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Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

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Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#991

Post by pacificleo11 »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #714
tunesmith wrote: post #123

People can't seem to summarize his argument without getting much of it grossly wrong, because his manifesto was a haphazard collection of good points, bad points, good arguments, lousy arguments, misrepresentations of others' views, and unstated implications. A perfect recipe for people to argue past each other about it. It's worth remembering that one of his conclusions was to end or replace gender-based diversity p…

You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case. If the author is wrong, that there definitely isn't some inherit genetic behavioral bias influencing job choice, than the bias is happening before students finish highschool. I'm a proponent for an "early bias" theory because of far l…

"The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. "

I agree with your point but economist will say that increasing the demand will be a better technique. Supply side will take care of itself. Affirmative actions are usually intended to create an artificial spike in demand for the purpose of greater good. How effective they are is a different matter altogether.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#992

Post by xurukefi »

I never understood why diversity should play a role in the hiring process. If I have a company and I want to hire somebody, the only thing I care about is whether this person offers a valuable contribution to my business or not. It's plain simple to me and I fail to see how superficial attributes such as gender or race are a part of this "equation".

With that being said, it is totally understandable why Google fired the employee, regardless of whether his voiced opinions were out of line or not. The manifesto was not well perceived by the media and not firing the employee would have resulted in bad PR. By firing the employee Google made a very rational decision.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#993

Post by Chris2048 »

roguecoder wrote: post #980
Chris2048 wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias But is the bias substantiated so that diversity hiring tracks it? Do the men who lose out to diversity candidates, the same that are benefiting from bias (as individuals, not "men, as a group")? Isn't this like saying "Jailing innocent men is a fair price to ensure the guilty don'…

Yes, that's what "systematic bias" means. In actual observational studies, the men who are excluded from positions by gender quotas are less competent than the women who replace them: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/03/13/gender-quot... This is why there is such intense reactions against correcting for bias: men with imposter syndrome or who are actually incompetent are afraid that they wouldn't be able to…

Which statement are you answering "yes" to? I asked if the quotas "track" bias - in the sense that bias is actively measured, and quotas adjusted accordingly.

I haven't read the study in your link, and might not even be qualified to interpret it, but two things stand out to me:

1) The study appears to focus on a single "event" or "snapshot" - not an ongoing, corrected process:

> Our research asks what happened when the central party organisation of the Social Democratic party imposed the quota on 285 local (municipal) political parties from the 1994 election and forward.

As such, it might be that the "mediocre reducing" nature of the results only apply to one-off applications of gender quotas where there previously were none. In fact, if one of the concerns is "cronyism" (or "insider bias"), then any quota requiring employment of outsiders might just be as effective at ousting the mediocre.

This has nothing really to do with my question, of whether such policies actually "track" bias, because it doesn't seem this example does.

2) They use a problematic/controversial definition of "merit":

> A competent politician, we argue, is a person who makes more than the median amongst politicians with similar characteristics.

They directly equate personal income with competence/mediocrity, which invites all kinds of questions...

Also, politics is a little different - there is a sense that politicians "represent" their populace, so the race/sex of politicians should also be more representative. Plus, politics is more "restricted" in the sense that only a certain population (size) of politicians need serve a certain national population (size) - but the restrictions (market size) in the corporate world might not be so distinct; There is plenty room for more qualified software developers.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#994

Post by bkirkby »

BeetleB wrote: post #884
slackingoff2017 wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case. If the author is wrong, that there definitely isn't some inherit genetic behavioral bias influencing job choice, than the bias is happening before students finish highschool. I'm a proponent for an "early bias" theory because of far l…

>You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case. >it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women. I cannot speak for Google and I haven't been following their recruitment efforts. However, I will say I'm a li…

Isn't that the majority of the evidence tho? What I keep hearing is that women are underrepresented because women are slightly more than 50% of the population but 10-20% of engineering jobs.

That implies that diversity initiatives are going to continue until we have slightly more than 50% representation. Which is not bad in and of itself, but it seems like the initiatives are not allowed to used research or data beyond less than 50% representation. It gets sinister and loaded with unintended consequences when the expected shortcut is just to implement quotas to teach that one metric.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#995

Post by panda88888 »

kevingadd wrote: post #401
_justinfunk wrote: post #394

A hiring process is by nature a discriminatory event. Right? You have a pile of resumes and you discriminate between the candidates during the selection process. This happens on a number of different criteria. The criteria that we should not discriminate on are sex and race. Anyone that doesn't agree with this is out of the mainstream. The issue is that if you cannot discriminate on sex and race, and 90% (made up num…

You can address an unbalanced hiring pool of qualified candidates (i.e. your 90%) by expanding the hiring pool (through various methods) until its balance comes closer to the balance of the overall population. Doing this doesn't require discriminating against anyone. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-v... for example, there are other tech companies with race balance much closer to nationa…

Or Google can reduce the overrepresented candidate pool to match that of underrepresented by randomly select the appropriate number of candidates from the overrepresented (i.e. Randomly reject, lol). This should have no effect on te bar each candidate is expected to pass, underrepresented or not.

Interestingly this hypothetical scenario would probably increase the false negative rate for overrepresented applicants due to random rejection, which effective lowers false negative rate for underrepresented applicants relative to the overrepresented.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#996

Post by dgudkov »

escape_goat wrote: post #203

The best explanation of why he was going to be fired and why that was the right thing to do (that I read) came from Yonatan Zunger, who had recently left a Human Resources position at Google; especially his third point, in the following post on Medium: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man... In many way, it was not an unfamiliar sort of rant for the internet, and I was struck by the author's e…

1 day later a PhD in sexual neuroscience explicitly confirmed [1] that Yonatan Zunger (a software engineer) has no clue about gender.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manife...

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#997

Post by tunesmith »

roguecoder wrote: post #979
gadders wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He only thought/suggested that, though. He's being punished for his thoughts.

Once you say it out loud, it's not being punished for thoughts anymore. Speaking is an action. As this thread shows, if he'd just kept his whiny assumptions about women's innate incompetence as engineers to himself he would have been able to remain happily employed in a cushy job.

FWIW... as someone who (I think, still mulling) is supportive of him being fired due to the code-of-conduct and contributing-to-an-unsafe-work-environment arguments, I'm pretty sure I'd be against firing him if he had posted these thoughts outside of his employment situation. It's even more interesting to think about if he had posted this outside of google and anonymously, and then someone had doxxed him. Then I'd probably be pissed and would be arguing on behalf of him - not his views, but that he shouldn't have been treated that way.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#998

Post by whitemale »

This makes me wonder if Google will at some point start introducing algorithms that will block search results that dare perpetuate that men and women are not totally equal biologically.

The same justification they used to fire their employee for having a different opinion can be also used to censor search results.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#999

Post by CRConrad »

I don't get this bit from the linked article:
"Google has denied the charges, arguing that it doesn’t have a gender gap in pay, but has declined to share full salary information with the government."
Doesn't the government have that data already? The IRS is part of "the government", isn't it?

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#1000

Post by purpleostrich »

delhanty wrote: post #719

One thing I'd like to ask the women in this forum: If you'd grown up back in the day before tech was cool and techies were (generally) just nerds with no money, would you have still been interested in tech? My recollection from my teenage years in the UK in the late 70s and early 80s, emptying my Post Office savings account to buy one of the first batch of 10^5 BBC micros, trekking all over London searching for a Rub…

Yes. My obsession with computers, which did not start until after I met some super geeks after college, has COST me tens of thousands of dollars, more if you count rent for my lab and patents.

It has cost me thousands of hours of time when I could've been reading literature, networking, cooking, going to med school, or a hundred other things.

It has been worth every fucking penny and minute and the best joy and highlights of my life have been when I learned about a new idea or created a new algorithm.

We exist. There just aren't that many of us and we don't glamour blog.

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