Google Hit With Gender Pay Discrimination Lawsuit (axios.com) 244
An anonymous reader shares a report: Three female former Google employees have filed a lawsuit against the search giant alleging gender-based pay discrimination, as the Associated Press reported. The former employees, Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease and Kelli Wisuri, all left the company after being put on career paths within the company that they say would pay them less than their male counterparts.
I shed no tears... (Score:5, Interesting)
/popcorn
Re: I shed no tears... (Score:1)
Wasn't it Audi who did the so-called Gender pay gap thing in an advert? When called on their own pay gap, they explained that it was due to gender differences in the types of jobs preferred? Well, that's the gender pay gap in a nutshell.
I look forward to Google reaping the consequences of hiring rainbow haired SJWs. The revolution always devours her children.
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Google reaping the consequences of hiring rainbow haired SJWs.
"We never saw it coming!"
- The company with the biggest databases and most advanced data processing algorithms in history
No, that's not what the gender pay gap is (Score:2)
When called on their own pay gap, they explained that it was due to gender differences in the types of jobs preferred? Well, that's the gender pay gap in a nutshell.
No, not unless the company is doing something to discourage women from this role. You can't say "I want to be paid the same as a top engineer, but I don't like the sound of that job so I'd like to do something of my choosing instead". Gender pay gap comes down to either barriers or discouragement tom people entering high-paid roles based on gender, or people performing identical roles just as well but with pay differences based on gender
Re:I shed no tears... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I shed no tears... (Score:4)
What he's saying is that Google will be likely accused of victim-blaming and perpetuating gender stereotypes no matter which kind of arguments they will use to defend themselves, even if those arguments are actually correct and show no pay discrimination took place.
Exactly. There is just no good outcomes for Google no matter what they do and this is entirely their own doing. If they settle, even without admission of guilt, it will be open season with frivolous discrimination lawsuits on them. If they go to trial and fight this aggressively, they be exposed for hypocrisy and likely end up losing in courts to memo guy; if they go to trial and fight this by citing generic statistics, they will still get accused of fighting aggressively and may lose the fight, and that lead to open season on them.
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If they go to trial and fight this aggressively, they be exposed for hypocrisy
No need to worry about hypocrisy. You can both acknowledge the cultural influences on the pay gap which have nothing to do with corporate malfeasance, and work as a company to improve the industry's imbalance which is caused by them. Every large tech company will continue to have a large pay gap until cultural differences which start at infancy are dealt with, and Google certainly cannot be blamed for that.
Frivolous Lawsuit (Score:5, Funny)
Why don't these chicks just identify as male if they want higher salaries? Problem solved.
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Totally. They should identify as gay men who get the payiest pay of them all.
Re:Frivolous Lawsuit (Score:4, Funny)
Why don't these chicks just identify as male if they want higher salaries? Problem solved.
Only men-born men get higher salaries. Womyn-born men lose on all fronts because they miss out on both cisgender privilege and systemic paternalistic privilege, while being victims of industry-wide sexism and unsafespaceness.
Link to actual article (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the actual source from the Washington Post [washingtonpost.com] rather than some blog or whatever the source cited in the summary is.
Enjoy (Score:5, Insightful)
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of grievance mongers.
It's because of social justice activism (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is infamously left-wing. That's the *reason* they're being sued. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it's true. Hear me out.
I work at Google. You'll find no real sexism here. What you will find is unending leftist propaganda. There's a weekly microaggression newsletter, even. The constant drumbeat is "You are a victim! You are being oppressed! The world is arrayed against everyone except white men!"
Now, when you put a normal well adjusted person in this environment, he or she starts to believe the propaganda and attribute any adverse circumstances to his or her identity group, not to his or her individual abilities and choices. The non-stop social justice narrative teaches people to see everything as a social justice grievance.
So is it any wonder that some women at Google started to really believe that they were being oppressed and sued? You reap what you sow.
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Re:It's because of social justice activism (Score:4, Insightful)
Me too...
There is more than a little bit of truth in the original post. Of course, being a older white male, there is zero chance that I can attain enough standing in this debate to have my opinion count.
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And the sad thing is, James Damore warned them this would happen; that to retain women, you need to pay them 26% more to cover the extra time off. And then he was fired for perpetuating gender stereotypes.
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Reality check: when you don't play by the rules, you get kicked out.
"Speak the truth" is NOT one of the rules. "Pay lip service to the company line" very much IS one of the rules. Most adults of average intelligence know this.
You want to stand up for what you believe is right? Be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Dem's the rules.
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Yes, I was just pointing out that in this case, the rules are going to cost Google a ton of money. AS PREDICTED.
If I wanted to build a futurism think tank on the blind spots of feminism, James Damore would be a top must hire.
Re:It's because of social justice activism (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm gonna link this post next time someone calls me an SJW.
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They demand and demand and you give a little and a little more and when you have finally had enough bullshit, when you will start taking instead of giving, they stop demanding. When enough of the people in power have changed hands that things are well below the tipping point again, these fucks start demanding again.
As the iteration progresses, the more volatile the region of the tipping point becomes, and the harder it is to keep from going ov
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See what happens. It wont be fucking pretty.
And, a bit ironically, I'm sure that the people who will end up bearing the brunt of what happens will be the people that the SJW's adore.
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The problem was the foot-in-the-door tactics by early SJWs. People gave them a bit of leeway by adopting some small parts of their agenda. Then they started demanding more and more, because they thought that others have finally "seen the light". Similar to kids they need to be shown that there are limits to what they can get by crying wolf all the time, if they want to live in a world of grown-ups and social peace and cooperation. Then again maybe they don't want peace in the first place.
We should have stop
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You could try, but SJWs will start a white lives matter movement.
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Exactly. The entitled eventually end up eating themselves.
Re:It's because of social justice activism (Score:5, Insightful)
An unverified AC making bold claims... Excuse me if I don't take your word for it.
It's entirely possible he just likes his paycheck. From literally every story about and leak out of Google they will hunt down and destroy the professional lives of anyone even so much as not stating what the AC said in a positive light.
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It's common sense: don't bite the hand that feeds you.
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hmm... If we embrace this reasoning, we are forced to also support the act of firing these three women in the story for defaming Google's policies on promoting people.
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Re: It's because of social justice activism (Score:2)
Firing a man is also discriminatory. Of course your reasoning (as well as mine in following yours) is that firing someone for damaging company reputation is in no way precipitated by what their gender is.
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Sure, but that's not a reason to take their word for it.
Re: It's because of social justice activism (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps if the whole lot of you weren't hell-bent on "turning the tables of oppression" and, instead, cared about the equality that we all deserve, you'd get farther.
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Sure. We just have to get certain minorities (like blacks and Native Americans) treated like whites, given good education, etc. Statistically, blacks are screwed, and I suspect it's worse for the natives except that approximately nobody cares about them so you never see the stats.
I want everyone to have equal opportunity, and opportunity is currently not anywhere near equally distributed. It is heavily biased by race.
Most of the time, when I hear people talking about groups other than white males wa
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I want everyone to have equal opportunity, and opportunity is currently not anywhere near equally distributed.
Wait... You are assuming that equal opportunity == equal distribution. Why? When does personal choice influence the opportunities which in effect changes the distribution? When does culture influence the distribution? We have passed laws to ensure equal opportunity what more needs to be done in your mind? At some point, you have to allow the individual to succeed or fail and let the cards fall as they may. That isn't racist if it is unequally distributed by race. What is your measure to determine when we ha
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No, inequality of outcome is not the same as inequality of opportunity, and I am well aware of that. It correlates, and very frequently when we look at unequal outcomes we find unequal opportunities. We do not have laws to ensure anything near equal opportunities. For example, the quality of public schools varies tremendously from pretty much useless to highly educational. Moreover, there are social factors that have to be addressed. Equality under the law is not necessarily equality, and assuming tha
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Equality under the law is not necessarily equality,
Equality under the law is what is important because then it means that any failure can be because of individual decisions. Culture is a big part of that as you alluded to with "social factors that have to be addressed". Such as single parent households and not graduating high-school. If there are instances of injustice then I will be right there with you to remedy that inequality. But when you have equality under the law individual choice must be taken into account for any outcome. Equality under the law me
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Eh, I worked there a couple of years ago and it's not far from the truth. I didn't get the micro-aggression training but I did get training on unconscious bias. Most of the SJW antics came from the employees but the org at that time was decidedly left leaning as well.
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Re:It's because of social justice activism (Score:5, Insightful)
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I hope you have the same skepticism for CNN and NYTimes anonymous sources.
it was inevitable (Score:5, Interesting)
Once Google denied that their gender gap could possibly be caused by any non-discriminatory factors, all you are left with is discrimination.
This is only the beginning. Class-action suits will soon follow and the statements of top Google executives in response to the Damore memo have painted Google into a corner.
To echo other posters, couldn't happen to a nicer company.
Re: it was inevitable (Score:5, Informative)
Someone on Twitter said it best: by firing Damore, Google rejected the only explanation for the gender gap that doesn't leave Google at fault.
Can you make a general case with 3 people? (Score:3)
Also, they "were put in a career path that paid less than those of males?". Maybe they weren't good enough for the higher paying paths.
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Their case seems to rely on proving that there is systemic bias. Others Google will just say that they sucked. So there will likely be lots of examination of the systems at Google for managing employees, particularly the technical/non-technical tracks.
If they can prove that then it could apply to a lot of female employees.
Not Pay Discrimination? (Score:5, Interesting)
The former employees, Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease and Kelli Wisuri, all left the company after being put on career paths within the company that they say would pay them less than their male counterparts.
Let me get this straight. They aren't suing because they were being paid less, they're suing because in the future they might've been paid less?
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It's the gender gap conflated with the glass ceiling all in one lawsuit.
How does something like this get proven? (Score:1)
You made your bed Google... (Score:5, Interesting)
Kelly Ellis (Score:4, Informative)
Name sounds familiar. Oh yeah, She claimed she was sexually harassed [businessinsider.com] two years ago. Obviously, nothing came of it, so she moved on to the next feminist myth.
Note to anyone hiring: Do not hire people who put "Patriarchy Smashing" on their list of skills on LinkedIn. Or this will happen to you!
Re:Kelly Ellis (Score:4)
Nothing came of it?
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/201... [gizmodo.com.au]
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claimed she was sexually harasssed.
she moved on to next feminist myth
Your position is that sexual harassment is a myth?
Whenever these topics come up, the part of the Slashdot discussion that I find most irritating is the logical jump from "some gender pay gap and sexual harassment statistics are misleading if taken at face value" to "any woman who claims she was sexually harassed or passed up for a promotion because of her gender is wrong and a liar." It seems to happen every time.
The first can lead to an interesting discussion about gender and it's effect on the tech workp
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Whenever these topics come up, the part of the Slashdot discussion that I find most irritating is the logical jump from "some gender pay gap and sexual harassment statistics are misleading if taken at face value" to "any woman who claims she was sexually harassed or passed up for a promotion because of her gender is wrong and a liar." It seems to happen every time.
The first can lead to an interesting discussion about gender and it's effect on the tech workplace.
No, it can't. It leads to a discussion where you're derided as an MRA, a sexist, a white supremacist (since in this country, didn't you know, white supremacy is linked with support of the patriarchy), and so forth.
The second is just ignorant prejudice.
It's a realization that the aforementioned response is more successful. It's lowering yourself to the common denominator because the common denominator is what appeals to the audience. It's actually exactly what SJW's say as well... you don't debate Nazis, you punch them. Well SJW's are Nazis, the
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So many lawsuits (Score:4, Informative)
So many lawsuits, class action on age discrimination, class action on sex discrimination for women, soon a class action on sex discrimination from men fired by James and people he's contacting, multiple lawsuits for interfering with businesses on videos, advertising, search engine ranking in the EU, etc.
It's almost like instead of focusing on business, Googles views are causing all these lawsuits. Crazy how that karma comes back.
ORLY? (Score:4, Informative)
Gender or minority-based pay discrimination can be identified by answering just one simple question: are there any jobs in the company or organization that are performed both by people across the relevant demographics being compared with approximately the same level of experience where there is a difference in rate of pay? If yes, then there is discrimination. If not, then you cannot infer that there is any. Even when the jobs that pay the most are dominated by whiite males, for example, you cannot reasonably infer pay discrimination based upon that statistic because there can be a multitude of factors which can impact which people even both to apply for certain types of jobs, and which are entirely outside of the company's ability to control. The only thing you can reasonably expect a company to do is to pay its employees ethically and fairly for the work that they do, and this pay should be reflective only of the demands that the work places upon an individual. Trying to get companies to fix sociological and societal problems that might cause people of mostly one gender to apply only for certain types of positions in the first place cannot reasonably be expected to be a company's responsibility to mitigate. That responsibility falls on all of us... not to give women or minorities more incentive to apply for such jobs, but to not give them any disincentive to do so.
Re:ORLY? (Score:5, Informative)
"The Economist" did an article on this. The end result from it (in the UK anyway) was that the gender pay gap was a fraction of a percentage point in a like for like. Inside a given company, with the same responsibilities and title, women earned the same as men. Women in a company tended to go for the lower paid, more hourly flexible positions, which is what dragged the average down. This is from the statistics gathered by a consultancy (Korn Ferry) with about 25 million sample points. That's reasonably robust.
The UK as a 0.8% difference in post from men to women for exactly the same role.
Oddly, the cries around this are suddenly that women must be given equal shares in the board rooms and at higher management. It doesn't say whether skills and choices lean that direction or not, simply that this must be made so.
You're absolutely right as far as I can see that people must be given every chance to shine, irrespective of gender, colour, or whatever. If they can do the jobs well, that's what counts.
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If men and women are equally compensated for the same work, there still can be gender discrimination, if men are favored for the higher-paying jobs, or if (the opposite side of the coin) primarily male-dominated jobs are arbitrarily paid more than primarily female-dominated jobs. Both of these used to be commonplace. There's still lots of people around who grew up when the man was expected to support the family and women were assumed to only work for extras, and didn't need to be paid as much. These thi
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What about discrimination that limits opportunity? The lawsuit alleges that opportunities to advance and get better paid positions were denied to female employees. As such they ended up in lower paid positions, unable at advance as fast as similarly or better qualified males.
That wouldn't show up if you simply compared people doing the same jobs. You would need to look at their performance and career path within the company.
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Key word there... "alleges". The biggest problem with this particular allegation is that, like most conspiracy theories, it is not falsifiable... and utilizes the fallacy of cherry-picking to make its argument, as well as falling for the fallacy of perception itself caused by pareidolia.
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You would need to look at their performance and career path within the company.
That's pretty much what I'd do in this case, too.
I guess everyone here has noticed that some people get promoted faster than others, for various reasons. Sometimes it's playing favorites, but usually it has more to do with someone's performance and ability.
And somehow I can't help but wonder if that's the reason here, too.
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Gender or minority-based pay discrimination can be identified by answering just one simple question: are there any jobs in the company or organization that are performed both by people across the relevant demographics being compared with approximately the same level of experience where there is a difference in rate of pay? If yes, then there is discrimination. If not, then you cannot infer that there is any. Even when the jobs that pay the most are dominated by whiite males, for example, you cannot reasonably infer pay discrimination based upon that statistic because there can be a multitude of factors which can impact which people even both to apply for certain types of jobs, and which are entirely outside of the company's ability to control. The only thing you can reasonably expect a company to do is to pay its employees ethically and fairly for the work that they do, and this pay should be reflective only of the demands that the work places upon an individual. Trying to get companies to fix sociological and societal problems that might cause people of mostly one gender to apply only for certain types of positions in the first place cannot reasonably be expected to be a company's responsibility to mitigate. That responsibility falls on all of us... not to give women or minorities more incentive to apply for such jobs, but to not give them any disincentive to do so.
This. Always this.
I know I've been discriminated by race, and I've seen people throw away unread resumes of people they knew they were black (I've seen it with my fucking eyes.)
With that said, all accusations must come with evidence, and all defenses must come with evidence. And this question above, that is the only way to legitimize or invalidate a discrimination claim.
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I know I've been discriminated by race, and I've seen people throw away unread resumes of people they knew they were black (I've seen it with my fucking eyes.)
I'm sure I've seen an article about how your name affects your job prospects. Have something innocuous like Scott or Jacke or Jane or Mary and there's no thought put into that area. Have something like Darnell or Tyrone or Shaneequa or Neveah and your resume is tossed before they get to your skill set.
Oh here's one:
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/top... [go.com]
I'm biased in favor of women, consciously (Score:4)
In the CS department where I work, we admit generally equal numbers of males and females. They are admitted because they have excellent SAT and GPAs and other assessment scores. By time they are senior, women are in the minority.
Why? Self selection bias. The CS program is tough. The less capable males are trained to be confident so they are more likely to stick around. Females are more self critical, so the less capable ones are more likely to change majors.
The result is that only the top notch females stick around to graduate. When I taught machine learning I got only juniors, seniors, and grad students. My TA and I quickly realized that we didn't need to bother writing answer keys in advance. We'd just take the answers from these three girls (two domestic, one from china), check them for correctness, and pick the best for each one. These gave us exemplary answers that were used to judge what would get maximum points.
Compared to them, the top males produced answers that were no less correct. But these girls especially wrote answers that were more concise, clearer, and easier to evaluate.
Teaching other topics to grads and undergrads, I've generally seen similar patterns. Teaching computer architecture, my best student was a girl in more than one semester, and the girls tended to work harder, with the majority of them in the top half of the class. And once again, I saw similar patterns among engineers while I worked in industry.
I work at a good school but there are lots of higher ranked schools. Google should be careful hiring me into a management, because if a female engineer graduated from a decent school I'm going to assume she is like the ones I have taught first hand and not be prepared to think less unless I see undeniable poor performance that can't be explained by things beyond her control. Most of the males are also amazing I'm sure but my experiences have taught me that less capable ones manage to graduate and get hired, so each one would have to prove himself to me individually before I'm willing to take some of the same risks with their work assignments.
If you want to bitch and moan about how women get an unfair disadvantage or advantage, all of y'all can kiss my ass unless you have had years of experience managing and teaching. Everyone else is by definition speaking from ignorance.
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Dude are you actually being serious? You say you are consciously biased towards women, and your evidence is that in your classes, which you teach, in which you are consciously biased towards women, you rate them higher? That's funny, but also sad and you should be fired for A) being sexist and B) clearly failing to grasp logic which makes you kind of unsuitable for teaching CS.
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Wow. Not good on the reading comprehension, eh? I'm biased towards them as a *result* of all the experiences I've had. I just described some of those experiences. Or are you going to back-pedal and then make some comment about "correlation not being causation"?
Consider the three girls in my machine learning class whose answers were *consistently* superior, and my TA (who was also male) and I both agreed about this. It's not like we just blindly accepted their answers. We always checked them. They we
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Whatever, dude. :)
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I'm not sure how "getting right answers" and "writing good code that works" constitutes "gaming the system." In what way are those things as cheaty as you seem to be implying?
Read the actual complaint (Score:3)
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Re:Settles in for Reasoned Debate (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Settles in for Reasoned Debate (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Settles in for Reasoned Debate (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Settles in for Reasoned Debate (Score:5, Funny)
Whoa there ganjadude, you need to watch how you administer non-verbal praise, facetious or not. The proper way to "clap" is to click your fingers. Clapping is an oppressive expression that shows your privilege. However many pico-aggressions you just committed before you have definitely crossed into micro aggression territory. Find the nearest minority or woman and give them $1000 to reaffirm that you are an ally to the cause and not an alt-right cis gendered sexist- racist- homophobe- xenophobe- islamaphobe deplorable.
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Can we add SI-phobe to those who think micro is closer to pico than nano?
Re:Settles in for Reasoned Debate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Settles in for Reasoned Debate (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you point to where he suggested "separate but equal"?
It seems to me that he was advocating for equal treatment. Specifically, that the jobs should be changed for everyone. He talked about "pair programming and more collaboration", being less competitive and "allow[ing] those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive", etc. None of those suggestions said anything about creating separate roles for women.
He also talked about opening up the gender/race restricted programs to everyone. Assuming such programs exist (and nobody has said they don't), Google currently doesn't even have "separate but equal", but simply "separate".
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I see SJW thrown around so often I just interpret as "person I disagree with"
No, the term you're thinking of here is "nazi".
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Nazi is to SJWs what SJW is to Nazis.
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I see attempts to whitewash the term so often I just shake my head.
It's not going away.
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I'm confused, is "whitewash" racist?
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Everything is racist.
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When everything is racist, nothing is racist.
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Seriuosly. This is why you don't hire women. You're just asking for trouble, once they get in and get established. They automatically think they should be running the place.
Stand by to get sued either way then because you are still breaking the law.... It might just be better to hire women and pay them appropriately... I think it will be easier for you, but it usually is easier to comply with the law...
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And, as James Damore told them, the appropriate pay for women is 26% more than for a man.
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LOL... Well, give it a go if you like, it's a free country, just don't expect me to support the effort..
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One could argue that probation was caused by women's suffrage when you look back in history, however I'm not sure it is totally fair to blame them for it..
Personally, I think the general idea of letting women vote was and is a good one... Ranks right up there with letting all citizens vote, instead of just property owners.
But again, I'm an old white guy who by definition cannot be in a victim class so who the heck cares what I think on this subject...
Re:OH! WOMEN! (Score:5, Insightful)
Prohibition. And yes absolutely, the woman suffragists _were_ largely the same group as the temperance societies.
Worse, they did it while the young men were away fighting WWI and couldn't practically vote. Talk about a kick in the teeth when you got back.
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they give voting rights to practically anyone these days. See where it got us.
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Seems to me somebody warned them that they needed to pay women more.....and then got fired for perpetuating gender stereotypes.
Re: Bring it on ladies... (Score:5, Funny)
I think you've signalled enough virtue for one thread fella.
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but-but-but... he's an old white guy who... whatever he said. Don't you forget that!
He's a hater (Score:1)
He may think he likes living in a fair world. But if he woke up tomorrow as a black woman at google he'd be dead by the end of the day.
See white people are blind to the suffering of others because they can't experience suffering. It's written into the nature of the universe.
Sadly nobody knows why this is because of the overabundance of white men in physics... they can't observe the phenomena
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You are an old white male. You speak into the wind as your opinion to them means nothing. As an ally they will eventually eat you alive when you are the only ones left standing.
It's no longer about justice or equality. SJWs are never satisfied. Ever. Their victim narrative will forever consume them as they topple each person higher then them on the oppression pyramid.
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Has appointed themselves defender of the group and knows whats best for them.
Not even members of the effected group get to so simply claim to know whats best for them.
With voluntary groups this is a no-brainer. The head of the NRA speaks for its members. The head of the UCLU speaks for its members. The head of the EFF speaks for its members.
Who speaks for Women? Who speaks for Latinos?
This is how legitimacy can be attained:
Form an actual association. For instance Latino-Americ
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Lighten up, Francis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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