She made her managers mad while he made half the company mad.
Why do you and other keep propagating this myth?
If anything I think you are making it harder for women in IT:
You are building a narrative that many respected people doesn't respect girls in IT which probably makes it even harder for them to choose IT.
Also I think you are building up under the idea that men and women are enemies in the workplace.
At this point I think it is well established for anyone that cared to read what he actually wrote that he was trying to help bring more women into Google, not saying that those who were there were somehow unworthy.
The claims themselves, that innate biological differences between men and women can partly account for their different representation in hiring in certain professions, is pretty much beyond dispute and has so much academic research supporting it that it’s pure gaslighting to treat someone like they are sexist or discriminating or biased for saying so. Note this has to do with factors that lead to representation in certain fields, and is not a statement about whether people of a given gender actually perform jobs in that field in any better or worse way.
Both Gebru and Damore are pushing agenda-based interpretations of existing facts, and both are doing so in ways that are not appropriate for a professional workplace.
I am glad at least to see that Google handled both situations relatively consistently, given how extremely similar in scope and impact Gebru’s comments are to Damore’s.
Damore said more than just that there might be reasons for the lack of women in tech. He also said that we should stop trying to increase their representation. Among a bunch of other things.
Re: Damore, I agree. He was pushing a bad agenda that tried to draw more than is reasonable from some academic research on gender disparity.
Very, very similar to what Gebru did as well. First by pushing agendas in a publication leading to its disapproval, then in her follow up email.
The direct quote (which can be read in the link [0]) is:
> “What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference.”
This is a direct, explicit, unequivocal reference to researchers and ethicists employed by Google to write research and policy documents on fairness, DE&I, and bias, within machine learning, staffing and hiring, and other areas.
The phrase, “stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference,” cannot be falsely made to apply to any context other than actively encouraging coworkers to specifically stop performing their direct job responsibilities.
My suspicion is that you would try to falsely misrepresent Timnit’s imploring to stop work as instead being about some type of non-work related activities or optional / extra-curricular activities that Google wouldn’t have a formal labor productivity stake in - and if that is in fact what your response would be, it is completely and wholly false and wrong.
[0]: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
In poker terms: one party bluffed and the other party called the bluff.
Now whether the clauses were abusive and the company was compelled to satisfy these conditions is left to lawyers, I suppose. I'm not privy to more details to have an opinion one way or the other.
The job is to increase diversity and inclusion, not to write documents. Programmers get this in other domains (the job isn’t to write lines of code, but to provide value to customers), but suddenly become naive when it comes to things like this.
The James Damore episode is another example. It is essentially 100% equivalent to what Timnit has done in this chain of events, but in that case the “wokeness” bloc on Twitter called for Damore’s firing and railed against his perspective - virtually a complete double standard compared to how they view Timnit’s behavior.
By the mostly anonymous nature of Hacker News, and the removal of any type of social credit for patronage of different ideologues, the commentary here is able to be much more nuanced and try to really account for a much greater variety of facts or perspectives.