I read the memo and didn't find it particularly persuasive; but this dismissal does further its core point. It's a bit tone deaf of Google to fire an employee concerned about groupthink.
This is not a workable argument against firing someone. If it were, all you'd have to do is say, "We have too much group-think here," followed by any egregiously awful statement, and you'd be insulated from consequences. That's just not how these things work.
I think any good argument against firing him has to hinge on the truth of what he said besides the group-think claims. Regrettably for him, I don't think there's much to most of it.
The truth of what he said has nothing to do with why he was fired. He was fired for not being politically correct and offending people, not because his arguments were right or wrong. People are usually most outraged by statements which are true or close to true but which they do not want to believe.
No, we're mostly offended by ideas that are false and actively harm people - like the entirely unproven notion that women suffer from biological weaknesses that make them less likely to be qualified as engineers.
> No, we're mostly offended by ideas that are false and actively harm people - like the entirely unproven notion that women suffer from biological weaknesses that make them less likely to be qualified as engineers.
All good, except he did not make that argument or anything similar to it. He did not state that women inherently suffer from biological weaknesses of any sort. And no, his ideas did not harm anyone (except perhaps indirectly himself). Literally nobody got hurt except him, he is the sole victim of the ordeal.
I hope that you have read the document in its original form, which is a PDF with some (admittedly weak) references.
But that is only because you did not study psychology in which case you would know that most things in that manifesto are scientifically proven and what he said does makes sense for women AS A GROUP not individually... :/
Posted on Google's private Google+ instance (which is very active). Pretty much like sharing it on an internal mailing list, or on Slack.
Seems like it must have gotten a few reshares to go viral enough for somebody to feel the need to leak it. I don't think we really know how widely it was read before it leaked though -- it might have been a big raging controversy inside Google, or it might not.
> Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. Richard et al (2003) found that fewer than 5% of all effects in social psychology exceeded r’s of .50. In contrast, nearly all consensual stereotype accuracy correlations and about half of all personal stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50.
