Google's Ideological Echo Chamber

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Google's Ideological Echo Chamber (Google's ideological echo chamber ), often Google memo referred to, is an internal memo that the US Google - engineer James Damore about the ideological attitude of the company towards the diversity was written. In the memo, Damore stated that, in his view, Google was preventing a discussion on how to deal with diversity and justified his view that gender inequality in cutting-edge technology was partly due to biological differences between men and women. Damore also made suggestions on how women working in software development could be promoted. Google CEO Sundar Pichai saw the memo as a perpetuation of harmful gender stereotypes and fired Damore on August 7, 2017 for violating the company's code of conduct . The memo and the dismissal received wide coverage in the mass media and public discussion.

content

The memo began with the following theses :

  • Google's political tendency equates freedom from attacks with psychological security, but the need to remain silent is the antithesis of psychological security.
  • This pacification creates an ideological echo chamber in which some dogmas are too sacred to be openly discussed.
  • The lack of discussion promotes an extreme and authoritarian expression of this ideology:
  • Differences in the distribution of certain gender-specific characteristics could partly explain why there is no equal representation of women in technology and management.
  • Discrimination to achieve equal distribution is unfair, divisive and bad for the economy.

In his memorandum, Damore expressed the opinion that the ideological orientation of Google clouded thinking about diversity and integration and thus stood in the way of diversity. He wrote: "The distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differs in part due to biological causes, and these differences may explain why we do not see women represented to the same extent in technology and management." According to Damore, these differences were due to this that women are more socially inclined, oriented towards consensus and collaboration . Men, on the other hand, are more interested in systematic thinking and therefore perhaps have more direct access to programming, and they are definitely more fixated on " status " and its symbols. Women, on the other hand, would rather strive for a work-life balance and, instead of spending day and night at work, would rather work part-time. Damore suggested changes to Google to better suit the needs of women, such as: B. pair programming , improving work-life balance, promoting part-time work, etc. a. Damore also spoke out in favor of a cultural change: empathy should be given less value, instead the benefit of emotional independence should be used, gender-specific programs and courses should be discontinued because of their divisive effect.

Course of events

Damore said he wrote the memo while on a flight to China after participating in a diversity program on Google. This program was disappointing, the attempt to discuss it in his peer group was unsuccessful. The memo was dated July 2017 and was originally distributed via an internal mailing list . It was made public in the first week of August and sparked a controversial discussion on social media . Google officially made it clear not to stand behind the document. Several current and former employees expressed criticism . According to Wired, there was also support for Damore in the internal forums at Google.

On August 7, 2017, Damore was released without notice.

Danielle Brown, Vice President Diversity & Governance, commented on the memo on Aug. 8, 2017: “Part of building an open, inclusive environment is promoting a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, can share feel confident in their opinions. However, this discourse must follow the principles of equal employment opportunities, formulated in the code of conduct, our guidelines and the anti-discrimination laws. "

Damore gave one of his first interviews to the Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson on his YouTube channel. In doing so, he justified his considerations on gender and minority policy within the company Google exclusively with scientific evidence.

A Google employee meeting originally scheduled for August 11th was canceled at short notice by Google boss Sundar Pichai, who justified this in an internal email with concerns about the safety of employees. Information about several employees who wanted to ask questions at the meeting had already been posted on ultra-conservative websites in the United States.

background

Like many of its competitors, Google is currently struggling to increase the low percentage of women in the workforce . It is 31% across the group, but only a fifth in technical functions. The US Department of Labor has been on trial against Google since April 2017, alleging that the company systematically discriminates against women. Early 2017 told a judge the company, pay stubs disclosed. On September 14, 2017, three former Google employees filed a lawsuit for “systematic and ubiquitous discrimination” in a court in San Francisco : women would be paid less at Google with the same “ competence , experience and position ”. They would also be offered fewer promotions than their male counterparts. At the beginning of 2019 it became known that women employed by Google sometimes earn better than their male colleagues.

A negative example is the US driving service broker Uber , which had run into a leadership crisis in the previous months after reports of the lax handling of complaints about sexual harassment cases came to the public. The topic is also present in the Silicon Valley investor scene following a lawsuit filed by a former junior partner for discrimination against her employer at the time, the venture capital company Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers .

reception

science

Numerous scientists with expertise u. a. in sex sciences , evolutionary biology , biology , sociology , psychology , neurology and gender studies have commented on the content of the memo; their assessments are partly contrary. The spectrum ranges from the confirmation that Damore has plausibly justified his considerations with specialist articles to complete contradiction. In many cases, restrictions are formulated; the studies used would be fundamentally valid, but would e.g. B. illuminate only parts of the relevant aspects or would not be representative of the social structure in the company Google. It has also been mentioned several times that inferring average values ​​about individuals is not helpful when there is a wide range of characteristics.

The British sociologist Catherine Hakim , with whose studies Damore et al. a. justified his theses, said according to The Guardian, for example, that their theses were reproduced correctly, but that "the attempt to link them to professional life is nonsense".

Damore had also gone too far for the Estonian psychologist Jüri Allik, to whom Damore had referred, by extrapolating from Allik's study of personality variations across countries; it is risky to link average personality traits with topics such as career choice. Incidentally, according to Allik's research, the gender-specific differences are "very, very small", if not "microscopic".

Jordan Peterson , Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto , interviewed Damore on Youtube . He said that in his opinion Darmore's theses were supported by scientific evidence and that the memo was not an anti-diversity manifesto in his eyes .

Lee Jussim , professor of social psychology at Rutgers University , wrote that “the author of the Google essay on the problem of diversity got all of science and its implications just right”, including: “Neither left nor right got it right” and that there is an “authoritarian and repressive atmosphere” to discuss the topic.

According to Caryl Rivers of Boston University and Rosalind Barnett of Brandeis University , Damore implies that stress and anxiety are inherent female personality traits . In reality, however, these are due to the lack of pressure and discrimination among men. For example, the 2008 study "The Athena Factor", which was supported by large companies, showed that in male-dominated areas women in high positions were more severely sanctioned than men when they failed and, unlike men, were not given a second chance.

Jonathan Haidt , professor of ethical leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business and Sean Stevens , director of research at Heterodox Academy , confirmed that Damore was correct in that the sexes were different, but that it was "extremely important" distinguish between interest / pleasure and abilities . They also said such a conclusion would not deny the existence of harassment and discouragement in Silicon Valley, nor its impact on earnings disparities.

According to David P. Schmitt , personality psychologist and author in the popular science journal Psychology Today , he believes that there are “gender differences in negative emotionality” and that this is “not a false assumption about gender”, but “ empirically well supported”. However, these differences would probably not be particularly large and irrelevant for a job at Google. He went on to say, “Reducing an entire group of personalities to one's biological sex is like surgical operation with an ax. Not accurate enough to do a lot of good, however, is likely to cause a lot of damage. In addition, men are more emotional than women in certain situations. The differences in emotions also depend on the type of feeling, how it is measured, where it is expressed, when it is expressed, and many other contextual factors. How all of this fits into the Google workplace is unclear to me. "

Peter Singer , professor of bioethics at Princeton University and honorary professor at Melbourne University , saw the content of the manifesto supported by "serious articles published in leading scientific journals ," but said that some of these studies were not without controversy. Regarding Damore's resignation, he said: "It is not necessary to decide which page is correct, just whether Damore's view is one that a Google employee can express. I think it is one."

Cynthia Lee, lecturer in the computer science department at Stanford University , thought that the memo on Vox was dangerous because of its "quasi-professional" nature, because it made it seem so well-founded for many. Damore's statements are not supported by his scientific evidence: He does not only consider personality differences that are too biologically given at the expense of influences of the social environment, he ultimately also emphasizes that the differences only relate to average men and women. It is contradicting that Damore puts the focus on Google with regard to average differences - which only recruits the best developers directly from the universities. Only 19% of Google developers are female. At Stanford University - with one of the most renowned computer science faculties worldwide with more Turing Awards and Than any other university - the proportion of female computer science students is significantly higher at 30%.

According to UNSW professor Renée Adams and Vanitha Ragunathan from the University of Queensland , the gender differences mentioned by Damore would be correct in relation to the total population, inferring from this about the Google workforce , where an average of 200 applicants are checked for each new hiring , but incorrect. “Typical” differences could even be reversed in selected groups: They referred to research, according to which z. For example, self-regulation and stimulability are more pronounced in average men , while security and tradition are more important for average women . In contrast, these differences were found to be exactly the opposite for managers of both sexes.

Geoffrey Miller , evolutionary biologist at the University of New Mexico , wrote in Quillette magazine : "If you ask me, I think that most of the empirical claims in the Google Memo are scientifically correct." However, Damore had relativized the possibility of deriving maxims from it himself "Many of these differences are small and there is a significant overlap between men and women, it is not that is possible, from statements about the population of individuals to close."

Georgina Rippon , a psychophysiologist at Aston University , contradicted Miller to the BBC . In their opinion, Damore did not understand the scientists, the basis of his argument would be wrong. “I don't know who he's read,” she replied, “it's one of those areas where science may develop faster than communication about it. He seems to want to suggest that because something is biological, it cannot be changed. ”Rippon suggested that spatial perception - often seen as an aspect where male and female brains differ - could be influenced by computer games . And more computer games or a different environment could have an effect on an individual brain.

Susanne Ihsen , Professor of Gender Studies at the Technical University of Munich , called Damore's theses “crude assumptions and worldviews” that “would not stand up to any scientific examination” in a survey by the weekly Markt & Technik magazine. In their opinion, his assumptions were "neither in biology, neurology, medicine, nor in the historical sciences, ethnology, sociology or in gender research" any justification.

An analysis of the memo on Quora by Suzanne Sadedin , evolutionary biologist and specialist in biodiversity and sociocultural evolution at the KU Leuven , was e.g. B. The Economist , USA Today , The Guardian and The Observer . According to her understanding, Damore implies that cognitive traits must be either biological (i.e., innate, natural, and immutable) or non-biological (i.e., learned). According to Sadedin, this “plant versus environment” dichotomy would be completely out of date. Rather, modern research is based on the more biologically based view that neurological features develop over time under the simultaneous influence of epigenetic , genetic and environmental influences. Everything about people goes hand in hand with both the plant and the environment.

Press

The memo and the reactions to it were extensively commented on internationally and in the entire German-language press . The memo itself was perceived as sexist by most of the leading German media . Criticism of the German media focused primarily on the company's reaction to prevent a necessary discussion of the theses by dismissing the employee.

Debra W. Soh, Ph.D. for sexual neuroscience , commented on the memo in The Globe and Mail, Canada, as "fair and factual." She argued that scientific studies found "gender differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behavior." In addition, prenatal testosterone would correlate with “a predilection for mechanically interesting things and jobs in adulthood”, which could explain the higher percentage of men in technology-related fields.

Jochen Bittner explained in a column for Die Zeit why, in his opinion, it is not sexism to talk about the different interests of men and women. He polemicized with reference to the Hjernevask series : while, according to gender researchers, differences “can be traced back to social imprinting” and the “brain structure” is “not to be taken seriously” as a cause, evolutionary biologists in the USA could “impress” even infants with “research results” would show gender responses. Bittner stated that David Brooks had already "come to the conclusion" that "in the dispute over genetic or social imprinting, evolutionary biologists had won the day." Ergo, it is "pretty silly" to "get excited" about the mention of differences. The different character is not only good, "even better" is the "claim" to perceive individuals "with all interests, talents and arguments" before a judgment is made.

In the Wirtschaftswoche , Lin Freitag thought it was a mistake that the author of what she saw as a “sexist manifesto” was dismissed: “Companies have to endure crude debates.” The network columnist Angela Gruber also thought it was “the wrong signal” in Spiegel Online , that the Google employee was fired, because that "should only confirm his allegation from the point of view of his supporters". She comments: "When a pseudoscientific , pseudo-intellectual and in some places irritating pseudo-tolerant text by a simple employee makes such waves, it throws a sad light on the poor overall situation in the tech industry in terms of diversity."

Michael Hanfeld wrote in the FAZ : “You can read your letter either way - as half-baked, paternalistic , as an attempt at mediation, as a lament from someone who sees his and the skins of his ' class ' (older, white men) floating away, or as Challenge. ... The women, not only at Google, would be better served by questioning a memo like this 'Manifesto' point by point, so that the men really get the ' gender gap ' at the next salary negotiation . "

In the weekly newspaper Die Zeit , Robert Franken pondered whether "the nerds are afraid of losing their status". In his view, the manifesto shows: “Some fear for their privileges . As offensive as the statements are, we have to take them seriously. "

“I've rarely read anything bigger than that.” Jessica Tomala confessed in GIGA magazine and came to the point that “The Google developer… seems to have not yet understood that stereotypes are simply out in the evolving society in which we live . "" The outrage over the sexist memo by a Google employee obscures the view of structural problems in the technology industry. "Wrote Catharina Felke in Die Zeit , because" they also exist in Germany. "

Nina Bovensiepen commented on the memo in the Süddeutsche Zeitung : “The anti-feminist manifesto of the Google employee is backward and stupid. He only gets approval because he expresses the fears of many white men about the changes in the work environment. "

Stefan Paravicini wrote in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung : “In Silicon Valley there is rightly no mercy for crude gender-specific prejudices. In view of the moderate success of efforts to increase diversity in its own workforce, however, Google should also be open to voices from outside the echo chamber. "

Belinda Grasnick saw a misogynist polemic in the taz in the document that clearly shows what opinions there are still about women in the industry. But she also noticed that the document had sparked a discussion within Silicon Valley .

In a gloss in Die Welt , Anett Selle said that one could justify in the same style why men are fundamentally bad journalists because of their physical structure and lower language skills .

Criticism of the reporting

In a guest column in the New York Times, David Brooks described the coverage of the Google Memo as "horrific": "The coverage of the memo has been atrocious". The mob that was currently chasing Damore would be like the mobs that were last seen on the (American) campuses .

Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic that he could not remember the last time so many recipients and appraisers of a text could wrongly characterize so many aspects, even though everyone had access to it.

Marc Felix Serrao commented on the course of the debate in the NZZ as a wave of shrill outrage almost simultaneously followed by Damore's freestyle through " Conservatives and libertarians ... to their new hero ". With reference to the anthropologist Peter Wood, he wrote that a permanent focus on group identities and their history jeopardizes social unity, since the focus is then on what separates instead of what unites. Serrao put forward the thesis that diversity had "produced fear-filled intellectual simplicity" and that contradiction was "not desired". Damore's dismissal is likely to increase the pressure to allow a debate.

aftermath

On January 8, 2018, James Damore filed a lawsuit against Google. In his opinion, Google uses "illegal employment quotas to meet the desired percentage of women and preferred minorities." Damore saw himself " discriminated as a conservative , white and man " by the termination . In this context, the journalist Kathrin Werner pointed out that in 2017 the quota of men in technical professions at Google was 80% and managers were 75% male and 68% white. According to the Süddeutsche , observers are "concerned that Damore's way of thinking is actually not uncommon within the tech scene," where women are often victims of sexism and harassment , especially in Silicon Valley . At the same time as Damore's lawsuit, the company has to deal with an investigation by the US Department of Labor that accuses Google of discriminating against women.

In three months after his release interview, the Guardian with Damore and his partner, one as Data Scientistin working at Google feminist , led Damore the controversy surrounding the memo part to its autism-related difficulty to represent relationships verbally back. He believes that "he has a problem understanding how his words would be interpreted by others." If he could turn back time, he would likely write the memo differently. He also presented the numerous interviews for which he chose protagonists of the anti-feminist and alt-right scene such as B. Peter Duke or Milo Yiannopoulos available. The interviewers use it to project their own positions; Damore has since admitted that he "wasn't really adept enough in some interviews to argue."

See also

Web links

Sources in the memo

James Damore cited the following sources in his memo:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Samantha Schmidt: 'I'm not a sexist': Fired Google engineer stands behind controversial memo. In: The Washington Post . August 12, 2017, accessed August 12, 2017 .
  2. ^ Ashley Feinberg: Internal Messages Show Some Googlers Supported Fired Engineer's Manifesto . In: Wired . August 8, 2017.
  3. ^ Sarah Emerson: Google on Anti-Diversity Manifesto: Employees Must 'Feel Safe Sharing Their Opinions' . In: Vice . August 5, 2017. Archived from the original on August 6, 2017.
  4. ↑ Nora Schareika: Alt-Right likes James Damore . In: n-tv , August 10, 2017
  5. ↑ Google cancels employee meetings on gender text . In: Handelsblatt , August 11, 2017
  6. ^ A b c Stefan Paravicini: Google throws engineers out of the "echo chamber" . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , August 8, 2017
  7. ↑ Sam Levin: Google accused of 'extreme' gender pay discrimination by the US labor department . In: The Guardian , April 7, 2017
  8. ↑ Sam Levin: Google told to hand over salary details in gender equality court battle . In: The Guardian , July 17, 2017
  9. ↑ Former employees are suing Google In: Die Zeit , September 15, 2017
  10. ↑ Benedikt Fuest: Google pays women better . In: THE WORLD . March 6, 2019 ( welt.de [accessed August 18, 2020]).
  11. ^ A b c Paul Lewis: 'I see things differently': James Damore on his autism and the Google memo . In: The Guardian . 16th November 2017.
  12. ^ A b The Google Memo: Four Scientists Respond. In: Quillette. August 7, 2017, accessed on August 12, 2017 .
  13. ↑ a b c David Brooks : Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google's CEO In: New York Times , August 11, 2017
  14. ↑ Prof: Google memo that correct about gender differences. In: Campus Reform. August 14, 2017, accessed on August 16, 2017 .
  15. ^ Caryl Rivers , Rosalind Barnett : We've studied gender and STEM for 25 years. The science doesn't support the Google memo. In: recode , August 11, 2017
  16. ^ Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Carolyn Buck Luce, Lisa J. Servon, Laura Sherbin, Peggy Shiller, Eytan Sosnovich, Karen Sumberg: The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology . . In: Harvard Business Review 2008
  17. ↑ Jonathan Haidt, Sean Stevens: The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say About Gender Differences? In: Heterodox Academy. August 11, 2017. Retrieved August 12, 2017 .
  18. ↑ David P. Schmitt: On That Google Memo About Sex Differences. In: Psychology Today. August 7, 2017, accessed on August 12, 2017 .
  19. ^ Brian Feldman: Here Are Some Scientific Arguments James Damore Has Yet to Respond To. In: Select All. August 11, 2017. Retrieved August 12, 2017 .
  20. ↑ Peter Singer : Why Google was wrong. In: Daily News . August 10, 2017, accessed on August 12, 2017 .
  21. ↑ Cynthia Bailey Lee at the academic literature search engine Google Scholar
  22. ↑ Cynthia Lee: I'm a woman in computer science. Let me ladysplain the Google memo to you. In: Vox , August 11, 2017
  23. ↑ Vanitha Ragunathan at the University of Queensland
  24. ↑ Renée Adams , Vanitha Ragunathan: The Google Diversity Memo: It's still stereotyping — just not the way you think it is! In: Quillette. August 11, 2017. Retrieved August 13, 2017 .
  25. ↑ Renée Adams : Women on boards: The superheroes of tomorrow? In: Leadership Quarterly , 2016 Vol. 27, pp. 371–386, doi: 10.1016 / j.leaqua.2015.11.001
  26. ↑ Nalina Eggert: What Google wrong to fire James Damore after memo controversy? In: BBC , August 9, 2017
  27. ↑ Corinne Schindlbeck: Of course that's sexist! . In: Markt & Technik , August 8, 2017
  28. ↑ Letter from Alphabet . In: The Economist , August 15, 2015
  29. ↑ Elizabeth Weise: Women coders respond to ex-Googler Damore: Nope. In: USA Today , August 16, 2017
  30. ↑ Sam Levin: James Damore, Google, and the YouTube radicalization of angry white men . In: The Guardian , August 13, 2017
  31. ↑ A Scientist Responds to Claims About Women, Diversity in Google Memo . In: The Observer , August 16, 2017
  32. ↑ Suzanne Sadedin : What do scientists think about the biological claims made in the document about diversity written by a Google employee in August 2017? In: Quora , August 11, 2017
  33. ↑ Debra Soh: No, the Google manifesto isn't sexist or anti-diversity. It's science. In: The Globe and Mail . August 8, 2017, accessed August 12, 2017 .
  34. ↑ Jochen Bittner : Men and women are just different. In: The time . August 17, 2017. Retrieved August 17, 2017 .
  35. ↑ Lin Freitag: Google, we need to talk . In: Wirtschaftswoche , August 10, 2017
  36. ↑ Angela Gruber: Of course better . In: Spiegel Online , August 8, 2017
  37. ↑ Michael Hanfeld : How men are like that . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , August 11, 2017
  38. ↑ Robert Franken: Are the nerds afraid of losing their status? . In: Die Zeit , August 9, 2017
  39. ↑ Jessica Tomala: Google and Misogyny . In: GIGA , August 8, 2017
  40. ↑ Catharina Felke: Abysses do not only exist in Silicon Valley . In: Die Zeit , August 10, 2017
  41. ↑ Nina Bovensiepen : The white men from Google . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , August 9, 2017
  42. ↑ Belinda Grasnick: Sexism lives on in Silicon Valley . In: the daily newspaper , August 11, 2017
  43. ↑ Anett Selle: All men are bad journalists . In: Die Welt , 10 August 2017
  44. ^ Conor Friedersdorf: The Most Common Error in Media Coverage of the Google Memo . In: The Atlantic , August 8, 2017
  45. ↑ Marc Felix Serrao: Diversity produces a fear-filled intellectual simplicity . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , August 19, 2017
  46. ↑ Application, E-FILED1 / 8/2018 9:43 AM, Clerk of Court, Superior Court of CA, County of Santa Clara, 18CV321529
  47. ↑ a b Google developer sues against dismissal due to sexism. In: sueddeutsche.de . January 9, 2018, accessed January 9, 2018 .
  48. ↑ a b Kathrin Werner: James Damore . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . January 9, 2018.