[alpsgolden]

The workplace is no place for politics like this.

I agree, but I'm pretty sure political posts were already tolerated at Google. If employees are allowed to post to internal message boards that women are underrepresented because interviewers are sexist or suffer from unconcious bias and should adopt policy Y, then employees should also be allowed to post an argument that women are under-represented for some other reason X and argue against policy Y.

And even if the workplace does have a no politics rule, the proper response should be a reprimand and asking him to delete his post, not a firing.

[mehwoot]

I'm not saying people shouldn't discuss company policies. I'm saying they shouldn't turn those policy discussions into a national/cultural political argument.

If you say "interviewers are being sexist and so we should adopt policy Y", I think that would be acceptable. If you said "there is systemic bias against women so you should vote for Hillary Clinton", to me that would not be acceptable. Once you turn something into left/right liberal/conservative etc you are harming rational discussion and making a lot of trouble in a lot of different ways.

And I think this is the solution that the person who wrote the letter is ironically ruining. You can't have sane level headed discussions about these issues when its framed as left/right. You can if you take every issue on its merits individually. If you want people to be free to voice conservative opinions, then don't turn every issue into a 10 page manifesto dissecting the failures of marxism. Just discuss the policy.

No idea if this reasoning is shared by Google though. It's just my view.

[alpsgolden]

I'm not saying people shouldn't discuss company policies. I'm saying they shouldn't turn those policy discussions into a national/cultural political argument.

I suspect that this memo wasn't any more political than much that gets shared in the message boards at Google. This issue was already politicized and the main gist of the politics stuff was, "Both sides bring insights and biases to the table, so we should do a better job making it comfortable for conservatives to speak up." By the standards of what I see going on the political discourse this was pretty tame stuff. The responses to the piece were 100X worse -- https://files.gab.ai/image/5986e3f03d1f1.jpeg

[dguaraglia]

As I explained to another poster just now: this guy painted a target on himself by becoming a huge liability for Alphabet. By stating that he's OK with discriminating by gender, he put them in a position where they'd have to flag him as someone who couldn't manage a mixed-gender team. Not only that, he should never be allowed to give peer reviews to people in mixed-gender teams. Not only that, he's obviously created animosity with other people inside the company who said they wouldn't want to work with him.

Just deleting the post won't magically fix those issues.

[alpsgolden]

As I explained to another poster just now: this guy painted a target on himself by becoming a huge liability for Alphabet.

Sure, but if Google has already decided it is ok to discuss this issue on company message boards and that it wants to encourage debate and discussion (which it has), then it shouldn't then fire a guy just because he makes an argument other people don't like. The principled thing would be to stand for freedom of debate. Otherwise you are just ceding the company to cry-bullies, ceding the message boards to the faction that is more willing to self-modify to be offended at opposing viewpoints. If anything, Google should fire the employees who responded with personal invective against a fellow Googler.

By stating that he's OK with discriminating by gender, he put them in a position where they'd have to flag him as someone who couldn't manage a mixed-gender team.

He did not say this. He is against discriminating against gender and wants the same hiring and recruiting process regardless of gender.

[dguaraglia]

> then it shouldn't then fire a guy just because he makes an argument other people don't like

He didn't "make an argument other people didn't like". An argument other people might not like could be "guys, I think everything in Google3 sucks and we should rewrite everything in Elixir." This was way beyond that.

I'll refer you to this article, because Yonatan puts it in way better terms than I ever could: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

> Otherwise you are just ceding the company to cry-bullies

While I was at Alphabet we dealt with plenty of cry-bullies, mostly in the form of conservative-leaning folk who thought they should be allowed to say whatever they pleased because "freedom of speech." Most of these self-styled Constitutional Scholars didn't realize that freedom of speech only applies to the government, not your employer. None got fired, as far as I can tell.

> Google should fire the employees who responded with personal invective against a fellow Googler.

And yet, this guy who is openly telling the world he doesn't trust females to be as interested as he is in the job should be applauded? Not sure I follow.

> He is against discriminating against gender and wants the same hiring and recruiting process regardless of gender.

Which is a completely specious claim to make, considering he most likely doesn't know the distribution of gender and ethnicity in the resumes the company receives and he's most likely not familiar with HR practices outside of interviewing. How can he claim there's an active conspiracy to discriminate candidates, when he doesn't know either of those things?

I don't ever recall seeing a diversity advocate say that the employee distribution should match the world 1 to 1. Diversity efforts have always focused on outreach, not on discarding resumes because the candidate is a white male. So he made up a straw-man, then he proceeded to attack it using cherry-picked science while making generalizations about political affiliations.

[alpsgolden]

This was way beyond that.

I read Zunger's article. Getting offended is in large part a choice. I apply the golden rule. If an Asian guy wrote a similar article for arguing why Asian people are over-represented at Google compared to white people, I would not take offense. Maybe he would be wrong, but if he wrote in the tone of the original article I would not call for his firing or say that I couldn't work with him.

mostly in the form of conservative-leaning folk who thought they should be allowed to say whatever they pleased because "freedom of speech."

A cry bully is someone who tries to get other people fired or de-platformed because they claim personal offense. Did these conservatives call for people to get fired? Did they succeed? If not, then good, I'm gladd their cry-bullying attempts were ignored.

And yet, this guy who is openly telling the world he doesn't trust females to be as interested as he is in the job should be applauded?

There is a enormous difference between noticing on average differences and direct personally targeted invective against a specific employee.

not on discarding resumes because the candidate is a white male

You are making up the straw man because that is not what he claims they are doing.

[dguaraglia]

> If an Asian guy wrote a similar article for arguing why Asian people are over-represented at Google compared to white people

If a woman at Google had written this, the conversation would be similar to what you describe. This is a man making a generalization about women. Key difference.

> A cry bully is someone who tries to get other people fired or de-platformed because they claim personal offense.

That's exactly what they would do, taking offense on all kinds of "liberal messaging." And yes, I'm glad they were ignored.

> You are making up the straw man because that is not what he claims they are doing

Then what is he claiming they are doing? (It's a trick question)

[totalZero]

It's a man talking about how men are over represented. You don't agree?

[cabalamat]

> Diversity efforts have always focused on outreach, not on discarding resumes because the candidate is a white male.

This is factually inaccurate, for example the BBC recently advertised positions where white people were explicitly excluded.

[dguaraglia]

I'm talking about a particular context. I'm sure you can cite "reverse-racism" in post-Apartheid South Africa too, but that isn't germane to the conversation.

[cabalamat]

> I'm talking about a particular context.

Of course you were.

That's why you said "Diversity efforts have always focused on outreach" (my emphasis) and not "Diversity efforts have sometimes focused on outreach" or even "In this particular context, diversity efforts focused on outreach"

[cm2187]

I don't think he claimed he was ok with discriminations by gender. Quite the contrary. He claimed there may be other reasons than discrimination for gender imbalances by profession and that these diversity programs actually introduce a discrimination.

[dguaraglia]

This is the same argument currently used against affirmative action programs across the US: "doesn't this discriminate against white people who could be qualified to get accepted into the same position /scholarship?"

It's a disingenuous argument which doesn't take into consideration the whole history of why the program exists in the first place. Not only that, by trying to justify it on biological terms, the author introduces the supposed existence of an inherent bias that Google is supposedly trying to ignore.

How about we try to achieve 1-1 parity with society's distribution and if after 30 years of encouraging people of all genders to participate in all professions there's solid evidence that some people don't care for X or Y reason, then we let the problem take care of itself? I mean if we truly are aiming for non-discrimination, that should be the metric, right?

[cm2187]

It is only a disingenuous argument if you are convinced that the gender imbalance is the result of a discrimination in the first place, which you seem to be quite certain it is.

Unlike the guy from Google, I won't speculate on the reasons but there are many gender imbalances that are clearly not the result of a discrimination. For instance a large majority of med and law students (80% in the case of law) in France are women. These are not low skill/low pay/low prestige professions, and I am not aware that there is any discrimination against men in these schools (nor that anyone complained there would). In the school of engineering I went to, the proportion was the reverse (20% women). Selection is purely based on a math and physics exam, very little room for discrimination either. Naturally this male/female imbalance makes its way from university to the profession.

I can't say exactly why we have these imbalances, there might be many reasons, some may be cultural, some may be biological, I don't know, and I very much doubt anyone on HN can pretend to have an authoritative answer, but I also very much doubt it has to do with discrimination.

[dguaraglia]

> It is only a disingenuous argument if you are convinced that the gender imbalance is the result of a discrimination in the first place, which you seem to be quite certain it is.

Then you proceed to write two paragraphs essentially supporting my position that we really don't understand why the imbalances exist. But somehow, this guy stating as a matter of fact that it's a biological thing is not disingenuous. I'm not sure how you can hold both beliefs.

[yorwba]

> But somehow, this guy stating as a matter of fact that it's a biological thing is not disingenuous.

Can you point me to where he states this? The closest I found was

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.

which is still very much in the "we don't understand, but maybe this is an explanation" camp.

[wolfgangK]

> By stating that he's OK with discriminating by gender,

Actually, he wrote exactly the opposite.

[boyce]

Of course he did. It's like Ukip claiming not to be racist. The most generous view is that they don't realise that what they advocate is discriminatory or disproportionately affecting particular demographics.

[wolfgangK]

Re: Ukip and racism, there is a lot of political acts to provide context that can invalidate (or not [0]) their statements. As for this guy, his memo should be considered on it's own (in good faith) for lack of outside context about the author.

I do not understand how what he actually advocates could be considered discriminatory. It seems to me that it would indeed "disproportionately affect particular demographics", but in a good way by making sure that no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox could induce any skill/gender bias in the workforce.

[0] I have no particular knowledge about ukip