The Digital Closet, page 11
In short, much of the workforce that is charged with creating the algorithms that govern the internet hold heteronormative biases about gender and sexuality. They often come from a position of privilege, desiring to work from mommy’s basement without recognizing the care and benefits that position gives them in the supposed meritocracy they believe themselves to be navigating. Their ideology tends toward the biologization of talent and the belief that brilliance is innate to individual coders. No other explanation could justify the hubris necessary to believe themselves as the ordained arbiters of the future. Further, much of this connects to an understanding of themselves as being ignored by the world, and women in particular, in their adolescence, as they were forced into the position of “betas” or beta males. They have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and are ready for their just rewards after having proven the world’s evaluation of them wrong. Those who disagree with this position are often structurally located in weaker positions in the corporate organizational chart and have little power to challenge the dominant culture of the valley. All of this looks eerily similar to the worldview espoused by the alt-right, particularly their anxieties around gender and sexuality. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the Google memo, to which we’ll now turn.
James Damore’s Google Memo
The most infamous instance of the penetration of heteronormativity, misogyny, and contemporary alt-right ideology into Silicon Valley is easily James Damore’s Google memo.36 In 2017, Damore circulated a memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber: How Bias Clouds Our Thinking about Diversity and Inclusion” internally within the company that was quickly leaked to the press and became a media sensation. The memo is couched within the framework of human biodiversity, a hobby horse often used by alt-right writers to leverage the authority of scientific objectivity to support their arguments but which tends to produce politically motivated pseudoscientific arguments. Damore begins the memo by writing, “I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions.”37 According to Damore, men and women—N.B., he exclusively uses these terms cisnormatively—differ biologically at the statistical level of population. These differences include
• women being more open to feelings and aesthetics than ideas,
• women having a stronger interest in people than objects,
• women expressing extroversion through gregariousness rather than assertiveness, and
• women being more susceptible to “neuroticism,” including having higher anxiety and lower stress tolerance.
For Damore, these differences explain the distribution of men and women into different professions, the gender pay gap, and the retention problem that tech companies have with female employees.
Damore is careful to note that while these biological differences hold at the population level, they do not map directly onto individual men and women. He further outlines some potentially useful “non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap,” such as making software engineering more people-oriented through pair programming and collaboration initiatives, making tech and leadership roles less stressful, and better facilitating work-life balance through options like part-time work. However, Damore’s memo is more famous for its other suggestions that echo familiar cries of “reverse racism.” Damore argues that it is discriminatory to foster diversity through
• diversity initiatives that offer programs, mentoring, and classes exclusively for women;
• using high priority queues and secondary reviews for female applicants;
• applying advanced scrutiny to groups of people not sufficiently diverse; and
• setting organizational-level objectives and key results for increased representation.
He follows these arguments with suggestions that Google de-moralize diversity, stop alienating conservatives, de-emphasize empathy (“being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts”), punish intentional sexism rather than unintentional transgressions and microaggressions (he argues here that there is no evidence that speech constitutes violence), be more open about the science of human biodiversity (e.g., IQ and anatomical sex differences), and reconsider making unconscious bias training mandatory for promotion committees, among other things.38
Damore describes Google as an “ideological echo chamber” with “extreme” and “authoritarian” elements. He argues that Google—and here he is referring specifically to the midlevel managerial and public relations teams instituting diversity initiatives—is “extreme” in its belief that representational disparities are due to structural injustice. Google is “authoritarian” because it engages in “discrimination”—or what critics like Damore often refer to as “reverse discrimination”—when it tries to institute policies to correct for structural injustice.39 He understands Google as a “silent, psychologically unsafe environment” that has been invaded by the culture of “PC-authoritarians” (i.e., politically correct authoritarians).40 Damore noted that he had received “many” messages from supporters within the company who thanked him for raising these issues and who noted that they would have been too afraid to speak out within the company.41 Thus, Damore understood himself to be standing up for the voiceless inside the company and as taking an acknowledged risk in circulating the memo. Screenshots of Google’s internal message boards, interviews with employees, and an informal Twitter poll all showed that a significant number of Google employees agreed with the contents of Damore’s memo.42 At one point, the document was inaccessible because so many employees were attempting to view it concurrently.43
Many women who have worked or currently work for Google have spoken out since the memo to argue that Damore’s ideas are endemic to the company. Kelly Ellis, a former Google employee who reported being sexually harassed at the company in 2015, noted that this rhetoric was common at Google, not just among coders but also among those doing performance reviews and on hiring committees.44 She told WIRED that “Those guys like to pretend they’re silenced and afraid, but they’re not.”45 Another Google employee noted that the response to the memo inside Google was highly gendered, with men being much more likely to agree with Damore and see him as brave for speaking out.46 A third Google employee noted of the memo, “It’s not worth thinking about this as an isolated incident and instead a manifestation of what ails all of Silicon Valley.”47 Megan Smith, a former vice president at Google who also served as chief technology officer for the United States under Barack Obama, similarly noted that these perspectives are common across Silicon Valley and permeate its culture.48
If one were inclined to take this evidence as anecdotal, one could look to the 2017 lawsuit in which the US Department of Labor sued Google for the release of decades of employment data in an effort to combat gender bias within the company.49 Janette Wipper, a Department of Labor regional director, testified in court that “we found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce.”50 Janet Herold, the regional solicitor for the Department of Labor, further noted, “The government’s analysis at this point indicates that discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry.”51 The lawsuit against Google, in addition to a handful of other Department of Labor suits against Silicon Valley tech companies, was grounded on the fact that these companies were federal contractors.
Two months after they were filed, President Trump signed an executive order that effectively rolled back Obama-era protections for female workers.52 It is worth noting that as of 2019, the Department of Labor has lost its lawsuit suing for the requisite data to demonstrate a long-term trend of gender bias within Google.53 While this story was largely passed over silently in the press, Trump’s executive order is reflective of repeated libertarian arguments that the gender pay gap is a myth and alt-right arguments that any gender pay gap is due to human biodiversity rather than cultural bias and structural injustice. Google made similar claims that it had closed the gender pay gap at all levels across the entire company when it refused to hand over the additional data that the Department of Labor requested. Thus, the context within which Damore wrote was one in which a number of female Google employees at both junior and senior levels were accusing the company of frequently harboring similar sexist beliefs and in which the best data available to the Department of Labor led them to believe there was a systemic gender pay gap across the entire company.
Damore was fired shortly after the memo was leaked—although a Harvard-Harris poll would show that 55 percent of surveyed voters said that Google was wrong to fire Damore.54 In his op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Damore described Google as seeking to placate the outraged mob that resulted from his memo being leaked. He wrote, “The mob would have set upon anyone who openly agreed with me or even tolerated my views.”55 Key Google executives and other Silicon Valley elites voiced their condemnation of the memo, including Danielle Brown, Google’s VP of diversity; Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO; Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook; Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube; and Megan Smith, a former Google VP. However, even Pichai, the ultimate authority at Google, equivocated in his statement, writing, “[T]o suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. [ . . . ] At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK.”56 This equivocation remains to this day, as Google has barred its employees from protesting the company’s actions in their official capacity as employees or anywhere near Google’s Pride Parade float at the 2019 San Francisco Pride Parade.57 In response, a number of employees have petitioned the San Francisco Pride board of directors to revoke Google’s sponsorship of the 2019 Pride Parade.58
Following his firing, Damore mounted a publicity campaign in which he began to increasingly echo the public’s interpretation of his message, quickly dropping his caveats about applying population statistics to individuals and his potentially helpful suggestions for reform and instead focusing on ramping up his image as a victim and his insistence on human biodiversity as a central cause of gender disparities in the workplace. In his Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA), Damore noted, “I honestly haven’t seen any valid criticism that disputes my claims.”59 Damore’s positioning of himself as a Silicon Valley pariah has led to his adoption by the alt-right in North America.60 This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Damore’s photoshoot with Peter Duke, who the New York Times has described as “the Annie Leibovitz of the alt-right.”61 In the resulting photo, Damore sits in a T-shirt that reads “Gulag” styled as the Google logo. Damore arranged to have this photo retweeted by Mike Cernovich, an alt-right conspiracy theorist who has previously claimed that date rape does not exist. Afterward, Damore claimed that he was unaware of Cernovich’s politics and past statements and only did it to reach Cernovich’s 300,000 followers.62 Like many like-minded coders in Silicon Valley, Damore keeps his politics hard to pin down, hiding behind claims of ignorance, claims of centrism, reliance on the rhetoric of science, and caveats about his potentially having some form of undiagnosed autism as an excuse for any insensitivity in his statements. On his AMA, Damore described himself as “centrist” and a “liberal,” but in a group for libertarian-leaning Google employees, he more accurately noted that his libertarianism “influenced a lot of the document.”63
In his AMA, Damore also noted that a key influence on his thinking was University of Toronto pop psychologist Jordan Peterson, who blends vague and thus easily universalizable morals with antiquated Jungian analytical psychology and highly motivated readings of empirical evidence of the biological differences of anatomical sex. In the wake of the media campaign, Peterson interviewed Damore for his YouTube channel, ostensibly to provide an objective assessment of the Google memo. Despite Peterson’s claims to scientific objectivity, he found nearly all Damore’s ideas to be well supported by “the relevant psychological science.” Peterson argues that Damore, in fact, holds what is the majority viewpoint and that Damore was only silenced and made to feel like a pariah because “social constructionists” are better organized—despite their being wrong factually, scientifically, and ethically. Peterson even describes affirmative action hiring practices as “racist.” The result is a revivified Damore, who in the end argues that he has been proven right, that the entire culture is attempting to silence any dissenting viewpoints, and that we need a more “objective” way of looking at these issues.64
It is worth noting that others who have fact-checked Damore’s memo have had very different takes and have found the scientific evidence for many of his claims to be either totally lacking or in contradiction to his statements.65 Anatomical sex differences actually don’t hold much explanatory power when it comes to people’s different abilities, attitudes, and actions.66 In a survey of nearly four thousand studies, boys do not perform better than girls at mathematics as children, and the advantages adolescent and adult men have in mathematical ability are much better explained by social conditioning and cultural biases.67 And while differences in anatomical sex do correlate to different occupational interests—like an interest in STEM careers—these differences are not biological. They are much more likely because of the discourse in communities surrounding different occupations, as well as social conditioning.68 These differences are exacerbated when it comes to working with computers, as it has long been known that males exhibit “greater sex-role stereotyping of computers, higher computer self-efficacy, and more positive affect about computers.”69 This is not only the consensus among researchers doing empirical studies of the very issues that Damore raises but also the standard position of the American Psychological Association.70 As Diane Halpern, professor of psychology and past president of the American Psychological Association, has noted, the problem comes when these differences are understood as deficiencies and interpreted as biologically preordained, when in fact they result from a complex and continuous feedback loop between biology and environment.71
What we can learn from this is that while Google increasingly seeks to diversify its labor pool and offer a voice to women at the managerial level, it does not, and likely cannot, fully commit itself to these endeavors. Silencing the discourse on human biodiversity within the company potentially alienates too large a group of the essential talent pool of male coders that the company needs to keep happy in order to operate its global empire. At the top of the pyramid, Sundar Pichai equivocates about his commitment to gender equity in the company, and at the bottom, myriad coders express deep sympathies with Damore’s position. This pseudoscientific biologizing of people’s abilities, attitudes, and actions according to anatomical sex is not only inaccurate and reductive of the complexities of anatomical sex but also erases the hard-earned and central distinction between anatomical sex and gender. This erasure leads to a slippage in which gender roles are easily essentialized through the same pseudoscientific appeals to biology. By combining sex and gender, gender also becomes binarized. This cisnormativity, as we’ve seen, undergirds heteronormativity. It is only atop this cisnormative binarization that heterosexuality is semicoherent as a concept and available as a cultural norm. Further, it is only atop this binarization that homosexuality can emerge as a derivative and abnormal concept. Instead of individual bodies connected by desire, we have categorically distinct bodies connecting within pre-articulated matrices of desire ([male, female], [male, male], [female, female]).
Coders operating within this epistemological framework are ill-suited to ethically manage the vagaries of contemporary sexuality as it manifests itself through digital communications. And further, because of its pseudoscientific grounding and the increasing retrenchment that occurs after pariahs like Damore are turned into martyrs by alt-right media, we are left with a discourse community surer of its convictions. While we will continue to draw on internal case studies from Google, as we’ve seen, this conjuncture is in no way limited to a single corporation but instead is endemic to Silicon Valley. This problem is exacerbated by the ambiguous messages of CEOs, the often-toothless warnings of middle managers working toward diversity initiatives, and the very silence that Damore identified in his memo when it comes to internal dialogues about gender equity and diversity. As we will see in the next section of this chapter, when these biases and silences are combined with the hacker culture surrounding the implementation of new algorithms and curation of big data in Silicon Valley, it can lead to biased technological systems and platforms that carry with them a large amount of inertia that inhibits the full correction of biased functions after implementation.
The Heteronormativity of Code
There is a hubris embedded at the core of Silicon Valley research and development practices that is frequently referred to as the hacker ethic. This ethic is unique to the conjuncture in which computer science arose, a cross-fertilization of military and academic research.72 It was brought to popular awareness by Steven Levy in 1984 when he published Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which celebrated a culture obsessed with openness, empowerment, and the fundamental maxim that “information wants to be free.”73 Levy’s interlocutors made convincing counterarguments at the time, such as Dennis Hayes, who argued that the hacker ethic was a myth constructed by computer journalists and a highly misleading representation of the field. Instead, Hayes saw a culture that was blind to purposes and solely fixated on techniques, a necessity because of its need to bow to corporate and military priorities to achieve research and development funding. Hackers were so obsessed with manifesting the innovations they envisioned that they were blind to their potential impacts on society.74 All systems had bugs that could not be predicted. The hacker’s job was to build the technology and make ad hoc adjustments to it to fix any errors or ill effects that might emerge. Hackers have a strong confidence that only they can arbitrate the future of technology, and any attempts to regulate them or rein in “progress” are ill-conceived. As Noam Cohen noted, “There is the successful entrepreneur’s belief that the disruption that has made him fabulously wealthy must be good for everyone.”75
