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.
I liked the pop-sci book I read about memory (maybe by Oliver Sachs?) that got into the idea that every time you remember something, you’re basically rewriting the remembered thing, as being what happened. Not the actual truth (whatever that might be), but what you remember about it. So, the more frequently you try to remember a memory, the more likely it is to misremember, or add, details. I’m probably wrong about this.
Probably because I misremembered it.
(Thank you, thank you, don’t forget to tip the waitstaff!)
Scaling… Scaling away-ay-ay-ay …
Let’s see…mostly guys, then add so up to just over 1/3 women, divide by 100, carry the…equals 75% womenfolk! Sorry, guy, you lost your job through your inability to do basic arithmetic, not because of girrrrrls.
“Log tables allow adders to multiply.”
The beginning of the joke is left as an exercise to the reader.
@Scildfreja
I’ve heard of that one–mostly because it was referenced in the legendary Papers, Please. (I believe it may have been born there, so to speak.)
It’s unnerving how even the progressive guys in those spaces can hold some pretty toxic opinions. I remember one telling me that women file too many false rape reports (when he knows I’m a rape survivor). And just the other day I was in the car with one and he was talking about how their training course in eliminating biases was bull droppings because people don’t experience the world in fundamentally different ways and something something meritocracy. It feels bad.
Lurker dropping by with cake snake. 🙂
kupo
QFT !!!
Unions and charities and activists along with any and every other kind of organisation don’t achieve any of their objectives by inviting people-employers-politicians just to be nicer people (or more flexible or more accommodating).
They state explicitly that they want specific things. It might be access for wheelchairs or more pay for overtime or equal pay or fairer rosters or creche/childcare facilities or safer work-travel-driving conditions or any other improvement-benefit-support needed in the community generally or in specific workplaces, schools and colleges, traffic intersections, sports facilities, community centres, whatever. Employers, school principals, local councillors, train and bus schedulers, or politicians might be the kindest, most thoughtful people ever. But they can’t know what needs doing or who is lacking important amenities-support-facilities if people don’t tell them about it.
@Edgy: Google “python cake” and you’ll see things ranging from “hilariously inept” to “Wait… that’s not Photoshopped?”
@ buttercup
That sounds really intriguing. Memory and recall is something I’m pretty interested in because of how it relates to witness testimony. There’s some pretty fascinating research on that. My area of ‘expertise’ (ie the bit I’m least rubbish at) is how trauma affects memory. For example when people give evidence at court that doesn’t tally with their initial accounts, a very common cross examination question is: “You would agree that your recollection shortly after the event would have been much more reliable than it is now, many months later?”
On the face of it that seems reasonable; but memory doesn’t work like that. It’s very common for initial recollection to be highly inaccurate and distorted. Then, possibly quite some time later, there’ll be some ‘trigger’ event (a car backfiring, a smell, someone using a particular phrase etc) that suddenly brings the real memory flooding back.
So this is a phenomenon we need to be aware of; especially to avoid accusations of unreliability or fabrication if a witness has given differing accounts at different times.
@History Nerd
This is at least in part a problem with poor recruitment policies and an over-emphasis on academic achievement. It isn’t unique to the tech sector, but I bet it is more common there than elsewhere. If you only want to hire the best and brightest and need some way to filter down the avalanche of job applications from everyone who wants to work for google, one solutions is to simply throw away all the applications from people with too few letters after their names.
Companies that aren’t google (or similar) can’t get away with this so easily, because their underemployed staff jump ship.
@weirdwoodtreehugger:
Pretty much. Although the race to the bottom has been going on for centuries, if you account for more primitive capitalist systems, including feudalism.
Also, this gripe about women being less capable than men and taking away their jobs dates as far back as the Middle Ages (which the time period most of these men seem to be coming from). Even then laborers, artisans, smiths, etc grouped into guilds and complained that women were driving down the wages with cheaper labor. They complained to the point women were forbidden to work, with prostitution being the only exception (and that lasted only for a while as well until it became legal to rape and murder prostitutes).
This was pretty extensively documented at the time. There is a very good book in which Silvia Federici discusses this called “Caliban and the Witch”.
Yes, many times: this isn’t at all unusual in the cultural sector.
While this is certainly a recognisable description of many of the meetings I attended in my last salaried position, I’d strongly refute the suggestion that there was a specifically gendered reason for this – I can think of plenty of peddlers of irrelevant, tangential nonsense who were decidedly male. (I’d sometimes be one myself, if the meeting was that dull.)
By contrast, one of the most ruthlessly efficient no-bullshit meeting chairs that we had was female, and indeed her ability to cut through the crap and not waste time was one of the reasons that she got promoted to the point where she’s now the number two in the company (at least last time I checked). Good for her: hand on heart, I can’t think of any of her male colleagues with quite the same skill-set.
@Alan
Oh hell no! One of my favorite computer tech advances (aside from all of them), is high resolution text/graphics!
@Scildfreja
Oh. My. God. You were the best friend I always wanted when I was a kid!
@[email protected]
Generally I’m pretty ‘meh’ when it comes to snakes but damn that’s so cute!
@Kupo
Snakelet: I am darkness
Me (in the voice of Homer Simpson: You look like cake icing
Common mispronunciation amongst my students is snake/snack.
@Diego
I read a chapter of that book for a class and want to read the rest. It was fascinating!
@kupo
I actually downloaded it but I can’t remember where from. I got the PDF sitting on my pc actually. Still halfway through but it is pretty enlightening. To think witch hunts was a knee jerk reaction to what amounted to a WGTOW movement (and actually going their own way to live off into the woods and build their own society because fuck patriarchy and feudalism, instead of endlessly whining like the MGTOW). Sad to think they lost.
On the other hand all this sexism, rampant calls for more discrimination, spread of toxic views on facebook and the like sort of makes me wonder… Can you imagine if there was an app, which either worked with tinder, grinder, okcupid, etc, etc (or a standalone app), which compiled info on people?
Imagine an app which immediately let you know a man’s stance on:
– Feminism
– BLM
– Their criminal history
– Domestic abuse reports
– Alt Right
– History of racist, mysoginist, transphobic, Homophobic, islamophobic, xenophobic comments
It would be a way to make sure these people don’t pass down their genes and prejudice, and are made uncomfortable in any scenario where decent people are present. Also, in a way I could see people complaining that it would be illegal given that a lot of this is private data, however, given that these people are all too eager to spread their toxicity on social media, I say make sure their views are spread far and wide.
It would also help women avoid being roped into abuse because these men always start out as the prince charming types and slowly reveal who they truly are.
I learned on computers that were generally only available to reasonably sized companies. One was a TI-990/4 (no, not 99/4). 3-foot cube case. Dad shopped at TI scrap sales 😛
Snakelet: Hmm, tastes like apple.
@Diego Now that app sounds like the definition of “beginning to go down the slippery slope, and picking up speed all the way down”.
@JS:
In a good way or in a bad way?
@ Diego
Apparently all those “which superhero are you?” type Facebook things are designed to collect data like that. You can get a pretty good profile on someone by how they respond to seemingly innocuous questions like “do you think all crimes should be punished regardless of the court verdict?” etc.
The info is then used for marketing purposes, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that includes political organisations and other groups.
@Diego
Not even slightly cool. Just don’t…
OkCupid (I don’t know about other dating apps) has a little questionnaire that you can fill out when you set up your profile, and it does pretty much what you’re thinking of. It asks questions about hot button topics like abortion and LGBT+ rights (You get a yes/no button as well as space to defend your position), as well as stuff about sex and relationships and other questions like that, and any user can go in and see what you’ve responded with when they view your profile.
Of course, when called out for being an asshole on the questionnaire, many men will make one of many claims:
– “I didn’t fill that out, my friend did.”
– “I don’t know how to change it. I used to believe that but now I don’t!”
– “I wasn’t paying attention when I filled it out!”
Of course, anyone who was very interested in changing these answers would have gone and done it, without someone else pointing it out.
And anyone truly interested in dating would have most likely made sure that shit was accurate to them.
HOWEVER
You’re asking for a lot of personal information with the whole “criminal history” bit, and that can be discriminatory in a lot of ways. I know we have freedom of association and all that, but given our current justice system, that might not be fair.
It also wouldn’t be fair to only put this on men. You’d have to put this on everyone. Women and non-binary peeps included.
Yes, men are more likely to be abusers, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only ones capable of doing so. Not just because women or non-binary abusers might prey on men, but there’s also women/non-binary people who use these apps to find other women/non-binary people as well, and they should also be protected.
http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/nope.gif
No. No, we are not advocating for eugenics based on anything, even if these people have shitty ideas about other people.
That is a slippery fucking slope.
@Alan Robertshaw
Well it’s true that companies have been collecting data for marketing purposes for years and decades even. However imagine an open database of recorded bigotry and how helpful it would be towards eliminating discrimination. A lot of these people are given a pass IRL because:
A) They comment through anonymous accounts on the internet, which cannot be tied to their profile.
B) People in their immediate circles are not generally aware of the type of toxicity they spread when they are online.
Making them as visible as possible would help cut down the discrimination against women and vulnerable groups.
@Paradoxical intention
I was under the impression that eugenics is aimed at excluding minorities and people through inherent traits. I’m talking about excluding assholes based on their views and bigoted beliefs.
Okay never mind, I see that I need to think that one over.
Though I see where you’re going with the whole criminal history bit, given that POC are more likely to be imprisoned over nonviolent crimes. I was thinking more along the lines of people with rape convictions and domestic abusers.
@Axecalibur
Very well then, I’ll backtrack since it does seem to mirror and borderline what Nazis advocate. I guess I didn’t think it all the way through.
As a general note, if someone mentions going “down the slippery slope”, you can assume they mean “in a bad way” unless otherwise specified. Others have mentioned why.
@JS
Yeah, I suppose. It seemed like a good idea at first. Making sure bigots are made to feel entirely alienated and unwelcome, and also making sure they don’t pass down their toxic beliefs to children. But given a second thought and conjuring up historical precedents I can see why it is actually a terrible idea now.
EDIT: This is fucking frustrating. How are we supposed to fight these people given that they now control government at almost every level and are pushing down their ideology wherever they go?