"Anti-diversity" manifesto at Google

In addition to the Left’s affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females. As mentioned before, this likely evolved because males are biologically disposable and because women are generally more cooperative and areeable than men.

And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.

Nothing like nodding and winking to racist notions about the lack of intelligence of certain groups of color or sexist innuendo of how women lack some of the physical characters of men.

Suppose I wanted to convince you that men and women had physically identical bodies. I run studies on things like number of arms, number of kidneys, size of the pancreas, caliber of the aorta, whether the brain is in the head or the chest, et cetera. 90% of these come back identical – in fact, the only ones that don’t are a few outliers like “breast size” or “number of penises”. I conclude that men and women are mostly physically similar. I can even make a statistic like “men and women are physically the same in 78% of traits”.

Then I go back to the person who says women have larger breasts and men are more likely to have penises, and I say “Ha, actually studies prove men and women are mostly physically identical! I sure showed you, you sexist!”

I worry that Hyde’s analysis plays the same trick. She does a wonderful job finding that men and women have minimal differences in eg “likelihood of smiling when not being observed”, “interpersonal leadership style”, et cetera. But if you ask the man on the street “Are men and women different?”, he’s likely to say something like “Yeah, men are more aggressive and women are more sensitive”. And in fact, Hyde found that men were indeed definitely more aggressive, and women indeed definitely more sensitive. But throw in a hundred other effects nobody cares about like “likelihood of smiling when not observed”, and you can report that “78% of gender differences are small or zero”.

In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine, unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera.

As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.

And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!”

This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there.

And if your answer is just going to be that apparently the negative stereotypes in engineering were stronger than the negative stereotypes about everything else, why would that be? Put yourself in the shoes of our Victorian sexist, trying to maintain his male privilege. He thinks to himself “Well, I suppose I could tolerate women doctors saving my life. And if I had to, I would accept women going into law and determining who goes free and who goes to jail. I’m even sort of okay with women going into journalism and crafting the narratives that shape our world. But women building bridges? NO MERE FEMALE COULD EVER DO SUCH A THING!” Really? This is the best explanation the world can come up with? Doesn’t anyone have at least a little bit of curiousity about this?

Silicon Valley was supposed to be better than this. It was supposed to be the life of the mind, where people who were interested in the mysteries of computation and cognition could get together and make the world better for everybody. Now it’s degenerated into this giant hatefest of everybody writing long screeds calling everyone else Nazis and demanding violence against them. Where if someone disagrees with the consensus, it’s just taken as a matter of course that we need to hunt them down, deny them of the cloak of anonymity, fire them, and blacklist them so they can never get a job again. Where the idea that we shouldn’t be a surveillance society where we carefully watch our coworkers for signs of sexism so we can report them to the authorities is exactly the sort of thing you get reported to the authorities if people see you saying.

Obviously this guy has no idea what he is talking about on this topic (and no doubt countless others), but that doesn’t matter. To read it, and debate it, is to accept the premise that whether or not women can actually be engineers, whether the other appalling things he said can be up for debate, when we have endless amounts of evidence otherwise. We don’t debate the existence of gravity. We don’t debate evolution (… oh wait, some of us do). We don’t debate the chemical composition of water — even though we can’t see it, we accept that it is two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom and get on with our lives. But this is the nature of Science — it gives us some things that we can accept as true. This is the nature of white supremacist misogyny — they take things that there is only evidence in one direction, and try and put it up for debate again.

We know who this guy is. We know who he is literally, because word gets around. But we know metaphorically. I doubt any woman or person of color who has worked with this dude was shocked to find out what he really thinks in writing. We know when we work with dudes like that. We know when they do our code review. We know when we find their comments on our performance review. We know.

We know in the way they treat us, even when other people say we’re reading too much into it, when they tell us he’s like that with “everyone”. We know in the feeling of discomfort. Maybe we don’t discuss it, but we probably do try to avoid being alone with him. We know he holds us in contempt, even when he has not — yet — shown it openly.

Clearly, Google should be taking a hard look at the internal culture right now. They should recognize that this leak is likely motivated by distrust and frustration about internal non-action — something the mealy mouthed (leaked) internal statement has done nothing to allay. They should be taking a hard look at a culture where a dude could 1) feel empowered and enabled to write something like this, not as a pseudonymous Reddit user but as an internal document with his name attached and 2) receive enough support in response from his colleagues to encourage him. They should ask “how do we fix this situation?” but then, if there’s not a hard look at the question of “how did we create this situation?” it will happen again, and again. It will happen small scale, every day. It will happen at this scale, again.

Culture change is hard. It is hard to take a look at your culture, and recognize that some of the things you championed and valued became corrosive weapons in the hands of people who cannot be trusted with them. Free speech as a value is prevalent in tech. When you hire and enable people for whom free speech means that they can dehumanize and devalue and destruct their colleagues it is a terrible thing. The problem is not necessarily that people can say what they think, the problem is that you hired someone and they worked there for nearly four years, believing that women — half the population — and people of color are somehow less than. Something that no doubt played out in their actions (how many interviews did this guy do, for example), and yet, if anyone with power noticed… they did nothing.

This man was educated at Harvard and MIT. They too are culpable here and should feel a deep sense of shame that they graduated and sent into the world someone with such poor critical thinking skills, who is too lazy to do the most basic of research. They should be concerned about every woman or person of color who came into contact with him in an academic environment.

As a society we should be concerned that we have given men like him cover behind “political view”. His views on women and black people are not “political” — they are dated nonsense that have been debunked by science — and not recently either. No-one cares about his views on the appropriate percentage to run as a deficit, or the appropriate ratio of funding between defense and education. No-one knows or cares whether he prefers government to be federal or local, his views on Korean reunification, or desirable international trading relationships.

His views on his colleagues are not political, they are human, they are demonstrably false, provably ignorant, and they are offensive. Offensive on a human level, and offensive on an organizational level — that someone who is paid well for their critical thinking and problem solving skills could fall so very, very short.

This is not the first time this year I have critiqued tech culture that creates these situations and then describes them as aberrational. I doubt it will be the last. I left Google three years ago because their external focus on diversity and inclusion was so far away from what I saw and experienced that it felt like being socially gaslit.

It seems that nothing has changed; I suspect the system is working as intended.