google employee's internal diversity memo goes viral

Man of Honour
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Another interview with James Damore.

I'm too embedded in the Google infrastructure to completely move away right now. But I think I'm going to start using Bing or Duck Duck Go for searches.

 
Soldato
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One in the top right is a bit dodgy - frankly I'd not like to see either Nazis or Communists at google. I suspect if someone had "punch all the communists" though and described themselves as a "national socialist" then they'd not last too long, bit odd that it is tolerated this way around.

Google has four offices in China. I'm sure they employ quite a few communists. :p
 
Associate
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One in the top right is a bit dodgy - frankly I'd not like to see either Nazis or Communists at google. I suspect if someone had "punch all the communists" though and described themselves as a "national socialist" then they'd not last too long, bit odd that it is tolerated this way around.

I think he just wants to be edgy :p.
 
Soldato
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Apparently a bunch of female Google employees took the day off because they were upset by the document, proving exactly what it set out to do.
 
Soldato
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I'm going to *try* to keep my reply concise for two reasons 1) I don't think in action (if not in thought) were actually that far apart having read through your comments and 2) from reading your comments its clear that you don't actually seem to understand the important terms relevant in the conversation.....


for example,....


Also worth pointing out that some "positive discrimination" is put in place to counter "negative discrimination", that could be as simple as removing ages and DoB from CVs and applications, or more complex systems to try and remove the bias against foreign sounding names.



There's no need to separate discrimination into 'positive' and 'negative'. Discrimination literally entails a person of group of people being preferred over another person or group of people. Placing 'negative' or 'positive' in front of discrimination is unnecessary and a tool of people who think that can deceive by placing a positive spin on their bigotry. You can of course reference those people or groups of people positively or negatively affected by discrimination.... but the discrimination in of itself is neither positive or negative as its both at the same time. (this is different than an argument about whether the discrimination itself is moral and or logically justified vs arbitrary and or unjustified)



But worse that that you seem to not even understand the concept of discrimination itself! You seem to think that removing/changing ages, DOB's and names from applications is (positive) discrimination when it’s the polar opposite of discrimination! By removing or changing this data the intent is to make it harder to discriminate against any person (be it to their personal gain or detriment) by removing information that could be (arguably unjustly) used to discriminate against them!


With that in mind I fear any discussion of the situation at hand will become bogged down my misunderstanding of the terms of reference.


But back to your post


Re bricklaying…..


Care to tell me in my quote where I said women on average would just as good as as the average man at bricklaying due to strength requirements? You can't, because I didn't, so again, while interesting it's irrelevant.


Well let’s look at what you said…


even then many of the more physical jobs could be done by a significant proportion of women as well, for example bricklaying. Your body adapts, both for men and women.


Well of course a ‘significant proportion’ of woman would be capable of bricklaying to some standard unfortunately not many women would be capable of performing to the same standard as even an average man given that they have around half of the average upper body strength of men and proportionally show similar gains from training.

So I’ll be clear in my assertion…… a significant proportion of women could not perform a very physically demanding job like bricklaying to the standard of even an average man without a lot of effort on their part and as such, combined with the low status of the job, few women could be expected to want to work as a bricklayer all other things being equal.

Now given that a company in the UK has to pay a woman and a man the same pay for the same role (unless there on what’s commonly called ‘job and knock’ in England – i.e. your set x amount of work for payment and can finish whenever you’re done). Why would it make sense to push women into a role they are less suited to at cost to the building industry and its customers?


Agreed, as I've expanded on in subsequent posts. Now the question is do you really believe that only 1% of women can become bricklayers, or is there something else to it, rather than just strength?


Again, you either don’t understand the terms or are you deliberately misconstruing the argument?

No I don’t believe that only 1% of woman are capable of being bricklayers….. I’m not however surprised however that 1% of woman are bricklayers. Most jobs in the workforce are attainable to a high percentage of the workforce both male and female. But clearly people will gravitate to jobs that they are most suited to and where possible jobs that they find personally interesting and or rewarding. I can understand that it’s confusing to ideologues that people have their own agency and not every perceived bad thing can be attributed to an external cause… Of course this hypothesis is demonstrated well by women often reverting to gender stereotyped roles where there is a more generous welfare state and child care provisions because they are more at liberty to pursue their desires then women in less egalitarian states with less or no welfare provisions who may decide to take up more high status, high pay, higher danger and less family friendly roles as their financial security is more important to them as they have less to fall back on.


Thanks for the advocacy journalism speech, it was "interesting", but broadly irrelevant. WES didn't collect or analyze the data, all they did was provide it in a nice clear graph. Other organisations have published this analysis as well, including the Independent and Spectator.


The analysis was done by the UK Researh Council, an equality organisation funded by the Government, and the original data was collected by The European Labour Force Suvey. So if you'd like to have another go I'd love to hear your speech on advocacy journalism aimed at the British Government.


Alternatively rather than doing the typical Alt Right junk of rubbishing a source without actually comparing the data, why not find some data that contradicts it, or even better why not head over to http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/microdata/european-union-labour-force-survey and analyze the data yourself to show why the UKRC analysis is wrong?


As already mentioned there may be a variation in the exact definition of engineer, yet can that really explain why there's such a big variation? Are there really that many bioengineers and environmental engineers in one country but not the other? Perhaps you can find out so you can properly refute the data presented?


Why not just consider that maybe, just maybe it has less to do with what women can and can't do, but societal norms. It's not as if it's a particularly controversial claim outside of certain circles. Women's roles in the workforce can vary quite significantly depending on the culture and country. Go back to computer science (as in the reason of this thread), and you'll see that in some countries there basically is no gender divide (eg India with a broadly 50:50 split on CS courses, because computers aren't seen as a male thing there). Again western countries are significantly less diverse than other nations.


It’s not at all irrelevant your post linked to articles from parties with an obvious and transparent bias such as Unions and advocacy groups! Should I post a link from an MRA site to ‘prove’ my point!

The data may well have been collected by a governmental body but it not useful information much like the supposed data on the ‘gender pay gap’ (also collected by government departments) is not useful for checking whether woman and men are paid differently for the same jobs as on average women and men do not do the same types of work!

The term ‘engineer’ is far too broad and too ill defined to make any useful comparisons on. The numerical makeup of different ‘types’ of engineers in different countries makes comparing ‘engineers’ in the whole by gender not very useful. Much like the gender pay gap I suspect the more you broke down the data the less discrepancies you would find between individual countries.


I have already explained why some more egalitarian countries may lag behind less egalitarian countries like India as women are more at liberty to pursue their wishes in some countries as so choose more gender stereotypical roles on average. If you want to roll back social provisions in some countries to get more women out there working hard to keep food on the table be my guest!

I’m not going to analyse the data myself because I don’t need to confirm reasonably that the chart you linked is junk information. As I previously pointed out the data on the chart is all over the place and you did not address one of the stark examples showing this...

That of Latvia and Lithuania with one having near double the percentage of ‘engineers’ then the other because you can’t without I suspect finding that the discrepancy won’t have much to do with societal norms, gender expectations and cultures in those two countries.

You can’t draw any meaningful conclusions from junk data unless you’re an ideologue who just picks whatever junk data fits your belief system whilst ignoring anything else!


Anyway moving on….


You quoted the Forbes piece with the except…


‘Companies with 30% female executives rake in as much as six percentage points more in profits, according to a study, feeding into a global debate over the scarcity of women in decision-making business roles.’


I could use that statement to just as easily show that successful companies hire more female executives as a PR move then the women actually causing the companies to be successful. But as you clearly don’t understand the terms necessary or interpretation of statistics we can of course expect the causation/ correlation fallacy to come from you …….


So in in summary

(Some) women are capable of pretty much all of the roles that (some) men are capable off.

The levels of suitability may however vary significantly between genders however especially for physically demanding roles as men are much stronger then women on average and both genders show similar gains from a physical training regime.


In jobs like coding it is likely that a much closer proportion of males and females are capable of performing most roles.



However, the differences in the natural and innate preferences, on average between women and men can be expected to show in the numbers entering different fields of work especially where people are more at liberty to exercise the desire for work they find interesting and rewarding. Additionally the differences in the distribution of certain attributes between the genders may result in situations whereby one group is disproportionally represented at the extremes even though the gender averages of the respective populations, as a whole, are similar


I have no doubt that societal norms, gender stereotypes etc do play a role in dissuading men and women from certain jobs but I believe you massively overstate their importance and in many cases as argued sometimes women choosing certain roles is because they have less choice and freedom not more! Are you suggesting that restricting personal choice and freedom to improve diversity figures is a good idea?



I think we agree that forcing ‘equality of outcome’ is a bad idea. I, like the Google employee who kicked of this who episode, just want some honesty from people so that we can establish that differences in gender distributions in the workplace cannot be solely used to justify any action as its to be expected!



I don’t mind programs to promote roles to genders or other groups underrepresented in them but that’s the limit! Beyond that everyone gets equal access where at all possible to opportunities to succeed and after that you get in or not based on your own merit and not the arrangement of your genitals, your preferred gender pronouns or colour of your skin.
 
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So company wide mandatory viewing meeting at 4pm today. Wonder what they will say, doubling down on the SJW rhetoric is my bet.

It occurred to me today, that the biggest/earliest tech company to fully embrace/enforce "diversity" hiring was Intel. They were dominating the industry when they started the policy, now they are running scared of AMD in pretty much every market segment and with no hope of a comeback on the horizon..

Kind of amusing that AMD is run by an ethnic minority woman who earned the position through talent not box ticking...
 
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