The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320/amp

by akalin • 9 years ago

353 515 9 years ago

gizmodo.com

greenyoda• 9 years ago

There's already extensive discussion of this here, with the full text linked as the top comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934581

agarden3• 9 years ago

Most of the people on that page hadn't read the document.

factsaresacred2• 9 years ago

That post is 12 hours old, the comment with the link was posted 30min ago.

ehsankia• 9 years ago

And most people in that post had not seen the document. They were commenting on the biased reporting from an article, who themselves got a biased interpretation from an employee. That's 2-3 levels of indirection there.

Smaug123• 9 years ago

Oh dear, this seems like a bit of an unwise thing to have written. Whether or not it's true, it's something you're Not Allowed to reason about, where "Not Allowed" is in the sense of PG's http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html .

naiveattack• 9 years ago

This was an excellent read about how to deal with the irrationality and repression of mobs. Thanks.

Perhaps this is where anonymous speech is important as it allows the discussion of ideas without giving importance to the persons behind them. Of courae, allowing for the fact that nothing can be truly anonymous :)

TheLilHipster2• 9 years ago

Perhaps this is where anonymous speech is important

I'd like to rebut that point as we have anonymous, mainstream means to socialize nowadays. Chaotic (4chan) and moderated (mediums like Hacker News).

Users speak truth to power all the time on these platforms, is it effective? eh.

IMO there is a lot of value in these words coming from someone (from google) who is clearly switched-on, yet has A LOT to lose. Either the discussion is presented to the general populace and we accept it and learn from it, or the google employee becomes a martyr.

Either way, the fallout of this document is what interests me.

factsaresacred2• 9 years ago

I fail to understand the outrage but attribute that to the fact that few bothered to read the document before allowing themselves to be outraged by it - such is the shallow, feeling-fueled, hysteria-laden media cycle of today.

The doc presents a point-of-view, grounded in reality. Furthermore it's not "anti-diversity", but rather anti-discrimination - specifically 'positive 'discrimination which it discredits while presenting alternative policies that are more inclusive (according to the author) and reflective of inherent psychological differences.

Have I read it wrong? Somebody correct me if I missed the controversial bits.

Edit: OK, it comes off the rails a little at the "Why we’re blind" section but overall it's food for thought (and no doubt a catharsis for many Right-leaning Googlers).

Since when is dialectics grounds for ostracism?

Quarrelsome7• 9 years ago

There is bad with the good. The suggestion that men and women ARE different is taboo. The premise that the differences between them are social as opposed to literal is a much easier way to force the same point (and IMO more correct but I respect I lack the science to be certain). This person lacks tact and the way they view the entire political sphere as just left/right is ultimately of concern. Way too simplistic outlook IMO.

ubernostrum• 9 years ago

It's perfectly all right to say that there are statistical differences between the average biological man and the average biological woman.

The problem is to then assume a gigantic pile of facts not in evidence (that the differences observed are 100% biological with no cultural influence whatsoever, that they conclusively explain gender disparities in many fields, etc. etc.) and accuse anyone who disagrees with you of being one of those terrible mean lefties who will unperson you for speaking the truth.

Generally, this type of person lasts up until the moment blind interviews become widespread.

Hnrobert42• 9 years ago

Yeah. I was willing to give him a fair hearing until he listed a handful of differences between men and women that he ascribes to biology without any factual support.

And therein lies the unconscious bias against which he is railing. To him, there is no question that men and women, on average, are fundamentally different in ways that affects their ability to and interest in work in tech.

I agree with him that folks shame those his viewpoint into silence. I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing.

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

The suggestion that men and women ARE different is taboo.

Is it taboo? Or is it just taboo in this context?

The premise is also shared by some arguments for trangender rights -- that gender identity is involuntary and biological at least to some degree.

home_boi3• 9 years ago

The suggestion that men and women ARE different is taboo.

This is the assumption being made by diversity hiring and diversity advocates. That some races/genders have different perspectives and viewpoints than others.

It can quickly follow that some of these viewpoints may make a person more or less fit for certain careers.

grey-area3• 9 years ago

I fail to understand the outrage but attribute that to the fact that few bothered to read

Rather than assuming those who disagree with you are shallow and hysterical (a contentious word choice, given the subject), perhaps consider why others might be outraged, you could try some empathy (though I know the article warns us against empathy).

The doc presents a point-of-view, grounded in reality. Furthermore it's not "anti-diversity", but rather anti-discrimination

I think it is explicitly anti-diversity in that it sees nothing wrong with the current order of things, if that order can be justified by failings in the weaker vessels that surround the author like empathy and neuroticism (as the author clearly thinks it can).

It does seem a remarkable coincidence that the natural order of things so neatly reflects the author's place at the top of the pyramid though, almost as if the rules had been written by people just like the author.

Since when is dialectics grounds for ostracism?

I doubt the author has faced ostracism, he certainly seems confident enough in expressing his disdain for a large number of the people he works with, without apparent fear of consequences. Since dialectics is usually taken as a search for truth, here are some things that the author believes which are not true:

Women are not more neurotic than men

Women are not less scientific than men

Women are not more interested in feelings and aesthetics than ideas (a curious dichotomy)

Women do not innately prefer jobs in social or artistic areas over say engineering

remarkEon12• 9 years ago

Sorry, but there's a whole host of psychological research that has long established behavioral differences between male and female. I find this new rejection on the Left of what are simply basic observations of biologically formed behaviors to be extremely bizarre. I'm really struggling to understand it because to me it seems like the same kind of science rejection we'd see on the Right if we were talking about climate change.

renaudg12• 9 years ago

I doubt the author has faced ostracism

Here's one of his colleagues threatening to quit "if HR does nothing in this case" : https://twitter.com/rakyll/status/893287112732291072

here are some things that the author believes which are not true

You've left out "on average" (which is stated no less than 7 times in the document). It does seem to be all supported by research : https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...

MichaelGG2• 9 years ago

Women are slower and weaker then men, demanding separate sports rankings to be able to compete. Seems almost dualistic to think their minds would be 100% identical.

jack92• 9 years ago

I think you have a penchant for turning probabilistic norms (women do score higher than men for neuroticism, on average from puberty onward, for example) into straw men.

Women are not more neurotic than men

That's not the same thing, so no.

From what I've seen it's exactly the opposite;

Finland is a case study in cultural gender equalization leading to gender gaps becoming more pronounced over time. You might want to look up Jordan Peterson, who is rather high profile, in regards to this topic. I think it's obvious that this document was formed after seeing a bit of his youtube material.

mcguire6• 9 years ago

"Grounded in reality?"

Could we get some sources for these claims?

In particular, I'd like to see values and standard deviations for "On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways."

renaudg12• 9 years ago

Here you go : https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

Well, the author's personal feelings of being shut out of conversations around diversity (and the resulting irony) stand on their own unless we think the author is lying or deluded about that somehow.

windsignaling• 9 years ago

Are the biological differences between men and women not rather straightforward?

onli3• 9 years ago

Do you really need scientific sources to notice the biological differences between two different sexes of a species?

curyous• 9 years ago

Seriously? If you think that men and women don't differ by more than their genitals, then you have to ignore all modern science.

DuskStar4• 9 years ago

Here's a wikipedia article titled "Sex differences in psychology" [1] that might have some of what you're looking for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology

bhouston5• 9 years ago

One issue is that acknowledging potential differences between the sexes can setup prejudice that acts to fulfill those prejudices. This can lead to widening gender gaps possibly more that any real gap in performance.

So many do not blindly advocate equality because they believe it completely but do so to avoid the overly negative and reinforcing effects of prejudice.

Think of this as a form of "Noble lie"

throwanem7• 9 years ago

You mean it's a falsehood cynically advanced by a power elite to maintain a social order which would otherwise be uprooted, and those responsible torn toe from nail, by the vast majority upon whom it inflicts grave injustice toward some greater goal whose tangible benefits somehow never make it as far as them?

rayiner7• 9 years ago

The argument basically proceeds as follows:

1) Gender differences exist

2) ???

3) Differences in representation are explainable by gender differences

The problem with the "???" step is that it's unrigorous handwaving. "Women prefer working with people." Okay, so that's why the majority of accountants are women? That's why STEM fields that don't involve people at all (math, biology) actually have quite a lot of women, while programming doesn't have much women despite being on the social/people-oriented end of the spectrum?

It's not that people are angry about the article's conclusions despite acknowledging the strength of the logical/factual basis. It's that people won't give sloppy reasoning the benefit of the doubt when they don't like the conclusion.

smsm4213• 9 years ago

The problem with the "???" step is that it's unrigorous handwaving.

Probably because nobody actually knows right now what actually causes the differences and how. The case that is caused exclusively by entrenched sexism - somehow driven by people graduating from the same institutions who have been fighting sexism for decades now, and by the same people who repudiate and denounce sexism on every corner - also does not sound very convincing. Sexists, of course, do exist, so does sexism, but presenting it as sole driver and concluding any deviation from 50% or whatever the population demographics would be is the ironclad indicator for sexism is as "unrigorous handwaving" as the opposite extreme.

home_boi3• 9 years ago

The competition isn't much better. There are hundreds of these massive leaps of logic used to justify the use of race and gender in hiring. Basically every reason for why the demographics of tech is the way it is this oversight.

At the core of diversity hiring (which corporations have spent billions of dollars on), the benefits of racial and gender diversity in a workforce have never been proven.

JSONwebtoken• 9 years ago

Assuming 1) is a true premise and 2) ??? is some black box function, it's hard to reason in any way that 3) is not true to some extent. When you change the input, you would expect the output to change unless you can somehow argue that ??? is f(x) = C. You can say step 2) is egregious handwaving, but as long as you cannot prove f(x) is a constant, 3) is true.

haberman10• 9 years ago

I agree that "???" is unrigorous handwaving. And I don't think it purports to be rigorous; from the document: "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership." (emphasis mine). "May" and "in part." I don't think this purports to be a proof.

Is this argument any more rigorous?

1. There is a non-50% representation between men and women in tech.

2. Unjust discrimination and societal pressures are the only possible explanation for this imbalance. Therefore we must intervene until it is 50%.

There is no doubt that unjust discrimination and societal pressures exist, and that we should fight these so that anyone with talent and interest can succeed in this field.

However, if 100% of these pressures were removed, would we have exactly 50% representation of men and women in tech? Many people appear to believe very strongly that this is true. What is the basis for this belief? Are we willing to entertain the possibility that, even without these pressures, we would have less than 50% representation of women in tech?

j9461701• 9 years ago

The problem with the "???" step is that it's unrigorous handwaving.

The problem with the "???" is it's not in its proper place in the chain of logic. The syllogism instead goes:

1) Do we observe certain traits cause individuals to tend toward science, while others cause them to trend toward the humanities?

Yes. Whether or not you will enter the humanities or the sciences is correlated with whether you display a higher empathizing quotient ("preferring to work with people") vs. systematizing quotient ("preferring to work with things/numbers"), regardless of your gender.

2) Do we observe these traits vary by gender?

Also yes. Men generally have higher systematizing quotients, while women have higher empathizing quotients.

[source for both points: http://www.somersetcanyons.com/ourpages/auto/2016/3/11/48638...]

3) Therefore, some amount of difference in representation logically comes from differences in these gendered traits - whatever might have caused them to become gendered in the first place.

Okay, so that's why the majority of accountants are women? That's why STEM fields that don't involve people at all (math, biology) actually have quite a lot of women, while programming doesn't have much women despite being on the social/people-oriented end of the spectrum?

Women represent over 60% of all undergrad university students, so we should expect fields that require an undergrad university degree to be a majority women barring other factors. Yet math, physics, chemistry, earth science, statistics, engineering - every one of them has fewer women than it should proportionately. Even biology, which for a brief time had a higher proportion of women than 60%, recently dipped back below that point. [graph: https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/upload/Deg...]

Conversely, here is a list of majors that have consistently had above 80% female proportions:

Fashion Design, Interior Design, Education, Social Work, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Art History

The specifics of why one given STEM major is more under-represented than another is an interesting question, but it shouldn't obscure the overarching trend - whether by a little or a lot, all the STEM majors have fewer women than they should. The data does indeed support the idea women prefer people-oriented professions over thing oriented professions on average.

tbrownaw2• 9 years ago

The argument basically proceeds as follows:

1) Gender differences exist

2) ???

3) Differences in representation are explainable by gender differences

Really? I read it as

1) Gender differences exist

2) Differences in representation may be at least partly due to gender differences.

3) Differences in representation should not be taken as automatic proof of bias.

rmc5• 9 years ago

"Women prefer working with people."

IMO the biggest counter-example of the "women are better at working with people / soft skill" theory is politics.

Politics is all about who you know, who has your back, how you can get people to do what you want (the voters, other party members), how you can get people to like you, can you predict when someone's going to stab you in the back? can you predict when to stab someone else in the back? Should you support person X? What will person/group X think if you support person Y/policy Y? It's all about soft skills, it's all about reading people, it's all about working people.

You don't need maths or logic, or numbers,or rationality, or science for politics. I'm sure we all know how bad many polticians are at science/STEM.

If these theory were true, you'd expect women dominate politics in the same way men dominate tech. But that's not what you see at all. Advocates for the "women are better at soft skills, and worse at numbers" need to explain this glaring counter-example. The other theory, of institutionalised sexism against women, fits observable reality better.

fjfish• 9 years ago

When I graduated in 1986 a third of my class were women. Something has driven them away from programming.

spaceseaman3• 9 years ago

and no doubt a cartharsis for many Right-leaning Googlers

And this is where I kind of break down on the whole argument. I've already made similar comments below, but I sort of what to expand on this sentiment. I do not think that the views of the author of this piece were political in any way shape or form. They are purely idealogical, and the ideology that he professes has no basis in reality. This is what we may criticize.

I will employ an extremely gross simile to illustrate my point. Suppose that some item exists in the world called a "whizzer". A whizzer spins extraordinarily fast. So fast in fact, that we can't even tell which direction it's spinning for sure. We can use rough guesses to determine the spinning, and support it with some evidence from the environment. If I claim that the whizzer spins left, and you claim that the whizzer spins right we have reached a state of deadlock. Would you call our disagreement in this case one of politics? Suppose I had some information that hinted the spinner spins left. (Analogous to evidence that women are actively stopped from entering technical fields due to sociological rather than natural factors, which exists in multitudes.) There is still no evidence that the whizzer spins right. Arguments that the situation of the United States' gender divisions are natural rather than sociological can easily be dismissed by looking at clear evidence. Women are not as discouraged from entering fields like biology, or medicine. These are just as technical and difficult as other STEM fields. This implies that the factors that affect this are sociological rather than "natural". This evidence is not indisputable and it does not tell the whole picture, but it points in a general direction.

If we return to the whizzers, let's suppose my evidence is very similar. It's not all-knowing, or all-answering but it provides a general direction. There's nothing "political" about this. The "other side" is simply not providing an actual basis of evidence. Your argument does not hold up to any burdens of truth. It's as if the person with no evidence that the whizzers spin right is furious that I should try and make decisions that assume the spinner spins left. That's what all the evidence points towards!

The argument that the email's sender makes is inherently flawed. There exist issues with the conclusions that they make because their reasoning is flawed. I am not demonizing a political opinion, or attempting to police your ability to think or express your opinion. The email fails to convince anyone because it lacks an accurate argument.

I am not trying to demonize you. I don't think this has anything to do with Right / Left. Look at the facts. Look at the data. Listen to women from the industry who time and time again have stories of all the crap they've had to wade through. When all this overwhelming evidence claims something and the only thing the other side can produce are appeals to cognitive bias and naturalism, arguing that this is "just how the world works" it makes no sense because there is no sense in the argument.

If this were "how the world naturally works", how could we have possibly normalized so quickly? Women were only allowed to vote very recently in this country, black americans were only recently systematically segregated. There are people currently alive who have seen both of these greatly disruptive forces in direct action. What argument can possibly claim that those forces have completely dissipated in the United States? What about the United States allows such forces to be dissipated so quickly? Why are these issues more prevalent in places like Silicon Valley than other countries when the United States was one of the latest to adopt the different policies?

The argument simply does hold up to intellectual rigor. It fails to answer those questions in a consistent and convincing matter. If you believe that those questions are flawed, then why is that? Again, there exists no refutation except one born from cognitive bias and a flawed world-view. That's why people are opposed to it. It just doesn't make any sense. The conclusion is not a logical continuation of the premise, and that is why people are upset. I don't know or care where you lie on the political spectrum - all I see is a flawed argument.

Specifically you say "reflective of inherent psychological differences". What inherent psychological differences? Do you truly claim that you can generally predict the way your daughter will think differently than your son from the moment they are born? Do you think that these are in way accurate or determinate of your son or daughters future interests and achievements? Do you actually believe that they will have a "fair shake" regardless of whether they are male / female / white / black? That their life will be entirely based on the way they live it, and not on the way the world looks at them? Do you further believe that we shouldn't try and correct such distinctions?

If you actually want to engage in argument, then attempt to address these issues. Instead all I see is a further appeal to bias by just grouping this as a "right-leaning" opinion. What makes this right-leaning? All this does is further divide idealogical issues as if they have to be "one side vs another". It's nonsensical and all it does is further group or divide people rather than address the objective quality of the argument.

EDIT: May I ask why I'm being down-voted? It seems that no one is even willing to acknowledge these questions, let alone address them. I'm attempting to engage with people at a fair and even level. I don't intend to lecture or degrade, but simply discuss. A resistance to this is concerning.

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

I didn't downvote, but if you want a "peer review":

* This is a longer post, which should be fine, but there is little organization to the different thoughts in it; this makes it harder to digest. Maybe do a bit of signposting or provide headings for your subsections.

* Since it's longer, your post would probably be better served as a top-level comment. Or a full-on blogged response submitted to HN as an article.

* Since it's longer, it's probably getting less attention; a few detractors are enough if everyone else is disinterested.

* You ask more questions than can probably be answered coherently in the HN format. It's possible that some are rhetorical, but it's not clear which.

* Some of your thoughts are strong, some are fine, some aren't all that strong at all. It's not worth breaking them all down. But, for example, you ask what inherent psychological differences exist. It's fairly easy (compared to debugging a core dump) to search around a little bit and get a cursory understanding of that position. Some people might consider that enough to downvote and move on. Given the length of your post, you might just leave that sort of thing out in the future.

* You seem to reject that gender issues don't include a right/left schism. I think that's an interesting position, but the burden would be on you to support it.

My reply is already longer than it should be, but I hope some of that is helpful. If not, it was meant well at least.

jee_accnt7• 9 years ago

"Women are not as discouraged from entering fields like biology, or medicine. These are just as technical and difficult as other STEM fields"

It is not about being difficult. Biology and medicine require a vastly different kind of intelligence than Physics and Math (and computer science). Also, doctors work with people, while engineers work with machines. And the author argues that women, on average, prefer working with people. This can pretty simply be explained by the difference in estrogen and testosterone.

So no, it's not fair to say that there is no evidence that the whizzer spins right. And the author never denied that there are cultural factors. He is saying that there are biological factors too, which should not be ignored.

aagha• 9 years ago

Would you feel the same way if the author--instead of focusing on sex differences instead chose to focus on eugenics? What if s/he argued that the reason blacks/African-Americans were under-represented in tech/at Google was because of eugenics?

zimpenfish5• 9 years ago

It would honestly not surprise me that it would be A-OK here. We've already had someone defending Charles Murray.

Quarrelsome7• 9 years ago

Microaggression training

wat? They now train people in microaggressions at work? Is the "training" mandatory?

havetocharge• 9 years ago

It's not mandatory.

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

It sounded like it was a mandatory part of managerial training.

DonbunEf7• 9 years ago

It's not mandatory. However, when I was at Google several years ago, it showed up on my calendar, it was not optional, my manager said that I was expected to attend, and I attended. But it's not mandatory.

renaudg12• 9 years ago

So is it ""not mandatory"" then ?

lotsoflumens3• 9 years ago

Of course it's mandatory ... unless you don't care about silly little things like bonuses and promotions.

asploder• 9 years ago

It’s interesting that the author considers the conceptual framework of microaggressions spurious, while describing his negative experiences as a conservative Googler in terms of what a feminist might describe as microaggressions. To further undermine his own point, he asserts that several harms against conservatives have been caused by these microaggressions.

The difference between effective negative feedback and harassment/microaggressions is the former encapsulates a desire for the person receiving the feedback to succeed. Or, in the feminist lexicon, empathy.

santoshalper• 9 years ago

I noticed that as well. I find it interesting that the alt-right has started to embrace so much of modern feminist/liberal terminology and tacitly accepted so many of the premises.

The modern alt-right conservative: "I don't believe in safe spaces, but please stop bullying me!"

twh2702• 9 years ago

This is incredibly disingenuous. Much of the left considers simple disagreement to be micro-aggression, while at the same time finding it perfectly acceptable to launch hate-filled screeds of animosity and hatred at anyone who doesn't toe the line, e.g. "You're a fucking animal that deserves to be put down!!"

Your comment implicitly supports this sort of misbehavior, implying that any complaint by an "alt-righter" is just whining and carries no legitimacy.

Both the far left and alt-right have adopted extremist positions and in general have nothing good to say about each other. Please don't legitimize hateful, unacceptable behavior from the left just because the alt-right has learned to play some of the same games.

throwanem7• 9 years ago

What surprises you about this? Historically speaking, it seems high time for a synthesis to arise.

I'm not sure what you find incompatible in "I don't believe in safe spaces" and "please stop bullying me". Hiding from bullies is a tacit concession. Confronting them is not. You might confront a bully and lose, but you might confront a bully and win, too.

Many at least - I think most if not all - who embraced the "alt-right" label, before its cynical and unjust equation by their enemies with Nazism, perceive themselves to be and have been bullied by those with whom they have the intolerable temerity to disagree. But those safe spaces which they have attempted to establish have not been permitted the conventional inviolability, but rather been gleefully invaded and their inhabitants shamed and castigated without scruple. Why "believe in safe spaces" when you are not permitted to have them, but rather encouraged with great firmness to accept that only once you have surrendered your dissent, and publicly abased yourself in hope of expiation for the sins you now forswear, will there be even a chance you may be allowed to feel safe?

As in every case where bullies run rampant and are unchecked by any impartial force majeure, the only passive defense has been invisibility, and it is very hard to remain unseen indefinitely. Your enemies only have to be good, or lucky, for a moment. You have to be good, and lucky, all the time. When you inevitably slip, or when your good fortune inevitably runs out, you are at their mercy. The social, educational, vocational, and even legal consequences can be severe - and, worse, it is not in your power whether they will be or won't be. But, like any bully, they're probably going to work you over that much harder for making them go to the effort of catching you, instead of politely submitting yourself for violation like a good little victim.

And as with any bully, there's no merit in what they do to you. No doubt every bully imagines himself enforcing some sort of right ordering upon society, in whatever sphere his power enables him to encompass. But this is a lie. The bully does what he does to his victim because his victim cannot or will not be what the bully demands he be. But even this is a lie. In truth the bully does what he does because he can, and because it's easy, and because it brings him pleasure.

Some grow out of this over time. Not all do. And power is seductive. It can easily betray you into doing things to others which you would never suffer upon yourself. It can give you any number of reasons for the former to seem virtuous even though the latter is iniquitous. The danger comes in the difficulty of differentiating this betrayal from reality. There are times when it truly is virtuous to, for example, break someone's nose, and times when it truly is iniquitous. Standing up to a bully, for example, bears virtue. Imagining one stands up to a bully, while in fact behaving as a bully oneself, does not. It is vitally important for everyone, but especially everyone with the power to crowdsource the sort of vengeful mob that can so easily destroy someone's social and professional and educational life, to bear this distinction sharply in mind. To fail in so doing risks erring into shameful, unjust, indeed frankly abusive behavior. And I suspect there are few on any side of any political divide who would be willing to argue that abusive behavior merits tolerance from those whom it would make its victims.

freshhawk4• 9 years ago

I'm not surprised by it at all, because I think it's not that they have started to embrace the premises but always did and used them as the foundation for their ideology.

It is, to generalize, a group of white, middle class people who were raised in this modern feminist/neo-liberal framework that struggled to translate very academic ideas into a pop culture suitable form. Those poor approximations got mutated by internet forum culture (tumblr and 4chan most famously, but it happened everywhere).

The alt-right people looked at this incoherent pop-ideology and, not totally unfairly, saw it as saying that race and culture are the same and are very real, unless you are white. Sex and gender are the same, are real for men but a constructed form of oppression for women. It's not a fair description of the actual ideas, but the pop-ideology was and is an incoherent mess. So a group of mostly middle class, mostly white and mostly men rejected the parts they didn't like and used the incoherent aspects that benefited them as weapons. The parts they did like remain unexamined, so while they ridicule the language used by their "enemies" they still think inside that ideology.

smsm4213• 9 years ago

There's a difference between asking not to be fired because somebody overheard and misunderstood your conversation as being "microagression" and asking mentioning anything that might upset you to be proscribed. In fact, the persons doing the latter are very likely to be the perpetrators, and not the victims, in the former. So it's completely logical - what they are saying is "we do not believe in declaring everything that we disagree with is violence and should be purged from existence, and we do not want to be purged from existence because we think so". I think there's nothing wrong in such opinion.

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

I find it interesting that the alt-right has started to embrace so much of modern feminist/liberal terminology and tacitly accepted so many of the premises.

The alt-right, to some degree, is a movement that has accepted the framework of progressive identity politics and has decided that they better start fighting for themselves, too. The complaint about safe spaces is an argument about equality and power ("If I don't get safe spaces, nobody does!") than an argument from principle.

I find the whole thing distasteful, but I can understand why if someone finds identity politics a foregone conclusion why they would start fighting on the battle lines they think were drawn for them.

So I'm not sure how to get out of this mess, but I think a first step is trying to understand people, even if they're wrong.

LyndsySimon2• 9 years ago

Many on the right now use that terminology to implicitly underscore contradictions in those belief systems.

I think it would be a mistake to believe that they subscribe to those viewpoints. Rather, a core characteristic of conservativism is a desire for rules to be followed and equally enforced. Pointing out places where the left is inconsistent is their way of discrediting those views.

amiga-workbench3• 9 years ago

I don't see what's micro about losing your job for wrongthink.

skywhopper• 9 years ago

Who has lost their job for wrongthink?

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

...or being officially stereotyped (privileged, overrepresented). Or being explicitly excluded (mentioned several times in the article).

rifung8• 9 years ago

I don't see what's micro about losing your job for wrongthink.

I admit this is my first time hearing the term "wrongthink" but I assume this means something along the lines of "thinking the wrong thing".

If that's true, then nobody loses their job for wrongthink. What they lose it for is actually acting on it, which i guess you could call wrongdoing.

Take for example, sexual harassment. It's okay to find your coworker sexually attractive, and also okay to think about them in a sexual manner, but to openly say something without regard for whether it would make them uncomfortable is not okay.

rhizome7• 9 years ago

Do you believe in the term, "culture fit?" How Google responds to this describes theirs. If you say that "it's different," or, "it depends on the department," then that's just a difference of degree, not of kind.

Moshe_Silnorin• 9 years ago

Summers was put in a struggle session and fired for pointing out an obvious hypothesis that has psychometric backing.

Your ideology is ascendant. Congrats. But please don't tell me destroying someone's earning capacity is a micro aggression.

And know, this can't last. This strange moral fad will pass: our modern Lysenkoism is about to be killed by cognitive genomics.

The lies require constant maintenance while the truth drips in from every pore.

malandrew• 9 years ago

Thank you for introducing me to the term Lysenkoism.

smsm4213• 9 years ago

I think there's a bit of a difference in conservatives complaining about their ideas not being honestly considered and being excluded because of (perceived) groupthink, and claims like saying "America is the land of opportunity" or wearing a sombrero or making a burrito while being white as "aggression", micro or not. If the question were about some people, out of sexist or other considerations, would exclude feminists from being considered the part of intellectual discourse, that complaint would not get much pushback. Most reasonable people would agree that feminists should have equal chance to present their case, and for it to be considered on merits. What gets significantly more pushback is widespread attempt to use "microagression" framework to police everyday conduct and "micro"-criminalize or shame routine behavior - food choices, activity choices, clothing choices, even how a person sits - it all can be "microagression". Microagressions are[1]: "Where are you from?", "America is a melting pot", "I believe the most qualified person should get the job.", presence of liquor stores in certain neighborhoods, commenting on certain behaviors (note there how telling person of one race about being loud and another about being quiet is aggression, but the reverse is not, because obviously everything depends on the race!) posting a funny picture about Obama[2], or "Statements that indicate that a White person does not want to or need to acknowledge race" and "statement made when bias is denied"[3]. I think there's a bit of a difference here between the complaints.

[1] http://sph.umn.edu/site/docs/hewg/microaggressions.pdf [2] http://time.com/32618/microaggression-is-the-new-racism-on-c... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Hasknewbie2• 9 years ago

I think the author is implicitly referring to more than simply unpleasant interactions at work.

As someone who is neither American nor conservative, I have to give it to them that there is a level of virulence from some on the left that is far beyond mere microagression, but is not acknowledged as such: there are continuous attempts to ban some speeches on campuses. If a ban fails it is picketed (which is OK), sometimes violently (which is not): speakers may receive death threats, and so can attendees. At first nobody cared because it was happening to far right hate-clowns (not that this would be a good reason to ignore this in thebfirst place), but this has drifted toward anything non-left, and now is even happening to people who do not toe the line, however liberal they may be (cf. the edifying story of Bret Weinstein).

Are there conservatives whining at things that are in fact tiny microagressions, and the hypocrisy is funny? Absolutely. But there is also a legitimately more dangerous phenomenon that is slowly growing, and the worrying part is that it is not being acknowledged by the 'moderate' left. The fact that political crusaders on their side routinely attempt to ban free speech, or send death threats, should be very much a concern to progressives. Instead it is oddly glossed over, and/or lumped in with microagressions or counter-demonstrations.

During Obama's first term people on the left could not understand how the American right could tolerate the crazies from the Tea Party and were looking the other way whenever their insane ideas were uttered. But today we are seeing the very same behaviour on the left when these psychotic episodes pop up. That is not normal. Regressive and authoritarian tendencies should be acknowledged and denounced, regardless of what side of the political spectrum they come from.

Pulcinella6• 9 years ago

So what you are saying is that there should be safe spaces for conservatives to express themselves? That conservatives should be welcomed for their diversity? That conservstives should be given a participation trophy and honored for their special snowflake ideas?

hudibras• 9 years ago

Wow, I didn't know I could cringe that much in such a short time.

davesque4• 9 years ago

The only thing cringe worthy IMO was that he didn't appear to cite any studies or data to back up his claims. Or did that publication of the document omit things like that? If he had done so, would it still be cringe worthy?

ggreer5• 9 years ago

From Gizmodo's summary:

Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.

I'm guessing the author did link to studies (or at least summaries of studies), but these were removed by Gizmodo or the leaker.

rayiner7• 9 years ago

The intellectual contortion required to get from the premise to the conclusion is actually quite impressive.

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:
They’re universal across human cultures

Except the gender ratio in science/engineering is anything but universal across cultures. 70% of science/engineering students in Iran are women: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to-ta.... Indeed, in many parts of the world that are not known for being "liberal" with regard to gender equality, women make up a significantly higher percentage of the scientific workforce than in the U.S.: http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-science-technology-e... (44% in Latin America, 40% in Eastern Europe, 37% in the Arab states).

In the Soviet Union, a majority of engineers were women; after the fall that proportion went way down (from 60% to 40%): http://www.asee.org/public/conferences/20/papers/6985/downlo....

Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).

If this were true, shouldn't women's interest in CS be going up now that the web is all about feelings/aesthetics/social? Programming, in my view, is actually in the middle in the "people versus things" spectrum. It's much more about people than, say, math. And of course, 45% of math majors are women, so I'm not sure how that fits into the author's theory.

Women on average are more cooperative

Maybe, but does the degree of that effect explain the observed differences in representation? Tech is actually very cooperative. Compare, for example, litigation, which is all about confrontation and acrimony. But a third (and growing) of all litigators are women!

ChuckMcM• 9 years ago

Agreed, it is a common trap of people who are 'smart' to assume their own reasoning is valid even without external confirmation. I appreciated that they included sources for their reasoning but I expect that if that was posted to the politics list inside Google it was probably sliced and diced several times. It apparently generated quite a bit of conversation there and my guess is a couple of 'centithreads' at least. It would be interesting to see the full discussion.

There were two very interesting discussions with similar sorts of intellectual gymnastics when I was there, one involved whether or not getting rid of bottled water helped the environment and the other how the phrase 'free tibet' was such a trigger for Chinese nationals.

rhizome7• 9 years ago

Agreed, it is a common trap of people who are 'smart' to assume their own reasoning is valid even without external confirmation

Increasingly identified as "Engineer's Disease."

eintagsfiege2• 9 years ago

What do you know about women in CS in Iran? How many of them end up working in CS? I wouldn't jump to conclusions just because you find such outliers. Some weird mechanisms might be driving such numbers (like people not being given a choice what to study, people being forced to study something useful because they can't afford to study literature or gender studies for fun, women studying just to meet men to marry, men having mostly died in a recent war, and so on...).

Edit: I am not allowed to comment anymore, so this Eintagsfliege (mayfly) will die now. Bye.

smb062• 9 years ago

I wouldn't jump to conclusions just because you find such outliers. Some weird mechanisms might be driving such numbers

spaceseaman3• 9 years ago

- you mean political and sociological forces that unnaturally perturb so called "natural trends"? If you claim Iran could potentially have such factors that encourage women to enter the field in "above-average" numbers, what allows you to wholesale eliminate similar factors when examining the situation within the borders of the United States that could cause women to enter the field in "below-average" numbers? What allows you to directly assume that one viewpoint is inherently more palatable besides your biased worldview?

Furthermore, your comment essentially only exists for you to cast doubt on the opposing viewpoint while bringing up common reactionary points of view that also have no evidence. You have no evidence that women in the United States "study literature or gender studies for fun" [1] or that "women just study something to meet men to marry". Not only are these ideas incredibly flawed, but you appear to have brought them up for no other reason that to further cast suspicion on the parent poster without actually addressing any of their claims. You just threw out ideas that people are likely to get up in a huff about.

[1] While I majored in CS in college, I also pursued a minor in critical theory. The people in that classroom were not taking those courses "for fun" any more than programmers took to their classes. They felt it was incredibly important to be able to dissect the immense amount of media we have in the world today and what it means. What are video games trying to say? Or modern films? What ideas do these share with bedrock pieces of literature that we've studied in critical theory again and again? Is it really so bad to enjoy that? Furthermore, gender studies is filled with people itching to try and discuss (and come to good conclusions about) THE VERY THINGS WE ARE ARGUING ABOUT RIGHT NOW. Isn't the fact that we spend so much time discussing such things nowadays evidence that it is a very real and important thing to study and discuss?

oddlyaromatic2• 9 years ago

You make many assumptions here, on many different levels. Regarding parent's comment:

1. Iran was but one example of the uneven rates of participation in science. Of course there may be many interesting reasons for this. There are many reasons for most things.

2. Parent didn't actually jump to many conclusions as far as I can tell. You may be projecting. What conclusion did they make based on the 70%?

Finally, your list of factors that might influence the % of women studying science in Iran is weirdly general. Are those factors more prevalent in Iran than other places? Literature and gender studies are not alternatives to "useful" fields of study, they are useful. Culture matters. It's not just fun, it's hard and filled with contradictions and challenges. But you are right that it's not lucrative, and becoming less so. Maybe studying the arts is not so big in Iran as other countries and the sciences are more of a default choice?

Now maybe I'm the one projecting, but it feels like you want parent commenter to discount the 70% on the basis of some weak hypothetical guesswork about possible reasons to do so. This is how cognitive bias works. Answering the 70% question is interesting, and we should see what we can learn about it, and how that compares to our instincts.

LogicalBorg• 9 years ago

70% of science/engineering students in Iran are women:

The Forbes site you reference cites a Quora post, which quotes a Wikipedia article. What the Wikipedia article actually says is that 373,415 out of 1.5 million engineering students in Iran are women, which is 24.9%, not 70%.

This is not that different from the 19-20% of engineering degrees awarded to women in the U.S.

swrobel• 9 years ago

But what does the Wikipedia article cite? It isn't a source itself...

smsm4213• 9 years ago

Right now Wikipedia says:

One in four (26%) Iranian researchers is a woman, which is close to the world average (28%). In 2008, half of researchers were employed in academia (51.5%), one-third in the government sector (33.6%) and just under one in seven in the business sector (15.0%). Within the business sector, 22% of researchers were women in 2013, the same proportion as in Ireland, Israel, Italy and Norway.

Quoting this UNESCO report: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002354/235406e.pdf

Looks like Forbes preferred to quote anonymous response on Quora instead, clearly considering it more authoritative source. After all, this is what distinguishes established press from amateurish projects like Wikipedia - they do thorough research and rigorous fact-checking before publishing something. Don't they?

lazyjones• 9 years ago

Indeed, in many parts of the world that are not known for being "liberal" with regard to gender equality, women make up a significantly higher percentage of the scientific workforce than in the U.S

Because, unsurprisingly, they're also not very liberal with regard to women choosing their field of studies. Frequently, their parents decide for them.

_xhok4• 9 years ago

This is an interesting point. A harsher way to phrase this is, judging by empirical evidence thus far, it takes controlling, illiberal attitudes in order to hold the gap closed.

xyzzyz4• 9 years ago

Frequently, their parents decide for them.

As someone coming from Eastern Europe, that is sometimes the case, but it's not the biggest factor, which I believe is that life's harder there, and smart women chose whatever is going to give better income and job security. When women are free to chose whatever, because they believe their life will be fine regardless of whether they get that higher paying job in IT or that fun degree in Literature, they chose according to their real preference.

pacala2• 9 years ago

Graduation rates in CS have declined in US, from 37% in the 80's to 18% in recent years. http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor....

18% percentage of graduates correlates quite well with the percentage of women in tech roles at large American-based corporations. Especially if we take in account the explosive growth of the field, which makes the numbers dominated by recent grads.

Google, 20%, https://www.google.com/diversity

Microsoft, 17.5%, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/d...

Apple, 23%, https://www.apple.com/diversity

Amazon, ???, https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=tb_surl_diversity/?node=1008009..., no "tech-role" category.

Facebook, 19%, https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/fb_diversit...

A whole different discussion could be had around ratios within the foreign-born slice of the workforce, which further skew the numbers one way or another. Alas, I could not find the data.

SudoNhim• 9 years ago

Except the gender ratio in science/engineering is anything but universal across cultures. 70% of science/engineering students in Iran are women: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to-ta.... Indeed, in many parts of the world that are not known for being "liberal" with regard to gender equality, women make up a significantly higher percentage of the scientific workforce than in the U.S.: http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-science-technology-e.... (44% in Latin America, 40% in Eastern Europe, 37% in the Arab states).

Later in the document he goes on to point out that gender disparities are greater in more liberal countries (e.g. great disparity in US than Iran, greater disparity in Finland than in the US). Interpreting this as our culture being somehow more oppressive (and then Finland's even more so) requires an "impressive level of intellectual contortion" - if anything it seems to be evidence that there are differences in preferences, and therefore greater freedom -> greater divergence.

koffiezet2• 9 years ago

Thing is, even within STEM area's, there are huge differences in m/f ratios. Computer science and engineering? Here in Belgium that sits at 10% female. Maths and other sciences make up for that when you only look at the big "STEM" picture.

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

The intellectual contortion required to get from the premise to the conclusion is actually quite impressive.

I read the whole thing differently than you did. What is the conclusion you are objecting to?

jorgemf4• 9 years ago

> Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing). If this were true, shouldn't women's interest in CS be going up now that the web is all about feelings/aesthetics/social?

Because they prefer to become nurses than CS working in front end.

I think you should think beyond CS and think about careers. There are things more cooperative and empathic than CS.

smsm4213• 9 years ago

70% of science/engineering students in Iran are women

I know very little about gender issues in Iran, admittedly, but I would be very very careful making any social/cultural conclusions driven on a material from totalitarian and semi-totalitarian regimes where decisions of members of society are not free. I mean, how do we now that 70% figure is a result of a cultural choice and not some governmental program driven by whatever ideas the ruling caste has? You can not say it is about culture if it could be just a direct or indirect result of some or other edict from Powers That Be.

Update: also looks like 70% figure is a complete baloney, not based on anything but anonymous Quora postings. Wikipedia has different data (see my comment above) on par with data in other countries. If somebody has any respectable source for the 70% figure please quote it.

tzs• 9 years ago

> Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).
If this were true, shouldn't women's interest in CS be going up now that the web is all about feelings/aesthetics/social?

It's the managers and marketing people that decide to make a website feeling/aesthetics/social oriented, and the graphics designers and artists and content writers that figure out what needs to be done to do that. From a CS point of view, a feelings/aesthetics/social website and a cold/ugly/inhuman website are pretty much the same--it's just a different set of assets they are given to display.

Programming, in my view, is actually in the middle in the "people versus things" spectrum. It's much more about people than, say, math. And of course, 45% of math majors are women, so I'm not sure how that fits into the author's theory.

We like to pretend that CS and math are similar, or even that the former is part of the later, and perhaps that is even true when by "CS" we mean what, for example, Donald Knuth does. But for most of us working in industry, even if our degree says CS, we are really more technicians than scientists. I would expect the influences and abilities that might make one choose math and the influences and abilities that might make one chose CS at most schools to be fairly different. (At schools where the CS program is highly theoretical and rigorous, I'd expect more overlap).

Has there been any research on the kinds of math that male mathematicians and female mathematicians tend toward? There's quite a bit of research showing women are better at verbal tasks and men better it spatial visualization tasks. I wonder if that translates into men tending more toward geometric kinds of math and women toward symbol manipulation kinds of math? (I'm using both "geometric" and "symbol manipulation" very loosely).

(Math preferences are kind of weird anyway. There is a fairly strong documented correlation between whether a mathematician is an algebraist or an analyst, and whether that mathematician eats corn on the cob in rows or a spiral. WTF?)

BTW, I'm still not convinced that people are asking the right question when they ask why aren't there more women in programming. I think the right question might better be why are there so many men in programming? Looking at the Wikipedia article on "Sex differences in cognition" [1], and the one on "Sex differences in emotional intelligence" [2], and just concentrating on the ones where they cite reasonably solid looking peer reviewed research, it looks to me like women actually come out ahead overall. What I mean by that is that the things women are better at seem to be things that will be more widely useful. E.g., good verbal ability helps with far more jobs than good spatial visualization.

I'd expect that in an ideal world that is free of discrimination, where people are limited in careers only by what they are interested in and their abilities compared to others competing for the same jobs, women would have more viable choices than men.

I suspect that programmers can be broken down into two groups:

1. People who are reasonably well rounded and have a variety of serious interests. They are into programming as a means to an end. It is a tool that can be used to help with their other interests. They might enjoy programming, and strive to be excellent at it, but it is not the main focus.

2. People who are interested in programming itself as their main interest. What their programs actually do is not all that important--it is the challenge and complexity and cleverness of the code itself that matters.

My guess is that the first group is going to have a much closer to balanced male/female ratio. The second group, for reasons similar to why males are much more prone to autism, is going to be overwhelmingly male. I also guess that this second group is fairly large, and this accounts for a non-trival amount of the male/female imbalance in programming as a whole.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_emotional_i...

Invictus0• 9 years ago

It is one thing to debated the veracity of a view, it is another to declare that that view should not be debated. For every point there is a counterpoint; every argument a counterargument. Arguing that the reasoning is flawed is not sufficient to ban it from discussion.

scribu3• 9 years ago

So, would you also agree that the existence of climate change should still be up for debate, even though there is overwhelming scientific evidence in one direction?

NB: I do not know what the scientific consensus is on cognitive differences between men and women.

davesque4• 9 years ago

That's a straw man reply. You cherry picked one of the most easily defensible claims and then implied that the OP would disagree. What gives you the right to implicate them in this way? Or did I miss another post in this thread where the OP did, in fact, express skepticism of climate change?

TimTheTinker8• 9 years ago

"Scientific consensus" is a term I dislike, as it seems more opinion-based and authoritarian, and less evidence-based.

brians2• 9 years ago

Yes, because I want a place to read articles about measuring its nature, shape, and effects. I want to be able to talk about countermeasures, so I have to be able to advocate theories of detailed causes---and I need to hear the best possible arguments about why those are wrong.

I'd love to have similar conversations about how nature and nurture affect outcomes, including how race and sex tendencies are or are not swamped by a lifetime of socialization, but our society has absolutely no way to do so without hurting a lot of people. We have other good work to do, so we can defer those conversations—maybe past my lifetime. Maybe try having them in smaller settings, with a framework of trust and love?

amarkov• 9 years ago

I think that, if a random Google engineer wrote an essay about why climate change isn't real, it would be weird and inappropriate to insist something be done about it.

ebola1717• 9 years ago

If there's one thing decades of arguing on the Internet has taught me, it's that debate is highly overrated.

And if there's anything decades old social science research has taught me, it's the Overton Window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

pscarey• 9 years ago

I believe that most arguing over the internet doesnt qualify as debate, and consider it somewhat of a lost skill. Critical thinking/analysis is not undertaken by most people, particularly on the internet.

Debate is a cornerstone of democracy - to take the climate change example, anyone should be able to question it, and the evidence for it should be what persuades the majority of people, leading to a decision. In these cases, debate is a very effective mechanism. Unfortunately, people don't tend to engage and debate properly.

A good, reasonably relevant read (5 min) is Isaac Asimov's A Cult Of Ignorance, which I think goes some way to explaining the lack of engagement with debating.

jerrylives2• 9 years ago

internal meme network

i really want to believe that at Google there is a massive distributed cluster dedicated solely to facilitating meme throughput

akhilcacharya• 9 years ago

There most likely is, I know an engineer that works on it.

Apparently they were one of the teams piloting Tensorflow for Android...have no idea why though....

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

Sometimes the best places to swing for the fences, technologically, are places far away from the core business, where the impact of a half-baked idea is minimal.

ericjang• 9 years ago

this is true. Source: I work at Google

jboggan• 9 years ago

Recently left Google and I can confirm, Memegen is real and draws significant resources to operate.

jerrylives2• 9 years ago

So reading the article above it didn't make clear - are these memes generated by AI or is it just an internal meme creation / sharing site?

icco• 9 years ago

http://thefw.com/take-a-peek-inside-googles-internal-meme-ge...

davesque4• 9 years ago

I don't really understand why this is getting so much attention. It's just some guy's opinion.

magicalist• 9 years ago

Yeah, I assume it's the gossip aspect. Tech people love to mock tabloids and celebrity magazines, but they (we) still flock to this kind of "leak" and the takedowns of whoever is the current tech messiah.

As for the document itself, you can read literally the exact same bullshit posted on HN several times a day (and then the same kind of responses that were in the motherboard piece), so I'm not sure what's worth writing home about.

drdeadringer• 9 years ago

It seems that my receiving my SWE Lifetime Member pin about a week ago is a bit fortuitous.

jondubois2• 9 years ago

I agree that giving someone an unfair advantage because of their gender or race is a form of discrimination. Gender and race are just two of many factors that individuals might struggle with when it comes to their career and life.

If you're an introvert, short, fat, nerdy-looking or you have a weak posture; there's no support group to offset your shortcomings and all the insidious ways in which they will sabotage your career! It's no coincidence that CEOs look like and talk like CEOs - We live in a superficial world and we are animals; there is no need to moralise things; it might just come across as hypocrisy.

TheOtherHobbes• 9 years ago

When you have a culture where more than 40 million people live below the poverty line and even wealthy people can be bankrupted by medical conditions, debates about workplace privilege seem like a niche form of special pleading.

The US economy is a monstrous engine powered by discrimination and inequality. Discrimination against (mostly) college educated women who might want to be developers is barely a footnote in the much wider political picture where access to high quality education, business development opportunities, housing, and health care, are so strictly rationed they might as well not exist for a depressingly large percentage of the population.

If discrimination is wrong, then it's wrong for everyone. If it's only wrong when some people are affected by it, then it's still discrimination - and the argument is really about which kinds of discrimination are socially acceptable, which aren't, and to whom.

jondubois2• 9 years ago

Very true, it's completely arbitrary in the grand scheme of things and it doesn't deserve so much limelight. If it's a problem in one company, then the discussion should be kept within the confines of the one company instead of making it everyone's fault and everyone's problem. It's preemptively biasing us to overcompensate in areas that are already very well compensated.

taysic9• 9 years ago

While I agree with you, the article did not mention that any unfair advantage was being given to women yet I've seen so many claim this.

Instead it says "the author argues that women are underrepresented in tech not because they face bias and discrimination in the workplace, but because of inherent psychological differences between men and women. "

So instead it just seems to be arguing that there is no disadvantage in what may appear to be unfair.

It also says "Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety."

That seems super subjective unless the author has some concrete examples. While they may be right, if we policied everything other people said so that any one person would feel comfortable expressing an unpopular opinion... I don't think the author wants to open that can of worms?

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

the article did not mention that any unfair advantage was being given to women yet I've seen so many claim this

It does mention promotion preferences and special groups.

welder• 9 years ago

Don't give unfair advantages based on gender/race, but do prioritize finding individuals of diverse gender/race whom meet your criteria. It will make you more successful in the long run.

mAdamTus2• 9 years ago

He started out well, but about halfway through meandered into bullshit. Bad data, cherry picked data, incorrect incorrect understanding of the science, incorrect conclusions -- he even referenced the Cultural Marxism Conspiracy theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...

By the time we hit "why we're blind" he's gone fully off the rails.

I sympathize with him -- and even agree with several points, but he did himself a huge disservice here.

marknutter3• 9 years ago

Why do you call Cultural Marxism a conspiracy theory? Have you actually read through any of the papers being pumped out by humanities departments in academia? Not only is marxism on full display, it's actively promoted. Hell, it's one of the foundational elements of Critical Theory.

mAdamTus2• 9 years ago

Nutter indeed.

cbeach3• 9 years ago

"Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently."

As an experiment, I'd like to see if HN upvotes or downvotes this statement from the memo.

I'm willing to put my karma score on the line to find out what HNers believe (this will help me decide if HN is a community worth investing further time in).

ryanx435• 9 years ago

The HN community lives in a very large ideological bubble.

The technical articles are good, though.

cbeach3• 9 years ago

It's a pity isn't it? I hoped the HN community would still see the value in "diversity of opinion" - even if said notion was uttered by a "haram" individual.

The leftist, tribal mindset is clearly a powerful and poisonous thing for all sorts of communities. Let me know if you find a better one for discussing new tech.

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

You might be getting downvoted by people who don't like this kind of experiment. Or your use of scare quotes or something. I'm not sure you can draw a lot of conclusions from the score on your post.

But, yes, most of the HN community lives in a bubble. If we're honest, we all do, but people who take pride on their education and intelligence are especially challenged when finding that kind of humility.

cbeach3• 9 years ago

Good points. I have removed the scare quotes (not intended as such)

mcguire6• 9 years ago

"this will help me decide if HN is a community worth investing further time in"

If that is the question, then the answer is "no".

jorgemf4• 9 years ago

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

What are your opinions about this? Do you think biological differences leads to social differences (not only gender but race, height, etc)? Do our "intelligences" [1] differ based on our gender? [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc...

[2] https://www.elsevier.com/connect/can-brain-biology-explain-w...

MichaelGG2• 9 years ago

Some US sports are very non diverse, but it's ok because it's majority non white, and everyone agrees is mostly meritorious - Athletic performance is hard to fake (outside drugs).

Yet even suggesting that minds are subject to the same kinds of differences is considered heresy. It's almost dualistic - as if we're all born with a mind/soul of the same capability.

fatbird5• 9 years ago

It's not heresy. Sports represent a closed ecosystem of relatively straightforward traits->skill benefits. Professions are not bounded the way athletic roles are. The fields of law and medicine removed various sexist barriers to women participating, and female participation increased; I've seen no one suggest that the professions have significantly shifted in nature due to an influx of female brains.

Against that, we have a long history of pseudo-scientific arguments that biological differences matter and thus justify discrimination. And we have a long history of ending discrimination and proving those arguments to be bullshit, so we're now rightly sceptical of the sort of biological determinism that the manifesto author wants to resurrect.

swframe22• 9 years ago

I was talking to coworker who recently transferred from China to the US. He told me that China is will dominate the US because diversity is the greatest US weakness.

Kind of shocking because our company is about 1/3 White, Indian and Chinese. But he doesn't see that as diversity. I think that is the answer that he can't see. Once groups accept each other as equals diversity becomes a non-issue. It does take work and there are lot of people who are not ready.

In addition, China is not one culture. It has many but maybe they are not as visible? I suspect secretly they are still very active behind closed doors.

In general, I feel that many immigrants have come from societies that are much more homogeneous. When they see US racial or gender problems some think that it's a weakness. I think that these problems can (and will) be solved but I can understand that given their upbringing they see it as an unsolvable problem.

Unfortunately, I don't think mandatory "busting unconscious bias" training will work for everyone. For some, their bias is just too deep. In time, I think many come around but some will never change. Unfortunately, they do hold a lot of power and when you report to one, you can find yourself setup to fail before you know it.

I've said this before: Women, please don't put up with stuff and don't give up. Please seek out a mentor who can help you become an executive in the company. The best way to fix this is to rise above it. It is not easy but please don't give up.

And for the "people against affirmative action", there are other ways to address your concerns. You can ask harvard to accept donations to increase class sizes. When some all-male colleges started accepting women, they doubled the class size. Please don't make it a race war. Harvard really only cares about money (and reputation). Find out what they want in order to get what you want. You don't have to take slots from people escaping a 300-year cycle of poverty. No it is not your fault, but it is your country (for better or for worse).

rifung8• 9 years ago

I was talking to coworker who recently transferred from China to the US. He told me that China is will dominate the US because diversity is the greatest US weakness.

Has said coworker seen the research which suggests diversity increases company performance? http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-...

john_moscow• 9 years ago

Or perhaps bigger companies that have better financial results simply get extra cash to spend on hiring people that they don't need in terms of directly solving business problems, but that improve the company's public image.

swframe22• 9 years ago

There is that study that indicates that facts don't change opinion.

(There is a scene in BSG where Six tells Guys that maybe Boomer doesn't know she is a cyclon; what will happen (to you) when she finds out? I've tried and boy it can get seriously painful very quickly. Sometimes it is better to leave the fixing to the professionals. The other name for freedom fighter is terrorist.)

ethanhunt_• 9 years ago

The study doesn't control for companies are probably much more likely to have Diversity Programs if they are doing really well.

Sounds like a study that finds people who buy Rolexes live longer. It's not the Rolex: it's that only rich people who have money to take care of themselves well can afford a Rolex.

taysic9• 9 years ago

I appreciate everything you said. It was tough for me studying an engineering degree in college but since then working has been a breath of fresh air. I feel I owe a lot of that to the spirit of professionalism within companies.

It's interesting your Chinese friend said that. I recently found out that unless you are ethnically Chinese, even if you are born in China you aren't a citizen.. correct me if I'm wrong. I feel like a big reason why America will continue to thrive - because it values innovation over particular attributes of the people involved.

More than 1/3 of top tech companies in the US are started by immigrants. http://www.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-founded-by...

marknutter3• 9 years ago

How many tech companies are started by women?

0xbear5• 9 years ago

As a former Googler: dude is _so_ getting fired and blacklisted. I've seen people driven out just for saying someone else looks good in a bathing suit. Not a direct or indirect report, mind you, a person completely outside the chain of command, at a team event in (IIRC) Hawaii. A small minority of people takes victim mentality and makes it near religious internal dogma. The rest just go along with it due to fat paychecks and the lack of desire to get fired for not being PC enough.

door7• 9 years ago

I've seen people driven out just for saying someone else looks good in a bathing suit.

understandably, as that is extremely unprofessional and sexual harassment

stagbeetle7• 9 years ago

Your comment was one of the points argued in the memo.

It's important to understand and prioritize intention or else: >increases [in our] our sensitivity, which is not universally positive: sensitivity increases both our tendency to take offense and our self censorship, leading to authoritarian policies.

This means distinguishing between a well-meaning comment and a maleficent or predatory remark.

Veratyr3• 9 years ago

I think the exact wording and context is important here.

"Hey Googlette, you look really good in a bathing suit" is a comment about how the woman's body looks in a revealing outfit. I'd say this is generally unprofessional, though in some contexts (perhaps she'd just been expressing a lack of confidence in her body), it could still be appropriate.

"Hey Googlette, that bathing suit looks really good on you" is a comment on the particular bathing suit and how the combination works well. It's potentially more of a comment on her good choice and fashion sense than on her body. If the bathing suit is particularly risqué then it might be inappropriate but if it's just a normal bathing suit I don't think it'd be any more inappropriate than "your new haircut looks really good" or "is that a new top? It looks really good".

0xbear5• 9 years ago

I'm sorry, saying to someone "you look good" is not "sexual harassment" no matter how much you want it to be.

rifung8• 9 years ago

A small minority of people takes victim mentality and makes it near religious internal dogma. The rest just go along with it due to fat paychecks and the lack of desire to get fired for not being PC enough.

As a current Googler I am surprised to hear this. I think most of the people I work with would agree that while it might be normal to think something like that, you should keep it to yourself.

0xbear5• 9 years ago

You say you're surprised, and then confirm my opinion almost to the letter. Truth is, it's dangerous to not "keep it to yourself", so people don't talk about it.

CalChris2• 9 years ago

Fat paychecks are rather nice and I've been fired. If you believe in something, you shouldn't be unwilling to risk that. Also, I'm unaware of any blacklist. Google looks good on the res and there's plenty of jobs out there.

Colin Kaepernick believed in something and he's paying the price. If you're expecting me to feel sorry for this cupcake, that ain't gonna happen. I have a sliver of respect for him for writing it and zero respect for what he wrote. I sure don't think I'd want to work with him.

taysic9• 9 years ago

If that were true and significant, it would mean the company would bleed talent and become such an uncomfortable place to work that a competitor would gain advantage. That's why the market works. For the record, I've heard the exact opposite about the google work environment.

nybbler2• 9 years ago

I'm pretty sure that remark isn't why Vic Gundotra was driven out.

the_cyber_pass3• 9 years ago

Aren't blacklists supposed to be illegal in the US?

jee_accnt7• 9 years ago

At this point, firing him would be a huge PR mistake for Google.

remarkEon12• 9 years ago

Would it? Imagine the think pieces and clickbait it would generate. The guy would get an interview on Tucker Carlson and the Joe Rogan podcast but the whole thing would be over in 2 weeks.

FlashGit• 9 years ago

Well I'm fully on board with the notion that (workplace) diversity is overrated nonsense but this document could only be described as counter-productive at best. So things like this will only be used to justify the very thing he claims to be objecting to.

JacobJans• 9 years ago

This guy claims that women are more neurotic and talkative than men; and that they prefer thinking about aesthetics; and that women are more "cooperative."

The subtext is that this is the reason we shouldn't support women becoming software engineers.

Uggghhh.

glorkk• 9 years ago

You either fail at reading comprehension or you are being dishonest.

Nowhere does the author say we "shouldn't support women becoming software engineers". His argument is simply that women are, on average, less inclined to become software engineers because of innate psychological differences, which explains the unbalanced gender ratio in tech. He suggests we should stop all forms of "positive" discrimination in the form of employment quotas that are aimed to correct the gender imbalance, and instead select individuals based on their merit.

notacoward3• 9 years ago

employment quotas that are aimed to correct the gender imbalance, and instead select individuals based on their merit.

That is itself misrepresentative enough that your own snark about reading comprehension or dishonesty rebounds on you. Quotas aren't the issue. Echo Chamber Guy is railing against all measures to increase diversity, including many that would improve the correlation between merit and hiring/promotion.

notacoward3• 9 years ago

There's a lot wrong with the screed, but its use of "neurotic" is being overplayed. It's clearly not being used in either a clinical diagnosis or pop-culture sense. Rather, it's a reference to the "five factor" personality model, in which "neuroticism" is not an unqualified negative. Also, to the extent that it is a negative and is more prevalent among women, it's likely to be a social construct for which we should correct, not (as the echo-chamber author) an immutable fact that we should use as an excuse for inaction.

chroma2• 9 years ago

I notice a lot of misrepresentation of views on both sides, almost to the point of strawmanning. I think a charitable interpretation of the author's best points can be summarized as follows:

- Racism & sexism still exist, even at Google. This is bad. (On the bright side, the problem seems to be getting better over time.)

- It's good (and good for business) to eliminate discrimination based on gender, race, sexual preference, etc.

- There are many benign reasons why a completely unbiased company can still have skewed demographics. One possible reason is that women & men tend to differ in psychological makeup. (Unfortunately, it looks like links to some studies supporting this claim were removed from the post, along with some charts.)

- Therefore, Google should focus on eliminating bias & discrimination, not on getting employee demographics to match the nation as a whole. In short: focus on equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. If sex-specific psychological differences exist, the only way to get equal outcomes would be to lower the hiring bar for women or raise the bar for men.

- If men & women tend to be psychologically different, Google should be aware of that and change work practices to better accommodate women. For example: More pair programming, as (to use the language of the author) that allows more working with people rather than things. Though for competitive positions requiring long hours (usually management), such changes may not be possible.

These points seem to be put forth in good faith by a frustrated employee who lacks tact. Moreover, I don't think these topics should lie outside the realm of debate. Either they're not true, in which case they can be dismissed with counter-evidence. Or they are true, and Google is wasting tremendous resources trying to solve these problems in the wrong way.

taysic9• 9 years ago

As a female engineer I don't resonate with the proposed changes for woman working with other people etc. I'm a very independent worker and that's partly why I've thrived in this field. In short, I don't think companies should make any adjustments based on gender. Just ignore it - that part I agree with - let people self select what and where they want to work themselves. And I also don't agree with quotas though I see how they might have served a purpose at one time.

If other woman are anything like me, the bullet list comparing two different points of view are cringe. People are so hard to define. And woman in particular I think generally don't feel like their potential is known yet because their presence in the workplace is so young relatively. So the last thing anyone wants is to be categorized by old stereotypes.

chroma2• 9 years ago

I also thought the pair programming example was odd, as I've never noticed different propensities for pairing based on gender. As far as I can tell, it is equally disliked. :)

bayonetz• 9 years ago

Thanks, I really appreciate this distillation. If we've learned anything, it's that trying to write stream of consciousness screedy manifestos like this is super hard and people should probably just stop trying. Still though, despite some of the questionable logic and missing evidence (which I'm surprised it's not a lot worse given the way these kinds of things get written -- middle of the night after some last straw), this person seems to be sincerely trying to spark a dialogue of mutual benefit to both sides of the debate and the company as a whole. Yet so many of the comments in this thread are just intensely dismissive and uncharitable. They aren't like, "ok so he fucked up here and here for this reason, I can see where he was going with this point and that point and there are some kernals of truth there, let's engage with this, etc." No, they are more like "this guy got this and this wrong, therefore it's all wrong, and therefore he should just stop now and recognize what a piece of shit he is." It really does feel sometimes like the chilling effect tactics of past rightist regimes has now been weaponized by us on the left out of some sort of unconscious spirit of payback or settling past debts of oppression. It's not a good look.

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

...who lacks tact...

It's worth pointing out that "tact" is a cultural construct and highly subjective.

It's also worth pointing out that emotional arguments are generally better received than dispassionate ones. People tend to think emotionally at least as much as they reason, so sanitizing thoughts in the wrong way would neuter the position.

humanrebar20• 9 years ago

If men & women tend to be psychologically different, Google should be aware of that and change work practices to better accommodate women

I'd rephrase that more like:

"If we want diversity of thought and disposition, we should make room for diversity of work styles (pair programming, remote work, etc.). If the women-work-differently hypothesis has merit, it will help address the gender imbalance while making room for other kinds of excluded people."

Animats• 9 years ago

I'm amazed that people are seriously upset by someone publishing that.

Somehow, most of the women I know don't complain about harassment much. The one who does complain mostly gets it from her female boss. The one in SF tech says that Uber people tend to be jerks but the rest of the industry there isn't bad. The one from France has more problems with age than with sex. The lawyer has had some annoyances, but finds it useful to be underestimated by the other side. The ocean lifeguard fought her way onto the L.A. County lifeguards (competitive with no special allowances for women, and few women make it; this is the real-world Baywatch) and is proud that some macho guys apologized to her.

This probably reflects that they're all horse people. Once you're used to dealing with somewhat pushy half-ton animals, microaggressions aren't a big deal.

rifung8• 9 years ago

Somehow, most of the women I know don't complain about harassment much.

It does not seem productive to trivialize and disregard people's issues only because we haven't witnessed them ourselves.

Indeed this attitude is actually why an internal group where people can report sexist, racist, and other inappropriate behavior is called "Yes at Google", because so many people thought this kind of thing doesn't happen, or at least it wouldn't at Google.

tbrownaw2• 9 years ago

It does not seem productive to trivialize and disregard people's issues only because we haven't witnessed them ourselves.

There's a difference between trivializing or disregarding particular complaints, vs questioning just how representative they are of the broader situation.

xyzzyz4• 9 years ago

yes-at-google had some really ugly stuff when they started out, but then everyone run out of stashed stories, and it's been almost exclusively petty issues for the past few weeks, and most of which look like people acting in good faith, just genuinely unaware of the impact having on the reporting person. Looks like the really bad stuff doesn't actually happen all that often.

Thing is, life in general is filled with stuff that makes people uneasy, but you always have to judge the intent before you can condemn the behavior. The y-a-g format is completely opposite of this.

LouisSayers• 9 years ago

Good on him.

We should appreciate our differences and understand them rather than bury them under "equality".

I hope some good comes of this.

devrandomguy6• 9 years ago

Well, this is an issue that I would never have dared to tackle, myself, mainly because I do not have the political skill to do it safely. So, I offer a thank-you and a salute to the less inhibited guy who rose up and drew the first bullet. Now that I have had a chance to read this and observe the public reaction, my own views have developed further.

I was already of the opinion that the various -ism movements each represent a form of discrimination themselves, towards the inverse set of people that they represent. That starts to become a problem when there are people in the intersection of many inverse sets of -isms. This time, let's not create another -ism; let's not make "counterminorityism" just another thing to bash people over the head with.

Instead, it is time to design a continuous reintegration process for our network of distinctive identity groups, to ensure that they do not become incompatible over time. We need a social/psychological framework for identifying and rectifying arbitrary imbalances of resources and social power, because that is a common theme in the root causes of all of the -isms. We need to acknowledge our culture's memes [1] as an increasingly powerful force, worthy of serious study and possibly even regulation or open engineering; take a close look at the psychological manipulation of advertising, to see why this is needed.

This true unification, for lack of a more specific word, would likely be every bit as disruptive to current social and economic structures as the decline of slavery; most powerful organizations would prefer to play meaningless games with the -isms, perhaps even play one minority off of another [2] to prevent a unification. It is something that we will have to develop from the ground up, and develop over time, with collaboration from all fields and all identities. As you can see, at this point, my (our?) feelings and thoughts on the matter are still rough, unpolished, in a state of growth. We need to start seriously thinking about these things, lest we find ourselves on the losing side of a new -ism.

[1] Ideas, beliefs and themes that persist in our collective psyche, not animated gifs.

[2] We are all in a minority. If you aren't, then that is your minority, and you get no love, no assistance, because of what you are. Welcome to the minorities.

JelteF2• 9 years ago

I'm really wondering if those removed hyperlinks are pointing to sources for the stuff that's stated as facts. I really miss any references of some of the claims he's making and I find it hard to believe that the writer added none at all.

devrandomguy6• 9 years ago

How is it sexual?

door7• 9 years ago

straight men commenting on the attractiveness of women's bodies is pretty blatantly sexual. what other reason is there to make that kind of comment? "pure aesthetics"? like Wow Jessica from accounting's body is consistent with Greek Ideals about Archetypal Female Beauty. come on.

devrandomguy6• 9 years ago

Commenting on someone's bathing suit is not inherently sexual, because we do it in non-sexual contexts; for example, I complemented my nephiew's new swim trunks earlier this summer.

A particular complement might be sexual, but we shouldn't assume that. For all we know, the guy is gay, and we are now discriminating against that.

Furthermore, commenting directly on the awesomeness of someone else's body is also not inherently sexual. Have you never admired a female athlete, the way you admire a male athelete?

smsm4213• 9 years ago

How did you know this was a straight man talking about a woman?

"pure aesthetics"

You do not think people can appreciate the beauty of human body without wanting to immediately have sex with it? Ever been to a museum? Especially classical section? A lot of skin there. Apparently, those people were real maniacs and sexual predators...

dang• 9 years ago

At some point this becomes indistinguishable from trolling and in my opinion you hit that point. Please don't post like this.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14938471 and marked it off-topic.

devrandomguy6• 9 years ago

With all due respect, I am concerned that people are over-sexualizing things, as a form of moral panic. My solution is to dispassionately discuss the problem, so that it can be de-escalated.

Kudos to the mod team for their handling of the larger affair over the past week, it is truly unfortunate what we are all dealing with right now.

(10 minutes later) Ok, I can see that the original comment should have included my follow up point, in order to avoid creating the "tripping hazard" that set the stage for Door's response.

didibus3• 9 years ago

I hear a lot of complaints about conservative ideas being shunned and bullied, but I disagree completely. Why haven't I read a 10 page pro-diversity creed circulating at google?

I haven't heard or read about progressive ideas in a long time, a long long time.

I'd be willing to bet a pro diversity creed would get much stronger bullying against it too.

Anyways, I'm tired of this issue, and people trying to pretend there's an optimal truth. This is a human made field, if we wanted, we could change it. We just need to agree on what to optimize for, and there lies the problem, I don't think we know or care what we ultimately optimize for. Too me, it seems we're currently optimizing for the stock market. And until it's clear that women make a big impact on that, people will be cautious to fray too far from what's been tried and worked in the past.

tmh79• 9 years ago

First of all, let me lead with: I'm a neoliberal democrat type person, I support diversity initiatives, reaching out to and supporting under represented communities, making changing to work culture to help people who haven't succeeded historically (IE mothers who leave to take care of their kids) etc. I disagree with most of the points in the guys doc.

Why haven't I read a 10 page pro-diversity creed circulating at google?

The corporate culture in SV is pretty far to the left (all things being considered), you don't see things like a 10 page pro-diversity creed circulating internally because for the most part, those type of documents are official company policy. IMO, this is a good thing.

I think open discussion of ideas like the one in this document would be beneficial because they are easy to refute and all people involved can take it as a learning or educating experience. The guys conclusions aren't "morally bad", but they are "demonstrably wrong" and its easy to see why if honest discussion was permitted. The problem is, open discussion is not permitted because the culture of the left seems to confuse "demonstrably wrong" with "morally bad" and thus makes having bad ideas a sin, instead of say, an opportunity that one can be educated on an enlightened.

didibus3• 9 years ago

How many people in SV join Google and spend time thinking about why those policies are in place, what underlying principle and reasoning has warranted them? How many explanation is there for why the current Google status quo leans left or appears to do so? Is that open for discussion too? I don't think so.

Now, I also find it ironic that status quo is considered progressive. The underlying principle of progressivism is change, continuous improvement through conscious change, measured by the impact on the lowest common denominator and the sum of all value. That is, you want to make the pie bigger and the smallest piece of pie bigger too.

I'm open for conversation, but you need to hear all data points to make an informed decision, one way discourse is possibly worse then no discourse.

CalChris2• 9 years ago

The corporate culture in SV is pretty far to the left (all things being considered)

I'd disagree there. To attach a couple of names to it, I wouldn't say the corporate culture here is Bernie. I'd say it's Hillary. [1] And if you think Hillary is pretty far to the left then I have an ICO I just gotta tell you about.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/silicon-valley-shows-its-p...

feelin_googley• 9 years ago

"...(ignoring or being ashamed of its core business)..."

This deserves its own "manifesto".

In case of any misinterpretation, I interpret "core business" to mean the ever exciting business of selling online ads.

JelteF2• 9 years ago

How is this not on the front page btw? It has almost 200 points an comments in 2 hours and it's placed 37 at the moment. This seems like a failure of the HN ranking algorithm. @dang (or someone else) could you explain what's up here?

TimTheTinker8• 9 years ago

Another article along similar lines seems to have received similar un-accounted-for down-modding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14834758

adjkant• 9 years ago

I have one simple ask here. To those who agree with any of this article beyond "we should be able to discuss this openly", please read this. People have all read this document, and if you agree with it, you value diversity of opinion. I'm not asking anyone to debate it - there's plenty of that here which doesn't seem to be going anywhere, as usual, which you can and should join into to try to reverse that. But read this first.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-...

mrcabada2• 9 years ago

I believe the gap is more cultural-made than sex-made. Basically there are the same differences of capabilities between two random males and between a random male and a random female.

the_cyber_pass3• 9 years ago

If you are talking about IQ the data would support you, the problem comes when you look at standard deviation and we see men have a slightly higher standard deviation which leads to the extremes on both sides being overwhelmingly male. It's not something we need to worry about much in day to day interactions because you wont notice it but in hyper selective environments it might become an something people notice.

mrcabada2• 9 years ago

How do we now this isn't something that is being caused due to the female being suppressed in our history? This studies are biased due to the fact that females haven't been treated equally for centuries and this affects on how the female see the world, affecting the real purpose of the study.

It's like taking a male that you have treated emotionally bad and you tell him thru all his life he can't do this and that and a male where you tell him he must be strong, he must do this and that. Boths are males and I bet you will find the same differences between these two males and between a male and a female.

nthcolumn• 9 years ago

He, and it is a 'he' has missed the point entirely. It is not that we do not recognize that people are different, it is that we value that diversity and therefore endeavor to remove from our community such impediments to achieving a balanced social group. It is a classic dominant social group position that the incomers fit in rather than the group dynamic have to change to accommodate. It is surprising to have a Google thought-leader with such low-brow views. If you think you are in an echo-chamber or bubble perhaps it is simply because nobody agrees with you.

smsm4213• 9 years ago

Can anybody explain to me why it is called "anti-diversity" or even "sexist"[1]? Never in the whole document the author argues against diversity.

[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/8/5/16102476/google-diversity-vp...

the_cyber_pass3• 9 years ago

It's a product of the left/right divide in modern American politics. It's mostly a dog whistle so the other side knows he is ok to unperson.

TimTheTinker8• 9 years ago

Is this being downmodded? (230 points, 3 hours ago, 298 comments, and already on page 4)

TimTheTinker8• 9 years ago

#290 6 hours later. This must have been down-modded. Before we ascribe political intent, however, consider that they may downmod controversial posts regardless of political leaning.

lotsoflumens3• 9 years ago

TL;DR

Some guy not only speaks his mind, but has the balls to actually write his thoughts down.

The completely predictable response from "forward thinking progressives" follows.

Pulcinella6• 9 years ago

Are not those people also just speaking their mind?

lotsoflumens3• 9 years ago

I assume they are .. however, they take no risks with their shaming.

vfulco• 9 years ago

Wow, refreshing. The truth will set you free.

dennisgorelik• 9 years ago

Google (and other tech employers) wants to discriminate in favor of hiring more female engineers, because teams with a little bit higher ratio of female engineers work better overall, even if individual female engineers are not the best individual contributors on their teams.

However, openly stating that Google wants to discriminate in favor of females - is illegal.

So Google uses double-speak and encourages hiring more females under "affirmative action" and "diversity" guidelines.

Not everyone understands double-speak, so there is disconnect between what Google is trying to do and opinions on the ground ("why do we discriminate against males in favor of females?").

That disconnect results in internal popularity of "Anti-Diversity" papers like this.

notacoward3• 9 years ago

Or maybe Google wants to hire more female engineers because they realize that 19% representation does not reflect any kind of natural proclivity and therefore must reflect some kind of discrimination. One might plausibly argue that innate differences - more in preference rather than ability - could account for a small difference. 55:45? OK, I can believe that. 60:40? Beginning to wonder. 81:19? Absolutely not.

Where discrimination clearly exists, Google could quite reasonably want to compensate for it. No, not by lowering the bar or setting quotas. Legality aside, we should all know by now that hiring less able candidates isn't good for anyone - often least of all for the candidate who is being set up to fail. Other approaches include casting a wider net, training interviewers to avoid unconscious bias that could lead to false negatives, increasing retention by providing support and additional training (e.g. in negotiating techniques at performance-review time).

None of these lead to anyone less qualified overtaking anyone who is more so. They drive people like the "echo chamber" author nuts only because those people refuse to acknowledge that the problem exists (or matters) in the first place. Because they can't conclusively pin either the problem or solution down to one place in our social code, they decide it's a feature rather than a bug. It's the very same tendency that makes them - and anyone who enables or defends them - crappy engineers. I'll bet "echo chamber" guy was on the way out already, for reasons unrelated to political beliefs. It's not "brave" to manufacture an excuse for getting canned that doesn't require acknowledgement of one's own insufficiency.

alexryan• 9 years ago

I’m very sad to see this happening to a great company like google. I first encountered the new culture at Google I/O extended event I attended a few months ago. It disturbed me very deeply but I couldn’t figure out exactly why since I didn’t actually disagree with anything that the diversity proponents wanted to achieve. I’ve had some time to process it though, and here’s the deeper issue that I find so disturbing about what seems to be happening at google ...

How we habitually respond to “uncomfortable situations” in life matters a great deal. As individuals, it strongly influences our trajectory in life. In companies, the predominant tendency strongly influences the trajectory of the company.

One option is to habitually respond by “getting curious” and by “identifying that part of our predictive model of the world which is weak and seeking to understand the situation more deeply with the intent of strengthening our predictive model.” When we choose this option we tend to want to listen intently to those who believe differently than us, to seek to understand the deeper needs that are driving them, and to strive to pursue win-win (or “positive sum”) solutions to problems. The option tends to leads to a strengthening of “moonshot thinking” because our confidence in our ability to solve problems grows in direct proportion to the strength of our predictive model of the world.

Another option is to habitually respond by “being offended”, ”to sink into victimhood, powerlessness, learned helplessness”, “dividing into us vs them”, “initiating conflict”, “appealing to authority to protect us from the threat of them”. When we choose this option, we tend to disconnect from those who believe differently than us, to be unaware of the deeper needs that are driving their behavior, and to sink into pursuing win-loss (or zero sum) solutions to our problems. This option tends to lead to a strengthening of a downward spiral of “victimhood thinking” which decreases our confidence in our ability to solve difficult problems by skillful means.

edited: What I find so tragic about this is ... we have 7.5 billion minds in this world growing ever more connected to each other and to vast sums of knowledge by the internet. From a first principles perspective these minds represent more than enough resources to solve the most challenging problems that affect us all. If we would only fight each other with win-loss intent LESS and instead direct our aggression towards solving the difficult important problems that affect us all, we could solve these difficult problems so much more quickly. Why would we choose waste time fighting each other, when we could, for example, be building a piece of the puzzle that helps researchers cure the leukemia that my friend’s young son was just diagnosed with? Why would we make that choice?

Presumably this was the hope of the google founders who established the mission of “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible.”?

I propose that >the tendency to “get offended” and “seek win-loss” solutions to problems should be targeted for extermination. We are better than this. > the tendency to “get curious” and find “win-win” solutions should to take its place.

URSpider94• 9 years ago

Wow, this paper is a textbook example of begging the question. The author makes a number of completely unfounded generalizations about women and men, then goes on to use those as a basis for protesting against Google's corporate diversity programs.

I wonder if the author would like to keep walking out on his very weak limb, and claim that African-Americans are under-represented in tech because of their genetic characteristics.

abalone• 9 years ago

Also ridiculously racist. Really!

Amidst his rambling "evolutionary psychology" argument concerning the gender gap he also protests racial diversity programs.[1] And his explanation for that? Are black people also bad at programming because of evolution? It's buried here:

"Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)." (emphasis mine)

So non-whites are doing worse in engineering because they're dumber, according to science. Seriously, does dressing these views up in pseudo-academic prose make them any less racist?

[1] "Stretch, BOLD, CSSI, Engineering Practicum (to an extent), and several other Google funded internal and external programs are for people with a certain gender or race"

Qub3d• 9 years ago

I can't speak for software engineers as I'm not really one myself, but I have seen evidence that guys in the development and IT fields are legitimately scared of interacting with women and in the process violating some rule they didn't know of [0]. Reality may be different from what they perceive, the but point is that some men do actually perceive this "threat". The motivations of this internal letter, whatever they are, seem to be almost certainly highly emotional.

Whenever a difficult, nuanced topic like the one HN is discussing here comes up, its important to consider the medium by which all of us are communicating. Your quote with emphasis added is a perfect example: it may have been something this particularly frustrated individual threw out without much thought (the entire letter going public at all shows a lack of thought), but it could very well have been dog-whistling to racists.

The thing is, we can't know. Unless we're in a forum (in the Socratic sense) where thoughts can be clarified, I propose we take things at their face value. That's all we can confidently do.

[0] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664

aliakhtar• 9 years ago

The first ever computer programmers were women.Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, etc did pioneering work in the field. Women can absolutely be great programmers.

ankushnarula• 9 years ago

A 2011 Norwegian documentary series had an episode called "The Gender Paradox" that examined this very issue in depth with interviews with evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists and sociologists. It arrived at the conclusion that employment disparities increase in many professional fields due to natural divergent proclivities when socio-economic opportunities become equal for the sexes.

ON AVERAGE in Norway (one of the top 5 most equal countries), females prefer more people-oriented fields such as medicine and males will favor more systems-oriented fields such as engineering. Again, this is ON AVERAGE. There are major overlaps in many fields (e.g. arts and research sciences) - and in some fields there is virtually none (e.g. nursing vs sanitation). This is not controversial amongst scientists who do their best to suspend ideological or wishful thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

fatbird5• 9 years ago

Yonatan Zunger, a (recently departed) distinguished engineer at Google, wrote a very good response: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

rcpt• 9 years ago

chroma's summary above does a much better job understanding the manifesto than that medium post imo (cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14938457 ). Yonatan just hones in on that one botched idea and then berates the author for the rest of the post.

fatbird5• 9 years ago

Chroma's summary is a "charitable interpretation" (his words), and shouldn't be considered necessarily accurate or representative of the manifesto author's intent. A straight faced reading of it yields something not nearly as constructive as what Chroma presented.

Yonatan isn't simply berating the author. He's explaining in detail why the manifesto is problematic in many ways that have to do with context and circumstance. What the author presents as ideological intolerance, Yonatan describes as the host of practical considerations to running a business and a workplace that, one suspects, the author wouldn't have a problem with if he weren't feeling constrained.

sgustard• 9 years ago

My son was in the hospital recently and the head surgeon was a woman. Her primary assistant was a woman. The anesthesiologist and her assistant were women. There was a male nurse or two.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have encountered this situation 25 years ago. I'm sure "biological factors" mean "most women don't go into medicine" because of the years of hard work separated from their families, and they aren't excited by the technical bits. Even if you wanted to hire women doctors, they don't bother going to medical school.

I'm sure a thousand male doctors wrote a thousand letters just like this one as they saw their workplaces changing. And guess what, it happened anyway, and the state of medical care across the world is better than ever.

The field of software engineering is still crawling out of the stone age.

koffiezet2• 9 years ago

I think it's more a cultural problem where certain jobs and studies are very polarized and tied to a specific gender. This is not just software engineering/it, but a lot more common than you would think, also the other way around.

When talking about masters, where consistently over the last 10 years or so, 56% of the students is female here in Belgium, law, medical and chemistry studies are currently 60%+ female and some studies, like language, biology, crime, pharmaceutical are 70%+ female, arts and psychology 80%+ and pedagogy and logopedic/audiologic over 90%. That are pretty huge gaps, and yet that's not something you hear about that often.

These stats are taken from multiple reports (in Dutch) from a few universities here in Belgium in years ranging from 2010 to 2013 [1] [2], and one report I only have on paper (all with pretty similar results)

Yes there are also many areas where it's more equally divided (surprisingly, mathematics and economics), but I don't think it's necessarily the 'software engineering' field, it's for a large part society. My gf for example studied chemistry, and even if she's a bit of a geek sometimes, she never even considered software engineering/it as a study. And when I asked her why, she said it just doesn't have any appeal to her, although when I taught her to write small scripts in python and some basic HTML she thought that was awesome.

And I know quite a few geeky girls just like her, doing stuff ranging from having studied sexology, veterinary, economics, law, chemistry, ... Only 3 of the ones I knew started in software engineering and 2 never finished. One became a cop, the other switched to medical, and the one that finished her degree now teaches mostly math since she didn't see herself writing software her entire career.

The only way I see to get more women interested in engineering in general, is to get girls interested from a young age. You can't just wave your magic wand around and wish there's a even a 70/30 male/female ratio when only 10% of the software engineering students in the first year is female, and many of them drop out over the years.

[1] https://www.kuleuven.be/diversiteit/pdf/20130927%20Gender%20...

[2] http://www.ugent.be/nl/univgent/waarvoor-staat-ugent/diversi...

cpr• 9 years ago

We had this discussion years ago on my Harvard class list, back during the Larry Summers flap.

Obviously, no one would be/could be against women choosing whatever field of study and work that fulfills them the most. (I say that with 6 daughters in mind!)

However, perhaps the lower representation of women in STEM is simply because they find other fields more interesting (law, medicine, what-have-you). STEM (at least the academic path) is a fairly single-minded grind, and that wouldn't appeal to many people. Apparently it appeals to fewer women than men, and I don't blame them! What's so great about STEM, honestly? It's just another field of human endeavor, with no particular reason to value it more highly than others. (Certainly, it's clearly valued by the HN community, but we're a tiny slice of the real world.)

(I did learn (sadly) from that discussion that women have been grossly discriminated against in certain scientific fields in academia--one of my classmates is the astronomy head at a midwestern university, and she had plenty of examples to share, getting there.)

Aside: Seems to me that the public outrage is at least partially just virtue-signaling.

fatbird5• 9 years ago

When I see someone mention virtue signalling, I dismiss them as posturing for their community of opinion. Is that fair?

smithsmith• 9 years ago

The author has a point. One suggestion to hire people without bias is to make the interview online for the most part and then conduct very few face to face interview with multiple rounds and getting an averaged feed back of the interviewees in text format and judge based upon it.

The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

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