That's a major crux, though. You're implying that what this fellow did was provide a reasoned complaint, but if I were to distribute manifestos at my workplace, unsolicited and unofficially, I'd be disciplined or terminated regardless of what was written in it.

To add to that, it wasn't a constructive argument with a new solution -- the only proposition was regressive action. I'd posit that it's akin to someone arguing that since civil rights were not smoothly implemented, we may as well roll back the clock because some members of society had it easier that way. It's pretty weak, and certainly not what I'd call a well-reasoned manner.

My understanding is that it was shared on a message board of some kind intended for employees to share and discuss their thoughts. If that isn't true, and he sent this document out to some mailing list or what have you - then I take back what I said and agree with you (though firing seems a tiny bit extreme).

To your second point, the document proposed multiple steps at investigating or remediating the problem, such as the author saw it. Regardless, I hope you would agree that applying the standard of "You cannot discuss a social problem unless you have a solution to it, or else you will be fired" seems suboptimal.

> "You cannot discuss a social problem unless you have a solution to it, or else you will be fired"

This isn't what happened though; this guy circulated an authoritative sounding memo accusing the women in Google's workforce as being held to a lower bar as the men, and outright stating that their "biological differences" was holding back engineering productivity.

I must have missed the parts where he explained that women were held to a lower bar or that biological differences were holding back productivity. Perhaps you could quote them, or refer to the specific sections of the document, I'll reread and then be able to have an informed response.

Don't hold your breath. It's easier to regurgitate what you read somewhere else. Which seems like more than half the commenters are doing here.

At just about every opportunity he used words and phrases like "average" and "in general" to make it clear that these metrics are just that, average.

He clearly points out that any individual woman may be more suitable to leadership and tech than any individual man, but when forced to generalize, then we must be honest about the averages.

here you go.

> "Women, on average, have more:"

> - "Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs"

> - "Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness"

> - "Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men..." (Ironically, this is a good thing for an engineer to have)

He provides no source for this.

> "Google has created several discriminatory practices: Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race, a high priority queue and special treatment for 'diversity' candidates, hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate."

And blatant disregard for the social context that these groups exist in.

He does a provide a source in the form of a wikipedia article that uses actual citations [1]. The version with sources (gizmodo removed them in their first publication of the memo), is located at [2].

As for your comment on his "blatant disregard for social context", he explicitly mentions that he believes that biases should be corrected and that society probably also is to blame [3], he just doesn't believe that biological factors does not play any role at all.

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

[2] http://diversitymemo.com/

[3] http://diversitymemo.com/#suggestions

> he believes that biases should be corrected

So he believes in decreasing the false negative rate? I'm confused.

Guess people didn't get it. It's not believable to claim to want to correct biases when you want to remove measures that correct biases. Even more ironic is using much of the paper to argue differences between men and women just to say that men are being discriminated against because they aren't treated exactly the same as women. Therefor the program should be replaced by his own version with 4 out of 5 measure focused on women, but despite the differences between men and women doesn't discriminate against men, because he said so. The guy isn't rational, he has just come up with a lot of synonyms for "I disagree".

Thank you for clarifying.

Regarding the first point, about women being higher in neuroticism, the author does provide a source - wikipedia. I understand there are different versions of the document, some of which omit sources or links. The version I'm using as a reference [1] maintains a hyperlink to Wikipedia's page on sex differences in psychology. Wikipedia may not be the most reputable source, although I've always thought quite highly of it, but in this instance, Wikipedia, which does seem to support the author's contention, has it's source, an academic psychology paper. The paper's abstract [2] does also repeat the Google author's claim, that women are higher in neuroticism.

As far as the Google author's sourcing goes, I believe linking to a well sourced article on Wikipedia should be a sufficient citation for the document (which wasn't intended as an academic paper but something more like an argument on a forum - per my understanding).

I don't see how this claim, that women are higher in neuroticism, leads to what you alleged the author was claiming - that the biology of women hurts productivity at Google. This seems to me like a possible explanation of why there are not as many women in leadership positions, and not an argument that the women who are in leadership positions have any defect.

By analogy, suppose I was asked why there were few Chinese basketball players, and I answered that height is useful in basketball, and Chinese people are shorter on average than white and black players. This may be a suitable explanation for the observed phenomenon, or it may not be, but either way you should not interpret me as claiming that Yao Ming is a short person.

For your second point, this seems obviously true. The "false negative rate" presumably refers to when candidates who would be good hires are rejected for some undesirable reason. In other words, the test is generating an incorrect negative (your interview comes back "Do not hire" on a person who would make a good candidate).

This false negative rate effectively "raises the bar" to get hired at Google, albeit in an undesirable way. The initiatives that the author links to in this section are presumably aimed at reducing the false negative rate for women, and thereby lowering the bar that women need to clear to get hired.

Obviously it's a good thing to reduce your false negative rate. You get more qualified employees and people who are qualified get a good job. The discriminatory part of this, which the Google author is highlighting, is that Google wants to reduce the false negative rate FOR WOMEN and isn't applying these same initiatives to hiring in general.

I agree that the author did not have enough regard for the social context of his post. He seems to have believed Google's lies that they cared about letting employees express themselves and share ideas to improve the company - when, of course, Google is a soulless corporation that will fire anyone with the temerity to criticize their sacred cows. I think that says roughly that the employee was a bit naive.

[1] - https://www.scribd.com/document/355823379/Google-s-Ideologic...

[2] - http://doi.apa.org/buy/2001-01642-012

> The initiatives that the author links to in this section are presumably aimed at reducing the false negative rate for women, and thereby lowering the bar that women need to clear to get hired.

You (he) can't say that you are lowering the bar since a false negative is positive like any other positive. Widening the bar is a more apt analogy.

Reducing the false negative makes getting a job "easier" (a higher percentage of applicants succeed) and therefore is lowering the bar. I understand your point about how this metaphor may not be exactly the right language to use, but that seems like a trivial difference in semantics and not content.

I don't think it's a trivial difference. Lowering the bar suggest that people are now being accepted on lesser merits. But a false negative is a binary condition. Both positive and false negative results are over the bar. False negatives are positive results we misjudge. If he is suggesting something else he should say that and support it. I would define "a higher percentage of applicants succeed" as "more likely".

Imagine that applicants were scored between 1 and 100 and anyone with a score over 90 is offered a job. Suppose that being nervous in an interview gives you a -5. A nervous applicant has a higher bar - a 95.

Someone says maybe we aren't hiring enough women because women have been socialized not to be engineers and are therefore nervous when applying. Let's work on a program to help women be less nervous, then we'll hire more.

Now the DM author says "let's apply that program to everyone, not just women, otherwise we'll be lowering the bar for women." And Google immediately fires him. Your observation is that he shouldn't have said "lowering the bar" but it's objectively true.

In this example, the bar for women is 90 + the likelihood of being nervous * 5. If you remove the second term for women and not men, you are lowering the bar for women.

That's precisely _not_ what was said.

But I guess the brigading has commenced- I would invite you to read the thing without bias and read it's citations and sources. Even if you disagree that we could do more to remove things like, stress and status to make tech less appealing to men.. you might find out why people are agreeing with him and why this piece circulated internally.

Mostly, it seems, scientists agree[0] with the "facts" he states that arent' google specific. So dismissing it outright without having the discussion is only doing the women in tech a disservice.

[0]: http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

> Mostly, it seems, scientists agree with the "facts" he states that arent' google specific

Really? Yonatan Zunger[1] seems to disagree with you.

[1] https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

Four PhDs in Social and Gender Biology disagree with him.

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

He had some great thoughts and elucidated the best I've seen so far. Thanks for contributing this.

Yonatan Zunger says this:

> nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect,¹ and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it. But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else.

Except it turned out James Damore of the DM has a Masters in Biological Systems from Harvard. And is experienced engineer working in Search (he disputed the author's chops there too).

Calling it a "manifesto" is only being done by the media though, it's a memo, or at best the first post on a forum topic.

A "memo" thats primary focus was to have an open discussion based on statistical evidence and ideally foster a more welcoming environment to people who are not currently represented as well as Google would like.

It's not a manifesto. It is an opinion on how to make Google better and confront its biases. They are always looking for ways to improve but PC is beyond what is acceptable to look at.

"reasoned manner" != suggesting colleagues have inherent traits that make them less biologically suited to their work.

I get it. Some of the points in the memo were reasonable.

But just because the bread and cheese on your shit sandwich look delicious, doesn't mean it's not still a gross shit sandwich.

I meant "reasoned manner" in the sense that it was a document with footnotes citing scientific research, and that he wasn't out on the plaza screaming about how he hated women, or something like that. The former, even if you object to the conclusions or the spirit they are offered in, you can just ignore by not reading it, or rebut by pointing out flaws with your own document. The latter is obviously a real problem in every way.

Suppose someone asked why it is that Jews are overrepresented in things like winning nobel prizes, being millionaires, working as a college professor, or working in politics. My answer would be that Jews tend to have higher than average intelligence, so it is only natural that they are overrepresented in fields that require higher intelligence. But wait - some of my colleagues are not Jewish! Am I suggesting that my colleagues are less biologically suited to their work? Oh dear, that can't be right. Maybe the politically correct answer is that there is a secret cabal of Jews who run society and try to elevate their own into positions of power... but, come to think of it, that doesn't sound like such a good answer either. Maybe the real PC answer would be to accuse whoever asked of being a racist.

To your point about some of the arguments in the document being gross and terrible, I'd like to discuss those points in particular. I read the document and didn't see anything obviously wrong or objectionable. If there is something wrong, it seems to me the thing to do is correct with a better argument or better evidence, not fire the author for having the wrong opinion.

On page 3, he clearly discusses overlap between men and women even with biological differences. He did not write in absolutist terms.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

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. _______________________________________________________

On average.

He makes it clear at the beginning that individuals must be judged as individuals separate from their race or gender.

But, when talking about groups of people, the only way to do it is to use averages.

Girls like to play with dolls more than boys on average. Agree or disagree?

If you agree you're a sexist these days.

Which is a shame because real sexism is walking up to a girl playing with Legos and saying "here sweetie, play with this doll, it's more lady like."

We're now to the point where main stream thought has conflated real sexism perpetrated on an individual with the very mention of statistics of a group.