Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.

I think advancing points is fine, but if you're after productive discussion rather than an adversarial debate, you need to proactively invite discussion. And if an adversarial debate was what he was after, that does strike me as inappropriate work communication.

And for the record, I did not get any aggressive tone from his paper. I thought he was as polite as he needed to be and made the necessary caveats. I think many people were just so unprepared to hear any argument from an opposing viewpoint that they read into it what they wanted to.

This was addressed in the article. This burden has fallen on women since they were teenagers. To expect them to do it yet again, to have to defend themselves at work this time, is ridiculous.

I'm talking about handling what Damore claimed in an intellectually honest way. You can't dismiss his points just because you're tired of talking about them (or what you think are the same points you've always been talking about, but I think Damore's comments on each gender's preference and pressures for picking careers had something worth discussing). What he said had at least some spark of originality and insight, otherwise it wouldn't have gotten nearly the attention it did. Consider, would we be talking about the memo if it were about how he thought Sundar Pichai was a lizard man?

Those who disagreed with Damore already won the battle. They kicked him out of Google and doubled down on their diversity initiatives/echo chamber. We should be able to talk about his arguments honestly and rationally without falling back on gendered reasons at this point at least.

We are and lots of people are doing so, but another point made in this post is that the workplace isn't the venue for this.

These are just tough problems. How do you make up for a system that is biased against you? At what point are you disadvantaging the incumbent group? They didn't exactly choose to be in the incumbent group as much as the oppressed group chose their's.

It's hard to have an honest conversation because it's easy to police words, but tough to police thoughts and motivations.

This is pretty interesting. At this point I accept that I'm both racist and sexist because of the culture I grew up in. But there was a time when I took the suggestion that I was racist or sexist as a deep assault on my character and intellect.

I think it's hard to admit, probably especially for software engineers, that we're biased in some way, but the truth is that this stuff is insidious. It's somehow true that boys are called on more than girls, and they're given more positive feedback for participation in the classroom. Or like earlier in this thread I referenced Dr. Sadedin's Quora post and someone responded to it assuming that she's a man. Or I remember a prominent woman feminist on Twitter talking about how she was confused why a woman flight attendant was talking about the weather forecast, potential turbulence, and landing time when she realized the woman was actually the pilot.

No one's immune from this. It's pernicious, it's embedded in our culture, and it pervades our entire society.

> At what point are you disadvantaging the incumbent group? They didn't exactly choose to be in the incumbent group as much as the oppressed group chose their's.

This is a fair point. I think (to use a corporate term I kind of disdain) we need buy-in from white men and we don't have it right now. Most of us don't believe that a problem exists, or that we are sexist and racist (importantly, just like everyone else), or that we personally need to do anything about this. Until that changes, we'll still feel cheated by pro-diversity policies, and issues like this will keep flaring up.

I think the fix is simple but not necessarily easy (oh no, accidental Rich Hickey reference haha), and it's to just keep talking about these issues. Not, of course, in the workplace, but in your social circles. And if you can't learn about this stuff in your social circles, do some research online or broaden your social circle to challenge yourself a little (I use theflipside.io and it's been surprisingly illuminating). Because the facts are that current US society and culture puts over 2/3 of us at a significant disadvantage, and the sooner the dominant group (straight cis white men) gets wise to it the sooner we can fix it.

I don't think that's a fair characterization. I think a lot of white men recognize that a problem exists. It's just that there are so many other problems in this society right now that it seems low on the totem pole. Personally, I'm more afraid of an outbreak of violence between neo-Nazis and radical Marxists. It's hard not to draw parallels to 1920s Europe.

Yeah things seem pretty fucked right now, and it's kind of hard to believe it all happened in less than a year. Not really confidence inspiring.

> I think a lot of white men recognize that a problem exists.

Honestly, I'd like to hear from them. Just look at this thread, the ratio of anti-Damore to pro-Damore people is like 1-to-10, and the other threads are even worse.

I will say I pushed it too far when I said "[m]ost of us". Looking at this Gallup poll 58% of White men support affirmative action for women and 52% of White men support affirmative action for racial minorities. The MoE is 5% and that's pretty close, affirmative action questions are subject to social desirability bias, I would assume numbers have dropped in the Trump era, and I don't necessarily think support for affirmative action translates into "I'm cool, and maybe even happy with the idea that a similarly qualified woman might get a job instead of me", but hey 58 is 58 :)

But I don't really accept the explanation that "there are so many other problems". This is a huge problem if you're a minority in the US. It's really an issue of perspective here.

I'm white and I agree a problem exists, although I'm not American. I'm also basically on the "pro-Damore" side in this thread, although I don't necessarily agree with everything he wrote in the document. You seem to take this as an indication that I'm sexist or denying sexism exists, and I think a big part of the problem is exactly this kind of "you either agree with me or you're a sexist pig" approach.

A person can be pro-equality and even for encouraging more women to go into tech, without agreeing that all gender differences are caused by social conditioning or that affirmative action is the proper way to fix it.

Oh cool, hi!

> A person can be pro-equality and even for encouraging more women to go into tech, without agreeing that all gender differences are caused by social conditioning or that affirmative action is the proper way to fix it.

Sure, alright. What do you think about the problem? I guess, what are your ideas for addressing the gender gap without pro-diversity policies and affirmative action?