391–400 of 660 posts
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…
However, openly stating that Google wants to discriminate in favor of females - is illegal.
So Google uses double-speak and encourages hiring more females under "affirmative action" and "diversity" guidelines.
Not everyone understands double-speak, so there is disconnect between what Google is trying to do and opinions on the ground ("why do we discriminate against males in favor of females?").
That disconnect results in internal popularity of "Anti-Diversity" papers like this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read what Rayiner wrote more carefully. Computer science is unique among STEM fields --- even mathematics --- in its gender imbalance. The "???" here has a name: it's called "special pleading". It's not hard to see why people would get angry at a special pleading intended to excuse gender disparities.
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.
You can not remove the biological factors. So they're a dead end.
Too me, it sounds more like people claim we have nowadays removed sexism, that Google has none, and others disagree, that they are still there, while not as strongly maybe, and until they are fully addressed, we can't tell if the system is fair to biology or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 trip…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The difference is that we know that unjust discrimination and social pressure exist; we know it was historically very bad; and we have a concrete theory of causation. With the biological explanation there is no theory of causation.
For the people living in those historic eras. We don't know the effects it has on people living in the modern era.
And then you have to make the leap on why tech companies should be enacting social justice in the first place. They're not the guardians of society. Social justice is inflammatory and hiring is basically a zero sum game because "diversity" doesn't affect head count (other than for the liberal arts majors and recruiters who have made careers out of the diversity issue)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see what's micro about losing your job for wrongthink. I admit this is my first time hearing the term "wrongthink" but I assume this means something along the lines of "thinking the wrong thing". If that's true, then nobody loses their job for wrongthink. What they lose it for is actually acting on it, which i guess you could call wrongdoing. Take for example, sexual harassment. It's okay to find your cowor…
Wrongthink is a play on some of the Newspeak terms in George Orwell's 1984, it roughly equates to a thoughtcrime. Sexual harassment, discrimination, racism and personal attacks absolutely do not belong in the workplace. The usual advice is to keep politics out of the workplace, but "progressive" ideals are often the default with nobody batting an eyelid. You run the risk of being marked as a non culture fit if you ev…
I completely agree that affirmative action kind of backfires in some ways. I'm not entirely sure what the solution to that is.
> I dread to think how uncomfortable I would be knowing that I was a diversity hire, and some arbitrary box I fit in was the reason for my hiring rather than my skills and experience.
This was actually brought up by a woman at one of the TGIFs at Google and the response was that we don't hire people just because they fit into some arbitrary category. I do think that we make an attempt to get a more diverse group of people into the application pipeline, but you certainly wouldn't be hired just for the sake of diversity. That doesn't stop people, even within the company, from being misinformed however.
> As a child I can't think of anything that would make you more of a social paraih than an interest that is considered "nerdy", from my experience boys get it a bit easier with such interests and attract a bit less derision. Girls seem to be even less understanding when it comes to that kind of interest, especially from other girls. I can very easily see how that kind of social feedback would make you think twice about pursuing certain interests. I didn't really have that many friends growing up, and largely didn't give a shit about what other people thought of me, so I pursued whatever I found interesting and useful.
I think that Google does try to do this. This is why we have many programs encouraging women to get into CS majors and the such, because like you say, it's difficult to get more diverse hires if the application pool is not diverse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because politicians require hyper-competitiveness to reach the top of the political hierarchy. Unfortunately most women would be considered far too agreeable, or conversely gender stereotypes portray females as being out-of-character (bossy) pursuing such cut-throat roles.
I suspect the amount of hatred against the German chancellor Merkel I can hear in casual conversations here in Italy (by males and females equally) is mostly to be attributed to her being perceived as bossy just because she's a woman. An equally bossy man would be normal
Another example, I have read research that ADHD might not necessarily be less common in women, just under diagnosed. A little boy running around the classroom and talking to everyone is potentially referred to a doctor for ADHD. A little girl running around the room talking to everyone is considered "social."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any peer reviewed citations for those claims? If this is as certain as you're assuming, it should be easy to point to the underlying mechanism and evolutionary underpinnings.
Ha. The Evolutionary Psychology wiki is probably a good start, but if you're skeptical of evolution I'm not confident anything I'd link would convince you.
Again: do you have any citations? If this was as well as established as you're claiming they should be easy to provide.
It’s interesting that the author considers the conceptual framework of microaggressions spurious, while describing his negative experiences as a conservative Googler in terms of what a feminist might describe as microaggressions. To further undermine his own point, he asserts that several harms against conservatives have been caused by these microaggressions. The difference between effective negative feedback and har…
I don't see what's micro about losing your job for wrongthink.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are actually a few studies showing gender differences in infants and monkeys. (males preferentially looking at/interacting with mechanical things, females faces/dolls) From that, you can assume that there are at least some biological differences in behavior between the sexes - and thus differing workplace representation is not necessarily 100% derived from social pressures. And if that's the case, achieving a 5…
IQ variance might explain part of the difference in nobel prize winners, but is minuscule at average IQ in tech (~90th percentile).