2017/08/08: James Damore and his Google Memo on Diversity

Hello, so some of you may have heard about the leaked Google memo that has been circulating virally around the internet for the last couple of days. That was written by James D'Amour, who was fired last night. He reached out to me and put us together, and so I'm going to talk to James today about exactly what happened and why, and perhaps what should be done about it. So that's what we're going to do with the interview I had with him which finished at about 3 o'clock on Tuesday, August 8, follows immediately after this introduction.

Hi everybody, I'm speaking today with James D'Amour and an unidentified Google employee who wishes to remain anonymous, for reasons that I think are obvious. Last week, James put his hand in a blender by circulating an internal memo that I would say has become somewhat infamous.

So James, let's start with a bit of discussion about you. Tell us who you are, about your background, and about what you were doing at Google.

James: Yes, so I was actually just really interested in science and psychology and stuff. I really liked puzzles, and that's how I got into Google actually. I did one coding competition, and they just recruited me out of that. At Google, I was mostly working on search and image and video search in particular.

Interviewer: So, tell us about your educational background a bit.

James: I guess so. I just did random science and math in undergrad, and I ended up with a degree. I didn't really know what I was going to do, so I started doing research at MIT, and then I went to a systems biology at Harvard. I initially wanted to work with Markovic; she's really great in evolution and game theory, but then I started working on other things.

Interviewer: So tell us a bit about systems biology. What is that exactly? What kind of research were you doing at MIT?

James: Yes, systems biology has many different meanings, but it's generally just mathematical biology. I guess seeing biological systems as a whole rather than just individual molecules. So I like looking at populations and my interest in evolution.

Interviewer: So why did they see you as a viable candidate at Google, do you think?

James: I think they just saw a smart guy that could code.

Interviewer: Fair enough. Now, you've been there three years, is that correct?

James: Yes, but also a new turn before that.

Interviewer: So about four years total. Sure. How would you say you performed as an employee? Were people being happy with you or not?

James: No, I got promoted twice. My last review was the highest possible: superb, which is the top few percentiles. So I definitely wasn't fired based on performance.

Interviewer: And have you enjoyed working at Google? It should be a good experience.

James: Yeah, I love Google. That's the horrible part. Like, I've always been the biggest Google fanboy. I've never had an iPhone. I always try to convince my friends to use Android and all these different things, and yeah, I mean, this just puts a sour taste in my mouth.

Interviewer: Okay, so you'd go to a good educational background. You were interested in things that Google would be interested in, you were a good coder, you worked with them for a number of years, done an excellent job—you're pretty good at Google, that's basically the background.

James: Yeah.

Interviewer: Okay, now last week you wrote a memo that attracted a tremendous amount of attention. In that memo, you made a number of claims, and the claims were, and please correct me if I’m not summarizing this properly, you were attempting to describe reasons why a lack of gender parity might exist within Google, for example, and within engineering or broadly, and also in occupations more broadly. And you laid out a very elaborated document, and I reviewed it, and as far as I can tell, your opinions are well supported by the relevant psychological science. I think what I'll do in the description of this video when I link it is put in the references so that people can decide for themselves. I want to put up a webpage about gender differences in general, but I'll try to hit the highlights for this particular document.

So why did you do this?

James: Yeah, so about a month and a half ago, I went to one of our diversity summits. They were unrecorded and super-secret. They told me a lot of things that I thought just were not right.

Interviewer: Okay, what do you mean unrecorded and super-secret?

James: Well, they were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they've been doing to try to increase diversity.

Interviewer: And what kind of practices?

James: Well, basically treating people differently based on what they're raised—it's a system, yeah, basically.

Interviewer: Oh, I see. And so it was ultra-secret and unrecorded in what manner?

James: Yes, most meetings at Google are recorded. Anyone at Google can watch it. We're trying to be really open about everything except for this. They don't want any paper trail for any of these things, low-key.

Interviewer: Why?

James: Because I think it's illegal. I mean, as some of the internal polls showed, there were a large percent of people that agreed with me on the document. So if everyone got to see this stuff, then, you know, they would really bring up some criticism.

Interviewer: Yes, a large number of people in Google and a very large number of well-informed biological scientists, we may also add.

James: So, I mean, I was quite struck by your document, given that it would have been a decent document for a well-informed psychologist or research psychologist too, right? But here's somewhat of an outsider, but you got the highlights accurate as far as I'm concerned.

Interviewer: So, okay, you went to this diversity meeting, and you weren't happy with the sorts of things that you were being told and with the practices—is that correct?

James: Yeah.

Interviewer: And what would I need to do?

James: Well, there's a lot of ways in which they pressure people to increase the diversity of their team. You know, there's no way to do that besides actually choosing someone based on their race or gender.

Interviewer: Right. What do you mean, "I don't work should be precise"? I mean, I more women or underrepresented racial minorities...

James: Yeah, you know, can I jump in? Yeah, I would hesitate to say that that's a hundred percent true across 100 percent, right? So the organization that I'm in, I have not personally seen anything that I would deem crosses the line. You know, I personally believe that there are a good amount of synergies to be found if you can combine slightly different ideologies into a room, and that is the thesis that some groups are working towards. Obviously, there's going to be a distribution of how people follow the rules, and you know, it's unfortunate to hear that it could be that some people fall to the wrong side of that distribution, but that certainly wouldn't apply to everybody.

James: Well, yeah, that’s number one. It's certainly also distressing to hear that there is acceptance of the idea that diversity can be mapped onto race and gender, especially with regards to performance because there's no evidence for that whatsoever.

Interviewer: So you went to this meeting, and then you decided to write this document. How long had you been working on it before you released it?

James: Yeah, so I was doing it throughout my free time. I just wanted to clarify my thoughts on this, and I really just wanted to be proven wrong because, you know, if what I was saying was right, then something bad was happening. So, yeah, about a month ago, I submitted feedback to that program, and you know, I saw that people looked at it, but no one actually said anything. I basically said what I said in the document, and then I linked to the document itself. So I published this about a month ago, and it was only after it got viral, and then after a week, the news that Google started caring.

Interviewer: Okay, so how did it go viral? And, you know, how was it leaked?

James: Yeah, so there’s a group at Google called Skeptics, and so I was like, okay, maybe they'll be able to prove me wrong some way; like they’re skeptical about things, right? I wasn’t naive. So I sent them a message like, okay, what do you think about this? Is Google in some sort of echo chamber? And you know, then it just exploded after that.

Interviewer: And you are internal; it just spread throughout all of Google?

James: Yeah, and you know, with the feat, the Skeptics group just started to spread it around. Yeah, and then there was a lot of upper management that specifically called it out and started saying how harmful it is and how this sort of viewpoint is not allowed at Google.

Interviewer: Yeah, what sort of... you find exactly the idea that there are differences between men and women that actually might play a role in the corporate world—got a definite opinion that's not acceptable?

James: Yes, same. It can be understandably tricky morally and politically, but the thing that was disturbing to me about watching the response to you is that, as far as I can tell, there isn't anything that you said in that paper, first of all, that is in fact biased in a manner that should open you up to the sorts of charges that have been opened up against you or that violates the scientific literature as it currently stands. So both of those are rather distressing.

James: Yeah, and there's a lot of misrepresentation by upper management just to silence me, I think.

Interviewer: Yes, and why is that, do you think? Like, why is it that Google couldn't actually, you think, promote and have an intelligent discussion about this instead of...

James: Well, first of all, I read Danielle Brown's response to you, which I thought was absolutely appalling, ill-informed, and appalling. And then they fired you, which seems to be like really bad PR. But more importantly, doesn't actually deal with the issues at hand. You know, they're basically saying something like, "Well, what was the rationale for firing you exactly? What was the excuse that was given?"

James: So the official case was that I was perpetuating gender stereotypes.

Interviewer: That you were perpetuating gender stereotypes.

James: Yeah. And did they say anything else about your performance or about anything else that you'd done?

James: No, that was the only reason.

Interviewer: And who fired you?

James: Technically, it was my HR representative and my director.

Interviewer: Okay, and do you have any idea on whose orders they were acting or if this was something that they conjured up themselves?

James: I'm sure it probably went from higher up than that because this is a huge PR move, so they need approval from higher up, right? I think the CEO actually made some comments about the issue today, which I'll probably cut into this video as we edit.

Interviewer: So, okay, all right. So the first question is, how are you doing?

James: I'm doing okay. There are a lot of messages that I'm trying to sort through and just trying to figure out what I should do now, but yeah, I’ve gotten some interesting job offers as far as I feel.

Interviewer: Yep. I’ve gotten a rising amount of...

James: Yeah, well, I suspect I’m sacked. I'm virtually certain that you have a majority viewpoint; it's just that the people who hold the alternative perspective, which are the radical social constructionist types, exist in everything—everything is a consequence of socialization—they're a little bit more organized politically. But they're clearly wrong scientifically; they're wrong factually. They're wrong ethically for that matter.

Interviewer: So you probably have more support than you think, and it will be very interesting to see how that turns out. So what do you think about having written this? I mean, now your life is going to be turned upside down and for quite a while, I suspect. I mean, so you put yourself out online doing this, so what do you think about that?

James: It definitely sucks, but at least I was proven right, you know?

Interviewer: When you... what do you mean by proven right?

James: Well, just that the whole culture just tries to silence any dissenting view, and that we really need some more objective way of looking at these things.

Interviewer: Yeah, well, I felt the same way when the University of Toronto decided to attempt to shut me down after I made my videos. I thought, well, that just proves my point. I made the videos saying, well, I don't like the climate that's developing; it's making it very difficult to have conversations about certain things.

James: Your examples even more egregious, I think, because you know, I at least objected to a piece of legislation that in principle would have been a benefit to an identifiable group—in this case the iron's gender group. I don't believe it is of any benefit to them, but you could make a case that it was. But all you, as far as I can tell, is review the modern personality literature and the literature on individual differences relating to men and women and other groups, and there's actually not very much opinion in your piece at all.

Interviewer: So what that is, is that it is not possible to actually have a discussion about the scientific literature on these issues without putting yourself at risk.

James: Not a hell of a thing for engineers because the engineers rely on the facts, as far as I can tell. One of the things I like about engineers is that they tend to stick very closely to the facts; they're not a very political group, you know, generally speaking. They're much tactical.

Interviewer: Yeah, I don't know how they can expect to silence so many engineers and intelligent people and to deny science like this.

James: Well, the question too is what are your supporters within Google going to do? Because, you know, I would say you're a great warning man because you showed what happens. You showed exactly what happens if you have enough, I don't know what you call it—curiosity and courage, I suppose—but mostly curiosity to lay out what you think for discussion.

Interviewer: We need to open these conversations. You said that you know you weren't jumping up and down in existing. You were right; you were trying to lay out what you understood from doing a fair bit of reading, and make the case that see these facts—the facts about the differences between men and women and employment choice and payment and all that—aren’t being discussed and they're not being discussed.

James: I mean, we know that example—I don't put this citation in the description—it's been very difficult for the Swedes, for example, to flatten out the gender distribution for engineers in Sweden and in the Scandinavian countries in general, despite their advanced social engineering, let's call it.

James: And they also can't get male nurses. You know, I think it's four out of five in Scandinavia, if I remember correctly, they are female, and the reverse number is our engineers are male. And you know, that seems to be associated with this quite well-founded scientific observation that women tilt towards interesting people and men tilt towards interesting things, and that that's associated with testosterone exposure in utero.

Interviewer: This is science, you know? An attack isn't anybody beating an ideological drum because most of the people, I would say that most of the people who are publishing this would have been even happier had it turned out the other way. You know, the findings actually run contrary to their biases because academia is generally full of people whose biases are laughs, and now and then, you know, scientific findings emerge to dispute an ideological proposition. That's certainly the case with the role of biology versus society in establishing gender differences.

Interviewer: So the science is very credible. It doesn't mean it's completely beyond dispute, but that's not the point either because your survey was actually a pretty decent survey of the current state of affairs with regards to individual differences. That doesn't mean that...

James: Right.

Interviewer: So, okay, so what are you... buddy, what does your family think about this?

James: Yeah, they definitely support me, but they don't really know what I should do from here. They don't want me to, you know, just go to a ton of news corporations and do all these interviews and stuff because they just want to twist whatever I say towards their agenda too. It's not really clear what I should be doing.

Interviewer: Yeah, well, there's certainly no shortage of people that want to talk to you. I mean, I've been contacted by four or five journalists who would like to speak with you. We can talk about that afterward; I could let you know who they are, but yeah. Well, you’ve got a conundrum on your hands now. I mean, you’re a very straightforward person, and you're obviously not grinding any axe, at least not in any obvious way.

Interviewer: My suspicion is that talking to the right people could be of substantial use to you, but I guess it also depends on what it is that you want. I mean, that's something we can talk about. Now, you rattled up the cages of a fair good many people and a fairly large organization. Interestingly enough, just on the heels of Google and YouTube's announcement about the new free speech restrictions on YouTube, you know, and their incorporation of NGOs into that censorship process, so it's been quite a week for Google, I would say.

So you've opened up this can of worms. Imagine if you’re looking six months down the road, and say, if things happen that are good because of what you did. What is it that you would like to have happen?

James: At the very least, I want—because I do still care about Google—I want some conversation. If we had... for the ideologues to not just have their way. But yeah, I still don't have a clear vision on how exactly this will happen. You know, how this can spread farther than just Google.

Interviewer: Well, you spread farther than just Google, that's for sure. You know, I mean, I would say my experience with the press is that the first thing that happens, that will happen, is that you’ll get jumped on by people who will call you the sorts of epithets that would be appropriate if you were a bad guy, and you should just shut up and go away.