Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

Essentially, as analogy, there's no way for a person to say "Black people are inferior and shouldn't be hired", as a message broadcast through their entire workplace, and not have that person be creating a hostile work environment for African Americans. If that person says "I don't mean in general, I mean inferior just for this occupation, I don't mean inferior, just 'differently talented, they've got great rhythm'", it doesn't matter, if that person says "here's a study which says this, we should consider this in an open minded fashion" it doesn't matter. The message is unacceptable. That person is done, that person should be done.

If you're saying "group X is inferior and and I can prove it mathematically", that's still wrong because those people don't have a choice about being a member of that group and still exist in society. Discriminating against them drags society down. It's a prisoners dilemma. If everybody hires fairly then the relative drag is spread across the entire economy and everyone comes out better in the end. If they try to cheat then they'll have a local advantage but in the end it only encourages everyone else to cheat and you end up in the worst case scenario with the massive drag on society as a whole.

So the only rational solution for these corporations is to pretend to be as inclusive as possible while secretly trying to cheat as much as possible, which is exactly what we see. When some dumbass publishes a paper to the entire world saying "Hey, we should openly cheat.", of course he's going to get fired.

There is a whole wikipedia article devoted to it with a range of information on the topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

Downvoters, please cite which part of Damore's essay you think is comparable to overt racism. He explicitly said that he thinks women are capable, and should be hired.

> Assuming that it’s true that women on average are more likely to have trait X, why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women, or that if she IS like other women, that the trait has no bearing on her job performance?

Creating a stereotype generates distrust in the individuals that are part of the group described by the stereotype. You yourself had to delve on the wording of the phrase to explain why you think it's different. Do you think the average person would put as much thought on the wording?

Which is to say you either A: don't consider hn polite conversation or B: don't imagine the "relevant race" is present.

It is largely the PC crowd who read implied-inferiority into any study of biological differences between male and female.

If you look carefully at some of the comments from female Googlers after the memo was leaked, they talk about fears of being perceived as less capable based on their biology.

See the memo itself isn't only dangerous, it is what it could lead to.

But that isn't at all what the memo said.

This is conciliatory to you? Implying that the opposing side is blind to the truth and such blindness is preventing them from actually solving problems? Because to me this comes across as hostile and condescending.

It is my understanding that this community makes a point about sharing "anything that a good hacker would find interesting".

Strongly disagree. I think emphasis is a really big deal here. Here's a key line from the memo:

> 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.

This runs right into the Jon Snow line, "everything before the word 'but' is horse____." It comes across that the author doesn't think workplace bias is as important as [other stuff], or maybe that he doesn't think it's important at all, which is understandably hurtful to tons of people. Maybe that's an uncharitable reading, but can you really write about something like this and ask your readers to be unusually charitable to you?

He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities.

I think it's awfully charitable not to infer that he considers the women/minorities at Google (on average) to be inferior engineers.

Still, it's true that he never said that...

https://www.economist.com/news/international/21726276-last-w...

Is saying "we need more diversity" code for "white men are inferior"? You might be on to something.

Yes, but that's simply how statistics work. If you require one group of people to score 90 on some test in order to be hired, and another group to score 80, then among successful applicants the second group will have lower average scores than the first. There's no getting around that.

The argument should be over whether or not Google's hiring practices lower the bar for particular groups of people. If they do, then the above conclusion about the average talent of various groups is inescapable.

For example, in Europe more and more labour is voting for right wing parties. While left is becoming more and more rich/educated urbanite.

> While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment.

What he does is list "compassion for the weak" as a "left bias". That's not necessarily a statement in support of leftist ideals when combined with this two assertions:

> In addition to the Left’s affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females.

> The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness[11], which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause

(Which, BTW, is right before the first thing I quoted.)

But somehow it gets turned into "This means he thinks women are worse, therefore he's insulting women, therefore it's a hostile workplace, therefore he got fired." That reasoning is a major leap, and it's not Damore's leap.

Taking a fact and turning it into a hostile-workplace-opinion is the real problem.

You're just saying "He couched the point well-enough", he didn't say they were worse engineers, he just said they weren't naturally inclined to work with things. Sure that doesn't literally state that women as worse, it just casts an equivalent shadow on a woman wanting to be an engineer.

My only point was that the sentence, as written, was hostile and condescending and does not represent a conciliatory approach to conversation.

> 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 ..

And then he talks about "Google lowering the bar".

I'm not sure how can I parse part "... but it's far from the whole story" with "Google lowering the bar".

I'm not racist, but...

He basically said the opposite, but people have been so interested in triggering off the 'lowered the bar' phrasing to show their outrage that they're (seemingly willfully) ignoring the rest of the sentence which completely changed the meaning.

But 'by lowering false negatives' is hugely important. Google's hiring process has a lot of false negatives. These are qualified engineers who weren't hired that could have been successful at Google. This allows for 'lowering the bar' without sacrificing quality by not subjecting minority/female candidates to the more arbitrary/capricious stages of the Google hiring process that eliminate so many otherwise-qualified candidates.

Imagine if one of the ways that we chose to address diversity in the tech workplace was to exempt qualified female/minority H1-B candidates from the lottery and automatically approve their visas? It wouldn't make them any less qualified, since they could've gotten their visa through the normal lottery process. But it would 'lower the bar' by making it significantly more likely that they'd get visas. The post-interview stages of Google's hiring process are similar in their often-arbitrary selecting of who gets through.

It's also, on Google's part, a smart move to address their PR concerns. It allows them to increase female/minority hiring, thereby satisfying public calls for more diversity, without sacrificing quality. All they have to do is look into their process at where qualified diversity candidates are getting rejected and stop doing that. It's a luxury that other companies with fewer surplus potential hires don't have when trying to improve the diversity of their workforce. But possibly more importantly, it's not helping to improve the diversity of the industry as a whole, it only helps to make Google's stats look better. Google's standards for engineers mean that their false negatives can usually get jobs elsewhere without much difficulty. By taking this approach to diversity hiring, they're just shifting their own workforce demographics without helping the industry as a whole do the same.

I don't think that cherry picking one line out of a 10 page document with significant number of disclaimers, and which was originally presented in a way and desire to evolve and gather opinions represents the overall intent and tone of the document.

What I inferred from this, is that he learned that at least in some cases, there's aspects to Google's diversity hiring that they'd rather people not know about.

Now I don't know if this is false, true, or true within a small subset of Google; but his claim of the secret meeting does change the narrative somewhat in his favour.

> While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment.

Emphasis mine.

I would have preferred to be an artist or a philosopher, bu t my family was poor and had bills to pay.

Not to have to retype: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15022769

> Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence

> but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology[7] that can irreparably harm Google [[ citation talks about Communist/Marxist ideals, directly equating Google with a Communist/Marxist organization ]]

> Google’s left leaning makes us blind to this bias and uncritical of its results, which we’re using to justify highly politicized programs.

> Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased [[ says this without citing any evidence at all of this happening ]]

The "tone" of the document is pretty aggressive, even if Damore throws a lot of fluff and "but I don't mean..." in the mix. In general it sets it up as "Left is bad and violent, Google is left, FIX IT."

There’s a difference between “let’s have a discussion” and “let me tell you what’s up, all you wrong people.”

He mentions aptitude right here,

"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."

He also mentions it in an interview:

https://youtu.be/TN1vEfqHGro?t=30m13s

If the goal is to have a diverse group then a group composed only of women isn't ideal either. Diversity is not about raising or lowering the bar.

(Paradoxes FTW!)

Point being it is too complicated to nail down a biological factor that was determined from birth.

No culture is completely free from environmental influence. As we age, the influences from our youth act like compound interest. These can change the way we think. Nurture impacts nature, and vice versa. The generally accepted view these days is the process is cyclical,

"neurological traits develop over time under the simultaneous influence of epigenetic, genetic and environmental influences. Everything about humans involves both nature and nurture" [1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

When going into a situation where you've been at the back hand of such bias, specifically in a workplace, it's often hard not to show at least some condescension. Look at any number of public feminist actions and statements, for example.

"You had to buy inferior wood to get enough to build this house. I don't think there's enough good wood to build the house, therefore in order to get enough you had to buy inferior wood."

The fact of the quality of the wood is separate from the opinion of the availability of quality wood.

>While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftist protests that we’re seeing at universities

He's saying the leftist protests at Berkeley were violent. Which... is simply a factual statement.

"Google has created several discriminatory practices: ... Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" [Mind you _lower the bar_ is a hyperlink, to a gdoc I don't have access to, so he's citing another document as evidence of this practice].

So he is in fact arguing a factual claim, that google has applied inconsistant standards in practice, as I suggested in my prior post.

In fact, we find that the field was way more diverse before the 1990s, and the talent pipeline for female programmers only started choking in the late 80s (for reasons we could argue, but one popular theory involves boy-oriented PCs and video games).

No, assuming that men and women who applied have the exact same distribution of 'good qualities', you have twice as many male applicants as female applicants, and you want to hire as many women as men, you have to lower the bar for women.

That's not necessarily so; you could require mice to be heavier than 90 grams, and elephants to be heavier than 80 grams, and still have your elephants be heavier on average.

(I don't want to wade into the bigger argument, just pointing out that "that's simply how statistics work" only under certain conditions (which most likely apply here, but you wrote "there's no getting around that" when there is)).

>So he is in fact arguing a factual claim, that google has applied inconsistant standards in practice, as I suggested in my prior post.

Yes. Re-read my comment. Whether or not they apply inconsistent hiring practices is a factual claim. The idea that the only way to achieve the goal of hiring more women is to apply inconsistent hiring practices is his opinion.

Please show me where he says anything like "The idea that the only way to achieve the goal of hiring more women is to apply inconsistent hiring practices is his opinion."

Also, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "simply a factual statement" when there were a bunch of alt-righters participating in the violence. Ever heard of alt-right hero "Based Stickman"? People pay for his tickets to go incite violence across the US. Such a symbol of peace!

Seems more like a lie by omission to me.

edit: Also, I'm pretty sure there was internal "feedback" related to this memo that was equally hyperbolic towards the author.

He merely states that it can have that effect.

>Yes. Re-read my comment. Whether or not they apply inconsistent hiring practices is a factual claim. The idea that the only way to achieve the goal of hiring more women is to apply inconsistent hiring practices is his opinion.

It looks like a logical conclusion to me. Care to explain why you think it's not?

He brings up IQ here,

"the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)"

IQ has no relevance to a discussion on gender gaps, so, why mention it?

The quote's context is politics. In that context, IQ has recently been used in discussions over racial differences [2].

It begs the question, is Damore being honest about his views on race? If we replace "IQ" with "race", would that change the meaning he meant to convey?

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

[2] https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-bla...

Left and Right alike favor diversity, it how you get there where they disagree.

Diversity does not mean supporting the thought police, encouraging mob mentalities, and adopting zero tolerance attitudes.

A sizable majority of Americans do support gay marriage by almost 2:1, but they are very closely divided on other LGBT issues, particularly around what should and shouldn't be funded by the tax payer, etc.

And while Americans value diversity they also value freedom.

Scientifically the role of biology in gender behavior is not a settled issue, despite the many wishing to declare it so. I do not agree with the conclusions to which Damore jumped, nor do I feel strongly that biology was particularly relevant to the point he was trying to make. But it amazes me how even broaching the discussion triggers people.

And yet, stereotypes do play a role in generating prejudice. In a utopic unprejudiced society, where all people are treated exactly the same by everyone and where there's no pre-conceived notion of "gendered careers", then each person would stand for themselves and their choice of career wouldn't be affected by externalities.

As is, this is 2017 and we have white supremacists chanting about Jews and ramming cars into people. Clearly, we are not even close to that Utopia.

This sounds like willfull ignorance, no matter how true something is you aren't allowed to say it because it might hurt some feelings.

I'd prefer to acknowledge reality.

He "merely" says that Google is doing it, and that doing it lowers the bar. Therefore he's saying that Google lowered the bar. It's a pretty simple a = b = c scenario

>It looks like a logical conclusion to me. Care to explain why you think it's not?

Because women can achieve at the same level as men? I thought it was pretty obvious.

In any case, it's not a discussion for HN, but I wouldn't mind having it over a few beers/coffees.

The actual quote is:

> While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftist protests

Still doesn't change the meaning, my point being that the "violent leftist protests" he talks about don't happen in a vacuum. On the other side of the 'violence' there's always been lovely people like the alt-righter "hero" Based Stickman inciting violence.

To me, his choice of side to blame for the violence is pretty telling of what he thinks about "the Left". Whether correctly or incorrectly identifying them as the culprits of the violence, he's making a statement about the "movement" and not the particular instance of violence.

I'm curious, why do you think Damore's position is "right" but that position is not? Aren't the coworkers and higher-ups entitled to an opinion just as much as Damore?

The disclaimer before the 'but' reads quite clearly to me.

On a different note, Damore chose to include mention of "leftist protest" because Google's culture is left-leaning – he's explicitly saying that Google is very left, while not so left as these violent protests. Mentioning "violent rightist protests" wouldn't be germane to his statement about Google here.

In an extreme environment where advantages of the tail end of population distributions are important then it's less likely the market will choose a diversified workforce.

But besides that, if the solution is to dedicate any special effort in hiring from this or that group, then employees from that group will feel they have to prove they really are at the same level as the others. Which is the opposite of what you wanted, and exactly what the female engineers in this interview complain about.

Some go beyond propaganda and get close to calling for violence. Quotes include: "…you deserve what's coming to you." and "Yes this is silencing. I intend to silence these views. They are violently offensive."

As far as I know, none of these people were fired for their posts.

> the memo makes a whole case... how "leftists" are violent.

Which isn't true.

The major question is what does count as being "about working people". Is it claiming you're for equality/diversity/whatever? Or working to make working people life better?

Labour feel threatened by globalisation, migrants and so on. Today's left is very clearly for that. Thus labour feels left is no longer working for their interests. The right, which is against migrants, feel much ore for their interests.

Of course, there's an economic theory that migrants help the host country's economy and everyone end up being better off. But a "working man" only see his wage stagnate due to increased competition and his rent raise. Or his work place gone completely due to outsourcing.

The left just declaring that they're for the working man is not enough. Their recent actions very clearly don't ring a bell for the working man. The feels (as much as I don't like that) is very important in politics. People are tired of politicians talking about several-degrees-removed benefits. Although sometimes (but, as we can see, not always) politicians are totally right and it is actually the right thing to do, public needs at least some direct benefits right away. Although this is frequently called as populism in a derogatory way, I believe it's a crucial part of democracy. And it especially rings true to less educated and less well off people which happened to be core electorate of the left.

Which is not a sign of "bigotry" or being "backwards" or whatever. Better off people have more wiggle room, can take more risks (e.g. voting for people who offer few-degrees-removed benefits in the future) and generally care about higher level stuff in Maslow pyramid. The labour don't have this luxury.

How else am I supposed to take it when a self-identity right wing person claims the left don't believe some science related to IQ in the context of a diversity memo.

What "science" could he possibly be referring to other than the Bell Curve BS?

Basically, you're asking for evidence so that he can prove himself plausibly innocent of a crime that there's no evidence for in the first place.

Ah, the famous, "I don't agree with it so it must be wrong" argument. I can see how the smart and well-reasoning people on HackerNews would use that. Yes...

"To lower the standards of quality that are expected of or required for something." -- http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/lower+the+bar

If he didn't mean to say that, he should retract that phrase and apologize for saying something he didn't mean to say.

You getting "triggered" by people using the standard definition of a common idiom isn't helpful.

Parents often tell their children that a lie about what they did is worse than the original crime. I hope Mr. Damore didn't take this smug "I didn't actually say that women were inferior, it's all about preferences" tone that seems to be the first line of defence online, in his HR meetings only to be asked "So, what's this bit about race and the "science" of IQ you mentioned? Is IQ a preference?"

I'll note that the argument you present about Google only diversity-washing themselves at the cost of others having lower diversity, is the same argument that people make about their green energy efforts. In that area at least they've gone to great lengths to ensure that they actually improve the whole industry, not just steal the glory for themselves and I wouldn't be at all suprised if they had some very smart people ensuring the same was the case in this instance.

Also, the idea that finding ways to employ more women+minorities leads to poorer employees is exactly what many people don't after about - essentially, your argument is taking his opinion as fact, while I only wanted to point out the underlying message to his words.

Incidentally, we do not know whether his statement is true, or whether the changes to Google's hiring practices have changed the employees' operational capability.

In the absence of this information, with such a clearly (if somewhat subtly) stated opinion, it's natural that one would be offended by his words.

Before accepting a statement like his, it would behoove us to know what the actual policy changes are.

No one would find it weird if I claimed that women aren't able to run a 100 as fast as men. Yes, there might be some exceptional cases where women can compete, but they are just that, exceptions to the rule. Most of the time women compete among themselves since they would never qualify for anything if they competed in the same category as men.

Why is it unacceptable to make the same observation about intellectual endeavors, or programming specifically?

You claim that women can achieve at the same level as men. Let's assume they can for now. However, your gripe is with the under-representation of women at tech companies. So that claim doesn't really help you, you would need to show that women perform as well as men on average. Can you?

The passage in which that quote occurs clearly implies that the bar has already been lowered - in fact, the second half of the sentence offers the mechanism through which the 'bar had been lowered' ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate")

> No one would find it weird if I claimed that women aren't able to run a 100 as fast as men. Yes, there might be some exceptional cases where women can compete, but they are just that, exceptions to the rule. Most of the time women compete among themselves since they would never qualify for anything if they competed in the same category as men. Why is it unacceptable to make the same observation about intellectual endeavors, or programming specifically?

I guess I'm surprised that this is controversial (in response to your most recent comment to a sibling poster) - the reason we don't accept that women are worse programmers than men is... we don't have evidence that women are worse programmers than men.

There are data about physical strength (and amazingly clear biological correlates - most HN posters will never outmatch a top female athlete, and we only need to do a quick lab test to determine this). However, female/minority intelligence has been, and continues to be, a politicized issue - until the more overt instances of discrimination are eliminated, how can we jump from blaming the obvious societal barriers to blaming biology?

Why do you jump to the conclusion he must be talking about ethnicity? Afaik ethnicity wasn't referred to at all in his memo.

Sometimes you'd think there were two completely different memos under discussion given the lack of basic agreement on facts as relate to the memo itself, never mind it's arguments and sources.

Though, I guess you're right, he may have left it ambigous about exactly which IQ differences he believes in that "the left" don't. People seem to think it's wrong to complain about his communication style, but as this example illustrates, peppering a memo with alt-right buzzwords and then being ambiguous about which particular controversial IQ studies you support can just as honestly be interpreted as dog-whistling rather than incredibly high levels of naivety. I think most people suggesting his communication skills are lacking are actually just giving him the benefit of the doubt.

> "Google has created several discriminatory practices: ... Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"

Please note the last 5 words. Damore wasn't saying that diversity candidates got jobs in spite of being below the bar. He was saying that decreasing the false negative rates for certain groups is discriminatory towards those who don't belong to said groups.

E.g., the point is that focusing on decreasing false negative rates for group A but not for group B, will mean that, on average, more people who are close to the bar will be hired from group A than from group B. This is unfair to group B, since they are much less likely to get "the benefit of the doubt".

In essence, the quote relates to how Google deals differently with uncertainty depending on the gender of an individual.

Because the observation is inaccurate. There is no evidence that it is true.

>However, your gripe is with the under-representation of women at tech companies. So that claim doesn't really help you, you would need to show that women perform as well as men on average. Can you?

We have no evidence they can't, why would we assume that to be the case?

> Please, quote feminist propaganda with the same level of invective that has been circulated at Google and maybe we have something to talk about.

I showed a half-dozen examples of Googlers being far more insulting and threatening than Damore's memo. As far as I know, none of them were fired. The double-standard could not be more obvious. Damore was fired for the ideas he expressed, not the tone he used.

Had the reaction been one of kindness, understanding and a desire for cohesiveness where people tried to point out misconceptions and alert him to how his language was being received ("when you say 'lowered the bar' it makes me think 'less qualified', so perhaps you didn't meant that?"), this whole blow-up could have been avoided. Instead people reacted with righteous indignation and jumped to labeling him a misogynist and a bigot. At that point, all hope of a productive outcome, for him and Google at least, was lost.

For my part, I'm less interested in whether Damore really is bigot and a misogynist or any virtue of his opinions. I'm only defending what he could have possibly meant because I see so many people jumping to their own incomplete conclusions. This whole incident, to me, was more about how unproductive our reactions are to anything relating to a sensitive subject. People are so quick to trigger off anything resembling an assault on one of their sacred cows that they never take the time to figure out the intended meaning. I'm so sick of walking on eggshells knowing that I have to watch every single sentence and word choice because they'll be taken out of context and used against me. We're losing nuance in our discussions and it's creating a polarization of thought on each side that I find dangerous and divisive...there's no room for middle-ground thinkers to participate without being attacked by one or both sides. This makes those people either gravitate towards one of the extremes or disengage entirely.

Or accusing "PC authoritarians" of stifling diversity of opinion? (violence is not just punching people)

Or accusing "the Left" of denying science regarding biological differences between individuals? (there's a huge difference between "taking with a grain of salt, considering there's a lot of societal factors that might play a bigger role" and "denying")

Damore does a really good job of adding a lot of disclaimers and caveat emptors around a lot of his arguments, but he really didn't put that much effort into hiding his derision for "the Left."

> So you don't think that singling out "leftist violence" in events where there were "alt-right violence" is choosing one side?

James's discussion of left violence is because Google is a left wing company.

If Google was a right wing company, then saying "Google has mainly right wing politics but has avoided the violence associated with far right groups" would indeed by apt.