Google Teacup Tempest

[L'Emmerdeur]

The scientific basis for Damore's screed is dubious, but as long as he's saying something you already agree with, I suppose it makes sense to call it 'uncontroversial.'

A portion of his argument is indeed based on published science. In particular, there is a school of neuroscience that tries to popularise the notion that male and female brains are distinct. It claims that female brains are typically hardwired for empathy, while male brains are built to analyse systems, such as computers and cars. This all hinges on the idea that autism represents an extreme form of the male brain, caused by exposure to higher than usual testosterone levels in the womb. Yet recent experiments have repeatedly failed to find a direct link between foetal testosterone levels alone and autism.

Indeed, psychological studies show that there are only the tiniest gaps, if any, between the sexes, including areas such as mathematical ability and verbal fluency. Navigating this complicated field for my latest book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, I was told by a prominent American researcher into sex difference that he no longer refers to brains as sexually dimorphic, because the science simply doesn’t support this. There isn’t a neuroscientist alive who can say with confidence which sex any given brain belongs to.

The science cited in the Google engineer’s memo is flawed. But since it was published at the weekend, there has been a groundswell of support for it on social media. Reportedly, some Google staffers have also quietly agreed with it. The journalist Toby Young personally informed me on Twitter: “Evolutionary psychology tells us there are genetically based psychological differences between men and women.”

What they fail to understand is that there are published scientific papers out there to support every possible opinion, even that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Getting published doesn’t make an idea true, it only means that someone has managed to get it into print. In evolutionary psychology, theories are sometimes little more than speculation strung together with scant evidence.

...

Weak scientific evidence and empty theories are still being used to support troubling ideologies. Women are making enormous strides in science and engineering – yet, with some half-cocked hypotheses in their back pockets, male software engineers feel they have the right to tell them they are somehow biologically unsuited to this kind of work.

They forget, perhaps, that many of the world’s original computer programmers were women, including the first: Ada Lovelace. Women began to be marginalised in technology around the time that personal computing took off and become a lucrative industry. Male software engineers forget that discrimination and sexual harassment have driven women out of Silicon Valley, and kept countless more out in the first place.

The myriad historical, cultural and social factors that create inequality are all too easily glossed over when someone reaches for the closest, most convenient biological explanation for what they see. This isn’t just intellectual laziness; this is prejudice masquerading as fact.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Damore seems to at least occasionally have a rather loose relationship with the truth. Not only did he falsely claim to have a PhD from Harvard, his description of the diversity workshop that motivated him to write his memo is, eh, distorted.

'Here’s what Google’s diversity and bias training looks like'

James Damore, formerly of Google, gave his first interview since the controversy around his internal memo erupted to “men’s rights activist” and alt-right ideologue Stefan Molyneux. In the interview on Tuesday, he said that he had written the memo—which argues that women are underrepresented at Google due to biological differences—after an upsetting experience at a “diversity program at Google.”

“It was ... not recorded, totally secretive,” he said. “I heard things that I definitely disagreed with in some of our programs. I had some discussions there. There was lots of just shaming and, 'No, you can't say that, that's sexist,' and, 'You can't do this.' There's just so much hypocrisy in the things they are saying. I decided to create the document to clarify my thoughts."

So what was the program that set off Damore? A person familiar with the matter tells The Verge that Damore attended a voluntary one-day summit around diversity and inclusion. The program was free for Googlers to attend, but they had to sign up for spaces in advance. Far from being secretive, some sessions were recorded and materials were sent out to participants after the summit.

While we do not have the materials from that specific summit, the training that was offered was very standard, and may have overlapped with these slides and materials for Google’s Bias Busting @ Work, a workshop to help address bias in the workplace. The workshop’s resources are available publicly as part of re:Work, an open platform of HR materials used by Google.

[pErvinalia]

EvoPsych is a dodgy field. Half of it is populated by story tellers. The other half do good work, btw.

[Forty Two]

[Forty Two]

[Forty Two]

He thinks google is an "echo chamber" meaning there is little tolerance for differing ideas.

His thesis is "How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion." He's saying that bias clouds Google's thinking about diversity and inclusion, and he's trying to explain "how" that is. He is saying Google is biased.

Damore says -

TL;DR
● Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety,
but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
● This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too
sacred to be honestly discussed.
● The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this
ideology.
○ Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
○ Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
● 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.
● Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

Sounds rather milquetoast and uncontroversial.

Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech3

At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women
back in tech and leadership. Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the
workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just
socially constructed because:
● They’re universal across human cultures
● They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
● Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify
and act like males
● The underlying traits are highly heritable
● They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective

Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these
differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men
and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why
we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences
are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything
about an individual given these population level distributions.

Really rather uncontroversial. There are, I think, few who would argue that there are many small differences between men and women and that there is significant overlap between men and women; however, these small differences "may" "possibly" explain "some" of the differences and/or how men and women experience the workplace.

[pErvinalia]

It's about how credible his opinion is, though. Where's the evidence to say that women are going to be less able at engineering/coding than men?

[Forty Two]

He didn't say they were.

[pErvinalia]

"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."

[Forty Two]

He's saying that the so-called gender gap in tech can be explained by non-sexist factors. I.e., the "representation" of women being under 50% in tech and leadership can be explained, he says, by (a) women's stronger interest in people rather than things, (b) women prefer feelings and aesthetics to ideas. He says, "These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics."

He doesn't say they're unable to perform tech jobs, he says they tend to "prefer" other jobs. He says "possibly" and "may," such that he is not stating any of this as an absolute. As his memo states, he is trying to discuss the issue, and he perceived an "ideological echo chamber" that was not open to discussing or considering ideas such as his (he gave the example of the diversity training class he attended), and since he published his ideas, he was ultimately fired for them. If someone wanted to prove an echo chamber mentality, then firing someone over this rather tame and milquetoast memo would be one way to do it.

He points out women's extroversion (gregariousness) etc., and also women's difficulty in negotiating, asking for things/raises, and leadership. However, he notes "...these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support." In other words, he's highlighting what he things is a small shift of a bell curve here, where there is significant overlap, but in Google's policies and practices, they only work to help women who are having a hard time wtih speaking up, negotiating, asking and leading.

So, how can it be had both ways here? Either women DO have trouble in certain areas, or they don't. If they do, is it an exclusively female problem, or is there significant overlap? And, what's the source of the problem - is it "verboten" to discuss non-socially-constructed, non-sexist origins for these overlapping distinctions? Obviously, at Google it is verboten. Hence the echo chamber.

He also points to his assertion that women have "...higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs." He's suggesting that this is something that "may" influence what careers women "prefer" to pursue.

He says -

Note that contrary to what a social constructionist would argue, research suggests that “greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits.” Because as “society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality becomes wider.” We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.

He's quoting this paper - http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf

Nobody is saying anyone has to accept his sources, or his statements in this memo. However, given all his qualifications of his statements - the mays, the possiblies, the the probablies, the mights, and his nods to the value of diversity and his acknowledgment that sexism and bias does exist, etc., I fail to see what is so bad about what he wrote. He has sources, and maybe they're wrong. But, just because another person can cite sources that dispute this guy's sources doesn't mean this guy loses the argument.

Damore is referring to stuff like this -

Furthermore, despite attempts to encourage women to work in STEM, these numbers are barely changing. Even as more women join the workforce, few choose to work in STEM fields. Between 1991 and 2011, women accounted for 75 per cent of the growth in the number of workers in university-level non-scientific occupations, but only 27 per cent of the growth in the number of workers in university-level scientific occupations.

Some may argue that patriarchal social factors encourage women into stereotypically feminine fields (childcare, nursing etc.), and discourage them from pursuing STEM related careers. However, if one were to make the case that societal factors determine choices made by men and women, you would expect that in more egalitarian countries, the sexes would make similar career choices, and thus, gender gaps would recede. However, studying sex differences across 55 different cultures, Schmitt, Realo, Voracek, & Allik, came to the opposite conclusion (emphasis added):

With improved national wealth and equality of the sexes, it seems differences between men and women in personality traits do not diminish. On the contrary, the differences become conspicuously larger.

They also made this statement remarking on their own extensive research

http://quillette.com/2017/07/15/time-st ... nder-gaps/

[Forty Two]

In this horrible, terminable offense memo, he writes about ways to reduce the gender gap in tech.
Odd that it's hardly mentioned in the discussions, that what this guy is doing is advocating FOR a different perspective that he says would seek to INCREASE women in tech....

Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap

Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech and without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:
Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).
Women on average are more cooperative
Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.
Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.
The male gender role is currently inflexible
Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.
Philosophically, I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women. For each of these changes, we need principles reasons for why it helps Google; that is, we should be optimizing for Google—with Google’s diversity being a component of that. For example currently those trying to work extra hours or take extra stress will inevitably get ahead and if we try to change that too much, it may have disastrous consequences. Also, when considering the costs and benefits, we should keep in mind that Google’s funding is finite so its allocation is more zero-sum than is generally acknowledged.

[pErvinalia]

He's saying that the so-called gender gap in tech can be explained by non-sexist factors. I.e., the "representation" of women being under 50% in tech and leadership can be explained, he says, by (a) women's stronger interest in people rather than things, (b) women prefer feelings and aesthetics to ideas. He says, "These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics."

He doesn't say they're unable to perform tech jobs, he says they tend to "prefer" other jobs. He says "possibly" and "may," such that he is not stating any of this as an absolute. As his memo states, he is trying to discuss the issue, and he perceived an "ideological echo chamber" that was not open to discussing or considering ideas such as his (he gave the example of the diversity training class he attended), and since he published his ideas, he was ultimately fired for them. If someone wanted to prove an echo chamber mentality, then firing someone over this rather tame and milquetoast memo would be one way to do it.

He points out women's extroversion (gregariousness) etc., and also women's difficulty in negotiating, asking for things/raises, and leadership. However, he notes "...these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support." In other words, he's highlighting what he things is a small shift of a bell curve here, where there is significant overlap, but in Google's policies and practices, they only work to help women who are having a hard time wtih speaking up, negotiating, asking and leading.

So, how can it be had both ways here? Either women DO have trouble in certain areas, or they don't. If they do, is it an exclusively female problem, or is there significant overlap? And, what's the source of the problem - is it "verboten" to discuss non-socially-constructed, non-sexist origins for these overlapping distinctions? Obviously, at Google it is verboten. Hence the echo chamber.

He also points to his assertion that women have "...higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs." He's suggesting that this is something that "may" influence what careers women "prefer" to pursue.

He says -

Note that contrary to what a social constructionist would argue, research suggests that “greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits.” Because as “society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality becomes wider.” We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.

He's quoting this paper - http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf

Nobody is saying anyone has to accept his sources, or his statements in this memo. However, given all his qualifications of his statements - the mays, the possiblies, the the probablies, the mights, and his nods to the value of diversity and his acknowledgment that sexism and bias does exist, etc., I fail to see what is so bad about what he wrote. He has sources, and maybe they're wrong. But, just because another person can cite sources that dispute this guy's sources doesn't mean this guy loses the argument.

Damore is referring to stuff like this -

Furthermore, despite attempts to encourage women to work in STEM, these numbers are barely changing. Even as more women join the workforce, few choose to work in STEM fields. Between 1991 and 2011, women accounted for 75 per cent of the growth in the number of workers in university-level non-scientific occupations, but only 27 per cent of the growth in the number of workers in university-level scientific occupations.

Some may argue that patriarchal social factors encourage women into stereotypically feminine fields (childcare, nursing etc.), and discourage them from pursuing STEM related careers. However, if one were to make the case that societal factors determine choices made by men and women, you would expect that in more egalitarian countries, the sexes would make similar career choices, and thus, gender gaps would recede. However, studying sex differences across 55 different cultures, Schmitt, Realo, Voracek, & Allik, came to the opposite conclusion (emphasis added):

With improved national wealth and equality of the sexes, it seems differences between men and women in personality traits do not diminish. On the contrary, the differences become conspicuously larger.

They also made this statement remarking on their own extensive research

http://quillette.com/2017/07/15/time-st ... nder-gaps/

I didn't say he'd lost the argument. It's a question of how credible his sources/evidence are. If he's relying on shaky evidence then he's likely part of the problem of women being disadvantaged in these types of roles. Essentially being an apologist for sexism.

[Forty Two]

What media outlets and critics (and perhaps even Google) won’t admit is that the memo is well-reasoned, calmly written, and backed by research (which I’ve included below). This engineer isn’t calling for an end to diversity programs or an all-powerful white-male patriarchy, but rather a rethinking of how they approach diversity hiring.But that’s not even the main point of the memo. What he is primarily saying is that huge numbers of people at Google feel like they can’t speak openly. That the culture stifles intellectual diversity in a company that claims to be open to any and all views. That opinions contrary to the vocal left have been silenced through shame and outrage.

Perhaps somewhat predictably, the response has proven his point. The emotional outrage we’ve seen, especially from media outlets, in response to the document’s mere existence shows how true its main thesis is. Viewpoints that make us uncomfortable have been vilified and punished, regardless of their scientific accuracy. Holders of those viewpoints have to silence themselves for fear of public humiliation or worse, so much so that this memo had to be published anonymously. And now that he’s been fired, you can imagine other Google employees will hesitate to share unpopular opinions.

We’ll come back to that main problem, but let’s dig into the memo’s arguments about gender differences first: Is there any weight to what the document had to say?

Let’s put their argument more simply: men and women are different; those differences might explain part of why we don’t have 50/50 representation of men and women in tech and leadership, just as we don’t have a 50/50 representation in oil drilling and primary education. But that opinion has been “shamed into silence” because Google is afraid that discussing differences between men and women may upset some people. Since employees can’t express opinions that might upset people out of fear of shame or firing, the most extreme and authoritarian elements of the ideology have taken hold and go unquestioned.

The author’s point, at least related to gender and diversity, is that if there’s truth to general differences of interests between men and women impacting career choice, then diversity programs that try to create a perfect 50/50 split will be discriminatory against whatever gender is more interested in the field. On top of that, they’ll be bad for business, since you’ll have to force in less-qualified candidates to check off the diversity box.

This is all that the document is arguing about gender differences. Nowhere does it suggest that women are unqualified for engineering work, or that there shouldn’t be diversity programs

The article goes through some of the evidence cited in the report. http://observer.com/2017/08/congrats-me ... -criticsm/

It doesn't seem "shaky." And, if someone else has some other evidence, that doesn't mean this guy's opinion is hateful and sexist.

The author is arguing that because these differences exist, there may be differences in job interest at the population level as a result of these biological trends. Therefore, trying to create a perfect 50/50 split may be misguided compared to other more effective changes.

Assuming these differences do exist, as the research seems to indicate, it’s easy to see how they could affect job choice. At the most basic level: If men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people, more women will be interested in more social jobs, while more men will be interested in more mechanical jobs.

This is all the document has said about differences between the sexes. They seem to exist, and they probably influence job preference. Therefore, these differences in interests and base rates should be considered when designing effective diversity programs. Since, at least in the entry level, Google engineering is more mechanical and less social (according to the memo and confirmed by Yonatan Zunger’s response linked below[1]), this may make fewer women interested in going into engineering at Google.

That’s roughly what the author is saying. And when you look at it next to the research, he’s not making an altogether backward argument. The author isn’t arguing that Google should ditch diversity programs and have an all white-male company, rather, that they need to think more pragmatically about how to approach diversity.

If you try to hire at a level of diversity different from the base rate, you’ll make sacrifices. When you have 80 women and 20 men applying for a role, taking 10 of each will necessarily lead to a weaker composition than taking 16 and 4. Hiring 16 women and 4 men is fair based on the rates of applications you’re getting. 20 and 0 isn’t fair, and neither is 10 and 10.

If men and women are, on average, interested in different things, we can’t force people to change their interests, nor should we force fit them into roles because of a commitment to a series of numbers. Diversity isn’t about math; it’s about culture, effectiveness, structures, and fairness.

There’s a great line from the document:

“Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.”

Unfortunately, most reactions to the memo have been to do the opposite. To close our eyes, try to shield people who might be offended by it, and call for the author’s public hanging.

And that’s the bigger problem here: How everyone, particularly the media and Google, reacted to the memo.

By misrepresenting the arguments and not trying to effectively refute them, Zunger has provided evidence that Google executives truly are intolerant of views that they disagree with. If you can’t accurately interpret an argument before trying to refute it, and instead misinterpret it in the most offensive way possible, all you’ve done is provide rage-bait to people who already agree with you.

[Forty Two]

“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred…Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.” - Fahrenheit 451

Employees already fear voicing unpopular opinions because of what it might do to their private lives. Twitter is already shadow-banning accounts that they feel may be offensive. Is it such a stretch to imagine search results being censored because the information they contain might hurt someone’s feelings?

If that happens, it’ll be our fault. We won’t descend into a world of censorship because a totalitarian government mandated it, or an omnipotent company decided it, but because we became so afraid of views contrary to our own that we demanded it.

[pErvinalia]

I'm not going to read through all the studies listed, but how are they separating out genetics from learned behaviour? If they aren't successfully doing that, then they don't support the guy's thesis.