Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

Women that work in the field should definitely be respected as much as anyone else. They should be free of sexual harassment, and mistreatment. On the flip side, if only 20% of graduating classes in targeted STEM fields are women, and women represent a disproportionate amount of college students... then maybe the issue is broader than the affect of men on the field at that level.

I think part of it may be natural inclination... another is probably the role of movies and media. The latter likely a much bigger role on the impressions of the work and the likely types to fulfill those roles.

--- Edit:

Big example Daisy/Quake from Agents of Shield... started off as a badass hacker, best of the best... as the show moved on, the role was relegated to brawler, and the impact of intellect or technical ability was largely sidestepped, or made secondary and less.

Media portrayals of technical professionals all around are usually very unbalanced... and that doesn't even begin to go into the other fields that are disproportionately male or female, or the hindrance of men in higher education.

Assuming you're asking in good faith: because of the idea that diversity hiring effectively lowered the hiring bar.

Imagine for a second you have imposter syndrome. Now imagine that you've been told (not necessarily by Damore) that you're the (not quoting you here) "diversity hire". Imagine how much worse that imposter syndrome now is.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't try to get more women into tech, or into trash collection, or construction, or every other male dominated occupation, or men as nurses, etc... however, that doesn't mean having to change the rules for men or women. And pointing out that there are differences between men and women shouldn't instantly start of with a storm of hate.

"the average woman is shorter than the average man" ... "typical misogynistic cis white male patriarchal bullshit" ...

I'm not saying that everyone is volatile and prone to fits of excessive rage in response, but it really feels like there's no place for civil discussion or discourse with a growing portion of the population.

So ? That's the company's choice to make.

Many companies take the longer term view that having a more diverse workforce is more important than hiring the most technically adept candidates. Especially since having different viewpoints can aid in innovation and creativity.

I've actually heard where this exact thing has happened at Google, in a very high profile team. This isn't just a hypothetical, it's a reality.

You abhor discrimination during hiring. But yet you want to be able to discuss the differences between men and women in order to use them to discriminate.

[citation needed]

I think there are definitely a few companies out there who are playing with the hiring bar to improve diversity in an easy but ultimately harmful way. Probably not google, but these bad actors poison the well in these discussions, so to speak.

I said that hiring on diversity over merit was wrong. That's it... I never said anything about sex in terms of merit. The only place any discussion of sex or diversity belongs is in terms of messaging and in terms of possibly promoting jobs that are disproportionate to natural propensity towards a given role.

If you can't discuss, review, document, test or otherwise examine bias in terms of nature, environment, upbringing, educational exposure and other factors, then you can't force equilibrium at the end of a long process.

You can't hire 50% women in an industry, where only 20% of those educated for that field are women. Also, so long as choosing a field of study or work is voluntary, the best you can do is maybe have a more fair representation of a given gender in a given field that doesn't show only above average looking women wearing glasses with a few geeky quirks, then relegate them to more personality quirks, or make them less capable over time.

And MAYBE it's okay to have a field where most of the people in that field are of a given sex. I don't see the SJWs trying to get women into garbage collection, or throwing a fit over the gender bias in nursing.

I guess what I'm saying is when there's even a feeling that there is a system that is diversity over merit, people will assume that people they don't like who are minorities, are somehow less able to do their job, even when that's not the case.

In your example was the person in question hired because of their sex or race?

I don't believe the person was hired because of their sex or race. But again, even here, all minorites have to prove it, while the majority are assumed to be there on merit.

It's complicated by the fact that sexist & racist people will try and use reasons as justifications, that they will use their misunderstanding of statistics to short-circuit decision-making in a faulty and biased way.

But we shouldn't outlaw talking about reasons all the same. The reason we shouldn't outlaw talking about reasons, in spite of the risk of odious people using them as justifications, is that you would otherwise proceed unscientifically. Reasons relate to theories about the world, and if you discard reasons, your theory about the world is wrong.

Some have already decided that the REASON for gender imbalance in tech is rampant bias and male privilege, which they have publicly committed themselves to stamping out. Whether or not this is true, questioning the validity of that reason is considered an attack on their identity and value system.

Edit: I'm not sure it's clear from my comment, but to clarify, I am NOT SURE what the reason for the observed gender imbalance is. I'm not saying that it isn't bias/privilege/etc. I don't think the case has been proven one way or the other, but the personal attacks & utter misrepresentations I've seen used to try to shut down discussion is driving me pretty hard emotionally to one side at the moment.

Yep. Not because CS is a popular field where there is a shortage of skilled professionals, but because she's a woman. She was so upset by it that she chose something else entirely.

And this, I believe, is the strongest possible argument against discriminatory hiring practices.

If I hire someone who's black, or female, or gay/bi, or any other 'protected group', I want them to know that I hired them for their ability, not to fill some quota. And the only way to do that is to hire based purely on ability.

By setting 'diversity hire' quotas, Google's own HR department is telling anyone who qualifies for any of those quotas that they're not good enough.

Note: I find it interesting/disturbing/sad/telling that I've been sitting here for a long time contemplating if I should even submit this message since I use my real name here. The fact that we, as a society, have come to a point where we are afraid to even have this discussion really makes me sad. I respect every one of my colleagues deeply, male and female alike. The idea that someone could twist my words and paint me as a misogynist is beyond troubling.

This seems to be the common argument against diversity programs, but it strikes me as statistically true only if we assume a very even distribution between STEM graduates and prospective employers. Given tech's reputation as being relatively hostile to women, a company could theoretically find ways to advertise to prospective women employees that their internal culture was more welcoming of them -- that, in fact, they wouldn't be subject to the sexism that the female engineers in the linked article all said that they routinely face. This doesn't require the company to have different hiring standards between genders, or to pay women more. It does require them to change their recruiting practices in ways that acknowledge they may have to make specific outreach to women and other underrepresented minorities, but that doesn't strike me as having to be inherently discriminatory.

It all depends on what kind of company, what product industry etc. and it might not be about gender or minority diversity but something completely different.

This is what I think is wrong with this whole discussion. Diversity has become a goal in itself yet no evidence to support it's positive impact.

According to the PDF(0), it states on page 6, footnote 6

...Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done)....

The smoking gun here is "which is illegal and I’ve seen it done"... Well, shit. That seems to answer your question, "YES".

However... On James Damore's official website(1), it states the following from the same quote area.

...or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal).....

Which is illegal. No more claim of being a witness. How interesting. That would not validate your claim/question.

(0) https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

(1) https://firedfortruth.com/

Thank you. I have been noticing this for the past year, both here and in almost all other online forums. And it's not just the ability to troll or make a comment that you know might push a few buttons.

It's questioning whether it's even safe to post a logical argument against any of the narratives deemed sacred these days by the left.

The fact that the worst offenders in this new witch hunt are the same ones who have massive amounts of data on all of us is terrifying.

Choosing to recruit only from pools where the proportion of women is greater than 20% isn't quite the same as lowering the bar. The bar is at the same height for men and women, just with a skewed population. You're artificially excluding pools of people who would make good candidates, but since both women and men can bypass your outreach efforts by going straight to you, you're not refusing to hire anyone who is both qualified and motivated enough to apply directly.

I think proponents of the google diversity programs are arguing that they do this. I'm not sure whether they do. I think the real situation might be a hodgepodge of systemic factors and biases in both directions that sum up to something unpredictable, plus a few largely ineffectual diversity programs, and a massive question mark around why there are so few female CS grads in the first place (biology! sexism! gender roles! c64 ad campaigns! inertia!). Nevertheless, it's a bit more complicated than just lowering the bar for women.

(1) was written as a public statement by the center of the current moral panic. As such, it has to be hugely more careful about making unsubstantiated claims. Regardless of the truth of the matter, if he has no corroborating evidence of discriminating based on protected status, he can't make a public allegation of such without opening himself up to a defamation lawsuit.

these are the results:

"there are 48840 males, we will pick only 25000(51.187551187551186%)"

"we will pick all females to represent the company reaching out to them"

"let's say the company is going to hire 5000"

"hiring based on competence and taking females when equal"

"results:"

"male: number: 3505 percentage: 70.1% average score: 123.81256204767604"

"female: number: 1495 percentage: 29.9% average score: 123.75346343448992"

"if we force the 50% ratio"

"the average male score: 126.26036797470225"

"the average female score: 119.60577230318559"

so forcing a 50% ratio does indeed lower the bar. data for males and females were generated using the same function so arguments about biological factors are not even needed.

the code:https://jsbin.com/nogujuqewe/1/edit?html,console,output

Or you solicit more resumes from the 20%. Or you randomly throw out some resumes from the 80%. Neither of those will move the bar.

It's not because discriminating based on sex is illegal. If you lower the bar for white people because you take long term view that having more white people in your workforce is more important than hiring the most technically adept candidates then it wouldn't be "your call to make". In fact you would be sued into oblivion and rightly so.

>>Especially since having different viewpoints can aid in innovation and creativity.

Yes, that's why the memo mentions diversity of opinions. You don't get that by discriminating based on sex or race. You could get some of it by not firing people for expressing their views though.

"Choosing to recruit only from pools where the proportion of white people is greater than 95% isn't quite the same as lowering the bar."

I don't think it would get much sympathy but it's an equivalent with race substituted for sex (both are protected and it's illegal to discriminate based on them).

>>Nevertheless, it's a bit more complicated than just lowering the bar for women.

If you own a pub and want only white waitresses so you only invite white women for interviews you can do that without lowering the bar as well. Still you are discriminating even if you put elaborate system out there which magically result in only (to make the point stronger, substitute with a ratio like 90-10 or 80-20 to make the situation equivalent) applications from white women at the end.

My claim is a much narrower one, that you can hire a disproportionate amount of female developers without lowering the bar if you bias your incoming hires. It can be simultaneously true that Google's diversity policies are harmful to quality (because they restrict where Google hires from) while their female developers are as qualified as their male developers (because they came from the same place and meet the same standards).

If more companies are doing that then it's impossible to sustain without lowering the bar. If only you are doing that there is no point because then others will hire more men (as there is more qualified men left proportionally as you took bigger % of qualified women).

I am saying that the policy of "we don't lower the bar, we just look more into avenues to hire more women specifically" is somewhere between pointless and dishonest (dishonest as in created to hide the discrimination based on sex).

EDIT: As to affirmative action: I agree it's not the place for debating ethics of it. I am saying that affirmative action = lowering the bar either directly or indirectly and there is no way around that fact (at least industry wise, you can maybe sustain it locally if you are ok with others skewing their ratio in the other direction).

This rests on the assumption that hiring from a given pool exhausts it. It seems intuitive that hiring students from a university or bootcamp would have the opposite effect, as would hiring students from a particular academic background, since unemployment/pay metrics and prestige would drive more students there.

dishonest as in created to hide the discrimination based on sex

Since the clearly stated goal of affirmative action is to hire less of a majority group, it seems more likely that such a policy would be created to prevent imposter syndrome and "my male co-workers think I'm incompetent because of all the diversity hires" syndrome. With such a policy, nobody is a diversity hire.

Having worked in tech for 20 years and hired and fired all sorts of people I am unconvinced there is a problem in tech as big as it's being claimed.

The idea that you can only have role models if they are your gender is really really absurd and if people are really falling for that then they have a problem not the tech-scene.

There is no actual evidence that diversity in gender does anything for a company besides creating more complex work environments. There are far more important types of diversity to strive for.

So it implies lowering the bar unless it doesn't.

Companies can put more effort into finding woman candidates without caring whether the whole industry does so. If some companies bias toward women (without lowering the bar), and some companies don't bias, then the overall effect is that qualified women can get hired instantly, and more of them might be encouraged to enter the industry.

The difficulty is that "this discussion" can be - and usually is - conducted in a way that is harmful to women, either on a broad scale (specious arguments / failure to understand systemic bias) or an individual scale (wrecking someone's day / making a formerly welcoming environment feel hostile).

Those real consequences are on the line every time someone hits "Post" in this sort of discussion, and are a really good reason for any thoughtful person to pause and contemplate before doing so... perhaps do some additional self-education, or take the time to pose genuinely explorative-questions rather than rhetorical-questions or flat-out conclusions. If more people did that, I think you'd eventually see a lot less fiery refutation and much better discourse.

"If the numbers are true and the gender distribution in STEM graduates is 80/20, and you are intent on increasing your number of female employees, you have two choices. You either lower the bar on the 20% or you raise the bar on the 80%. In the end, the net effect is the same. The employees from the 20% group had a granted advantage against the 80% group."

This logic assumes that the 80% and 20% are functionally equivalent? (Which can be so if there's, eg, no systemic bias, but seems rather less likely when such is present.)

Another option would be to realize the the 20% already had to overcome substantial hurdles to get where they are, and to factor that into your decision-making.

Its so easy to make up crap about how its impossible to fix the issue without (made-up strawman). How about turning our intelligence toward useful comments? E.g. you could look harder for truly qualified candidates from among the 20%?

Brown talked with NPR last year, while at the chipmaker Intel. “I think maybe two or three specific things that explain our success,” she said. “The first thing is accountability. Setting these goals, communicating the goals, tying pay to the goals. I think that’s been key.”

She was at an important place at an important time. Intel had decided to do something no other tech giant had done before: publicly state how many women and underrepresented minorities it wanted to recruit, and how many it managed to retain. Of all new hires, Intel told the world, at least 40 percent would have to be women or underrepresented minorities.

This is obviously quotas.

Intel creates the diversity fund in 2015 for 125 million.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3047239/why-intels-capital-diver...

Then a year later in 2016, lays off 11% of their workforce.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c...

Then in 2017, Google hires Danielle Brown the VP who pushed the diversity fund at intel.

I'm beginning to think as a minority woman in tech, These diversity funds are worse than quotas.

Whats the point in being hired, then fired a year later.

I also suspect, every group is afraid of losing their job. Intel firing 11% of its workforce is scary example.

Presumably the programs Damore criticizes in his memo have been around for a long time. Do any of those involve the use of quotas?