Gadgetory

hi I'm Cannavale mo editor-in-chief of CNET news and I'm here in San Francisco with my colleagues Richard Nava who is the Google editor here on our team and Ian sure who is an executive editor for News Silicon Valley has had a lot to talk about this week about a topic that has been in the news for most of the past few years but has really taken off in the last few months that topic is diversity and inclusion there's been some high-profile stories about what's going on inside tech companies and this week Google has taken the lead in this discussion rich give us the sort of state of what's been going on sure so the the center of it is this memo that this this guy his name is James d'amour he's a he was a senior engineer at Google and he talked about diversity in the company and what he called an ideological echo chamber and in the memo he he talked about the the biological differences between men and women and that's kind of where we get into the controversy you know he cites some studies and people are kind of disagreeing with with with what he said what he hasn't said but basically it sparked a big conversation around gender and diversity in the company let's talk about though what has been sort of Silicon Valley's take on what he said about diversity no one argues that there are biological differences between men and women that's not at issue it's the way that he's used the arguments and studies to frame a discussion so just give us a bead on how Silicon Valley sees what he said the people who are upset about what he said and what his supporters think is that sure so the people who are really upset with this memo are arguing that this is basically gender discrimination that he's saying because of biological traits that there are things in in women that make them more neurotic and that's one of the reasons y-you see less women in in you know higher up leadership positions his supporters Ian have been saying that he has a right to his opinion and that this is all about the First Amendment and just having an open conversation what do you think well the First Amendment kind of stops at the government you the government is not allowed to control your speech but companies can choose to do pretty much anything they want with your speech there are rules around like what are your policies are you treating everyone fairly within those policies but you know there is no First Amendment protections for me to be able to say whatever I want and not get fired for it and Google seems to have taken the stance and again what we know from Google are from some memos written by the diversity officer there and their CEO sundar Pichai he came out with a note saying that Google believes that these kinds of views about limiting someone's potential based on their biology goes against their code of conduct what do you what do you think you know it's interesting because I definitely the code of conduct is an important thing right then having again policies and kind of HR stuff that is consistent is important for any large company I think a lot is gonna be really interesting about how far they can take this right I a lot of the stuff hasn't been tested in court before about whether or not you know you can have a code of conduct that says you know you can't say X Y or Z but one of the things I've heard a lot throughout this conversation that resonated with me is that he created a hostile work environment that you know this guy is in charge of people he decides raises and stuff like that and so he may these views may actually be adversely affecting his employees it's no longer a conversation it's actually affecting people's lives and that's there's a whole nother kind of ball of wax at that point rich and that is true right google has a peer-review system tell us a little bit about them yeah that's that's where these kind of get pretty hairy so Google has a system where you can ask your you have to ask your fellow your peers to review you and from from what I understand it's about like you got around five it happens twice a year and these things kind of dictate whether or not you'll you'll get a raise whether or not you'll get a bonus what kind of projects you're gonna get to work on right your level of responsibility and and on the on the other side of that it's you know whether or not you you might get fired or put on some kind of you know performance plan so you know these things matter and if if somebody has this kind of this predisposed bias it is it is something that you know they might want to consider why it's being one of the big conversations around diversity unconscious bias I don't know if this is unconscious or not given that we have a ten page three thousand word memo it's how you interpret what he said and that is certainly uh a big point of controversy this week people are saying his his views have been messroom misrepresented and that google was a little quick to fire him we don't know if he's done a lot of peer reviews right what is google telling us no they're telling us nothing we don't know it so so that's one thing to you know to be sure to point out that we don't know what the peer review situation is so he might have done none but it's it's a good question and it's something that Google should probably be forthright about and and if he has done peer reviews I think we have to ask the question of you know has this affected women's careers in Google right I mean that's that's a huge question and there may be people who have been getting less pay or may have even been pushed out of the company because of these views he holds so yesterday we were gonna hear from Google sundar pichai this thing of Google had set up an All Hands meeting and we thought we'd get some of those answers but then it was cancelled at the last minute rich tell us why yeah I know firsthand that it was canceled I actually went to Google to see what was going on and was was told that it was it was not happening he said that he canceled it because of fears of online harassment from from employees apparently or toward employees right toward employees yes yeah yeah apparently some of some people's online information had leaked and people have been you know daxing workers which is like pretty much how would you how would you describe daxing it's basically putting out the personal information of an employee so it could be everything from their email addresses and their phone numbers to their social security numbers to their family's information and it's something we see a lot with targeted harassment campaigns on the web this is something that happened a lot during this period in the web called gamergate right it's happened a lot during the election it's something that especially trolls on the web and an extremists like to use to rattle unsettle scare people that they disagree with I want to just step back for a second and talk about diversity in the tech industry as I said it's been a topic of conversation for the past few years a Pinterest engineer Tracy Chow led a campaign a few years ago for all of tech companies to disclose the makeup of their employee base and we started to see a diversity reports come out now their annual from more than a dozen tech companies and every time one of those diversity reports comes out the first thing we hear from a company is that that they should do should be doing better that they're predominantly male white employee base has not really shifted that much over the past few years now let's just remind people why that's even a subject of of interest why do people think that diversity is a business goal that they should be pursuing it wants to take that one well I mean I think the interesting thing is that the data out there and we've written about this on scene that is that diverse leadership often times leads to more profitability it adds it leads to more sales it leads to products being better it there's there's a lot of information out there that shows that this is not only a social reason to do it but there's actually a business reason you know the really interesting conversation I've heard in Silicon Valley a lot is that almost everyone seems to in leadership position seems to understand that that is the case and yet they are consistently hiring you know far fewer than the percentage of black Latino whatever people who are graduated of computer science programs in the country they're hiring far fewer than that percentage into Silicon Valley so you have this really interesting kind of mix up here where they say one thing they're predominantly doing the other and it's not changing despite supposedly Silicon Valley being so nimble and being so you know kind of being able to come up with great ideas they can't solve this one very fundamental one well in in Google's case the advocates for diversity there are like you're building products for the whole world they've got they've got seven they've got seven products that have more than a billion users and so the argument there is you want everybody to be able to use these things and so why not get everybody you know people from all walks of life to make them so they understand how different people are gonna be using them and there's an important point about why as well you remember Google Buzz right back in 2008-2009 they're compete competitor at Twitter it's okay if you've forgotten but you know one of the things that came up was that you know what it did is that you sent out status messages to your entire email contact list right and that was how they were gonna beat Twitter at their own game and the first thing that happened was that someone who had a restraining order against her husband I think it was ended up at connecting with him on Google Buzz against her will and it became this huge problem and a huge privacy snafu and actually helped to sync the product and so it's a great example of if you don't have a diversity of voices in the room you're not going to think about these things right because I don't have the same life experiences as someone who has a restraining order against her husband I just don't and so understanding it's not like you have to seek everyone out but having a diversity of voices will lessen the likelihood of that stuff happening okay so Google had an incident where one of their senior engineers posted a memo that has raised a lot of controversy about diversity and inclusion in Silicon Valley he was fired after the CEO of Google said that it didn't doesn't reflect the values that they believe in I was a company he went to hold an All Hands meeting but cancelled it because some of his employees were getting doxed or feared harassment for just raising questions about this debate so what's next rich what happens next well the the official word from Google is that they're going to be holding these forums over the next few days instead of this big All Hands town-hall meeting and then really it's who knows damar has filed a complaint against google right he said that he feels he's been unfairly fired so we're gonna have to see that play out as well right I don't know if he's filed his lawsuit yet but he's definitely threatened in the press to do something and so that that will likely at least to start this conversation that's really interesting as well about how far can your company policies go in terms of these things it's gonna be really interesting to watch in that regard so diversity inclusion we're far from the end of discussion about this intent we're still at the beginning I feel right I mean they it started with these diversity reports and these product snafus that just continue to happen and now you know we have Silicon Valley at the reckoning stage right where it's no longer just about talk it's about rubber hitting the road and we're I think we're very far from whatever the conclusion might look like right well so d'amore said that with his memo he wanted to start this conversation so in that regard he got it yeah all right well thank you for joining me today and I'm sure we'll be talking about this more often in the future Thanks you