Aren’t you arguing that personality and aptitude are the same?
I would also like to submit that even if there are genetic pre-dispositions by sex for STEM fields, it does not invalidate the prevalent sexism that occurs from college against women in STEM, and certainly in the tech industry overall. These are 2 separate issues. I would argue that it is the second one Google is attempting to correct, and one leg of that platform is community outreach and recruiting. Greater inclusion of women and minorities in the workplace should act to reduce bias. Perhaps it won’t eliminate it, but it should reduce it.
For those of you who think that all the sex differences in what people are interested in, such as working with people versus things, are caused by cultural conditioning rather than biology, it should be noted that these tendencies are found not only in experiments with very young children, but also in other primates.
Do you all think the the Patriarchy is brainwashing female rhesus monkeys into playing with dolls?
Usually there is two kinds of “a special kind of stupid” in the workplace.
One is that young idealistic, just new to the workforce and believes everything he or she was told by HR about valuing your opinion, and shit like that.
The second, has been at the company for a while and thinks they have the juice. That they too expensive to fire, indispensable, know where the bodies are buried.
So this moron writes a manifesto on a subject matter in this day and age, runs contrary to any HR policy and publishes it on an internal company network, and expects what exactly.
Metaphorically this is the same as walking into a police station with a drawn weapon, stating today is a good day to die.
So to me, the dude knew he was gonna get fired, that means he has/had an angle. So unless we are talking about someone like Bighead Bigetti doing a rest and vest on the roof, with too much time on his hands, decides to write his big thing, the guy is gonna make a shit load of money off Google. There is no way someone without a shit load of fuck you money is going to go off the rails like that.
I’m using many factors - history notably among them. And IMO, when all those factors are combined, I remain skeptical that biology is a better explanation than societal and cultural bias for disparities in fields like engineering.
“Better to be thought a fool, than write a 10 page manifesto removing all doubt.”
First of all, you write a 10 page manifesto on any topic and send it out to your co-workers, be prepared for disciplinary action. Claim that some people are inferior and shouldn’t be hired, prepare for global humiliation, termination and a great deal of difficulty getting another job in your field at the top level companies.
As far as suing Google, this guy has no shot. None, zip, nada.
I’ve worked IT most of my life. While the Silicon Valley culture may be very much a Bro-Culture, I can assure you that programming work elsewhere is very much NOT, and that sort of thing is not even remotely acceptable. At much of middle American corporations, women are far more common in management and even dominate lower IT management ranks at some of the companies I’ve worked for.
No part of this is about respecting someone else’s opinion, so let’s not play the “so much for tolerance” game. He is openly disrespecting some of his co-workers, and that is completely unacceptable.
Even if biology is a contributing factor to those traits, we need to evaluate whether those traits are a positive value. Google Guy has taken it for granted that empathy is useless while being more object oriented (in the non-computer science sense) is a good thing. How many times have you used an object and thought to yourself “The jackass engineer who designed this obviously never used it.”
But if he sends it to everyone, he doesn’t have to be talking to a specific person. That’s my point. Since he sent it out to everyone, he basically sent it out to women as a group. The very women he is attacking, by saying Google shouldn’t be trying to hire them.
He’s also just spreading sexist pseudoscience, and sexism inherently attacks all of the sex in question. He even argues that men can be more feminine, while at the same time arguing that women can’t do more “masculine” pursuits. Apparently women are inferior and can’t deviate from their proscribed roles because of biology, but men can.
He wants to pitch this as “conservatism,” but bigotry isn’t conservatism. I know a whole lot of non-bigoted conservatives.
Google has every reason to leave bigotry out. They have every reason to actually try to get more women involved, rather than allow a sexist to stay and alienate women by being allowed to peddle his sexist woo.
Effectively, what you are saying is that we can’t have any public discussion of population-level trends between the sexes, because people will perceive it as an attack on them as individuals.
I don’t get it. If I read a report that aggressive tendencies from testosterone may contribute to the high male prison population, I don’t get offended. The fact that I’m not in prison is an indication that I bucked that statistical trend.
The guy may have overplayed the role of biology–I don’t know–but I suspect part of what’s driving this is a sentiment that techies are being unfairly blamed for trends that started literally a lifetime earlier. Someone conducts a survey that women are massively unrepresented in tech, and the headlines that come out are that Silicon Valley has a massive sexism problem. Yeah, there are problems, but not drastically out of proportion with elsewhere. Our team hired 100% of the women that interviewed with us in the past year. That’s a whopping 1/1. I’m happy to say that wasn’t the result of quotas or anything else; she among the best candidates we’ve ever had. But the raw numbers aren’t there, because the CS grads aren’t there, because the women who are interested in programming aren’t there, because because because… virtually all the way back to birth.
Maybe techies are just a bunch of whiners. Fine. But by refusing to even acknowledge that there are more fundamental trends, people have guaranteed that women will never have equal representation in tech. If the imbalance is to be “fixed”, it has to be on the supply side. And that means starting way earlier. The Silicon Valley stuff will fix itself if that happens.
…of course we can have a public discussion of population-level trends between the sexes. We are having that now.
But works is not the right place to have a “public discussion.” If you try to do that at my place of work: and if you do it in the sort of ham-fisted-tone-death-psuedo-science way that brings my business into disrepute the way this clown did…I’m going to fire your ass.
But that isn’t what happened here. This wasn’t an external report. These were the musings of an employee. The equivalent of a badly cited Great Debates thread posted at the work forums. This guy isn’t an expert on diversity. He’s a guy with some ideas who shoe-horned citations into his thesis. This isn’t a scientific work.
Today is not a lifetime ago. It is not unfair to “blame” people for trends that they are directly responsible for.
This isn’t about a “survey.” Women and minorities have been telling everybody that Silicon Valley has a massive sexism problem for a very long time. Why are you not listening to them?
Yep: the rest of the world is just as fucked up as Silicon Valley.
Perhaps you should take advice from the memo about anecdotes.
Rubbish. The Silicon Valley stuff won’t get fixed until firstly you acknowledge that there is a problem. And that starts with people like you. As long as you are here arguing that this is a problem that has been blown out of proportion, then things will not get fixed.
Never said it was. But the topic has gone beyond Google now.
Maybe read more closely next time.
Google hires from the population of college tech graduates and above. Whatever the distribution of that population is, Google isn’t the one responsible for its composition. The trends that led to that distribution started decades earlier, and was an ongoing process.
There is absolutely nothing in my control that could affect the number of women graduating with CS degrees. People with kids can affect this. Educators can. By the time it gets to me, it’s too late.
…so you acknowledge your response to BigT was a big fat strawman?
Google’s decisions on who to hire is not based on things that happened decades ago. They are based on decisions they are making now.
And as long as you believe this: and as long as other people in Silicon Valley believe this, then nothing will be fixed.
My industry trends 80% male. My business bucks that trend. 75% of my team are women. I didn’t get those statistics with quotas, or via “affirmative action”, I didn’t get there by “waiting for the educators to catch up” or for parents to start “teaching their children well.”
I got there by examining my processes, identifying my own internal biases and privilege, by changing the way I recruited, by adjusting my priorities. Everything is in your control. You just have to make the decision to accept that control: then you can start doing something about it.
Asians, who are in fact a racial minority, are greatly over-represented in Silicon Valley in comparison to the general population. Not to mention Jews. Do you think the Asians and Jews are evil racist oppressors?
The funny thing about all this “progressive” hand-wringing over “white privilege” etc and assuming that any ethnic group can only be successful by oppressing others, is that everything they say about white people is even more true of Jews. They’re wealthier on average than whites in general, more educated, over-represented to a massive extent in academia, the media and so forth, and have significant presence in the government out of proportion to their small population. If you follow progressive “white privilege” thinking to its logical conclusion, you’d have to believe that the Jews are the most privileged group and oppressing everyone else. But for whatever reason, they only apply this line of thinking to white people.
I see affinities and aptitudes as being inseparable from one another, one gets good at what one does, and one does some things because one likes it.
For example I’m 100% certain I would be an excellent chef, if I had any interest in cooking; instead I use the aptitudes I have that would be applied to cooking in other areas because of my affinities.
They are constrained by the decisions women made years and years ago to not teach themselves programming when they were children, and to not earn degrees in computer-science and related fields.
As cited above, only 18 percent of CS grads are women. If Silicon Valley pursues equal representation of women in its work force, it will have to only hire an equal 18 percent of male grads, leaving the remaining 64 percent of CS grads unemployed. This will require demolishing about two thirds of the entire industry. Do you think that is feasible?
…ah of course. The “women are lying” defense. Gotcha.
Google only hires computer science graduates?
From your cite:
"Joan C. Williams (no relation to Wendy), a distinguished professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law and co-principal investigator for the Tools for Change project, which tries to level the playing field for women in STEM, told Inside Higher Ed that the Cornell study is** “seriously flawed” **in its conclusion that science is now a welcoming place for women. She argued that hiring has never really been the main source of discrimination against women.
Joan Williams and others noted that the fictional female candidates in the Cornell study were exceptionally well-qualified, a factor that may have mitigated gender bias. A similar 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which looked at more moderately qualified graduate student candidates for a job in a lab, found that male applicants were much more likely to be hired, given better salaries and offered mentorship."
No I don’t.
Do you think that Asians and Jews are a big giant strawmen?
Impressive rant. You should consider expanding it to ten pages and posting it on your company’s bulletin board. However it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I’ve said. But I’m glad you got that of your chest.
I’m Samoan/Maori. I’m not a white person. But I have privilege. And if you think that this only applies to “white people”: then you don’t understand what privilege is.
No they are not constrained by those decisions. They can do whatever the fuck they like.
What the fuck are you talking about? This is just gish gallop. You’ve just thrown stuff together to come up with some random conclusion. You can make a commitment to diversity without having to do ridiculous things with numbers. I ignored statistics entirely and ended up with a gender balance at complete odds with the industry norm. So I know you are trying to have a conversation with me: but you really need to start with understanding what I’ve said first.
The only strawman here is of your own construction. “Work might not have been a great forum to start this conversation” is not mutually exclusive with “he did not personally insult any women” which are also orthogonal to “he made some valid/invalid points” and “he should/should not have been fired”.
Others have made the point, but to repeat: when less than a fifth of college grads are women, Google doesn’t exactly have a lot of choice in the matter.
Try looking at the Google link, since they break down tech vs. non-tech hiring. Non-tech is 48% women–virtually even. Tech is 20%, or basically inline with CS graduation rates.
How many people were on your little team? Was it less than, say, 50,000?