SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Google is struggling to discuss the recent diversity memo controversy internally:
Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, canceled a scheduled all-hands staff meeting—moments before it was scheduled to begin—meant to address concerns over a controversial essay published by former employee James Damore.
In an email to staff, Pichai explained that questions from employees had been leaked and that, in some cases, specific employees' identities were revealed, exposing them to harassment and threats. Instead of today's large-scale meeting, which was to be livestreamed to Google's 60,000 employees worldwide, smaller groups will meet sometime in the future.
"We had hoped to have a frank open discussion today as we always do to bring us together and move forward. But our Dory questions appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally," Pichai said in the email.
Also at CNET.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday August 11 2017, @04:14PM (3 children)
It seems to me the difficulty is that this isn't the regular sports team red vs. blue politics (where we get all emotional and crap and then the bodies in Washington, DC rotate and nothing of substance changes, but abortions might be easier or more difficult to get or an LGBT person may have an easier or more difficult time considering serving their country in the military or what-have-you).
I'm guessing that the guy who originally spoke up and got fired either had been personally affected by Google's policies or was concerned about others who had been (possibly in ways that may violate anti-discrimination laws). When it's policies that affect one's job, I think that makes it a valid subject of discussion.
I know personally what it's like to be on the receiving end of bigotry from those who wish a womyn-born-womyn hegemony, and it sucks. Big time. Because you know that what you were accused of is untrue, what you are being punished for or the reason you're being held back is nothing more than the letter on your birth certificate—you are acutely and painfully aware that had that letter been different, you would have been praised because of your accomplishments and promoted/rewarded—, and when you try to talk about it, you encounter so much circular logic that it drives you insane. You are told that what happened to you is simply “unpossible,” and your account is found contradictory to the cosmic laws of the universe, meaning only that you must be a liar and must be treble guilty of whatever charge you were accused of and punished for in the first place.
Practically speaking, finding a different employer is probably the best way forward. Google seems to be eager to help this process along by firing anybody stupid enough to point out that brain gender is a thing and our problem with finding the right incantations to use during the ritual to make cisfemale programmed precipitate out of the æther might be more complicated than a matter of all assigned to the male gender caste sexually harassing womyn-born-womyn out of the field. To speak to your point, Google does not fire people who assert gender essentialism, and they encourage working from the “misogynerd” theory that all 3.6 billion assigned males on the planet are engaged in a grand conspiracy to actively and intentionally sexually harass womyn-born-womyn out of tech jobs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @07:18PM (2 children)
myn born myn have actually tried instigating more women to go into tech. Or that we didn't know dozens of women in grade, middle, or high school who knew their way around a computer, maybe even something older than a PC. And it isn't just that those womyn had *NO* interest in tech careers for reasons completely unrelated to the potential for douchey bro culture, mostly centered on the fast moving and financially lucrative startup ecosystem of the 90s through 00s.
Seriously, getting women interested in tech was like pulling teeth until casual games came out, and even then most of them only wanted social networking, casual games, and maybe a dating app. See how many have actually learned to use a computer/device more proficiently than that. Or offer to explain it to them and see how long it takes them to start screaming at you it is too complicated and don't fill my brain with useless nerd things! Seriously, whether my mother, my cousin, my female college schoolmates, or just random co-workers, almost none of them that were not already predisposed to the inner workings of tech as a child want anything to do with it as an adult, and even some of them that were, no longer are.
While we're on the subject, why is nobody complaining about women and non-nerdy (but also non-intellectual) men appropriating and diluting nerd/geek culture in order to have social (media?) 'cred'? If we're supposed to be culturally, sexually, etc tolerant of their identities, why are they not required to stop 'slant-face' or 'black-face'ing our culture with their superficial stereotyped mockeries of *OUR* cultural identities?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday August 11 2017, @07:56PM (1 child)
Well, my experience is limited to a professional setting where I had been asked to “train” a womyn-born-womyn in “programming.” After trying this several times, failing, giving it one last effort, which I had thought with great relief was succeeding (yay! I'm finally a *good girl*! Maybe feminism will see me as a legitimate woman now that I've shown I'm a *good girl*!) only to find from that person that they had a male brain! %$#@argh!…,
I believe the average time to eye-gloss-over given 1 hour sessions either once per week or three times per week, is about 2 months, regardless of the frequency of session.
I say womyn-born-womyn so much because I have found that trans women simply do not have these “barriers” with technology. Trans men are the case study we need here. Trans men I've worked with have the exact same problems with maths as womyn-born-womyn. $y = mx + b$ is incomprehensible and inaccessible to many womyn-born-womyn and trans men alike.
I try to avoid maths, because, well, always remember that math is hard and Newton's Principia Mathematica is a rape manual [wikipedia.org]. If you want to achieve eye-gloss-over in under 2 sessions, focus on maths. That was one of the very first mistakes I made: talking about things in mathematical language. I needed to stall eye-gloss-over for as long as possible, and I found that no matter what, I could not stall it indefinitely. It is not a problem of simple ignorance. We are dealing with something irrational. “Math is hard” is something that these people have incorporated into their identities so deeply, that they would rather that basic algebra remain forever inaccessible to them. Nobody wants to put their familiar, learned, comfortable gidentities at risk by doing something that they have learned since a very young age was something that people with similar identities (a certain group identity perhaps) simply do not do.
Engaging in maths for many of these people, I imagine, is similar to somebody socialized as the male gender putting on a dress or skirt. This is something that one simply does! not! do! eternity! wrath! unthinkable! burning! firey! damnation! AIDS! abomination! faggot! full! stop!
So what are my findings? (This is part of the answer key I was going to post last night before, uh, line noise, that was it, prevented me from posting it.) People socialized as the female gender experience great difficulty with mathematical subjects. This is not because the female brain is not capable of mathematics. This is not because the female brain is less capable than the male brain at mathematics. This is something, something very tangible, that our culture, specifically (but not only), reliably (but not always) does to these people, regardless of whether they have a male or female brain.
But I don't expect anybody to figure that out, because why the fuck would anybody ever fucking examine the fucking experiences of “gender confused” people to determine why there are no cisfemale programmers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by kaszz on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:45AM
I remember a maths professor noticed that the girls in his classes had small breasts. And the size of those tend to be dependent on estrogen levels. You could try to select for womyn-born-womyn with small breasts when attempting to teach programming and see if it improves the success rate.