to at-will employment being used against labor organizers in decades past.
You understand that, in much of the country, you can be fired simply for being a Democrat or a Republican, right?
The law recognizes the rights of the owners and managers of companies to organize them out of like-minded people.
If that's problematic for you, you should lobby for employment laws to change. It's arguably not the NLRB's place to come up with new protections; they're an agency largely unaccountable to the voters.
You understand that, in much of the country, you can be fired simply for being a Democrat or a Republican, right?
I was once pushed out of a job for being perceived as "too leftist." In retrospect, perhaps I should have claimed harassment.
I don't think any but the most ideologically fervent would consider firing someone for simply being a Democrat or a Republican anything but a crappy thing to do. I understand that at-will employment is a beneficial freedom to employers in the same way that free speech and freedom of association are beneficial freedoms to individuals. However, at-will employment was once used to actively discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion, or place of national origin. Society came to recognize that as a problem, and society came around to change "the social compact." The exploitation of ideologues to use at-will employment to implement "thought-crime" is abhorrent, and by your own admission, has come to be a widespread societal phenomenon.
> In effect, the ruling ratifies a particular squishy, ideological interpretation of science.
No, it just says that you can't wave a “labor organizing” flag to immunize yourself for consequences of violation of your employers facially-reasonable anti-harassment policy, thereby avoiding a situation in which employers could be put in the position of having to choose between violating the NLRA and violating the Civil Rights Act.
You don't have a legal right to engage in science-based discussion of anything at your workplace!
Damore's claim is subtly different. He relies on the fact that you do, under the NLRA, have the right to organize to change workplace conditions. But your right to do that is enforceable only through the NLRB, is an exception to at-will employment, and is trumped by federal and state EEO laws. When employee organizing conflicts with employer legal compliance, the employer's low burden to justify a termination is even lower.
> You don't have a legal right to engage in science-based discussion of anything at your workplace!
This is the point that I think most people aren't getting. It seems like people are starting from the position that one should be able to have free and open conversations in the workplace. That a company shouldn't be able to fire an employee for dissent.
But this is _absolutely_ not the case with at will employment. If you say just about _anything_ in the workplace (or not at the workplace!) that your employer doesn't like they can terminate you.
I think the quoted sentence is the key to understanding this all. Your 1A rights only protect you from the government. Your employer may not—and does not have to—tolerate a "marketplace of ideas"
This comes from Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act: "Employees shall have the right to...engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection."
In this specific case, the Advice Memo refers to protection for "expressing a dissenting view on matters affecting working conditions or offering critical feedback of its policies and programs".
They didn't say that. The lawyer who wrote this memo argued that Google had wide latitude in determining what qualified as sexual-harassment.
They had a policy that pre-dated this incident such that those statements qualified. The NLRB didn't determine that the statements were offensive. They determined that Google was operating in a reasonable manner when Google decided that those statements were offensive.
Perhaps it would be helpful if we cite the statements we're referring to. Which statement do you interpret as saying "Google had wide latitude in determining what qualified as sexual-harassment"?
In at least one statement which I've quoted here too many times already ("so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected"), the lawyer who wrote this memo expressed their own opinion that these statements were too offensive to be protected.
> the Employer determined that certain portions of the Charging Party’s memorandum violated existing policies on harassment and discrimination
> The Employer has a legitimate, lawful policy prohibiting race and sex discrimination and harassment in its workplace.
> An employer’s good-faith efforts to enforce its lawful anti-discrimination or anti-harassment policies must be afforded particular deference in light of the employer’s duty to comply with state and federal
EEO laws
> Where an employee’s conduct significantly disrupts work processes, creates a hostile work environment, or constitutes racial or sexual discrimination or
harassment, the Board has found it unprotected even if it involves concerted activities regarding working conditions
This seems like an interesting discussion to continue, weighing the deference the memo mentioned to the employer's policy against the fact that they ultimately make their own determination (which they must, of course, make to avoid abusive or spurious claims of harassment). Sadly, I'm too tired to continue right now. Perhaps another time.
I think Popehat (a fairly respected defense lawyer and first amendment blogger) has a fairly good write up of the NLRB memo and what it's ruling says here:
> The lawyer who wrote this memo argued that Damore's statements would normally be deserving of protection, if they weren't so offensive.
Incorrect; the memo assumed (did not conclude) [0] that Damore’s memo was entirely within the protected purpose, and concluded that even given that assumption, the particular elements within it, for which Google claimed to have fired him, were within the bounds of what Google could fire him for, given their legitimate, pre-existing policy.
A legal decision memo (or a court decision) will often assume a point not because it finds it well supported, but because a dispositive answer to the legal question can be reached without resolving the point on which the assumption is made, and courts and lawyers often prefer to avoid resolving subissues that are unnecessary to resolve in order to resolve the actual question they are posed with.
So it did not argue that Damore’s memo would have been protected but for the identified problematic elements.
[0] key language: “Assuming, arguendo, that the Charging Party’s conduct was concerted and for mutual aid and protection, [...]” (p.3)
The Advice Memo clearly implies skepticism at Damore's intent and the sources own which he relied. It sets the precedent for successful EEO claims against any venue where the content contravenes similar social justice based codes of conduct and employment agreements.
Damore's top line argument was that these diversity programs are causing reverse discrimination, workplace hostility, and monoculture. The rest of what he wrote was descriptive and prescriptive. And bear in mind, EEOC also has a mandate to protect employees who file their concerns over discrimination. I believe the active class action discrimination lawsuit against Google could be a stepping stone to break up this kind of EEOC precedent.
And I may be reading a bit too much into the "ruling", but I expect that their decision would have held even if employees did have a right to engage in "science based discussion" as GP posits. That's why they cite the Honda ruling. Essentially even if the content is not a-priori problematic, the way it is presented was.
It does. So far, about 4 people have explained this across many threads, and you still don't seem to acknowledge it.
Edit because rate limited:
The problem is not what was said, necessarily, but the way in which it was said. Hence citing the Honda ruling.
This is at least my, not-a-lawyer interpretation. That is, just because you are saying something to discuss workplace issues does not give you the right to say literally anything. Sufficiently disruptive discussion of workplace issues is still disruptive enough to merit a response, not because of the content, but because it is disruptive.
Apparently the NLRB draws the line for sufficiently disruptive somewhere before "results in the demonstrated loss of multiple perspective candidates".
Several people have claimed that. I dispute that claim because that's not what I see in the memo.
> the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be
unprotected.
Notice the reason the NLRB gave in this statement for why they are unprotected: not because they are unrelated to the discussion of workplace issues, but because they are offensive.
> Several people have claimed that. I dispute that claim because that's not what I see in the memo.
It matters little what you see in the memo. Google and the NLRB saw enough to terminate his employment, and to uphold that termination. This is generally how at-will employment works.
It sounds like you are saying the law and precedent is good. You just disagree with their interpretation of the facts in this particular case. Not everyone in a scociety can come to a consensus on every issue. That’s we have the court system decide.
If we have a legal right to discuss something at work, we should also have a legal right to a science-based discussion of that topic.
The Advice Memo seems to agree that discussion of Google's diversity program was protected speech, until it strayed into scientific findings that some people found offensive.
I think you're still not getting it. You don't have the legal right to discuss things at work without termination. Blanket federal employment law says that there is a powerful presumption in favor of the employer when terminating employees. They can fire you for what you say. They can fire you for dying your hair the wrong hair color. They don't need a good reason. You need a good reason if you're going to contest a termination.
The NLRB referred to some things employees do have a legal right to discuss without termination:
> expressing a dissenting view on matters affecting working conditions or offering critical feedback of its policies and programs, which were likely protected
Damore's memo was critical feedback about Google's diversity policy. The inclusion of certain controversial scientific findings is perfectly reasonable in this context.
The Advice Memo was signed and attributed to a 30-year veteran of the NLRB, and the content of the memo was signed off on by the NLRB's GC, who is a Trump appointee. They disagree with you.
This comes from Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act: "Employees shall have the right to...engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection."
In this specific case, the Advice Memo refers to protection for "expressing a dissenting view on matters affecting working conditions or offering critical feedback of its policies and programs".
Have you considered the reason you keep getting the same response to all of your posts in this thread is perhaps because you keep making the same assertions in slightly different ways?
Calm down dude; we get it. You don't have to post the same comment over and over again to make your point.
You'll have a make more meaningful conversation if you stick to one thread and actually engage rather than just copy/paste your reply.
When more than one person makes the same provably false claim, such as "There is no such “legal right” to discuss things in the workplace", isn't it worth correcting more than once?
Unfortunately posting more or less the same comment in many threads just makes other people do exactly the same thing in frustration and destroys the entire comment thread with copy-paste wars.
It's bad forum etiquette everywhere, not just on HN, and it ruins the conversation for everyone.
> When more than one person makes the same provably false claim
/shrug
Right or wrong regarding the content, you're not a one-person-army out there to single handedly defeat all the wrong-doers on HN.
If you're just here to tell people they're flat out wrong, rather than actually have a conversation, you're just spamming the thread.
I'm not telling you what to do or that what you're saying is wrong; I'm just telling you you're being rude by doing what you're doing in the way you're doing it.
> You're right, the NLRB isn't settling the science. It's saying that discussion of the science renders otherwise protected speech unprotected
No, its saying that the specific manner in which Damore discussed the matter, in the context in which he did (including the specific provisions of Google's pre-existing anti-harassment policy), and the actual effects it had in the workplace, meant that even if the purpose of the speech was the kind protected under the NLRA, the actual actions were not.
> and effectively removing workers' legal right to engage in science-based discussion of whether a 50/50 gender ratio is the appropriate goal
While there is a protected right to labor organizing, it is not an unrestricted right to workplace debate over employer policy goals, even before the kind of conflict with unrelated (to labor organizing) policy at issue here. The NLRB memo did not address the question if whether Damore was otherwise within the bounds of protected labor organizing, it merely found that even assuming his speech met the purpose requirements for labor organizing, Google was within it's rights to fire him based on the specific grounds they cited.
The great fear around this topic. What would be the consequence if it were scientifically proven that men had a slight biological advantage over women in software engineering?
I sense the mob puts a noise layer because the mob has an opinion of what to do in that case that it doesnt want to accept.
> What would be the consequence if it were scientifically proven that men had a slight biological advantage over women in software engineering?
They're already hedged against that. They would claim that only means that the software engineering process / profession was designed to cater to masculine traits, and as a result, is sexist. It's yet another tool of the patriarchy.
That software engineering has worked out as it has so far isn't indicative of success because we don't have the alternative profession to compare it to. One that puts more value in diversity, empathy, avoiding conflict, and working cooperatively. If only we valued those things more, men wouldn't have such a leg up.
That's the fun part of these views: they can't ever be proven wrong. There's always another level of underlying oppression for any perceivable sleight.
There are many much-less-disputed things which are obviously factually true but which, nonetheless, could put you on the hook for harassment depending on how, why, and how often you say them.
For example, suppose I have a co-worker who is an ardent believer in the cause of the southern states during the US Civil War. It is factually and indisputably true that the southern states lost that war, and were subjected to a humiliating period of military occupation afterward. If I were to, say, constantly bring it up and rub it in my co-worker's face, my co-worker could certainly go to HR and claim I was committing harassment.
Because he wasn't actually saying anything particularly bad. Instead, he was terminated on the emotional reaction to what others imputed he was saying. This reveals a breathtaking level of authoritarian ideological adherence within Google.
Because he wasn't actually saying anything particularly bad.
Careful there. What you mean is he wasn't saying anything you personally consider particularly bad. This is not the same thing as "objectively not bad". This is not the same thing as "something no reasonable person could object to".
And jumping from your personal opinion that it wasn't bad straight to "a breathtaking level of authoritarian ideological adherence" is, well, quite a leap.
Finally:
he was terminated on the emotional reaction to what others imputed he was saying
The issue with the original "diversity memo" was that there was absolutely no way to read it with the principle of charity in mind and also end up with the interpretation of it his supporters wanted (in order to support the "he didn't say that" narrative). So much of the "he didn't really say that" boils down to ambiguity in the text, but if we assume he had some purpose in mind that he thought was important, and that he was making what he believed was a rational evidence-based argument, and then try to figure out "what important thing is he arguing in support of here", well, there aren't a lot of possible conclusions to end up at.
This is not the same thing as "objectively not bad".
Anything that requires an imputational and emotional interpretation (which can't be supported by particular facts) to be "bad" is "objectively not bad."
if we assume he had some purpose in mind that he thought was important
Here, you're basically admitting that the reading required to support your position is an imputational and emotional interpretation which can't be supported by particular facts.
then try to figure out "what important thing is he arguing in support of here", well, there aren't a lot of possible conclusions to end up at.
It's entirely possible that a best-effort fair society with perfect equality of opportunity would still result in other than a 50-50 distribution in a given field for any number of complex, ever changing reasons, in much the same way that it would be impossible to have a vast liquid ocean with no waves. Or are you effectively making the questioning the validity of "equality of outcome" a thought-crime in and of itself? There are plenty of reasons to question "equality of outcome" without ever having to invoke the superiority of anyone.
We're at a point where we've got actual empirical data showing that in a bunch of other fields of human endeavor which have:
1. Seen a huge observed gender gap, and
2. Comforted themselves with "rational" and "objective" and "scientific" explanations to prove it wasn't their fault, and
3. Eventually been persuaded to try even simple measures to test whether bias on the part of people in that field played a part, it's been discovered that
4. Outcomes drastically changed once those simple measures were adopted, in a way which clearly and beyond reasonable doubt put the lie to the explanations claimed in (2).
To buy Damore's arguments we must either ignore this evidence, or somehow buy into a completely unsupported assumption that computer programming -- for reasons nobody knows -- is completely and utterly unique, and as a result that the solutions used in other fields are inapplicable and off-limits to programming. Even worse: we have to believe that about a field which previously did not have such a huge gap, and acquired it only relatively recently.
To anyone who does a bit of actual research on this stuff, Damore is practically a cliché. He's the person who ends up in the history book under "wow, people actually used to believe that stuff".
Meanwhile, you want to have your knee-jerk reflexes checked, judging by the kinds of catchphrases you immediately jump to when confronted with even mild disagreement.
Like the ones favoring women in medicine in some countries? Like nursing?
4. Outcomes drastically changed once those simple measures were adopted, in a way which clearly and beyond reasonable doubt put the lie to the explanations claimed in (2).
But only up to a point. Google and YouTube execs are on the record saying that they basically got to parity with the available candidate pool.
To buy Damore's arguments we must either ignore this evidence, or somehow buy into a completely unsupported assumption that computer programming -- for reasons nobody knows -- is completely and utterly unique
Not at all. We could just suppose there's something skewing the preferences of people in school.
Even worse: we have to believe that about a field which previously did not have such a huge gap, and acquired it only relatively recently.
Actually, for a time "programmer" was skewed towards women. That could also lend credence to the idea that something is skewing preferences.
To anyone who does a bit of actual research on this stuff, Damore is practically a cliché. He's the person who ends up in the history book under "wow, people actually used to believe that stuff".
No, the Big 5 results he cites are actually quite important in psychology.
So do something about it, if it bothers you. Each person is free to choose how to prioritize their time and efforts, and is not required to solve every other problem (or even every other similar problem) in every other field in every other country on earth as a prerequisite. But we both know that, and we both know that you're running off a script of sound bites.
Actually, for a time "programmer" was skewed towards women.
Yes, that's exactly my point. The types of "scientific" "biological" "truths" people like Damore tend to cite don't change in the time frame of that observed change. It's almost like there was some social factor involved. Perhaps some social factor having something to do with the large number of men who suddenly showed interest. Though of course we have literally zero cases in all of recorded human history of men rigging a system to favor themselves over women, so we don't have to worry that such a thing could have happened. We'd only worry if, say, we had many, many examples of it from many fields of endeavor in many societies across a huge percentage of recorded history.
I've personally engaged in education programs for high school women in tech.
Though of course we have literally zero cases in all of recorded human history of men rigging a system to favor themselves over women...Oh. Wait.
But the typical intellectual dishonesty here comes in the form of citing this history, then asserting that the current day must be the same, with zero proof. That is exactly what you just did.
According to the Google and YouTube execs, there are factors in the job which may skew employment according to preference, and perhaps the job should be changed to take preferences into account. This is exactly what James Damore proposed in his memo, and furthermore what Google and Youtube execs said in public:
Furthermore, they also state that employment at Google is at parity with the STEM/tech education pipeline -- about 2 in 5 women. Where is your evidence of "rigging" given the existing anti-discrimination laws and Google's extraordinary efforts to work against that? Or are you just pointing to it having happened in the past, then point to a non 50/50 distribution as "proof." Sorry, but that's circular logic. Can you justify the 50/50 distribution with other than circular logic? Aren't you just taking that as an unexamined axiom?
> Damore is practically a cliché. He's the person who ends up in the history book under "wow, people actually used to believe that stuff".
You know, that can be applied to you as well.
> Meanwhile, you want to have your knee-jerk reflexes checked, judging by the kinds of catchphrases you immediately jump to when confronted with even mild disagreement.
Oh the irony. It's funny to see oneself in such mirror (I was using the "I will be proven right and I know it" shitargument too).
A more accurate analogy might be a memo claiming that southerners are poorer than northerners because they lost the Civil War. Would you consider such a memo harassment?
Maybe? Most of the challenges on this thread seem to be premised on the idea that Google needs ironclad justification to terminate an employee. The opposite is true. We have, as conservatives vigorously argued for, at-will employment in pretty much the whole country.
The NLRA will protect your right to improve workplace conditions. The NLRB will not enforce that right if what you're doing isn't really about workplace conditions, or is about a desire to change those conditions to something that might conflict with your employer's requirements under the law.
My challenge to the NLRB's opinion is premised on the idea that Google employees have a right to discuss Google's diversity policy. The NLRB seems to agree, repeatedly saying that Damore's memo contained protected speech.
But when that discussion brings up unpleasant scientific findings, the NLRB and I diverge; IMO a scientific explanation should not render otherwise protected speech unprotected.
The issue isn't that the science is unpleasant. It's that state and federal law compel companies like Google to maintain anti-harassment policies, and the NLRB defers to the company on how they're enforced.
If you want to complain about Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, that's a different discussion; it's not really fair to take the NLRB to task for that.
> The issue is that referring to these scientific results is "harassment" because they are unpleasant.
That the manner and context in which Damore referred to them is a violation of Google's reasonable anti-harassment policy does not mean that either that act, and even less referring to them more generally, is harassment.
Necessarily, any anti-harasssment policy that will successfully prevent harassment liability seeks to, through means up to and including termination, prevent liability by dealing with acts before they reach the level at which legal harassment—a violation of the law by the employer—occurs.
An anti-harassment policy that only addressed acts after the threshold for legal harassment was reached would be a very expensive failure.
Google employees do not have a right to discuss Google’s diversity policy. That does not fall within the “improving workplace conditions” exception. Google is within its rights to simply fire all conservatives if it wants to.
I think labor law should be different, but it’s not.
> Google employees do not have a right to discuss Google’s diversity policy.
Yes, they do; that right however does not extend to violating Google's anti-harassment policy (which id, itself, a key means by which Google avoids liability under anti-discrimination law.)
This is sensible; the alternative would be the NLRA forcing Google to engage in acts and/or omissions which would result in liability under the Civil Rights Act, which is clearly not a tenable state of affairs.
None of the groups involved being a protected class under Title VII, and harassment being a means of discrimination against such a class, no, it wouldn't be harassment in the relevant legal sense, and would probably not be within the scope of an anti-harassment policy.
Also this memo would be in the context of an official company policy of preferentially hiring southerners despite them making up a small portion of the applicant pool.
If you want to read it benevolently (benevolent to the NLRB), you could also take it as a claim that his references aren't scientific, but pseudo-scientific[0].
His original memo did include references to scientific studies backing up his assertions, but several outside parties distributed the memo without these references.
The text you quote has scare quotes around "scientific", so it probably means that Damore's opinion was not backed by the science. That doesn't say the NLRB think that science doesn't matter, quite the opposite.
> He was terminated at Google's discretion under at-will employment, the same standard that might allow you to be fired for coming to work with blue hair.
Exactly. Google had the right to fire him. Which is why he should have published his memo anonymously. Unless, like Snowden, he felt that authentication was important, and was willing to face the consequences.
I think there is something pernicious about Google saying "tell me your opinion", "This is my opinion", "You are fired". In moral or practical sense, that can be a breach of contract.
As far as I know, this memo was published within a space where controversial topics are debated, and was made public by someone else. The person that leaked the memo did actual measurable damage to Google's reputation and PR efforts: were efforts expended to find and fire that person?
Lets not kid ourselves: damore was fired because of public outrage, not because of google policies, or the law, or "because no team would take him".
yeah, the discussion keeps neglecting this point. They fired him for doing what they asked. With respect to "at will employment", he didn't do it the way they wanted. What a funhouse. This action points out there is a set of rules which override what the employer tells you are the working conditions. The employer can reference those rules retrospectively to justify why your firing was not unlawful under the NRLA. I feel like this is beneficial to Damore's case though, because it shows that he can't seek relief from this catch-22 situation under the NRLA, and it's truly about the difference between what Google promised and what actually happened. It seems like this misrepresentation was deliberate.
> He was terminated at Google's discretion under at-will employment, the same standard that might allow you to be fired for coming to work with blue hair. He sought relief under an exception to at-will, the NLRA, which protects concerted action to improve working conditions. The NLRB determined that because the substance of his action involved requests that Google might reasonably determine would be problematic under EEO law, that whether or not Damore's actions were unlawful, Google was within its rights as a US employer to terminate him.
Ya, I understand that. I was objecting to the notion that his protests would have violated EEO law were they realized. That seems to me to be an uncareful reading of his opinions on the part of the NLRA board.
Wait, hold on, because the point still isn't clear. The NLRB is not saying that Damore's statements violate any EEO laws (they might, they might not; that argument isn't reached).
Rather, what they found was that Damore's efforts intersected with Google's anti-harassment policies. EEO law aside, NLRB gives deference to anti-harassment policies --- presumably for the same reason they'd give deference to ISO 27001 procedures done for regulatory reasons. Google gets to decide what the rules are for that specific set of issues. All Google has to show is that they have anti-harassment policies that Damore ran aground of. The NLRB generally isn't going to dig into the policies; that's what "deference" means.
It's important that people not come away from this with the idea that the NLRB is telling Damore what is and isn't OK for him to say in the workplace. Absent the organizing protections the NLRA provides, almost nothing Damore says in the workplace has any legal protection. It's not NLRB who fired Damore; it's Google. Reversing that decision is an extraordinary move; not doing the extraordinary is what NLRB decided.
> Curious, why do you believe in that? Have you evaluated the evidence and come to that conclusion, or is it a priori for you?
Curious why you question his belief?
All of the half-way reputable studies I've ever heard of have either concluded that there is no difference in male/female intelligence or that there are small differences in certain silos, with men scoring slightly higher on average in visuospatial while women score slightly higher on average in verbal.
Even if you accept the latter as fact (which there is no clear cut evidence-based reason for doing so, if you look at the studies in aggregate) it says basically nothing about suitability to "our profession" as both of those skills are important.
Given the choice between someone with higher than average overall IQ and outstanding visuospatial skills and someone with higher than average overall IQ and outstanding verbal skills, I'd generally prefer the latter as a colleague.
The memo did not claim that women were less intelligent. It claimed that women _prefer_ to work in fields other than tech. This is a statement of women's choices, not their ability. It also claimed higher variance, but not overall differences. In other words that there are more men on both sides of the extreme.
>This is a statement of women's choices, not their ability.
Wrong. The memo is poorly worded, but it does make the leap from just preferences to abilities in this sentence, despite not having evidence for the latter:
>>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.
The quote talks about abilities, which you said the memo did not say anything about. Damore was positing that both women's preferences and abilities is why you see less women in tech and leadership positions.
> ...also claimed higher variance, but not overall differences. In other words that there are more men on both sides of the extreme.
This is in reference to what the memo says about abilities. The memo does claim higher or lower overall averages, too, but those are in terms of preferences.
Let me lay this out point by point if I phrased this poorly before:
* The memo claims that women and men have different averages in preferences.
* That men and women have different distributions of abilities.
* The memo does not claim that there are different average of abilities.
Point #3 is what the parent comment claimed, among other things, and that is wrong.
>This is a statement of women's choices, not their ability.
Edit: Rather than reply, you now edited your comment to split hairs on distribution vs averages. That doesn't change the facts about Damore's argument about biological ability to be in tech is unfounded.
Hacker news wasn't letting me reply, so I put the classification in an edit. It didn't change the content of what I wrote, just added a clearer (I hope) phrasing.
I have not once mentioned biology in this comment chain. I made my original comment to dispel the myth that Damore claimed that women have, on average, less intelligence than men.
Whether you agree or disagree with the other claims made about biology is orthogonal to this statement.
The difference between distribution vs. averages is important. See the image linked to below. Damore is arguing the top half of the image. Many people mistakenly believe he is arguing the bottom half. Perhaps you believe the top half is unfounded too, but it's an important distinction.
Right. And what many have said is that there is not enough evidence in his to support the top half on his claim of biological abilities. Preferences, sure, but that can also be attributed to social constructs which he specifically tries to rule out.
It's splitting hairs to make it about distribution when there isn't sufficient evidence to support a distribution in the first place.
Here is an article from Heterdox academy that attempted to do a metanalysis of studies to determine if Damore was correct in saying there are certain traits that men display a wider distribution on. They conclude he was.
I have not personally looked at any of this data, nor vouch for it or Damore's or their conclusion. It could be wrong, either because the current best science is wrong or because the summary is unfair or inaccurate. My only point is that it appears to be a statement with some scientific support, not something that can easily be dismissed as false.
Abilities follow from preferences at the level being discussed (potential hiring pool at Google).
I am not good at being a nurse because I chose to become a software developer. I chose to become a software developer because I prefer working with computers over people. My preference in adolescence resulted in my being more capable as a software developer for a company like Google.
That this one statement keeps getting taken out of context and misinterpreted shows how flimsy the claims against the memo are.
>That this one statement keeps getting taken out of context and misinterpreted
Wrong again. When you look at the full context, Damore specifically says that it's not socially constructed like you're describing. Damore isn't arguing that women lack the ability for tech or leadership because they prefer to be nurses, his argument stems from biological differences:
>> On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:
>> ● They’re universal across human cultures
>> ● They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
>> ● Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify
and act like males
>> ● The underlying traits are highly heritable
>> ● They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective
>> 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.
Note that there are differences in certain abilities (most famously mental rotation) that are known to be affected by sex (male and female babies already perform differently). Now mental rotation isn't exactly relevant to software engineering, but there are other biological traits such as autism spectrum disorders that are anecdotally beneficial for software development. It wouldn't surprise me if there were a correlation between sex and programming ability.
However, the number of skills required for software development is quite large and any correlation is likely to be very small. Additionally, there is no a priori reason to assume that the average woman isn't better suited to it than the average man, since there are lots of other effects that could drown out an underlying difference in ability.
So Damore is technically correct, but that doesn't really matter in the end because he doesn't show that effect sizes are large enough to support his conclusions against the policies he opposes (whose evidence is also pretty weak).
I'm not sure we share the same definition of "technically correct", when the evidence doesn't support Damore's claim that biological causes are why there are less women in software engineering and leadership. It's true that there are observable differences in spatial reasoning and reaction time across the sexes, but as you say, those are hardly requisites for being a good programmer.
The full context is that he's writing this memo in the first place to propose alternatives to a hiring policy. That is: the relevant group is the hiring pool for Google. By the time men and women reach the point where Google's hiring policy is relevant toward their outcomes, the distribution of their abilities is already quite different. That's not even really questionable: It's why there are so many fewer women in the hiring pool.
It's selective interpretation to read this outside the context of the hiring policy.
Except what you said about social constructs in your comment isn't argued in the memo, hence you're now projecting about "selective interpretation."
Nobody is saying this isn't in context to hiring policies - that's your straw man. Damore was arguing that women were not in engineering and leadership positions because of preferences and biological abilities (in support of his memo's argument about hiring policies). The latter of which there is no evidence to support.
> Nobody is saying this isn't in context to hiring policies - that's your straw man.
You're evaluating the statement that way. That's not a straw man--it's removal of original context.
> Damore was arguing that women were not in engineering and leadership positions because of preferences and biological abilities (in support of his memo's argument about hiring policies).
Yet another example of the suspiciously common inability of opponents to comprehend the statement.
The statement makes no mention of biological abilities, only distribution of abilities in general (and preferences), caused possibly in part by biological factors.
And once again: The relevant group is the hiring pool for leadership / tech at Google, which undoubtedly has an unequal distribution of qualified men and women as a result of differing distributions of the abilities of men and women at that stage of their careers.
Here's Damore's statement again, with the context from the purpose of the document added by me:
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women (by the time they can be affected by Google's hiring policies) 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.
Tah-dah! When it's not stripped of context, the meaning is more clear. I still don't suspect misinterpretations will stop, though.
No evidence? The number of women who leave their career to become full-time childcare givers far out number men, even among women in high level career tracks.
You are arguing against your own claims. Damore claimed that women are not underrepresented at Google hiring, after considering the explanatory factors. You explained why the affirmative action diversity hiring policy is unnecessary.
Ow. I agree with you, but can you please not preface your comments with "wrong", "false", "no" etc? You're going on to argue (pretty convincingly) that the parent is wrong anyway, what's the point of cranking up the disagreement volume a notch, like that?
Good point. It's hard to get through confirmation bias, even when the person accuses you of being intellectually dishonest, but I agree the tone is a bit much.
Please identify where the memo claims they women have lower average ability than men. As a hint:
> 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.
This statement references distributions, not averages. E.g men may be more prevalent at the top of the scale but also at the bottom. This is entirely in line with what I wrote about the memo referring to variance.
> Please identify where the memo claims they women have lower average ability than men
The claims about their average tolerance for high-status jobs is a direct statement about average ability for certain job roles. You can perhaps argue that it accurately reflects the psychological research (which is a different discussion), but it absolutely is directly a statement about ability.
He also specifically says women generally have “a harder time...leading”, which is a direct statement of reduced average ability in all roles involving leadership.
He claims that women on average choose to work less stressful jobs. The exact terms he used are, "higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance". Perhaps others think "tolerance" is closer to "ability" than "preference", but that's not how I view it. For example, I have a pretty low tolerance for cold climates. I can tolerate them when I need to like when hiking on Alaskan glaciers, visiting relatives in cold places. On average I'm a pretty outdoorsy person so I think have have a good ability to hike in the cold, as I'm confident in my ability to layer clothing and whatnot. But usually I choose not to because that is my preference. Regardless, Damore even says that there are ways to mitigate this. He suggests that Google should,
> Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.
For your second paragraph, here is the full quote.
> This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for
raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences
and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a
women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men
without support.
This is in the context of how women prefer to channel extraversion. Again, preferences make it harder for them to end up in leadership roles. And yet again, Damore offers a way to mitigate this and achieve greater numbers of women in leadership roles:
> Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there's more we can do.
For both of your points, these aren't claims about ability but preferences from my reading. Even if you disagree with this interpretation, Damore still claims that these differences shouldn't exclude women from tech and advancing in tech careers and lists out ways to limit the impact these factors currently have.
Damore NEVER said that women had lower IQ than men. That wasn't the point of his manifesto, it was saying that the reason why you can't get 50/50 representation the way that Google wants to, because the nature of software development as it's done today makes it less attractive, on average, to women. He even suggested ways to change how software development jobs are done to make it more attractive to women in general.
It is still unclear though, why a belief in lower or higher aptitude of a particular group (as a whole) for a some specific type of activity should lead to any kind of discrimination. I realize, it often does, but attempt to silence the research and potentially, the truth, for some political reason does not sound good.
It's not silencing research, but silencing talking about research is a chilling effect. This research isn't off-topic pornography, it was research specifically on the topic of who works in the office.
But it wasn’t research. It was a sloppy regurgitation of some cherrypicked sources which made some sweeping claims, and oh by the way management was wrong and should let him tell them how to do it.
Consider the alternative: say his goal had actually been to learn what most scientists believe or to see how it applied to Google. That would be things like a representative literature survey, lots of questions about how you could measure effects, what the implications those effects would have, etc. Rather than just assuming current staffing was the optimal outcome, you’d ask how you’d even measure such a thing, etc.
Remember, before he joined Google he has experience working in a real research lab. There’s no way he doesn’t know what scientific discussion looks like – it just wasn’t as important as trying to portray his personal political beliefs as objective truth.
You’re mixing two separate questions. One is whether your boss has the freedom to hire and fire as they see fit, where the answer is yes except for certain protected classes. Their money, their rules…
If he’d sent out a memo saying any management initiative was wrong and they were stupid he could be fired for it in the state of California. He just wouldn’t have been able to turn it into cash from right wing causes.
The second question is whether this is science being squashed as his more emotional supporters frequently claim. I don’t think there’s any reason to conclude that since this was a really lousy attempt at scientific analysis remiscent of the creationists who try to sound science-y but are ideologically prevented from actually practicing science.
Management decisions don't come with references to scientific papers, or any claim that they are backed by science. Damore's memo, on the other hand, did exactly that.
My views are in part informed by this essay. It mostly deals with issues of interest, rather than ability, but the cumulative effect of interest divergence culminates in aptitude divergence.
That being said, i'm open to hearing contrary evidence. To the extent that i've read about it, there are non-trivial difference and they are large enough to at least partially explain some of the discrepancy in jobs like software engineering.
This is a perennial debate on HN. Since you asked specifically for me to expand on my own beliefs, my request to you would be to use the search bar at the bottom of the page and find one of the zillion threads I've stated at length my beliefs about this topic on. Wow, that was a bad sentence. Either way though: I'd rather keep on the topic of labor law here.
It's one thing to assume the null hypothesis. Quite another to discard ANY experience or data because it violates the null hypothesis.
Damore certainly cited many studies, and while there's valid criticism of their validity, "they disagree with the null hypothesis, ergo they are false" is not right.
Nor is "I have not read them, therefore the null hypothesis is right".
He did no such thing. Please stop spreading misinformation.
He linked to blogs and magazine articles then people started calling his footnotes “research”.
The one legit study he linked came to the opposite conclusion of what he claimed.
I suggest you go read his links for yourself and consider the sources. It might be illuminating, unless you are already biased in favor of the argument he made.
Just because you don't like his citations doesn't make you right in saying he didn't have them.
But first a side-note: Stop changing the subject. I was saying the null hypothesis is irrelevant here. I'm saying don't discard new evidence because it goes against the null hypothesis. A few comments up (and the answer to "why") was said "[I] strongly believe [in the null hypothesis]", which to me is very strange. How can you "strongly believe" in a null hypothesis?
I didn't like his references (and stop attacking me, and implying my position), in that you can't just cherry-pick a study you like and call it fact (though doesn't make it wrong. Just unproven). Everyone does this. It doesn't make it right, but stones and glass houses.
To understand what you consider legit studies, I randomly clicked on three of his links. At least two of them must not qualify as legit study, so could you explain why you say two or three of these are "blogs and magazines"? I guess you qualify the journal "Science" as unscientific and merely a magazine? So that's one.
Mind you, it'd be a real coincidence if the one supposedly legit study he referenced just happened to be in this list of three:
This is a reasonable assessment, but you still misrepresent Damore's memo - as virtually all who disagree with him have done since the controversy started.
> [...] that men are better suited to software development at Google than women
When you use generic "men" and "women", you imply he talked about a categorical difference. Damore explicitly talked about population distributions, even illustrated with a Bell curve. He said for example "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."
More importantly, he never said men are "better suited" to software development. You mention aptitude, when Damore focussed on preference and interest, based on a well-established literature of personality differences between men and women.
> The NLRB turned down Damore's complaint. I think he could theoretically still sue in civil court? I don't think that's commonly done? Either way, his complaint was denied.
Technically the NLRB didn't act on Damore's charge because he withdrew it. The Advice Memo was requested by and directed to a Regional Director at the NLRB. If the charge had not been withdrawn the Regional Director likely would have refused to issue a complaint, i.e. dismissed the charge. That decision could have been appealed to the General Counsel, a Presidential appointee. The person that wrote the memo, the associate General Counsel for the Division of Advice, reports directly to the General Counsel. If the General Counsel upheld the decision to dismiss the charge, that decision would not be appealable to any court. Nor can the relevant provisions of the NLRA be enforced directly by private lawsuit.
The NLRB has a vast reach that many employees are completely unaware of. Several years ago I was the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against an employer. About 6 months after I filed the lawsuit my employer fired me for fabricated "disciplinary" reasons (not unexpectedly on my behalf, it did take them longer to react than I had thought). Of course, my attorneys immediately sunk their teeth in this termination.
Almost immediately my attorneys launched a two-pronged approach. They filed additional complaints to the lawsuit and they had me file a complaint with the NLRB. Prior to this, I had never even heard of the NLRB and when I read their website I still thought it was a protection for unionized employees. This is far from the truth. My NLRB complaint consisted of two complaints, one for wrongful termination and the second was centered around the employer trying to stop my organizing the class action by terminating my employment (I was the only member of the class that was terminated at this point). At this point, I was also separated as a plaintiff from the "class" and had my own lawsuit against the employer that encompassed the wrongful termination complaint.
The NLRB almost immediately assigned an investigator (a staff attorney) to explore my complaint. This lasted a couple months with several meetings between myself, my attorneys, and the NLRB interviewing the employer and other current employees.
One thing I learned is that there is nothing an employer hates more than a federal agency digging around their business. In the end, the NLRB found both my complaints valid. They offered a settlement to the employer that involved monitoring and random complaince checks for a period of time.
At the same time, my lawsuit continued through the courts. What did help my case was the NLRB findings. It was hard for the employer to deny complaints when they had already settled complaints with the NLRB. In the end, we ended up settling the entire case.
After the case was settled the employer ended up terminating most, if not all, of the employees that were involved for various reasons (mostly false allegations).
Overall, the NLRB does provide a level of protection for the common employee and working conditions not just for unionized employees that I, and I am sure many others, are completely unaware of.
I was a restaurant manager. It was "alleged" that the owners were operating an "illegal tip pool" and "skimming" from said pool, as well as not paying proper wages (i.e. overtime, hourly minimum wage).
If you reread my comment, I spend a couple paragraphs explaining the procedural background to this. If the NLRB had found Damore's complaint valid, they would have intervened on his behalf. They did not, so they will not.
Apparently, there's no private right to action under the NLRA. Enforcement is public, and goes through the NLRB. If the NLRB decides against pursuing a case, that's probably the end for you (maybe short of suing the NLRB itself).
1. You believe that Damore's lawyers withdrew the claim because the NLRB said they wouldn't pursue it. Is that a correct assessment? That's the timeline AFAICT anyway. Does that make the memo a public statement of what they informed Damore of? Is that common, for the NLRB - or similar institutions - to release a memo about a withdrawn action? I'm not American so this all seems very odd to me. I just can't imagine a government body commenting on a withdrawn complaint here.
2. You have not read the memo itself. Is that true? Do you know where it is or where I can read it? How would I even start?
I'm not being critical, I just have no idea how the US's state and federal laws combine, and it all seems very complicated, procedurally odd and very overlapp-y.
You are looking at the wrong case, this is the correct one and contains a link to the Advice Memo, which is dated January 16: https://www.nlrb.gov/case/32-CA-205351
This is what an Advice Memo is: "The NLRB analyses referred to are NLRB Advice Memos, which are prepared by the Office of the General Counsel (GC), a division within the NLRB, to respond to requests for advice from various NLRB Regions across the country about the proper response to some specific fact pattern under the Act. In answering these requests, the General Counsel considers the facts of the specific question posed and analyzes Board precedent relating to the situation.
The GC then reaches a conclusion whether the particular fact pattern violates the Act or not. If the fact pattern does not violate the Act, the Office of General Counsel indicates the unfair labor practice charge should be dismissed. If it finds a violation, it will direct the Region to issue a complaint if the matter is not settled in accordance with its analysis of the law.
All this analysis, and the conclusions, are incorporated into a document known as an Advice Memorandum. These Advice Memos are distributed for the information of all NLRB Regions so that they will all have the same guidance and can address similar questions in a coordinated and consistent manner throughout the United States. The Advice Memorandum does not have the same authoritative force as a published decision of the Board, but it does set out the agency's enforcement position on the questions covered and provides guidelines that will be followed by all Regions when faced with a similar situation.”
So what happened was Damore filed a complaint under the National Labor Relations Act with the National Labor Relations Board. The regional office turned it over to the central office for advice, given the novel issues. The central office decided to decline the case, viewing it as not a violation of the National Labor Relations Act. I don't know whether Damore could still privately sue Google for violating the National Labor Relations Act in court or appeal this decision somehow; perhaps he had some rights, since from the link it looks like he withdrew his case on January 23, a week after the date of the advice memo. He does, however, still have a pending lawsuit against Google, which at the very least, could allege violations of numerous other laws other than (and perhaps also including) the National Labor Relations Act (e.g., California state law).
(for instance, any kind of official recognition that men are better suited to software development at Google than women)
This was where Damore's got his words twisted in his mouth: He never claimed that!
The problematic claims he did make are that women - on average - "have a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading" and are more prone to "neuroticism". Nowhere in the memo does he touch upon women's fitness for SWE jobs -- even though everybody seems to think so.
Whether he promoted stereotypes about women is another story (although most of his claims seem to have some backup by actual science) but the whole thing would have never blown so badly out of proportion if it wasn't for people who circulated a malicious and wrong summary of this memo, either intentionally or by being hanger-ons.
High "neuroticism" is tendency to ruminate on one's life experiences in a negative way -- to reflect especially on difficult situations and experience anxiety or distress. It is one of the "Big 5" personality traits.
It's not the same thing as being crazy or a neurotic in the Freudian sense (which is not a personality trait but a condition or syndrome, more or less vaguely defined).
Neuroticism should be parsed as a reserved word. It is a technical term and his use of it is proper since he is quoting academia. The results of research are not stereotypes. That would be like saying that it is a stereotype to believe that people who smoke have a higher possibility of developing cancer.
It is not problematic to use the terminology of the field that you are citing. The problematic part is misrepresenting those words as judgements. That would be like firing our programmer for lazy-loading images because we can't tolerate laziness at our firm.
> if the memo had been exclusively about how SFBA tech discriminates against conservatives and could in a number of ways be made more accommodating to them, Damore would had been protected from retaliation
Probably, but the entire conversation would have been different then, likely not even leading to his termination and the lawsuit in the first place
> and who believes strongly in the absolute innate equivalence in aptitude for our profession between men and women
Do you also believe in the absolute innate equivalence in motivation for our profession between men and women, so that in a perfectly fair society, we would end up with a 50/50 ratio?
Would this also be the case with other professions, such as nursing, psychologists, or social workers?
> and who believes strongly in the absolute innate equivalence in aptitude for our profession between men and women
I believe in it also, but shouldn't this idea be quantifiable in order to be a legit basis of a firing? I.E. where is the line between "promoting stereotypes" and "promoting science?"
I think? the answer is that it probably doesn't much matter. The Advice Memo states explicitly that the NLRB gives deference to employers on this matter, because they're required by state and federal EEO laws to suppress discrimination of protected classes.
So where this might become a material question is if you were an employer who was receptive to the "scientific" arguments for superior male aptitude, and you had employees that shared that view, and your employees organized to promote that view organically. Like, maybe you couldn't discipline them at the insistence of some other employee?
But in general it sounds like if the workplace issue you're organizing around is "does our employer go too far in trying to comply with EEO laws", the NLRB is not going to have your back.
So, what if you were an employer who was receptive to the "scientific" arguments for completely equivalent aptitude between males and females, and you had employees that shared that view, and your employees organized to promote that view organically. Then someone dissented from that view and a large number of those employees demanded the head of the dissenter? In that case, the NLRB has your back!
But in general it sounds like if the workplace issue you're organizing around is "does our employer go too far in trying to comply with EEO laws", the NLRB is not going to have your back.
Well, for one thing, I think the issue James Damore was organizing around is, "does our employer effectively make it thoughtcrime to question how they comply with EEO laws on the basis of differing average preferences." The NLRB's answer is that, yes the employer can make it a thoughtcrime, the NLRB has your back on that, and furthermore, that a lower level NLRB functionary can adjudicate on matters of truth in science.
Basically, what the NLRB has done here is to "instantiate into law" through the back-door of regulations and regulatory bodies, ideologically driven junk science.
I assume you write this knowing (a) that I do not at all agree with your conclusions about "science" and (b) do not really care, because science is not the issue here. Google has an anti-harassment policy. Damore violated it. The NLRB defers to employers in the enforcement of anti-harassment policies. Damore cannot use the NLRA to "overturn" Google's anti-harassment policies. This part of Damore's game is over.
(b) do not really care, because science is not the issue here.
The issue is witch-hunts. You may well come to care if and when they decide to come for you. Given my conclusions that you are a rational person who values truth, that may well happen to you. Then again, most people are just fine with coercion and injustice, so long as it's happening to people who "deserve it," in the style of comic book stories. It may never happen to you, and you may well be fine with them. That is also quite normal.
Thanks for that explanation, it was both thorough and frankly, illuminating in a way that I wasn't expecting.
Do you think if he had kept his original memo to those acceptable points(the hostile attitude toward conservative views), that they might have gone forward with it? Or would it have still been too difficult to prove with the case?
Yes. I'm summarizing not the Bloomberg article but the Advice Memo itself, which is on NLRB's case website (you can just go read it).
It's a little fuzzy because the Advice Memo asserts up front that it's assuming arguendo that the memo, in both its protected and unprotected components, constituted protected concerted action. So it's possible that NLRB never really reached the question of whether this kind of organizing truly constitutes organizing for "mutual aid and protection" under the definitions of the NLRA; it didn't have to, because whether or not you're organizing under the NLRA, the memo says there's pretty extensive case history saying you can't do it to work against federal anti-discrimination law.
The NLRA does not eliminate employment at-will! You can get fired for all sorts of dumb superficial reasons. You just can't be fired for exercising your specific rights to concerted action for improved workplace conditions under the NLRA.
But before you go flex this particular right --- and really people should start doing this, like, a lot --- go talk to a labor lawyer and dot your 't's.
This turns out to be pretty easy to do: you can just contact @michelleimiller at Coworker.org, who facilitates this kind of stuff.
Yes. Despite "limiting language" like "studies show" or "on average", the NLRB found that the Damore memo's claims that women are susceptible to "neuroticism" and that they have lower variance in IQ constituted valid cause for Google to terminate.
It's important I think to understand that the NLRB isn't saying that it's unlawful to write the Damore memo. They're not even saying that Damore's IQ and psychology claims violate EEO law. Instead, what they're saying is that they're close enough to the underlying issue of anti-discrimination compliance that the NLRB isn't going to second-guess Google's decision to terminate.
"It's important I think to understand that the NLRB isn't saying that it's unlawful to write the Damore memo."
Well, they did call what Damore wrote "sexual harassment" and "discriminatory", and sexual harassment is illegal and violates EEO, so that is basically saying that what he wrote is unlawful:
"The Charging Party’s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences
between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct
the Board found unprotected in these cases. [His] statements about immutable traits
linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the
top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment,
notwithstanding [his] effort to cloak comments with “scientific” references and
analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers."
It is probably not generally unlawful for a rank-and-file employee to make discriminatory statements. You can be fired for doing that, but the government is unlikely to step in and do that for your employer.
Not directly, no. But a company can be held liable if it isn't taking action against discrimination perpetuated by the rank-and-file (whether that be education on the subject, disciplinary action, firing, etc).
I dunno, if you believe the legal teams, the only reason he was fired at all is because of those points. Maybe you believe it or maybe you don't, but in some alternate universe he didn't say those things, and didn't get fired at all.
Honest question: I'm from eastern Europe, trying to wrap my head around this US controversy.
I fully respect Google's right for at-will termination, just trying to figure out whether Damore sinned by going against "world-as-is" or "world-as-ought-to-be".
I took the effort and found both the full text of this new National Labor Relations Board judgement [0, PDF], which includes:
"… statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism … were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment…"
and Damore's original memo, which cites a peer-reviewed published source [1]:
"research in large samples has shown that levels of N (neuroticism) are higher in women than men. This is a robust finding that is consistent across cultures. This is especially the case during the reproductive years, but is also visible in children and elderly."
Does such research really constitute harassment in the US? If so, what are the broader implications for science?
Other rebuttals I could find were similarly vague in distinguishing between facts ("is") and desires ("ought to be"). Has Damore's memo been rebutted at the "is-level"? Is he wrong in facts, or merely controversial in his proposed policies?
>The NLRB turned down Damore's complaint. I think he could theoretically still sue in civil court? I don't think that's commonly done? Either way, his complaint was denied.
There's still a civil lawsuit going ahead as the article notes.
It's a different set of claims but they have (in regards to the specifics of Damore’s claims; it's a class action charging a broader pattern, though) substantial overlap despite the differing legal basis. Particularly, if, as NLRB found, Damore was fired solely for statements violating a legitimate anti-harassment policy, this would be quite problematic for the claims in his lawsuit. Of course, the court in that case is not bound by the NLRBs fact findings.
I assume so. I read the civil complaint (I actually know his lawyer pretty well) but 1.) I'm not a lawyer myself and 2.) I haven't really studied the legal case in any depth.
If his memo had been exclusively about discrimination against conservatives, he wouldn't have been fired in the first place. The obvious reason Google fired him is that he was now poison in terms of working with others, especially women, because he was saying that women as a whole were either less suited or less inclined to be engineers.
Some of the bits in his memo were pseudoscientific bunk, no better than phrenology. Making a lot of noise about 'facts' doesn't help here, in fact it does the opposite. So it seems your stand here is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Some of the bits in his memo were pseudoscientific bunk, no better than phrenology.
One of the cited studies from the Damore memo was done across 55 countries, and effectively has a P value which is eyebrow-raisingly high. (They used another stats test.) It's definitely an important result, and is acknowledged as such by a big swathe of Psychology academia.
Sure, but just because I cite a study doesn't mean that the conclusions I make are valid. You seem to be saying that because Damore has citations in his memo it is ironclad (or perhaps you think that people who disagree with it disagree with every word of it).
Neither of those things are the case. There are subsections of the memo that are both objectionable and unscientific. That he has some things that are science-y does not make the entire document wholly unobjectionable.
Whether you find my stand irrelevant or not just because you don't agree with it, is telling and symptomatic for this discussion.
Why isn't my stand relevant, what is it you know for a fact that is pseudoscientific and even if it was the case, are you going to fire people for believing in God and being against gay marriage because it's anti-scientific.
First, you have to establish that it was a total breakdown which I think you will have a hard time establishing in any meaningful way. But by all means. Let's hear the argument.
The Boss says I can not trust this person again nor can their coworkers for x y z reasons (And I Am afraid Mr Danmore has done this) and the employee is toast.
This is a civil matter so its on the balance of probabilities this isn't a criminal court.
> who believes strongly in the absolute innate equivalence in aptitude for our profession between men and women
This sounds almost sarcastic. I get that hyperbole is a rhetoric device. I agree to a certain extent, too, while I understand that positive discrimination is discriminating never the less. But: The absolute "innate" equivalence between any two persons is not comparable.
Prejudice is not allowed, sure, but it goes both ways. You can't just take any 50% of the population and claim they must be as good as the other half, just as you can't take any half and claim they must be inferior. Because that is subjective -- concerning subjects -- whereas you want to be objective -- judging actions by their objectives.
> "concerted action" to improve working conditions
Improve the working conditions for whom though? IANAL, but I would think that it'd have to be an improvement in the working conditions for everyone, or at least not have a negative impact on other, non-managerial groups.
For example say engineering gets tired of the sales department's constant phone conversations and boisterous behavior. They organize a group that seeks to eliminate the sales department altogether, after all, the engineers are building a self-service SaaS product that sells itself.
Would the engineers have legal recourse if they were fired for seeking a change that would harm some other group?
>> You can't use the NLRA to organize in opposition to federal employment law. Wa-waa.
I know I should really not be focusing on that one silly little detail out of your comment (which I agree with in general) but can you please explain that "Wa-Waa"? Do you mean it as in the "wa-waa-waa-waaaa" sound from old movies, like in the video below?
There are no good outcomes in the current noise. People on both extremes will misread and misuse it.
Silicon Valley's achievement in the last 10 years is to make sure ambiguity is profitable. Resolution of anything or even a path to resolution just produces less clicks, talking heads and outrage.
The proof is in the pudding. Who wants to bet 2-5 years from now the status quo wouldn't have changed? Replace the issue with gun control, climate change or universal health it hardly matters.
If you guys want to see change the noise levels have to reduce.
The null hypothesis is to assume there is innate equivalence; the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate otherwise and the attempts I've seen so far are lacking.
The null hypothesis would be to accept the state of things as they are.
If there are very few women in computer science, you wouldn't assume it was due to some conspiracy or "systematic discrimination" without any proof. You wouldn't enact policies of reverse discrimination (affirmative action) to correct some supposed imbalance of the system.
You'd simply admit you don't know why, and search for proof of the reason.
A more correct null hypothesis is to accept the state of things as they are given signal from across time, though. Which raises the immediate question of why most programmers were women until recently.
I'm sorry, this statement is extraordinarily confusing to me. Why on earth is the null hypothesis that there is innate equivalence? This seems so precisely backward that I'm going to need you to justify it before I can agree. A lifetime full of thousands of interactions with both men and women on a daily basis have consistently shown me that there are huge differences between the sexes.
The fact that we are all equal does not mean we are all equivalent. I suspect you may not be making this distinction.
> Having "conservative viewpoints" is not a protected class.
In California, it is illegal for an employer to discriminate against an employee on the basis of their political beliefs [1], so to that extent particular political ideologies (including conservatism) can be viewed as protected classes.
No. You can't put the law "in context" while outright ignoring case law. Courts have consistently found 1101 and 1102 to offer broad protection. I'm not a lawyer, nor want to do the research. AIUI from learned legal commentary, the broadness has not been tested for exactly this sort of issue, but that doesn't make it slam-dunk unprotected either.
You're claiming to put something "in context," but rather than clarify you're obscuring. This type of fake-smart comment is what makes me hate hacker news.
It's not "fake-smart" to read a document and try to understand it. Refusing to do research yet making uncited authoritative claims strikes me as far more "fake-smart"
This type of arrogant hostile condescension makes me unhappy with with Hacker News.
The line between those seems quite thin. Showing support for a candidate is quite literally showing support for a certain set of platforms or political idea.
People organizing with other employees who share conservative views to engage in concerted action to improve their working conditions is a protected class, though, because people organizing with other employees to engage in concerted action to improve their working conditions is a protected class no matter what other descriptors you add.
"their" means employees', not just a subset of them. Suppose some people thought it'd improve their working conditions by freedom to share KKK rally times and places or organize porn watching parties at the workplace. The law isn't some robotic computer of legal rules. Context often matters.
They certainly don't need to be seeking improvements that benefit every single employee. For example, employees seeking to get paid maternity leave would be a protected activity even though it doesn't benefit all employees.
The KKK or porn examples would be an exception because it would create a hostile work environment for some employees to even suggest that, not because it would only benefit certain employees.
If Damore had only been trying to organize action to get improved work conditions for conservative employees, that would be protected activity and the NRLB opinion says as much. Google was careful to make clear that they were only disciplining him for parts of his memo that were likely to create a hostile work environment for other employees, that is something that they are not only allowed, but possibly required, to discipline employees for.
"To the extent that Damore's memo was about organizing against discrimination of conservative viewpoints --- a phenomenon that is almost certainly real in SFBA tech! --- it was protected."
You removed the first four and last three words of a sentence to twist it into something completely else. That's just malicious editing. His point was that the protection didn't extend to the full document because most of it was trying to achieve other aims which are not protected.
My point is that discrimination against conservative viewpoints is not a significant phenomenon in SFBA tech, unless by "conservative" you mean sexist or racist.
I'm really curious what conservative viewpoints people espouse that they feel they've been discriminated against for.
Also his comment is right there so I'm hardly revising history here, I'm just being specific about the part that I'm responding to.
> My point is that discrimination against conservative viewpoints is not a significant phenomenon in SFBA tech, unless by "conservative" you mean sexist or racist.
Or don't think gay marriage should be legal, or are religious, or dislike welfare, or oppose the ACA, or think abortion should be illegal.
EDIT:
Or thinks having separate male and female bathrooms makes a lot of sense, or supports strict immigration policies, or oppose affirmative action, or thinks "we reserve the right to deny service to anyone" should be a real thing, or ...
Thinking gay marriage shouldn't be legal is not "conservative", it's plain discriminating. Denying abortions to others is a bit muddier, but somewhat similar - forcing your own, not universally accepted moral code on others isn't exactly the nicest thing to do after all.
I don't know much about ACA, so can't say anything about it.
With those three out of sight, I'm really interested in what kind of discrimination people in SFBA tech that are religious or dislike welfare face.
> Thinking gay marriage shouldn't be legal is not "conservative", it's plain discriminating
While I certainly agree it shouldn't be illegal, there is a long history of religious opposition to this that I don't think it's so simple to hand wave away. Just because we feel strongly that we are obviously in the right, doesn't absolve us from understanding why someone might feel a certain way.
> Denying abortions to others is a bit muddier
This one goes beyond muddy into clear political territory. For every one person you find that sees pro-life as "denying abortions" you'll find someone who see it as "denying murder". Pushing this debate into the workplace seems beyond a bad idea.
> I don't know much about ACA
As someone who's premiums more than doubled after the ACA, I think it's fair to say its value is debatable and no one should be fired for sitting on either side of that debate.
> forcing your own, not universally accepted moral code on others isn't exactly the nicest thing to do after all.
Everyone feels they are living to their own moral code. There is no universally accepted standard, but firing/shaming/blacklisting people for their beliefs is wrong (according to my own moral code).
> With those three out of sight, I'm really interested in what kind of discrimination people in SFBA tech that are religious or dislike welfare face.
While I have not personally voiced the following opinion I have not because it could easily be called racist. I think the thing that would most improve the prospects of African Americans in the US is that they only have children after being married after 3+ years. Other changes need to be made but that would have a massive positive impact in the next 20-40 years.
Second, read about why David Gudeman was fired. He is the other named party in Jame Damore's lawsuit. He was fired for suggesting that a coworker's interaction with the FBI was not for being Muslim but for other reasons.
Depends on if that creates a hostile work environment or not. If a lot of your coworkers would be (or believe that they would be) negatively impacted by the policies you publicly support and talk about, then it's reasonable to think that they will have trouble working together with you and it's reasonable to think then that management may not see you expressing these views as something useful or positive for the company. And by "negative" above I do not mean that they would be inconvenienced, I mean that these policies may have drastic consequences on their lives and families, something it is much harder for those people to not have an emotional response to.
> I'm really curious what conservative viewpoints people espouse that they feel they've been discriminated against for.
I think this is a far more useful inquiry (i.e. what specific points) than generalized ideologies.
What viewpoints, indeed?
Many of the ones I hear from my self-described conservative friends and the public personalities they follow fall into these categories (my word choice, not them, I'm paraphrasing heavily):
1. "I'm afraid the government will take away my right to own
guns, which is enshrined in the second amendment to allow
citizens to overthrow an unjust government."
2. "I'm worried that the current political correct climate will
infringe upon my right to free speech, enshrined in the
first amendment."
3. "I don't want my church, which is against homosexuality, to
be forced to marry gay couples."
4. "I don't want 'confused men' to be in the same restroom as
my underage daughters."
These are just the most recent examples I can think of.
Generally, I find that most of what I hear these days falls into two categories: Fear, and thinly-veiled contempt for people who are different.
If there are other conservative viewpoints that I'm not hearing, I'm happy to correct my ignorance.
That being said, I find the very idea that the entire spectrum of human imagination can be compressed to 1 bit of information (left or right wing) is deeply insulting and, if true, one hell of an indictment of our species.
Very few people are able to put together a fact- and logic-based argument for why questions of morality like that should be questions of legality. E.g. why it's more like murder or theft or assault and less like lying or adultery. It's perfectly possible to think homosexuality is a sin and not think it should be illegal, and to treat homosexuals as perfectly decent humans who you would interact with in all the same ways you would anyone else. To a Christian, after all, everyone is a sinner.
That significantly undermines those causes to secular listeners. Without being able to do so, it usually sounds simply fear- or dislike- based. Much more like prejudice than like a sound basis for policy.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003EO8ER0 for more, from the inside, on the withdrawal by the American evangelical community from intellectual sphere. The right's "PC" instincts - shout down and kick out the heretics - has crippled their ability to convince those who don't already agree. The left is in danger of getting to the same place, but it's hilariously ironic how evangelicals don't recognize the mote in their own eye on this one.
You are talking the legality of same-sex marriage.
Point #3 is not talking about the legality of same-sex marriage. It is an opposition to compelling people to be complicit in same-sex marriage. Churches may still have some protection against being compelled to marry gay couples, but bakers sure as hell don't have any protection against having to make cakes for gay weddings, so it is reasonable to worry that the protections for churches may crumble soon.
Why is being "complicit" in same sex marriage any worse than being "complicit" in a marriage for someone who has sinned, possibly grievously, in other ways? The difference is only in the obviousness, and it's not clear to me that that's a good reason.
It appears internally inconsistent in a way I've never heard a sufficient explanation for. And as someone who no longer believes, who does support the explicit non-theocratic nature of American government, I think that's a reasonable bar to hold others to. The major emphasis in Christianity as it was taught to me was never on "enabling," it was on one's own beliefs and fruit.
And to the sibling about "legality should reflect morality": I take a much more conservative stance on that. There you would have to do much more work to convince me that legality should merely reflect a particular snapshot of a particular group's morality, as the American founders - with very good reason based on their experience in Europe - explicitly rejected that. So I think you'll need to develop that thesis a lot before it convinces me to break with American tradition, there. I favor a view that enough concrete harm has to be demonstrated to justify more restrictions, more police, etc.
tldr: many religious Republican views like these are not actually all that conservative ;)
> Why is being "complicit" in same sex marriage any worse than being "complicit" in a marriage for someone who has sinned, possibly grievously, in other ways?
It isn't worse. I know pastors who would refuse to marry a couple that included someone how was divorced or a couple that was having pre-marital sex. They cannot get in legal trouble for refusing that but they might get in legal trouble for refusing to marry two women.
> that legality should merely reflect a particular snapshot of a particular group's morality
Part of the Christian push back is that same-sex marriage was a none issue until around 2000. It was still unpopular enough in 2008 that Proposition 8 passed, in California! We are just saying that what has been considered immoral and illegal should stay that way.
At a meta-level: the discussion in this thread is one that I would hope would be welcomed anywhere that encouraged discussions of religion/politics in the workplace (I also understand workplaces that just don't want any of that).
But sadly, civility is not something I'm widely accustomed to in these debates, so I understand the general defensiveness that accompanies most comments on homosexuality. Which is why I'd favor workplaces not to encourage that sort of discussion at all. Though even then you'd expect a certain amount of prevailing winds, which is why I brought up Mark Noll - the dominant forms of Christianity in the US have largely retreated from making intellectual arguments, so in most intellectual circles you don't many. My answer to "why are universities so liberal" is "because religion went off and built a parallel education system because it didn't respond well to the challenges of evolution and other modern science."
> We are just saying that what has been considered immoral and illegal should stay that way.
But that doesn't seem like a reliable guiding principle on its own, e.g. mixed race marriage.
This is one of those things where there is no compromise that satisfies both sides, so from a least-harm perspective, it seems better to, as far as the state goes, pick the people who probably don't have a choice in the matter (I'm inclined to believe that homosexuality is primarily an innate thing, because I never chose to be straight, and can't imagine choosing to be homosexual) versus the beliefs of certain religious groups.
And the history of racial discrimination in the US points the way towards the reasoning behind equal-service type requirements for businesses. Any problems caused seem much smaller than the (proven!) potential for abuse if the laws weren't there.
> This is one of those things where there is no compromise that satisfies both sides
Agree completely on that point.
As much as I don't like the outcome, I think you are right on what the legal outcome should be based on the cultural viewpoint that homosexuality is innate.
A) Interracial Marriage is immoral.
B) Homosexual Marriage is immoral.
C) Remarriage (after divorce) is immoral.
Part of my disagreement is that I see B and C as related while you (and most of America) see A and B related. Alas, it seems like there is no way to convince the country of my viewpoint so I am stuck putting up with it.
> Why is being "complicit" in same sex marriage any worse than being "complicit" in a marriage for someone who has sinned, possibly grievously, in other ways?
If you subscribe to the view that same-sex marriage is a sin against a higher power, then your involvement in the marriage makes you actively involved in the sin.
If sinners get married, the marriage itself is not a sin. This is very straightforward in my mind.
Additionally, some churches have interviews with the bride and groom before marriages and if the pastor feels that they are unworthy of getting married will not marry them.
FYI I personally am not opposed to the legality same-sex marriage.
> tldr: many religious Republican views like these are not actually all that conservative ;)
> If you subscribe to the view that same-sex marriage is a sin against a higher power,
This is a newer one to me, off the top of my head I'm not aware of from where the marriage act would be considered the sin vs the homosexuality itself. What's the doctrinal reasoning here? Just curious, here, since I'm A-OK with churches being able to individually choose who to marry.
Businesses, on the other hand, are subject to a very different set of laws for very clear historical reasons.
Many religions view marriage as a sacred sacrament, instituted by God to join men and women. Under this view, same-sex marriage is easily viewed as mocking God and debasing the sacrament.
> This is a newer one to me, off the top of my head I'm not aware of from where the marriage act would be considered the sin vs the homosexuality itself.
Sin is normally considered at its core an offence to God because He is the only perfect one thus He is the only one with legal/moral standing to take offence. This is often highlighted as the reason that Joseph, when his master's wife wanted to sleep with him responded "How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?"
I think that in general morality should reflect legality. That is to say, the things that are moral should be legal, then things that are immoral should illegal and vis versa.
Is that a sufficient logic-based argument on why questions of morality should be questions of legality?
At a tangent to the Damore issue, on to the more general issue of conservatives claiming a feeling of being discriminated against;
There was this expression that got a bit popular during the early days of OWS: if someone tells you they’re thirsty, don’t tell them they’re not. Give them a glass of water.
I’ve heard concerns about self-censorship from enough actual real-life people, as opposed to Fox News blowhards, that I have to assume there’s at least a seed of truth to that. Something something lived experiences.
We can disagree as to why these people feel that way, and whether that’s a good thing (I’m perfrxtly happy with Nazis feeling like they’re a hated group, for instance), but maybe we should be respectful enough of people not to tell them they’re not living what they’re telling us they’re living.
That said, so much of conservative social policy has become thinly veiled discrimination of one sort or another - or is so closely associated with it that one can’t hear one without thinking the other - that it’s difficult to separate out views that need to be protected and views that need to be censored, without vilifying “conservative” in general.
I disagree and further again should say that though I am myself (I think pretty obviously?) a liberal, the argument that conservative politics --- not "racism" and "sexism" but rather "how should we organize, fund, and manage society" type stuff --- are suppressed in SFBA has, like, a lot of validity.
Not living in the Bay Area, the tech industry there seems like a hotbed of privatized funding, privatized infrastructure (e.g. employee provided busses for commutes), and privatized communities (on-campus lunch, recreation, etc). Often with a strong opinion on the proper function of government: that it shouldn't restrict the actions of their companies.
That all sounds just as conservative as their social (but not gov't organizational or managerial) principles sound liberal.
Could be. Could be an owners/labor distinction too.
I've never talked to a bigco developer who felt like they'd have career problems expressing liberal political views. But I have several friends, and have talked to a lot of other people, who have shared concerns about expressing conservative views.
It's anecdata, but there's a lot of anecdotes to be found about it.
I've only worked here about 20 years in smaller companies but had plenty of coworkers who were pretty loud and proud libertarians or conservative Republicans, especially around Clinton's impeachment or election time, and guys were wearing their red MAGA caps into the office where I was contracting after the 2016 election.
I guess it depends somewhat on what sort of liberal views you talk about.
I'd be worried about expressing anti-data-collection, anti-large-company, pro-break-up-Google views if I were a Google employee. Biting the hand that feeds you and all... I haven't met many developers with that view, either - people are willing to talk about it on HN, but in person? I haven't found it.
Maybe the reason liberal views on diversity get all the attention is because they're the only ones that even seem within reach.
If I say that women are on average shorter than men, is that a harmful stereotype when it comes to mixed gender basketball leagues?
If I say that women are more caring on average than men, is that a harmful stereotype only if it is untrue, or is it harmful to state it even if it is true?
I think you have misrepresented a few things. One, it was a pro-diversity memo, not an anti-diversity memo. Two, it didn’t say anywhere that men are better suited to software development.
It’s fine to disagree with what he said, but it’s not fine to mischaracterize what he said.
> is that if the memo had been exclusively about how SFBA tech discriminates against conservatives and could in a number of ways be made more accommodating to them, Damore would had been protected from retaliation.
But then this whole thing would be nothing, maybe a minor labor dispute. So this boils down to his bigoted views.
This is well argued but some of the assumptions are false.
1) Damore never argued men were better suited to software engineering than women.
2) Damore never argued for google to violate EEO laws, and in fact it’s the opposite.
It’s very sad to me that there is such widespread misinterpretation of Damore’s nuance in his memo. In every possible factual way it’s a pro-diversity memo, but because it cites research on the average personality differences amongst men and women (which are 100% true), he gets crucified as a bigot and an anti-diversity zealot.
Furthermore, when it comes to matters such as these, “belief” should not play a substantial role. We’ve already proven that men and women don’t differ much on intelligence. No need to believe one way or another.
> Damore never argued for google to violate EEO laws, and in fact it’s the opposite.
While this may not have been his intent, this ruling appears to imply that the EEOC thinks that the content of his words do amount to that.
You can disagree, but my expectation is, being that they are EEOC lawyers and you are not, their understanding of what does or does not violate EEO law is better than yours.
I do disagree. This is on multiple thorough readings of his memo and a sound mind. He never advocates for Google to discriminate against anyone in his memo, nor does he advocate for Google to not prioritize diversity.
There is no quote in his original memo to prove otherwise, legal opinion notwithstanding.
It did give me pause, then it gave me concern, then it fizzled into lack of surprise.
Damore lost the PR battle long ago. PR justice, while disheartening, isn’t anything new. Challengers to popular ideology are never right at first, but he’ll be right eventually. One day it’ll be more faux pas to assume there are zero average personality differences between the sexes.
This is venturing off topic, but you're actually incorrect that he lost the PR battle [0]. The majority of people support Damore, or at least disagree with Google. The majority of subject matter experts, however, do not.
According to Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA, employees can't generally be disciplined for exercising the rights provided under Section 7 of the NLRA. These rights are commonly understood to be about unionizing (ie, you can't be fired for trying reasonably to organize a union), but are actually broader: the NLRA protects an employee right to almost arbitrary "concerted action" to improve working conditions.
Damore was terminated by Google for authoring his anti-diversity memo. During the time he was authoring and distributing internal copies of the memo, he worked with (apparently) a bunch of other engineers at Google that shared many of his viewpoints (the memo covers a lot of ground). He was terminated after the memo, an artifact of his concerted effort to change aspects of how Google was managed, was published. He and his lawyer mounted an 8(a)(1) complaint.
As a starting point --- people with real-world experience or understanding of the NLRA should correct me where I'm wrong --- NLRA complaints get filed with the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB adjudicates claims internally. If a complaint is found valid, the NLRB will try to convince the employer to settle with the employee; if that goes nowhere, the NLRB will itself effectively sue the company. If the complaint is found invalid, the NLRB will inform the complainant that NLRB is done with the case.
Most of these cases (there are tens of thousands annually as you'd expect) are handled by grunts in DC. Novel or high-profile cases are escalated to a special department in the NLRB called the Advice Division. This particular case was not only escalated but apparently handled personally by the director of the division, an NLRB lawyer who'd been with the board since 1988.
The NLRB turned down Damore's complaint. I think he could theoretically still sue in civil court? I don't think that's commonly done? Either way, his complaint was denied.
The basis for the complaint is super simple and kind of obvious in retrospect: employers in the US are required by federal and usually state law to avoid discrimination against protected classes. To the extent that Damore's memo was about organizing against discrimination of conservative viewpoints --- a phenomenon that is almost certainly real in SFBA tech! --- it was protected. But to the extent that it attempted to organize around changes to Google management that might (might) themselves violate EEO laws (for instance, any kind of official recognition that men are better suited to software development at Google than women), they were not. You can't use the NLRA to organize in opposition to federal employment law. Wa-waa.
As it turns out, this was apparently super-apparent to Google legal and Google HR, who fired Damore precisely by the book, exclusively for promoting stereotypes about women and advocating for the inclusion of those stereotypes into Google's management processes.
I think an important thing to consider --- I'm no lawyer and am probably wrong about lots of this stuff --- is that if the memo had been exclusively about how SFBA tech discriminates against conservatives and could in a number of ways be made more accommodating to them, Damore would had been protected from retaliation. The Advice Memo says as much!
So for someone like me, who believes very strongly in both the importance of employee organizing rights (I think tech should organize into professional associations; "unions lite") and who believes strongly in the absolute innate equivalence in aptitude for our profession between men and women, this is the best possible outcome. There's a lot to take heart in here; we do in fact have the right to organize that we've been saying we have.