It's not necessary to tediously counter-argue every single argument the author made. I'm sure you don't expect people to counter-argue overly long badly written texts by various political ideologists from today or the past. I'm convinced it suffices to just argue why summary is wrong or rather the opposite is true.
As a matter of fact, other people have done this work for us, so instead of arguing it suffices to do a literature research. (I'm sure you know how to google feminism and that you might have an hour or two time to watch Youtube) But I'm happy to bring my own crude arguments:
- people, both male and female, oftentimes don't do things because they think they are not able to do them
- teachers have a bias towards encouraging certain stereotypes
- the whole environment pushes certain behaviours and interests on people
Speaking for myself (being male) my Physics teacher said nothing when I told him in class that I'm going to study Physics. He was encouraging the other people who planned to study that or an Engineering subject, not me. Even my father discouraged me from studying it because he thought my grades where not good enough and that I wouldn't be that kind of person. Still I managed to study very quickly and successfully. During my studies I also learned, that my thinking is different than other peoples'. I think more in pictures, whereas my peers in Theoretical Particle Physics rather thought in texts.
At work I often get overtalked and still deliver over-average results because I emphasise being polite, use proper argument and I look 10 years younger than I am. This really sucks and this proves to me that if you are female, you are basically screwed if you want to do something engineering like because even Engineers don't act analytically but emotionally based on prejudices.
I haven't seen a single criticism of the paper that even recognizes the author is referencing large-scale incontrovertible research involving the Big-5 personality model (the giveaway is the use of terms "agreeability", "conscienciousness", "neuroticism"). Instead we get what you offer: off-hand casual assertions that there must exist research which runs against large-n and replicable science-driven studies using the only mainstream and empirically-supported model of personality that seems to work.
Basically, this makes criticisms like yours on-par with climate change denial in the sense that they either fail to grasp the point being made or offer personal observations on irrelevant points as rebuttal. It is bad news for Google either way, since the author is correct to point out among many other things that high levels of "agreeability" are demonstrably bad for anyone to have in corporate environments, and if this affects men in the same way it affects women then why are the solutions gender-excluding? Anyway, perhaps you should research the Big-5 model if you aren't familiar with it: very interesting new research coming out on it continually.
Because it isn't relevant. The major weakness of the paper isn't that there are studies suggesting some differences between men and women, but that it doesn't convincingly argue why these difference are relevant to what is being suggested.
"The major weakness of the paper isn't that there are studies suggesting climate change exists, but it doesn't convincingly argue why these difference are relevant to environmental policy."
The author doesn't need to "prove" the science he references is real any more than I have to "prove" that climate change exists in order to discuss it. At a certain point, people are either educated or ignorant. And ignorance may be bliss, but there is zero reason for anyone grounded in rational skepticism to take the people attacking this guy on science any more seriously than they would take climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers, etc.
There's also no support for his conclusion that Google therefore doesn't have an obligation to improve diversity measures (which, as a normative claim, can't be negated by citing scientific research).
And above all, there's zero support for his positive claim that Google has a real obligation to adopt a definition of diversity that benefits him and not women, nor that Google has an obligation to defend and make accommodations for his (abhorrent) opinions.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042812... https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates-play/201...
As for the rest of your comment, it perfectly illustrates my comment above about critics having no clue what this guy is saying. At the very minimum, you are dead wrong to claim the author does not say that diversity is important and that Google should not address it. He simply says it should be addressed in non-discriminatory ways, something any sensible reader should have noticed had they read the ENTIRE SECTION he included titled "Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap".
And with that, I'm jumping out of this discussion: it pollutes the HN discussion section to have to repeatedly state what the article under discussion actually says.
> There's nothing in his evidence about women's personality traits that can lead you to the conclusion that they're necessarily underrepresented in STEM and in computer science.
Please explain where in either of your sources it says that women should be underrepresented in STEM and computer science - at all (why not the other way around?), let alone to anywhere near the extent seen today.
Hint: nowhere. Getting to there from personality quizzes is the unsubstantiated logical leap the parent was talking about.
Where does he do that? If I recall correctly, he mostly wanted to discuss the company culture. There were policies that were mentioned, but only to support his position that the company culture was supported by company policy.
I think if you want your argument to be more convincing, it would be nice to spend less effort on trying to brand the opponents "climate change denier", which sounds like a thinly veiled attempt to capitalize on a tribal thought-terminating cliche - basically a highbrow structural equivalent of calling someone a Nazi - if you're in any way like a Nazi, you can't win an argument, whatever the argument is about, because that would mean being a Nazi is good, and we all agree it can't be true! Addressing the argument directly instead of trying to affix the killer label is what should distinguish a reasoned rational discussion from a televised political debate.
> but there is zero reason for anyone grounded in rational skepticism to take the people attacking this guy on science any more seriously than they would take climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers, etc.
There is also zero reason to consider comparing somebody do anti-vaxxers or any other outgroup a rational argument. You have many good points here, you don't have to boost them with irrational appeals to tribal cliches (even if you assume everybody is in the same tribe as you, it's still not rational argument). Pleading the rational arguments is better than pounding the table.
I took it as an argument by analogy. A more analytical approach like listing logical errors and fallacies wouldn't go over well either. I'm curious how someone else would phrase those points without neutering them.
“The major weakness of the paper isn’t that there are studies showing a natural variability in Earth temperatures over time, but it doesn’t convincingly argue why that variability is the cause of recent sharp temperature increases.”
Well, the grammar of the sentence doesn’t really make sense (even in the original), but you get the point.
Intrinsic gender differences exist, like natural temperature changes exist. But in both cases, they do not explain all or even most of the observed variation; the rest is caused by society.
Likewise, biological arguments are irrelevant to the overall conversation about diversity in tech. And I'm speaking as someone who thinks that there are a lot of flaws with the current attempts to solve these problems. I think diversity policies are often misguided and lead to suboptimal solutions. But I think this is a hard problem, and there are not going to be any easy solutions. The argument that women aren't biologically suited for working in tech is the lazy and stupid solution. All it does is draw lines between us and them and give newspapers a bunch of trash to print.
This is not what the writer says.
> I think... there are not going to be any easy solutions.
The article suggests a number of non-discriminatory solutions Google could easily implement.
I've seen that research. What conclusions do you think you can draw from it?
That might be wrong. I think using emotions as a guide reason can work, sometimes very well. It doesn't link anything to women - women can be disengaged and men can be emotional in the ordinary course of their day.
That surely sucks and should not happen to you, or anybody. However, it happens - and it happens to many people that tend to be introverted, shy or just tend to be conflict-avoidant. You'd be surprised how many such people are among males. Not every male is a stereotypical hyper-aggressive alpha.
> if you are female, you are basically screwed if you want to do something engineering like because even Engineers don't act analytically but emotionally based on prejudices.
I find it somewhat disappointing that you just made judgement about millions of people working in certain area because you've had some bad experiences in one place with a handful of people - most of which probably didn't even realize their behavior is counter-productive and would be ready to accommodate given proper tools - such as meeting setup with explicit way of ensuring everybody has an opportunity to participate and somebody who is more extroverted and verbal does not hog the scene. There are many known methods to do this and many people who are trained in doing it, one only needs to be willing to look it up and use it. I would think it's much more productive approach then rendering a wholesale judgement on the whole field and declaring it hopeless.
I would say approach of "if you're female and want to Engineering, you should be ready to overcome some challenges, and here are the tools for doing so and for those wanting to help in this" is a much more productive approach.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
It seems there's good evidence that on average, biology affects career preferences to an extent. (Preference differences were even shown in 2-day old infants and (with a rather large standard deviation & n=41, iirc) primates.
The OOP's argument, to me, seemed to be primarily against institutionalized discrimination (e.g. affirmative action), which seems reasonable to me.
Not that status quo is OK. But there are probably better ways to help -- like programs aimed at introducing girls to computer programming, for example.
I think you should brush up on the meaning of the word "proves".
And I'm not just talking about being able to "Google it". If I use Google or a general search engine then I have to wade through who knows how many links of ambiguous quality and/or bias.
That stuff gets fueled by articles leaving out certain numbers to show a desired conclusion.
True or False isn't the problem. The problem is avoiding key points that you have to already be knowledgable enough to realize what's missing. That's how people end up with "facts" that are still wrong.
You leave out important information to reinforce a bias and it will get reshared as "fact".
Happens all the time with any topic that's even a little heated.
Googling and searching can give you a scan of total web assessible content.
Ultimately you need to either review available knowledge and make decisions or put your trust into an external entity.
People are sick to death of speech codes, wrong think, collective mob mentality enforcing what is and isn't ok to talk about and which opinions you have to hold to be in line with acceptable thought in media, corporations, silicon valley, education, etc.
As you stated, the facts of the matter don't have relevance here. And if he was wrong, why not discuss it rationally and unemotionally. Or even disagree and move on.
But no, now he's fired for having the wrong unspeakable points of view that do not fall in line with the state religion of mandatory gender quotas.
https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slideshow/embed_code/key/3...
Of course men and women are different on average, but are they different enough to justify the massive disparity in tech? No.
> It is important for us to know that females begin in high school to perform less well than males on mathematical problem-solving tasks. Problem solving is critical for success in many mathematics-related fields, such as engineering and physics. In this sense, mathematics skills may continue to be a critical filter.
It speculates that this may be because
> the content of problem-solving items on those tests may have heavy representation of masculine-stereotyped content, which has been shown to produce better performance by males in some studies, although results on the issue are mixed
So the Figure 1 the slide uses from the paper has smeared the critical skill, from a software-development perspective, across a large set of other math-related skills. The results of the paper with respect to that skill are inconclusive, not surprising since it's a 27-year-old meta-analysis. Surely there are better results to cite by now?
Google or a college level computer science course is specifically pulling from adults who are in the very top percentiles in logical/quantitative skills.
The abstract of the paper notes that while the math difference is small among the total population: "differences favoring men emerged in high school and college" and "grew larger with increasingly selective samples, and were largest for highly selected samples and samples of highly precocious persons."
So the slide deck obscures the fact that in the relevant sample, men have better skills, by including the general population (women, average folks) where there is no difference.
Nonetheless, there is research indicating gender differences in math vary greatly between countries and appear to be correlated to other measures of gender equity [2]. Even in countries with relatively large discrepancies, there's not a big difference. I couldn't find any meta analysis of specifically programming skill, but an analysis of one CS department didn't find gender differences due to ability [3]. An older study showed women and men scored similarly on an introductory class, but women were less likely to get an A or A+ [4]. A small study of elementary students showed that girls and boys did equally well on easy problems, but boys did better on hard problems [5].
[0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
[1]: Compare these tables for math and computer science: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab34.pdf and https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab33.pdf
[2]: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/136/1/103/; PDF https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Else-Quest/publi...
[3]: http://www.pd.infn.it/~lacaprar/ProgettoScuola/Biblio/gender...
[4]: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED384389.pdf
[5]: http://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/publications/Sullivan_Gender%20...
The data from other professions overall seems to be in line with a "women less interested in systemizing activities" http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
In particular, why is math so much better?
It's a much smaller field, with far fewer lucrative jobs. For any given smaller fields, there could be a number of reasons why it is more or less equal. My hypothesis is that men are biologically more inclined toward geeking out and doing coding or such for fun. If men who are good at math are also geeking and out and coding, while women just do their high school math homework, women would have a comparative advantage at plain math as opposed to computer science.
This would suggest that the gender gap could be reduced by forcing women and men to do computer programming as part of a standard high school curriculum. But the idea of forcing women to do something other than what they do in their free time, just to close a gender gap, seems to me pretty appalling totalitarian.
Nonetheless, there is research indicating gender differences in math vary greatly between countries and appear to be correlated to other measures of gender equity
Reading the studies, some things are positively correlated, some are negative. Some things have no correlation. There are lots of controls and data manipulation going on, hard to tell if the dredged for the results or not. And if you look at other types of studies you see the opposite result -- http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
I couldn't find any meta analysis of specifically programming skill, but an analysis of one CS department didn't find gender differences due to ability
If the scores are equal, this would suggest no bias in selection. If women are unfairly excluded from computer science, or face a higher bar due to discrimination, then since they were more selected their scores should be higher.
A small study of elementary students showed that girls and boys did equally well on easy problems, but boys did better on hard problems
Keep in mind girls mature faster and differently, so differences in elementary school aren't all that predictive of differences later.
If CS doesn't involve a lot of math, what does it involve that might be impacted by biological or psychological causes?
(P.S. I went to a STEM high school and I know plenty of women who are absolutely stellar in mathematics and science, so I know that's not the issue here.)
Re your question on biological or psychological causes, why limit your consideration to those areas? The evidence points to social or economic causes, given the large shifts in women over just a few decades:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
1. Women are generally more conscientious and studious. I've seen data they do more homework, get better grades, even in math, and are more likely to make the honor roll. 2. The more difficult the math test, and the higher the score bracket, the more men outscored women. Average SAT score for men was only a little higher. But among those scoring 800, men outnumbered women two-to-one (this has changed a bit, but they have also made the math test a lot easier, far more testers get an 800 math than get an 800 verbal). Then when looking at who gets a 100+ on the American Mathematics Competition tests, men dominated by about a 10 to 1 ratio. 3. I have observed throughout life that men seem a lot more likely to "geek out" on stuff -- whether that be coding all night for fun, editing Wikipedia articles, taking apart a mechanical device, trying to beat all the quests in an RPG, etc. This is inline with studies showing men to be much more system oriented. I have a hard time believing this is due to culture messaging because for a lot of these things men receive enormous cultural messaging that they are losers for being such geeks, yet they do it anyway because it is such fun. 4. Men tend to have higher variance in almost all things. More men at the top, more men at the bottom. 5. This Stanford article notes "Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. " http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... I think that skill becomes more important the harder a math test becomes, or the harder a programming project is.
I think the 1970's style computer punch card programming, which was very corporate, and did not involve as much keeping large complicated systems in working memory, was less prone to creating a gender imbalance. It more favored conscientiousness.
Whe computers became available in every household, men were much more prone to geek out and become expert programmers on their own time. This means the pipeline of programmers ends up being much more male dominated.
Furthermore, the skills required to be a computer programmer at a top company like Google, require someone from the top percentiles in being able to juggle items in their head, and there are a lot more men in those percentiles than women. I think programming at Google is much more akin to doing well on the AMC than it is to answering an average SAT-level math problem. When we not the disparity in math ability is small, it obscures that the disparity at the very high ends is much larger.
Show me how many standard deviations apart men and women are when it comes to skills that lead to success in CS.
In that case, even at the IOI level (high school, so 14-18 year old kids) women are already severely underrepresented: https://www.quora.com/How-has-female-students-participation-...
You see the same thing at the college level too (for example topcoder where they isn't even any possibility for a sexist team selection bias since anyone can just register and compete).
In some sense, it makes it not tech industry's fault. It's a failure of our education/training pipeline where we are not training competitive women even from an early age.
Competitions are overrepresented by people who think they can win. We are taught that confidence and overconfidence skews male.
Oh. And that would be a biological, innate difference in behaviour between men and women, wouldn't it?
And even if women are as good as men at maths or computer programming- which wouldn't surprise me much- can't they be just less interested in it, just in the same way they're less interested (as you seem to imply) in competition?
And could I be as good as the average woman in teaching or as a nurse? Possible. Am I interested in it? No.
I wasn't taking a position on the debate either, just pointing out that specific argument could be problematic.
Regardless, I'm opposed to affirmative action for many other reasons anyway.
Many people would disagree, and some would have you fired for saying that.
As far as the presentation, it accurately notes that as far as we can tell, the average difference in ability between men and women is very small or zero. But there is compelling evidence that men and women do naturally differ in interests (the "people vs things" thing), which if true would directly lead to unequal representation in various fields.
This mentality is exactly why the Google enginner made the post. The company and many others like it are forming echo chambers where anyone with any opinions that go against the status quo is fired. That's ridiculous! Especially with something as nuanced as sex and gender.
It is a known fact that there are physical[1], emotional, and psychological[2] differences in people around the world. If there are psychological and emotional differences between the genders, then why is it so surprising to think that they would overall have different career preferences? The fact that someone would fire an employee instead of let them question the boundary between biology and cultural influences is absurd.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
Here's an outline of what I believe to be a useful model, and some useful questions to ask, and experiments to run in real life to change things.
+-------------------+
| |
+ |
+---->X1+---+ |
| | |
| +-->Q |
M+------+ | + |
| | | v
| | +--------+W
| | ^
+---->X2+---+ |
+ |
| |
+-------------------+
The slides, and most peoples argument is based on the model where there is only one factor math ability, which is why people go 'oh but that doesn't account for it / the disparity is so small'.
The important question is how do all the factors ADD UP?
Now,
If Q does not correlate with W, fix your interview questions first.
Then, if you want more women to do well in the interview, well, ... -- the wrong approach is to compromise the integrity of the interview, which compromises the company's business, and which is demeaning to women, although you could use this as a proxy to make the interview more comprehensive -- the correct approach is to investigate X1, Xn factors and train to remove these discrepancies earlier on way before the interview itself, if we decide that we want to. biases in the interview processes are only biases when removing them improves the correlation between Q and W
Another thing to do is to change the nature of the work itself. In which case the factors and interview questions will change accordingly. Play to peoples' strengths!
The nature of the work must include the performance of the team including the individuals as there may be a benefit to representation when it comes to solving problems of a crowd with varied people.
Interestingly, the Google article covers a lot of this, and even suggests some changes that can be made.
A large number of factors can quickly add up even if the individual factors as small.
I welcome comments from the more knowledgable, but I feel that a lot of knee jerk reactions here are just taking individual statements from the argument and loudly saying NO, or saying well there's no difference here.
I don't think it works that way. This version is problematically simplistic: I have +10 and you have -2; now add Affirmative Action and I've got +8 and you've got +2. I'm still not receiving negative discrimination. But, you're also missing the follow-on effects; specifically:
1) People who are not actually deserving on their own merits, but were getting in due to the privilege boost, are no longer present.
2) People who are actually deserving on their own merits, but were not getting due to other disadvantages, are now present. Overall merit of my coworkers goes up; I'm now working with better people and so get better/faster myself.
It didn't start as a zero-sum game; it's not going to end up as a zero-sum game.
Remember the myths of the meritocracy; success is not limited to the deserving, and the deserving are not limited from failure.
If you had +10 and they had 0, you would stay at +10 and they would go to +2, taking the place of someone else that only had +1 and leaving you alone. For you in this case it isn't a 0-sum because you never lose.
For the people on the edge, it is 0-sum because they are on the edge of not getting the position. Any advantage given to someone else removes them from contention.
This is making it real hard to understand what you're saying.
What is your understanding of how AA works?
To counter this historical disadvantage, the candidate possessing it is given additional 'points' which push them beyond the other. All other things being equal or close to equal, this becomes the tie-breaker.
I learned that the biggest part of AA is actually just letting the kids know they qualify. We grow up with the narrative that after highschool you do college; and that you'll succeed at going somewhere. Not everyone gets that narrative, so a big part of AA is finding the kids that qualify for admission / scholarship / etc, and letting them know that. The next part is helping them apply; if no-one you know has ever navigated an academic bureaucracy, it's confusing and intimidating.
It's like the Black Panthers. Everyone knows about the least of their efforts (police watch), because it's also the most controversial. Few people know about the bulk of their efforts (school lunches) because it's not.
[7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”
You can probably find some people who agree with individual parts of that but if you get a full bingo then you're basically dealing with a Nazi.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Ma...
No he doesn't. He says Marxists participated in gender/race politics, and the ultimate goal of Marxists was destruction of capitalism. Which, btw, if you read any of real Marxists - who aren't exactly hiding, thanks (not ironically, they shouldn't be hiding) to the wide freedoms allowed to all of us by American democracy, that's exactly what you will see, in very plain words - they blame capitalism for these problems and want it to be eliminated.
That doesn't mean, of course, that everybody who participates in gender/race politics is a Marxist. There are a lot of folks that legitimately want, e.g., for gays not to be booted off work for being gay, without necessarily buying into the whole eternal oppressor/oppressed identity/class struggle narrative. Neither it means - and nowhere it was claimed - that "black people, gay people, women, trans folk and the poor were in no way oppressed".
> then you're basically dealing with a Nazi.
You just called somebody a Nazi because he said Marxists are lefties and are against capitalism. Way to go.
No one asked for their opinion on Marxism. No one asked for their opinion on Google hiring practices. They volunteered both, and the fact that in their mind these things are entwined together.
Which, not coincidentally, is a talking point of those so far right that facist or Nazi is not a slur but a descriptive adjective, sometimes self-applied.
Plenty of people hate Marxists. It's the ones that think Google wouldn't hire gay people unless Marxist's wanted them to, and therefore hate Marxists that you need to watch.
This is false. Neither the manifesto was "about hiring less minorities", nor the footnote contained the conspiracy theory. The footnote contained facts, which you declared to be Nazi conspiracy theory because Nazi conspirologists mentioned the same facts. It's like saying somebody is a Nazi because Nazis think 2x2=4 and they do too, so they clearly agree with Nazis, so they are Nazis themselves.
> No one asked for their opinion on Marxism
You imply one should express one's opinion only if Powers That Be - of which you undoubtedly see yourself as a prominent member - ask them to? Wouldn't you like that. Fortunately, it's not the case - one can express one's opinion about Marxism whenever one likes to, and that doesn't make one a Nazi.
> No one asked for their opinion on Google hiring practices
Shut up, grunt, and back to the keyboard! We don't pay you to have opinions!
Sure, why not. Google has the right of insist their workers STFU and let the VPs think for them. It's not what it says on the box, but if it's what it is, no problem.
> Which, not coincidentally, is a talking point of those so far right that facist or Nazi is not a slur but a descriptive adjective
No it is not. Nothing expressed in the manifesto has anything to do with Nazism, and the only extremely tenuous connection that you could find is that some Nazi conspirologists also talked about Marxists participating in gender politics. Which would be very easy to observe to anybody who knows anything about current politics. Your claim that it is not a slur is a bald-faced lie.
> It's the ones that think Google wouldn't hire gay people unless Marxist's wanted them to
If you imply that the author of manifesto thinks something like that, it is again a lie. If you do not, I don't understand why you brought up those imaginary non-existing people.
I also find it disappointing, though not surprising, that the whole discussion of a long and dense text concentrates here on latching on a couple of words in a footnote, misinterpreting them in the most hostile way possible, affixing the most emotional and charged label available and refusing to discuss anything else on the grounds that affixing the label explains everything. It is, unfortunately, what many people on the internet think political discussion is. The same people then lament how bad the politics has gone lately. Maybe they should stop digging.
Maybe it’s not deliberate but given the context it raised a major eyebrow for me.
Nope, it does not. The only common things are that both talk about Marxists (as do many other conversations, including ours) and about gender politics (as do many other conversations, including guess what). Not everybody who opposes Marxists is a Nazi who thinks Jews from Frankfurt School want to take over the world. And not everybody who thinks class-warfare (or identity-warfare) approach to society is wrong is a conspirologist Nazi.
> Its a specific conspiracy theory btw
Right. And that's why using it as a generic club to bash over the head everybody who ever mentions Marxists and their participation in gender politics in negative light is wrong.
> Maybe it’s not deliberate but given the context it raised a major eyebrow for me.
Only because your major eyebrow was on hair trigger to be raised. You need to adjust your eyebrow so it won't raise over every mention of mundane political arguments and not call a Nazi everybody who says something about Marxists. Having such eyebrow makes you look bad.
If someone says "the left, including Marxists, is concerned with gender and race in a way it wasn't previously" then I agree totally. Likewise if someone mentions that various Marxist intellectuals have contributed to political theory around gender, race, etc., that's just a fact. If someone says "I'm a conservative, the politics around race and gender are harmful", I'll disagree strongly, but that's it.
It's this specific story or narrative that Marxist intellectuals were trying to use class warfare to gain power, and when it failed they shifted to promoting race and gender based politics to gain power, that is very troubling for me due to repeated experience. Citing it offhand as a commonplace makes me wonder whether he shares the same intellectual influences as the other people I've heard say it.
Stereotyping is ok, as long as we are doing it for the right reasons. For us, there's no need to consider the personality and the content of the message, as long as we can label him a Nazi because couple of words matched.
> Online people tend to take off the mask and you get actual Holocaust denial.
Wow, it's Holocaust denial now. Gowdin, save me!
> It's this specific story or narrative that Marxist intellectuals were trying to use class warfare to gain power, and when it failed they shifted to promoting race and gender based politics to gain power, that is very troubling for me due to repeated experience
Let's see. Do Marxist intellectuals participate in race and gender based politics? Yes they do. Do they want to have power? Of course they do, what's the point of getting into politics if not getting power and getting policies you like enacted? So what exactly makes you a conspirologist Nazi when you mention these obvious - and entirely unsurprising for anybody who knows what "Marxist" and "politics" means - facts?
> Citing it offhand as a commonplace makes me wonder whether he shares the same intellectual influences
Nope, nope. You didn't just "wonder whether he shared influences" (if you go far enough, everybody shared influences, otherwise we couldn't even communicate), you said his claims were literally Nazi talking points and connected to antisemitic conspiracy. Which is not true at the least, the only common thing is the basic facts which no sane person would deny. After recognizing those facts, the actual Nazis go way off course of the facts into the looney bin territory, and invent crazy conspiracies like Jews being behind all this to take over the world. The author does nothing of the sort. Yes, they both start with the same facts. That's because facts are facts, they are independent of who recognizes them. It's where you take it from there is important. The Nazis take it into craziness, as is their way, the manifesto author does not.
Because all positive discrimination is negative discrimination to someone else, so obviously when you are against discrimination you should be against positive discrimination too.
How do you know when you have enough positive discrimination?
Do you just make sure that the representation of different groups is the same as in the population? This is a poor solution because it cannot be said that this would have been the distribution without negative discrimination.
Also, along what lines would you now pick your categories?
Would you ensure representation for latino lesbian women who speak spanish and like chocolate cake on tuesdays?
Which is to say that the category can get arbitrarily small.
Those who do the former, point at decreasing gaps between population groups as evidence that their approach is more fair. Those who do the latter point at specific cases where a person was ipso facto denied something that they would otherwise be a better fit for, because they were positively discriminated on the basis of some factor.
The catch is that conceptualization of fairness is driven by empathy ("I wouldn't like being treated like that if it were me!") - and empathy in humans works towards individuals, not large populations. A guy who couldn't get a job because his race made him rank lower is easier to empathize with, because the injustice is done to him personally and explicitly, as opposed to another guy from a historically discriminated group who is suffering from an accumulation of subtle but systemic biases throughout society.
Thus, too much or too visible positive discrimination triggers a significant social pushback, which may well swing the pendulum far in the opposite direction.
But you're missing the point.
All discrimination is aimed at individuals. Claiming that because individuals of group A have been negatively discriminated against, you don't balance it out by performing positive discrimination for them (even if it is exactly the same individuals), because you achieve that positive discrimination by performing negative discrimination against another set of individuals.
If you notice that Zuckerberg rejected a person because she was a black woman, because she was black, and you counter that by somehow benefitting that woman, and having Zuckerberg pay some sort of penalty, then that is just and you have 'counteracted' Zuckerberg's negative discrimination.
But if, after noticing that Zuckerberg rejected a person because she was a black woman, you penalize him and make him hire some another black woman over where a white woman would have been more qualified, then you have not 'counteracted' anything. You have performed negative discrimination against another set of individuals, under the color of 'positive discrimination'.
Secondly, it does not belong in the work place where it is rightly perceived as an aggression by the female coworkers (Telling them the bar was lowered to recruit them, they are inherently inferior to men at the job etc etc.)
Edit: To all the downvoters - I'll be charitable and assume that you are just subconsciously biased and not outright sexists. To see your bias in this situation just try to imagine that 40 years back some employee working at the Google of the day wrote such a manifesto against positive discrimination in favor of African Americans, citing all sorts of statistics claiming how they are lazy, lack commitment etc. Would you guys have wanted to 'hey let's talk about it' as well?
As to "aggressions", I would challenge anybody to find a quote from the memo that could be considered aggressive. There are likely scientific inaccuracies, as with any hastily written and/or poorly cited piece. But I think the author did, on the whole, as good a job as can be expected at staying academic in tone and content. Lampooning him as aggressive seems disingenuous.
tl;dr they don't need to lower the bar to diversify the company.
That's wrong though. Pretty much all high profile, successful tech companies right now have more open positions than they can hire for. My significant other (also a highly successful engineer) and I all get recruitment emails from Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple/whatever every couple of weeks. They get countless applicants, but most of them are not what they want.
That means if you're trying to diversify, out of those thousands, it would be exceedingly easy to just pick all the ones that match the current flavor of the day in term of diversity, regardless of skill, and be done with it. Even though certain combinations of gender/ethnicity are (relatively) rare, there are a few, especially if you include bootcamps, self taughts, promoting from other departments, etc. If you hired 100% of them, it would probably make a bump in the company statistics.
My current employer is, IMO, doing it reasonably well. They don't lower the bar as far as I can tell, but widen the net (open offices in other regions/countries, have hiring events at more colleges/universities in more cities, organize diversity events to attract people, etc). It's not "enough", but it does move the needle and everyone that I've interacted with have been really good.
One of my previous employers straight up lowered the bar, no ambiguity. We would interview someone from a diverse background, they were obviously terrible (like, by a landslide), and they'd be like "Well...we really don't have many people from <this ethnicity/gender>, maybe we could hire them anyway". And sometimes they did. It did not end well (and gave fodder for racist/sexist people, ugh).
There are a -lot- of companies right now that do the later, and they hurt everyone, because they force those doubts and discussions to happen. It's easy, and if the people who have to pick up the slack end up bitching, you can just call them out for discrimination. I don't work at Google and have no interest to do so, so I don't know where they fall. One of my friends who work there and is a fairly vocal activist tells me its relatively okay /shrug.
1. Posing the question, "Was the bar lowered to recruit female or minority candidates?"
2. Stating that I did not have an answer to that question.
3. Suggesting that the author believed the answer to that question was "yes."
4. Asserting that it was not wrong for the author to dispute the merit of policies that he believed had lowered the bar in question.
5. Disputing the idea that the original memo was "aggressive."
The entire premise of the manifesto is that one third of the company only has a job because of their gender. In what world is saying to thousands of people "We only hired you because you don't have male genitals" is not an aggression? Maybe it's not to people who don't give two shits about their work, or their accomplishments at it, or whether or not they'll have a job next week. Most people aren't in that category.
Has you ever been in that kind of situation? Where somebody reduces your entire justification for existence to the color of your skin, or which chromosomes you've got?
And yes, I have been in a situation where my merit as an engineer was called into question (I'm sure most engineers have). At the time I felt that the assessment was unfair. However, even if it had been demonstrably, objectively unfair, it would be incorrect to call it aggressive unless the intent had been to cause or threaten physical or psychological harm.
Aggression is an accusation that hinges entirely upon intent. Even an act that actually causes physical harm is not aggressive unless the intent of the perpetrator is violent or hostile. Similarly, even a memo that actually causes psychological harm is not aggressive unless it was the intent of the author to inflict that harm.
I haven't checked that the citations are any good... but he certainly put them in.
Surely he owns copyright, and his work is being published without consent?
Or should I say... could you please add a citation? ;)
Without the links it looks like a bunch of totally unsubstantiated arguments. With the links, parts of it are better substantiated.
Most of the members of those groups would highly disagree with you. Most of the female Google employees who have expressed opinions about it on twitter are quite angry over it. And, regardless of how it was meant, saying that a third of the people at the company don't deserve to be there is hostile.
Let me present an argument:
"Black people are killers, thieves, and lazy layabouts. Statistics [Citation, Citation, Citation] support me. The only reason <company> employs black people is affirmative action. Draw your own conclusions, folks. ;)"
How is this not aggression? What would be aggression, at this point? Dressing up in a white hood, and circling the office with a wooden cross? Do we need to have rational, calm, logical debate about whether or not the statistics I'm citing are correct?
Physical violence isn't the only form of aggression. Telling your colleagues that they aren't wanted in your workplace is absolutely a form of aggression.
> And yes, I have been in a situation where my merit as an engineer was called into question (I'm sure most engineers have).
Was your merit called into question because of the colour of your skin? Or your gender?
There is a world of difference between being treated like crap for <some reason>, and being treated like crap because the asshole you're dealing with is prejudiced towards you. It really has to be experienced to be believed.
Introducing "killers" and "thieves" to this example distances it from the discussion we are having, since you introduced words with violent connotations. Let's leave it at:
> Black people are... ...lazy layabouts.
This is still a far cry from the contents of the memo, but we can work with it. There are a lot of negative adjectives that can be applied to this sentiment: Racist, wrong, counterproductive, even evil. But aggressive is still wrong. It just doesn't fit the definition. Stereotyping a group of people as "lazy" or even "useless" is not violent. It doesn't threaten violence, and it's intention is not necessarily to cause harm. Have a talk some time with an actual racist who is otherwise a peaceful person. They used to be very common. You'll hear them make all sorts of generalizations about black people that sound totally insane and horrible to us, but they don't mean it in an aggressive way. They wouldn't wish harm, physical or otherwise, on anybody. They genuinely believe that that is simply "how God made them" or something like that. Judging from the tone of the memo, plus the benefit of the doubt which we owe even those we disagree with, I think it's plain that the author of the original memo feels similarly.
Again, aggression is all about intent. You have little evidence to back the idea that our author guy wishes women, or any other person or group, harm.
Are you suggesting the author put forward a similar argument?
People have also made that exact same argument for decades. Racism was not a moustache-twirling Klanner setting crosses afire (Although it was that, too.) It was the reasoned, fact-supported argument for why people of colour are not as good as Real Americans. Ever since the civil rights movement, it has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the workplace - possibly because most of us accepted the radical notion that the color of your skin has no influence on the quality of your work.
His argument is let's treat people as individuals and we should stop using inappropriate grouping to push a discriminatory agenda.
An accurate analogy using race might be:
White people are more shy on average than Black people. Companies are using this statistic to justify white only social skills classes.
I think that discriminates against all the black people who are also shy. Let's just make it so any shy person can go to these classes.
I read the paper. I don't see at all how it relates to fascism, Trumpism, or whatever you want to call it.
I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination.
If there were factual inaccuracies in what the author wrote, why not discuss them? Why not use high-quality sources to validate your argument? I wish it was the opposite, but I don't have the time to research the psychological/sociological perspectives on these issues. Human civilization has grown thanks to being able to specialize. I specialize and (hopefully) make contributions in one field, but I depend on others that have specialized elsewhere to provide knowledge and resources I can depend on.