Monday, August 21, 2017

Google Fired Engineer for Speaking Out


Although this happened about two weeks ago, I found it interesting enough that I wanted to write about it anyway. On August 5, an internal memo at Google by James Damore, titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber", was leaked to the public. The memo was originally written because of Damore's concerns about Google's "diversity for the sake of diversity" policies and hostility towards differing opinions were mostly ignored by his peers. In his memo, Damore argues that Google's political biases have created an "echo chamber" where discussing certain topics or ideas is discouraged. According to Damore, "the lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements" of its collective ideology, which include views that "all disparities in representation are due to oppression" and that "we should discriminate to correct for this oppression." In particular, he argues that the lack of equal gender representation at Google, despite Google actively attempting to hire women, might be partly due to innate differences in the prevalence of psychological traits between men and women, and that discrimination to correct for differences in representation is unfair and potentially damaging to Google's business.

A number of sources, regardless of whether or not they agree with all of Damore's conclusions, have verified that the scientific information in his memo was accurate, including but not limited to:
Additionally, Damore went out of his way to specify that he is not suggesting differences of ability or generalizations based on group identity, but rather a difference in distribution of traits:

However, despite Damore's memo being scientifically supported and attempting to generate discussion from a mostly non-biased standpoint, Google fired him within two days of the memo being made public, with executives, including the CEO, citing "incorrect assumptions about gender" that are "offensive and not OK." Many have criticized this decision as silencing debate and proving the very point made in the title of the memo, especially because the memo was updated to clarify that it was not meant to perpetuate stereotypes, but rather to start an honest discussion. Despite this, the memo has been seriously misrepresented by a large portion of the news media, with many publications comparing Damore to the alt-right, despite Damore stating in the memo that he considers himself a classical liberal.


Discussion Questions:
  • Was Google wrong to fire James Damore?
  • Are other companies or institutions "ideological echo chambers"? How prevalent is this phenomenon?
  • Could psychological differences between men and women help explain unequal gender representations in certain industries?
  • Is reverse discrimination a problem in hiring practices?

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