For all intents and purposes the content of the memo was balanced, polite, and restricted to the Google audience. The adult reaction should have been to punish the leaker (which I believe should be an actual breach of the code of conduct) and organize internal debates to allow multiple viewpoints to confront.

Rallying with the hysterical mass and shutting down the minority voice is certainly not about supporting debates and free speech. It's about throwing red meat to the wolves so the company can quietly solve its all too real gender pay gap issues without making too much PR waves.

>being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”

Go ahead and claim women are more neurotic and have a lower stress tolerance. Don’t expect everyone to pat you on the back and claim you’re just expressing a minority viewpoint... because you clearly aren’t. James Damore didn’t bother to do any research on the topic - I guess he just assumed his feelings were correct? And he assumed he wouldn’t suffer any consequences for claiming 1/3 of his coworkers were meek easily spooked neurotics?

Go and actually read the original memo at https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso.... Which, for this particular point, links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizin... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism (see in particular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism#Sex_differences). From which you can access about a metric fuck ton of actual research.

We can't expect to have any reasonable discussion on the topic if the standard of criticism is not reading the piece one is criticizing, and then stating obvious falsehoods (like "didn’t bother to do any research") as facts - probably hoping other readers also won't bother checking.

EDIT:

Also:

> Go ahead and claim women are more neurotic and have a lower stress tolerance. Don’t expect everyone to pat you on the back and claim you’re just expressing a minority viewpoint...

Those are actual falsifiable statements. They can be either true or false. The whole idea of considering them as "viewpoints" is ridiculous and it's precisely what's the problem with the whole environment surrounding the discussion.

Stop it - you are being extraordinarily deceptive with statements like this. Did you actually read this memo? And I mean read it critically? Are these quotes falsifiable statements?

"These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics."

Didn't see a citation for that. Care to cite the evidence? Can we prove that this assertion is true or false?

"This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."

Would love to read your citation for anxiety leading to lower number of women in high stress jobs.

"Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them."

Again, I'd love to see some evidence showing that the desire for work life balance is the reason that men disproportionately in leadership positions in tech.

Stop pretending that just because the author has sources that his conclusions are supported. His argument was poor. Anyone with reasonable reading comprehension could see that, politics be damned.

Neuroticism is an actual measurable thing and the research seems to indicate that women typically measure about half a standard deviation above men on it.

I honestly didn't know this before but it seems like when he's making these claims he's using objective research that finds these things across cultures.

>> being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”

> Go ahead and claim women are more neurotic and have a lower stress tolerance.

Pichai seems to think that "neurotic" is an insult. Turns out it's just part of an established model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

He used internal messaging services. Someone leaked the document. That "someone" is sitting in his/her office today getting no punishment whatsoever.

Is it enough for some people to consider it that?

Consider gay marriage. Each side thinks the other is being bigoted towards some group. Do we just take people's words for it?

This only leads to people getting increasingly sensitive over increasingly minor things and it's a vicious circle.

So how do we break it? How do we re-establish open discourse?

The message here seems abundantly clear and I have trouble understanding how it can miscontrued to be anything other than reacting to a clear violation. I can't even think of how to restate what is so clearly laid out in the note.

I wouldn't rule out the potential that there is uneven enforcement of such violations, and that would make this action look questionable. But I don't know enough about Google's internal operations to get to that conclusion.

When a murderer is sentenced for murder... there are 2 levels of understanding the sentencing. One is that he broke the "code of conduct"/law, the deeper is why we consider that to be unlawful (societal harm).

Saying he clearly broke the code of conduct just shifts the question to how useful the code of conduct is.. its not some fucking holy unbreakable scripture from the sky, its man made, just as the firing is.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I'll even stick with your example in asking - is murdering someone a good way to start debating the "why" of the law against murder?

There are certainly examples where breaking the law proves to be a powerful and effective way to start the conversation. But how often does this hold true when breaking the law causes real harm to others? I doubt the answer is "never", but I can't come up with any argument for how this applies to the current situation.

Anyways my main point was the breach of code of conduct is just the technical reason he was fired. If you read the line item he was fired for, its clear its vague enough to be used many many different ways. I don't think its productive to focus on whether he broke some rule somewhere when the whole situation that led to the firing is known to us.

I think it is certainly a very fine line to walk and people (including Google employees) will definitely see it in a lot of different ways. But, reading this as an outsider, the note appears to me to address the situation very directly and conveys a real sense of urgency (more so than I have ever seen from any of my employers, at least).

"many points raised in the memo ... are important topics."

So what? Other points were a violation of the CoC. Goodbye, good luck, see you around the campus!

At every company in the world. You aren't seriously expecting a company code of conduct to be applied fairly in some sort of scientifically measurable way? The code of conduct is there to protect against the worst types of behavior, and plenty of bad behavior will slip under the radar. So what? It's not meant to create some sort of utopian workplace. It's meant to create a better workplace for those who have historically been discriminated against. So far, it looks like it has come in handy at least once in a very public way.

It should be. If violating the CoC has no consequences then there should be no CoC in the first place.

The CoC makes it clear that some actions and some types of speech are entirely unwelcome at the company.

The memo also makes it clear that if you have a minority viewpoint that does not violate the CoC, then you should be encouraged to express those viewpoints. It even gave specific examples of the parts of the original memo that do not violate the CoC.

This is problematic since the toxic effect of uncertainty and ideological supression at the work place is not mitigated by it being produced through arbitrary executives or an executives arbitrary interpretation of some given code of conduct.

edit: If the purpose of the code of conduct is to create this uncertainty, than that alone should be reason enough for the code to be improved.

edit2: And of course, this specific code of conduct did not generate the legitimicy it should have created, which is why we are talking about this incidence.

What's confusing or unclear about that? It's crystal clear to me that Google prioritizes a workplace free of harassment over your individual ideology. If your ideology makes other employees feel harassed or intimidated, you'll have to leave your ideology at home.

And if you're not clever enough to understand that a statement in a widespread memo like "women, on average, have more neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)" could cause one gender to feel intimidated or harassed, then perhaps you're not clever enough to work at Google.

Science is not an ideology or opinion; in a diverse environment, reasonable positions are disputed by arguments, not power play.

Exercising an executive bias to intimidate the employees into subscribing to a specific ideology is nothing this code of conduct were able to prevent. The coc could not perform worse measured by it's own goal.

It's no service to any code of conduct intention if a code of conduct is treated as some chilling orthodoxy that is used to prevent a communities open dialogue and self awareness.

"Women, on average, have more neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)." isn't a reasonable position at Google, or any other big company. If for no other reason, to protect the company from being sued for gender discrimination.

Neither are any of the following statements reasonable:

"Blacks on average are... [insert some negative]".

"Jews on average are... [insert some negative]".

If an employee can't figure that out, you should fire them with zero hesitation. Open dialogue at a place of employment has many limits, and it will never be the top priority. If you say something that offends enough other employees, you're going to get fired, and that's not going to change no matter who you work for.

Intimidating is a strong word for this, I think. I would call it intimidating if the original memo was a challenge to the code of conduct, as opposed to a violation of it.

Either way, I agree that other employees could see this as intimidation and that makes the whole situation much more complex. I suppose that ultimately I would not stand 100% in defense of the course of action, but I am also not grabbing my pitchfork over it.

If it's so clear, then could you specify exactly which parts of the memo were "fair to debate" (as Pichai says) and which part were "clear violation?"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

Which part did he break exactly? Bias? Seems like something that can be construed to mean basically any ideology or opinion, conservative or liberal.

Saying diversity training sucks, or that Google should re-evaluate how they encourage diversity, or that men are getting a raw deal, would have been tolerable.

What about that they are inherently less interested in football?

Culture plays an effect, but we really need to realize that biology probably pays a role too, and potentially affects gender parities in many careers.

Oh wait, maybe I don't agree with you...

However, that does not give licence to Google to place unreasonable limits on employees constitutional rights.

To do so would give privately entered contracts the power to overturn the constitution which society has enacted.

The debate here is over whether his comments were reasonable in this context.