And the whole topic brings up Google and Facebook monopolies and use of our personal data:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2...543755001/

"I invested in Google and Facebook years before their first revenue and profited enormously. I was an early adviser to Facebook’s team, but I am terrified by the damage being done by these Internet monopolies.
Technology has transformed our lives in countless ways, mostly for the better. Thanks to the now ubiquitous smartphone, tech touches us from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep. While the convenience of smartphones has many benefits, the unintended consequences of well-intentioned product choices have become a menace to public health and to democracy...."

Guess the former employee was right.


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A former Google software engineer says some women at the company skipped work today, upset by the leaked memo.

(08-08-2017 12:11 PM)SuperFlyBCat Wrote:  Guess the former employee was right.


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A former Google software engineer says some women at the company skipped work today, upset by the leaked memo.

Those women have no place in the workforce.

Sent from my SM-J700T using CSNbbs mobile app

(08-08-2017 10:06 AM)Hood-rich Wrote:  

(08-08-2017 06:43 AM)fsquid Wrote:  

(08-08-2017 06:42 AM)450bench Wrote:  Having a "vp of diversity" says it all...

There isn't a Fortune 500 company that doesn't have one now

Source?

me

(08-08-2017 10:29 AM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  Here what has happened.

Google can fire the guy for any reason: Check
Guy was fired for expressing an unpopular opinion: Check
Google and guy will come to an "undisclosed settlement:" Check

Here is the calculation at Google HR

We can fire him for any reason but we are firing him for presenting an unpopular opinion. This will cost us money and negative publicity but we can weather both without much concern for our long term goals.

Do it.

they will settle out of court for some trivial amount and management is seen as caring individuals. The game is the game.

(08-08-2017 12:11 PM)SuperFlyBCat Wrote:  Guess the former employee was right.


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A former Google software engineer says some women at the company skipped work today, upset by the leaked memo.

yep. The cartoons and memes write themselves. Google must use the same PR firm as United airlines.

Did the author (I think his name is "Damore") sign his name to the editorial or did he get outed? If he honestly believed that Google was just going to allow Wrong Opinions to be respectfully spoken/heard/discussed without repercussion, then he sure didn't know much about Google. Or maybe he just hadn't worked there for very long. He looked about 22 in the photo I saw. Don't know when it was taken, of course. I agree with those who have said he has no legal recourse. Unless he had a very unusual clause in his contract to cover situations like this (not likely).

For the kind of people who either voted for Trump or considered doing so, little mini-dramas like this are a stark reminder: In the corporate/academic/media world, your choices basically boil down to two, and only two: (1.) Keep your head down and STFU, or else (2.) get fired, voted off the island, shamed on social-media, etc. It will be interesting to observe the long-term political fallout from this and similar episodes (Brendan Eich/Mozilla, etc.).

Slate-http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2017/08/why_did_a_google_engineer_feel_empowered_to_share_his_sexist_memo.html

Typical leftist response:
"Firing an employee who made it clear he felt many of his co-workers were inferior was the right move, and it says something about what Google wants to be as a company. That someone felt comfortable disseminating the document in the first place, however, says even more about the company Google currently is."
He didn't say they were inferior. He said people are individuals. Expecting 50/50 in that type of field is not realistic. He also expressly said that many people did NOT feel comfortable.

"There is no major U.S. corporation that thinks a gender imbalance like Google’s is tolerable, even as most have a long way to go toward improving that ratio."
Ah, back to quotas. Which have been ruled illegal. Nothing to address the author's issues. Even Title IX allows the defense that schools offer sports in proportion to interest.

“What about the company culture sends the message that sharing sexism and racism will be accepted?” Baker asked in a Medium post after the memo emerged publicly. “Do we want this to be an environment where racists and sexists feel safe and supported to share their views?”
Sexism is ignoring individual differences. The author didn't. Everything where he said women and men were different (as he repeatedly said-"on average") is supported by research.

"But as another ex-Googler, Cate Huston, wrote in another Medium post, the bigoted internal email didn’t reveal political views. Rather, his views “are dated nonsense that have been debunked by science — and not recently either."
Ms. Huston gave no specifics on what he said was "dated nonsense," but merely called the author names. Again, typical from the left.

"The memo also is, unfortunately, illustrative of an organization that allows someone with such hard-line prejudices to work there for nearly four years, perhaps even expressing these views in ways that do, in fact, harm the ambitions of women and people of color at the company. That could have happened simply through disrespecting colleagues, participating in hiring decisions, or ignoring Google’s mandatory trainings on “unconscious bias” in the workplace."
So he might not follow the mandatory indoctrination? It was hardly hard-line prejudices. Again, they write with no specifics. Everyone has biases. The author recognized he has some.

"What women could ever work alongside a colleague or anyone who supports him knowing they think women are less biologically suited for the job? That sounds like a horrible place to work."
Left making stuff up again. That's not what he said.

I've yet to find any criticism of him that is the least bit self-aware. Sad comment on the critical thinking skills of people on the left who supposedly have higher education.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/con...fferences/

"An article by Adam Grant called Differences Between Men And Women Are Vastly Exaggerated is going viral, thanks in part to a share by Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg. It’s a response to an email by a Google employee saying that he thought Google’s low female representation wasn’t a result of sexism, but a result of men and women having different interests long before either gender thinks about joining Google. Grant says that gender differences are small and irrelevant to the current issue. I disagree....

Suppose I wanted to convince you that men and women had physically identical bodies. I run studies on things like number of arms, number of kidneys, size of the pancreas, caliber of the aorta, whether the brain is in the head or the chest, et cetera. 90% of these come back identical – in fact, the only ones that don’t are a few outliers like “breast size” or “number of penises”. I conclude that men and women are mostly physically similar. I can even make a statistic like “men and women are physically the same in 78% of traits”.
Then I go back to the person who says women have larger breasts and men are more likely to have penises, and I say “Ha, actually studies prove men and women are mostly physically identical! I sure showed you, you sexist!”

I worry that Hyde’s analysis plays the same trick. She does a wonderful job finding that men and women have minimal differences in eg “likelihood of smiling when not being observed”, “interpersonal leadership style”, et cetera. But if you ask the man on the street “Are men and women different?”, he’s likely to say something like “Yeah, men are more aggressive and women are more sensitive”. And in fact, Hyde found that men were indeed definitely more aggressive, and women indeed definitely more sensitive. But throw in a hundred other effects nobody cares about like “likelihood of smiling when not observed”, and you can report that “78% of gender differences are small or zero”.

Hyde found moderate or large gender differences in (and here I’m paraphrasing very scientific-sounding constructs into more understandable terms) aggressiveness, horniness, language abilities, mechanical abilities, visuospatial skills, mechanical ability, tendermindness, assertiveness, comfort with body, various physical abilities, and computer skills.

Perhaps some peeople might think that finding moderate-to-large-differences in mechanical abilities, computer skills, etc supports the idea that gender differences might play a role in gender balance in the tech industry. But because Hyde’s meta-analysis drowns all of this out with stuff about smiling-when-not-observed, Grant is able to make it sound like Hyde proves his point...."

Some other interesting stats from the contra grant article:

"In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine, unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera.
As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.
And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!”
This makes no sense...."

"Meanwhile, men make up only 10% of nurses, only 20% of new veterinarians, only 25% of new psychologists, about 25% of new paediatricians, about 26% of forensic scientists, about 28% of medical managers, and 42% of new biologists...."

This guy was not very wise if he really believed in this logic-despising, hyper-PC political climate that what he did would go over well.

What's really disturbing here isn't that this guy was fired, it's that the climate that necessitated the firing was here in the first place.

Corporations and businesses know "diversity" is BS, but they need to play lip service to it because if you don't somewhere down the road some idiot social justice warrior AG at the state or federal level is going to start prodding them if they don't have sufficient diversity.

This is prime area for Trump to act and try and get legislation through to kill this Maoist political climate, but he won't.

(08-08-2017 03:14 PM)EigenEagle Wrote:  This guy was not very wise if he really believed in this logic-despising, hyper-PC political climate that what he did would go over well.

What's really disturbing here isn't that this guy was fired, it's that the climate that necessitated the firing was here in the first place.

Corporations and businesses know "diversity" is BS, but they need to play lip service to it because if you don't somewhere down the road some idiot social justice warrior AG at the state or federal level is going to start prodding them if they don't have sufficient diversity.

This is prime area for Trump to act and try and get legislation through to kill this Maoist political climate, but he won't.

He might, but will the Senate come through?

Google done f'ed up.

(08-09-2017 01:46 AM)Kronke Wrote:  Google done f'ed up.

Trump won't like this.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/d...after-all/


"...Which just goes to validate a big chunk of James Damore’s complaint! Can you imagine working for a company whose managers comb through your e-mail traffic looking for signs of ideological crimethink, and blacklist you? Their word: “blacklist”. [UPDATE: Readers point out that Winter is not saying he goes through employee e-mails, but rather through public comments on Google’s internal communications platforms. Still, that’s cold comfort. — RD]

Who would want to work in a place where the management thinks its virtuous to empower commissars to denounce and punish those within who happen to say the “wrong” thing? Damore should consider himself lucky...."

"What’s happening at Google is an example of the workplace environment many conservative and religious people face every day at the hands of progressive bigots. “Diversity” is an Orwellian term that means “uniformity of progressive thought” — or else. It is now crystal clear that if you are a conservative, or a male of any political belief, you will be discriminated against at Google. Google is a hostile workplace to people like you — even though it depends on your labor for its success.

In The Benedict Option, I wrote about the consequences of this for orthodox Christians, and how these trends within corporate America will make many workplaces miserable for believers. In his forthcoming book The Once And Future Liberal, the Columbia University professor Mark Lilla, a self-described liberal, writes critically of “identity liberals”:

It got liberals into the habit of treating every issue as one of inviolable right, leaving no room for negotiation, and inevitably cast opponents as immoral monsters, rather than simply as fellow citizens with different views. And it also relieved liberals of the patient work of finding out where people stand, trying to persuade them, and building a social consensus, which is the most secure foundation for any social policy. Liberals’ legalistic approach created a large opening for the Republicans to claim that they were the true representatives of the demos, which the Democrats represented a caste of high priests. And the image remains in the public mind...."



"Look at what Google has done, and look at the reaction on social media from those who support Damore’s firing. It’s a heretic hunt. Consider what it must be like at Google this morning, knowing that managers can and do go through your e-mail and keep a blacklist blocking your advance within the company because they conclude that you hold the wrong opinions — and you never know about it. They make decisions affecting your career based on things they’ve read in your private e-mail, and never give you the opportunity to defend yourself. Anyone within the company who expressed sympathy for Damore on e-mail is now on notice that Collin Winter will not work with them. And anyone who wishes to curry favor with Collin Winter knows how to suck up now.
And a broader lesson here: if somebody within the company is blocking your advance within Google, you can get rid of them by denouncing them to Human Resources as “anti-diversity”.

Eventually reality will catch up with Google, as it caught up with the Soviet Union. An ideology based on a false view of the world, one that punishes capable people and rewards the ideologically pure, cannot succeed in the long run. But a lot of people’s careers will be ruined before this left-wing McCarthyism runs its course.

The reason I doubt that the political left will take Lilla’s commonsense advice is that identity politics is its religion. The left tells itself that it favors “science-minded thinking,” free speech, and fairness, but this debacle at Google shows what a sham that all is. But you know, it was right there in front of us all along. Google’s corporate slogan is, “Don’t be evil.” Just like a church. The James Damores of the world aren’t just wrong — they’re evil. You cannot reason with evil; you can only destroy it."

No one expected the Google Inquisition. The proles inside the company won’t make that mistake again.

Female scientists says its Google and the Google lynch mob that are anti-science and making up their own "facts."

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/...e35903359/

"Some intentionally deny the science because they are afraid it will be used to justify keeping women out of STEM. But sexism isn’t the result of knowing facts; it’s the result of what people choose to do with them.

This is exactly what the mob of outrage should be mobilizing for, instead of denying biological reality and being content to spend a weekend doxxing a man so that he would lose his job. At this point, as foreshadowed in Mr. Damore’s manifesto, we should be more concerned about viewpoint diversity than diversity revolving around gender."
Debra Soh writes about the science of human sexuality and holds a PhD in sexual neuroscience from York University.