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From The Verge:
Google didn't violate labor laws by firing engineer James Damore for a memo criticizing the company's diversity program, according to a recently disclosed letter from the US National Labor Relations Board. The lightly redacted statement is written by Jayme Sophir, associate general counsel of the NLRB's division of advice; it dates to January, but was released yesterday, according to Law.com. Sophir concludes that while some parts of Damore's memo were legally protected by workplace regulations, "the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected."
Damore filed an NLRB complaint in August of 2017, after being fired for internally circulating a memo opposing Google's diversity efforts. Sophir recommends dismissing the case; Bloomberg reports that Damore withdrew it in January, and that his lawyer says he's focusing on a separate lawsuit alleging discrimination against conservative white men at Google. NLRB records state that its case was closed on January 19th.
There are White House Staff positions open, I hear.
Previously: Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences
Google Cancels "Town Hall" Due to Leaks
(Score: 5, Informative) by TGV on Tuesday February 20 2018, @06:48AM (6 children)
The usual drivel: male CS professors. My daughter and her friends never even got near a CS professor before they decided that STEM is not for them. One even chose a lower school level to avoid maths. I don't know who you're trying to troll.
> During WWII, computing was dominated by women
As in: arithmetic by hand, yes.
> Then the men came back from war, and because of the highly sexist culture of the time the high-paying jobs such as IT
In nineteen forty fucking five? IT jobs? There were none. You really are a troll.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @09:03AM (1 child)
Really more of a gen Y-er, too young to qualify as a Gen X-er, but not really part of the Millenial culture either...
Most of the women when I was in junior college during the late 90s early 00s had no interest in Computers. *LOTS* had interest in STEM, although still a fraction of their male counterparts. 25-33 percent in S(-T)EM, split mostly between teen/early twenties and 30-40 year old returning students, as opposed to maybe 5-15 percent in Technology, mostly clustered in office applications, web design, Photoshop/Flash/3D CAD+CAM, and CISCO. The outliers, who numbered less than a dozen in more than 4 years of classes (I was a slow learner, combined with single offering classes that took more than a year to get an opportunity to re-enroll in), were Computer Programming students: A mexican-american who was forced to drop her computer science classes because they didn't qualify as part of her MBA major. An Indian girl who hadn't even considered computer programming until I suggested it to her in a a different class a year before, who took it then decided (smartly I may add) to continue in a different SEM path (sadly lost to history, I think maybe biochemistry?), 3-5 japanese girls across C++/Java who were either too poor or too academically unqualified for Japanese schools, for whom the international rates at the Junior College/State level in the US made more sense, two Koreans (one in tech, one doing it as a side gig from Culinary Arts before returning to that career path after an opportunity to own her own business), and finally a big pile of Iranian/Ukrainian women most of whom were taking it as a transfer prerequisite for their Civil Engineering degrees at the local State College.
Out of all of those polled, sexism was actually the *LAST* reason for any of them not entering the field. 'I can't been seen in a nerdy field' was #1 among the non-SEM people. The next group were trying to get into a field their culture respected. The third group hadn't grown up with computers and considered them a black box. And the rest had already figured out that many other fields both had better pay and better respect, unless you were using it as a backdoor path to management. Out of the few who both were in the Tech classes and continued through them for as long as I knew/heard from them, only maybe 5 chose to continue it either as a career or into the 4+ year degree level. A couple finished up Cisco certification then moved back to other fields, either due to lack of jobs (basically everyone wanted the second or third tier Cisco certs by that point, many of which were only offered via private classes and only a few of the middle classes were offered at a single local junior college once a year, meaning 5-10k+ just to get up to a level where somebody *MIGHT* hire you, unless you already had an in via HR/hiring managers.) A few others strung along guys trying to get through their degrees without actually learning the material, made it to mid-upper classes, then quit when they couldn't complete coursework that didn't have rote answers. Out of the ones left, I didn't keep in touch with any of them after college, although a few were friends of other people I was still in touch with and I got updates on. The ones who made it all the way and got jobs mostly stayed in tech. The student visa ones often stayed in the US and either became permanent residents or citizens. The rest left mostly because either the money to be made was misrepresented to them. The prestige they'd been lead to believe existed in the career paths didn't, and finally that there were easier paths to tech management for the ones who were interested in the money, which was far more lucrative at the managerial level than at the other levels.
Out of the people I knew who were *MALE* and successful in tech, they were all self-taught. The only self taught women I met who were in tech were one of the Korean ladies mentioned above, plus a white girl who was literally a female doppelganger of me but like 5 years older, and she had run her own 8 line BBS in the early 90s during High School. The former was the only person to actually invite me to visit their office so I could check out her office's datacenter. The latter was the first of 5 girls I ever asked out, and the most epic rejection ever. I got burned for age. education, and my nerd cred in three sentences 'I was running an 8 line BBS before you got your first modem. Also, I'm in COLLEGE. I am just here because they didn't offer this class there, so I was allowed to enroll in it here.'
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 20 2018, @09:38PM
The rest left mostly because either the money to be made was misrepresented to them.
Huh?
I got burned for age. education, and my nerd cred in three sentences 'I was running an 8 line BBS before you got your first modem. Also, I'm in COLLEGE. I am just here because they didn't offer this class there, so I was allowed to enroll in it here.'
Ouch!
Out of all of those polled, sexism was actually the *LAST* reason for any of them not entering the field. 'I can't been seen in a nerdy field' was #1 among the non-SEM people. The next group were trying to get into a field their culture respected. The third group hadn't grown up with computers and considered them a black box. And the rest had already figured out that many other fields both had better pay and better respect, unless you were using it as a backdoor path to management.
This is the thing that the STEM advocates just don't seem to get (or don't want to). They think STEM, especially programming, is some highly-coveted career field that pays a fortune, and it really isn't. It pays better than flipping burgers of course, and many other middle-class jobs requiring lower skills and education, but for really smart people able to do this work effectively, there's other career fields out there that are more lucrative, more interesting, more fulfilling or helpful to humanity, have better job security, or some combination of those, and on top of that, have better prestige. Which has higher prestige, a medical doctor or a Python programmer? Well, try asking out a bunch of desirable women (or men if you're female or gay), after claiming to be one or the other of those two, and see which one nets you more dates. And if you're worried about doing something to help people or humanity, which one is a better bet? Any highly-experience programmer should be able to tell you that it's *very* unlikely that your work as a programmer is really going to help humanity--very few programmers get to work on something genuinely useful to millions like Google Maps or a NASA project or a particle collider or medical device; most of them are lucky if whatever CRUD application they worked on actually gets used for a while to calculate payroll for some company, instead of being thrown in the trash because it "missed a market window" or whatever. However, work as a medical doctor and you're almost guaranteed to be helping people. Or if you want a highly-paid career that requires high attention to detail, but will also last you to retirement, law is a much better bet than programming. As a bonus, if you're a lawyer, you'll get a FAR nicer office to work in than almost any programmer these days, as lawyers (and even their assistants) get nice, comfortable offices to work in, whereas programmers are treated like cattle and forced to work in "open plan" offices with zero privacy and constant distractions.
The main way to be extremely successful in tech is to either move into management, AND do really well there (which means you have to be skilled at corporate politicking), or start your own business and be lucky enough for it to win big.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @09:11AM
And you claim to have a daughter? When everyone knows trolls do not. So who really is lacking all crediblity here?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 20 2018, @06:16PM (2 children)
And yet most of my female CS classmates reported stuff like this, and as mentioned universally switched from CS to math, physics, or finance. That's not something that just happens, and it shows that these were women who have the aptitude for technical work. Your daughters' choices suggest she doesn't have that interest, which is fine, but doesn't explain why women who did have enough interest to start taking CS courses decided to stop taking CS courses. It also sounds like you're in a different country than I am.
No, I'm talking about the Bletchley Park bombes which deciphered German codes, which was a 75% female staff. And I was a little off on the dates when things shifted: The majority of programmers of the early American computers, such as ENIAC and the Mark I, were women as well.
You're right that women also dominated the by-hand arithmetic that was relied on heavily by, for instance, NASA.
Yes, there were. Not many, but they existed. And of course a lot of what was going on in the early days of computing was more focused on hardware engineering rather than software, because of course the challenges were mostly about building computers than programming them to do things, and the programs were relatively simple due to the limitations of the equipment.
In the 1940's, women were most of the programmers, some of the engineers, and overall critical to the operation of computers. By the 1960's, all those professions were now dominated by men. That demands explanation, and a very reasonable explanation is that the well-documented sexism of the time affected computer-related professions just like they did most other professions.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TGV on Tuesday February 20 2018, @08:44PM (1 child)
> universally switched from CS to math, physics, or finance.
Happens to a lot of the boys too. Except switching to physics is weird, since physics is a lot harder than CS.
> Yes, there were. Not many, but they existed.
No, there were no IT jobs. There were research jobs. There was no "information technology" in 1945. The ENIAC wasn't ready until 1946. In 1945, companies didn't have computers, only automated counters, which they didn't program.
> That demands explanation, and a very reasonable explanation is that the well-documented sexism of the time affected computer-related professions just like they did most other professions.
Absolute bollocks. Equally likely is that society in general didn't want it, or that they went on to get children, or that the returned men were simply better at programming stored program computers. And I mean equally likely in the sense of: reasoning you make up as you go without any proof, just to hammer on an idiotic argument. Much more likely is that it's a matter of numbers: in 1945, computers only existed as experiments, in 1960 all large companies and banks in the Western world had computers running. With all study grants for GIs returned from the front, men simply outnumbered women.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 20 2018, @09:36PM
The point that you're carefully ignoring is that the motivation for the switch wasn't because they weren't smart, or weren't good at math or science or engineering, it was to get away from the people in general and men in particular they were having to deal with in the CS department. Since dealing with those people added substantial difficulty to their CS work, they found physics the easier subject.
To give you an idea of the kind of stuff I'm talking about: CS lab monitors had to remove substantial amounts of pornography from the shared machines and male students were asking female students to show their tits while they were trying to work on their homework. And nobody involved was being punished.
As for my last point, are you denying that there was sexism in the US prior to 1960? Because it sure sounds like you are.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.