The sexist part is not the "hard problems" but the competitiveness. I don't think sexism is intrinsic to solving hard problems - certainly gender-inclusive companies work on hard problems successfully. But in my experience those companies tend to be more collaborative.
Google needs to celebrate heroes. Like Jeff Dean. Or Sanjay Ghemawat. Those are Great Men. They are "Living Gods" because they solved Really Hard Problems. Getting into that class of people requires being a "lead" which necessarily means other people around you aren't leading. So you need to prove why you're worthy of being the "lead" which means proving the others around you aren't. This is toxic masculinity. Not solving hard problems.
Proving that you can lead does not neccesarily mean that you must prove others cannot lead. This is the fundamental problem in your thinking when you make such generic and universal claims. If people are doing this (and I do believe it happens a lot), then it is certainly very toxic culture but calling it "toxic masculinity" is forcing the issues into your own sexist ideologies. Also, competitiveness is not by default "masculine". You are doing massive disservice to many brilliant competative and successful women by making such blanket claims. When resources are finite, competition are natural regardless of sex. For example, we all need to demonstrate good grades out of school to get in to programs with very limited seats. Being able to compete is neither exclusive or inherent male characteristic.
Whether or not it's "toxic masculinity", the internal lingo around performance reviews at Google is lulzy.
It's called "perfing" (as in, if you do something bad, you might get "perfed hard" next cycle) and managers frequently threaten to take people "into the Perf Room" although it's just an expression (there isn't actually a dedicated "Perf Room"). Anyone who gets below 3.0 (Meets Expectation) during the calibration process is called a "PB" It used to be "pillow biter" but you can't make that joke anymore so it's just "PB", as in "How many PBs does Exec want us to have this cycle?"
It's offensive and backward, but it's also hilarious that grown men (and women, if they ever get let in to executive circles) are using language that sounds like it was invented by teenagers.
> It's called "perfing" (as in, if you do something bad, you might get "perfed hard" next cycle) and managers frequently threaten to take people "into the Perf Room" although it's just an expression (there isn't actually a dedicated "Perf Room"). Anyone who gets below 3.0 (Meets Expectation) during the calibration process is called a "PB" It used to be "pillow biter" but you can't make that joke anymore so it's just "PB", as in "How many PBs does Exec want us to have this cycle?"
1. You must be in an incredibly toxic enclave if managers in your org are routinely threatening people that way. It's certainly possible, it's a big company, there's been a number of shitty directors/execs that have made the news. But given points #2 and #3, I have reservations about believing generalizations about this particular claim.
2. ME is not a '3.0' (Unless you're measuring on a 12-point scale, that starts at 0.) There are three ratings above, and only one rating below ME - Needs Improvement. Which is a pretty serious wake-up call for the person and their manager.
3. Very few people get NI, you seem to be confusing Google with either old Microsoft, or Amazon, whose bell curves, as I understand, require(d) ~1/5th of the company to be on the shit list at any particular point in time.
Women demand men that are better than their peers while men only demand women who are good on their own. The evolutionary pressure produces men who are competitive in this toxic way.
This is pure evopsych fantasy land. Women do not, as a rule, demand men "better than their peers". We would see more little old ladies out there who held out for above average, never got it, and chose instead to remain single.
>We would see more little old ladies out there who held out for above average
How in the world can you come to this conclusion when society hasn't been in the situation where old ladies as a whole were in a position to be close to equal financially compared to their male peers in at least the last century? If anything, you have to wait a few more decades to come to this conclusion at minimum.
The original contention was that women held out for higher-status men, leading to selection pressure such that men evolved to be more competitive. If women are only very recently even able to be more selective, then I don’t see how all this is supposed to work.
Is there even any evidence that modern women are more “choosy” than men? You’d have an hypothesis like: among married 40-something women, the distribution of socioeconomic status matches that of women overall, whereas married 40-something men have higher SES than would be expected. Should be easy enough to test with publicly available data.
>If women are only very recently even able to be more selective, then I don’t see how all this is supposed to work.
That's not what the above implied. You can still fulfill the condition "be more selective" if the male populace as a whole was earning way more than the female populace before, which it very clearly was. This directly questions the notion of there being a bunch of old ladies who'd have held out: the majority would've found their "better off financially" peer. Things only caught up in the last few decades or so. All those younger generation women still need to age into old ladies in the first place.
>Is there even any evidence that modern women are more “choosy” than men?
Financially? Yes. While I don't fully subscribe to the idea of "equal or better than", you only have to look for a few minutes to see the hoards of anecdotes and studies pointing towards women putting vastly higher weight on a man's finances than the other way around, to the point men can use their money to compensate for deficiencies elsewhere[0]. That alone would explain why women haven't been nearly as competitive in the workplace as men: men have a far bigger incentive to do so on top of all the other incentives both experience.
> You can still fulfill the condition "be more selective" if the male populace as a whole was earning way more than the female populace before, which it very clearly was. This directly questions the notion of there being a bunch of old ladies who'd have held out: the majority would've found their "better off financially" peer.
But the original idea was that women prefer men better than their peers -- that's a direct quote from that top-level comment. You seem to be saying something distinct from that, that women prefer men who are better off financially than they are. These are very different claims.
Further, if you're right that women tended to satisfy their desire for higher-status men simply due to the fact that men used to have more money on average than women did, then where is the selection pressure supposed to come from? There's no pressure -- it wasn't hard for a woman, who had few career prospects, to find a man with a job who could bring home consistent pay.
> you only have to look for a few minutes to see the hoards of anecdotes and studies pointing towards women putting vastly higher weight on a man's finances than the other way around
Take your pick between "I don't really care about anecdotes" and "I have my own anecdotes that tell me that women don't place significantly more weight on socioeconomic status than men do". I'm curious about the studies, but I'd have to find a copy of the article you cite before I'd place too much stock in it. What I'd like to see is some proof in the data that conditioning on socioeconomic status does not significantly alter marriage rates for women but does do so for men.
The whole usage of the phrase "Toxic masculinity" to describe "Competitiveness" is some throughly pointless gendering which only serves to confuse matters.
It seems that you missed their point: the toxicity is non-gendered. (I say you missed their point but they also kinda did a poor job of making it, FWIW.) There might be a point that Google's culture in practice is male-dominant but I think it's mistaken thinking that puts the toxicity on the male-dominance.
Consider your words as if they were being said about a woman:
> Proving you're smart by solving hard problems is a gorilla-chest-thumping exercise.
I agree that competitiveness is masculine[1], but it's not obvious to me that this is a case where it is toxic.
It may be a more competitive or masculine environment than you would prefer, and that's fine. But what benefit do you think comes from labeling the perceived problems of Google's culture as "toxic masculinity"?
[1]Yes women are also competitive, but most of the extremely competitive people are men.
Solving hard problems isn't an inherently masculine thing, but basing a work culture's progression around being able to prove employees solved hard problems is a pretty good example of toxic masculinity. And the phrase "toxic masculinity" does not mean that all masculinity has problems, it's a separate (and pretty well-documented) concept.
Toxic masculinity accurately represents what the OP describes and is clear here. There's nothing to be offended about. It's revealing the angst that sprang up from this community of mostly men.
Classic Bulverism on display. Don't defend your position, just assume you're right and offer an armchair pyscho-analysis for why people who disagree with you are wrong.
Here's some more Bulverism: What's there to defend? Colloquially toxic masculinity means exactly what the OP was going for. It's to jockey for power, position, and status at the expense of others (and often detrimental to their own goals). Hey! Women sometimes also display these toxic masculine traits commonly found in male primates! You should be more inclusive and call it toxic humanity! has to be one of the least useful things you can bring to the overall discussion.
Also, that is not what toxic masculinity means. If you have an all-woman organization that has a culture dominated by counter-productive competition, you don't call that "toxic masculinity". That just wouldn't make sense.
At best, the competition is a symptom of the real (alleged) problem of toxic masculinity: too many men. Specifically an environment where men are systematically favored over women for sexist reasons.
That Google is suffering under such a system is a claim which needs defending.
I suspect, though I cannot prove, than than many of those comments are made at least somewhat ironically.
We've been perpetually informed than men and women are the same from the neck up for decades, and a Google employee (James Damore) was even fired for pointing out that men and women differ in their preferences, attitudes, and social behaviors.
That it is now OK to acknowledge those differences when it makes men look bad is quite the standard to set.
I mean, which is it? Are men and women the same or are they different (on average)?
