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The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

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Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#321

Post by taysic »

haberman wrote: post #259
rayiner wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument basically proceeds as follows: 1) Gender differences exist 2) ??? 3) Differences in representation are explainable by gender differences The problem with the "???" step is that it's unrigorous handwaving. "Women prefer working with people." Okay, so that's why the majority of accountants are women? That's why STEM fields that don't involve people at all (math, biology) actually have quite a lot of women,…

I agree that "???" is unrigorous handwaving. And I don't think it purports to be rigorous; from the document: "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership." (emphasis mine). "May" and "in part." I don't think this purports to be a proof. Is this argument any more rigorous? 1. There is a non-50% representation bet…

Who says we need 50% women in tech? Has Google released a statement on this? While I have seen some inflammatory articles on the subject I don't know that many woman care if there are 50% woman in tech. I can tell you as a female engineer, I just hope that women know it's open to them and feel comfortable joining the field. I don't care about convincing uninterested people.

Instead here are some of the issues Google seeks to address which seem plenty reasonable to me.

"Our goal is to create an environment in which every Googler can thrive. We check and recheck our people processes (including promotions, compensation, and more) to ensure fairness and equity in all things that impact Googlers. For example, we took action when we saw that women in tech were less likely to self-nominate for promotions. We’ve also long had gender pay equity in our workforce and we recently shared our approach to compensation with the hope that other organizations will adopt similar fair pay practices." https://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#322

Post by didibus »

tmh79 wrote: post #224
didibus wrote: post #181

I hear a lot of complaints about conservative ideas being shunned and bullied, but I disagree completely. Why haven't I read a 10 page pro-diversity creed circulating at google? I haven't heard or read about progressive ideas in a long time, a long long time. I'd be willing to bet a pro diversity creed would get much stronger bullying against it too. Anyways, I'm tired of this issue, and people trying to pretend ther…

First of all, let me lead with: I'm a neoliberal democrat type person, I support diversity initiatives, reaching out to and supporting under represented communities, making changing to work culture to help people who haven't succeeded historically (IE mothers who leave to take care of their kids) etc. I disagree with most of the points in the guys doc. > Why haven't I read a 10 page pro-diversity creed circulating at…

How many people in SV join Google and spend time thinking about why those policies are in place, what underlying principle and reasoning has warranted them? How many explanation is there for why the current Google status quo leans left or appears to do so? Is that open for discussion too? I don't think so.

Now, I also find it ironic that status quo is considered progressive. The underlying principle of progressivism is change, continuous improvement through conscious change, measured by the impact on the lowest common denominator and the sum of all value. That is, you want to make the pie bigger and the smallest piece of pie bigger too.

I'm open for conversation, but you need to hear all data points to make an informed decision, one way discourse is possibly worse then no discourse.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#323

Post by smsm42 »

tptacek wrote: post #250
humanrebar wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is objecting to special pleading in a different direction. In other words, there's another train of thought: 1) Sexism exists 2) ??? 3) Differences in representation are explainable by sexism I think the original article was making a more nuanced argument allowing for an interconnected set of factors explaining the gender imbalance.

For differences in representation to be explainable by something other than sexism --- which has been rampant in other fields, in particular medicine and law, in the past and then enduringly corrected --- you'd need to establish either that CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science, virtually all of which see better (usually: much better) gender parity than CS does. In other words: you'll ne…

So you reasoning is going like this:

1. There is problem X

2. Possible cause of problem X is the reason Y

3. In fields where we are sure reason Y is rampant, we have successfully solved problem X by attacking instances of Y

4. In the field F, we have had no comparable success doing the same, despite all efforts.

5. Therefore, it is obvious that reason Y is much worse in F than everywhere and we should double and triple and quintuple our efforts there, until there is success. Since we reached success in other fields, it is stupid to assume we can't do the same here.

Do you see a problem with this chain of thought? If not, let me apply this logic to another model:

1. Cough is frequently caused by bacterial infections.

2. Antibiotics treat bacterial infections with much success in many cases

3. In patient P, antibiotics did not lead to any improvement of his cough.

4. Obviously, we need to double, triple and quintuple antibiotics doses until P is finally healed.

I hope you realize here that maybe P has a viral infection instead, or maybe he needs to stop smoking, or maybe he has another one of the hundred of causes of cough there could be.

>you'll need to demonstrate either that it's somehow harder to write the 900th instance of the same SQL query than it is to understand supersingular curve isogenies,

What you mean by "harder"? Is it harder to lift 600lbs than to give birth to a baby? Why do you assume that the question is about "harder" and not, for example, "more pleasurable" or "more intellectually satisfying"? Maybe SQL queries just bore prospective biologists to tears?

BTW, among composers the gender balance is even worse. Is it harder to write a symphony than to decode human genome? What metrics would you use to compare them?

Maybe instead treating everything as a nail we should try and consider some alternative hypotheses than "CS and musicians hate women"? It might be more efficient than force-feeding antibiotics to somebody who does't have bacterial infection.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#324

Post by Veratyr »

door wrote: post #146
0xbear wrote: post #121

As a former Googler: dude is _so_ getting fired and blacklisted. I've seen people driven out just for saying someone else looks good in a bathing suit. Not a direct or indirect report, mind you, a person completely outside the chain of command, at a team event in (IIRC) Hawaii. A small minority of people takes victim mentality and makes it near religious internal dogma. The rest just go along with it due to fat paych…

> I've seen people driven out just for saying someone else looks good in a bathing suit. understandably, as that is extremely unprofessional and sexual harassment

I think the exact wording and context is important here.

"Hey Googlette, you look really good in a bathing suit" is a comment about how the woman's body looks in a revealing outfit. I'd say this is generally unprofessional, though in some contexts (perhaps she'd just been expressing a lack of confidence in her body), it could still be appropriate.

"Hey Googlette, that bathing suit looks really good on you" is a comment on the particular bathing suit and how the combination works well. It's potentially more of a comment on her good choice and fashion sense than on her body. If the bathing suit is particularly risqué then it might be inappropriate but if it's just a normal bathing suit I don't think it'd be any more inappropriate than "your new haircut looks really good" or "is that a new top? It looks really good".

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#325

Post by remarkEon »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #226
remarkEon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except he didn't say that the differences we observe are 100% due to biology. I'm actually pretty shocked at how much of this thread seems to deliberately mischaracterize what he wrote.

> Except he didn't say that the differences we observe are 100% due to biology. He did, if he didn't intend to he used the wrong language. He had a section called: > Personality Differences Where to his credit he did say: "on average" but then he failed to distinguish these differences as cultural or social. Rather he prefixed that part of the article with a section that stated: > On average, men and women biological…

How in the world did you determine that "on average differences" means 100% explanation? Full disclosure, I work in supply chain and statistics is part (maybe most) of what I do so maybe I'm being pedantic.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#326

Post by j9461701 »

rayiner wrote: post #125
factsaresacred wrote: post #5

I fail to understand the outrage but attribute that to the fact that few bothered to read the document before allowing themselves to be outraged by it - such is the shallow, feeling-fueled, hysteria-laden media cycle of today. The doc presents a point-of-view, grounded in reality. Furthermore it's not "anti-diversity", but rather anti-discrimination - specifically 'positive 'discrimination which it discredits while p…

The argument basically proceeds as follows: 1) Gender differences exist 2) ??? 3) Differences in representation are explainable by gender differences The problem with the "???" step is that it's unrigorous handwaving. "Women prefer working with people." Okay, so that's why the majority of accountants are women? That's why STEM fields that don't involve people at all (math, biology) actually have quite a lot of women,…

>The problem with the "???" step is that it's unrigorous handwaving.

The problem with the "???" is it's not in its proper place in the chain of logic. The syllogism instead goes:

1) Do we observe certain traits cause individuals to tend toward science, while others cause them to trend toward the humanities?

Yes. Whether or not you will enter the humanities or the sciences is correlated with whether you display a higher empathizing quotient ("preferring to work with people") vs. systematizing quotient ("preferring to work with things/numbers"), regardless of your gender.

2) Do we observe these traits vary by gender?

Also yes. Men generally have higher systematizing quotients, while women have higher empathizing quotients.

[source for both points: http://www.somersetcanyons.com/ourpages/auto/2016/3/11/48638...]

3) Therefore, some amount of difference in representation logically comes from differences in these gendered traits - whatever might have caused them to become gendered in the first place.

>Okay, so that's why the majority of accountants are women? That's why STEM fields that don't involve people at all (math, biology) actually have quite a lot of women, while programming doesn't have much women despite being on the social/people-oriented end of the spectrum?

Women represent over 60% of all undergrad university students, so we should expect fields that require an undergrad university degree to be a majority women barring other factors. Yet math, physics, chemistry, earth science, statistics, engineering - every one of them has fewer women than it should proportionately. Even biology, which for a brief time had a higher proportion of women than 60%, recently dipped back below that point. [graph: https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/upload/Deg...]

Conversely, here is a list of majors that have consistently had above 80% female proportions:

Fashion Design, Interior Design, Education, Social Work, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Art History

The specifics of why one given STEM major is more under-represented than another is an interesting question, but it shouldn't obscure the overarching trend - whether by a little or a lot, all the STEM majors have fewer women than they should. The data does indeed support the idea women prefer people-oriented professions over thing oriented professions on average.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#327

Post by swframe2 »

rifung wrote: post #180
swframe2 wrote: post #104

I was talking to coworker who recently transferred from China to the US. He told me that China is will dominate the US because diversity is the greatest US weakness. Kind of shocking because our company is about 1/3 White, Indian and Chinese. But he doesn't see that as diversity. I think that is the answer that he can't see. Once groups accept each other as equals diversity becomes a non-issue. It does take work and…

> I was talking to coworker who recently transferred from China to the US. He told me that China is will dominate the US because diversity is the greatest US weakness. Has said coworker seen the research which suggests diversity increases company performance? http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-...

There is that study that indicates that facts don't change opinion.

(There is a scene in BSG where Six tells Guys that maybe Boomer doesn't know she is a cyclon; what will happen (to you) when she finds out? I've tried and boy it can get seriously painful very quickly. Sometimes it is better to leave the fixing to the professionals. The other name for freedom fighter is terrorist.)

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#328

Post by 0xbear »

rifung wrote: post #242
0xbear wrote: post #121

As a former Googler: dude is _so_ getting fired and blacklisted. I've seen people driven out just for saying someone else looks good in a bathing suit. Not a direct or indirect report, mind you, a person completely outside the chain of command, at a team event in (IIRC) Hawaii. A small minority of people takes victim mentality and makes it near religious internal dogma. The rest just go along with it due to fat paych…

> A small minority of people takes victim mentality and makes it near religious internal dogma. The rest just go along with it due to fat paychecks and the lack of desire to get fired for not being PC enough. As a current Googler I am surprised to hear this. I think most of the people I work with would agree that while it might be normal to think something like that, you should keep it to yourself.

You say you're surprised, and then confirm my opinion almost to the letter. Truth is, it's dangerous to not "keep it to yourself", so people don't talk about it.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#329

Post by 0xbear »

door wrote: post #146
0xbear wrote: post #121

As a former Googler: dude is _so_ getting fired and blacklisted. I've seen people driven out just for saying someone else looks good in a bathing suit. Not a direct or indirect report, mind you, a person completely outside the chain of command, at a team event in (IIRC) Hawaii. A small minority of people takes victim mentality and makes it near religious internal dogma. The rest just go along with it due to fat paych…

> I've seen people driven out just for saying someone else looks good in a bathing suit. understandably, as that is extremely unprofessional and sexual harassment

I'm sorry, saying to someone "you look good" is not "sexual harassment" no matter how much you want it to be.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#330

Post by ithkuil »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #202
humanrebar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The suggestion that men and women ARE different is taboo. Is it taboo? Or is it just taboo in this context? The premise is also shared by some arguments for trangender rights -- that gender identity is involuntary and biological at least to some degree.

I think anything that tries to brush 50% with a hue that isn't literal biological fact is tenuous and gets people's backs up. e.g. > Men are more violent than women. I mean that's somewhat factual (i.e. considering crime rates) but the very mention of the phrase is tinged with ulterior motive so it becomes taboo. Basically you're better off sticking to literal difference, avoiding sociologically and focusing on diffe…

Well it does make a difference when you're talking about the countermeasures that society (or in this case a private company) should adopt to fix the problem. If you claim that the cause for male violence lies solely in the upbringing you might in the best case waste a lot of resources in the worst case cause a lot of psychological suffering so common in all our attempts to "fix" the "wrong" behaviour of kids (left-handed, homosexual, ...).
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