Google Striving For Diversity Gets Called Out By Employee

[JohnyMac]

On another subject line here we were talking about YouTube censorship by owner, Google. Well below is the opening two paragraphs of a ten page internal Google memo written by a employee.

It starts out..

.
    Reply to public response and misrepresentation

    I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem. Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber. Despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired. This needs to change.
    TL:DR

>  Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the
    antithesis of psychological safety.
>  This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
>  The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.
>  Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
>  Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
>  Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50%
    representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and
    bad for business.

I do not know how long this memo will remain on the interwize so if you want to read it before it goes poof, click here and then scroll down.

As a side note: I am starting to witness the PC, diversity, safe place, etc. crap dissolving. Once the promoters of this crap is going away I wonder what they will do to stem the tide. 

[Nemo]

Copy it all.  Keep a copy on your computer.  Print it.  Make is to you can scan and repost all over the place.  Become the mosquito buzzing around Googles ears.  Put it out on your tweeter and instagram and all that.  Make sure the world knows and pays attention.

We will give you a very proper burial after you decide life is not worth living and go out in a blaze of glory with your wife. After your computers disappear and cannot be located.

Nemo

[JohnyMac]

Employee who wrote the aforementioned memo was terminated yesterday. I wonder how they censor their search engine on things they do not support/approve of.

Today Google may only censor 2% of their search engine but a year from now might it be 10%? 20%?

[CJS06]

Johny

They absolutely censor their search engine.  All you need to do is search for something in Google and say DDG. During the election cycle there were a number of instances where a search for anti Hillary info would bring up anything but on Google, you would need to scroll to page 2 or 3 of results even though on other search engines it was top items based on search criteria.

Chris

[JohnyMac]

Yupper. That is why I use DuckDuckgo as my search engine.

  WARNING

Just think about it.

Google is a Monmouth. One day they come in and say, "all of our departments will not allow any other thought then what we support." Of course that would be fascism but you would NOT be able to write that as they would censor your word.

Now on one side, they can legally do this as they are a private company. On the other hand, web users have asked for this to happen and have no real recourse other than to go to another search engine. May I suggest, go now before this happens.

  WARNING OVER 

[Erick]

I've read the essay.
By firing him they really proved his point amazing considering how his essay was crafted to be as inoffensive as possible and as tactful as possible.

I would have written it using  a lot stronger terms.

[Erick]

PS: Just copy/pasted it to my Facebook feed

[Nemo]

The guy got canned today.

Nemo

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-diversity-idUSKBN1AO1WY

August 8, 2017 / 11:08 AM
Google fires employee behind anti-diversity memo
David Ingram and Ishita Palli

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A Silicon Valley culture war pitting liberal-leaning tech firms against a small conservative cohort took on new intensity on Tuesday after Google fired a male engineer for a memo that decried the company's commitment to hiring women.

Memo author James Damore, 28, received jeers, cheers and a couple of job offers, while the debate raged on social media and some tech firms took steps to prevent similar episodes from embroiling their companies.

Damore confirmed his dismissal from Alphabet Inc's Google on Monday, after he wrote a 10-page memo that said the company was hostile to conservative viewpoints and that women on average have more neuroticism.

Many in Silicon Valley found his views, which argued that men in general may be biologically more suited to coding jobs than women, offensive and destructive. The manifesto was embraced by some, particularly on the political right, who branded him a brave truth-teller.

The episode recalled past examples of the wide gulf between U.S. conservative activists and the tech sector.

In 2014, Brendan Eich was forced out as Mozilla's chief executive after his opposition to gay marriage became public. Most technology executives held the opposite view, and tech companies often gave benefits to same-sex couples well before gay marriage was legalized.

"Anyone who deviates from the talking points of the liberal left is shunned, shamed and forced out," Andrew Torba, chief executive of the social network Gab, said in an interview.

Torba, whose company is popular among conservatives, said Damore could work for him.

WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, whose group released hacked emails that helped the campaign of Republican U.S. President Donald Trump, also offered Damore a job, writing on Twitter that "censorship is for losers."

Firing Damore was too extreme and Google should have put him through training instead, said Aaron Ginn, co-founder of the Lincoln Network, a group of libertarian-leaning tech workers and investors.

"You're going to make him a martyr. In this hyper-tribal political day we are in, I think you'd want to try to avoid making him a martyr," Ginn said.

Intense political feelings recently divided two board members of Facebook Inc, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. Last August, Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix Inc, warned investor Peter Thiel in an email that Thiel's support for Trump showed "catastrophically bad judgment," the newspaper reported.

The outcome of that dispute is not known. Hastings and Thiel remain on Facebook's board. Facebook declined to comment.

More generally, Silicon Valley tech companies have been under mounting criticism for not doing enough to promote gender equality and stamp out sexual harassment.

Claims of persistent sexual harassment in the ranks of Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] and of several venture capital firms have led to management shake-ups.
The Google logo is pictured atop an office building in Irvine, California, U.S., August 7, 2017.Mike Blake

The U.S. Labor Department is investigating Google to see whether the firm has unlawfully paid women less than men. Google denies that it does.

Google, which has used the motto "Don't be evil," received accolades from many quarters for treating Damore's memo as a threat to its corporate culture.

"What he wrote is extremely toxic to the tech community we are trying to support. He's categorizing us in a way that makes us seem weak or incompetent," said Adriana Gascoigne, founder of the San Francisco nonprofit Girls in Tech.

Josh Reeves, chief executive at Gusto, a software company, said he expected the topic would come up at its all-staff meeting on Wednesday.

Gusto's code of conduct "specifically prohibits a memo like Damore's," Reeves said, if the memo would be offensive to individuals in a protected group.

Damore, who could not be reached for comment on Tuesday, said in an email to Reuters on Monday that he was exploring a possible legal challenge to his dismissal.

His case would likely be weak, employment lawyers said, and some lawyers said Google could have faced lawsuits if it had not acted against him.

Google said it could not talk about individual employee cases.

U.S. companies have broad latitude to restrict the speech of employees in private workplaces, where First Amendment protections against government censorship do not apply.

Damore's title at Google was software engineer and he had worked at the company since December 2013, according to a profile on LinkedIn.

The LinkedIn page also says Damore received a PhD in systems biology from Harvard University in 2013. Harvard said on Tuesday he completed a master's degree in the subject, not a PhD.

Industry experts note that in the early days of tech it was mostly women who held the then-unglamorous jobs of coding. But as the value of top-notch programming became clear, men came to dominate the field.

Other tech companies on Tuesday were closely watching the controversy at Google unfold, and grateful they were not the ones caught in another debate over gender and diversity.

"Every large organization has a James Damore - but at tech companies, they're more liberated to share their personal views," an executive at one major Silicon Valley firm said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Tech firms have an abundance of "smart, confident people who think they have an obligation to share their wisdom with their coworkers," the executive said.

Reporting by David Ingram, Salvador Rodriguez and Heather Somerville in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Jonathan Allen, Taylor Harris and Gabriella Borter in New York and Dustin Volz and Jonathan Weber in San Francisco; Editing by Bernard Orr and Lisa Shumaker

[CJS06]

Here is the core of the problem.  This one line.

 "if the memo would be offensive to individuals in a protected group."

There should be NO "protected groups". They dont get it..... having a protected group establishes and proves there is discrimination.....against those not "protected". 

WTF these people are in the ultimate echo chamber that is a big circle jerk.

Where the F@#k is it in the Constitution....which Amendment states that a basic human right is not to be offended.  These people and there views are incredibly offensive to me....make them stop 

[JohnyMac]

Yupper, CJS06 yupper.

Here we see the same thing today on the news. All of the Politicians crying that Mr. Trump said some scary things to NK. Hell, even McCain was belly aching.

If they do not see that Sec. Tillerman is the good cop and Trump is the bad cop they are useless.