I hear Elon Musk is hiring…
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Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases…
Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.
“Facts and reason.” Christ, what an engineer. I mean, I’m a (software) engineer too, and I hang out with other engineers and I think we can be OK people sometimes, but we do seem to struggle a lot with stuff like grey areas or admitting that we don’t know stuff or that some things are just plain hard to know. No, if I just reason long enough and fact hard enough I can know everything there is to know without any of that messy stuff like asking questions or having experiences or getting up from my desk.
Maybe it’s a bit of an overstatement but when it comes to such complex subjects I’m not sure there’s any such thing as “facts”, or not as he uses the term at least, just evidence and theories. Nothing is certain, every dichotomy is false, truth is a moving target.
Hard to say which part of that screed hurt my head the most. I like how he says that “social constructionism” is a myth, but explains that men behave the way they do because of how they’re judged by society. Not only is he wrong about oh so many things, he can’t even keep his story straight.
I think my favourite part might be the confidence and total lack of self-awareness with which he writes (my emphasis):
For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment…
Translation: “Stand back, I’m gonna strawman the shit out of this thing.”
I’d be willing to bet that he’s learned nothing from any of this.
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“Men are assholes, so please ladies, give us men a break, you don’t know what it’s like to have to deal with us all the time…, …”
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Someone’s on my husband’s FB right now trying to disingenuously argue that it should be okay to talk about differences but he’s not implying women are worse at engineering because of them. Hey, why don’t women work on oil rigs? Could it be genetics?
I’ve known a woman who worked on offshore oil rigs. She said that the environment assumes entirely men will be on there. She had to get a “shewee” because you don’t stop and wander off to the bathroom to take a leak. It’s just not done.
Oh, and I’ve fucking got bingo now, he’s just said HE’S the one that is REALLY discriminated against because jobs will pick a woman over him for “diversity”. Jesus.
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FFS, oil rigs didn’t exist when human beings evolved… Everything is making me angry today…
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OK, I’m trying to do my part. I sent a note to my closest female co-workers.
Hi all,
You are the women I work most closely with. I’m on your side. I hate this whole thing of male-dominated tech, and that Google memo kerfluffle made things worse. If I ever talk over you in meetings or anything else that makes your life harder, just say, “hold on a sec.” I will also try to notice if someone else is talking over you or making your life more difficult than it needs to be. I think generally we all work well together, but I also couldn’t say nothing about this.
Cheers
Received positive responses. We move forward from here, knowing that we have each other’s backs.
Assholes like this Google guy need to be run out of town. They have no place.
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Asshole. This is the new/old thing where the person calling out an injustice is somehow the one perpetrating the injustice. New stupidity, same as the old stupidity.
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“How dare you call our customs evil? This is an affront to Southern honour!”
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What’s funny is it was an entirely hypothetical scenario. He said IF there were an equally qualified woman, then SHE would get the job and that’s totes unfair! But … it never actually happened? And how is a company supposed to pick between two “equally qualified” candidates? Pick the white dude, apparently.
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I love that line of reasoning. Look, if you’re losing out on jobs because someone else has an advantage: Get Better. That’s competition, and life is not fair. Buckle down and work harder instead of complaining, snowflake!
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I don’t get it. Do Elon Musk’s companies have lengthy credos?
I’m just saying the guy was hired under the credo of, “Don’t be evil”, which is totally subjective. With a credo that includes, “We don’t treat anyone with prejudice based on Gender, Sex, Race, etc”, it would send a clear, non-negotiable message. I think Google made the right decision to fire the guy, and to not be associated with that kind of thinking (for example, that men are naturally better at coding), but if some things are up for debate, while other aren’t, they should make that clear.
That’s only been the status quo ever since the US was “founded,” after all…
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Thanks for indulging my JAQing.
I find it amazing how differently different groups of people can interpret the same text.
Let me assure you that I never was even remotely tempted to agree with the text as interpreted by you (and most others here).
I am not well-trained in hearing the dog-whistles and shibboleths of American political culture. Apparently, the memo is full of things where reasonable, non-sexist Austrians of all genders might agree or politely disagree, but people in other parts of the world decide that he just avoided explicitly stating some far more disagreeable opinions, and therefore conclude that he’s not interested in honest debate.
Dogwhistles just don’t travel internationally.
I would have thought this is an inherently political subject. I really don’t see how this can be discussed apolitically. Why are things the way they are in our society, how do we want them to be, what do we do in order to get there? That’s the very definition of politics.
Also note that both sides in the debate claim that they want the same goals: equality for all, reduction of the gender gap, fact-based politics, open discussion instead of blind ideology. Both sides disagree about the facts and the means to reach the goals. Each side accuses the other about lying about their goals. After all, they’re not for equality, as they claim, they are for discrimination!
People are only ever this unproductive on political topics.
The hard part is defining what “reasonable” means in this context. Everyone thinks they’re being reasonable. He might not have provided examples of being “shamed” or “shouted down” in his memo, but he provided examples of what opinions he considers reasonable, and he got fired for them, and people are shaming him. So he did end up providing a concrete example after all.
This is also the time when the classic “computer nerd” stereotype developed. I mean the stereotype of a socially inept male, somehow stuck being a bright but awkward teenager for the rest of his life. I guess, for reasons somewhat ingrained into our culture, that is an image that fewer young women than young men feel comfortable identifying with.
Interesting. This is another thing that might not travel too well over international borders. I’m a man and haven’t written anything like this to my female colleagues, so I can’t really know, but my gut feeling is that if I copied your text it would be understood as “me strong man, me protect woman” and met with nothing but eye-rolls here in Austria.
In other news, here’s an interesting fact I recently learned about the percentage of women in computer science:
Among computer science students in Iran, the percentage of women is close to 50%.
Which confuses the heck out of me, because it doesn’t seem to fit any of the theories, neither the conservative nor the progressive theories. I’m willing to bet that Iranians have the same biology as Austrians and Americans. I am also willing to bet that Iranian culture is at least as male-dominated as Austrian or American culture.
So what’s going on?
There’s a big difference between taking an approach of, “I’ll protect you” and “I stand with you”. @anon89609066 seems like he at least was made a gesture to try to show some solidarity. I could be completely off base here though.
It’s actually more like 70%. I have read it’s an out from oppression.
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Sure, there’s a big difference, and the response(s) @anon89609066 has received validate his approach. So none of you is off base here.
I just suspect that the same wording would be interpreted differently in a different cultural context (i.e., mine). Which I thought was a relevant example, because after all I had remarked how most people around me reacted differently to the same memo than you did.
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I think because there is a time and place for everything. I wasn’t going to do it, but then I thought I can’t sit around saying nothing. Also note my word choices: I tried hard to be sending support, not acting like a pimp. There’s no perfect way. I probably could have word smithed it more.
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Bryan Lunduke’s video about it and giving thoughts I find agreeable. He speaks many of the same things I want to say but in a far better way with far more tact than I am able to. Going from my personal experiences in just simple social interactions it’s always one group wanting to ‘protect’ themselves and their friends and will stomp all over anyone going 'hey can we talk? What you mean you making a statement and going ‘this is so’ counts as 'talking? I thought talking was I say things you say things and we try either agreeing on one or other point, or on some middle ground. What the hell.'
Wouldn’t know it by looking at Google themselves. People calling in sick ‘because they can’t handle the environment’ google’s own CEO returning from a vacation and posting a blog entry. Frankly Google is coming off as very bullying off of that.
Yeah… The idea that somebody saying that maybe the pool of potential female coders is in fact smaller because interests of talented women perhaps naturally skew towards things like pediatrics, veterinary care and psychology is “making me feel unsafe at work” and therefore has to be fired and demonized (and lumped together with nazis) is a bit too much.
It looks like we are at a point where the mere act of being insufficiently enthusiastic about all and any moral crusades and campaigns is ground enough for ostracism.
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