What a ridiculous strawman. My argument is that activists (which may be men or women) who claim Google is a hotbed of anti-women sexism are incorrect.
The numbers are similar in most related fields such as physics and engineering, although mathematics apparently does have around 40 percent women at the undergrad level and 30 percent at the doctorate level. Still well under 50 percent. Women are a majority in some other fields such as biology, and nobody gives a shit.
No, they cannot. They (and other Silicon Valley companies) have to hire qualified workers. If they don’t, they will go out of business and the computers and Internet you’re using to post this message will not exist. An unqualified person cannot design a working computer chip or a complicated piece of software. The laws of math and physics don’t bow down to political pressure.
One company can possibly do that, at the expense of other companies hiring even fewer women. For the whole industry to hire 50% women would require either hiring massive numbers of completely unqualified women to match the number of men, which would waste money and cause them to fail in competition with companies or other countries that don’t do that, or to fire most of the men until the remaining men equal the women, which would destroy the industry and much of modern civilization in general. These are not “ridiculous things with numbers,” they are basic arithmetic.
Your profile says you’re a photographer. I imagine there are a lot of women who can take photographs, so you were able to assemble a team of mostly women. That is not true of every industry.
Thats a strawman. You can have a public discussion. We are having one now.
Of course they have choice.
In leadership 75% of the team are male. That isn’t “virtually even.”
“The company is overseen by a board of directors, which passes instructions down through an executive management group. This group oversees several departments such as Engineering, Products, Legal, Finance and Sales. Each of these departments is divided into smaller units. For instance, the Sales department has branches dedicated to the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Despite the use of a standard corporate organizational structure, Google has developed a corporate culture based on giving employees substantial leeway to develop new ideas without excessive oversight.”
How do computer science graduation rates affect picking leadership positions in engineering, products, legal, financial, sales, and the board of directors?
My team doesn’t have a problem with diversity. Your team apparently does. How many are on your team?
This firing shows that science is no at valid defense.
It doesn’t matter that one-day-old babies show sex-based preferences (objects vs faces).
Contemplating the possibility that science may suggest that (population-wise) women have different preferences is wrong, data be damned.
Despite California’s status as an at-will employment state there are still protections for actions taken by employees to discuss workplace conditions under the National Labor Relations Act. This is a part of labor law often used to protect protect union organization efforts.
Google very well might win out in the end, but looks like he won’t go down without a fight. And remember who gets to appoint NLRB members now. Sigh.
He was making a general statement there, not limited to Google specifically (if he was being specific to Google, then he needs to explain what makes them special).
I claim the statement is wrong. A statement about populations, sent to a group that contains members of that population, is not an attack on individuals.
Leadership is a mix of tech and non-tech, and so you would expect the distribution to be somewhere in the middle. 75% is a little higher than the 69% overall, but not absurdly so, and you would expect to be tech “top-heavy” at a place like Google.
Some managers are hired from other companies; most probably rise through the ranks. Promoted managers match the internal demographics. Hired managers reflect the demographics of Silicon Valley.
Techies don’t do well with managers that have a generic MBA or whatever. They need some degree of experience relevant to the team they’re managing. In many cases, that means a CS degree.
We have one trans woman on our team. How many do you have? Yaaawn. Playing “my diversity is bigger than your diversity” is pointless.
I have little doubt that Google themselves has many woman-dominated teams larger than yours. It’s not enough to dent the statistics. And at any rate, every woman that Google hires is one that isn’t hired somewhere else in SV. It’s a zero-sum game. Again: if there’s to be any real change, it has to be on the supply side.
…who claimed that “Google is a hotbed of anti-women sexism?” You have literally just created a strawman just now.
I said that “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?”
I’m not talking about activists. I’m talking about the voices of men and women who have spoken out about the sexism problems they have experienced in Silicon Valley.
So please can you make a decision. Do you want to have a conversation with me? If you do: then address the words I have said. Susan Fowler was not an activist. She was an engineer who used to work for Uber and now works for Stripe. Its stories like that that I’m referring too. Do you think that Susan was incorrect? Then you are calling her a liar.
But if you don’t want to have a conversation with me: then by all means, rant away about activists and “anti-women sexisim” and whatever else you like. Just stop quoting me and pretending that you are engaging me when you are not.
Nobody gives a shit? REALLY? I don’t think you’ve been paying attention.
Well thank fuck that I never suggested google hire unqualified people then.
You can’t come up with a more ridiculous conclusion than what you did with the statistics you used. You said:
"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. "
You really have to twist and contort to come up with a diversity scenario that ends up with the destruction of an entire industry. Yet you managed to do that in a couple of sentences. Real life is not like that at all.
You’d be guessing wrong then. Everybody can take a photograph. But not everyone has the skills, the training, the aptitude, and the money to be a professional event photographer. There is a reason why the statistics are weighted the way that they are. I can’t change the industry overnight. But I can change what I am doing.
…he was talking about google specifically. It wasn’t a general statement. It was an internal document. It was leaked externally.
I just looked up the Google executive team. Only four out of eighteen executives have computer science degrees. Only five were women. Your numbers don’t hold up.
You started it.
Supply side is simply part of the equation. As thirdname’s Washington Posts cite demonstrates: when equally qualified candidates are put side by side the male candidate tends to get hired. How does changing the supply of qualified people change the tendency for people to hire male applicants? Is google completely incapable of addressing this tendency until the supply side changes?
It was phrased as a general statement, and as something specific to Google it makes zero sense. At any rate, I’ll let BigT clarify if he wants.
You’ll have to clarify exactly which “executive team” you mean. In any case, 5/18 is 28%. Again, close to their overall 31% total score.
I wasn’t using the demographics of our team to prove that a company 7,000 times larger isn’t subject to supply constraints. Yeah, any given group within Google can make it point to seek out more women. Probably many do, and in some areas, such as UX, they may well succeed. That doesn’t mean it’s possible for Google as a whole.
You don’t seem to have read the article at all. It says that the bias has now flipped. Furthermore, it says almost the exact thing that I’ve been saying:
[QUOTE=WaPo]
This is the latest in a series of studies by the Cornell researchers, many of which have concluded that the scarcity of female faculty in science departments (about 20 percent in most fields) can’t be blamed on innate sexism. In a study published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, they found that young and mid-career women are more likely to receive job offers than male candidates, are paid roughly the same amount, are granted tenure and promoted at the same rate (except in economics), remain in their fields for the same amount of time, and are about as satisfied with their jobs. The study attributes the lack of female scientists to early educational choices — like opting not to take Advanced Placement calculus and physics in high school or choosing not to declare a math-intensive major in college — rather than discrimination later on.
[/QUOTE]
It does cite an older (2012) study that still shows a pro-male bias. But for highly qualified candidates it’s now men that are at a disadvantage.
At any rate, studies of science departments are interesting but not completely applicable to tech. STEM is not a homogeneous blob of people.
Programming jobs take people in with non-CS degrees, but this does not necessarily imply that the demographics should match those degree-holders as a whole, since the ones that “defected” are a self-selecting group. Physics degrees are common, for instance, but in many cases it’s because they did not like academia and wanted to work in industry. Studies of academia are therefore irrelevant or worse.
"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."
He didn’t send it out to the world. It was distributed internally: and only leaked to the world. The “everyone” he sent it to has to be google or else the sentence doesn’t make any sense.
Why are you using the 31% figure?
You’ve just finished arguing that the leadership team gender breakdown is a reflection of the tech team breakdown, which is dependent on the limited pool of computer science graduates.
We don’t know who is in the “leadership team.” But we do know who is in the executive team. And only 4 of the executive team have computer science degrees. So your numbers don’t hold water. There is no reason why the executive team break-down would have to match the breakdown of the rest of the google team. Based on the background of the executives it should more rightly match the demographic breakdown of the “non-tech” team: but it doesn’t. Based on your premise: can you explain why?
And I wasn’t trying to demonstrate that either.
I’m not expecting google to fix the problems with diversity overnight. But that this is even an issue (and that it took several days to address) shows that they can do so much better.
Huh. Are you telling me that the countless scientific studies and anecdotal testimony that spans practically every industry all over the world have flipped in the matter of four years in STEM? Would you care to explain how they achieved this remarkable turn-around so that we can apply these lessons everywhere else? Perhaps you could tell google, who apparently are incapable of doing anything about diversity until parents start teaching their children right?
You don’t seem to have read the article at all. Do you remember why they were citing the older 2012 study? I quoted that section before. I’ll quote it again.
"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."
This wasn’t a study using real world statistics. This was a survey of 900 faculty members, using exceptionally well-qualified fictional female candidates. The candidates were ranked: they were not hired. The claim that “things have flipped” is extraordinary: and Joan Williams points out the flaws in that interpretation.
Maybe these survey results from the tech industry might be more relevant for you.
“60 percent of women in tech reported unwanted sexual advances
65 percent of those women had received those advances from a superior at work
90 percent of women witnessed sexist behavior at company offsites or at a conference
84 percent of those surveyed were at one point told they were “too aggressive” in the office”
Are unwanted sexual advances something that google can deal with now: or do they have to wait for the supply side to come right first?
Here are some more survey results from the tech industry.
Don’t trust those studies? I can keep posting them if you like, because nearly all of them say the same thing. When equally qualified candidates are put side by side the male candidate tends to get hired. If this one woman you recently hired (from the available pool apparently of only one female applicant) wasn’t “among the best candidates you’ve ever had” but was instead a good, solid worker, on a par with the rest of the candidates, would she have had a chance? I can guess the answer you will probably give me, and of course I will accept your answer at face value. But time after time the evidence clearly shows that (at other workplaces, not yours) this candidate wouldn’t have had a chance. That women and minorities have to work harder to achieve the same recognition as their male counterparts. That less qualified men will get the promotion. That men, on average, will get paid more for doing the same job.
These are all things that google can work on to improve diversity in the workplace. And guess what? That is exactly what they are doing. It is absurd to claim that google can’t do anything about diversity until the ratio of computer science graduates changes. They can do plenty of things: and they are doing plenty of things. But change is incumbent on people in the industry accepting there is a problem. And this thread demonstrates quite clearly that people are resistant to that notion. Silicon Valley will not “fix itself” if the only change is that more women get computer science degrees. Because everything else that I’ve just talked about will still be happening.
There’s an interesting interview with James Damore on YouTube.
Google Memo: Fired Employee Speaks Out!
He certainly doesn’t come across as a raving nutcase…
…BUT… Damore - and the talkative, Trump-supporting, right-wing interviewer he has chosen to speak to - both come across as hyper-intellectual and intellectually arrogant, self-centered rather than self-aware, libertarian, out of touch, and very condescending to anyone who doesn’t share their world-view.
Damore says on his LinkedIn page that he received a PhD in systems biology from Harvard University in 2013. However, Harvard says that he completed a master’s degree in 2013, not a PhD. Game over for him, I think.
What’s funny - almost - is that he says there is a culture that bullies and intimidates those that question how Google thinks of diversity, and gets fired for it. Sort of like the Sam Goldwyn quote -
I can’t stomach Stefan Molyneux either, but I’m completely in agreement with one thing he says around 20:40 about people who deliberately mischaracterize arguments in order to incite angry, mob-like reactions. If there’s any chip on my shoulder, that’s it.
What exactly did you do that resulted in 75% of your team being drawn from a 20% subgroup within your industry? Which processes, internal biases, and priorities etc. changed?
It seems unlikely that you could get this skewed a mix without actively favoring women in the process, but perhaps some detail would shed some light.
Among the people who take the AP test for Computer Science 17% are women. The difference in interest is already there in high school. Studies I have seen indicate that girls’ interest in computers dips in middle school. The obvious implication is that in order to solve this problem we need to find a cure for puberty.
My impression, both on this board and in general, is that people rarely deliberately mischaracterize arguments. They don’t think, “'He argued X, but I’m going to say he argued Y.”
Rather, they take one quick, superficial glance at the argument, and either fail to understand it or can’t be bothered to try. Instead they make a wild, incorrect assumption about what has been said, in accordance with their biases or beliefs or what they want to vent about.
I think it’s all these things plus. Because many people don’t think for themselves, and aren’t really capable of assessing what someone said and then figuring out the correct response to that on their own. What they do is trot out pre-canned reactions that they’re read or heard elsewhere. In order for that to work, everything needs to neatly fit into their pre-existing knowledge base.
So they might know that on Issue X, the Other Side says A, B, and C. “We” counter A with F & G, B with H I, & J, and C with K & L, and since it’s obvious that these are all powerful refutations we destroy them in all arguments and in reality. Now someone comes along from the Other Side and offers up Argument D. What to do now? The only approach in that circumstance is to figure out which of A, B, or C that argument is closest to and then trot out F & G, H I & J, or K & L as appropriate. (And it’s a lot easier if the other guy didn’t say D, but rather said Aa, in which case A is the obvious fit.)
