For those wanting a females perspective on the memo itself…
Doesn’t touch the firing, or delve particularly deeply into the memo, but an interesting read, from a woman, who is a software engineer no less…
Girls are generaly not interested in techy things. That’s why most of the tech sector is made up of men.
Google get over it.
1 Like
Knowing one or two female engineers, they went into engineering for the “build things” and not for the “computers are cool tools” part.
Overall, women are not that interested in tech.
Criticizing Google is a dead end. It changes nothing. Why don’t you focus on the fact that it’s possible for companies in the US to fire people for pretty much any reason? That’s what needs to change if you’re truly interested in this issue. In most European countries this wouldn’t have been a firing offense because most have labor laws to protect employees from this type of behavior. Job security is infinitely better in the EU than it is in the US.
This is more of a contextual response. I’ve heard very much from her about many incidents that I simply can’t fathom experiencing, ranging from not being taken seriously in a professional environment despite being highly qualified to vulgar comments on the street from teenagers while merely walking the dog in the evening. Big city, small town, doesn’t matter, catcalls from passing vehicles, dismissal from colleagues, just an overarching trend of marginalization for no apparent reason.
She also does not fit into what one might call the societal expectation of what a woman “should be” in that she is not particularly social and does not desire to be so, there will be no children in our lives. Essentially she feels like an outcast already and language presented in the (notably distributed) memo simply feels like another transgression against her ability to compete on that fair playing field the writer complains is missing or being undermined.
I found this piece interesting: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/345824-opinion-the-google-diversity-memo-should-start-the
Edit: I found this one even moreso: http://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/internet/2017/08/were-asking-wrong-questions-about-google-anti-diversity-memo
sigh back to work time.
I’m not anti-discussion by any means, but his method of starting a discussion by submitting a memo to a closed circle of supposedly like-minded colleagues was definitely the wrong way to start one. He was obviously incorrect about at least one of them.
Why did you call them girls? Why is the tech sector not made up of boys?
Working with a few dozen, I can count on one hand the number of them that actually care about what’s inside the workstation. Granted most of them are ME’s, but that’s my experience. They all want to build cool things. There’s only one woman in our engineering department though.
4 Likes
I dunno, personally it still reads like hot garbage to me.
Google (or some other company) favoring a certain stereotype employee is no news. Rather find me one which doesn’t, structurally or otherwise.
My first impression of the memo was the one of bias confirmation. And each time I feel bias confirmation I have learn to step away and think again.
On the memo author:
You have to be really stupid, stupid, stupid, to assume a company memo won’t get passed around as-is, or leak out of the company. Google fired the guy is a win-win situation. He didn’t like it there. They don’t want him there.
On women in tech:
My experience of women in tech (not UX design but hard core software development) are usually in tech not because, but in spite of the gender roles. Sometimes they are in it for other reasons, sometimes for the same as men. Being there in spite of their gender roles, women average performance is usually fucking excellent, compared to the male average performance, which is… well… the average. And even that average is impressive to me, given how many obstacles women must navigate every day do get in that zen zone, in tech or outside tech. Far from all the men are dicks, just plenty are. Which is a generic male gender role rigidity issue. Not a generic female gender role non-rigidity issue. Which is one thing accurately raised by the memo.
Back to the memo itself:
For sure, the memo raises some damned important social issues (group identities, compulsory male gender role, alienation of conservative people at work and the value of having different types of people for each organization, etc.), and should have been iterated over by the Google management to improve its quality, instead of dismissing it altogether. It does not discuss female gender issues greatly, but it is introductory on male gender and conservative mindset issues and I think those deserve a very honest inquiry.
That memo does imho not deserve internal censorship, especially so at Google which is an immensely culturally significant company and shapes the world. It is irresponsible to censor this kind of dissent in such a company.
As for the tone of the memo:
It is much much above the average of five white guys in a closet talking feminism. Or five white guys in a closet talking racism. I find no particular issue with the tone of the memo other than it is occasionally slightly lazy.
The public response to the event was more and more clickbaiting. And I would instead rather like to hear an actual feminist dissect it (any resident women/girls/feminists up for it?), separate out what they think are good points and bad points, and then provide an honest opinion on where one may go further constructively from that memo, if anywhere, and really why not, if not.
Exactly. This is not really a freedom of speech issue (which it is being falsely promoted as and misconstrued to drive political agendas of L/R throwing some people yet another bone to fight over against each other), but more related to a tech company policy, and labor laws.
Look, there is no way in hell I could get fired for passing this sloppy text in my organization. Outside the fact that I could get in trouble negotiating my next raise for writing it during my work hours, which are better spent elsewhere, and wasting 30 minutes of my coworkers time on issues not relevant to their work. Finally, leaking this text outside the company would be the one offense most likely to get someone fired - for unauthorized communication with outside parties beyond their job description, and potentially damaging to our business image.
Are we even sure the person who leaked this is identified at Google and still has their job?
2 Likes
That’s my point. I don’t know why people are turning this into a rocket science.
I would like to know how the Google execs came to the conclusion that they workforce has to be 50% female.
1 Like
I am not agreeing or disagreeing with it, just mansplaining it as far as I can understand it:
In order to have as much power over their future as men do, in an equal society, an equal number of women would have to have an equal understanding of the technology as men. Google have chosen to promote this apparently because their management honestly believes that equal power distribution across genders is how one improves the world.
One can argue if it does. One can argue if they are doing it right even if it does. One can even argue whether this is an interesting and/or important agenda to debate.
It is all about distribution of power in the sense that knowledge is power. But then perhaps it should be about equal distribution of knowledge. Or the optimum unequal one. Interestingly, the memo author does raise these specific questions himself.
Help me out here. What exactly was said that shaped your opinion so negatively? A couple quotes would suffice.
It’s weird because based on the arguments I keep hearing from the US, the difference is because of lack of equality and bad behaviour from men that keep women out of technical fields, yet here in Finland and as far as I know the rest of the Nordic countries that dominate the world statistics in equality, all technical fields are male dominated and all healthcare and communications fields are female dominated despite a heavy push to get more women to take part in the male dominated fields.
For ex. for all technical fields in both polytechnics and university, only 26% of the applicants were women in 2014 How are you supposed to get parity when 74% of the people who even apply are men?
(for applying statistics see http://www.dia.fi/uutiset/dia-yhteisvalinnan-tulokset-2014-julkaistu/ and use google translate)
(note:Uni and Poly does not have tuition in Finland, you also get money from the government to do your studies so income is less of a factor than in the states)
Actually, these are quite good indeed, and certainly worth reading. They certainly did cover what I was asking to get to read up on, once I finally got around to reading them. Thanks a lot for posting them @Steinwerks :
1 Like
Diversity is good, but the middle east is bad because the west put groups of people who don’t belong together within the same borders.
I don’t think that there has even been a debate about diversity to begin with, let alone if diversity measures have gone too far. I disagree with his manifesto because he just assumes diversity is something that is critical for the operation of a company and that any lack of it is because of bias or racism.
First off, it’s very clearly a pipeline issue. To truly measure “diversity in the job market” first look at the number of students graduating from relevant programs then compare the number of grads to their representation in the workforce. I would guess that most minorities are OVER represented in the workplace compared to the programs they graduated from.
If you hire based on population demographics and not demographics relevant to your field, then you will statistically be hiring sub-par people just for their genitals or skin color because you will be hiring the top 50% of black graduates but only the top 2% of white or Asian graduates.
This is simply math.
Please provide a source of a multicultural haven or a place where diversity has been a benefit? There has always been a debate about diversity. Not so much of genders or ideas but of cultures more than anything.
2 Likes
You have framed your question in a very specific way.
I am under impression you just wanted to shut up the idea that diversity and multiculturalism can be a positive thing by a rhetorical question conditioned on having the opponents to the idea waste a lot of time before responding. This conditioning makes your question a common bait.
Benefits don’t occur without trade-offs, but there certainly are benefits to both multiculturalism and diversity. Expecting a potential/debatable benefit without a potential/debatable drawback is a folly, because there are no free lunches, ever, for as long as the resources are limited. Just like everyone, I enjoy diversity to a degree. You and I will probably just simply disagree on what diversity yields an enjoyable ROI, to whom, and in what exact way. As you say, there has always been a debate about diversity, and I’m pretty sure there always will be.
I chose to respond, but not with a source, because no source will change what you or I are comfortable choosing to support, privately or politically. You can always find plenty quality sources contrary to your opinion if you just make the effort. It’s not as if it hasn’t been already discussed. Providing a source is not an entitlement to having an honest and respectful opinion on a subject.
@BryzNasty makes one thing glaringly obvious - there is a very limited amount of companies which can each achieve maximum statistical diversity simultaneously. I’d add that there is no guarantee that a company which has achieved maximum statistical diversity individually for themselves has a more or a less advantageous ROI than one which hasn’t. This ROI estimation is what the memo unsuccessfully attempted to debate.
2 Likes
You could have just posted this as a response:
Please note that I do appreciate your response, and the manner that you chose to respond in. I don’t have a great handle on that variation of human patience.
My two cents is taking a stab at my frustrations of how careful we have to be with what we say… I don’t necessarily think less of one group of people for another, that is not what my comment addresses.
We’re all [big companies; trickle down effect] a bit too sensitive because we know that business for public IPO is a lot about being a Public IPO and not much else can change that. The reason they ran away with firing him was cause they just wanted the fire to be put out immediately - or at least pushed away from their noses.
It’s funny how even google can’t escape this reality that companies past a certain scale are now a meme. And yet where did all this come from…
So I didn’t answer any questions here. Moreso just gesticulation expressing my paranoia without any evidence to back it up. Please don’t be mad.
extension (edit):
It appears even google has to operate on defense occasionally… For the company it’s likely this is all about how people react to what has happened - and that is what dictated the actions of firing the individual.
I say this because I know for a fact having keeping this man on to mop the floor at night wouldn’t cause company profit to fall through the floor with the bucket of soap.
ok, now you can be mad. i’m sorry in advance. please let me know if this needs to be deleted.
You’re right, sorry. Who needs borders or a culture anyways. Let’s just all be one big free to roam cesspool with no identity.
Sounds about right.
I don’t even know what the fuck this dude is saying.
1 Like
I am late to the party, but I like the way Louis Rossman explains his thoughts on diversity
1 Like