While it's true that people are VERY much overly sensitive these days, I was just talking about things in a workplace environment, not just a day to day walking around type of thing. When it comes to the workplace, it's best to keep inflammatory arguments to yourself....even when you are 100% right. If the guy has posted this on his private Facebook account or whatever and that led to him being fired, I'd have a MUCH bigger problem with it than I do him posting it at work to other employees.
Open discussion is not equal to blasting out controversial memo to entire company. At that point, the employee made it about himself, rather than any type of open discussion. There were many routes to share his views openly within the company - this wasn't a good one. You seem to have a fairly limited understanding of how any company operates. Just because a company has an open policy to communication doesn't mean they would fine with employees doing anything they wanted.
What makes you think that? They have something like 50,000 employees. You think he's the only employee at Google to air unpopular opinions within the company? What makes this situation unique is that you heard about it. He wasn't fired for the unpopular opinion - he was fired because he posted his opinion in a way that went public and caused a headache for the company. This is really very simple. An employee's value to a company is based on what they bring to the table, how replacable they are, etc. Offsetting that is a cost to the company - salary, benefits, other costs. If the value is higher the cost, the employee likely has a job. If it's not, he or she doesn't. In this case, they had an employee that had value to them. He suddenly made his cost to the company much higher, and thus the value vs cost proposition no longer was in his favor. Thus, he was fired. I don't see why Google would or should be obligated to keep an employee who brings negative value to the company. Even ignoring the headaches and costs of dealing with him in public side, he also pissed off a ton of other valuable employees, which has it's own significant costs within their company culture, etc.
Politically/sociologically, it's very possible he is the only one to broadcast them, yes. Agree to disagree. I'm curious about, if this truly was a "company wide email", whether Google was encouraging or typically using such broad platforms for employees to talk about these subjects. Both of those possibilities seem very very odd. I'm aware of the simple cost-benefit situation that we're dealing with here. I never said Google should be obligated to keep him, but I am disappointed in Google for either 1) disagreeing with his opinion which I feel has quite a bit of merit to it and 2) not standing behind their employee in situations like this especially when the claim to be investing in 'open dialogue'. It will be interesting to see how the wrongful termination suit goes.
Of course it is all BS and it is naive to think otherwise. It is all about PR stunt to make the company look open-minded, tolerant, and blah, blah, but in reality it is still a public company and any bad PR hurts the company business. If you hurt company business, you will be let go. As an adult working in real world, he should have known better. BTW, I think the reason that a lot of ppl voted for loud mouth Trump, in part, was because they thought he could say whatever he wanted. Sure, he gets a lot of heat for saying things, some are very stupid, but he doesn't give a damn about push-backs because he is a billionaire. Average Joe simply couldn't do that.
"...as for the low % of women and minorities (Blacks, Hispanics) in engineering and other STEM fields...I feel that at least some of that can be traced all the way back to their grade school years, and the surrounding culture, peer pressure and socialization that occurs during that time. Physiological/biological differences has very little (if anything) to do with it." An excellent post. I particularly liked the quote, which I find on target. The issues women face in the workplace go back a long time. Here's an example. My sister graduated from UT in 1966, the year Charles Whitman went berserk. She was lucky to have been in Houston on a short visit at the time. What she wasn't lucky about were the options university counselors suggested to her from the time she was a freshman. She could be a public school teacher, a nurse, or a secretary. With a degree, she could aspire to become an executive secretary, given time. Women were viewed as going to college to find a husband, and that if they worked after graduation, it was assumed that it was only until they found a husband. If a woman continued to work after marriage, as soon as she became pregnant, her career was essentially over. My sister just missed the cultural change that began the year she graduated. She ended up being a public school teacher with a master's degree in English Literature, teaching English as a second language. Now retired after becoming burned out teaching, she writes romance novels and has a couple of antique/collectible businesses. Highly intelligent, she could have been anything. That wasn't what she was told at the time.
I agree - while in the workplace, he should have phrased his opinions in a different way. How does this sound? "Google is barring me from entering the mentoring program because of my skin color or my gender. I'm also given a low priority queue for the same reasons. Google is demonstrating hiring preferences based on skin color, gender, or ethnicity. Google sends org-level OKRs calling for increased representation for people who are not the same skin color, gender, or ethnicity as me. I urge Google and its employees to NOT continue the application of such prejudice and to recognize and understand that to favor one person based on their skin color, gender, or ethnicity in the workplace is to disfavor those of different skin color, gender, or ethnicity, which is tantamount to racism, sexism and/or ethnic prejudice."
For those of you who wanted data, here's an article on it that links to several studies: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/08/ada...fferences-between-sexes-are-slim-to-none.html Here's some of it: In his memo, Damore, who has since been fired but is "exploring all possible legal remedies" to his dismissal, linked to sources ranging from Wikipedia, The Estonian Centre for Behavioural and Health Sciences and WordPress blogs to The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal. However, "The gold standard is a meta-analysis: a study of studies, correcting for biases in particular samples and measures," explains Grant. When you look at that data, the psychological differences between men and women are not significant, he says. "Across 128 domains of the mind and behavior, '78 percent of gender differences are small or close to zero,'" explains Grant. "A recent addition to that list is leadership, where men feel more confident but women are rated as more competent," Grant writes, linking to the American Psychological Association. Grant also points to a survey of 4,000 studies showing that men and women have equal capabilities in math. The difference is, from a young age, boys are encouraged to be successful at the subject, Grant says. "When teachers know students' names, boys do better on math tests. Yet when grading is anonymous, girls do better on math tests," he explains. "And before a math test, reminding college students of their gender leads girls to perform 43 percent worse than boys. But if you just call it a problem-solving test, the gender gap in performance disappears." In fact, says Grant, "There are only a handful of areas with large sex differences: men are physically stronger and more physically aggressive, masturbate more, and are more positive on casual sex. So you can make a case for having more men than women… if you're fielding a sports team or collecting semen." So what does account for the imbalance of men and women at major tech companies, not just at Google? It is at least partially a result of social pressures, Grant says. "Women have systematically been discouraged from working with computers. Look at trends in college majors: since the 1980s, the proportion of female majors has gone up in science and medicine and law, but down in computer science," Grant writes, linking to a meta-analysis of psychological studies and an NPR report.
Would be a solid thing to post if he wasn't a white male. Sexism and racism against white males is socially acceptable....to the point where those who point it out when it happens are often accused of sexism or racism. If he wants to be able to talk about racism or sexism against him, he needs to become a different sex and race.
I imagine if he had posted that, he would have had some conversations with higher-ups (good or bad), we would never have heard about it, and he would not have been fired. Because in that scenario, he's registering a personal complaint, rather than painting with broad brushes and offending fellow employees.
I'm not sure what the first sentence was supposed to be (good job good effort) but the second one started with "I think" so nothing after it can be trusted.
This is a great post - and gets to the root of the issue - that science hasn't shown a difference. By arguing that people should look at the science to see these so-called differences, he is in fact showing his bias against women. Because if he was unbiased he would have done his homework to know that science did not side with him. Instead he cherry picks his information that supports his bias - confirmation bias. We see the same thing with many posters here.
Good study. I think anyone would love to have the discoveries and accomplishments of any of these women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabiola_Gianotti Certainly their intellect is / was equal or greater to some of our best and brightest in history.
I would like to read the details of their study, but it appears to be behind a pay wall. Not seeing how the quoted passages in your post directly contradicts his assertions. At best, you could argue that he overstated his case. I wish the response focused on the science, rather than making insinuations about his character and intentions. My whole issue here isn't that his claims are irrefutable, but rather that what he was claiming was very obviously misrepresented in the media. Those misrepresentations very likely contributed to his firing through the outrage and bad publicity it generated in the media, and I have a problem with that. I say that as someone who is liberal and sympathetic to the cause of trying to foster more diversity.
The public discourse on this will be interesting How many people will support him and think he should keep his job . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . .while also thinking Keapernick not having a job is correct and fair. Rocket River
Of course the major difference being that the major part of why Kap lost his job and has failed to get a new job is that he sucked at doing that job and by all accounts, this guy was good at his job, he just expressed ideas that the company didn't agree with. I mean, you should probably include that part.
1. You have no f*cking idea how good or bad the guy is 2. Collin is better than Jay Cutler, FitzMagic, and a whole host of others. . . so you are just lying Rocket River
