The two main letters are F and P. Just focus on those.
I don’t know that Google was mischaracterizing this guy’s arguments - just that the matter shouldn’t be discussed at all. It isn’t so much that his arguments are wrong - they must never be presented in the first place.
Their Vice-President in Charge of Diversity sensed a disturbance in the Force, said “I find your lack of faith disturbing” and choked off the discussion with the Jedi mind trick. “You’re fired, rebel scum.”
Regards,
Shodan
I would say that up until the 90’s/00’s, this would have been a valid bias to have based on real-world experience about how men and women performed in the workplaces. Regardless of whether women and men are equally talented at engineering, women were actively discouraged from studying or going into tech fields. This meant that many women who had a natural ability for engineering ended in up non-engineering fields. Men, on the other hand, were encouraged to go into technical fields if they had that interest. I think this led to tech workplaces where the men there were natural engineers while the women were there because they thought it was a good career opportunity.
I’m saying that based on my personal experience of working as a programmer since the 80’s. Early on, women generally seemed to be in the field because they thought it was a good career path rather than they loved computers and programming. Some women did have that passion, but most quickly left the field or transitioned into a non-programming job like management, documentation, project management, etc. Even if the the programmer new hires back in the 80’s were 50% men/women, you’d end up with like 80% men to 20% women after a couple of years.
However, that is no longer the case. Starting in the 90’s/00’s, it seemed that the women getting hired were programmers because they like programming rather than seeing it as a lucrative career. Now I don’t see any significant difference between the productivity between men and women programmers. Men and women still have different personalities and they approach their work and personal interactions differently, but from a technical standpoint you can’t say one is better than the other.
With all that in mind the constant harping on how awful the field is for women would discourage women from following that career path, then it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.
Emphasis mine.
He could still come back and play for da Bears!
For Google management, I doubt whether it’s even about the content of his arguments. They don’t really care what he said, or whether it’s right or wrong.
It’s all about public perception and Google’s public image, and to a lesser extent perception among Google staff.
If the memo was quietly discussed on internal forums (as it seems it initially was), then nobody would care. But someone on staff regarded it as a major issue and leaked the memo to the press. There was a huge reaction. ‘Google staffer writes discriminatory, sexist memo!’ It was not going to simply go away. If they did nothing, next it would be ‘Google supports sexist, alt-right staffer!’ This is not how they want the company to be perceived, so they fired him.
“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.” 
The percentage of women programmers has gone down since the 80s and early 90s. If programmers are getting into the field out of love of computers then your experience is exactly aligned with the essay and the science of gender differences.
Few people on this board let alone the general internet frenzy about it have read the guy’s piece. And that’s typical any time somebody is pilloried for something that doesn’t itself fit into a tweet or reasonable length web board post.
So there’s another key layer to it: whether the media or blog sources people are relying on to understand what the guy said were deliberately mischaracterizing it. I don’t see a basis for any strong statement that’s ‘rare’. And anyway what constitutes ‘mischaracterizing’ an argument about a complicated controversial topic tends to be pretty tangled up in one’s opinion of the topic. Any long back and forth, like you see on this thread between/among certain members is likely to filled with claims of ‘straw man’, ‘you’re ignoring what I said’ etc, claims that the other side isn’t focusing on the right point, or else of course they’d agree.
Even the Google CEO’s explanation for the firing kind of admitted he was a cherry picking in a sense, ‘many points in the piece could be debated’ (or some such sop to the thing not being wholly invalid) but it violated some basic principals everybody ‘must’ agree with. The latter isn’t stated exactly that way but via the mechanism of claiming that certain ideas amount to bad acts against certain people who don’t agree with them, ideas or opinions being ‘violence’ (the Google CEO didn’t use that word, many others have and typically do for things they consider wrongthink).
I watched this typo go out as I was dashing off to child care obligations, too busy to bother to edit. All day I’ve been thinking of possible Favreau puns to defend myself, overlooking the possible Favre move (which I am otherwise generally in favor of).
Let’s turn this around a little bit. If a paper had been written assuming the feminine characteristics as the baseline and concluded that the company should be cautious about hiring men because they tend to be inconsiderate, more greedy, and are more violent, especially in the workplace, would that have been okay? It wouldn’t either, even if there are studies that we can base those claims on.
These are issues that would be appropriate to discuss with HR or policy people, but by putting it on an internal list that everybody in the company can and will see, he effectively called his coworkers neurotic and devalued characteristics he broadly attributed to women. There are ways to say “I think we’re approaching diversity the wrong way” that don’t call out your coworkers and put your management in a position where they can’t put you on a team with women because you could not possibly by considered fair by them.
None of us know enough about this guy, his history, or his performance to say whether its unfair that Google fired him.
As with almost all things, there is more than meets the eye. I don’t assume this guy just up and decided, out of blue, to say a bunch of stuff that could be seen as obnoxious. It’s much more probable he has a history of doing this kind of thing, and not heeding feedback advising him to stop.
If this were his first “offense”, perhaps we wouldn’t even be talking about this guy. Odds are good the letter was leaked by someone fed up with him and wanted him gone.
I couldn’t possibly expand on this well written opinion piece by Katie Hopkins.
I don’t agree with silencing people that dare express an opinion contrary to my own. I don’t agree with the former Google engineer. I do support his right to express them.
.
I found this length blog post to be well-written and thoughtful. It’s on the topic of women-in-tech in general.
I think the comparisons of percentages of women in tech vs percentages of women in other historically-male-dominated and prestigious fields (law, medicine) to be particularly telling, but the topic is complicated enough that it’s worth reading the entire thing.
Katie is making the point that stifling opinions that we don’t agree with doesn’t make them go away.
What you are really doing is driving unpopular opinions underground. There is no back and forth debate.
These people are only talking to others that share and validate their own world views and opinions.
That can be very dangerous for our society.
We don’t know what’s out there. No one dares to express any non-PC view anymore. It can cost them their job.
Again, he didn’t do the things you claim. He used neuroticism in a specific way that means they experience higher levels of anxiety. His point was specific to the employee survey that measures Google employees feelings about working at Google. Say women are on average 5% more anxious in a given situation than men. If that’s true, then no matter what Google does their female employees will report 5% higher levels of anxiety on the survey.
As for empathy, he didn’t devalue it generally. He devalued it specifically for this situation because, as he argues, it leads to basing policy off of anecdotes instead of data.
Again, he wasn’t fired for his opinion. He was fired for the way he expressed it.
Anyone at a large company who has undergone training on discrimination and creating a hostile workplace can tell you that he put himself out there are the poster boy for “hostile workplace.” He denigrated his co-workers, and made it difficult for large groups of employees to work with him. This doesn’t even get into the damage he did to the Google brand. Given the fact that the memo was leaked, the damage may have been unintentional, but it still happened.
2 very big strikes against him, and Google really had no choice but to terminate.
He may very well go back and try to get the CA Labor Relations Board interested in his case or the larger issue of whether Google discriminates against a class, say white men. I think it’s unlikely that will go anywhere.
You’re misrepresenting what the guy said in saying that you could “turn this around” with an example of a paper which urged “be[ing] cautious about hiring men”.
The guy did not say that the company should be cautious about hiring women. He just said “if you see that absent women-promoting actions the company is overwhelmingly male, it might be because of various characteristics and not due to bias”. You turn that around at a company which is overwhelmingly female and it would pass by without a peep from anyone.
If he shares your manner of interpreting statistics, then he might’ve been fired for incompetent reasoning.
Google employees–male or female–are not representative of the population at large. As a group, they are much more educated, driven, and technically-minded. We have no reason to think their prevalence of neuroticism matches the masses. For all we know, women who go into tech have lower baselines of anxiety than their male counterparts, because their skins have to be extra thick and non-quirky to counter the pressures they do.
All that aside, he did opine neuroticism is why women are less likely to go into high stress jobs; in other words, his point was not limited to self-reported anxiety on Google surveys:
(bolding mine)
You know the Machiavellian view is that in fact that Google top management (with the exception of the “diversity” manager) does NOT believe in what it is saying about gender diversity, but that this (including the firing of this person) is all a PR gimmick. This view is much more consistent with:
Wow a cogent response to an argument he actually made. That’s a rare sight in this thread. And I’m sure you can see how what you responded to is far different than how HookerChemical characterized it.