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Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women
Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2017-08-17 19:01
Article here. Excerpt:
'On the day Google software engineer James Damore was fired for writing a Memo about Google’s diversity programs that went viral, my daughter Davita, 24, shot me a quick text: “Dad, I can’t believe they fired the guy. That was the wrong move.” We met the next day and talked at length. The conversation was a wonderful blend of perspectives from a young millennial woman and a baby boomer man. Our conversation kept coming back to this point: Isn’t it time our culture and its businesses used science to solve gender issues rather than just ideological conformity?
For anyone who hasn’t followed this: Damore wrote a brief treatise on Google’s gender policies. His position was a moderate one, agreeing that there are gender gaps and calling for continued study and policy advancement to help women, but also suggesting that gender science, not just ideology, would help deal with the gaps effectively. Science, he argued, can bring more women in because it can help workplaces like Google make jobs more attractive to the various ways that women approach their work—some of those ways show difference from male approaches.
Let me say before I continue: I do not work at Google so I won’t speak for them; there may be other issues regarding the firing that I don’t know about. I should also disclose that I spoke at Google ten years ago. I think Google is a powerful culture-changer, and I generally support the company and believe in its platform. So, what I say in this blog is said with those caveats. I will stick with what I know well: gender science.'
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Comments
Science is only useful
When it confirms what we already believe.
It's useless otherwise.
Or at least that seems to be what a lot of people think, especially feminist types.
In many ways, feminists have done their best to destroy science. They dress something up to look like science, but there's no actual science involved.
Get off of Alphabet
Get off of Alphabet Inc./Google and all their subsidiaries. There are other search engines, other video sharing sites, and other ways of monetizing content out there (just do a Duckduckgo.com search of "alternatives to [insert Google product]" to learn more).
Yep
Science brought us out of the Dark Ages. Feminists want to take us back to it. Them and Islamists.
footnotes?
"Both Davita and I wished he had footnoted his research—this might have helped him make his case more strongly--but the research he refers to is available to anyone who wants to pursue it."
It's my understanding that his original memo did include citations, but that the version circulated in the MSM took those out, giving it the appearance of hearsay or junk science. Am I mistaken about this?
In any case, it's hard to know how to respond to something like this. A boycott of Google is not practical, of course, because most of us have become so dependent on it (my experience with Bing is that it isn't as good), and also because a boycott wouldn't get enough participation to make any difference. Write a letter to Google? It would just go straight into the round file. I've had several people peremptorily remind me that Google is a private company, and can make whatever personnel decisions it wants to make. To which I would like to answer: Of course! Who says they can't? But does the fact that they're a private company somehow place them above reproach? The public can no longer comment on their actions, or make decisions as consumers? (Regarding the "decisions as consumers," however, I'm not sure how much latitude we really have with an entity like Google.)
Actually, it's a public company
GOOG is a public co. traded on the stock exchanges of the world. Indeed, GOOG has to hear input from shareholders. The mgt. need not concur nor act on that input but any shareholder has the right to deliver feedback to mgt. Buy a share of GOOG then go to a shareholders' convention. If you can speak at it, great. Diff. cos. have diff. rules re who can speak and how, and for how long.
Since lionizing Yuri Kochiyama in May, 2016, who applauded the 9/11 attacks and openly admired Osama bin Laden, I have switched to using Bing. I find Bing to be really good for many things, much better also in searches for images than Google, and a better resultset format, too. Sometimes I go to Google to search something but generally if Bing doesn't turn it up, Google doesn't either.
Only prob I have w/ Bing is the canvas-picture backgrounds that slow down page load time. If Msoft had a simple, no-frills search page like Google (minus the ridiculous politicized doodles), it'd be darn-near ideal.