I worked under a lady CEO. It was so refreshing compared to life under men. There was open dialogue, I felt I could voice ideas safely.

I think all CEO's would be females. It's like their social approaches to inclusion is unilaterally better than (white) men.

Is that sexist?

(From a 50 year old white man).

Posted by: TSP | Aug 8 2017 18:03 utc | 1

Thanks, b, for the change in academic realms from geopolitics to anthropology. You wrote:

"The biological differences between men and women do result in observable social and psychological differences which are independent of culture and its biases."

I disagree. From an anthropological perspective, biological differences form the basis for all cultures and thusly cannot be independent of culture since they form its core. Yes, Google's policy is ideological, but what policy can claim to be ideologically neutral? IMO, the answer is none. Here I invoke Simon de Beauvoir's maxim that females are "slaves to the species" that she irrefutably proves in The Second Sex. Fortunately, some societies based upon matrilineal cultures survived into the 20th century thus upending the male dominated mythos created to support such culturally based polities.

Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 8 2017 18:06 utc | 2

bell curve much? read the Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould. generally your work is excellent but this post is of poor quality.

Posted by: marxman | Aug 8 2017 18:18 utc | 3

The truth is google only hire women so that the nerds working there can get laid.

Posted by: Thegenius | Aug 8 2017 18:45 utc | 4

@TSP

Were you beaten senselessly by your dad when you were a child?

Posted by: Thegenius | Aug 8 2017 18:48 utc | 5

Social engineering is what it is. Social engineering is what it does.

It's an elite corporate project to androgynise humanity, a la 1984.

Simply put, women will not achieve their full potential outside the family.

The corporate project will continually have to put in place special discriminatory measures to pretend they're equal in the SMET areas when all the evidence shows they're not, other than in very special cases.

It's a project that's doomed to failure in the end, but much misery will be caused to both men and women as this elite project continues.

Thankfully, the rest of the world isn't as brainwashed as Westerners.

They're the future.

Posted by: Anti-Soros | Aug 8 2017 18:50 utc | 6

You can disagree with B's science, and you can disagree with James' science. James was fired for expressing his opinions and beliefs. This is so little about sexism and so much about freedom of speech and freedom to consider other ideas. Bias shut that down at Google. These comments are in line with shutting down independent thinking. I'm a little surprised to see that sort of ideology here. When people - like B, like James - put their own circumstances at risk for the sake of open mindedness, they deserve as much support as culture and society can offer.

Posted by: Bruce Ballai | Aug 8 2017 18:52 utc | 7

If Google or other silicon valley tech companies dont hire unqualified women, the place would be a sausage fest of socially inept nerds

Posted by: Thegenius | Aug 8 2017 18:54 utc | 8

Ivan Illich wrote a very interesting and controversial book "Gender" on the difference between Gender and Sex. I do recommend every one to read this book (and all of other Illich's writings).

Posted by: Bamdad | Aug 8 2017 18:55 utc | 9

thanks b... this is more politically correct material.. it is what canada and probably many western countries have been doing for some time.. google is a piece of crap corporation as far as i am concerned, so this is in keeping with their neo-liberal agenda..

@7 bruce... i agree it is about freedom of speech, something sorely missing in the politically correct realm of western society at this point in time..

Posted by: james | Aug 8 2017 18:57 utc | 10

'non-discussible ideology'.....great phrase b. None of it much matters because in 10-20 everybody will be bi-sexual or trans-gender anyway. Any hold outs will be required to attend re-education courses.

Posted by: dh | Aug 8 2017 19:04 utc | 11

he says men are better than women - women are "neurotic" and can't handle stress and don't do as much hard work as men and spend more money and on and on and on....

his level of argument and citation is about that of a teenager. he makes a lot of statements with no support, such as men are better coders than women because women like social interaction more. and even if men really are more cutthroat than women, his assumption is that being cutthroat in management makes better companies. (Microsoft made great money, not great products.)

furthermore, his definition of 'left' and 'right' are narrowed to probably his entire life experience which appears to be just out of college?

Posted by: anon | Aug 8 2017 19:12 utc | 12

There is some hope though.

The whole SJW thing is being exposed day and daily for the complete nihilistic fraud it is.

Especially in America.

If you wanted to destroy a country then Gender Games is the way to go.

Globalists must destroy the US and Europe to achieve their goal, but they must just keep them alive until Russia is destroyed.

A delicate balancing act.

Posted by: Anti-Soros | Aug 8 2017 19:14 utc | 13

Left and Right are elite frauds, though the Left primarily carried forward the gender destruction project.

The Right was bullied into it and for the most part has jumped aboard.

They seem to be fighting back a bit now.

Posted by: Anti-Soros | Aug 8 2017 19:18 utc | 14

@11 dh.. lol.. that's about it... it isn't enough us old white males are trying to be flexible here...

Posted by: james | Aug 8 2017 19:20 utc | 15

@6

"Simply put, women will not achieve their full potential outside the family.

The corporate project will continually have to put in place special discriminatory measures to pretend they're equal in the SMET areas when all the evidence shows they're not, other than in very special cases."

I really wonder how someone can go through life interacting with women every day, and most likely having wives, daughters, nieces, etc, and still hold the opinion that "by the way, you're inferior shit and stupid and only good for producing babies". I would think first of all that actual interaction with women would reveal this not to be the case, but if nothing else I would think not being a freaking sociopath with a bleak worldview would prevent someone from being ending up as such a douchebag.

I also love stuff like this: "It's an elite corporate project to androgynise humanity, a la 1984."

Good god, masculinity is the most fragile thing in existence. Anything, absolutely anything, that in any way threatens its privileged position brings forth the waves of hyperbolic whinging. Talk about being triggered. How about you stop defining your manliness by subjugating women. Efforts to correct inequalities do not mean men are being turned into women, or whatever gibberish you're complaining about.

Posted by: Merasmus | Aug 8 2017 19:21 utc | 16

With respect to the commenter alias "karlof1", you seem to have drifted off-topic somewhat.

Please point out specifically where the author of the now infamous Google memo seeks to in any way denigrate women to a position in any way resembling slavery.

You have signally failed to refute anything in the memo as you have resorted to the lazy straw man of sexism.

You can doubtless try harder and probably do better -- 0/10, for now, and see me at the end...

And while you're at it, why is feminism preferable to chauvinism - do please explain clearly and try to stay on point.

Posted by: T-Sixes | Aug 8 2017 19:22 utc | 17

Who, I mean who!

Who truly believes that women prefer coding all day long.

You need to be a bit autistic spectrum to enjoy that.

That's why there's so many nerds in these areas.

Perhaps women need to be given extra vaccines at a young age and then they'll develop the skills necessary to succeed in these spheres.

Trading your sociality for nerdom is not a choice many women want to make.

I wouldn't make it myself, and I worked in this area.

Used to make my brain hurt, a lot.

All abstract, nothing tactile.

keep women human, is what I say!

Posted by: Anti-Soros | Aug 8 2017 19:25 utc | 18

Merasmus

The family is not an inferior thing. Women are not an inferior thing.

The family is the centre of life and women its masters.

That's where they will achieve a truly fulfilling life.

Why should women want to demean themselves by accepting the poor male equivalent of female creativity.

Posted by: Anti-Soros | Aug 8 2017 19:29 utc | 19

I was a pilot for Lufthansa and really had no problems with our
ladypilots. Of course they had and have the same salary as males. But what was interesting:only a few chose to apply for the job, with LH this meant to pass a test then enter the pilotschool and passt al checks, incl. licencing. But:the percentage of the few who reallly passed all this was around 90 percent, I mean, a girl who wants this real tech job and is intelligent will get it. Boys tend to overestimate their abilities and therefor fail. Only about 10 percent who try the test actually pass it. That is pne typical gender difference. PS:I am male ;)

Posted by: Dafranzl | Aug 8 2017 19:36 utc | 20

Completely agree with poster "Anti-Soros" -- "Merasmus" is twisting this obtusely beyond all recognition, read the memo, "Merasmus", and make your own mind up, so as you don't come over so utterly lopsided and brainwashed in your awareness of sexual politics. And, on that note, as to "Dafranzl", is your comment not verging on real, like genuine, sexism in that you are expressing some kind of shock horror that women can actually pass a couple of tests and fly a plane?

Posted by: T-Sixes | Aug 8 2017 19:42 utc | 21

@Anti-Soros

I'm pretty sure it should be up to the women to decide what they want to do with their lives. Some may want to be housewives, others don't. It's about freedom of choice (you know, that thing conservatives are always claim they care so much about). You really don't see any problem with men telling women what women truly want in life, and ensuring that that one thing is the only option available to them, do you? It's amazing how men will declare that the different sexes have different natural spheres, and then put family in the women's column, and literally everything else, and the freedom to choice from all those other things, in the men's column.

Posted by: Merasmus | Aug 8 2017 19:46 utc | 22

Merasmus

You seem to think that the family and children are some sort of lower form of achievement.

Where'd you get that idea?

As I said, female creativity is the closet thing to godliness any human can get.

Don't trade that for poor male efforts at creativity.

There only sadness and frustration lie.

So much so indeed that the elite project in creativity is currently engaged in attempting to undermine God and Female creativity with its own version of androids, robots and all the rest of the cheap Frankenstein tricks for which frustrated males and their ersatz creativity are famous.

When will a bridge or an app, a poem, a book, a piece of music, ever come close to creating and nurturing life itself.

Posted by: Anti-Soros | Aug 8 2017 20:03 utc | 23

There is a big cultural problem that keep women out of technical fields. In the west, the striving to a career leads to a sudden mid 30s realization that maybe they do want a family. My experience with west Africans is that they marry younger, have their families and get on with careers. This also has the benefit of them going into the work force when they are a bit more mature, and have actual life responsibilities.

Posted by: Johan Meyer | Aug 8 2017 20:07 utc | 24

The Mismeasure of Man
From Wikipedia

The Mismeasure of Man

Stephen Jay Gould

The Mismeasure of Man is a 1981 book by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.[1] The book is both a history and critique of the statistical methods and cultural motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology."[2]
The principal assumption underlying biological determinism is that, "worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quantity." This argument is analyzed in discussions of craniometry and psychological testing, the two methods used to measure and establish intelligence as a single quantity. According to Gould, the methods harbor "two deep fallacies." The first fallacy is "reification", which is "our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities"[3] such as the intelligence quotient (IQ) and the general intelligence factor (g factor), which have been the cornerstones of much research into human intelligence. The second fallacy is that of "ranking", which is the "propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale."[3]
The revised and expanded second edition (1996) analyzes and challenges the methodological accuracy of The Bell Curve (1994), by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Gould said the book re-presented the arguments of what Gould terms biological determinism, which he defines as "the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status."[4]

Posted by: okie farmer | Aug 8 2017 20:19 utc | 25

For starters, good coding is not a male characteristic, because most of the gender is quite terrible. So the question is: are "good coders" a more sizable minority among men or women? Both percentages are culture related, and they probably have a gender component.

A weird thing is the gender ratio of women/men students of computer science seems quite even in some Asian cultures, like Iranian, and very lopsided (1-9, 2-8) in American culture that has a "feminity ideals" like "girls are not good at math". That is overlayed with relatively meager rewards in American society for engineering fields, compared to law and medicine. I suspect that the ratio of male jurists in Iran is very lopsided, so girls, for the want of good legal jobs, go for engineering and math. (That is not a serious theory.)

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Aug 8 2017 20:22 utc | 26

@Anti-Soros

Ah, benevolent sexism. Putting women on a pedestal and making it their prison.

"Women are not an inferior thing."

It would help in convincing others that you actually believe this if you hadn't literally opened with (and then reiterated later) saying that women are generally too stupid to work in STEM fields.

"Who truly believes that women prefer coding all day long."

You could start by asking some women programmers. Though I really should point out the false dichotomy you're engaging in here: women can be mothers or they can be something else, in your mind they can never be both.

"So much so indeed that the elite project in creativity is currently engaged in attempting to undermine God"

Because I'm sure the (supposed) creator of the entire universe can be undermined by a hairless chimpanzee. "And I would have gotten away with it too, if hadn't been for you meddling humans!"

@T-Sixes

I don't particularly care about the memo or its asinine content. I'm responding to what people have said in these comments.

As for the memo itself, neither side comes out looking particularly good. The engineer's memo essentially boils down to "girlz r stoopid, and need to get out of my workplace" (he's not attempting to engage in debate, which some of his defenders have claimed, as in 'he's just asking questions and the PC police are too scared to engage him'), and Google's response was "you voiced an unacceptable opinion so we're going to fire you" (they aren't interested in debate either, but he wasn't offering one in the first place). It also has a lot of the inane 'both sides have good points, the best answer is in the middle' centrist faux wisdom I've come to expect from the type of idiot who makes up most of the Silicon Valley echo-chamber. Ah yes, the right is 'pragmatic'. They're pragmatically destroying their economies by forever seeking tax cuts and the reduction of a national 'debt' they don't even understand the nature of. Spare me.

Posted by: Merasmus | Aug 8 2017 20:37 utc | 27

@26
Women are more group oriented and dont like to do solitary work like coding

Posted by: Thegenius | Aug 8 2017 20:38 utc | 28

Convenient that we just ignore the substantial body of research on gender bias in professional fields, particularly tech.

Abstract

Biases against women in the workplace have been documented in a variety of studies. This paper presents a large scale study on gender bias, where we compare acceptance rates of contributions from men versus women in an open source software community. Surprisingly, our results show that women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s. However, for contributors who are outsiders to a project and their gender is identifiable, men’s acceptance rates are higher. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.

Posted by: Damon Harris | Aug 8 2017 20:46 utc | 29

Link to the earlier post: https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/

Posted by: Damon Harris | Aug 8 2017 20:47 utc | 30

@26

The explanation for Iran I've heard is that STEM fields simply aren't held in high esteem in Iran, so at a minimum it's a dearth of male interest in the area that has created a lot of openings for women. On top of that there may be cultural/social pressure for women to go into less prestigious fields while all the 'more important' areas are dominated by men. It's certainly fun to think about how projects like Iran's recent ballistic missile test are in large part facilitated by female input. If Iran is to hold the US at bay (or punish it heavily should it actually attack), it's going to be with weapons created by people working in fields that are apparently held in low esteem.

Posted by: Merasmus | Aug 8 2017 20:50 utc | 31

one thing women can do that men can't? that's right.. some things are factual.. a lot of stuff is culturally and socially imposed though... women working doing coding.. have at it.. forcing equal numbers being hired sure seems like 'politically correct thinking' to me... give the job based on the qualifications.. skip with the politically correct bullshit..

Posted by: james | Aug 8 2017 20:58 utc | 32

@okie farmer
Perhaps different types of intelligence exist, but if they do, they are highly correlated, hence the emphasis on (the mathematically dubious) g.

FWIW, I advocate a modified lead/iodine deficiency model to explain most variation in IQ. Unlike older studies, more recent studies have found a small IQ gap between men and women, and women having a narrower IQ range (standard deviation) than men, i.e. fewer outliers high and low. If you look at US blacks, they have a narrower standard deviation of IQ than whites as well as a lower mean IQ. This may be understood quite readily:

Healthy pubertal brain development adds to the standard deviation e.g. 9 points standard deviation in my proposed model---12^2+9^2=15^2, where 15 is the defined std deviation over population of IQ. Poor environment e.g. poison or lacking nutrition cause mean to differ as well.

The environmental argument is usually attacked on the basis of twin studies, e.g. using the Falconer equations. That is because the equations are not usually derived from first principles. To wit, one has mean environmental effect, deviation from mean environmental effect correlated with gene, and uncorrelated with genes, which might not even be environmental, but simple developmental noise. Those arguing that twin studies show the environmental effect to be small, ignore that means are subtracted in calculating the Pearson correlation.

For women, especially after bromide replaced iodine in preparing dough for bread, late 70s or early 80s, the need for iodine will not be met sufficiently during puberty, as both breasts and the brain require iodine for development, in large quantities, and with feminising endocrine disruptors in greater quantities in the environment, breast sizes have risen on average (cup size inflation). Note deviation from previous generations' size should matter for same genes, not deviation from population mean, so if daughter is bigger than mother, e.g., then lower IQ expected, but not because daughter is bigger than agemate, as the environmental mean is shared (but does not enter Falconer equations' correlations, being subtracted)...

With US blacks, lead poisoning is still an issue, albeit much smaller than during the 90s. Look at the NHANES III data---the histogram of blood lead is nearly inverse, which suggests sporadic poisoning (lead paint, with dBLL/dt=R-BLL (ln 2)/\tau_{1/2} where R is the rate of intake (function of time, zero most of the time under sporadic poisoning). Also, sub-Saharan Africa largely avoided the Bronze Age, going straight to iron work---the Bantu used a bit of copper but not much evolutionary pressure to develop resistance to lead uptake. If you read e.g. Unz review, I did previously argue that blacks in US are more likely to live in lead painted housing, based on BLL, but US data show whites as likely to live in such housing---blacks take up more lead for same environment.

Posted by: Johan Meyer | Aug 8 2017 21:05 utc | 33

Forgot to add---lead almost always is present in soft metal e.g. copper deposits.

Posted by: Johan Meyer | Aug 8 2017 21:07 utc | 34

I find it fascinating that the liberal snowflake SJWs claim to promote diversity except diverse opinion. There's a reason that the neocons were liberals.

And the communist heroes of the left including Lenin & Mao are comparable to the fascists with my way or the highway to death.

Posted by: ab initio | Aug 8 2017 21:10 utc | 35

depends entirely on the type of jobs applied for. If one can pass the physical and mental tests for the job applied for, gender or race shouldn't matter. That's assuming the employer's requirements are reasonable.

Posted by: ben | Aug 8 2017 21:12 utc | 36

Google probably knows that Russia and China have competitive advantage in employing women.

BBC

According to Unesco, 29% of people in scientific research worldwide are women, compared with 41% in Russia. In the UK, about 4% of inventors are women, whereas the figure is 15% in Russia.

or here

Is engineering destined to remain a male-dominated field? Not everywhere. In China, 40% of engineers are women, and in the former USSR, women accounted for 58% of the engineering workforce.

Women get these jobs when they are needed, if not, they are expected to stay at home. It is not about free speech, feminism, ability or choice.

This plateau is of concern to policy experts. For the last decade, the European Commission has highlighted the risks related to the shortage of engineers and has called on member states to draw more widely on the pool of female talent. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics warned last year that the demand for computer engineers in the U.S. would see an increase of 36% by the year 2012. It seems urgent in these conditions to train more women. So what are the obstacles?

Google needs those female engineers. As simple as that.

Posted by: somebody | Aug 8 2017 21:13 utc | 37

P.S.---If men weren't so afraid of the power women weld, because of our lust for pro-creation, things could be different.

Posted by: ben | Aug 8 2017 21:19 utc | 38

T-Sixes @17--

I didn't address the content of the memo, if you had read more carefully. I quoted a sentence b wrote and went on from there. Seems your knee-jerk hit you I the head.

Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 8 2017 21:19 utc | 39

The same thing had been said in 2011 by a Norwegian documentary, "Brainwash" (highly recommended viewing, it can be found on Youtube with English subtitles).
The Norwegian government cut its funding for "Gender studies" after its airing.

I am a woman, and its seems to me the politically correct comments here all have one thing in common: they confuse two distinct notions, difference and inferiority.
I feel different from men, I know I am, but in no way do I feel inferior. I am not interested in sports, cars or coding. I am interested in psychology, childhood and fashion. Sorry, it's not cultural, since it's the same the world over. I will add it cannot be cultural, because the sex roles are differentiated in the animal kingdom too. Take a male lion and a female - the male naps, she hunts. All the other animals equally show different patterns of behaviour according to their sex, save ants, amoebae, viruses and other microbes, bugs or non-mammals. So, pretending that there are no differences between men and women, when all it takes is two minutes of observation of nature (let alone a clothes shop during sales) is sheer gaslighting.

Men and woman are complementary, which is way more beautiful, diverse and life-enhancing than that drab uniformity/sameness that, it seems to me, emanates from people who are so narcissistic they are scared stiff of anything that is not their mirror image.

As for me, I love men, and I love the fact we are different. With men's abilities and women's, there is nothing we can't accomplish together.

Posted by: Lea | Aug 8 2017 21:34 utc | 40

@Merasmus

“I don't particularly care about the memo or its asinine content. I'm responding to what people have said in these comments.”

-- OK, so be a good girl and make yourself useful: you can start with the housework. Please explain how can you comment so vitriolically upon specific matters you admit that know almost nothing about?

“As for the memo itself, neither side comes out looking particularly good. The engineer's memo essentially boils down to "girlz [sic] r stoopid [sic], and need to get out of my workplace"”

-- You are mistaken, as usual: the points are societal, biological and anthropological in their character and not AT ALL driven by chauvinism, which your bitter and ill-informed input, certainly, is.

“(he's [sic] not attempting to engage in debate, which some of his defenders have claimed, as in 'he's just asking questions and the PC police are too scared to engage him'), and Google's response was "you voiced an unacceptable opinion so we're going to fire you" (they aren't interested in debate either, but he wasn't offering one in the first place).”

-- Absolute nonsense, as usual: the guy’s gripe seemed to be that there’s no oxygen in which to engage with certain subject matter. There’s a stultifying, stifling, suffocating, oppressive atmosphere perpetuated and sustained by people just like you, “Merasmus”.

“It also has a lot of the inane 'both sides have good points, the best answer is in the middle' centrist faux wisdom I've come to expect from the type of idiot who makes up most of the Silicon Valley echo-chamber.”

-- You mean, it’s balanced and considered? Have you finally read it now, then?

“Ah yes, the right is 'pragmatic'. They're pragmatically destroying their economies by forever seeking tax cuts and the reduction of a national 'debt' they don't even understand the nature of. Spare me.”

-- Are we drifting tediously away from the salient points, due to your total lack of knowledge or awareness of what you are talking about?

Posted by: T-Sixes | Aug 8 2017 21:36 utc | 41

@karlof1 - so, to be clear, you are commenting on an article regarding a memo you haven't read? Do you not think it might be an advisable next step for you to take the time to read the memo, in order to better inform yourself, so that you don't keep jerking and hitting yourself in the head?

Posted by: T-Sixes | Aug 8 2017 21:41 utc | 42

If you would like to read the memo, let me help you: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf

Posted by: T-Sixes | Aug 8 2017 21:46 utc | 43

@TSP 1

I worked under a lady CEO. It was so refreshing compared to life under men. There was open dialogue, I felt I could voice ideas safely.

I think all CEO's would be females. It's like their social approaches to inclusion is unilaterally better than (white) men.

Is that sexist?

Your experience says more about your boss as an individual and has little or nothing to do with her gender. The worst boss I have had was a woman and so was the best boss I have worked for.

The myth of the "kinder, gentler" female leader has been thoroughly debunked. Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher were both women. Thinking woman are morally and ethically "purer" than men is ridiculous.

As for Google vs. the engineer...of course he was fired. Corporations are not democracies. They are top-down dictatorships.

Posted by: Temporarily Sane | Aug 8 2017 22:26 utc | 44

Sorry, but you miss a or perhaps 'the' crucial point here.

So let's say that men & women are indeed different, and this also influences their job preferences, independently of societal influence. I have my doubts, but let's just assume it for now.

Now if an employer thinks that men and women have different qualifications and strengths, s/he might come to the conclusion that they complement each other. It would thus make perfect sense to build teams with a balanced gender mix, in order to optimize results for the company. Whether or not each individual employee is the best possible hire is secondary - it's overall performance that counts.

Actually the first commenter TSP pretty much confirms this thesis, albeit only anecdotally.

PS. had to laugh reading post #4, thanks!

Posted by: smuks | Aug 8 2017 22:38 utc | 45

@40 lea. thanks.. i see it much the same way as you..

@45 smuks... as i mentioned - hire people, regardless of sex, race, and etc - based off merit and qualifications.. skip with the politically correct bs.. yes, i agree with @1, however anecdotal is it and i got a laugh from @4 too!

as for a lack of engineers and etc in the west.. i always think back to the joke about their being 30 engineers for every 1 banker in japan, verses 30 banker types for 1 engineer in the usa.. it was something like that... i guess you could throw in real estate sales people instead of bankers if you want... it paints a picture that probably has a good degree of relevance to the changing fortunes of countries, or cultures that pursue a certain path, over other ones also available.

Posted by: james | Aug 8 2017 22:50 utc | 46

What awful discussion here. Says a lot that the most adult and mature commentators here are those that I find myself somewhat in disagreement with.

Looking forward to your next piece though as always Bernard. Not that I don't like this either per se - but I'd be lying if I didn't say I find your non-geopolitical work to result in the silliest and most ideological of discussions and commentators. Though I still encourage you to keep doing what fufils you regardless.

Posted by: George Smiley | Aug 8 2017 23:07 utc | 47

...
Good god, masculinity is the most fragile thing in existence.
...
Posted by: Merasmus | Aug 8, 2017 3:21:12 PM | 16

How dare you ponder male flaws in a debate about female flaws!?

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 8 2017 23:49 utc | 48

I agree with his ultimate conclusion:
Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

Forced equality is not the way to go. It winds up twisting society in bad ways. Is this the number one problem facing the US and American businesses? Isn't group think bad whether from the inside or the outside? Playing one group (sex, race, etc) off against the other does make a good distraction.

Posted by: Curtis | Aug 9 2017 0:26 utc | 49

@T-Sixes

I'm not a woman, you idiot. And I never said I hadn't read it, I said I wasn't addressing it, only responding to things said in these comments.

>various [sics]

Good job! It's almost like I was mocking the memo-maker as a grown up version of the kind of boy who puts 'No Girls Allowed' signs outside his treehouse. A kind of manchild, if you will.

"Absolute nonsense, as usual: the guy’s gripe seemed to be that there’s no oxygen in which to engage with certain subject matter. There’s a stultifying, stifling, suffocating, oppressive atmosphere perpetuated and sustained by people just like you, “Merasmus”."

Riiiiiiiiiiight.

The part about centrism is in relation to the memo explicitly talking about Left and Right politics, and how each side supposedly has valid points. This is precisely the type of centrism that is a. destroying the US and the EU, and b. rapidly disintegrating, especially in America.

@Lea

One key difference would be that humans are (ostensibly) a higher lifeform that isn't driven entirely by instinct. So appealing to how things work in the wider natural world is something of a non-starter. Regardless, even if you were going to do that, there are creatures far more closely related to us than lions we could draw comparisons to. For some *strange* reason people appealing to nature never have much to say about the Bonobo...

"So, pretending that there are no differences between men and women, when all it takes is two minutes of observation of nature"

Literally no one is making this claim though. I have literally never met a feminist who claimed sexual dimorphism didn't exist in humans. What I seen is a whole lot of people who absolutely refuse to differentiate between sex and gender, however.

"Men and woman are complementary [...] With men's abilities and women's, there is nothing we can't accomplish together."

Nice sentiment. The problem is I have never met anyone who, while complaining about women in the workplace and talking about how there's some natural division of labor, then suggested anything like a 50/50 split. Or even 60/40, or 70/30. Instead, they do what Anti-Soros above does, and relegate women to breeding and housekeeping, making the divide more like 90/10 or 95/5 or some similar extremely lopsided value. They give to men by far the greater share of opportunity and freedom, and claim this is a natural and fair division, while telling the women they shouldn't even desire more, and should be content with a 'woman's unique happiness'.

Posted by: Merasmus | Aug 9 2017 0:42 utc | 50

@40 Lea

Nailed it. And I believe the purpose of b's foray into gender and/or lgbtq discrimination is that, currently, it is intrinsically tied to the empire's tactics of subversion and infiltration. It upsets me to no end that fomenting discord between the yin and the yangs of the world is the lockstep modus operandi of the bringers of chaos. "Linear" thinking a la "women can't do it" or "women must do it" are really just distractions, and they are important architectural designs of the true believers in the uniparty who are trying to crush the way to peace.

Any meddlesome actions taken by any entity, whether affirmative action or discrimination against men due to preferencing female hires, is sure to end in disaster anyway. Look at the US and tell me it is not a powder keg. Russia, in the wisdom of ages, saw the ngos in their country for what they were. Eliminating these meddlesome devices is best by nipping them in the bud.

The female always overcomes the male anyway by weakness and stillness. Water over rock. When women want to be rock (Hillary Clinton), you've got problems.

Posted by: NemesisCalling | Aug 9 2017 0:46 utc | 51

Lea @ 40: Very thoughtful and insightful comment, thanks..

Unfortunately, most men can't get by the second strongest drive in human existence, the drive to pro-create, and it clouds our thinking. History gives credence to this theory.

Posted by: ben | Aug 9 2017 1:08 utc | 52

I haven't seen the term patriarchy introduced to this discussion. I think patriarchy is a good term for the historical attitudes that assert innate/generic/gender related qualitative differences between female/male capabilities.

I posit that women are better at gestating children than men and any other comparison is mostly self serving conjecture because of woefully inadequate science.

And I agree with NemesisCalling that ".....it is intrinsically tied to the empire's tactics of subversion and infiltration. It upsets me to no end that fomenting discord between the yin and the yangs of the world is the lockstep modus operandi of the bringers of chaos. "Linear" thinking a la "women can't do it" or "women must do it" are really just distractions, and they are important architectural designs of the true believers in the uniparty who are trying to crush the way to peace."

Posted by: psychohistorian | Aug 9 2017 1:15 utc | 53

@ Posted by: Lea | Aug 8, 2017 5:34:19 PM | 40

A pleasently mature position expressed clearly.

Posted by: x | Aug 9 2017 1:15 utc | 54

...
..."Dafranzl", is your comment not verging on real, like genuine, sexism in that you are expressing some kind of shock horror that women can actually pass a couple of tests and fly a plane?

Posted by: T-Sixes | Aug 8, 2017 3:42:57 PM | 21

There was nothing ambiguous about what Dafranzl wrote. He expressed genuine respect and explained why he is NOT surprised by their success.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 9 2017 1:22 utc | 55

Oh the totalitarian times we are living.

Posted by: falcemartello | Aug 9 2017 1:27 utc | 56

I read the memo. Compare the tone of the memo to the misogyny and sexism of the miners in the movie North Country starring Charlize Theron - the racism of the segregated South of the 50s. There were a number of statements he definitely should have left out even if he thinks they are true. "Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employees sacrifices (e.g. more hours, stress, and danger), we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power." or "Women are more prone to stress" (although I would agree with him if he had said - women who are mothers worry more than men) “Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.” He could have left out his poor analysis of left-right. It is true for me that suffocating and/or just silly political correctness is found more often on the left liberal side. Of many conservatives it can be said, "The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental." Robert Anton Wilson He did show a bias when discussing the differences between men and women. Maybe because I'm an older white man I didn't find them so much insulting as debatable.
There are many other statements that I found correct "men take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths." "Philosophically, I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women." It certainly is true that many of the problems that diverse peoples or women have are equally true of many white men not in the upper crust. "This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed." (Have I found this to be true - revisionist Holocaust history for example)
I certainly think he shouldn't have been fired for bring up these issues. The differences between men and women as they relate to employment should be considered and studied. His firing, in fact, proves one of the points he was trying to make.

Posted by: gepay | Aug 9 2017 1:31 utc | 57

Wow.

So this is what they call identity politics. And this is how it drives out issue-based discussion - in this case freedom of expression within the corporation.

Got it, thanks.

ps.. @ 37 somebody - thanks for that slice of real life.

Posted by: Grieved | Aug 9 2017 1:39 utc | 58

observable biological diffs (karlof1); womanless females (AntiSoros). google perks (thegenius); thought blockouts (Ballai); neo-liberal agenda (james); non-discussible ideology (dh); a unique corporate category-classified androgine (Merasmus); blinder-enhanced directed-answer response (T-Sixes); amazing test results (Dafranzl); the (statistically) mature woman (Hohan Meyer); determinism (okie farmer); absolutes (ab initio); train more women (somebody); different but not inferior; even complimentary (Lea); top down dictators (Sane); flaws (Hoarsewhisperer); discriminatory (Curtis); rocking women are problems (NemesisCalling);
please consider the following http://www.unz.com/jman/the-five-laws-of-behavioral-genetics/

Posted by: fudmieer | Aug 9 2017 2:28 utc | 59

@59 I actually referred to that piece obliquely, by calling variation not correlated with genes, 'noise,' in particular his last point, from Emil Kierkegaard. Btw if the latter is reading, Mr Kierkegaard, in our last email exchange, in references to a paper by Debes, you interpreted his beta (-2.2) times his proxy (blood lead level's base 10 logarithm) naively, to wit that the logarithm of blood lead level predicts IQ. A simple problem, involving that same ODE---maternal leave, paid or not---expectant mothers' exposure to lead during the pregnancy, under the frequent poisoning regime (gasoline/petrol) will roughly stop upon taking maternal leave, and thus the (linear) dose during the pregnancy will be linearly related to the logarithm of the cord (birth) blood lead level. There is more to say, and I shall email a more detailed commentary shortly...

Posted by: Johan Meyer | Aug 9 2017 2:48 utc | 60

@45

The memo actually said something similar about using the complementary traits of men and women in teams. He mentioned how women's traits were good for the design of user interfaces and men's traits were good for the back end. What made Steve Jobs so distinctive wasn't that he was a great engineer or inventor (he wasn't). He thought about user experience like a woman. Apple was great on the "female" side of software engineering while Microsoft was great on the "male" side. Microsoft did, and still does, better on the back end but, as Jobs famously criticized them for about 25 years ago, their products lacked culture and taste.

Posted by: Thirdeye | Aug 9 2017 3:34 utc | 61

Camille "if it were up to the women we would still be living in grass huts" Paglia would have a field day with this one.

Posted by: Thirdeye | Aug 9 2017 3:37 utc | 62

@25

IQ is not biological determinism. Saying that it is strictly hereditary is. There is a strong correlation between IQ and ability to perform intellectual tasks, and with social performance up to about IQ 120. The correlation drops away above that because the extremely profound thinking at which higher IQ provides an advantage is less tied to social performance. I see no contradiction between saying IQ is a valid measure of cognitive ability and saying that it is culturally influenced. Some cultures do not foster the development of cognitive ability.

Posted by: Thirdeye | Aug 9 2017 3:53 utc | 63

63
ok
Asians win

To measure intelligence you first have to define it.

It is highly likely that what the tests measure is the ability to adapt and to take IQ tests willingly and gladly.

This is simply cultural.

Duh.

Posted by: somebody | Aug 9 2017 4:09 utc | 64

It would be great if issues like this could be discussed in here with no one referring to tired old cliches such as political correctness or 'social justice warriors' but I see that possibility has gone right down the gurgler.
Loaded saws such as they are as bad as both Google's policy and "James's" foolish minute, they add nothing but a cloud of emotion & obfuscation to a debate that badly needs resolution.
I believe James, the author of the original minute is completely wrong, but Google's response is woeful. If I were an ill-informed shit stirrer I would feel obliged to say that Google's entire policy is, what do the tossers call it? "virtue signalling" but dragging out that cliche which like the other two I mention, offers nothing meaningful since it like them is an easily digestible chunk of nonsense which can be swallowed whole without demanding thought, much less proper consideration by the consumer.

The problem I have with both Google's policy and James's essay on it is that they are trying to quantify things which are essentially unquantifiable. Sure Google can list a few positives which women are allegedly meant to bring to a workplace and James can counter with a list of women's alleged shortcomings, but both lists are totally didactic, prescriptive and limited by the particular author's prejudices.
We have no idea of all the virtues and flaws of either gender, mainly because we are limited by our limited imaginations, but also because many are subtle and importantly they vary from person to person. I cannot think of a single characteristic that all men have in superior quantities to all women or, vice versa, that all women have in superior quantities to all men.

In other words trying to make a science of this shit is nonsense, a complete waste of time & energy.

BUT

One thing I do know is that a diverse workforce (meaning gender & what do they call it 'sexual preference', plus race, culture and education) is likely to be more productive, more efficient and more satisfying to work in than a 'team' where everyone has identical or at least similar backgrounds.

That isn't science talking for the reasons I outlined above, that is me operating from experience - the dreaded 'anecdotal evidence'.
Although if you think about it there is a logic to having a group/factory/office/corporation staffed by people from a kazillion different environments, because it makes it more likely that whatever crops up whenever, will have been faced up to and dealt within by someone in the group.

I really don't get why amerikans are still banging on about diversity 30 years after the fact.
It's as if like with race, the amerikan population has been pickled in aspic, unable to move beyond a point sometime back in the 1980's when ill-informed Anita Bryants fought for reaction.
Don't they realise they are being played, that the owners have taken sides in this debate outta a pragmatic call nothing to do with ideas on either side of it, but because it suits them to divide people & have them passionate about irrelevancies.
While this deliberately foolish rake over long decided points is hammering on, just about no one is considering the fate of auto workers in the south who are being deliberately obstructed from organising by global corporation teams chocka with lawyers, glib spruikers and standover types.
What are Google's attitudes towards unionised workplaces?
I betcha they aren't up for it unless it is some bullshit Google workers association for happy workers - leadership selected by Schmidt & co.
If Google were a fairly organised workplace management wouldn't need to decide this stuff, the workers would have already done it thru their union structure.

I betcha this entire kerfuffle is 95% marketing and 5% keeping people divided. Google is in more shit than a Werribee duck over a whole heap of things with the EU who aren't really down for tax evasion; so Eric wants to play good neolib for them - as always, a cheaper option than paying their share.

Posted by: Debsisdead | Aug 9 2017 4:13 utc | 65

the best take on the subject would be by Lionel....lionelnation.com on utube....very much worth a listen....

Posted by: michael houston | Aug 9 2017 4:38 utc | 66

Camille "if it were up to the women we would still be living in grass huts" Paglia would have a field day with this one.
Posted by: Thirdeye | Aug 8, 2017 11:37:08 PM | 62

It seems to me that 90%+ of the man-made objects we see, from gadgets to skyscrapers, were dreamt up, prototyped and, where possible patented, by Blokes. So could Camille be correct? And if not, what form would Paglia's field day take?

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 9 2017 4:41 utc | 67

@fudmieer

That is indeed interesting, although I have idea what "a unique corporate category-classified androgine" is supposed to mean.

@Thirdeye

I wouldn't say Steve Jobs had any kind of insight into good UI design. He was good at marketing; designing slick elite toys and being able convince people to pay significantly more for a worse product. Not many people in the grand scheme of things, but enough that their cult-like devotion was enough to keep the company afloat. I think the only time Apple had a better GUI was when the Microsoft side literally just had text. MS had to play catch up, but Windows was always more intuitive than Mac OS. I'm dubious about MS having a better back end, BSOD and all that, but then Mac OS was really, really shoddy as well.

Posted by: Merasmus | Aug 9 2017 4:51 utc | 68

Posted by: Debsisdead | Aug 9, 2017 12:13:07 AM | 65

Very well put. I always enjoy hearing your thoughts here.

Posted by: George Smiley | Aug 9 2017 4:53 utc | 69

I read this and just had to pass it on.....GRIN

This is a related article from an UK IT web site with, IMO, very high entertainment value

The first commenter noted that the outpouring of comments might be interesting in itself.....hehehehe

Posted by: psychohistorian | Aug 9 2017 6:09 utc | 70

I applaud those who did not take bite and begin a food fight about so called gender inequality [vast and important subject in itself only be able to be tackled as a major problem or rather designed as "desirable" feature within entire abhorrent socioeconomic system we are living in regardless of gender] but focused on who is talking namely Google.

The very fact of who supposedly portraits itself as a defender of equality should end the dispute as Google has no authority whatsoever to speak about social, cultural equality since it was founded [by Wall Street] solely as a dominating destructive monopolization monster of totalitarian terror and manipulation for which they have been fined $billions already and more to come.

They all (SV gurus) became evil they swear to denounce when almost two decades ago, people warned of their destructive power and horrible implications for economy, society, freedom of speech and expression.

SV billionaires are epitomizing evil while fashioning themselves as friendly enlightened despots who know better than we all dummies.

Who loves democracy, freedom and equality? SV?

Silicon Valley loaded with gender undefined human bots and army of cute over the hill megalomaniacs mostly funded by Deep State, NSA, CIA, IC, Surveillance state and by Hindu and Chinese capital who bring with them tech-clueless women as well as straight and LGBT managers [not workers] to enjoy “sexual” freedom in the US they are often denied at home, and they employ so disgusting gender and LGBT identity politics played shamelessly in corporate offices that resemble match making service making SV a cesspool of neo-feudal serfdom, a cult-like following and intellectual submission to clueless corporate bit..ches, including sexual submission, exploiting low-paid fertile minds of young, brilliant but clueless millennials.

Google, FB and others' corporate culture wrongly called peer review based tech culture [in fact favored by Hitler, Stalin and Mao] , turned into a constant brutal office politics [like anywhere else] , fight to metaphorical "death" among S&M coteries of submission, courtiers of corporate kings, mafias and other "gangs" of identity politics of division of Google/FB etc., wage slave population [employees] to make them weak, submissive and apathetic robots wanting to keep a lucrative job in era of prolonged economic depression despite of devious end they are contributing to.

Have you heard about Google workers' Trade union? No, because that would have been a sure avenue to women equality and most of all self governance of workers within this tyrannical, behemoth which leadership cannot even be dislodged by the shareholders.

The inequality of any kind comes from who is making such a judgment (good, better, worse) and what criteria is being used, and in Google the so-called meritorious factor of judgment of a employee performance is ability of making huge profit for corporate owners while supporting total control of the workforce, and that is what's wrong with presented here issues of inequality of gender.

Inequality of gender presented ion this article is not biological nor innate social issue but hard corporate greed issue that is forcing people to be treated as machines robots judged for how much profit they make for the oligarchs and their return of investment in a human flesh, epitomizing the very idea of capitalistic alienation of labor from a creator of fruits of labor and valuating it arbitrarily in term of bankers money, according to goals of greed and exploitation of human and environmental resources.

There is no tolerance without human equality there is no equality without self-governance. None of that exists in Google.

----------------------------------------

Posted by: Kalen | Aug 9 2017 6:47 utc | 71

Emus have equality. Old man emu sits on the eggs and raises the chicks. Mammals seem a bit different.
Daughter has a newborn. Her hubby is a bit more of the sensitive new age type than myself. I asked her if he wakes at night when bub cries? Nope. Seems the general pattern with humans. Mothers must have a better mothering instinct than fathers. Seems to be the same with most mammals.
Males and females have different factory installed programming.

Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Aug 9 2017 6:52 utc | 72

The field of optometry is rapidly becoming dominated by women - why no outrage at the proportionate lack of men? And of course, we can always discuss the blatant discrimination of the National Basketball Association against white males...

1. This is the natural outcome of divide-and-conquer identity politics. Don't give the proles time to question the decisions of the elites, instead have them fight amongst themselves. Pay no attention to those trillions of dollars we have wasted in pointless endless winless wars, no, worry about gender equality...

2. This is also yet another reason why the rich want to flood the labor market. A flooded labor market does not just give the rich low wages, it gives them raw social power. Without H1B visas etc. Google would never have fired that engineer, because he would have been hard to replace. But with an endless supply of cheap labor, an employer can require anything of an employee - to hold certain political opinions, for example. And this also exlains a lot of the corruption that we see in journalism. A journalist who fails to write what he/she is told, can be easily fired, getting a comparable job is nearly impossible, and talented writers are a dime a dozen. Hence, Russia hacked the election. And maybe I can pay my mortgage this month.

In a flooded labor market only the occasional saint will take a stand on principle, because being fired is tantamount to a lifetime sentence of poverty. In a tight labor market people have more room to speak their minds, because their skills are rare - in this case every worker has a little bit of the power of tenured university faculty. And it would never do to let the proles speak for themselves.

Posted by: TG | Aug 9 2017 6:58 utc | 73

@Peter AU 1

Sounds like her husband is just a lazy asshole. Couples taking turns to see to the baby is very common.

Posted by: Merasmus | Aug 9 2017 6:58 utc | 74

Having read the paper, it is just one mindless stereotype after another. Not really worth reading.

Moreover, anyone who thinks there is freedom of speech in corporate America is a fool.

Posted by: TimmyB | Aug 9 2017 7:26 utc | 75

Merasmus | Aug 9, 2017 2:58:48 AM | 74

Sounds like you have no understanding of the basic programming that we are all born with.
Watch the natural world for awhile.

The basic programming can change from individual to individual.. but in general there are differences between sexes. Many ideologies including pc try to ignore this.

Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Aug 9 2017 7:28 utc | 76

http://www.unz.com/jman/the-five-laws-of-behavioral-genetics/

The five laws of behavioral genetics are:

All human behavioral traits are heritable

The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.

All phenotypic relationships are to some degree genetically mediated or confounded.

Posted by: okie farmer | Aug 9 2017 8:17 utc | 77

75

Companies have to stop one part of the workforce trying to discriminate against the other, they also have to stop personal politics.

It is bad for the atmosphere at work, it is bad for image, it is bad for business, it is bad for recruiting.

They should respect privacy and the freedom to express opinions outside of work. But this guy crossed the line as he was speaking on a professional issue.

Men have the problem that they don't know how to compete with women, so they prefer to cut them out completely. Most guys nowadays figure it out how to work around that.

77
It is a futile discussion. If you intend to act on these assumptions you are back to human breeding, eugenics and fascism.

Who is to decide which 'behavioural traits' are desirable?

People have to accept themselves the way they are and work from there. The alternative is hell on earth.

Posted by: somebody | Aug 9 2017 9:57 utc | 78

65

One thing I do know is that a diverse workforce (meaning gender & what do they call it 'sexual preference', plus race, culture and education) is likely to be more productive, more efficient and more satisfying to work in than a 'team' where everyone has identical or at least similar backgrounds.

It certainly puts you out of your comfort zone. Not everyone can deal with that.

71
Google, FB and others' corporate culture wrongly called peer review based tech culture [in fact favored by Hitler, Stalin and Mao] , turned into a constant brutal office politics [like anywhere else] , fight to metaphorical "death" among S&M coteries of submission, courtiers of corporate kings, mafias and other "gangs" of identity politics of division of Google/FB etc., wage slave population [employees] to make them weak, submissive and apathetic robots wanting to keep a lucrative job in era of prolonged economic depression despite of devious end they are contributing to.

I don't know about Hitler, Stalin or Mao. It is wise to realize, if you work for a US tech company, that you work in a goldfish bowl. As I remember it, you get paid well for the hardship. If you don't like the atmosphere choose a different company. Engineers are scarce.
The worst problem is created by the state that allows tech companies to recruit from abroad but does not give foreign workers the right to stay in the US outside of their work contract. If that happens to you, you are a slave. And obviously, workers with a secure citizenship are continously threatened to be replaced by diverse, young, cheap, creative people.

Posted by: somebody | Aug 9 2017 10:26 utc | 79

karlof1 says:

Here I invoke Simon de Beauvoir's maxim that females are "slaves to the species" that she irrefutably proves in The Second Sex

irrefutable proof? well, i guess that settles it. fortunately or unfortunately i haven't read the book, it's beyond my interest, though i have to admit that the pathological imprints must be fun to decode.

Posted by: john | Aug 9 2017 10:42 utc | 80

b, based on all the crappy trolling, I suspect either CTR or 4chan's infamous /pol/ have found your blog, both of whom are scared to allow the issues to be discussed, each for their own reasons.

Congratulations and/or condolences are in order.

Peter AU @76,
Sounds like you actually believe that we are born with more basic programming than we actually are. Also, kindly don't ever presume to speak for others, thank you.

Posted by: Jonathan | Aug 9 2017 11:15 utc | 81

Actually, Gepay @57, women often work as firefighters, at least in the UK. The difficulty with that is the fact that working practices and equipment use designed to be executed by one man have been "fudged" so that two or more women (or smaller men than in the past) can get by. Good luck with that in truly horrendous circumstances and conditions where traditional male attributes like size and strength can usually be relied upon to do things on sight or at the FIRST time of asking.
On garbage collection, despite the non-specific "operatives loading at rear" signs adorning the trucks, I have yet to see a female operative. Odd, that.

Posted by: Cortes | Aug 9 2017 11:25 utc | 82

Despite a lot of words posted in the comments, Google has carried out their stated policy: WE WILL CENSOR ANYTHING WE DO NOT AFREE WITH ..!! including what you read and what you search to read. Dump Google.

Posted by: ger | Aug 9 2017 11:30 utc | 83

I think the point of J Damore's complaint is that Google is aiming for an artificial balance of genders in departments based on the supposed real-life demographics of countries in which it operates.

Suppose in Country A where Google has an office, the population is 52% female and 48% male according to its most recent census (let's not mind when the census was taken). According to Google's own directives on gender equality then, not only should the Country A branch have a staff base that is more or less 52% female and 48% male but in each and every one of that branch's departments, the gender mix must be 52% female and 48% male.

Suppose one department is surveyed and the gender mix turns out to be 55% male and 45% female for reasons unknown. This would mean that the department comes under pressure to change the gender mix so that it "reflects" the gender mix of Country A's general population. If this means that the department must be forced to relax some of its hiring procedures to admit more women and/or accept quotas on hiring men, and as a result can no longer claim to be hiring the right people for the right job, then Damore's complaint would be justified.

Perhaps the point of what Damore is saying would strike home even more if Google decided that, based on statistics (however accurate or no), about 10% of Country A's population is homosexual. This would mean that the Google branch there must hire more gay people over straight people to bring its staff population and diversity levels up to the point where they are "representative" of "real life".

Posted by: Jen | Aug 9 2017 11:37 utc | 84

@Thirdeye 61

Interesting thought re Apple/ Microsoft difference.

But what I tried to point out was more about the benefits to workplace culture and ultimately to results achieved by gender balance in a team or company. I can't guarantee that it's 'true', but it sounds plausible to me - and if google thinks so too, it would make perfect sense from a corporate perspective to 'positively discriminate'.

Debs expressed it better than I did, see #65.

Posted by: smuks | Aug 9 2017 12:00 utc | 85

I am a woman engineer working in a male dominated environment. I complained to my boss last week about his unfair treatment of me. He gives me the most tedious and boring jobs because he says I am thorough in my work, but he rewards the male engineers who aren`t by giving them more interesting jobs. Whenever I make a comment, he ends up explaining the most basic and fundamental things to me in front of everyone, as though I were a new grad. I actually have more experience than he does. I have not attained a position of leadership recently because my work is not valued. If I do something extraordinary, it is assumed that anyone would have or could have done as much, even though I have extraordinary achievements under my belt. The situation has actually gotten worse over the last ten years, as I found it was improving until about right after the Internet bubble burst. I worked in Europe where I was often the only woman in the department but returned to North America where I thought it would be better, but it seems to have reverted. Maybe because of the high number of male immigrants working in the field who have recently come to North America? Anyway, I don`t find it to be a very good career, not because of the subject matter but because of my colleagues who are almost exclusively assholes. When I talk to them, a lot of them assume that it is for romantic reasons, for example. I am attractive but I don`t dress sexy and don`t flirt at work. But if I say hello to them then it must be because I want them as a husband.

They are a bunch of assholes. The guy at Google just thinks that because there are few women there, it was a choice of women that led there. But how many women dropped out along the way to such a job because men were such assholes?

Posted by: mischi | Aug 9 2017 12:09 utc | 86

@Debs 65

+3
Some very good points raised - anyone who hasn't read this post, do so.

"The problem I have with both Google's policy and James's essay on it is that they are trying to quantify things which are essentially unquantifiable."

Spot on. This is actually a common theme: Anything that can't be expressed in max. three numbers is too complicated for many people, esp. economists. Which is why they'll never understand humans or society.

"One thing I do know is that a diverse workforce (meaning gender & what do they call it 'sexual preference', plus race, culture and education) is likely to be more productive, more efficient and more satisfying to work in than a 'team' where everyone has identical or at least similar backgrounds."

Thanks for putting this much more clearly than I could. (cf. diversity in political advisory bodies)

"Google is in more shit than a Werribee duck over a whole heap of things with the EU who aren't really down for tax evasion"

And taxes are the easy bit - google's abuse of its monopoly position is the real issue.

Posted by: smuks | Aug 9 2017 12:13 utc | 87

Allow me to quote something from last night at the strangely perverted Zero Hedge:

"I have to wonder how many here have ever actually worked for a "company". This kind of activity is never allowed, and they always fire you. They won't even worry about lawsuits, or negative publicity. They will not care, they will enforce "discipline" and will fire first and not ask any questions later.

"If you work in a real company, you know this. They just fire you for saying ANYTHING, especially if that becomes publicly known. This is just the harsh reality."

Look at this from a realistic perspective. This little boy lands at Google after a very impressive stint at Harvard/ Princeton/ MIT, and promptly writes this peculiar "memo". Did he realize that this was 100% guaranteed that they would fire him? What does he want?

If this little incident had happened to a taxi cab driver, would we be having this discussion? Nevermind if women are smart or not, the truth is that young men with fancy degrees in computer science from Harvard/ Princeton/ MIT can be absurdly stupid. People that other people think are intelligent are usually rock-stupid. This is what you really need to know.

Posted by: blues | Aug 9 2017 12:16 utc | 88

Merasmus | Aug 8, 2017 8:42:28 PM | 50

« humans are (ostensibly) a higher lifeform that isn't driven entirely by instinct. So appealing to how things work in the wider natural world is something of a non-starter. »

You are right. Humans are above base animal instincts like eating, sleeping and reproducing. As "higher lifeforms", we don't do any of these things.

« For some *strange* reason people appealing to nature never have much to say about the Bonobo... »

I'd love to know what that's got to do with anything, but anyway, last time I looked, female and male bonobos showed different behavioural patterns. For instance, the males don't look after the babies. The mothers do. They even have a particularly strong mother-son relationship (while who knows who the father is), so maybe you shouldn't have brought up the subject at all.

« I have literally never met a feminist who claimed sexual dimorphism didn't exist in humans. What I seen is a whole lot of people who absolutely refuse to differentiate between sex and gender, however. »

I was very clearly pointing to behaviour, not dimorphism. How you achieved reading what I most specifically didn't refer to baffles me.

« Instead, they do what Anti-Soros above does, and relegate women to breeding and housekeeping »

You are reading minds, like many liberals. That's to to say, you put words to beliefs YOU hold about conservatives, instead of answering what they say (not what you imagine, figure or fantasize they are saying, but what they have actually written). At least in the West, nobody is relegating women to anything they don't want, apart from men like you. By your very immature male ideas about what a woman should be like, one can see you are not a woman (in a nutshell, you think women should be men). Please don't try to mansplain to us what we should believe or do. For instance, 90% of all hospital nurses and 100% of pediatric nurses are women. This is not a matter of « discriminatory hiring procedures » that would bar men from nursing jobs or redirect them to driving ambulances (a nearly 100% male job), it is a matter of being naturally more drawn to some jobs and not to others.

Aaaand this is called "reality". Thank you for reading and have a good day.

And thank you to the kind people out there who approved of my previous comment. Cheers to you!

Posted by: Lea | Aug 9 2017 12:33 utc | 89

What I think is happening is that we are biologically programmed to believe that women should never be allowed to do "hard work" of any sort. Rather, they should stay at home and raise the kids. We are born with these instincts, and they cannot simply be canceled ideological fiat. It would be great if we could just have "free will" and all, but "free will" is just a flimsy religious concept that doesn't stand up very well in opposition to instinct. Why is this not obvious?

Posted by: blues | Aug 9 2017 12:36 utc | 90

Jen | Aug 9, 2017 7:37:18 AM | 84

This is a must listen, to fully understand exactly what James Damore actually said/wrote.
It's an interview of Damore by Molyneux; and pretty damn good;

http://theduran.com/stefan-molyneux-speaks-with-fired-google-employee-james-damore-video/

A pretty amazing individual (Damore) actually.
Grossly mis-represented by MSM...duh!

Posted by: V. Arnold | Aug 9 2017 12:40 utc | 91

Actually, b, nailed this one 100%; kudos to b...

Posted by: V. Arnold | Aug 9 2017 12:44 utc | 92

Just to wrap up the heated discussion, let´s suppose our mankind or one of our societies eventually succeeds to put women and men at perfect equal condition and representation on TWO different fields:
1)suppose that Norway or russia (who have come thru a long way in gender equality status) succeed to put the TWO in perfect, balanced equality plights in jobs, political posts, schools, and everyday relevant actions, for 30 years.
2) Let´s suppose that five big automobile makers worldwide do the same, 30 years, in their hiring and promotion policies in complete free gender approach.
Let s imagine that the policies along time were such that no complaints or whinings show up along those 30 years.
I challenge anyone to give me a sensible answer to the flwg question: what will be the results and probable behavior of both genders in those companies after this period?
I figure nobody knows but everyone has a good hint.And that one will come precisely from common sense...

Posted by: augusto | Aug 9 2017 12:54 utc | 93

Damore premises are under my judgement quite good and some unanswerable.
What would Damore´s conclusions come to is another much different problem. The most frequent error in human reasoning is drawring conclusions that were not(included or comprised) in the premises.

Posted by: augusto | Aug 9 2017 12:58 utc | 94

Actually, b, you really screwed up over this one. I have to add that not only am I a woman engineer, but I am a GERMAN woman engineer, and worked in Germany where I found the men to be especially jealous and withholding towards any woman, especially an engineer, who was quadrilingual, while they barely managed to squeak out a sentence in English that non-Germans could understand. I find Germany to be particularly bad for women in Engineering and Science, so your attitude doesn't surprise me one bit.

Posted by: mischi | Aug 9 2017 13:12 utc | 95

> The (legal) "principle of equality" does not imply that everyone and everything must be handled equally.

Actually, it does. Exactly that.
What you later described was unequal consequences of handling equally non-equal objects.

The memo states that non-equal handling (anti-male discrimination) by Google gov't intended to negate non-equality of objects and lead to equal consequences is decreasing Google net efficiency.

Posted by: Arioch | Aug 9 2017 13:38 utc | 96

"What I think is happening is that we are biologically programmed to believe that women should never be allowed to do "hard work" of any sort. Rather, they should stay at home and raise the kids. We are born with these instincts..."

I am not an anthropologists, but I can be one when I comment. Hm.

How did humans live as they were evolving. Number one, agriculture appeared ca. 10,000 ago, until then the evolution had to adapt us to hunting-gathering societies. Contrary to a romantic vision of women taking care of children while men were 'going out to hunt giraffas', most of the food was gathered by women. Tools were primitive, and to get enough food etc. women worked at least as much as men. Men were necessary to be able to fight with other groups/bands, so they were "primed" to be more "pro-active and aggressive", and to have better spacial orientation, traits also useful for large game hunting, but in the sense of "hard" versus "not hard" work, how does it matter when we discuss office work?

Then agriculture appeared, but the division of work did not change considerably. I guess fighting acquired more importance over game, and women-produced plant foods formed even larger part of diet, something to defend against other villages. Social hierarchies started to appear, giving some premium to "leadership/sociopaths". There were also more crafts and they were often arbitrarily partitioned among the sexes, e.g. in some cultures women were potters, in some, men, and the same with weaving etc.

Only very, very recently, less than a thousand of years, tools made of good metal etc. increased male productivity to allow them to seclude women in the homesteads etc.

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Aug 9 2017 13:47 utc | 97

@blues 88

You pick an interesting point here:

"Look at this from a realistic perspective. This little boy lands at Google after a very impressive stint at Harvard/ Princeton/ MIT, and promptly writes this peculiar "memo". Did he realize that this was 100% guaranteed that they would fire him? What does he want?"

Of course, this may tell us that people with brilliant degrees can be incredibly dumb. Nothing new there.

On the other hand, how many such 'scandals' are in fact part of carefully orchestrated campaigns?
Let's not forget that Trump & friends pursue a strategy of 'divide and rule'. His voters want jobs, less inequality and less corruption, which the govt is unable and/ or unwilling to deliver. What better way to keep them distracted and disunited than by various '-isms' pitting one segment of society against the other - racism, sexism, xeno-, homo- and transphobia, you name it?

Posted by: smuks | Aug 9 2017 13:48 utc | 98

#89 Lea,

Bravo for your answer to the tedious and tendentious Merasmus, a cautionary example of what extreme SJWism does to your rational faculties and powers of non-ideologically driven observational abilities if ever there was. Thanks also for your #40.

My wife is very much a female, and at the same time (unsurprisingly to me), a top notch administrator of systems and staff at her work at the main library at the University of Pennsylvania. In my own opinion, based upon years of attentive observation of her, these abilities are informed by her feminine outlook. I do have to say that a "boy's club" still exists to a large extent in the upper management, but they would be in sorry stead were it not for the disparate strengths that their largely female professional staff bring to bear.

People seek environments conducive to their satisfaction, and gender differences do seem to play a strong role in their choices. But let it be stated, the personal strengths and aspirations of individuals are only somewhat correlated with traditionally perceived "gender differences", only valid in a statistical sense, and not on the level of the individual. That's why I believe in equality of opportunity, and not equality of outcome, particularly in the representation of employees by gender, racial, or cultural background. Free association works best, and can actually be a driver for institutional success.

Hence, I abominate the identity politics clutched on to in a death grip by the Democrat party, and by reflex by the cucked out Republican party, as this works toward the undermining of equality of opportunity, replacing it with staffing by a gender, racial, or cultural spoils system, heedless of the best qualified and those who aspire most for career success.

Posted by: JerseyJeffersonian | Aug 9 2017 13:50 utc | 99

@mischi
I recognize your experiences all too well. I too have worked in traditionally male workplaces both blue collar and academic in both Europe and N. America. I have quit a couple of jobs because of unbearably boorish co-workers and have also had to live with being assigned the most tedious tasks and had overbearing and belittling bosses that always seemed threatened by my superior abilities. I have felt excluded from the oldboys clubish cliques in workplaces and have felt isolated and alone at work.
I have also experienced the embarrassment of having to bat away unwanted sexual advances from male colleagues who find my good looks and good smell (sic) too hard to resist.

I am a man.

Posted by: Køn | Aug 9 2017 13:52 utc | 100