> This is a huge misrepresentation of the ideas of the memo.
People encouraging a 'charitable' reading of the memo have argued that the memo says that Google shouldn't aim for 50/50 diversity as a goal (or that increasing gender representation as an end in itself is likely to lead to sub-optimal outcomes), and that women and men are biologically different in their suitability for different roles. I'm really trying quite hard to think where the misrepresentation comes in, or indeed, if it's not about that, what the memo is actually about.
_Here_ is where they misrepresent what he said. He didn't suggest that men and women differ in their suitability for different roles, but rather that men and women _generally_ differ in their suitability for different roles. There will always be deviations from the norm, and given the fact that there are known physical and psychological differences between the sexes[1], I don't see why those differences wouldn't lead to differences in career choice overall. However, there are plenty of women suited to be engineers and plenty of men not.
Edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? If I am misinterpreting something, I would love to know the flaw in it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
I'm honestly not sure how one could in good faith make that case given the current climate. A couple weeks ago, I would have bet on his memo being generally derided but not anathematized.
> "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."
He also mentions this in one of his interviews [1].
This sentence is nonsense, which you can tell from how you had to formulate the conclusion. Not "A therefore B" but "A therefore you can't rule out B."
Yes there are gender differences in psychology. But the link between the specific gender differences the Manifesto author pointed to and the conclusion is non existent. The piece is just a bunch of handwaving. It's the Chewbaca defense of sexist ranting.
Here is a direct quote from the memo:
"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."
This sounds exactly like what the above poster summarized: "women and men are biologically different in their suitability for different roles".
My guess is because you've condensed the central underlying premise into a compact, impossible to misunderstand, obfuscate, or mischaracterize idea, upon which a real discussion can be undertaken. This is counter to the goals of one side of this discussion, in my opinion.
Using this "on average" bullshit when making adverse reccomendations aimed specifically and directly people who are anything but is an especially nasty sleight-of-hand, and sound reason to disregard the writer's claims of good-faith and benovelence.
Of course, it's possible that Damore is just an brainless idiot who is too intellectually mediocre to check his own work for basic logical consistancy, but he lost the benefit of that particular doubt When putting Harvard and MIT on his CV.
At this level, the rules are different. If, like Damore, you're presenting yourself as one of the best and brightest, you better live up to a very high standard when taking public shots at the standards of others. Otherwise, you could get dumped very unceremoniously.
The moment you point out that the same kind of argument was made about black people not long ago, most of the trolls just disappear.
He didn't say that either. In fact, he advocates for more diversity and suggests changes that, at least according to him, should increase diversity without the negatives he's concerned about.
The NYT piece could have just said something like, "...fired for harboring anti-diversity attitudes that are obvious from reading a deceptively worded diatribe," or something like that. At least be honest about what he literally said and what additional context and inferences add to the picture.
This is the "only the literal words should be taken" argument - but words can have contextual meanings above and beyond their literal meanings.
"Urban crime", for example, literally just means "crime in an urban environment" but is often used as a dogwhistle for "crimes committed by POC".
Same with Damore's memo - he may not literally have said the things people are seeing but - if you assume it was written in bad faith (which the pseudoscience and "I'm just asking the questions" would indicate) - the dogwhistles are clear.
By now I'm convinced he wrote the memo in bad faith. The moment he beelined to every alt-right media outlet wearing a "Goolag" t-shirt it was clear this wasn't just an honest mistake. Even an idiot would understand that writing a memo setting up a "left vs. right" argument and then attacking Googlers as "repressors misguided by leftist ideals", while laying out a flawed biological argument for why "women are not well suited for engineering" is not going to go down smoothly.
It's no coincidence that he admittedly kept pushing this around when it got ignored until it eventually "made it to the public." Had he really wanted to have an honest discussion with HR about practices, he could've emailed them directly. Then he sued immediately after getting fired. Very tight timeline for a well-intentioned snafu.
> Why argue that it says things it doesn't?
Where did I do that?
> At least be honest about what he literally said and what additional context and inferences add to the picture.
At least be honest about the actual content of the memo. The additional context and inferences are just fluff to mask the base premise: "women are biologically different, that means they probably don't want to work here, please stop trying reaching out to them, you are discriminating against everyone else."
Here: "while laying out a flawed biological argument for why "women are not well suited for engineering" is not going to go down smoothly"
Do you actually not realize that's what he said? Since we're on HN, I bet you wouldn't make such a sloppy mistake of imprecision if the topic was something other than gender/race/sexuality.
So far I've gotten a lot of people saying "he didn't day that!" but without explaining what he said. Please clarify.
There have been at least two large threads on HN on this topic. You would have me believe everyone is saying "he didn't say that!" but with no explanation of what he he said?
What he said was that in the aggregate, women and men statistically have different interests, behaviors, and performance in different fields. I can't imagine how sheltered of a life you'd have to live to not be exposed to this in real life, or more appropriately, how intellectually dishonest you'd have to be to pretend you've never noticed.
To me, this rise of anti-intellectualism in the west is rather scary.
...which therefore explains the lack of women in tech and leadership. People are taking exception to the latter claim: that the biological differences between men and women justifies the lack of women in the tech industry. The former claim, that men and women are biologically different, is uncontroversial.
> I can't imagine how sheltered of a life you'd have to live to not be exposed to this in real life, or more appropriately, how intellectually dishonest you'd have to be to pretend you've never noticed.
You are conducting a straw man argument against a claim that the other side is has not actually made.
Did you use justifies instead of explains accidentally, or is that actually your understanding?
> The former claim, that men and women are biologically different, is uncontroversial.
Have you been reading the same discussions as I have?
> You are conducting a straw man argument against a claim that the other side is has not actually made.
The irony.
As it is to claim that the reason for so few women in the tech and leadership is due to sexism, no? Oops, I guess not, there I go with my old fashioned misogynistic presumption of innocence. Silly me thinking the onus should be on the person demanding special treatment to prove the need, when of course the onus should be on the person providing that special treatment to prove why it isn't needed. Guilty until proven innocent, it's a brave and confident new world.
Wait, then what was "and then to call for the elimination of programs designed to encourage more women in tech" all about? I'm now in the position of having absolutely no idea what you are fighting for....it's not for programs to increase female representation, I presume it's not against such programs.....so what is it then? I guess we'll never know, which is fairly common in these conversations, because simply asking seems to be too much to ask.
Edit: (Sticking around to dole out some downvotes though I see, that'll teach me!)
Fair enough. That's a valid theory to entertain, and I'm sure there's a growing body of science supporting both sides of the debate. Now, the question is this: if that was the case, how do we determine the extent to which the biological factors affect career selection, when we live in a society that encourages gender stereotypes? If we don't know the extent, how can we jump to conclusions about outreach generating "a discriminatory framework"?
That, at the end of the day, is my main complaint about Damore's memo. It's just a weak attempt at generating outrage.
> To me, this rise of anti-intellectualism in the west is rather scary.
Anti-intellectualism has many faces. The fact that we are discussing this in an open forum, and that we could probably sit on a coffee shop and have a civilized discussion about it is proof that the whole narrative about "liberal values = cultural Marxism" is at least partially bogus. Meanwhile, the same people who complained about stifling free speech at Google are threatening to leak the names of liberal Googlers to alt-right websites. Where's the outrage about that?
There is extensive study on this topic going back several decades, if you're interested in the topic, there's not shortage of material. There's also plentiful anecdotal material where college educated forward thinking mothers very quickly learned the reality of nature vs nature after bearing children of different genders.
> Meanwhile, the same people who complained about stifling free speech at Google are threatening to leak the names of liberal Googlers to alt-right websites. Where's the outrage about that?
I'd have absolutely no problem condemning that whatsoever. Imagining your philosophical "opponents" as some sort of one dimensional monsters isn't doing yourself or your movement any favors.
That would have been a valid claim until the unfortunate incidents in Charlottesville (and Bloomington before that, and Seattle before that...) People threatening to expose liberal Googlers to the same kind of ecochamber that celebrates someone driving a car into a crowd is beyond the pale. Anyone who takes so lightly potentially having blood in their hands is a monster.
This is my last comment regarding this topic.
That person being me presumably. Guilty until proven innocent, a recurring theme lately.
> This is my last comment regarding this topic.
What a loss.
EDIT: Seems I'm not being allowed to reply anymore (gee, where do conspiracy theories about censorship of conservative speech come from eh?), so I guess I'll have to reply here...
> No, I was talking about the Googlers who were threatening to leak names to alt-right websites.
You wanted the people that are threatening to leak names to be outraged at themselves? I think I'm losing track of all the parties involved in this vast criminal conspiracy.
Anyways, besides this entire topic being utterly pointless, if the right to speak freely is granted to only one side, I guess I should take the hint and adapt to our new world by keeping my mouth shut.
No, I was talking about the Googlers who were threatening to leak names to alt-right websites.
I'd love to have my mind changed. Most of my friends are liberal and think this science is bunk, but from what I've read there is a lot of evidence that women are more interested in things than people, and a moderate amount of evidence that at least some of this preference is biological.
To clarify, I'm not saying that there's 0 possibility that there are differences between sexes, just that trying to rationalize the current gender imbalance in engineering as "girls being girls and boys being boys" is a bit disingenuous, considering different countries perform differently. This article has some interesting data to mull over: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/th...
There's no "right answer" right now, and yet there's a lot of people around here defending Damore's memo as if all the premises were completely accurate.
The idea that that women are more into people than men, who are more into things is much more well established. With large cross-cultural studies and meta-analysis showing one the largest effect sizes in social science.
Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where, and Why? http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x
Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/
But the % of women in CS doesn't seem to correlate very highly with my intuition about sexism. For instance I would never think that Mexico or Poland was a far less sexist place than Norway. Nor does it seem to correlate well with female student's math anxiety. Mexico and the U.S. seem to be very similar in terms of the math anxiety gap, but very far apart in term of number of female CS majors.
You could look at the charts and see support for the hypothesis that "there is variability in the % of women in CS therefore the difference is cultural" but you could also look at it and say "look across every cultural in the world women choose CS less often than men".
We also don't know why, it could be gender stereotypes about what field women go into, or it could be emphasis on passion vs income. With countries that place greater emphasis on community and income having larger numbers of women in CS, with countries that place greater emphasis on passion and interests having a lower number of women in CS.
Or they completely stop taking you seriously.
The increasing absurdity of this discussion is astonishing.
You take yourself really seriously, for someone defending the modern equivalent of phrenology.
> "we shouldn't do anything to increase diversity, because women are biologically different and hence they won't be interested."
This is not the argument. You should be ashamed of yourself for behaving like this.
So what is the argument?
If 80% of candidates were left handed, no one would think twice about 80% of hires being left handed. Ditto for female candidates. Ditto again for male candidates for relatively undesireable jobs. But once the topic of discussion is male candidates for highly paid jobs, the logic completely changes.
Pretend this isn't happening as much as you like, it's no skin off my nose.
And yet, that has changed over time, implying that there's definitely a big non-biological component to the ratio.
> If 80% of candidates were left handed
Right, because a biological characteristic that literally doesn't have any effect in professional careers is exactly comparable to a biological characteristic you say does make a difference. Talk about comparing apples with "things I say are an orange, but let's pretend I'm saying are an apple for me to draw this completely irrelevant analogy."
> it's no skin off my nose.
Of course it is not, and that's why you can be so blasé about the whole thing.
Which OP and I are not denying. Such a simple logical error I would almost expect among the civilian population, it's odd when software professionals on HN seem to completely loose their logical faculties when certain topics are discussed.
> Right, because....
See above comment.
I don't think there's any conflating going on when he literally says biological differences in preferences and abilities explains why there aren't more women in tech.
It doesn't help that in the English language the word "disposition" can be used to mean both innate tendency and preference. When I say "I have a nervous disposition" I mean "I have an innate nervous tendency" rather than "I prefer to act nervously", but "disposition" can also mean "the power to do with something as one pleases." The fact that he does pair it with "innate" suggests that this preference is something we are born with however, and something that would indeed impinge on our biological suitability for a role.
He even goes as far as to suggest that "there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles" can be and "we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this)." It seems clear to me that he is using quite causal language there, and this isn't just a "preference" for people-oriented roles he's talking about.
Also, to be charitable to NYT, the fact that we are having to be this forensic with language over something that was written last week (as opposed to Plato's Republic, written 5000 years ago and which has been through many translations), and still can't agree what the memo is about, probably suggests that any misinterpretation is understandable and probably not borne of malice.
We need to work on promoting common understanding and a common corpus of non-inflammatory definitions (i.e., the "charitable" interpretation of the other side) so that we can get back to the work of friendly political engagement and discussion. We must not be so quick to ostracize, mock, or dismiss those with whom we don't agree. It's usually not too hard to be sympathetic to their position if you strip away the political manipulation promoted by those who stand to benefit from divisiveness.
Not sure where you get "suitability" out of that. And not sure where you get "suitability" out of either "tendency" or "preference". Unless maybe the most adversarial reading possible, and even then...not really.
> "there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles" can be
Yes, and? In order for those who prefer more people-oriented roles to want/prefer/enjoy those roles. Incidentally: both men and women (larger overlaps, remember?)
> this isn't just a "preference" for people-oriented roles he's talking about.
That is exactly what he is talking about here.
> having to be this forensic with language
Not really. What is in the memo is fairly simple and obvious. It's the misrepresentations that twist themselves into interpretative pretzels.
If someone has a prevailing tendency, and it's a prevailing tendency that they are born with (i.e. an innate prevailing tendency), and that tendency impacts their ability to carry out certain roles, then they are innately less suitable for those roles. The second half is you selecting one definition of disposition (the "preference" one), and basing your argument on that.
What I see argued there is the tendency for women to prefer something like early childhood education or psychology over software engineering.
It has nothing to do with suitability at all.
See also: Why Brilliant Girls Prefer non STEM Subjects[1]
The studies it cites show that women who are good at math (SATs, I think) also have good verbal skills, so they simply have more options. And apparently people of either gender who have both options open to them prefer non-STEM.
That is even an ability difference (whether biological or not is irrelevant, though SAT scores appear to have a strong genetic component) that has nothing to do with women being "less suitable" for STEM and yet fewer women in STEM.
So your logic that any type of argument, even if it's just preferences, has to automatically mean that there is a claim (if hidden) women are less suited is quite simply wrong.
Apart from the mistake pointed out elsewhere of taking a statistical argument about populations that tries to explain population differences (and not individual differences) and turning it into exactly the essentialist argument you find objectionable.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
Similarly, a disposition that applies generally to a gender doesn't mean that gender is suitable or unsuitable - suitability is a term for policies that get applied to individuals.
You make an excellent point here. This is very common among James Damore's critics. Thank you for pointing this out.
Dictionaries define "suitable" in terms such as "such as to suit; appropriate; fitting; becoming", which all either carry a moral connotation (appropriate, becoming) or one of capability independent of volition (such as to suit, fitting). Let's not forget that one of the primary underlying moral motivators of the fight against sexism/discrimination against women is freedom (it's not an accident that "emancipation" means "release from captivity"). To turn, in this context, a statement that says that women do not want tech jobs into a statement that women can't do tech jobs (with a connotation of "even if they wanted") is not just a minor cosmetic change - along the axis that matters, it flips the meaning of the memo upside down.
He does say "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."
And "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business."
He basically says the gap isn't 100% caused by sexism, and he thinks gender blind strategies for closing the gender gap should be used instead of non-gender blind strategies.
I disagree, I'm all for programs that encourage more women in tech, even if the program has to be restricted only to women.(I think this also applies to minorities) I just don't think his argument to restrict these programs to only gender blind ones is a thought crime.
P.S. I'm so tired of defending this asshole, but people are aggressively filling his mouth things he did not say.
Of course variance within groups is larger than variance between groups, so making discriminatory policy decisions based on group averages is deeply unfair and offensive. That doesn't mean that setting 50:50 gender representation targets in job roles wouldn't be sub-optimal for what appear to be biological reasons.
A lot of stuff in that memo I thought was very offensive - reasoning about specifics based on group attributes is a logical error in the same class as racism and antisemitism - but it's also not reasonable to say that everyone is equal, and thus the distribution of outcomes should reflect the distribution of the population. Everyone is not equal.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...
The paragraph from NYT does not make any kind of normative "ought" claims at all about what is reasonable, it merely states that he was fired and this is what the memo said.
But what was written was not what the memo said. And Damore has been insistent that it wasn't his intention to say anything of the sort. It's what people have inferred about the memo, and the NYT author could have easily written "and made statements that can be fairly inferred to question female suitability for technical jobs". Or something pithier along those lines (I'm not a contributor to the Times).
>questioned the company’s gender diversity policies
It did that.
> made statements about women’s biological suitability for technical jobs.
It did this too. But I'd argue the NYT opinion piece is too vague here. "made statements about" does really mean anything. I suppose the "suitability for" is a bit wrong. More like "biological inclination towards" technical jobs?
That changes things slightly but I can't see it as a huge misrepresentation.
The underlying idea of the memo is that biology can partly explain women's career choices (true) and that Google should recognize this and factor it into their diversity targets more than they do. That second part is highly debatable. Without controlling for gender bias and many cultural/historical effects, I'm doubtful we can even really begin to detect how much biology influences the choices of any given individual in the real world. How can we blame biology for a woman's choice if the mere fact that she's a woman causes her to be reviewed more harshly by others for the same work? Taken less seriously? Etc etc. These are real effects, and until they are gone, it will be impossible to determine what role biology plays on average participation levels in tech.
(edited to clarify NYT opinion piece, as opposed to NYT article)
People, maybe fairly, have been criticizing Damore for his writing prowess. The same people should have a higher standard for a professional writer published in the NYT.
Damore's writing prowess is maybe not the issue exactly, other than it is a symptom of the lack of clarity of his ideas. Unclear ideas, unclear writing. It's certainly reasonable to conclude from Damore's memo that what he believes is that "women choose (and succeed at) tech jobs at a lower rate than men because on average they have biological characteristics that mean they tend to be more suitable for other kinds of work" ... preference, biology, culture, expectations, it's all one big interconnected system. He's not at all clear about what, given the biology, he thinks the "natural" rate is... unless he thinks it's already about right? So it's not clear what he means, or even if he knows what he means. Taplin could certainly have been more precise in the NYT, but Damore did nothing to control interpretation of his words (nothing, at least, that succeeded).
To me this is like trying to optimize software in the wrong place. Biology is surely a factor somewhere in the chain, but many other things are causing more problems, and in ways that are easier to fix, so we probably shouldn't spend time on the biology thing just yet, because it won't cause much impact overall.
It's worth pointing out that Damore allegedly posted his thoughts in an internal forum with the intent of editing and developing his ideas. He didn't get a world class editor (present performance notwithstanding) or the opportunity to print retractions with a presumption of good faith and professionalism.
> He didn't get a world class editor (present performance notwithstanding) or the opportunity to print retractions
I'm sure he is surprised at his memo's international newsmaking, but he is not modifying his stance based on the feedback he has received. In his recent WSJ article [0], Damore wrote "I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment" ... which indicates he still thinks the memo was basically fine and that that's all he was doing. He's focusing on the echo chamber and the most gentle and obvious idea in his memo (that not 100% of gender variance is socially constructed). He assumes the only people who were not in agreement with him and complained were those who believe "that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and all people are inherently the same."
He takes no responsibility for not ever quantifying the biological effect, yet still recommending changes to the processes based only on that the biological component exists at all. This makes no sense to me. Unless maybe he cannot even see the logical gap there because it is filled with his own beliefs and stereotypes about gender.
I assume that article gave him the opportunity to consult a world class editor, and he may print retractions if he chooses.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-was-fired-by-google-15024...
He is clarifying what he meant, to no apparent effect. It's not hard to find a clip of an interviewer asking whether he thinks women are inferior. He, predictably, says he believes nothing of the sort. And then this gets printed in the Times.
> He assumes the only people who were not in agreement with him and complained were those who believe...
I think all your other points are fair points for a discussion of the merits of his ideas. That discussion, at least on his part, isn't really possible now that he has been fired from Google and his views misrepresented so thoroughly everywhere else.
We'll probably just go in circles about this. The content of the memo, as a whole, does not reflect the harmless statement that "not everything is purely cultural" ... To suggest that biology might be even a significant factor in the lopsided representation is a mistake. Not just politically, but I believe factually too. And it is a bad one because it happens to overlap with the general stream of biases and impressions people already have about women in tech. And now they must also deal with people maybe believing their own interpretation of this memo. I think he should have been far more careful and specific in his terms.
Also, he could believe his views are not demeaning to women, and be wrong. It is hard to see our own biases. I feel I have shown much of my own in writing about this but life is short!
He was asked, in the Bloomberg interview [1] (30 sec in), whether he had changed his position at all. He describes the process of creating the document, and explains that the current version is what he believes is the scientific consensus on the matter.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-10/fired-engin...
He mentions aptitude in the essay:
"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."
He also fumbles over his description of this in one of his interviews [1].
> People, maybe fairly, have been criticizing Damore for his writing prowess.
Yeah, words matter, particularly when you're claiming your essay is representative of current science, and that you were a PhD student.
> The same people should have a higher standard for a professional writer published in the NYT.
This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper:
Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
"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."
This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper:
Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
I did feel the person who responded to me was still correct to have high expectations of linguistic precision for a professional author being published by a national organization.
Some of his suggestions implied that Google work practices could be more welcoming to people who enjoy more teamwork in their day-to-day (the bit about pair programming). And he mentioned that more flexible work arrangements would benefit people who wanted a different balance of work and family life. Both points imply that women want those things more (plausibly true, but I think that's an empirical question). So he thinks women generally want to work differently, but that's not saying he thinks they do worse work. If he thought that, he'd recommend putting women in less important roles or giving them easier work.
Google's current programs are ineffective and discriminatory, so alternative programs and work culture should be considered to achieve higher diversity.
How big part of the memo is focused on differences between the sexes? The section called Personality differences that everyone talks about is:
11 lines, 245 words, 1662 bytes.
Even if we include the only other place in the memo which reference this section (Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap), we are only adding a total of 7 lines, 222 words and an additional 1402 bytes.
The large focus of the memo was political diversity. About 97 lines, 1671 words and 11071 byes was written on that topic.
It is a result that the author of that memo should have reached after counseling and seeing evidence supportting of /equality/ programs actually being about equal treatment (or at least fair, as in having multiple possible measurements and a consistent policy of utilizing the best scores to reach a determination.).
I feel like a lot of animosity was allowed to fester among all parties due to a lack of intelligent, open, and respectful discourse about problems and perceived problems.
He clearly has beef with the unfair nature of those programs but they are still the best way I know of concretely responding to realities of a complicated world filled with prejudice and bias beyond any one organization's control. There's always room for improvement based on new data though.
Often, but not necessarily. Since this is a forum for people who like to be technically correct, I'll throw my two cents in here.
To give an example, let's assume that there's a split between group A and group B between high cost and low cost universities. Group A are 90% of the high cost students and group B are 90% of the low cost students. Google send representatives to mostly the high cost universities at the moment, because they're assumed to have the best students. This is resulting in a remarkably large proportion of As at Google. To counteract this, you could go and explicitly target Bs, which would fit with your description. Or, you could lower your threshold and start sending reps to lower cost unis as well. This increases diversity yet at no point is specifically preferring Bs.
I picked this example of high cost/low cost unis purely because it's easy, not to make any statement about whether this kind of thing happens or is important for future performance. this is also not a hugely important point, but it was floating about in my head.
Let's say Google has 10 reps, and in the old days 8 went to A, 2 to B. If they now send 5 to A and 5 to B... The A group will feel that they lost something, and the B group will feel like they never even HAD 8 reps, so not necessarily feel that things have become fair... It might be fairest to have a period of 2 going to A and 8 going to B for the same length of time that 8 went to A, and THEN balance it to 5 and 5... But if A suddenly goes from 8 to 2... well, those people are going to be writing memos like nobody's business about it. Even at 5 and 5, there will be memos. Even at 7 and 3, possibly. The slightest change to the status quo could provoke a memo.
(and for the record I do appreciate this comment, in case that didn't come across.. I'm responding in a similar spirit... not important but worth thinking through all the same)
(but he makes factual errors, so his argument is false)
Women are perfectly capable of choosing jobs they like.
That leaves a lot out, but it's the high order bit.
"Non-discriminatory [against men] ways to increase women's representation in tech include making engineering people-oriented (rather than systems-oriented), disincentivizing competition, endorsing part-time work, and making it socially acceptable for men to leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles, but a meaningful application of these strategies would prevent driven employees (mostly men) from working extra hours or taking extra stress, which would have disastrous consequences for Google's success."
Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
This piece was paid for and printed by the Times. It might have been edited by the Times as well. It's not a letter to the editor.
Either way, Taplin considers himself an expert on Silicon Valley culture and seems to have problems objectively describing at least this part of it.
Newspapers include opinion sections from very diverse authors. The NYT has, for example, published a section by Putin:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-cau...
The Times does decide what to print, even if they print an unpaid Putin. They would presumably decline to print a letter from Kim Jong Un about how he shot 38 under par, including five holes-in-one.
Yes:
https://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/editorial/op-ed/op...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.html...
This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper:
Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
If an article appears under the New York Times' logo and URL, then it can reasonably be assumed to reflect an opinion that the New York Times wishes to be associated with.
See their editorial submission page for yourself:
https://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/editorial/op-ed/op...
"We're interested in everything, if it's opinionated and we believe our readers will find it worth reading."
Right?
https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-r...
But you most probably are not.
Spend some time thinking about why that might be.
IMO it's fine for them to publish an editorial by Vladimir Putin, as long as he's not laying out a case for subverting elections in Ukraine (or here) or murdering unfriendly journalists. They caught some heat for letting him publish anything at all, if I remember correctly. But I think their decision was defensible, in part because he was writing on a matter of broad public interest, and because no reasonable person would assume the NYT supports Putin's more criminal-leaning behavior.
No. That is not a reasonable assumption. Newspapers frequently carry highly opposing pieces in their opinion sections. That's how newspapers have worked for a very long time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op-ed
The NYT has, for example, hosted Putin in the opinion section:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-cau...
It doesn't make any sense to publish something under your name and then complain when people think you're endorsing it. If I paste a pro-Nazi editorial into my blog, should I resent being held to account for it?
That's why it's called the "Opinion section":
https://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/editorial/op-ed/op...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.html
> Last week, Google fired a software engineer for writing a memo that questioned the company’s gender diversity policies and made statements about women’s biological suitability for technical jobs.
This is a huge misrepresentation of the ideas of the memo.
This level of journalism, both from the writer and from the editors, is disappointing.