91–100 of 443 posts
Why are people so outraged at this guy? I read what he wrote and it honestly sounds like he's trying to be helpful. It's at least polite. The knee-jerk "SEXIST!" reactions to him come off extremely self-righteous and immature. There are a hundred other male-dominated careers and I never, ever hear women complain about not being equally represented in them. Why? Because they're not attractive careers.
> He is one individual in a company that employs more than 72,000 people. Why has Silicon Valley spent the weekend talking about him Because we're not talking about a memo posted by one random engineer that got the reaction it deserved for declaring a large fraction of his co-workers sub-standard engineers (among the myriad broken things in that memo). That would have been a story for all of five minutes. Instead, we…
Are you blatantly lying about the content of the memo? Like, I wouldn't think so. I think you're hallucinating your own meaning to it. Would you mind explaining the thought process that lead you form this representation?
The major elephant in the room here, which the memo doesn't seem to address, is that as late as the 1960's, computer programming was seen as a natural career for young women. Has biology changed that much in the last fifty years?
In the sixties you would type punch cards and make sure you typed correctly so that you don't mess the batch run. EDIT: it was more of a secretarial type of job. And women would socialize with other women on the job. The point is that aside from the title, the IT industry then is in no way what we understand by IT industry now.
(Also, uh, I feel like "make sure you typed correctly" is a special case of "detail-oriented," which we just had an article yesterday trying to claim that men are better at because autism is more prevalent in men.)
Why are people so outraged at this guy? I read what he wrote and it honestly sounds like he's trying to be helpful. It's at least polite. The knee-jerk "SEXIST!" reactions to him come off extremely self-righteous and immature. There are a hundred other male-dominated careers and I never, ever hear women complain about not being equally represented in them. Why? Because they're not attractive careers.
A noticeable issue is in google and other tech cos it's totally okay for people to virtue signal against white males, even Asian males. Any other group and you're treading on very thin ice. You're likely to get summoned to see an HR rep.
One of my first exposures to this "manifesto" was on Twitter with someone starting a thread with "Google has a Nazi problem." The majority of the other responses I read either attacked the author, dismissed the entire text in whole, and/or refused to actually argue the paper's points because they saw them as so ridiculous or "obviously" wrong. I read the paper. I don't see at all how it relates to fascism, Trumpism,…
Secondly, it does not belong in the work place where it is rightly perceived as an aggression by the female coworkers (Telling them the bar was lowered to recruit them, they are inherently inferior to men at the job etc etc.)
Edit: To all the downvoters - I'll be charitable and assume that you are just subconsciously biased and not outright sexists. To see your bias in this situation just try to imagine that 40 years back some employee working at the Google of the day wrote such a manifesto against positive discrimination in favor of African Americans, citing all sorts of statistics claiming how they are lazy, lack commitment etc. Would you guys have wanted to 'hey let's talk about it' as well?
That answer should be "No."
By that alone, that engineer has created a toxic team environment.
You can't put a female engineer on his team, he can't work across teams with other female engineers, he shouldn't be interviewing potential female engineers given his obvious bias against them, etc.
If this isn't a reason to fire someone - what is?
Why are people so outraged at this guy? I read what he wrote and it honestly sounds like he's trying to be helpful. It's at least polite. The knee-jerk "SEXIST!" reactions to him come off extremely self-righteous and immature. There are a hundred other male-dominated careers and I never, ever hear women complain about not being equally represented in them. Why? Because they're not attractive careers.
Exactly! I came here to essentially post the same thing. I can't remember ever, even once, anyone talking about how to get more women into construction, forestry, fishing, sanitation, etc. Curious, isn't it? Likewise, I never hear anyone asking how we can get more men to be pre-school or early education teachers, home health aides, social workers, etc. In fact, I genuinely don't think I've ever once in my entire life…
Why are people so outraged at this guy? I read what he wrote and it honestly sounds like he's trying to be helpful. It's at least polite. The knee-jerk "SEXIST!" reactions to him come off extremely self-righteous and immature. There are a hundred other male-dominated careers and I never, ever hear women complain about not being equally represented in them. Why? Because they're not attractive careers.
It seems that the focus is always on the reaction to these pieces, and I wonder why. It's obvious why people are angry - he's trying to find a biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career. That's something that has mostly been dismissed as quackery, and has been shown to have some pretty negative consequences throughout history. The onus of people who want to stick up for this guy i…
If companies were really, truly interested in fairness and equality, then their HR policies for hiring would say one and only one thing - that the best candidate is the one that gets the job. Only exception would be issues with background checks or perhaps questionable/falsified work history or resume. Other than that, the rule stands. There would be no need to ensure "diversity" as a corporate policy because any and all minorities that apply and are the best will get hired. In those cases, HR would be there to document in detail who was the best and why to protect the company from frivolous diversity related lawsuits. HR would also act as a check and balance on imperfect and possibly biased individuals.
Regarding the "is it okay to fire this engineer" argument the author is making - here's what I'd ask the author. If you were managing the team this person was on, would you feel comfortable placing a female engineer on the team to work with him knowing the he fundamentally believes women are inadequate engineers? That answer should be "No." By that alone, that engineer has created a toxic team environment. You can't…
He doesn't believe that at all, and I'd like to hear why you think he does.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's be frank, here. This is not someone merely "expressing an opinion." This is someone rallying against diversity, using pseudoscience to back up claims that women and minorities are inferior, and thus shouldn't have been hired. On top of that, they ranted about how Google had not done enough to make conservatives feel they have a safe space, when the only thing Google has done on the subject is to make others fee…
He didn't rail against diversity, he railed against what are effectively affirmative action policies. Several times he went to pains to point out he wasn't against diversity of people, just the initiatives at Google. He railed against the idea that pay and hiring gaps must be caused by biases and, once you rule out bias, what you're left with must be some combination of cultural, biological, and personal factors. Bet…
If you want to address real issues, then you need to address how a team can cope with one of their members, a member who likely is one of the people who is giving reviews of them, has come out saying that they do not deserve to be there simply because of their gender or their race.