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.
Alan, more specifically,
Your eyes see the “H1B” shapes: some sorta lines (mostly vertical, two horizontal) and some roundeybobs on the end. That’s coming from the retina into the occipital lobe by way of midbrain shenanigans. By the time those lines and curves are starting to resolve into an assemblage of shapes (not yet letters, but recogniseable as constructs-of-primitives) occipital neurons have fired off into other areas of the neocortex. Some of those areas are responsible for language recognition (temporal lobe nonsense), others are visual, some are spooky-conceptual-stuff.
Some of that spooky conceptual stuff is MRA-related, which would have already been firing away from reading the article (or seeing the particular combination of black border/white field website layout, these fonts, and these images, with these screen names, etc). These neurons, being active, are easier and more quick to fire (provided that they are not fatigued). This all is assembled and routed into short term memory formation, with the MRA-stuff arriving first. Because those neurons are already primed and firing, it’s a recency effect – you’re already thinking about it, so it more easily connects itself to whatever other things your brain generates at the time.
Then there’s some double-spooky stuff going on as your wernike and broca’s zones turn all of that into language. I’m pretty sure that involves dictionary ghosts, but I’m not sure.
Short form: You’re right, it’s all association. Bad news, though, everything is association. you’re also right that, if you encountered it on a website about pencils you’d think it was referring to a type of pencil. You could also think that if you were recently looking at a pencil, or if the border off the page was a particular yellow that reminded you of a pencil, or if you could smell graphite.
Brains are weird, guys, for really real.
Snakes are adorable!
I don’t have if it says anything bad about me, but I tend to love carnivorous and predatory creatures. Including the much maligned shark.
Felines are obviously the best and cutest predator but raptors, snakes and sharks are great too.
Also, i lov donut snek. I lov danger noodle. I do him a boop.
Darn you, Kupo, now I want to make pastries that look like snakes.
Cinnamon rolls with heads might look a bit like a ball python maybe…
*wanders off grumbling to browse cookbooks*
@ scildfreja
I do find it amazing how much of perception is just a quick sensory scan of a few key data points, then our brains fill in the gaps on a sort of ‘best guess’ basis.
Still that’s where all the cool stuff like optical illusions comes from. And on a more practical note a lot of art and ways of presenting media.
Well, considering I just fell for a suggestion that actual snakes were donuts that looked like snakes, I guess I’m an example of perception cuing.
Ah well, at least I’m not a bad example.
I really thought those snakes were donuts for a moment. Maybe I was just hungry?
They are totally beautiful snakes; they look like they’re burnished with gold.
What’s the evolutionary advantage of looking like confectionery?!
@Alan
I actually figured this out on my own as a kid before I was ever taught how perception works. I have a hearing loss, so there are more gaps for me than most people in the perception of sound, and after many times of *knowing* I heard something that wasn’t actually there I figured out that my mind was filling it in.
I kind of feel like this makes me more skeptical of my own perceptions and less likely to insist that something I feel I know to be true isn’t some kind of misperception or misunderstanding.
@Alan
Really good camouflage in candyland?
One — How many of the dudes complaining about women having babies are also complaining about white genocide?
Two — This guy does know that fathers exist, right? The only reason that maternity leave is more common than paternity leave is the pressure on mothers to be primary caretakers, yet this guy acts like reproduction is this annoying thing women do all by themselves.
I know everyone wants to talk about donut snek and danger noodles, but I must say in regards in the original topic…
Was anyone really surprised by this? The tech industry is in a rut 90% of the time because many white guys with money want to keep the status quo as it is. The most obvious place to see it is in video games, where I swear we really haven’t seen anything “new” from a Triple A studio in years. Sure, the indie companies are on the rise, but I feel like they get stomped out so easily by the bigger guys.
There’s gotta be a way to change the tech industry, and I want to be one of those people involved, but frankly my school tells me I should go nowhere near a game studio because of a lack of skills and the inability to “play nice”… Because I tend to call out bullshit from most nerds.
I mean, wasn’t the issue with Yahoo! that they did everything they did worse their competitors? Except for Yahoo! Groups back in the days, until they redid it and locked every member out their groups and people said “fuck this bullshit”?
Snakes, now. First I thought “snakes that look like doughnuts, funny” and then JS made me think “are those actually doughnuts that look like snakes?” And then it was confirmed that they were actual snakes that looked like doughnuts. Which means that it’s imperative that we (collective we, mind you) make doughnuts that look like snakes.
Snakey-doughnutty symmetry, see. I feel it’s important.
@Dragon Arthur
Am I surprised it was written? Not even a little. That someone felt comfortable sharing it with a group of coworkers? I mean, in a company that large there’s bound to be someone who doesn’t realize the potential consequences. That it appears Google doesn’t care that this has gone viral internally? Yeah, actually. I’ve been to their Tech Ladies events in the past, and at least some Googlers do care about women and being inclusive. They’re currently under investigation to determine if their pay practices are discriminatory and they really can’t afford more negative press, so I would expect something like this to get squelched early and hard well before it went internally viral let alone before it got leaked. But I’d expect an emergency press statement as soon as it went Internet viral.
But expectations aside, what’s your purpose in asking whether we’re surprised? What does it change? If we’re not surprised, are we to just ignore it?
As for game development, that’s a difficult one. On the one hand, I don’t want gators to see my name in some credits and decide I’m at fault for whatever issue they take with a game, and on the other hand I know some game devs personally and it sounds like the sexism is no worse in a game studio than in the enterprise software sector where I work. If anything gg has made some game design more aware of the sexism issue. Ultimately I decided not to attempt to enter games because it takes a very specific skill set I don’t have (I could learn it, but not having gone to a specialized school like digipen puts me at a disadvantage), they tend to crunch harder, and gg is still a thing.
Ms Edgy Nation:
Would you settle for an Arrakis Sandworm pastry?
https://kitchenoverlord.com/dune-week-spice-filled-sandworm/
…All this talk about discrimination/not even getting hired/indie studios getting crushed is kinda discouraging.
That said, damned if I won’t try.
@Troubelle
Don’t let it discourage you. Do what you’re passionate about. 🙂
I used to like Yahoo Games. They had a ton of free to play games and you could chat during them if you wanted although I rarely did. There were loads of good puzzle and card games. When I was in college a lot of my friends played the site. There were ads that you were required to sit through every so often but they were not too invasive and obnoxious.
Then they reorganized their games site to be almost entirely advertisements for downloads that you had to pay for. Like you could play a few levels free and then it would direct you to download it. The entirely free and no strings games still existed but they were buried in all the other crap and hard to find.
Then they closed the games section entirely. That was probably the last time I used Yahoo for anything although I might still have an email account that I don’t use.
Considering the popularity of casual games that used to be on Yahoo, it seems like a bad idea to completely wreck a service that as far as I could tell was popular. Anyway, that’s why I have no interest in anything Yahoo related.
@Kupo
Thanks. Even if I can’t manage it full-time, maybe I can organize a patchwork team and dip into game jams.
@Troubelle
Yeah, I’m currently dabbling in HTML5 games. It scratches an itch. 🙂
Jeez, I’d farking love to actually be in a meeting where there were 6 women! That would be an amazing refreshing change after 20 years of maybe one other woman besides myself in a tech meeting!
*starts gnawing on walls in annoyance*
@WWTH
Except PUAs!
mmmm, scaaaly
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs348b-competition/cs348b-05/snake/data/scales_02.jpg
@Alan – It is really fascinating how your mind can play tricks on you. My senior thesis was on memory fluency and involved getting subjects to misremember seeing words on a list based on how easy they were to solve as hangman-style puzzle clues. If they had to struggle to come up with the word, they were less likely to report seeing it on the list earlier. If the solution came easily, they were more likely to “remember” seeing the word even if it wasn’t there.
Memories of true events come more quickly and easily to mind, so our brains assume the converse, that readily surfacing ideas and thoughts must also be true. That might explain why manospherians insist so hard that their lazy stereotypes are true and 100% happened.
@Troubelle!
Troubie, do yourself a Ludum Dare! It’s a weekend game jam that’s run every few months. They give a theme at the start of the competition on Friday evening, you have until Sunday to send it in. The games are all silly and small and goofy, there’s no fee, there’s nothing but good feels and good times, and a very supportive community. Also you can jam with teams, have longer time if you want – it’s really just a motivation to game-make and a way to network. Lots of fun! Also all the games are free if anyone wants to go explore. They’re very small and usually sorta trash, what with only being made in a weekend, but it’s fun to see what people do.
Do that!
Bingo! Buttercup, i didn’t know you did that! That’s super cool!