He used a Google mailing list
Business Insider says nah, James Damore isn’t the new free speech hero the world has been looking for.
James Damore, the Google employee fired Monday for publishing a 10-page anti-diversity manifesto, almost certainly has not had his First Amendment free-speech rights infringed. If he sues Google — which Reuters reports he is considering — he will lose, unless he can find a court willing to create a new free-speech right for American workers.
Tuesday morning, the alt-right corners of the internet are rallying to Damore’s cause. He is a shining example of how the left bans certain conservative ideas and punishes people for trying to discuss them openly, they say. It is outrageous that someone can lose his job simply for disagreeing with the politics of his liberal employer, they wail.
But what about for circulating his own opinion that women aren’t good enough to work at Google? What about the effects that will have on Google as a workplace, Google’s potential for being sued by the government, Google’s reputation? Is all that a good enough reason for someone to lose his job?
“I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does,” Damore told The New York Times.
The problem is that US labor law is well settled in this area: In the vast majority of US states, employees have almost no rights to free speech at work.
The First Amendment constrains the government, BI goes on, not employers.
Another catch for Damore is the fact that he did his speechifying in and at Google, using Google resources. That’s not the same as expressing an opinion elsewhere in the world using his own resources.
Damore’s problem is that he used an internal Google mailing list owned by Google to disseminate his manifesto. People do not have the right to use their employer’s resources to pay for their freedom of speech.
As illustrated by Volokh years ago in The Washington Post, the California test is whether Damore’s speech disrupted the legit business of his employer. As CEO Sundar Pichai’s memo makes clear, his manifesto became so internally disruptive that Pichai had to cancel part of his vacation to deal with the fallout. Pichai’s memo describes a “very difficult few days” at the company that forced him to fly back to California, from a trip to Africa and Europe, to fix the Damore problem. That would indicate that Damore’s speech was so disruptive it was handicapping Google’s work of building software. Indeed, the reports coming out of Google suggest that the internal reaction was so extreme that plenty of work hours were lost as employees clashed over the manifesto.
Gee, dudebros can’t even have any fun any more.
1. First Amendment rights don’t apply (Google is a private company, not the government).
2. Damore used Google resources to propagate a personal agenda. From my stint as academic faculty, I know that such use is ground for summary dismissal; and, in professional societies, for instant expulsion (example of the latter: the jettisoning of Vox Dei from the SFWA when he used their Twitter account for racist blatherings).
3. The special California provisions apply to protection of personal political activity outside the workplace; and nothing trumps the hostile working environment/biased reviewing potential that people with Damore’s mindset would unleash on their workplace.
I was wondering about that. It’s one thing for him to “merely express his opinion”; it’s surely something else to do it in a company memo? It has the imprimatur of the employer and its audience is captive. Some dudebro is pontificating at the water cooler, anyone who doesn’t want to listen to him is free to walk away.
The T’s & C’s of your working conditions end where they but up against the T’s & C’s of another persons working conditions. Sorry. Not Sorry. The ability to express contempt for an entire class(es) of other people and their purported attributes and abilities is not a right of your employment. Entitled ass.
Hey, that’s Dr. Damore to you.
Oh wait, it’s not:
Probably some woman took his PhD.
Damned inflation, gets at qualifications as well as cost of living!
PS: exagerating and falsifying qualifications also probably a sackable offence.
The “on the company dime” thing was always the issue to me (yes, the manifesto itself is an issue, but it’s hardly the first of its kind, and not really remarkable for its own sake). Say what you like on your own blog or Facebook wall, and leave your employer out of it, but using the company network to deliver a screed makes it their business.
My second-to-last employers had a Usenet feed, including internal company newsgroups. Things were a little more relaxed 15-20 years ago, and it was OK to post both internally and externally, provided you didn’t spend all day doing so. Sometimes the internal arguments about politics could get a little, um, sharp, but everyone understood that professional courtesy had to be maintained — six months from now, you might be working with, or for, the person whom today you dearly want to call a benighted idiot. And I think anyone who posted a 10 page screed on their pet theory of what is wrong with the world would have been regarded as, at the least, obsessive. Which makes me wonder what Damore was like to work with.
Where I work, people regularly use the company e-mail list to deliver political screeds; since they are routinely conservative and/or libertarian, no one really says anything, because that is the mood of the town (make that, state) where we live and work. Should I take it upon myself to do the same thing, I would no doubt be written up immediately (though no one said anything when I did answer one stupid e-mail with a few actual facts; but then, I left the bosses off it, and the others were hopefully too embarrassed by their stupid meme to say anything).
I suspect this would have caused no repercussions at all if it hadn’t become an issue within the company, and/or if it hadn’t become a news item.
If that’s the way he sets out a “scientific” argument, at that length and with no respect for either his audience’s understanding or actual data then I’m very worried that Harvard gave a Masters.
Thank you for replying to my comment yesterday.
I’m not sure you’re entirely fair to Damore when you say he doesn’t think women are good enough to work at Google. He has given reasons why women are seemingly underrepresented there, and made suggestions as to how that situation can be addressed. Yes, he may have been naive or disingenuous. But his critics seem reluctant to engage with the substance of his arguments.
I don’t think he should be treated as either a pariah or a martyr, and I’m not going to add any more fuel to the flames.
Eric the Half Bee @ 10,
If that were his first attempt at making a scientific argument and if he were 17 then we would pat him on the head, sit him down and offer some words of (motherly?) advice. But he is not.
He is not such a person, is he? Depending upon whom you believe, he has either a Masters or a PhD in a scientific subject. And he is not a child. As an adult he takes responsibility for his own actions, right?
So let us look not at whether he is a hero, martyr or simply an idiot. Let us look at what he actually did. He used his employer’s resources and possibly time as well to create what may have been a scientific paper or may have been political polemic. Whichever it may have set out to be it was an attack upon his employer’s policy, the publicly announced policy, which caused such chaos among his colleagues that the CEO had to fly half-way around the world to calm things down.
Now let us look at the content. Whether his intention was political or scientific, he is clearly unfamiliar with the literature, of which there is an awful lot in either dimension. He cherry-picks, he offers no citations, he gives no space to alternate arguments even to attempt to refute them.
In addition, he is clearly unfamiliar with the history of his own industry. Given that we are talking about a period of about 150 years there is no excuse for that. Certainly not if you are attempting to tell it where it should go next.
What would you do if you were the boss and he was saying to his colleagues, “I intend to treat many of you as inherently inferior and will expect you to prove to me, over and over, that you are not.” You’d throw him out, wouldn’t you?
‘will expect you to prove to me, over and over, that you are not’–that’s really the issue, isn’t it? It’s been patronisingly explained to me before, in this situation and similar ones, that no one’s saying no woman is capable of [doing manly thing]…but any woman that [does manly thing], or lays claim to being able to, is viewed with scepticism and suspicion. I’ve probably mentioned before that I was taken in for most of my life by the ‘I don’t see gender, I treat everyone equally once they’ve proved their competence’–not realising that in fact it’s only women or other outsiders who have to prove their competence. Insiders get the benefit of the doubt. And of course you don’t just have to prove your competence once; you have to do it pretty much every day–and if you EVER make a mistake or admit ignorance forget it–you’re back in the ‘dumb girl’ pile.
(I do, though, want to give an anonymous shout-out to my colleagues at my new job–whatever I may think of the job itself, I have not once noticed any of this kind of behaviour, let alone any condescending or ignoring or belittling–possibly for the first time in my working life I’m actually being treated like a person. Which is all the more remarkable in that the work I’m doing is adjacent to but not exactly within my area of expertise, so I admit ignorance all the time.)
@Eric#10
There’s a couple fo things to unpack, here. First of all, there are appropriate places for initiating discussions of subjects that are “controversial” (or down right stupid and ignorant) and on your companies dime is not one of them. The moron who did this could have put up a private blog entry inviting discussion, and that would have been perfectly within his rights. Of course, people like me would also have been perfectly within our rights to point and laugh, but hey, that’s the beauty of free speech. It’s a marketplace of ideas, and as long as proponents of ideas are not being bullied or threatened, every idea should be free to duke it out with every other.
Of course, that does not mean that every person should have to “engage with the substance” of every single iteration of every argument. You know what? We’ve seen this idea before. We know the basic argument, we know the nuanced version. We are perfectly entitled to go, “Oh, it’s that piece of shit doing the rounds again,” and proceed to point and laugh. These ideas and arguments don’t jump out of nowhere, they have long, long histories, and those of us affected by them are frequently very familiar with that history. Often more so than the young white dude who thinks he’s being original, or clever, or incisive.
So, this guy thought it was OK to write a piece that suggests that many of his co-workers are biologically unsuited to the kind of activities needed to succeed in his area of work. he wrote this on company facilities, making it a concern to the company. He (somehow) did not predict that this action of his would cause major in-house repercussions. We can therefore conclude that:
a) he’s an idiot,
b) he’s appalling to work with – because he can’t predict very obvious outcomes of his actions – what, did he think the women he worked with were going to nod sagely and say, “You know, he has a point…”? Would you react like that if, say, a black man wrote a memo in the company you work for saying, oh, I don’t know, “White men don’t have what it takes to make it to a high level in this job, unless they are promoted because they are white.” If that was the case, I think you’d be pretty upset. (And don’t tell me you’re not a white dude. You are.)
c) he’s an idiot
d) he hasn’t read his T&Cs of emplyment very well… I don’t know the US phrase, but in the UK it would be worded “behaviour likely to bring the company into ill-repute”. Every place I’ve ever worked – public and private sector – has had a clause that says something like that. I imagine it’s even worse in the US, given the control private companies can claim over their employees lives. If you do womething that makes the company look bad, you can have your employment terminated. Doesn’t matter how justified you feel, or whether you feel you’re just looking for “discussion” if they company thinks you’re a liability to their public image then bang, you are out.
e) he’s an idiot.
f) he’s not a martyr, or a pariah, he’s a dude who has cost his company money, time and reputation rehashing a stupid argument that was old when his grampa was in diapers. Unsurprisingly, the company has turned round and explained that they can do without an employee who costs them time, money and reputation leading to a final conclusion of
g) he’s an idiot.
Hmmm. So heroic dissenters like Damore are being opwessed?
Those Coastal Academic Elites exclude flat-earthers from geography departments, creationists from biology, and Shoa-deniers from the history department.
Freeze-peach is trampled!
As Susan Wojcicki (YouTube CEO) said, I’d like to see how different the reaction would have been if the word “women” in the memo had been replaced by another non-white non-male group, many of which are in the single digits among Google employees. Does that paucity mean they’re biologically “unsuited” to write code? I’m amazed that people are mouthing variants of “critics are refusing to engage with the ‘substance’ of Damore’s arguments” (as if this tripe has not been argued — and refuted — ad infinitum ad nauseam for millennia).
I don’t know about Shoa deniers in the history department, but I do know that biology departments are not allowed to exclude creationists; they may be required to teach the subject matter, or they may do like some do and ignore it, but this is considered a religious consideration, and is not a grounds by which one may be excluded. As usual, the Coastal Academic Elites have very little say in it, and what say they usually do have is to agree that the policy of non-exclusion is correct, as long as the individual in question does not push religious beliefs on the students.
University biology departments don’t hire creationists who plan to teach creationism as a valid scientific alternative (they can obviously do whatever they want in their own time). They can sometimes get in under the radar (like Guillermo Gonzalez of Rare Earth fame) but they almost invariably get flagged before tenure.
Athena, this has been an ongoing discussion in academic circles, but I believe (though it’s difficult to find the case law I remember, because my searches are bringing up a wealth of irrelevant stuff) that we are not allowed to refuse either employment or tenure based on belief in creationism. If the instructor teaches it in class, that can be dealt with, but failure to teach evolution may be harder to pin down and legally address. If it is specifically mentioned in the course competencies, sure, but in my experience (as a person who has spent enough time in science departments to obtain a Ph.D., and currently teaches college science), it is extremely easy to avoid teaching evolution and still get tenure. Most universities are more interested in how much money you are bringing into the school, and how many papers you are publishing in peer reviewed journals.
My botany teacher (in college, and a majors class) actually apologized for mentioning evolution, and requiring that we learn the basics (really, only the definition). Fortunately, the rest of my instructors were not so reticent, and I was able to get the education I required. In the case of my botany instructor, who did not actually teach evolution other than mentioning the word once, he did get tenure, and his only difficulty in getting tenure was related to a dispute over some grants. No one on the tenure committee had any problem with his attitude toward the central theory of biology.
I realize this is anecdotal, and not all schools or tenure committees will operate this way, but I feel like we should avoid being complacent about the ability of our colleges to weed out creationists.
@Eric the Half Bee
I think Ophelia exaggerated for effect. I haven’t read the memo but for charity’s sake I’ll assume that the opinion he expressed was just this: statistically women are less interested in tech (because evo psych) and that’s why there are fewer women than men in tech positions in Google.
OK. Fair enough. Now, notice it took him ten pages to express an opinion I was able to sum up in one sentence?
EtHB, everybody who’s even remotely interested in these matters has heard Mr. Damore’s opinion and the evidence for it, for the past forty fucking years.
Here’s a brief, and I think fair, response:
That hypothesis (that there are ultimately genetic reasons for less female interest in/aptitude for STEM) could turn out to be true. The counter-hypothesis, that nurture not nature accounts for the differences, could also turn out to be true.
We cannot tell for sure, at this point, because we have no way of teasing apart the variables. We do know–and this is uncontroversial–that gene expression itself is affected by environment, as are our brains and our behavior. That environment–which can help or hinder women–includes things like 10-page screeds on company letterhead (that regurgitate discouraging just-so stories we’ve all heard eleventy thousand times before).
Google has chosen to encourage its female employees, and therefore, Mr. Damore’s memo was against company policy.
It was also far too long, and apparently poorly argued. Maybe instead of worrying about whether or not Google was wasting resources on feemales, Mr. D should have worked on his own writing and reasoning skills.