How most reacted to the “Googler’s Manifesto” is alarming
An internal document written by James Damore, a now ex-Google engineer, is making headlines. The document is titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” and its subtitle reads “How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion.” This is a brief recap of my late evening reading:
- One of the first articles to break the news is titled “Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral’” The very first paragraph of this “Anti-Diversity Manifesto” is
“I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes,” and goes on to say
“open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document.”
Maybe James Damore is trying to mask his intolerance with fluffy words. Or maybe it’s plain old irony. Sweet sweet irony. - The most prominently featured post on my Medium feed today was Yonatan Zunger, also an ex-Goolger, commenting on the news. The first of the three points he tries to make is that
“the (document’s) author does not appear to understand gender.”
Despite it being the first point, Yonatan doesn’t dwell long on it. He simply concludes,
“if anyone wishes to provide details as to how nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect, and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it.”
Now to be fair, the main takeaways of the post is in the latter two points. The first point was probably only used as a device. However, I was in awe of how strong of an opinion he can have while readily admitting that he is “neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist.” - One of the top responses in Yonatan’s post led me to post written by Sophia Eng. She uses statistics that “average women programmer makes nearly 30% less than male programmers” to strengthen the premise of her post, which she got from a Fortune article. The article, in turn, got its numbers from a study conducted by Glassdoor. The study itself seemed reliable; it was based on 505,000+ salaries and found that the gender pay gap is around 5.4% after statistical adjustments, which is in line with other meta studies. I was quite fascinated to see that, indeed, the study found a pay gap of 28.3% for computer programmers after adjustment. So I dug deeper into the study’s appendix. There I found that salaries lumped into the “computer programmers” category showed a pay gap of 28.3% from a sample size of 138, while “software engineers” showed a pay gap of “6%” from a sample size of 35,050.



The point I’m trying to make is that, I was surprised to see so many people outright dismissing James’ arguments. Not many seemed to truly contemplate on the matter from both sides. Most seem to be okay with not doing any of their own research beyond the first page of a Google search. Some were even quick to attack James’ character. It’s quite terrifying, actually.
To an extent, I get it. For media companies like Vice and Gizmodo, clicks matter. Whatever headline that will rake in the most views will be picked. They will continue to sensationalize issues and gloss over the intricacies of the matter. They will cater to the taste of one type of readership, while dismissing any evidence that goes against their narrative. Authors on Medium are kind of like media companies too. They need recommendations and shares to build clout. So again, I get it.
But when we’re not working for a company or for our online alter egos, when we are fully our own self in our own safe place, we can do better.
We can be open to being wrong. We can try look at the hard data. We can try to listen to multiple perspectives and truly contemplate on them. Always being right in an echo chamber is much scarier than being wrong sometimes. Well, that’s what I think at least.
For those who are actually interested in the science behind all of this, I would suggest reading through this article, but with fair warning: It is quite long. If you start, don’t stop midway. Please read through the entirety of it, including the three comments at the end.
Edit: I do not mean to dismiss everything in the two aforementioned Medium posts. I’m nitpicking small details in them to advance my own message. But that’s kind of the point. In a somewhat ironic way I guess.
