She gave a talk at my school once, she was invited by my then advisor. This was in 2017 right after she left MSR. We had a brief change, and even back then you can tell she’s not into kowtowing to the patriarchy. It’s quite hard for ambitious women in compsci, they have to walk a tight edge between firm and “motherly”. Men have no such constraints.
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Clarification: I’m speaking about women researchers in an academic setting in general. And hoping to lend a bit of detail on this researcher as a person.
I've worked with many women at FANG companies and I wouldn't describe any of them as even somewhat motherly (though I have noticed "firm"). I think Dr. Gebru was fired because she cast Google in a bad light with some rather dubious arguments in a paper she wanted to publish and when she was asked to not publish her research she she sent an unprofessional email to a wide audience.
I don't know why this person was fired, but looking over the email/document she posted on her twitter it looks like she is asserting that her employers are racists and sexist on little evidence. Why would you, or she, expect to be permitted to slander the company this way and still keep her job? Although I don't know if she published this document before or after her termination, so it may, or may not have been a factor.
Gebru wasn't fired because she "cast Google in a bad light", she gave an ultimatum to her boss threatening to resign if they don't disclose names of all reviewers who criticized her work AND blasted group emails calling for sabotage
Her research does cast Google in a bad light. She writes about how language models (like Google's BERT which influences somewhere between 10% and 100% of searches) are environmentally unfriendly and encode hegemonic language making them subtly racist and sexist. Her solutions are to use smaller language models and more curated data sets, which are probably not palatable for Google.
Dr. Gebru was told the paper shouldn't be published with Google's name and some of the feedback on it that she received had to do with the paper not mentioning how Google was combating or leading on the problems with language models that she called out. In other words, if her paper had made Google look good, they probably would've been okay with her publishing it. Given that her paper made Google look bad, they wanted her to change it or not publish it. When she got that feedback she sent her intemperate email (in which she included her ultimatum to resign) and was terminated shortly after.
I think it's debatable, given that she did offer an ultimatum, whether she was fired or resigned - but I know she prefers the former and I think that's at least a coherent way to describe what happened (Google accepted one side of her ultimatum by firing her).
>In other words, if her paper had made Google look good
A more charitable assumption might be that they wanted her paper to address feedback from the reviewers in lieu of being published as is. The feedback that she was presenting a biased interpretation by leaving unmentioned the existing work being done to combat bias in the models.
I have heard that academic departments literally bend over backwards to cultivate women as professors and extend every possible advantage to them in order to promote them. This is from a classmate who did her PhD and is now a tenure-track professor at a prominent school. I know for a fact that she was also the recipients of various scholarships, grants etc. while she was in school, many of which she attributed to being a woman in the field.
Your statement that "it's hard for women in CompSci" rings false to me. I think women do face higher barriers in many corporate settings that have been mostly male-dominated, but my personal observations about women in CompSci academia lead me to believe that women are treated better vis-a-vis their counterparts in other university departments, and also in other male-dominated industries.
Yeha I’ve noticed structural programs that help women, especially at the undergrad level. And the grad level (where people mentioned operated) it’s highly advisor/manager dependent. At the academy, each PI run their own independent fiefdom so some can be very abusive across the board. This is where being a minority makes it worse because it’s more difficult to form commodory with those around you. These are all first hand accounts and observations I’m reporting. So both can be true: favored at the institutional level but still lagging at the personal level.
Having been through grad school I can assure you it’s tough no matter your gender. In fact, women stand a higher chance of getting more financial assistance for their studies because of the structural support for women that continues at the graduate level. Also, in my experience, men tended to have much more conflicts with their advisors and left the graduate program in larger numbers than women (perhaps even proportionally, men walked out more). Ironically, my women colleagues in grad school complained much more about interpersonal conflict with their female professors and research group members than the men. On the personal front, it seems to me that it’s neither here nor there: it’s so subjective that it’s practically impossible to see any pattern whatsoever.
+1 to this. On my very first day of my very first CS class in college over 10 years ago, a guest speaker came in to beg to take girls to an all expenses paid conference about women in CS. I was never afforded a similar opportunity.
Reading their comment I don’t see that specific claim being made. The comment discussed different treatment with regards to personality, but doesn’t relate that to this firing directly.
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Clarification: I’m speaking about women researchers in an academic setting in general. And hoping to lend a bit of detail on this researcher as a person.