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Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

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Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#851

Post by Consultant32452 »

deanCommie wrote: post #848
Consultant32452 wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Only when it comes to things that the right is is indisputably on the wrong side of history and hasn't figured it out yet (gay rights, gender rights, etc). Except that's not how it works the other direction. You mentioned communism. The left is indisputably on the wrong side of history here and hasn't figured it out yet. And yet somehow the right is still willing to engage in reasonable discussion. A person could ta…

> And yet somehow the right is still willing to engage in reasonable discussion. This is a joke right? Proposing universal health care, paid maternity leave, or raising the minimum wage leads to screams of "SOCIALISM!" and any explicit support of socialism leads to screams about the millions of people killed by Stalin. There is no reasonable discourse about the idea of weak-link based cultures (rather than strong-lin…

When was the last time you saw a random nobody make national headlines news and have their career ruined for proposing universal healthcare? Yes, debates get heated, but the right generally does not try to destroy you in this way for being "wrong."

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#852

Post by pukerz »

_dps wrote: post #315

Could a lawyer educate me on a technical matter here? They say that "discriminatory statements are not protected". Is "discriminatory statement" a matter of law or a matter of fact? Naively I'd expect a jury to decide if a statement is discriminatory.

Search for 'Rekieta Law' on YouTube, he is a lawyer analysing the case in depth

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#853

Post by pukerz »

leereeves wrote: post #351
rendall wrote: post #103

Did the NLRB memo specify exactly which statements in Damore's memo were discriminatory and hostile? Is there a copy available?

The two statements they mentioned specifically were: > Women are more prone to “neuroticism,” resulting in women experiencing higher anxiety and exhibiting lower tolerance for stress, which “may contribute to . . . the lower number of women in high stress jobs”; > Men demonstrate greater variance in IQ than women, such that there are more men at both the top and bottom of the distribution. Thus, posited, the Employer…

The second statement was not even in the memo

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#854

Post by sseth »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #777
sseth wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication or this post is that the ratio of women among immigrants was lower than the indigenous population, and thus the influx of immigrants drove down the percentage of women in tech. I am not aware of other countries, but in India at least we have a higher percentage of women in IT than in the USA. So is it really true that female representation among these immigrants is lower than the indigenous population…

Anecdotally, I've encountered more Indian men than women in IT in USA. I'd guess that men emigrate more than women (and women who emigrate tend to come with their spouse), but I don't know for sure.

There are definitely more indian men than women in IT, by a big margin. But to take an example, Google currently has about 18-20% women in technical roles, i.e. 1 in 5. So assuming more than 1 in 5 immigrants in Google were women, you cannot argue that immigrants are the cause of the low ratio of women in Google. What we need to answer this question is the ratio of women among immigrants vs the overall ratio, something i could not get data on.

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#855

Post by tome »

wolf550e wrote: post #844
tome wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Do you have a link to that calculation? Maybe tptacek was impliticly referencing that calculation. I took what he said at face value but maybe real world numbers make my claim moot. By way of calculation, apparently 30k software engineers work for Google[1] so there are probably around 15k in the USA. There are 600k software engineers in the USA[2]. I estimate that Google employs about 10% of the enginee…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997524

Thanks! A variance ratio of 1.15 is nowhere near the 2.2 that my calculation predicts would be necessary! I think yorwba and I have done the same calculation from opposite directions and reached the same conclusion. A huge difference in variance would be needed to explain an 80/20 split at Google level.

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#856

Post by ncallaway »

leereeves wrote: post #599
ncallaway wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Employer determined that certain portions of the Charging Party’s memorandum violated existing policies on harassment and discrimination > The Employer has a legitimate, lawful policy prohibiting race and sex discrimination and harassment in its workplace. > An employer’s good-faith efforts to enforce its lawful anti-discrimination or anti-harassment policies must be afforded particular deference in light of th…

This seems like an interesting discussion to continue, weighing the deference the memo mentioned to the employer's policy against the fact that they ultimately make their own determination (which they must, of course, make to avoid abusive or spurious claims of harassment). Sadly, I'm too tired to continue right now. Perhaps another time.

I think Popehat (a fairly respected defense lawyer and first amendment blogger) has a fairly good write up of the NLRB memo and what it's ruling says here:

https://www.popehat.com/2018/02/20/lawsplainer-the-nlrb-damo...

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#857

Post by dragonwriter »

leereeves wrote: post #557
ncallaway wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and the specific details of this case are not protected by the NLRA. Also according to the NLRB.

Yes, we all agree that's what the NLRB said. We're discussing how they came to this conclusion. The lawyer who wrote this memo argued that Damore's statements would normally be deserving of protection, if they weren't so offensive.

> The lawyer who wrote this memo argued that Damore's statements would normally be deserving of protection, if they weren't so offensive.

Incorrect; the memo assumed (did not conclude) [0] that Damore’s memo was entirely within the protected purpose, and concluded that even given that assumption, the particular elements within it, for which Google claimed to have fired him, were within the bounds of what Google could fire him for, given their legitimate, pre-existing policy.

A legal decision memo (or a court decision) will often assume a point not because it finds it well supported, but because a dispositive answer to the legal question can be reached without resolving the point on which the assumption is made, and courts and lawyers often prefer to avoid resolving subissues that are unnecessary to resolve in order to resolve the actual question they are posed with.

So it did not argue that Damore’s memo would have been protected but for the identified problematic elements.

[0] key language: “Assuming, arguendo, that the Charging Party’s conduct was concerted and for mutual aid and protection, [...]” (p.3)

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#858

Post by dragonwriter »

leereeves wrote: post #204
tptacek wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter not because the NLRB is settling the science for itself, but because the NLRB doesn't want to intervene in cases where employers enforce anti-harassment policies. There's a case history about this, cited in the memo. Remember, the presumption at law is that Google has the right to fire employees for virtually no reason (conservatives should find this congenial). Damore was attempting to avail himsel…

You're right, the NLRB isn't settling the science. It's saying that discussion of the science renders otherwise protected speech unprotected ("so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected"), and effectively removing workers' legal right to engage in science-based discussion of whether a 50/50 gender ratio is the appropriate goal.

> You're right, the NLRB isn't settling the science. It's saying that discussion of the science renders otherwise protected speech unprotected

No, its saying that the specific manner in which Damore discussed the matter, in the context in which he did (including the specific provisions of Google's pre-existing anti-harassment policy), and the actual effects it had in the workplace, meant that even if the purpose of the speech was the kind protected under the NLRA, the actual actions were not.

> and effectively removing workers' legal right to engage in science-based discussion of whether a 50/50 gender ratio is the appropriate goal

While there is a protected right to labor organizing, it is not an unrestricted right to workplace debate over employer policy goals, even before the kind of conflict with unrelated (to labor organizing) policy at issue here. The NLRB memo did not address the question if whether Damore was otherwise within the bounds of protected labor organizing, it merely found that even assuming his speech met the purpose requirements for labor organizing, Google was within it's rights to fire him based on the specific grounds they cited.

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#859

Post by dragonwriter »

stcredzero wrote: post #335
ewjordan wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damore has basically 3 points in his memo, in increasing order of disputability: 1) Conservatives are discriminated against at Google, which is a problem for working conditions 2) Google pushes an aggressive voluntary affirmative action policy which aims to hire women and underrepresented minorities at rates much higher than they appear in the relevant sector of the workforce, and the way this is pushed internally is…

But the ruling says that the specific arguments you bring into play may still be in violation of company policy, and such arguments are not automatically protected by virtue of being connected to a working conditions complaint. In effect, the ruling ratifies a particular squishy, ideological interpretation of science.

> In effect, the ruling ratifies a particular squishy, ideological interpretation of science.

No, it just says that you can't wave a “labor organizing” flag to immunize yourself for consequences of violation of your employers facially-reasonable anti-harassment policy, thereby avoiding a situation in which employers could be put in the position of having to choose between violating the NLRA and violating the Civil Rights Act.

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#860

Post by Majora320 »

rayiner wrote: post #522
fzeroracer wrote: post #468

The problem with Damore's theory he posited (that the difference in traits and abilities between men and women is why you see a certain imbalance in tech) ignores the history of computer science, where in the early days of CS you had a large amount of women entering into software followed by a sharp dropoff in the 80s [1]. The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed…

It's not just the history of computer science. Damore's essay was based on time-tested pseudo-scientific reasoning, the sort that has been invoked to exclude women in many different fields. When law firms offered Sandra Day O'Connor a secretarial job after she graduated third in her class at Stanford, do you think they said "we just don't like women?" Of course not. They couched their bias in appeals to the differenc…

> When law firms offered Sandra Day O'Connor a secretarial job after she graduated third in her class at Stanford, do you think they said "we just don't like women?" Of course not. They couched their bias in appeals to the differences between men and women, and how those differences supposedly were relevant to the practice of law.

Note that he isn't saying that women do have these traits; they are saying that on average, they are more likely to. In this example, O'Connor would just be one of the ones to not have them.

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