Google cancels meeting on gender controversy due to employee fears of harassment

Please leave personal attacks out of this. I've done the courtesy of reading Damore's memo and citing and quoting from his linked references. Don't reduce my interest in discussion to having an "extreme axe to grind", which is somewhat ironic since I'm in the demographic that Damore's memo purports to advocate for.

> Employment here is based solely upon individual merit and qualifications directly related to professional competence. We strictly prohibit unlawful discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, veteran status, national origin, ancestry, pregnancy status, sex, gender identity or expression, age, marital status, mental or physical disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, or any other characteristics protected by law. We also make all reasonable accommodations to meet our obligations under laws protecting the rights of the disabled.

From the code of conduct. "XX% of hiring must be of phenotype Y" is in direct violation of the code of conduct. "If two candidates of phenotype X and Y are equally qualified, prefer the X candidate" is in direct violation of the code of conduct. "Target hiring search based on phenotype X" is in direct violation of the code of conduct.

Edit. "women-in-tech initiatives" _are not_ a form of discrimination. Phenotype-based hiring and promotion policies _are_.

Edit2. There is no such thing as protected groups under law. There are only protected characteristics. For example, sex. One can't discriminate on the basis of sex, _either_ female or male. Favoring females is de-favoring males, thus discrimination.

Actually, rhetorical forms are fallacies if they are not universally true. That they may be true in particular instances is not important.

> "XX% of hiring must be of phenotype Y" is in direct violation of the code of conduct.

Does Google have mandated quotas? For which demographic, because they seem to be either ignoring them (which would mean they aren't mandates) or aiming pretty low when it comes to women and non-asians. Or they coincidentally ended up with roughly the same quotas as all the other large tech companies:

http://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/

> "If two candidates of phenotype X and Y are equally qualified, prefer the X candidate" is in direct violation of the code of conduct.

"prefer the X candidate" (if X is a stand-in for a gender/racial/subgroup of protected category) is plain illegal. So I'm assuming that's not an official Google mandate (without further evidence).

But this would be a pointless mandate anyway as there is no such thing as "equally qualified". Has a hiring manager ever had to decide between identical twins who went to the same schools and internships for the same amount of years and received the same grades and job evaluations? Is there a universally agreed upon conversion scale upon which we know how many years at MIT equals a year at Harvard (or vice versa), and how that translates into "qualification points" depending on job title?

> "Target hiring search based on phenotype X" is in direct violation of the code of conduct.

Uh, well since we're trying to interpret the letter and spirit of the quoted passage in the Code of Conduct, I hope it isn't pedantic to point out that the quoted passage specifically refers to the basis of "employment" and employment is related to, but not recruitment? I mean, has there ever been a recruiting process that was unaffected by factors unrelated to "individual merit and qualifications"? LinkedIn built a unicorn business off of the bias of networks. Before LinkedIn, there was this concept called "references".

If you're suggesting it's wrong for a job search to prioritize diversity, at what level? I'm not a lawyer but let's assume that a policy of "reject all applications from whites and non-females" would be legally prohibited. However, sending a recruiter to do a luncheon at Smith College or Howard University is clearly not illegal. But is it "wrong" or suboptimal if Google sends a recruiter to those colleges even though it's much cheaper to do a recruiting tour at Stanford and Berkeley? Does the extra expenditure for sending a recruiter to colleges that are mostly black/women constitute evidence that Google has racial/gender biases, because it's spending more money to recruit at colleges that have far fewer whites/men than the average college? What about donating to and allowing employees to spend worktime assisting and interacting with programs like Black Girls Code or the Society of Women Engineers, which would presumably increase the chances that members of those organizations end up successfully networking with Google recruiters?

Just as Damore argued in his memo, diversity is not as simple as skin color or gender. So it stands to reason that initiatives with the aim of supporting and increasing diversity or not simple, nor reducible to "Google hires unqualified non-white-males in the pursuit of public relations/appeasing SJWs", which is how Damore seemed to interpret things.

But why should we assume Damore has interpreted Google's initiatives correctly, which would imply that the Google employees who agree or participate in these initiatives are idiots and/or complicit in discrimination? He didn't name any specific people or employees so it's possible that he's had adequate interaction with the initiatives and its facilitators to make a privileged assessment of them. If he has evidence that these programs led to either illegal discrimination of qualified candidates, and/or the hiring of inferior candidates, I'm assuming he'll bring that up with his complaint to the NLRB.

Don't get me wrong, the rhetorical trick that idlewords is implied to use is just as annoying. Like, "If pro-life people truly cared about human and babies lives, why don't they speak up for single-payer healthcare?" It involves irrational assumptions and/or over-simplification of issues. And its implications are itself a logical fallacy: If people who support A also support B, and people who support C support B, then people who believe in A but not C are hypocrites

But No True Scotsman fallacies can occur without those pre-requisites and it's a common enough fallacy that it deserves its own term, so that it's easier to identify and denounce its use.

Also, I really want to know if there is a specific phrase/category that describes what idlewords is accused of, for the same reasons of easier identification and denunciation :)