Re:Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
by solidsnack9000 on Saturday February 17, 2018 @12:30AM
(#16399230)
High "neuroticism" is tendency to ruminate on one's life experiences in a negative way -- to reflect especially on difficult situations and experience anxiety or distress. It is one of the "Big 5" personality traits.
It's not the same thing as being crazy or a neurotic in the Freudian sense (which is not a personality trait but a condition or syndrome, more or less vaguely defined).
Re:Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge
by fareesh on Sunday February 18, 2018 @08:30PM
(#16410115)
Neuroticism should be parsed as a reserved word. It is a technical term and his use of it is proper since he is quoting academia. The results of research are not stereotypes. That would be like saying that it is a stereotype to believe that people who smoke have a higher possibility of developing cancer.
It is not problematic to use the terminology of the field that you are citing. The problematic part is misrepresenting those words as judgements. That would be like firing our programmer for lazy-loading images because we can't tolerate laziness at our firm.
This was where Damore's got his words twisted in his mouth: He never claimed that!
The problematic claims he did make are that women - on average - "have a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading" and are more prone to "neuroticism". Nowhere in the memo does he touch upon women's fitness for SWE jobs -- even though everybody seems to think so.
Whether he promoted stereotypes about women is another story (although most of his claims seem to have some backup by actual science) but the whole thing would have never blown so badly out of proportion if it wasn't for people who circulated a malicious and wrong summary of this memo, either intentionally or by being hanger-ons.