Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion
go/pc-considered-harmful
James Damore - damore@
July 2017
Feel free to comment (they aren’t disabled, the doc may just be overloaded).
For longer form discussions e g/pc-harmful-discuss借景抒情的作文
reduceReply to public respon and misreprentation 1
TL;DR 2 Background 2 Google’s bias 2 Possible non bias caus of the gender gap in tech 3 Personality differences 4
Men’s higher drive for status 5
Non discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap 5
The harm of Google’s bias 6
Why we’re blind 7 Suggestions 8
Reply to public respon and misreprentation
I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that xism exists, and don’t endor using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in reprentation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can't have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.
Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our culture of shaming and misreprentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber.
Despite what the public respon ems to have been, I've gotten many†personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up the very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend becau of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired. This needs to change.
TL;DR
●Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offen with psychological safety,
but shaming into silence is the antithesis of p sychological safety.
●This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too
sacred to be honestly discusd.
●The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this
ideology.
大中国歌词○ Extreme: all disparities in reprentation are due to oppression
○Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
●Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we
don't have 50% reprentation of women in tech and leadership.
●Discrimination to reach equal reprentation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.
Background1
People generally have good intentions, but we all have bias which are invisible to us. Thankfully, open and honest discussion with tho who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document2. Google has veral bias and honest discussion about the bias is being silenced by the dominant ideology. What follows is by no means the complete story, but it’s a perspective that desperately needs to be told at Google.
Google’s bias
At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral bias. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus bias. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine the prejudices:
___________________________________________________________________________
妆前乳的正确使用顺序1 T his document is mostly written from the perspective of Google’s Mountain View campus, I can’t speak about other offices or countries.
2 O f cour, I may be biad and only e evidence that supports my viewpoint. In terms of political bias, I consider mylf a c lassical liberal a nd strongly value i ndividualism and reason. I'd be very happy to discuss any of the document further and provide more citations.
Neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society or, in this ca, company. A company too far to the right may be slow to react, overly hierarchical, and untrusting of others. In contrast, a company too far to the left will constantly be changing (deprecating much loved rvices), over diversify its interests (ignoring or being ashamed of its core business), and overly trust its employees and competitors.
Only facts and reason can shed light on the bias, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming disnters into silence. T his silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies. For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal reprentation.
Possible non-bias caus of the gender gap in tech3 At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit bias are holding women back in tech and leadership. Of cour, 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.
On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. The differences aren’t just socially constructed becau:
● They’re universal across human cultures
● They often have clear biological caus and links to prenatal testosterone
● Biological males that were castrated at birth and raid as females often still identify
and act like males
● The underlying traits are highly heritable
● They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that the differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological caus and that the differences may explain why we don’t e equal reprentation of women in tech and leadership. Many of the differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given the population level distributions.
____________________________________________________________________________ 3 Throughout the document, by “tech”, I mostly mean software engineering.
Personality differences
来了天使们Women, on average, have more:
●Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally盐酸伊托必利片
also have a stronger interest in p eople rather than things, relative to men (also
interpreted as e mpathizing vs. systemizing).
○The two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or a rtistic areas. More men may like coding becau it requires systemizing and even
within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both
people and aesthetics.
●Extraversion expresd as gregariousness rather than asrtiveness. Also, higher
agreeableness.
○This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for rais, speaking up, and leading. Note that the are just average differences
and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is en solely as a
women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men
without support.
●N euroticism(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.
Note that contrary to what a social constructionist would argue, r earch suggests t hat "greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits." Becau as “society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality traits becomes wider.” We need to s top assuming that gender gaps imply xism.
健身房练腿Men’s higher drive for status
We always ask why we don't e women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we e so many men in the jobs. The positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.
Status is the primary metric that men are judged on4, pushing many men into the higher paying, le
ss satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cau men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and s uffer 93% of
work-related deaths.
Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap Below I'll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous ction and suggest ways to address them to increa women's reprentation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of the areas, but I think it's still instructive to list them:
●Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
○We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how
people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive
ourlves or students into thinking otherwi (some of our programs to get
female students into coding might be doing this).
二苯胺●Women on average are more cooperative
○Allow tho exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there's more we can do.
○This doesn't mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google.
Competitiveness and lf reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn't
necessarily disadvantage tho that have them, like w hat's been done in
education.
●Women on average are more prone to anxiety
____________________________________________________________________________ 4 For heteroxual romantic relationships, m en are more strongly judged by status and women by beauty. Again, this has b iological o rigins and is culturally universal.
