What do you think of the flap over the memo written by a Google employee? What is purported to be the text of the memo is here at Gizmodo.
The next shoe has dropped in the form of the employee who wrote it having been fired. Contrary to what some have written I think that Google probably has a pretty good case for termination on the grounds of improper use of company resources in violation of company policies but putting forward such a defense could potentially throw more mud on the company than is already clinging. I suspect that regardless of whatever else happens Google will not emerge from this incident covered in glory.
It seems to me that the most stinging claim made by supporters of the author of the memo is that you can’t pursue technical excellence, profitability, and ideological purity simultaneously.
I don’t have strong views on this one way or another. I don’t know the state of the scholarship on sex bias in the area of technology that Google represents so I can’t make a statement about that and, well, I’m an empirical sort of a guy. I don’t care whether Google is technically excellent, profitable, or ideologically pure. Those would seem to me to be questions for its stockholders.
Update
In comments (thanks, Andy!) I was directed to a typically good post by Scott Alexander on the subject. Here’s his peroration:
It doesn’t have to be this way. Nobody has any real policy disagreements. Everyone can just agree that men and women are equal, that they both have the same rights, that nobody should face harassment or discrimination. We can relax the Permanent State Of Emergency around too few women in tech, and admit that women have the right to go into whatever field they want, and that if they want to go off and be 80% of veterinarians and 74% of forensic scientists, those careers seem good too. We can appreciate the contributions of existing women in tech, make sure the door is open for any new ones who want to join, and start treating each other as human beings again. Your co-worker could just be your co-worker, not a potential Nazi to be assaulted or a potential Stalinist who’s going to rat on you. Your project manager could just be your project manager, not the person tasked with monitoring you for signs of thoughtcrime. Your female co-worker could just be your female co-worker, not a Badass Grrl Coder Who Overcomes Adversity. Your male co-worker could just be your male co-worker, not a Tool Of The Patriarchy Who Denies His Complicity In Oppression. I promise there are industries like this. Medicine is like this! Loads of things are like this! Lots of tech companies are even still like this! This could be you.
He comes very close to persuading me that there are differences between male and female accomplishment in various fields, that it is dictated by preference, and that preference is highly influenced by biology although that may not have been his objective.
I have a couple of quibbles with his post: men outnumber women in the practice of medicine by nearly two to one and you don’t have to look very hard to find complaints about hostile work environments for women in medicine any more than you do in software development (see the recent flap about Uber).
My inclination is to wish that there were more female programmers just as I wish there were more female physicians if only because I think that groups highly dominated by one sex tend to be more tolerant of bad behavior on the part of people of the predominant sex. Accomplishing that without compromising quality may be a challenge for the reasons that Scott delineates.
“I don’t know the state of the scholarship on sex bias in the area of technology that Google represents so I can’t make a statement about that and, well, I’m an empirical sort of a guy. ”
Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex has an excellent, longish piece on this that I highly recommend:
Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences | Slate Star Codex
I agree that Google had every right to fire this person but I think it was an unwise decision not the least of which the act seemingly confirms the central complaint in the memo. After this, who in the company would dare to question any diversity policy?
Secondly, good managers and leaders should know when to counsel someone and when to sh!tcan them. In my view, the appropriate response in this case was counseling.
Well, it was bad PR because it was boring and idiotic. People who think in terms of ‘ideological purity’ regarding equality are simply regurgitating the pedantic crap they read recently on the internet by some guy who is going to prove, via though experiment, that racism doesn’t even exist. What was compelling (to me) as a man about Susan Fowler’s recollection of her work was how direct it was. Something happened and she dealt with it, and then something else happened, and she wrote about that using real language.
It was the exact opposite of this limp-dick bullshit. I mean what does “Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things” even mean? Men aren’t interested in people like their children and women aren’t interested in things like houses? So men will be less grieved if you kidnap their child and women will be less affected by their house burning down? If it’s just low middlebrow boilerplate that (basically) sexists repeat in order to justify a world in which men may dominate access to important ‘things’.
MM,
There is actually a lot of compelling research on the “people vs. things” theory that can’t be dismissed with simplistic “sexism” handwaving. The link in my previous comment contains links and summaries of some of this research.
Andy,
That Slate Star Codex guy has the lovely trait of simply explaining away claims of ‘sexism’ without ever seeming to have ever listened to what women in professional fields say discrimination and sexism are like. Put it this way–I could believe, being skeptical, in a people vs things distinction in some form in gender. But ‘things’ for the Slate Star Codex seems, to me, to be related to not caring at all about ‘people’. Which is completely different than having being interested more in ‘things’ than ‘people’.
And it’s not only this post by that guy–the stuff I have read is all about how men should be able to tweet lame sexist jokes at a woman but woman should not be able to respond to it for fear of harming the man’s reputation. I suspect that his glib answer is that he’s a ‘things’ person, but to a lot of people he’s just an asshole.
MM,
Calling him an asshole doesn’t invalidate his arguments or evidence – and really, most of what he presents are other people’s arguments and evidence in the form of actual research. Did you actually read the whole thing, because it doesn’t sound like you did.
I’m somewhat familiar with some of the literature as I spent some time recently reading papers on Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). Scott’s post points to some other interesting research on androgen-related conditions and their effects on socialization and all kinds of gender preferences including the “people & things” theory. Again, it’s not something that can be dismissed by name calling or vague arguments about listening to what women in professional fields say.
BTW Dave, good comments in your update.
As you probably remember, my wife has a doctorate in an engineering discipline, one that is completely male dominated. She also spent almost 1/4 century in the military, which is also male dominated. So I am “woke” on this topic (to use the social justice vernacular) and agree completely that fields dominated by men – or any other singular group, are more tolerant of bad behavior. I experienced this myself as a full-time at-home Dad – parenting related groups and activities, dominated by women, often did not appreciate or want my participation. Fortunately that has changed somewhat for the better over the last decade.
When I was in college in my year out of a class of several hundred there were just four women in the engineering school in that cohort (two chemical, one electrical, one industrial, none in mechanical or civil). I could see how badly their male peers were behaving towards them and trying to explain it was frustrating.
It seems to me that the problem with complaints of sexism, racism, or any other sort of bias is that at the extreme end the complaints are over whether people like and respect each other all of the time.
A Google female employee who complained said she felt threatened by the content of it, and one of the managers also expressed this concern that women would be made to feel that they had to work harder to prove themselves. Why is that so terrible? I grew up assuming that this is what women SHOULD do, and should feel proud when such efforts were fruitful.
Is it wrong for men to need to see extra proof, if they internally doubt the capability of women to do certain jobs? Sure. But that doesn’t mean we can circumvent this human foible by passing legislation or corporate policies against thought crimes. For the extreme stuff that should be done, but when it comes to making the expression of all human biases illegal it’s much more likely to produce unintended negative effects like backlash or driving the behaviors underground than to produce some kind of harmonious environment.
Part of the issue is that large subgroups within Google are not American. Razib Khan has mentioned that he’s had friends hired as token Americans on Chinese teams. This intentional multi-national design requires Google to be more proactive on teaching and policing gender norms because these can vary greatly.
Andy,
I did read it. He concedes, basically, that there’s no difference in ability between women and men. It’s all personality, he says, as if that determines who wants to code. What’s funny is that if there is no difference between women and men in maths abilities, then we have to concede all conventional wisdom about inherent difference in gender was wrong. And yet he proceeds to say that personality is purely inherent. Because why not? Sure, men told women for centuries that they were dumber because they were women. Well that was wrong, but why be skeptical of this claim by about inherent tendencies which justifies a male-driven workplace?
The workplace just seems a bad forum for him to write something like this. I think some of his cited research is spotty and questionable. It becomes a rant in some places. It also ignores the history of how some women have been treated in tech, and other fields for that matter. I think that I would have to fire or demote someone who wrote this in our corporation. Hate to think how well things would function when he had to work with women in the future.
That said, if he had to write something I think it should have been sufficient to point out that women dominate some fields and it just isn’t mathematically possible to have women have at least 50% of all positions while dominating some areas.
On the bright side, at least he didn’t go into religion!
Steve
I don’t like Google anymore. “First, do no evil”. They said.
Unless you have a BS degree from an accredited college, you are not an engineer, or if you like, you and the sanitation engineer are the same.
It is my understanding that gender is a social construct with no basis in biology. Rather, it is a spectrum between male and female, but this is incorrect because it relies upon biology. There are multiple biological conditions that are not male or female, but they are not included on the spectrum.
This is rather puzzling to me. Perhaps somebody with one of those big brains could help me.
As to the screed, the tl;dr paragraph is a whiny mess, and the rest is no better. First, what do the blue lines mean? Second, how are the bullets related to the paragraphs? Third, it is a mess, but I just skimmed it. (This was still painful.)
After his bias bullets, he seems to state his thesis. (Emphasis is mine.)
Apparently, he is proposing two independent theses, but I suspect that he is clueless. Implicit and unconscious are not synonymous, and again, the he is probably clueless. Then, he uses five bullet points to support a biological cause for gender differences, and how this relates to either of his thesis baffles me.
His reasoning about personality differences in women supported by his bullet points go from openness in women to their neuroticism is brilliant. I have no doubt that he could prove not only that no racism exists but that racism has never existed.
I got bored. I re-read his tl;dr paragraph and decided that he was never going to support his thesis.
Back to engineers, they usually have an ability to reason. The downside is that they can come to rather interesting conclusions.
Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber
She sounds like a physicist, but her story about the leather jackets and the reason they were not getting one is pure engineer-logic:
On the other hand, this sounds like a manager:
I suspect that the first part is more common than most people realize. It does not justify the behavior, but gender and race requirements can have unintended consequences. Also, her experience of a hostile work environment can occur even while diversity is being actively pursued.
If the Google snowflake went to work for Uber, my guess is that he would be writing a 10 page screed about his mistreatment there. “I am not being treated fairly because the manager is keeping all the women on the team.”
Susan Fowler has a blog post that has a link worth reading. So You Want To Learn Physics…
The link is in the first sentence – “If Susan Can Learn Physics, So Can You”.
Again, she lays out a logical (but somewhat emotional) argument, and there are no list of bullet points and no blue lines.
If anyone is still interested, link goes to back and forth between Adam Grant, who studies this area, and Alexander. Decide for yourself who gets the better part of the argument. I will note that Allexander’s comments about pay among physicians is off base. OB/GYN docs are well paid, but not in the same class as radiologists, and among OB/GYN docs the highest paying subspecialties like GYN/Onc are dominated by men. Of note, Alexander leaves out the highest paying specialties like Neurosurgery, CT, vascular surgery and orthopedics. Wanna guess what gender dominates those?
Steve
Grrr.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
Thanks, steve. You’re right. It is an interesting exchange.
As I noted in my post I find some of Scott’s claims about the practice of medicine suspect. To be honest I think that just getting into med school may tend to favor men. Maybe things have changed since I was an undergrad but I saw some pretty aggressive behavior among premeds—sabotaging experiments, stealing notes, etc.
It seems to me they mainly disagree on the margins.
BTW, Megan McArdle weighs in:
As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People – Bloomberg
MM,
Your comment didn’t make much sense to me but for me the issue really comes down to this question: Why are there gender differences in professions? Differences that exist in many countries, not just the United States? Chalking it up to men telling women they are dumb doesn’t cut it as an explanation anymore.
I don’t think I want to read an exchange if it focuses on physicians, because I don’t think that is where the issue lies. I think the issue is math, and I think lumping a lot of STEM majors together, with various levels of math intensity obscures the point.
Computer programming majors are interesting because of the extreme splits btw/ math and verbal abilities on GRE scores: high math, low verbal. Computer programmers are also generally paid less than people in other occupations with similar math aptitude. I suspect the explanation is that those with more than programming skills obtain non-programming jobs, whether it be as managers, salespeople, consultants or just about any occupation these days which touches on computers. OTOH, programmers are likely to work for corporations which seek to maximize returns by hiring people solely with programming skills, unlikely to leave to go elsewhere and know where to find them.
Foreign, non-white female scientist writes:
No, the Google manifesto isn’t sexist or anti-diversity. It’s science.
PD,
The discussion of doctors is a minor point in the original piece. I agree with what others have said about that portion being a weak argument.
It doesn’t focus on physicians there’s just a little side remark to the effect of “thank goodness we don’t have that problem in the practice of medicine” which I found sort of obtuse.