The primary thesis of Damore's memo [1] was not that women are biologically unsuited to STEM careers. The primary thesis was that, at Google, you cannot even advance the hypothesis that biology might be a factor without putting your career at risk. Ironically, by firing Damore, Pichai proved him correct.
EDIT: if you doubt this, just look at the document's title and TL;DR section.
"Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed."
...firing him, at least the way they did it, confirmed that position.
There's nothing revelationary about that statement.
Anyone could read Google's code of conduct and know that Google would fire/reprimand someone for being toxic to their coworkers. Employees are free to debate and cherry pick evidence about their opinions on the world being flat, 9/11 being an inside job, even a fake moon landing.
James decided he wanted to debate about his opinion on his workers being biologically inferior (among other opinions). He had a chance to receive feedback on this from coworkers and change his position, the problem was he didn't and continued to broadcast his opinion which was toxic to his coworkers.
It's a strange hill to pick to die on because nothing is surprising about how this played out, other than how the media is still talking about it.
That's a loaded question. I didn't come to the conclusion, many others have based on his premise of using personality constructs as being caused by evolutionary psychology.
You can see it in the paper how he starts with the obvious, "Men and Women are biologically different" and then jumps into observable personality differences, which are not proven to be biologically driven. It wouldn't be so bad if he didn't attribute these "biologically-caused" personality differences (neuroticism, agreeableness, less ambition, etc.) to women being the ones to blame for their problems in tech.
This opinion is toxic to his coworkers, which is a violation of the Google Code of Conduct.
Saying someone has racist ideas is a loaded accusation. I think it's fair to ask for elaboration.
> ...jumps into observable personality differences, which are not proven to be biologically driven.
Some personality differences in populations are supported by some studies. He cites studies about personal interests, for example. It's possible that he goes too far (scientifically speaking) with some conjecture, but he was careful to say that properties of large populations don't apply on the level of an individual or selected group.
>Saying someone has racist ideas is a loaded accusation. I think it's fair to ask for elaboration.
Except I didn't accuse James of having racist ideas, I pointed out that his opinions are toxic to his coworkers. I'm not sure what you're getting at.
It's true that he attempts to check himself throughout the paper, but it's contradictory because he then proceeds to take it too far. It's the equivalent of saying, "I'm for diversity, but...." and then demonstrating he's not for diversity by arguing against it.
Which is why this paper is a rambling rant from someone who chose to commit career suicide for his opinion, and it's surprising that the media is still focused on it.
"Racist ideas" was the wrong term to use. That was a typo. Apologies.
Is "sexist ideas" fair? "Bigoted ideas"? That seems to be the implication when labeling ideas about gender "toxic". The colloquial language around this sort of thing is imprecise. That brings me to my next point:
> ...and then demonstrating he's not for diversity by arguing against it.
The paper seems contradictory because people have definitions in mind for words like "diversity". But not everyone has the same definitions in mind. He can be for diversity of thought and want to encourage that with discussion of structural changes while still preferring a world with more women in tech. This position is not the Google HR definition of "diversity", but it's clearly part of his idea of diversity.
I'm not sure what invoking semantics on the word "Diversity" has to with this, especially since you thought I accused James of being racist (which I didn't). Despite his leaked rant, you don't know what his definition of diversity is, nor do you know what Google HR's definition is. All you know is that he was let go, the details of which are not leaked.
You seem to be reading a bit more into this, which is probably why the media is still writing about it. There's something for everyone to confirm their beliefs in the paper, whether it's to defend or attack it, and you're demonstrating that with the repeated word games.
You nailed it with your earlier comment about how James' firing had more to do with the fact that a great deal of people has interpreted his post as offensive rather whether being offensive was his ultimate intent. His memo was not clearly written, caused a scene, and damage to the brand. If he had some great idea, he has done it a disservice, and his supporters should blame him for such bad writing, rather than Google for doing the rational thing.
> ...but he was careful to say that properties of large populations don't apply on the level of an individual or selected group.
Then why bring it up if what he says doesn't matter within the context in which they are hiring people. Google isn't hiring people on a population basis. They are hiring people on an individual basis.
They are drawing candidates from populations. He's arguing the problem could be upstream from Google HR practices. As in, there aren't enough women applying (I don't think that's controversial). He elaborating on his answer to "Why not?"
I'm sure that is part of the hiring disparity among females and underrepresented minorities. As a black guy myself, I know the same is true among black people who simply aren't interested in engineering but Damon makes weird ability judgements based on the population.
This makes no sense as people with different interests would never bother in the first place no matter how much time and money you threw at them. So again I say why bring up the upstream problem to begin with as it being related to their abilities for engineering?
IMO, the only way his text makes sense is if you are someone looking to back up potentially racist and sexist biases by misusing science. It makes me question their ability to work with people different than themselves.
With that said I'm actually torn on the issue of the firing. Google says its a place for diversity of opinion etc etc...So on some level they should stick by it.
However, I understand why the firing may have needed to be done. The fact that a low level employee made the news for being controversial means you have to be fired. You can't send a memo out like that and expect there to be no career consequences at your company of employment. You will never be able to live it down.
The only point related to abilities I can see in the memo is
Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher
agreeableness.
○ This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for
raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences
and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a
women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men
without support.
So Google acknowledges this difference in ability and has a program to counter it. He points out that this is unfairly generalizing when applied to individuals, thus demanding the program to be opened to men as well. I think this is a good suggestion, regardless of what I think about the rest of the memo.
> So again I say why bring up the upstream problem to begin with as it being related to their abilities for engineering?
Well, for one, if only 45% of interested applicants are women, maybe 45% female employees and managers is a reasonable goal.
> Damon makes weird ability judgements based on the population.
I remember a lot of talk about interest levels and personality types. Not much about abilities. I also think the point about multimodal distributions fairly address my concerns about possible bigotry and stereotyping. Which ability judgments concern you? And why didn't the part about multimodal distributions vs mean values assuage your concerns?
This idea that one can only disagree with it because they haven't read it is extremely uncivil, and does nothing but attempt to shut down the discussion here.
Documents filled with political hot buttons screw up people's emotions and they can not process such documents rationally or in a balanced fashion, many people see only what offends them or what they want to defend. It is just screwed up...
Yep, it even rambles about the failure of Marxist communism at one point. It's a rant with cherry picked evidence, but people find something it in to confirm their beliefs and try to defend/attack it.
I was left with the impression he wants the introduction of a quota for sympathizers for a political organization. My takeaway was that he wants to work with people who are officially representing political parties.
Maybe it is that I have lived in a country where carrying party cards to work was a step in professional life. But the point that stuck to me was painting the situation along political spectrum.
By advancing the hypothesis that it might be a factor, without a need to do so, it's always going to be seen as advocating for it, even if he says he's not.
For example, a host on certain news channel might say, "Is Obama secretly a Muslim? I'm not saying that he is, but why can't we ask the question?"
It's easy to see why people would get upset by that comment (for multiple reasons). The fact that he says he isn't saying that doesn't matter, because he effectively just did.
If he had just limited the paper to inclusiveness as a conservative in a left leaning culture, without dragging the whole women inequality thing into the matter, it probably wouldn't have been meet with such a backlash.
No matter what he intended the thesis to be, that thing was just a bunch of dog whistles that sounded an awful lot like ignorant alt-right bullshit to me.
The memo appears to be based on actual real science that seems to be the consensus.
However, the author appears to be completely tone deaf and extremely socially awkward - he has very poor communication skills. And lacking the understanding that there is a current culture war going on - to allow himself to be taken as a champion of some of those groups seems to show he is oblivious to the greater social/political discussion out there.
It does not help his argument to be the white knight for the _actual_ misogynists and racists.
>The memo appears to be based on actual real science that seems to be the consensus.
No. See this wired article, his view is not consensus. I do agree that it was pretty poorly made though!
Professor Gina Rippon, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at Aston University in Birmingham, said it was surprising how much of the research Damore misinterpreted or got wrong. She added that sex differences backed-up by proper research scrutiny were so tiny they couldn't explain the kind of gender imbalance at Google.
"They're assuming a divide that doesn't really exist," Rippon said. "Either its biological or its social and if its biological you can't change it so Google shouldn't be wasting its time with all these high minded equal opportunity initiatives.
"But the key thing is it can be changed – we know that if women have poor spatial skills, which has been demonstrated in the past, then its easy enough to change that by appropriate training – very often its associated with video game experience for example. He seems to be saying there are fixed differences and we're wasting our time trying to gain equality," Rippon said.
I've read that critique, but I've found numerous more critiques that have supported his position. Do I have a monopoly on saying what percentage support him - No, but it appears so far, and this may turn out to be wrong, that more academics appear to support his claims than those that deny them.
They can be left to argue among themselves however just like any other scientific debate. Social sciences are further complicated due to the nature of how difficult their studies are to perform and analyze.
Perhaps some quality over quantity is needed, this answer on quora is the most in depth critique of the bad science in his paper I've been able to find so far:
Besides it's hardly fair for us to expect academics who are critical of the memo to speak publically about the issue when the alt-right is currently doxxing people for doing just that.
I don't find her critiques convincing in all respects. A couple of her answers seem to be strawmen. For example:
The passing mention of IQ is interesting, since it has nothing to do with gender, which is the focus everywhere else. He’s presumably talking about race, but he doesn’t want to be branded a racist, so he keeps the reference subtle. So why risk doing it at all? It’s a dog-whistle to the alt-right.
She admits she is _assuming_ his intentions - sets up the strawman, and counters it. BOOM - the guy is now racist.
As for Milo and his ilk - yeah they can go to hell - but what? This guy gets fired for speaking publicly? That seems a double standard.
Not the person you are asking, but since I also found some of her arguments to be straw men, I will list some parts I find convincing.
> As an evolutionary biologist, the claim that these observations are “exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective” is especially painful to read. I would not dismiss the field completely, but many of its predictions have turned out to be wildly misguided.
> All in all, we have no reason to think female software engineers should perform worse at software engineering based on female trait distributions. And there’s a huge amount of evidence that promoting diversity improves the performance of teams and companies.
Note that that was a straw man, but I agree with the denotation anyway.
> We know that negative stereotypes damage people’s performance. We know that unconscious bias influences our judgement of others’ competencies. Consequently, whenever there’s significant cultural prejudice against certain groups, as there is with female software engineers, we expect to see inequalities emerge. So it’s implausible to attribute these differences to biology alone.
This touches on the part where I disagree the most with the memo: he acknowledges that bias exists, but appears to base his recommendations mostly on his non-bias explanations. He would have done better to underline that he doesn't want all anti-bias programs to end, but instead open them to more people where that makes sense. (He mentions a program to help women get better at negotiation, which would also help men who are bad at negotiation, but who are excluded because of their gender.)
He makes references to real science, but gets nowhere close to demonstrating that the effects he references should manifest themselves as an 80/20 gender ratio -- presumably worse, if his policy recommendations were adopted. Hell, I'm not even sure if the gender differences would make women worse at engineering, on average, anyway.
And HR, instead of addressing those points, refuting what would be wrong, and leading him to apologize if so, thus sending a powerful message about the existence of debate and rationale, recommended his firing, making him a martyr, and validating the part about the lack of dissent.
If this document stated 'I can't believe we don't talk about whether or not corpses feel it if you rape them.' You probably couldn't use that argument. Google decided what he said is fucked up and that he wasn't part of their society any longer. That type of dissent excluded him from their society and therefore no discussion is necessary. He is divergent and should be removed, just like someone who can't write code.
Both of those theses are quite sexist, and no, neither one is appropriate for discussion in the workplace. Especially a workplace that wishes to appear as welcoming for all, not just conservative white men.
If the workplace wishes to appear welcoming for all and at the same time has numerous sacred topics that cannot be touched even with a mile-long stick, then it is clearly not welcoming enough.
No, his thesis was that the gender gap can be explained by biology.
Verbatim, from the manifesto:
"For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation."
The way he explains it with biology is that he rattles off a bunch of micro-facts, and then uses 'logic' with a big sprinkling of bias, to reach amazing macro-conclusions.
The line you quote is not saying that all of the gender gap can be explained by biology. It's saying that it is an extreme position to say that all of it can be explained by "differential treatment" (sexism in one form or another).
EDIT: if you doubt this, just look at the document's title and TL;DR section.
[1] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...