The Best Goddamn Discourse™ on the Google Manifesto
I’m here from the front lines of the Discourse™ to tell you that things are bad.
Okay, it’s actually not all terrible, but things are really not super great, and nothing I’ve read really felt incisive or particularly compelling. (Sidenote: Apologies for tacitly discussing only a gender and sex binary here—adding a caveat every time would be tough, so I’m just putting it up front.) Anyways, here goes.
The manifesto, if you haven’t already seen it, is here. The guy who wrote it got fired. Google’s response was pretty much that “we support ideological diversity but you can’t distribute 10 page manifestos alleging that your coworkers are, on average, biologically inferior coders because of their gender.”
Naturally this whole thing caused a shitstorm of attention. Other people have focused a lot on the document, but I’m going to first take a look at the questions and arguments raised by people (in both good and bad faith).
To roughly sum up the state of the Discourse™, there are three sides:
- The document is Bad
- Actually, the document isn’t Bad
- It doesn’t matter whether I agree with the document or not, your employer is entitled to fire you for publishing incendiary 10 page manifestos and making them look Bad
#3 is ironclad enough that a lot of people who would otherwise have been outraged have backed down here, even if they contend that “facts shouldn’t make you look bad.”
Still, the question most people ask—and I there are people asking this honestly—is:
This kind of proves his point that diversity suffers if dissenting views are silenced, doesn’t it?
I think there’s a knee-jerk reaction to say “no it doesn’t” because gender diversity and racial diversity won’t suffer. But it’s true that ideological diversity can suffer when dissenting views are silenced. In fact, it’s almost tautological. And it can be a good thing.
The bottom line is that it’s a good thing for some beliefs to not be acceptable at the workplace. Even if you’re coming at this from a totally amoral perspective, it’s pretty easy to see how a hostile workplace resulting from, say, someone claiming “black people are lazy” will lead to less productive work.
Also, there is plenty of room for ideological diversity between the Overton window where everyone agrees not to claim that women are not suited for tech jobs because of biological reasons, as evidenced by Smith’s tweet. (Smith is an avid neoliberal who writes about economics for Bloomberg, not some diehard hippy leftist.)
“But,” he says “doesn’t this lead to a sort of slippery-slope where we start banning anyone who has conservative beliefs?”
“No, not necessarily” I say, “because claims of biological inferiority are more toxic than, say, the belief that government should be smaller.”
“Who decides what’s toxic,” he says, typing furiously. “Who can be an impartial arbiter?”
“The company decides what’s toxic,” I respond. “If you don’t like that or don’t trust the company, you should advocate for more government oversight or the unionization of tech. It’s certainly possible this could hurt feminists in the future, as it did in the past.”
At this point, most people have said “No, I don’t want that—Google just shouldn’t have fired him for expressing a factual view.”
One of the main points of contention here is on the issue of “neuroticism,” which is one of the ‘Big Five’ traits. (FWIW, I think a lot of this is extraordinarily soft social science and not worth the time of day.)
The author wrote:
Women, on average, have more:
Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
Invariably, everyone links to the same couple of studies or the Wikipedia page. Essentially what this research shows is that based on self-reporting, women are, on average, more neurotic than men. Of course, what this doesn’t prove is that this neuroticism results from a biological difference between men and women.
“Sure,” he says “but neuroticism is a highly heritable trait.”
“There is evidence that neuroticism is heritable,” I reply carefully “but that does not mean it is primarily a result of biological factors, or that those biological factors differ between men and women.”
“He’s not saying we shouldn’t have women. Everyone’s calling it anti-diversity, but it’s actually pro-diversity. He’s saying that women are individuals and that there’s lots of overlap among these traits, and that some men are definitely less fit to be coders and leaders than women.”
Here’s where we reach what I think is the crux of the debate and why some people who have otherwise been fairly reasonable about egalitarianism have come to defend this manifesto: it presents itself as reasonable and uses lots of caveats and qualifiers, so it can’t just be saying that women are inferior.
The author begins:
I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes… Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story…
Then there’s this paragraph (emphasis mine):
Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
The author is not screaming or ranting. He’s not calling women “ignorant sluts.” And it’s certainly true that there are some biological differences between males and females (e.g. height is strongly dimorphic). The author is even rejecting notions that we should judge men and women at an individual level.
But then the author goes on to make a number of sweeping statements about what biological differences between men and women result in.
Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men… These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.
He uses this conclude that there are biological reasons for men to like coding.
women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading
This might be a bit harder for someone to swallow, so he directly follows it up with the caveat
Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women
Now we get to a fun section where he proposes “non-discriminatory” ways to reduce the gender gap, with suggestions such as making software-engineering more “people friendly.” (And then laments that there are limits to this.)
Easily the best commentary he has is this:
Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.
It’s a strikingly feminist view for a document about how biological differences between men and women mean diversity initiatives are bad.
We even get a lovely, reasonable line at the beginning of the next section before he goes all in.
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.
Great!
However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices
Oh?
Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]
A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
Hmm…
We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology[7] that can irreparably harm Google.
Oh?
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 [sic] than men. We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue [sic] affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and whiner[10]. Nearly every difference between men and women is interpreted as a form of women’s oppression. As with many things in life, gender differences are often a case of “grass being greener on the other side”; unfortunately, taxpayer and Google money is spent to water only one side of the lawn.
And here we have it. All of that reasonableness goes out the window and you can feel the petulance about how he’s been wronged.
Of course, we go back to Mr. Reasonable McCaveats at the start of the next section:
I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority.
He then goes on to make suggestions about how programs that help traditionally disenfranchised minorities should be dismantled because they’re discriminatory.
If you feel like you were gaslit, congratulations. That’s pretty much what happened. He insists that he’s pro-diversity, that he really wants to give everyone a fair chance, but he’s just constrained by what he views as immutable differences rooted in biology.
A lot of people are getting (rightly) caught up in a discussion about that biology. We did too. For just a moment, though, let’s pretend we agree that these differences exist and are rooted in biology, and that we care about diversity.
Let’s start with some basic (self-admitted precepts)
- The current representation of women in Google is about 30%
- There is overlap between men and women
- There are existing biases that affect women and other minorities in tech
Now let’s pretend to be him, acting in good faith. What kind of suggestions might we make?
Before we dive in, I want to take a tangent with this twitter thread.
Nowhere, not in a single line of that 10 page manifesto, does the author evince even a single bit of curiosity about what the right distribution of men and women in tech should be. He writes that we should “strive for more” but isn’t clear about what that is, but implies that parity (a 50/50 split) may be unreasonable because of differences.
Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.
It’s revealing, then, that his manifesto begins with a discussion of political biases and veers into paragraphs of criticism of the Left and the benefits society affords women.
Generally, it’s in bad taste to attribute a motive onto someone else’s writing—especially when it’s different than the stated motive—but this is really the heart of the matter:
The author is not truly, seriously interested or concerned about figuring out how to address disparities in tech. (Hell, he may not even realize this.)
The utter lack of interest in assessing what the distribution should be followed by the screed against the Left and the suggestion that programs that help minorities are “lowering the bar” are the equivalent of the suspect checking his nails. The author is instead bothered by a culture that he feels has left him out.
Why does recognizing this bad faith matter? Because it allows readers to realize they’re being gaslit when the author makes claims that diversity matters to soften the blow of claims that biology likely means women are worse coders.
Anyways, I don’t have anything else to say, so I’ll just close with this tweet.