Google fires employee behind anti-diversity memo

I this up on another group, thought it might spark a thread here!

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(Reuters) - Internet giant Google has fired the male engineer at the center of an uproar in Silicon Valley over the past week after he authored an internal memo asserting there are biological causes behind gender inequality in the tech industry.

James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, confirmed his dismissal, saying in an email to Reuters on Monday that he had been fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes".

Damore said he was exploring all possible legal remedies, and that before being fired, he had submitted a charge to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accusing Google upper management of trying to shame him into silence.

"It's illegal to retaliate against an NLRB charge," he wrote in the email.

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc based in Mountain View, Calif., said it could not talk about individual employee cases.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai told employees in a note on Monday that portions of the anti-diversity memo "violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace," according to a copy of the note seen by Reuters.

It was not immediately clear what legal authority Damore could try to invoke. Non-union or "at will" employees, such as most tech workers, can be fired in the United States for a wide array of reasons that have nothing to do with performance.

The U.S. National Labor Relations Act guarantees workers, whether they are in a union or not, the right to engage in "concerted activities" for their "mutual aid or protection".

Damore, though, would likely face an uphill fight to seek that protection based on his memo, said Alison Morantz, a Stanford University law professor with expertise in labor law.

"It's going to be a hard sell that this activity was either concerted or for mutual aid or protection, rather than simply venting or pitting one group of workers against the others, which does not sound very mutual," Morantz said.

Debate over the treatment of women in the male-dominated tech industry has raged for months. Claims of persistent sexual harassment in the ranks of Uber Technologies Inc and of several venture capital firms led to management shakeups.

Management at the largest tech firms, including Google, have publicly committed to diversifying their workforces, although the percentage of women in engineering and management roles remains low at many companies.

The U.S. Department of Labor is investigating whether Google has unlawfully paid women less than men. The company has denied the charges.

Damore asserted in his 3,000-word document that circulated inside the company last week that "Google's left bias has created a politically correct monoculture" which prevented honest discussion of diversity.

The engineer, who has a doctoral degree in systems biology from Harvard University, according to his LinkedIn page, attacked the idea that gender diversity should be a goal.

"The distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and ... these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership," Damore wrote in the memo.

He quickly received support in conservative media outlets. On Breitbart News, once run by Steve Bannon, now chief strategist to President Donald Trump, commentators overnight discussed whether to boycott Google and switch to services such as Microsoft Corp's Bing.

Google's vice president of diversity, Danielle Brown, sent a memo in response to the furor over the weekend, saying the engineer's essay "advanced incorrect assumptions about gender".

Reply to
amdx
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They support dissent by stifling the expression of dissent >:-}

Old news...

But, hey! It's Google... who gives a crap? ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

"Don't be evil."

Reply to
krw

He cherry-picked a bunch of statements like "women on average suffer from more anxiety then men" which may be true, I definitely couldn't tell ya for sure, but presented them as statements of fact like it was all settled science and there was no uncertainty at all. Given the "science facts" which he decided to include his conclusion that women shouldn't be hired for software jobs followed naturally. Because it was set up that way.

It was kind of low quality college sophomore text for someone with a PhD too.

Also I don't have a reference for this offhand but I believe one of the articles I read about it said not only did he write the memo but started implementing the "policies" contained within unilaterally among the members of his project team without the permission of management, which if true is a you're fired offense right there. I'll see if I can find a ref for that

I know some guys who work at the big G and the hearsay is that the guy was "known to management" and a habitual PITA in other aspects of the corporate environment as well; they were probably looking for an excuse to get rid of him anyway, and he gave it to him. He knew who he was working for and what kind of company it was, he basically threw himself to the wolves as the result was totally predictable. Like, what you expect.

Reply to
bitrex

He thought Google gave more of a shit about defending his right to freely express his political ideas than defending their PR, which is probably a dumb notion to have as an employee of any company.

Reply to
bitrex

Sorry, "right" should be in quotes in this context.

Reply to
bitrex

He also said in his memo that they need to have "less empathy" and be more ruthless in the hiring/termination process. The completely natural thing to do to someone pleading for an employer's HR department to be more ruthless is to fire them immediately. If they complain then it means they didn't really believe in what they were saying.

Reply to
bitrex

I had to wonder about Danielle being in the diversity department rather than an engineer.

Mikek

Reply to
amdx

Someone somewhere is probably writing a follow-up on why women are biologically unsuited to get MBAs too I suppose

Reply to
bitrex

Politically incorrect, she means.

Reply to
Rob

Even if we assume that the statement "women on average suffer from more anxiety than men" is true, and we also assume that suffering from anxiety makes you less suitable for working at Google (I am not saying anything about the actual truth or falsity of either statement), then the obvious thing for Google's HR folk is to sort by anxiety suffering - not by gender.

Reply to
David Brown

Why is it the term "politically incorrect" is only used when criticizing someone for judging others as being "politically incorrect"? No one actually uses the term in the first person context of actually saying someone is "politically incorrect".

Seems more like a straw man type of thing. "Let's create this 'political correctness' thing and then complain that others use it".

Are you being politically incorrect.... on purpose?

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

a common error. The sensible thing is to sort by ability to achieve, not by daft notions about things that might or might not mildly correlate.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

How very Catbert of you. This seems apposite:

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I do think the guy might have a point though about gender bias in some engineering and hard sciences being at least partially innate rather than cultural. But there are always exceptions to any general rule.

There is a difference in how male and female brains use pattern matching and 3D visualisation. Females being generally much better at languages.

The number of women mathematics geniuses I have met can be counted on the fingers of one hand and it isn't just a selection effect. Two of them were while I was still at school but they ran out of steam later. Another is now a professor and senior researcher at Jodrell Bank.

There are always exceptions which led to the first woman maths genius Phillippa Fawcett in 1890 Mathematics Tripos ranked above the Senior Wrangler at Cambridge. Female senior wranglers are still rare events.

The ratio for chess grandmasters male to female is about 1500:35 and a lot of that ratio is definitely just a cultural selection effect. In my university physics class I think the M:F ratio was around 10:1 whereas at advanced level secondary school the ratio was more like 3:1.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

But the obvious conclusion is that anxiety causes femininity and so femininity is a good indicator of anxiety and should be used as a discriminant for risk of anxiety.

I recall listening to a religious radio station on travel (there sometimes is no other station in range). The guy was arguing for the ban on transgenders by analogy describing how women were unfit for combat duty because they would have to do this chore, or that chore and as a whole were unable. He couldn't seem to see that these were things that some men would not be able to do and that they could be screened for. *NO ONE* who couldn't do them would be unfit for combat duty. In a different context he

*did* seem to be saying they should screen for performance of specific tasks as if that would disqualify *all* women without acknowledging it would also disqualify some men. Then he somehow tried to tie that to transgenders by saying their presence would somehow destroy moral without commenting on the fact that there are presently active duty transgenders serving without issue.

Obviously trying to create a rational where none existed. I only wish religious radio would sponsor debates.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

How about we don't take action based on assumptions and invalid conclusions? This isn't climate science you know! Can't we just act on the idea that there is no justifiable reason for excluding anyone from a career they might be interested in? The corollary to that is that we should help to even out the discrepancies by encouraging those groups underrepresented in science and engineering? Is that such a hard or terrible thing to do?

So you want to slice ability into tiny pieces and categories and try to predict how groups will perform? That's a bit like predicting how food will taste by analyzing the chemical content. Better to just sit down and taste it.

How is your personal anecdotes relevant to the discussion? You aren't John Larkin who can analyze climate by looking out his window.

I got started in engineering about the same time companies were accepting women as engineers, in the early 80's. The company I worked for hired one new hire woman and she felt totally out of place, or maybe like the gorillas in the primate building at the National Zoo. I've never seen such unhappy looking animals in my life and a close second were employees at a defense contractor.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

It wasn't so much that they were "politically incorrect"; I believe it would be perfectly possible to write a memo fostering discussion about whether the gender gap in tech is a social construct, biological, or how much of what that it is, that one would never have cause to be fired over.

I think it was more because of the way he wrote it, which was more or less presenting every statement he made as a statement of fact like he was the world's foremost authority on the topic.

Hey, maybe men _are_ better suited to coding then women due to biological factors. I definitely couldn't tell ya for sure, but he had an opportunity to write an actual good document containing actual science (given that he apparently had a PhD and worked in the sciecnes at one point) and instead dumped a lot of pseudoscience and gut feelings onto the page, and pretty much just came off as a person with an axe to grind.

At the end of the day he's still working for a company that has many concerns outside of giving Employee X a platform to ramble on about any topic they wish on company time, and in true egomaniac fashion he forgot who he was working for and who his final loyalty when on the clock was supposed to be. If I were a manager there I'd definitely be wondering what exactly we were paying this guy ~150G a year for after reading through it.

He even lists a "bias" the Right supposedly has as being "too much respect for authority" but I'd say that's often a legit virtue - he clearly forgot that the people he was working for had needs outside of his own and in the corporate world that's something that gets you f***ed.

Reply to
bitrex

Well, of course. Read what I wrote - the whole of the logic, not just the last bit.

Reply to
David Brown

You could easily construct a "biological argument" that men are unsuited to jobs in aviation/spaceflight, what with their "on average" greater height, higher body mass, higher testosterone levels that make them more prone to frustration and anger, etc...

Still seem to be a lot of men flying things tho

Reply to
bitrex

If she weighs the same as a duck, she is made of wood and therefore a witch? Unfortunately, there are real people, with real authority, who do think like that.

Rationalising decisions after they have been made is a fundamental feature of how human minds work - other important features being pattern matching and generalisation. It takes a lot of effort and ability to think rationally and objectively - it is much easier to fall back to simpler, more basic methods. At the risk of doing /exactly/ the same thing myself, I would say it is a common feature amongst religious people - once they have decided that there is a "god" of some sort, everything else has to be rationalised to fit that decision.

Reply to
David Brown

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