By David Futrelle
By now, you’ve probably heard about the so-called “Google Manifesto,” one anonymous Google dude’s ten-page anti-diversity rant that suggests, among other things, that women are somehow biologically unsuited to work in tech.
It’s hardly an original argument, but it’s one that has a lot of appeal to the sort of aggrieved tech dudebros who post a lot on Reddit — many of whom apparently also work at Google, where (Motherboard reports) the memo went “internally viral.”
Well, it turns out there’s a Yahoo! manifesto too — a bit shorter, to be sure, but equally revealing of the aggrieved male entitlement that permeates the tech world. The anonymous Yahoo! manifesto seems to have originated on 4chan’s technology board in 2012; it’s been posted on assorted manosphere-friendly sites since then, and cropped up today on alt-right fantasy author Theodore “Vox Day” Beale’s Alpha Game blog.
Take it away, anonymous shithead:
As a former employee of Yahoo!, I can say with absolute conviction that the majority of the problems with the company stemmed from too many women being involved in the first place. When I started in 1999, it was mostly guys. By the time I left last year, it seemed like it was easily 75 percent women.
Yeah, not quite. As of 2014, two years after this “manifesto” was written, only 37% of Yahoo!’s employees were women, with only a small percentage doing actual tech work. Studies suggest that men routinely overestimate the percentage of women in mixed groups. Even if Mr. Anonymous was exaggerating somewhat for effect, he’s dead wrong: women are vastly underrepresented at Yahoo!
No matter what job or position they were doing, they either were out on maternity leave half the time or just getting back therefrom. It was the most frustrating thing in the world to try to work with.
Yes, it’s true: working women spend literally half their time on maternity leave, after which they get pregnant again and push out a new baby one to three months later.
Have you ever gone to a meeting with six women and yourself as the only guy? You might as well not even turn up; nothing is going to get done, anyway. It’s just going to be an hour spent on irrelevant, tangential nonsense with no decision reached at the end.
Pretty sure this is every meeting ever, dude.
I wasn’t a misogynist before working there, but after seeing the company go from pretty good to total shit, and with it being directly related to the number of female employees fucking everything up, I kind of am now.
You ladies forced him to hate you!
Everything was awesome in the beginning; then they basically outsourced everything they could, brought in cheap labor, and took away 90 percent of the perks that the employees used to enjoy. Everyone of any value was replaced by H1Bs and women started to swell the ranks of middle management.
Ah, the inevitable racism has arrived!
It was just shitty decision after shitty decision, Who the fuck greenlit the goddamn Yahoo! Music engine? Terrible product. Then they fucked up Yahoo! Chat by taking away profiles and trying to force this worthless social networking Yahoo! 360 garbage that no one liked. Then they ruined the message boards and classifieds.
You know that most of those making high-level decisions at Yahoo! are still white dudes, right?
Yahoo!’s problem was that they got filled with a bunch of middle management useless twats who kept ‘fixing’ things that weren’t broken because they felt they had to justify the existence of their jobs.
Or maybe they’ve just never recovered from the success of Google? I’m frankly amazed the company still exists.
Rather than actually making improvements, they ‘improved’ their userbase away with a bunch of shitty changes that took away everything that anyone actually liked about the products.
Alter that, it was basically just hanging around collecting a paycheck and doing shitty work because I didn’t care. Everyone else was doing pretty much the same thing.
Sorry you hate your job, dude, but you really can’t blame women for that.
What really blew my mind was the Google guy rattling on about how women just weren’t as interested in building up their status as men. I was under the strange delusion that staff of both sexes were being paid to code, not build up their status??!
In a comment thread on this I found this gem: https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/08/05/too-op-girls-only-panel-metrocon-florida-scientist/
I’m so sick of STEM dudes right now.
But it seemed like it was easily 75 percent women.
And therefore it is.
Poor Tech Guy has a bad case of the misogynistic feels.
Listen, guy, maybe you ought to see someone about that.
As another former employee of Yahoo: this guy’s full of it. The company went from “pretty good to total shit” not for any reason related to diversity hiring, but simply because Google and Facebook squeezed it out of the market. (Rejecting the Microsoft buyout was a grave mistake, one committed, I should observe, by the male board members and not Carol Bartz who was the CEO at the time.)
But the issue here isn’t any particular asshole at any particular tech company. Misogyny and xenophobia have been baked into the culture of the technology industry over a fifty-year period, and, unfortunately, it’s going to take a generation to fix it. The default mindset of the white, male computer engineer is “I am very smart, always did well in school/on tests, and thus I am very successful: so if you are less successful than me, you must not be as smart or didn’t work hard along the way.” It’s a myopic worldview that presents our comfortable position as something that we earned by dint of advanced and rare abilities: a flattering illusion reinforced by tech’s insular, socially exclusionary culture where we tend only to talk to people like ourselves.
It’s not enough to point fingers at Google or Yahoo (or even possibly-more-deserving targets like Uber): we have to change the entire culture of tech. Until then there are going to be too many guys who think like this, not just at companies you’ve heard of, but at every technology company and department in the country.
@Kupo Well it’s good to know that Metrocon is in desperate need of panels in case I ever want to do any of mine there since they approved this nonsense. That is seriously the weirdest creepiest thing I could imagine through from start to finish and is also about the least STEM method of data collection I could possibly imagine.
Many Google employees say they feel their advanced skills are under-utilized. An employee might have a heavily research-oriented master’s degree or a PhD, but he or she ends up doing fairly basic coding on most projects. The academic literature supporting an innate gender disparity in STEM aptitude applies mostly to advanced research, like whether your PhD dissertation is recognized as an important contribution to the field, etc. Men and women do equally well in STEM courses up through the first year or two of graduate school when you’re mostly taking courses and not doing research. Evaluating someone’s research can be more influenced by bias and prejudice, and it’s much more difficult to compare two groups of people based on something like research aptitude.
Even by the standards of people who think there’s an innate disparity (and they’re on very shaky ground with that), it’s unlikely that would make much of a difference in a typical coding job at Google.
The big “myth” of tech culture is that people think they’re “naturally good” at coding and therefore deserve a privileged position in society. Hence the hostility to helpfulness, etc.
This isn’t a women and people of color in the workplace thing. This is a capitalism thing. Every job I’ve ever been at for any length of time has gotten worse as time goes on because all companies want to squeeze as much labor out of their employee as they can at the lowest price. This race to the bottom has been going on for decades.
My mom left the workforce in 1980 (yeah, women worked before 1999.
Who knew?!) was born to be a stay at mom and then later to go back to get a degree. When she reentered the workforce in the early 90’s she was shocked by how much worse working conditions were than in the 70s.
I can not think of anything more hypocritical than the same libertarian tech bros who oppose any kind of law or regulation that protects workers having the gall to whine about the degradation of working conditions over the last couple of decades and then blaming it on women. The lack of self awareness here is just staggering.
Since I was mocking Jerry’s lack of science 101 know how in the Cassie Jaye thread, I will do the same to this Yahoo.*
Correlation is not causation. Correlation is not causation. Correlation is not causation. Just because you noticed more women around the office, does not mean the presence of women in the company is the cause of the company’s problems. He did not provide a speck of causal evidence here. He just said things at Yahoo used to be good, then women came to work here, then things were bad. Therefore, women are bad! Can tech bros please for the love of Katie stop claiming that they are superior at all things STEM because PENIS** if they’re not going to display even the most cursory knowledge of how science works.
* Not my best funny. Sorry.
** I’m aware that not all penis havers are men and not all men have a penis, but douchebag misogynist STEMlords tend not to be and they really do seem to think that a penis has the power to give them all sorts of virtues and abilities.
Yonatan Zunger, on medium.com (which won’t give me a link URL; huh?) is a former Google employee with a lovely (lengthy) response to the Man-ifesto.
This is not even just a problem with Google or with the tech industry. Of course, drudge work needs to be done by someone. But at least in the US (can’t speak to workplace culture elsewhere) hierarchy seems to be considered the most important thing of all. Management tends not to trust employees enough to consider their feedback on how to improve things. They don’t trust them to have a little control over how they do their work. They don’t look at each individual employee, evaluate their strengths and give them tasks tailored to those strengths. They just want employees to shut up and do as their told with a smile. A lot of talent and skill is left unutilized and undeveloped because of the toxicity of workplace culture.
@WWTH:
BINGO. And as long as it keeps on going, the workplace is gonna keep on suckin’.
Unfortunately, twice as hard for women as for this whiny white broflake.
I got to the part about “Women like to deal with people more, this is a biotroof” and just skiiiiiimmed. I also enjoyed the “no more empathy! We need to be logical and un-engaged to be able to evaluate problems.”
>:C
Ugh.
Some companies can have their employees do really interesting projects. But, by and large, you’ll see lots of stuff that just requires basic coding skills. That’s partly management culture and partly the emphasis on skills you can learn by rote in the educational system (both of those issues probably go back to capitalism).
It would help somewhat if computer science programs focused more on programming language design theory, math, collaboration/helpfulness culture, and grading students more based on open-ended coding projects the students are personally interested in as opposed to exams or projects with a pre-written specification. I don’t think exams or “challenge projects” are bad, but it’s not good to assign so much weight to them in grading.
@eataTREE
I would argue that we change the culture by pointing fingers at Google, Yahoo!, Uber, and every other company with sexist cultures. We can’t expect anything to change without pointing out what needs to change. And nothing will change until we make them extremely visible and hold them accountable.
Honestly you’re getting awfully close to being patronizing to us about how we need to deal with the sexism problem in tech and my patience is very short today.
I’m so glad I get a week off from techbros right now.
Edit: @Rhuu
As a woman who has difficulty reading people and gets extremely drained from daily interactions, I want to scream into a pillow every time this false assumption is made.
@Kupo: Internet hugs if wanted.
@Rhuu
I has wine now. And Red Dwarf (thanks, Valentine!). And wine-infused cheese. And now puppy hugs! And snek donuts!
http://i.imgur.com/pzRZvTw.jpg
Natasha:
Is this it?
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788
@kupo
Oh gawd they’re so adorable!
Looks like I dodged a plutonium-cased bullet. I’ve always done well in STEM subjects, loved math, and loved computer programming even more. Started out with a Commodore Vic-20 and learned BASIC, I was about half-way through teaching myself machine language and basic Boolean algebra (at age 12-ish) when hormone-induced depression started and I just gave up on most things.
I don’t even want to imagine what being a trans-woman in that environment would be like! Although I’m guessing it would taste like suicide in fairly short order.
@Jesalin
Hugs to you.
Today I learned that snake donuts are a thing. (If they’re real?)
That’s a whole nother level of cute, creepy, and delicious. Also amazing level of detail. Beautiful.
I’ve got a haunted house group who would probably love to see that in person 🙂
@JS
They’re real snakes. Their coloring makes them look like donuts. Plus that pen they’re in looks a little like a baking sheet.
Same beginnings as Jesalin: VIC-20, BASIC, etc. Only I kept at it up to, and including, an undergraduate degree. Then came job-hunting, whence I discovered that I was … ta-da! … surplus to requirements. Almost every position being advertised wanted 5 years of industry experience. The rest, pretty much all of them that were in my area (which was a tech hub, though not Silicon Valley itself), I sent off to … and never heard anything back. Sank without a ripple. Not so much as one interview, let alone, say, an actual career-track tech job.
I suppose if I hadn’t been roundly ignored by every tech company hiring in my area, I’d probably be a brogrammer now, so maybe it was for the best. 🙂
@ jesalin & surplus
We should do all our posts in 22 x 20 character format.
@Surplus
I know what you mean. Everyone wants 5+ years experience for junior level jobs. I only got the job I just left because I interned with them, and then once I’d gained a couple of years experience was able to have some other companies take my resume seriously. Most of them still rejected immediately or never responded, though. If you’re still looking, a third party recruiting company, but not the kind that does contract BS, could help you get noticed.