If a memo like the Google diversity memo leaked by one of our company's (written by one of our employees about our firms), do you think that we would have fired them? I have a feeling that we wouldn't

Dude when you publish to your coworkers that you believe your gender is superior to their gender at the type of work you are doing you will get fired. Every time. Just try that sometime with a coworker. Tell them based on what you know about their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc that who you are is definitively better than who they are.

BCG1: You should maybe try reading the actual memo and not the NYT made up editorials... the guy wrote a well researched and fact based memo. It was not something about why men are superior to women.

If the content didn't warrant him being fired, then why should a media reaction based on lies warrant it?

Also, the reactions to it beyond even the lies told by the media have been absurd. People skipping work because they are too upset over it? Way to show how mentally tough women are. If this guy got fired, then every single person who called off because of being upset should also be fired.

So yea. Not exactly enlightened conversation. There's one thing to debate if the decreasing pay gap between genders is occurring. It's a whole different conversation to suggest women should get paid less or can't do their job because they are riddled with anxiety and don't enjoy competitive environments

Thanks for reading the memo BCG, I did too, and the coverage and synthesis of it by most media sources is so egregiously superficial and biased that it causes me once again to distrust any journalist's summary of anything. Once again, we need to read the primary source material for ourselves.

Look at all the qualifiers and modifiers he used in his memo -- may, could, partial, etc. He was not claiming X = Y, he was claiming X is a factor in Y. Personally, I find most of the criticisms of his memo to be intellectually dishonest. Misreading what he's saying, waving away his modifiers, failing to follow his argument. It's embarrassing to think that professionals in our industry are this bad at logically parsing and evaluating arguments. The politically correct crowd is intellectually bankrupt.

Wow D2, way to completely twist that. Obviously men and women aren't EXACTLY alike biologically. The article is making a claim that men are biologically better at development than women, which we argue is not the case.

Do you believe men are biologically more analytical and therefore better at coding/engineering/etc D2? Interesting to see if you can handle the question flipped

I just keep replacing "tech engineer" with "consultant." I think many of our male colleagues feel the same way about us. I'm still not on board with the affinity group decisions

P1: There is scientific evidence that qualities that lead to better coders are more prevalent in men than women. This is basic science. What studies do you have to refute the studies he provided?

I haven't checked which if any of the authors claims he provided sources for, so I could easily imagine that that some of them are just stereotypes and not backed by data. But I do find it symptomatic of the general "truthiness" of our age that all the most common objections to what this guy wrote rely on first mischaracterizing a claim, before evaluating the mischaracterized claim. Even in this thread, people like BCG1 and P1 attribute claims like "women should get paid less or can't do their job" or "men are biologically better at development" that are quite clearly never made in the original text. The claims the author made were about preferences, not abilities. If those claims were true, they would still matter for recruiting, because if a smaller share of women want to do X, it's still going to be hard to achieve gender parity in the people you convince to do X unless you pay the women way more, and that wouldn't necessarily be fair either. Now maybe they're untrue. But it's clearly not the case that preferences are exactly equal - maybe they differ in more complex ways than the stereotypes. And yet nobody I've read has actually engaged with any of the central claims of the author either positively or negatively. Basically we just have a bunch of people who've been waiting to say some shit, and they're using this guy as an excuse to say their shit, not actually responding to anything he said. No wonder people say that discourse in America is fucked.

M1- completely agree. I brought this up in a discussion elsewhere tonight and this person compared it to how Gretchen Carlson could have been fired by Fox for mentioning discrimination. I cannot believe all of the people who are bringing up how this guy could be a victim of discrimination. I see the logical argument for that, but at the end of the day, it was bringing the company bad press and there was a biz case on that alone to fire him.

OP- I'm just going to use your logic- with what United did by dragging that guy off of the plane- they were technically allowed to, right? Did anyone get hired as a result of the bad press? I don't know. It's not uncommon for there to have to be a head that rolls. I do think that he has a strong NLRB case, however, I also think what he wrote was ignorant so I'm not sure that you'd want an ignorant person like that working for you either, and yes, I have read the memo. It seems like the intent was good, but facts or no facts, there is a lot that was ignorant.

MEMO: Women on average are more cooperative
Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.
Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.
The male gender role is currently inflexible

He basically got fired for documenting, in a lucid and clear fashion, his thoughts, feelings and analysis.

BCG1: Which of his scientifically sourced points are you trying to refute? Do you think as a whole men and women are the same biologically? That there are no differences between the two sexes?

There are some men who feel like this memo was their manifesto and D2 seems to be one of them. I think that there are thousands more

OP: More so there are a bunch of people who hate the current culture of feels over science. Data should drive conclusions. Not feelings and emotions about how we hoped the world works. Women and men are different biologically. This is basic facts. That is the reason you will never see a female in the MLB, NBA, or NFL.

D2- As a friend, you might want to stop while you're ahead. You're really going back to some second wave feminist ideas there. I wish you all the luck in your career.

https://archive.is/z6xxP

Look, I really don't want to have a big discussion on the memo. Not now, not today, but maybe later this week. At the moment, I'm more interested in the fired part of it. The person who posted what I referenced above is an employment law lawyer and I do see the logical argument for why it made sense for him to not het fired, even though I am personally ok with it. We work at some pretty big name companies, but I don't think that we have the same brand recognition as Google. If a memo like this were at one of our firms or a small company and it didn't go public, would this person have lost his job? Probably not and what does that say? On one hand, it is a person expressing his views, but on the other, there are all of the wrongs that have already been mentioned. One of my points is is that I kind of think that more men believe what he wrote that they'd be willing to admit, kind of like how a bunch of people said that they were going to vote for Hillary but actually voted for Trump

*fired

By ignorant, I mean that he is painting broad brush strokes of what all women are apparently like. I'll stop there, but I could go on. If you want to have an open-minded convo about the content of the memo, I would be happy to do so, but I'm not interested in being told that I am stupid for what I believe, especially since the memo is essentially about me. If you believe that parts of the memo are true and want to have a respectful convo about it (not combative), I would be happy to share my opinions on why I think that what he wrote is incorrect