It is not some twisted, crazy view
Awesome. Peter Singer also thinks James Damore shouldn’t have been fired. He says why in the Daily News. (Shouldn’t it be David Brooks writing for the Daily News and Peter Singer writing for the Times? This arrangement seems backward to me.)
James Damore, a software engineer at Google, wrote a memo in which he argued that there are differences between men and women that may explain, in part, why there are fewer women than men in his field of work. For this, Google fired him.
Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, sent Google employees a memo saying that “much of what was in that memo is fair to debate,” but that portions of it cross a line by advancing “harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
Pichai did not specify which sections of the memo discussed issues that are fair to debate, and which portions cross the line. That would have been difficult to do, because the entire memo is about whether certain gender stereotypes have a basis in reality.
No it isn’t. There are other things in the memo.
Singer goes through the list of Damore’s stale observations about how wimmin R diffrunt.
Damore is careful to point out that the evidence for these claims does not show that all women have these characteristics to a higher degree than men.
Oh for god’s sake. How credulous can you be? Yes of course he is, because he’s putting on a show of Highly Reasonable Dude.
I wonder if Peter Singer would have said all this if Damore had written exactly the same memo but substituting “blacks” for “women” and “whites” for men.
Except I don’t really wonder. I’m pretty damn sure he wouldn’t have.
There is scientific research supporting the views Damore expresses. There are also grounds for questioning some of this research. In assessing Google’s action in firing Damore, it isn’t necessary to decide which side is right, but only whether Damore’s view is one that a Google employee should be permitted to express.
I think it is. First, as I’ve said, it is not some twisted, crazy view. There are serious articles, published in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, supporting it.
Second, it addresses an important issue. Google is rightly troubled by the fact that its workforce is largely male. Sexism in many areas of employment is well-documented. Employers should be alert to the possibility that they are discriminating against women, and should take steps to prevent such discrimination. Some orchestras now conduct blind auditions…
And more businesses should do that, Singer says cheerily.
But once such anti-discrimination measures have been taken, to the greatest extent feasible, does the fact that a workforce in a particular industry is predominantly male prove that there has been discrimination? Not if the kind of work on offer is likely to be attractive to more men than to women.
If the view Damore defends is right, that will be true of software engineering. If it is, then moving beyond the avoidance of discrimination in hiring and promotion to a policy of giving preference to women over men would be questionable.
That may be true, but we’re not there yet. We’re not anywhere near that yet. We’re still mired in a world where dudebros spend much of their spare time explaining what’s so wrong and stupid and inferior about women. Damore’s banal “memo” was just more of that, dressed up carefully enough that it – bafflingly – fooled Peter Singer. I find that kind of pathetic.
So on an issue that matters, Damore put forward a view that has reasonable scientific support, and on which it is important to know what the facts are. Why then was he fired?
Pichai, Google’s CEO, says that “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.” But Damore explicitly, and more than once, made it clear that he was not reducing individuals to a group, and so was not saying that all — or even, necessarily, any — women employed by Google as software engineers are less biologically suited to their work than men.
Jesus christ! Has the man never heard of lying? Has he never seen any advertising or public relations or political speechifying? Yes we know what Damore explicitly made clear, but he didn’t mean it, and that was blindingly obvious to any woman who has already heard this shit 90 thousand times and doesn’t need to hear it again.
Wouldn’t you think a philospher of Singer’s caliber would have the nous to figure that out?
Google is a very selective employer, and so it is highly probable that Google’s selection processes have led to Google employing women who are, in specific traits, uncharacteristic of women as a whole. The target of Damore’s memo was the idea that we should expect women to make up half the software engineering workforce, and that Google should take measures directed towards achieving that outcome.
Pichai also quotes Google’s Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.” Damore’s memo did not harass or intimidate anyone, and in a society that protects freedom of expression, there was nothing unlawful about it. Was it biased? To show that it was, it would need to be demonstrated that Damore was biased in selecting certain scientific studies that supported his view while disregarding others that went against it. Perhaps that case could — and should — be made, but to do so would take some time and research. In any case, Pichai does not attempt, in even the most cursory way, to make it.
See above. All this depends on taking Damore completely at face value, which is just dense, and not only dense but obnoxiously clueless about injustices perpetrated against people who aren’t like him. If he had read even one of the many articles or posts by women in tech that explained why Damore’s memo is crap, he probably wouldn’t have written this.
Embarrassing.
Here’s another thing: it doesn’t matter if anything he says is true (it isn’t) because our society and by extension corporate America works better when we choose to treat everyone as equals.
People are more productive and useful if they’re not treated like shit.
I think Singer would like to bend over backwards to be fair to people he’s criticizing – certainly it was an approach to G.W. Bush’s environmental policy and justifications he took in One World – but when he’s just analyzing a given document in isolation, and he’s making that isolation a part of that effort of extreme fairness, the bending over backwards to be fair can become tipping over backwards in willful dismissal of relevant context and effects.
Isn’t it nice how easy it is for well off, famous white men to see that this subject needs to be debated? That we need to debate how many ways they are superior? How many ways we are inferior? And how much the science that they do, the philosophy that they do, demonstrates that they are superior to the rest of us? Isn’t it nice?
NO, IT IS NOT NICE. So here’s a clue: if you are a white male, and you are about to say something supportive of a manifesto positing that women are somehow “different” in a way that ensures they can forever be kept out of the jobs you like doing, even if you think you are not doing that (this is about groups, not about individuals – WTF? Nice cover, asshole) – if you are doing that, you need to stop, regroup, and think. Then go out and read a lot of stuff – feminist stuff – to see if this argument is sound. To see if this argument is old, and has whiskers, and women are sick to death of hearing it. And ask yourself if that argument about “group” vs “individual” would be convincing if you were talking about men, about people of color, about Jews, about LGBTQ…
It is the fact that it is a generalization about a group that makes it problematic. If Damore wanted to right a memo that said “Sally X isn’t really very good at coding; you might want to check her work a bit closer”, then he might have an argument, because he would be addressing something that needed to be addressed. But lumping a group together makes it worse, not better. It colors us all – we have to prove ourselves over and over and over and over, and even then, we are still judged as lacking. There is no proof good enough to demonstrate that we, individual women, are indeed talented, intelligent, educated, competent, and valuable employees. We are always tainted with the “just a woman” vibe. The “estrogen” vibe, if you will. The “more of a guy thing” vibe.
If one more man speaks up in defense of that memo (and I’m sure a million more will), I may go off the deep end and run amok. I am sick to death of having to prove myself to young men (and old ones) who have been brought up to think that they are somehow the pinnacle of evolution, and that everyone else on the earth is about a million years behind them, still collecting berries on the savannah.
Jeff, I’m not sure that argument works here. It doesn’t sound like Singer is criticizing Damore at all, and I hardly think he’s being fair to Pichai. He’s just ringing in as one more smug voice on an issue that doesn’t affect him at all, but that he thinks he understands when he doesn’t. And that is me bending over backwards to be fair to Singer, even though I’m coiled like a spring ready to run amok.
It’s easier for white men to feel threatened by a white man losing a job for being a dickhole than for them to feel true empathy for the millions of women who’ve not been able to get one because of bigotry.
Well, put down those pitchforks, he took great care to make it ‘clear that he was not reducing individuals to a group, and so was not saying that all — or even, necessarily, any — women employed by Google as software engineers are less biologically suited to their work than men.
Big fucking deal. Isn’t a group by definition formed from individuals? So by saying that a group is unsuited to a particular task, the implication is very clearly that the individuals in that group are unsuited to that task. It would be very odd if the individuals were adept at the task but became inept when viewed as a group, which is apparently what Damore and his apologists seem to be claiming with that particular disclaimer.
@Seth that’s a really good point. That’s what’s bothering them, isn’t it?
‘it is highly probable that Google’s selection processes have led to Google employing women who are, in specific traits, uncharacteristic of women as a whole.’ These traits must be uncharacteristic of men as a whole as well, otherwise everyone would be working for Google. This is a relatively subtle example of the powerful idea that each man is a separate distinct individual entity (you’d never dream of saying anything about ‘men a as a whole’), while women are largely fungible (and it seems to startle men when they find one that appears to be in some way ‘different from the others’).
Yes, guest! You have it and well put!
One of the things these making-excuses men have not addressed – I wonder why? – is that what Damore has done is act well above his pay-grade. On company time and using company resources.
He has tried to usurp the function of Human Resources who will have, one hopes, drawn up a detailed person specification for the job, checked academic qualifications, checked work record, interviewed the person with senior technical people and very likely if it is relevant administered the sort of test by which Damore sets such store. Thus any woman who got in would already have a fair chance of being able to do the job. She will not need to be checked out all over again by some random bloke she passes in the corridor. Though, as inknklast indicates, that tends to be what happens in real life! And if it turns out that she can’t do the job? That’s for her line manager and no-one else.
As for usurping the function of senior management, enough said. Of course he was sacked.
No excuses, guys! Even philosopher guys!
iknclast, it’s not meant as much of an excuse at all for Singer – no excuse at all, in the end. I was trying to convey that the approach he was taking, in trying to be fair (in a sort of mechanical, context-unaware way) to Damore was one so extremely out of place here that it was bound to end up unfair to anyone else, Pichai particularly.
It starts off as an attempt to be fair, of some sort – that’s the most excuse I want to offer for him. After that, the way he’s trying to be fair, leads him to screw up that goal toward anyone else, and to be excessively, inappropriately fair to Damore himself.
I doubt he means to be one more smug voice ringing in, but it’s hardly less condemnatory to suggest – what I mean here – that his approach still leaves him systematically insensitive to real issues and effects, as much as if he were coming at it from sheer smugness. It’s the clueless side of male privilege, instead of the nasty one – significant in understanding someone, not so much when it comes to how it plays out for the injustices inflicted or ignored.
The usual smug clueless guys are passing it around to each other with lashings of smug clueless praise, all couched in Highly Reasonable Dude language.
Ah, but none of them do, right? They’re just trying to be reasonable, but these hysterical women seem to be preventing that. The fact that they are hiding the claim of hysterical women by attacking Pichai doesn’t make it any less that, since the charge against Pichai seems to be that he listened to the “mob” (i.e., hysterical women).
This is the phrase that most pissed me off:
In short, Singer appears to be accepting Damore’s view, but wants us to think he only wants it debated. Most of these guys want the “debate” because they are so sure that it will come out in favor of white men. (even though few of them would say men, and even fewer white, that’s what it boils down to). From what I read, he did not start out trying to be fair to Damore; he started out from the beginning (at least of what Ophelia quoted) that he actually feels this memo is important, needs to be shared, and needs to be debated.
In short, the debate comes down to “why are women insisting they are equal to men when Science® so clearly shows they are different – in a good way, of course, because cleaning up after men, changing diapers, and cooking yummy meals is important, too.”
While everyone is talking of Damore’s views and feelings and opining about women’s abilities and intrinsics, nobody except one journalist bothered to ask the Google rank-and-file women what this means to them and for them. Here’s the relevant interview in Business Insider — long but worth reading.
http://www.businessinsider.com/female-google-employee-responds-to-james-damore-memo-2017-8
I’ve not yet engaged Singer’s work. This does not motivate me to put him higher on the reading list.
So, I went and read Singer’s screed. I’d figured there had to be more to it than excerpted, and if there is, it’s not content-full. I was too fair to Singer; he’s laying out a bunch of comments that carefully ignore all the signal problems there, but enough, addressed carefully enough, to give an appearance of judicious consideration.
It’s a sharper disappointment than I’d had already.
Yeah. His piece would be quite convincing to anyone who hadn’t read the Google memo…so that’s how dishonest it is.
Athena, I found that link very interesting. One of the things I found interesting is that Google had given permission for the interview, and she very carefully said nothing that could be construed as criticism of Google. In her read, there really isn’t any sexism, or any gender pay gap, and Google is the best place in the world to work. Now, this might be true, but the fact that they are currently under investigation by the Labor Board (which she carefully says is too broad, and they are asking for too much) makes me suspect that she was carefully vetted before she was allowed to give the interview.
Iknklast, agreed. This is a carefully vetted “completely satisfied” employee who is given regular access to the upper echelons because of her useful mindset. So if this is her take, you can imagine what the standard woman employee at Google is thinking.
Statistically speaking, “Isn’t a group by definition formed from individuals” (Acolyte of Sagan), it is a distribution. It’s likely the mean of the distribution of quality female tech workers is lower than male tech workers, but not because of intelligence, more likely due to lack of opportunities and/or lower society/educational stimuli over the last half century.
Distinguishing between individuals and groups is actually critical when trying to avoid bias, regardless of what one knows about group averages.
iknklast, I am afraid many more men will come out to support this memo in days to come, please do not run amok. I shall pick berries in the savannah if needed. With Fuhrer Trump, it might be a necessary survival trait for the future of our civilization.
Ah yes. We must have reasonable calm discussions about these ideas.
Remember how Damore ran to be interviewed by Stefan Molyneux? Here’s another Molyneux guest declaring that the Charlotteville Nazis have “robust” and “well thought out” ideas about the “Jewish Question” and other topics, and those hippy dippy liberals just don’t wanna have a debate….