Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer over his now viral memo

Re:Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer ... by ubernostrum on Monday August 07, 2017 @09:58PM (#14953005)

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

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

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Re:Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer ... by onli on Monday August 07, 2017 @10:38PM (#14953402)

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

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

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

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Re:Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer ... by ubernostrum on Monday August 07, 2017 @10:58PM (#14953608)

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

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

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Re:Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer ... by onli on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @08:31AM (#14957083)

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

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

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

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

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Re:Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer ... by ubernostrum on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @11:34AM (#14958887)

Also, the Google memo explicitly did not say that women should not be coders.

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

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

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Re:Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer ... by onli on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @02:09PM (#14960728)

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

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Re:Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer ... by ubernostrum on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @12:01PM (#14970595)

It is terrible style for you and Googlebro to keep asserting a 50/50 quota that nobody else ever said was the goal while insisting that it's your critics who are misrepresenting what was said.

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

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