Quillette has some pieces from four scientist discussing the memo.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/
Employees are free to think whatever they want about the corporate culture. We all have the right to do that. No one can make you think like everyone else. Once the words are put on a page, though, it’s a different story. The employer has a responsibility to enforce its rules, which are a combination of federal requirements and internal policy. Free speech may be a right, but in the place of employment, it may well have consequences.
I need to work on my memo about how men should not teach/be around minors because they are significantly more likely to commit the vast majority of crimes. Everyone at work will love it!
I believe it. To me, the problem is the interpretation. Do you have to be male-like to be productive in science and engineering? Just like someone’s daughter upthread, you don’t have to design swords to be creative/productive. You could be a crying emotional mess and productive. Since it is a male dominant field, we overidentify productivity with male behavior. IMO, that’s why diversity should be encouraged regardless of political correctness. It opens up new possibilities that would be unavailable otherwise. Unfortunately, most diversity training is not well thought out and mediocre. I can see why that would irritate smart people in engineering.
I didn’t know if I disagreed with Google in firing him at the beginning. Now I firmly believe they wre wrong to fire him. Firing amounts to bullying and shutting up. I think they can do better than that. Open up a serious dialogue and encourage opposing views to play out. It won’t hurt Google.
^No, that’s just silly. We also definitely don’t need to be increasing the number of men teaching in primary education. There’s absolutely no downside to having critical fields be single-gender dominated!
Yes, there is if you struggle with skilled labor shortage.
Actually, I think male teachers should face more scrutiny in hiring and during work in K-12. We’ve had two arrests at schools my D has gone to (ES and HS), both males. I only know about those because they happened at our schools, I don’t know about other incidents. There are few male teachers in the district and to have two of them arrested is pretty alarming to me.
I found the response to the memo by Mr. Zunger who was a senior exec at Google extremely persuasive. It is linked in post #27. Basically he says Damore is wrong because he doesn’t fundamentally understand what engineers do. The skills Damore contends women have more of is precisely what Mr. Zunger says successful engineers need:
I would agree post defense but not with post proposal. Post proposal is better than just completing passing prelim/qual bit it’s still a long ways off and you can’t use all but dissertation. When you say all but, what follows has to be almost trivial or certainly what’s left should be a lot smaller than “all” part. Post proposal doesn’t cut it.
I am a manager with hiring authority at midsize (6k) STEM company. We hire cream of the crop. We regularly go through diversity and unconscious bias training because otherwise we lose out on quality people.
Even so, it was a revelation to me to have some insight into Google’s interview process when D1 went through the process. During her senior year, she made the cut for an on-site interview, but didn’t make the cut for an offer. Turns out that Google recruitment tracks and stays in touch with everyone that does the on-site.
You know that story about blind auditions and orchestras? There were few women in major orchestras, so candidates started auditioning behind a screen so the “interviewers” wouldn’t know the candidate’s gender. And the number of women offered orchestral jobs increased, but was still well south of 50%. Then someone realized that you could subconsciously tell the gender of the candidate by the sound their shoes (generally high heels) made on the hard stage surface. Carpet was added…and voila, 50% of the job offers went to women.
Google can’t go quite that far, but they do a few things to try to eliminate bias. The interviewers administering the on-site technical interviews are not the team leaders with hiring authority. The interview is simply to assess the technical chops of the candidate. If they are judged acceptable, then the matchmaking with a specific team and task manager begins. The manager already knows that the candidate meets the company’s performance standards. There are a few candidates who pass the technical bar but can’t be placed, but it’s very few.
For the technical interview, Google keeps records of any previous candidate’s interviews, including the questions they were asked and the answers they gave. They make sure to not use the same questions (because obviously you’ve figured out how to answer them). And here’s the really interesting part: they look at how the candidate answered before…and how they answer in the current interview. That’s so they can see not only how much you know, but can get a sense of how you’ve grown since your last interview. For D1, they were able to see that she had become far more knowledgeable and sophisticated in her approach. It was not just her raw knowledge–it was a quantifiable demonstration of her capacity for tremendous growth.
This is not a company that gives jobs to unqualified individuals because they are underrepresented minorities. This is a company looking to mine talent in a systematic way. They’re not always going to get it right (I give you Mr. Damone). But they have the resources to really try to lay down carpet on the floor.
This would be like opening up Pandora’s box. What other topics of interest should Google open up with its employees? Racism? Politics?
Since I also wondered if he just had listed doctoral program rather than PhD on his Linked page, these purported screen shots were helpful:
http://www.businessinsider.com/james-damore-removes-phd-studies-linkedin-2017-8
The two articles I found most interesting the last few days were the medium article, post #27, and the response from one of the scientists cited in the memo, also one of the “four scientists” all over the top of my google search feed on the memo today.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sexual-personalities/201708/google-memo-about-sex-differences
And a thought provoking (at least for me) response from a young female scientist:
and another point of view:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/theres-something-odd-about-that-google-memo/
I agree with Harvest Moon that he is very young. I prefer to believe he was clueless, and especially clueless if he was actually involved in the Harvard incident someone linked to upthread, which caused his professors to issue a public apology. I don’t know he was directly involved, just based on this article… To me, it does seem he was most likely aware of the fall-out from a controversial performance.
http://gizmodo.com/fired-google-memo-writer-took-part-in-controversial-s-1797658885
And finally, I learned there are scientists who have been challenging the views of the “four scientists”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/opinion/sunday/darwin-was-wrong-about-dating.html
So far as I can tell, none of them has weighed in on the memo thus far.
etaL I have no opinion on whether he should have been fired or not, absolutely no idea.
Let me guess at least one of the real reasons why such diversity trainings take place at tech companies like Google. STEM-heavy companies hire a lot of fresh immigrants from places like India and Russia where racism, sexism, and anti-gay sentiments are considered the norm. “A chicken is not a bird, a woman is not a human.” Ever heard that Russian saying? Ever heard of a guy complaining to the HR that he cannot work in the same lab with females for religious reasons because they might be “unclean”? Ever seen a newly hired prof storming into the department’s head office and demanding to kick a pregnant PhD student out of the program because being pregnant is not compatible with doing quality research? Just a few little things I have encountered in my career. A person who grew up in the US might find such sensitivity training stupid and useless, but to someone who came from a different culture, it might at least give a hint that they are “not in Kansas anymore.”
BTW, the guy seems to think that the law is binary, and a complaint to the NLRB will get Google in trouble. His right to concerted activities does not trump other folks’ Title VII rights, as that legal analyst in the CNN link pointed out.
What is odd in this context is that women in technical roles in computer companies appear to be proportionately more common among non-US-born people, including those from countries where views on gender roles would ordinarily be more restrictive on women.
OP back. I can’t imagine why the guy claimed to have a Ph.D. on his LinkedIn profile (if he did claim that), when he did not.
On the other hand, I have to say that the instances recently mentioned by BunsenBurner seem significantly worse to me.
Meg Urry (Professor of Physics at Yale and previous chair of the department there) gave a seminar at my university on the topic of women in science. Afterwards, during the discussion session, a number of my colleagues made exactly the same points about women having less interest in science than men do. They were not even shut down in the discussion.
I think it would be ridiculous on its face to say that people of different races have more or less interest in science. To the extent that there are differences in representation, it is a combination of circumstances and racism, in my view.
On the other hand, I don’t think it is obviously ridiculous to say that in a truly just society, we might find differences in the representation of men and women in science. Nor do I think it should be impermissible to say that.
We don’t know what the gender proportions in various occupations would look like, in a truly just society. We can see that over the past 40 years or so, the ratio of the number of females scoring over 700 on the SAT by age 12 to the number of males doing the same has increased about four-fold. I don’t believe that the ratio has stabilized yet. We can see that the gender distributions on the Math Olympiad teams vary widely from country to country, even in countries with relatively similar mixes of nationalities (the Czech Republic vs. Slovakia, East and West Germany, when the country was divided).
Another issue raised by the memo-writer was whether women (on average) wanted high status jobs at the cost of high stress and long hours. I don’t know whether this is true or not. I am somewhat inclined to doubt it. I would quite inclined to doubt it, if a similar claim were made about European-Americans vs. Asian-Americans. It is impossible to separate women’s willingness to take on the high-stress, long-hours jobs (say, 90 hours a week and up) from the issue of whether an arbitrary woman would be able to do that sort of job, while meeting family responsibilities–without at stay-at-home spouse (or even with one, with children of a certain age) and without additional support staff at home. My colleagues traveled quite a lot when their children were young–going to conferences and giving talks (maybe 15-16 weeks a year). It was quite beneficial to them. I did not feel that I could responsibly travel that much. Others’ circumstances may differ.
I also don’t know about the circumstances of the memo. The Google employee apparently wrote it on a 12-hour work-related trip to China, right after a diversity seminar. The writing doesn’t strike me as all that bad, for an off-the-cuff response on a plane trip. I don’t know whether feedback was requested, from the seminar. I also don’t know who leaked the memo.
It seems to me that Google corporately actually acted in a fairly thin-skinned way. A tech company needs to be able to tolerate differences of opinion among its employees. I’d be uncomfortable working for any company that expected me to toe the line, and not to criticize its policies internally.
One of the co-founder of Google is the son of a physics professor. My guess is that the corporate culture at Google initially looked a bit like a physics department. This incident makes it look to me like “suits.”
One of the links cited earlier on this thread is this:
http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html
It comes from an online source, Stanford Medicine, copyright 2017, Stanford University. The article is called “The Cognitive Differences between Men and Women.” The author, Bruce Goldman, is a science writer for the medical school’s office of Communication & Public Affairs. The conclusion is that part of the differences in cognition are biological. I regard this as carrying the imprimatur of Stanford University.
Of course, Stanford University was also the academic home of Frances Conley, the first woman to pursue a surgical internship at Stanford hospital, the first female Stanford faculty member in any surgical department, the first tenured woman in neurosurgery in any U.S. medical school, and also the first to become a full professor
. . . and the author of Walking Out on the Boys, a really horrifying book about her experiences of misogyny at Stanford (wikipedia says “sexist attitudes and outright sexual harassment”) and her ultimate decision to resign in 1991. She returned after several months, after changes in university policy were made. Apparently, the “last straw” was the appointment of a man as department chair, after he had been accused of sexual harassment by two clerical staff members. She is now retired.
If the allegations in her book are correct (and I have no reason to doubt them), I think the application of the Google standards to Stanford’s surgical faculty would have more than decimated the group. For that matter, Conley’s book is quite critical of Stanford University.
I have no doubt that she was entitled to stay at Stanford, despite bringing down a storm of criticism on Stanford, and on specific colleagues whom she named in the book.
One if the key goals of diversity training should be to distinguish between group trends and the individuals you encounter every day. Sure, most women don’t want doctorates in physics. But the women applying to the program at your university want physics doctorates a whole lot more than all those men out there who are not applying to any program at any university. So look at the person and drop the stereotype. Simple, but not easy.
Travel, oh boy. I asked DH once how often people asked him “What do you do with your kids when you travel?” He gave the expected blank stare. Want to know how many times I was asked? Well, how many trips did I take? Multiply by about 7.
ucbalumnus: In regions of the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc, women tended to be well represented in fields where they were not well-represented in the U.S. When I was growing up, this was particularly true in medicine. But medicine was a much higher-status field in the U.S. than in the U.S.S.R.
Aside: I don’t think most of any demographic groups wants a doctorate in physics. We have no idea what the gender distribution would be in a just society, that offered equally encouraging environments to boys & girls, and to young men & young women.
@BunsenBurner I grew up in Russia, and while you’re correct that it was a fairly sexist society, it was also a norm for a woman to have a job. There were many Russian women who switched careers after immigration to become programmers because it seemed the easiest way to get a job. There was no idea you have to be a man, or be super-smart to do a routine tech job. Getting into a management position, especially managing men, was a different matter, but this is also changing for the better I believe.
For more anecdotal evidence - I think I see more Asian girls in STEM activities in school than non-Asian boys.