Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even if I practiced for years to try and catch up.
I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.
I think one thing that struck me from the linked article was the point that the memo wasn't structured to invite discussion. It wasn't "let's have a chat", it was "here's an evidence bomb of how you're all wrong".
I think advancing points is fine, but if you're after productive discussion rather than an adversarial debate, you need to proactively invite discussion. And if an adversarial debate was what he was after, that does strike me as inappropriate work communication.
Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). Plenty of far more aggressive articles and essays have been written from the opposite side that have not been criticized in the same way.
And for the record, I did not get any aggressive tone from his paper. I thought he was as polite as he needed to be and made the necessary caveats. I think many people were just so unprepared to hear any argument from an opposing viewpoint that they read into it what they wanted to.
> Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem).
This was addressed in the article. This burden has fallen on women since they were teenagers. To expect them to do it yet again, to have to defend themselves at work this time, is ridiculous.
I'm not talking about a woman having to prove her technical ability to her male coworkers at work because of their prejudices. I know that that's bullshit and I'm sorry they have to do so.
I'm talking about handling what Damore claimed in an intellectually honest way. You can't dismiss his points just because you're tired of talking about them (or what you think are the same points you've always been talking about, but I think Damore's comments on each gender's preference and pressures for picking careers had something worth discussing). What he said had at least some spark of originality and insight, otherwise it wouldn't have gotten nearly the attention it did. Consider, would we be talking about the memo if it were about how he thought Sundar Pichai was a lizard man?
Those who disagreed with Damore already won the battle. They kicked him out of Google and doubled down on their diversity initiatives/echo chamber. We should be able to talk about his arguments honestly and rationally without falling back on gendered reasons at this point at least.
I'm still making up my mind on this one, but for the sake of argument, I'll disagree with you.
The workplace was the venue for this, because 'this' was evidence was that Google(his workplace)'s diversity initiatives and censorship were harming the company. He attempted to go through the proper channels (HR) as discussed in another part of the comment section for this very article.
Completely ignored by HR, and after some watercooler discussion in which he received confirmation that he was not the only one to have such thoughts, he decided to organize his thoughts into a memo, which from his perspective, introduced ideas that could explain the gender employment gap at Google and help make the company better by erasing the notion of being a 'diversity hire' among other things.
What it did not do was claim that his female coworkers were inferior. I feel the need to reiterate that because that seems to be the disinformation that many take home with them and use for their arguments against him. With it, they vilified and ousted him.
Going back and reading it now, it's hard to believe such a seemingly harmless claim (women aren't as well represented in tech because they're not as interested in it) has created such outrage. I blame this mainly on Gizmodo, and those who piggybacked their original article (that blatantly lied about what he wrote and presented his memo which they had quietly edited). Some credit also needs to go to whoever leaked the memo, which Damore probably did not mean to leave the relatively small group of people he originally introduced it to, at least at that point in time.
Really, what he presented and how he presented it were not very controversial. It easily could have been addressed internally by HR, or discussed within the company by its employees without the dishonesty and witch hunting. My point is, what he presented should have been acceptable in the way he did it especially given Google's claims of free speech and the historical precedent of memos like these, but dishonesty and close-mindedness distorted it until it looked like he was calling for repealing women's suffrage.
> Going back and reading it now, it's hard to believe such a seemingly harmless claim (women aren't as well represented in tech because they're not as interested in it) has created such outrage.
It is only hard to believe if you are entirely unfamiliar with the history of this discussion.
Let's take a more obvious example: the common racist claim that black people are lazy. It is possible to dress this up in neutral, scientific-sounding language. Someone ignorant of the history of racism in America could be fooled into saying, "Gosh, we should consider that as an explanation for why tech is disproportionately white." (That someone could harbor racial bias, but that need not be true.)
That would correctly generate outrage, because a) one should not be ignorant about the history of these things when jumping into a discussion with such impact on people's lives, and b) there is a long, long history of virulent racists edging their way into the mainstream by dressing up their prejudices just enough to sound reasonable to the ignorant.
Returning to Damore, the fact that a bunch of white men ignorant of the history of gender bias can't spot the patterns does not mean the patterns aren't there. The benefit of the doubt only applies to educated doubt, not the doubt that comes from not knowing what's going on.
That you were surprised by the outrage only means you haven't been paying attention.
> That would correctly generate outrage, because a) one should not be ignorant
Then the [racial|gender|*] discrimination would never go away because there will always be some history. Damore or whoever wouldn't ever be able to talk neutrally and society will live forever with that discrimination.
I'm not surprised this is happening during Trump's term.
And these are all points that apologists don't seem to understand. Why we can't just have rational discourse, debate about these issues, come to a middle ground. You know middle ground and compromise means in issues like gender and race inequality? That at the end of the day, the minority is still treated as less than. Hey there's been some progress, isn't that good enough? No, of course not.
We've been discussing these issues for generations. At some point the discussion has been had. No one is saying anything new. But every new group of people believe they have something worthwhile to say about it and until they get to regurgitate their own brand of ignorance they'll whine and cry about how they're being oppressed for not being able to maintain the status quo.
People's humanity and civil rights are not topics that should be open for debate. But the people who want to debate that start with "science" as the thin end of the wedge.
Of course, the thing that's always up for question is the participation of minorities. It's never a guy saying, "Fellas, the science shows that men are poor at cooperating and highly prone to aggression and violence, so let's debate whether we men should be allowed to manage or supervise other people."
> It is only hard to believe if you are entirely unfamiliar with the history of this discussion.
Completely disagree. The crux of most historical discussions were based on ability and was blanketed to all individual women, as they were implying that gender was the only causal factor. Discussing how prenatal testosterone may be a factor in influencing decisions for a distribution of a group is a completely different beast.
The thing that bothers me about the left is their inability to accept any sort of biological determinism as a possible large contributing factor to anything. Out of curiosity, if we were to use your analogy loosely:
> Let's take a more obvious example: the common racist claim that black people are lazy.
If evidence came out that a certain portion of blacks were missing some sort of hormone that is almost completely causal in lack of desire to eat apples, so that it skewed their distribution in a statistically significant way, would you accept it? If it pertained to something considered more valuable, like say, intelligence or athletic ability, would you still accept it? Do you see that this shirks the definition of racism since it is talking about distributions and not individuals?
> That would correctly generate outrage, because a) one should not be ignorant about the history of these things when jumping into a discussion with such impact on people's lives….
Anyone can take offense to anything and be “outraged.” What good does that do? A sliding metric of people being sensitive and getting emotional is no reason to not have discussions. In fact, some people have disorders making it difficult for them to navigate social contexts tactfully. Are you saying people on the autism spectrum shouldn’t be a part of the discussion? This could possibly apply to James (I don’t know), especially if you’ve watched any of his interviews.
>b) there is a long, long history of virulent racists edging their way into the mainstream by dressing up their prejudices just enough to sound reasonable to the ignorant.
> Discussing how prenatal testosterone may be a factor in influencing decisions for a distribution of a group is a completely different beast.
No. It is the same discussion, just revised for fancier modern science. But it's the same deal: "I, a man, have noticed a possible fact about women. That proves that the status quo is awesome, and let's talk about going back to a simpler time before civil rights were such a thorn in my side."
The reason nobody on the left will discuss biological determinism with you is because of its rich history as a tool of oppression. The discussion has happened a zillion times over hundreds of years.
It's the same reason that most people who understand evolution won't bother to debate with hardcore creationists: it's a fucking waste of time. The creationists will never come around and say, "Oh, gosh, guess I was wrong." Motivated reasoning driven by deep bias is just not a fertile ground for discussion. Anybody who's sincerely interested in the history of evolution or the history of racism or the history of sexism can take a class. That somebody wants to strongly argue a point without having done that work is a big sign it's useless.
> Anyone can take offense to anything and be “outraged.” What good does that do?
This is a fine example of motivated reasoning. Nicolashahn, who at least has the decency to write under his own name, was clearly talking about morally justified outrage. If you would like to argue that people on the receiving end of sexist and racist bias don't deserve to be upset, make the argument. But you can't slip it like this.
> Are you saying people on the autism spectrum shouldn’t be a part of the discussion?
No. But as someone on the spectrum, I will say you're an asshole for using me as a strawman in a dumb argument.
> Would you mind giving a modern example?
Oh, modern. You mean after racism and sexism ended? When did that happen exactly?
If you're serious about all this, open an account in your actual name, stop with the bad rhetorical techniques, and carry on with the discussion. But as far as I can tell, you're yet another bigot who popped on a mask.
>No. It is the same discussion, just revised for fancier modern science.
You seem to be missing the nuance of distribution vs every individual. To me, this is a big distinction.
>"I, a man, have noticed a possible fact about women."
Actually, the vast majority of people in the social sciences are women, many of whom found this correlation with prenatal testosterone despite the evidence running counter to their ideology. If you would prefer, I can cite you many female researchers' names on peer reviewed articles. Regardless, why does it matter what gender the person is, if the science is sound?
>The reason nobody on the left will discuss biological determinism with you is because of its rich history as a tool of oppression.
That's too bad. As the confidence of a fact increases because of corroboration of evidence, the history of a more generalized, historical concept of the specific claim should have less bearing on whether it is true or not. If the issue doesn't appear sound, simply find evidence to refute the claim; the main concept behind the scientific method. Moreover, I debate this with people on the left all the time. If they aren't far left, they usually just downplay the amount the hormones affect decision, but they don't rule out there is any correlation.
>It's the same reason that most people who understand evolution won't bother to debate with hardcore creationists: it's a fucking waste of time.
False analogy. Yes, evolution is the only theory that has significant corroborating evidence and bringing up "designers" with mountains of evidence to the contrary (and no supporting evidence) is just faulty reasoning. Also, many times creationists make claims that are unfalsifiable and thus useless. On the contrary, though, people working hard to isolate independent variables in the messy field of cognitive psychology to find correlations to other attributes is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.
>This is a fine example of motivated reasoning. Nicolashahn, who at least has the decency to write under his own name, was clearly talking about morally justified outrage. If you would like to argue that people on the receiving end of sexist and racist bias don't deserve to be upset, make the argument. But you can't slip it like this.
It isn't sexist or racist if you talk of distribution instead of every individual. Is it racist to ask for someone's race on a medical form? No, it's highly useful. Black males have a higher incidence of prostate cancer... or is that racist by your reasoning?
Why does using one's actual name make any difference to the content of the discussion? Are "Mark Twain's" literary works worthless because that is a pseudonym?
>No. But as someone on the spectrum, I will say you're an asshole for using me as a strawman in a dumb argument.
How is that a strawman? You implied that tact should be used when discussing things with strong historical contention. I brought up the fact that a certain proportion of people with a social disorder can't meet you metric because of materialistic deficiencies and that your requirement ostracizes those people. It's simply a further example of why I think emotions and feelings have little place in a discussion.
> Oh, modern. You mean after racism and sexism ended? When did that happen exactly?
No. I was genuinely curious what you were referencing.
>If you're serious about all this, open an account in your actual name, stop with the bad rhetorical techniques, and carry on with the discussion. But as far as I can tell, you're yet another bigot who popped on a mask.
Once again, why does my actual name matter or have any bearing whether I am "serious?" I am serious or else I wouldn't have taken the time out of my busy schedule to reply.
Vaguely saying I'm using "bad rheteorical techniques," isn't very useful. I assume you are talking to your belief that I used a "strawman" fallacy.
Masks are useful. Often, I'll put on a devil's advocate mask when debating with myself. I find this usefully gives me a more balanced perspective.
> Yes, it matters whether you are owning your words.
Well, clearly, superficial things to the actual content of the discussion like who I am, matters to you. A blanket statement that "it matters," is too reductive.
> This discussion is about how we structure society to serve its members.
Agreed.
>It has a long history of bigots cloaking their bigotry in a zillion ways. It is rife with people putting on masks -- from white hoods to anime avatars -- as a way of manipulating the discourse and avoiding social accountability for their attempts at social change.
Social accountability? You'll have to define this and why this is important in a discussion.
I find it interesting that you are equating an anonymous discussion about how to best serve society to white supremacists running around assaulting and killing people. Rather an extreme jump.
>If you want to be taken seriously -- certainly by me, probably by anybody -- then step up. Otherwise you're indistinguishable to me from the thousand other people I've dealt with who are happy to support self-serving sexism and racism from the shadows.
Interesting. You still cling to this belief that I'm supporting "self-serving sexism and racism" without specifics and not rebutting anything I've said. I'm starting to think you are currently incapable of being nuanced in thought. I hope this changes for you.
I don't have to define anything. I don't have to rebut anything. Somebody who is putting on a hood to discuss their opinions is the one who has to earn a response.
The norms of academic debate are decent ones, but they evolved in a very particular context, one where people committed to a lifetime of study and public service to earn their right to participate. You have done nothing here to earn similar consideration.
>I don't have to define anything. I don't have to rebut anything.
Certainly not. The request for a definition was meant to imply I can’t talk to the claim about “social accountability,” not knowing your definition. Unfortunately, you not rebutting anything just appears like you can’t, not that you won’t. You are definitely practicing what you preach; You are letting emotion ruin a conversation. In fact, it smacks of a tactic my 4 year-old daughter would use.
> Somebody who is putting on a hood to discuss their opinions is the one who has to earn a response.
I find it amusing that you use these “powerful” historical symbols to conjure up condemnation and emotion, when they have very little to do with anything I’ve discussed. It must be an easy life when you just dismiss things without observing or thinking about them. I find this is the most common feature among leftists and rightists and is predominantly why you guys are unable to come to an agreement on anything. Truly a spectacle.
>The norms of academic debate are decent ones, but they evolved in a very particular context, one where people committed to a lifetime of study and public service to earn their right to participate. You have done nothing here to earn similar consideration.
This is a website dedicated for people to “... make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial.” This isn’t a place of academia, but the principles behind having a good discussion remain, regardless of the context.
I’m sure you don’t decry the use of pseudonyms when women in the past used them so that the quality of their work wasn’t judged by their gender. I find it funny you can’t abstract that same concept to now. It almost seems like you desire to know who I am, so you can place me in a box like the many misogynists did to those women in the past. Seems to me, perhaps you are the new form of racist/sexist.
Lastly, people don’t necessarily have to devote a lifetime of study to be cited in the academic community. That comes with the merit of the research. There are many people who dedicate their life to academia, but are cited very little due to quality of their research.
I was hoping to actually have a discussion where we could each learn something from the other, but you make this impossible. You could have reached a moderate, but instead you alienated me. Really, all you did was prove one of the points I made in the beginning, that emotion is the heighth of irrationality and shuts down conversation.
> Ah, the brand new account created just to push against an antisexist position suddenly has well-developed opinions on the history and the purpose of this website. What a surprise!
I copy and pasted the intent from the welcome tab. "Well-developed?" It took me about 30 seconds.
I've just found out about y-combinator from a coworker fairly recently. I'm looking forward to contributing more, since I am in the technical industry. I hope my future interactions are more interesting and with significantly less assumptions about people and their intents. Speaking of which, instead of making assumptions, you could just ask people questions... but I guess that is too difficult.
> Self-proclaimed "moderates" in hoods are a dime a dozen. If you aren't going to take your words seriously enough to take the minimal step of owning them, there's no reason I should. I can get poorly argued pro-sexist waffle anywhere.
I lean "right" and "left" depending on the issue and your definitions for "right" and "left." Most of the time, my beliefs are rather balanced and not really "right" or "left," but a mixture of both. I don't know what else moderate could mean.
I don't know why you feel "owning my words" matters in a discussion, as you won't discuss it. You've simply thrown out the word "social accountability" without a definition.
Yes, it matters whether you are owning your words.
This discussion is about how we structure society to serve its members. It has a long history of bigots cloaking their bigotry in a zillion ways. It is rife with people putting on masks -- from white hoods to anime avatars -- as a way of manipulating the discourse and avoiding social accountability for their attempts at social change.
If you want to be taken seriously -- certainly by me, probably by anybody -- then step up. Otherwise you're indistinguishable to me from the thousand other people I've dealt with who are happy to support self-serving sexism and racism from the shadows.
You have a poor understanding of AI. It's not magic. It just looks that way because we throw it a bunch of data and it learns to mimic parts of it without us having to understand what's going on at the level we would if we'd had to build the machinery ourselves.
It is in fact quite easy to do machine learning work and come out with what is effectively racist AI. People have already done plenty of it accidentally.
> Going back and reading it now, it's hard to believe such a seemingly harmless claim (women aren't as well represented in tech because they're not as interested in it) has created such outrage
I think the larger problem is that this is an overstatement. Women might not be interested in joining the current tech culture, but that doesn't mean they aren't interested in tech to a larger extent than the current numbers suggest.
Part of the disconnect is that these initiatives are aimed at changing the culture to be more attractive to women, and the people who really like the culture don't see the need.
Certainly the current tech culture is effective and fairly productive, but I certainly don't know that it will be more, equally, or less productive with these culture changes.
I don't think you can claim that "tech" and e.g. civil engineering have much in common in terms of culture, but they still share the lack of men/women parity.
Yet somehow, programming is considered a woman's job throughout vast swathes of India. China is much closer to parity in engineering as well.
You're ignoring that girls are socialized to think they're bad at math, science, etc. Boys are told the opposite and are pushed in this direction. I certainly was. My parents were drilling me on math by age five.
In all developed countries, only 10-25% of engineers are female. An American society in is very different from that of Australia, Sweden, Greece or Germany.
Not sure why, but I know one possible explanation.
In developing countries, people are pressured by their basic needs. An engineering job generally pays well. People in such countries are less likely to do what they want and more likely to do what pays well, so gender ratio in engineering is close to 50/50.
In developed countries, people are guaranteed to survive even without a profession or job. Less financial pressure, more freedom of choice, less women in engineering.
Well doesn't this sort of support Damore's hypothesis ? Some of the smartest girls I know went into marketing, purely because they just loved that field. Somehow to them sitting in an office in front of a computer all day didn't seem that appealing.
Is it safe to infer that, in th developed world, given a career choice women have a propensity to not choose tech ?
On the contrary, it sort of refutes Damore's hypothesis: the difference is not inherent but merely societal, because we observe that, when encouraged, women can succeed at engineering as much as men.
In other words, if true, we should strive to understand why fewer women choose tech in developed countries and fix it, not automatically assume it's because they are inherently less interested.
Succeeding at engineering is not the same as having the desire to do engineering. If it takes encouragement to push women into the field, that says the desire is not there.
I am going to go further and suggest that software engineering is just not that desirable of a career, no matter who you are. Given that compensation is a function of supply and demand, and this career is fairly well compensated, the lack of people – both male and female – entering the career path would suggest is not the top choice of anyone.
What appears to be happening is that some men are willing to put up with an undesirable career because of the higher than average compensation, while women are less wooed by those monetary factors.
The only 'fix' here is to drive home the importance of doing unhappy careers for big money towards the female population. But do we really want to do that? That does not really seem like a great goal. There is more to life than money.
All of that enters the realm of the highly subjective, with some parts I may agree with and other I don't. I, for example, definitely didn't enter this field because of the money. Other people I know did. I certainly cannot generalize to large groups of people. I disagree with your observation about "some men" and "women", or rather, I'd say "what happens is that some men are willing (and some, like me, are not) and some women aren't", and furthermore, I'd question whether this is a desirable state of things. I happen to think working long hours is crap, and something that needs to change (and the reason I find startups unattractive).
What matters here is that, with the right incentives, women can be as successful as men in this field. Note that the converse is also true. This automatically destroys the notion that there is some kind of biological (or inherent, whatever) impediment for women, which is what the memo was fundamentally about.
> I, for example, definitely didn't enter this field because of the money.
But we're talking about the population at large, not the tiny group of 'geeks' who revel in the tech environment. There are always outliers.
If the general population – both men and women – wanted to do this kind of work, they would be falling all over each other to do it, just as they do in careers that are desirable. Instead, you see businesses falling over the few people who are willing to do it. That is not a sign of an attractive career path. Quite the opposite.
Again, not even men want to do this type of work. This is not even a gender issue at the heart of it.
> I'd question whether this is a desirable state of things.
But can you fundamentally change the job so that it is desirable to the general population? Programming is simply an awful time that most people wouldn't wish upon their worst enemy. It is as simple as that. We can go around and try and blame things like culture, but at the end of the day the work that has to be done sucks.
Yes, some people are wired strangely and happen to like it. Pick anything you find distasteful and I can find you at least one person who loves it. That's the nature of having 7 billion people and all of their random mutations. That does not mean the masses have any interest whatsoever.
> What matters here is that, with the right incentives, women can be as successful as men in this field. Note that the converse is also true. This automatically destroys the notion that there is some kind of biological (or inherent, whatever) impediment for women, which is what the memo was fundamentally about.
Your overall point may be true, but your logic seems flawed. The fact that women can be as successful as men in the field does not mean that there is not some biological reason to not want to do the job.
You're mixing highly subjective aspects that I don't find worthwhile to debate here ("the job sucks") and that I disagree with. No, the job doesn't suck more than other career choices. Sorry you feel that way, maybe consider changing jobs?
> But can you fundamentally change the job so that it is desirable to the general population?
But it's not the general population we're talking about; that's a straw man. We just must strive to create a work environment that's not hostile to women and which doesn't discriminate against them based on prejudice. And yes, not excluding a segment of the population just because of irrelevant biological traits is desirable and worth the effort.
> Your overall point may be true, but your logic seems flawed
To me it's logically flawed to claim there's a biological impediment and when shown cases where women are successful, to suddenly claim "of course, they do it for the money in third-world countries!" as if this somehow explained biological differences. Money is not a biological factor, it's a societal one! The logical disconnect is so pronounced that it must point to an emotional blind spot.
> No, the job doesn't suck more than other career choices.
Then why are men and women alike rejecting the field? Men less so, perhaps, but neither gender are jumping at the chance to have the job. Not even the well above average compensation that attempts to attract them to the industry.
> Sorry you feel that way, maybe consider changing jobs?
This is not my opinion, this is what the data shows. I'm glad you do not feel that the professional is awful. I personally do not feel that way either, but we cannot use our biases to believe that everyone feels the same way. Be very careful of your biases.
> We just must strive to create a work environment that's not hostile to women and which doesn't discriminate against them based on prejudice.
In order to even think about whether the workplace is hostile to women, we first have to determine why neither gender is interested in the profession. Again, this is not my opinion. This is what the data is telling us.
> To me it's logically flawed to claim there's a biological impediment and when shown cases where women are successful, to suddenly claim "of course, they do it for the money in third-world countries!" as if this somehow explained biological differences.
Let me be clear: I am not saying it is explained by biological differences. I am saying that your explanation does nothing to exclude biological differences. Women proving success in the tech workplace does nothing to discount a biological aspect, and it is flawed logic to believe otherwise.
That's one kind of encouragement, sure, but not the only one. I'm not even arguing money is necessarily the best reason. All I need to show is a refutation of the notion that there is some kind of biological/inherent impediment for women to be successful at tech.
PS: for that matter, my personal experience -- coming from a family of scientists who aren't rich, and which includes my mom -- is that there are other factors at play beyond money. Note I don't live in the US.
Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech?
"Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more likely to be rooted in Stem subjects."
A very good point. Women don't go to STEM jobs because they get sufficient compensation in work that they like more, on the average. And it's easier to do what other women do.
That factor hasn’t stopped women from becoming e.g. doctors and lawyers.
Just 50 years ago, very few women did that, because discrimination (e.g. for healthcare in America, gender-based discrimination was only banned in 1975) and culture norms.
But now it’s pretty close to 50/50 gender ratio in these areas (females are 47.3% of law students in 2007, 46.7% of medical students in 2013).
Yes, we can conclude that structural discrimination of women in law and medical students has largely gone away. Why does anyone think that STEM subjects would somehow retained such discrimination?
I consider it more likely that now women do what they want to do. And that is in many ways a good thing.
But this possible explanation, even if true (which I don't know), is still a refutation of Damore's argument: there is no biological or inherent basis for having fewer women in engineering. If women, when they see the need (e.g. for economic reasons) or are otherwise encouraged, can successfully tackle engineering fields, then surely the difference is societal and not inherent, unlike what Damore seemed to claim?
This is how I read the idea in the comment you replied to: external factors (namely, needing money to satisfy even the most basic life needs), not biological ones, are the ones that drive some places to have a more evenly split men/women ratio. When the environment is "safe" enough that you don't need to worry about how you're going to survive, that's when the biological predispositions come to light, and you get women going to what they inherently prefer, and move away from the things they don't.
I don't think the point is that women can't successfully tackle engineering, they can. But that doesn't mean that they have a predisposition towards it. If you encourage (or even force) someone into a particular profession, they might excel at it, but that doesn't imply that they would've picked it on their own.
Men and women living in richer and mostly western countries have the luxury to choose the jobs they are attracted to even if that attraction is to some extent based on biological factors and not societal or economic factors.
I personally wouldn't go as far with that claim, but young girls are certainly discouraged from pursuing STEM careers either actively or unintentionally (representation/role models, toys etc.)
What I (and I suspect others) want to see is proof of active discouragement, rather than the lack of encouragement.
The link between wealth, marriage suitability and social status is well observed for men, and in stereotypical pattern boys are pushed towards professions which maximize the potential for high income. Since society do not measure the value for women on how much money they bring, it follows that girls are not pushed with the same fever towards high paying jobs except if local situation causes families to do so by necessity (which is one explanation why certain countries have higher ratio of women in typical high paying profession).
I have the theory that if you want to get equal amount of young girls and young boys in STEM careers you need to remove focus on how such choice can lead towards high income. It would not increase the encouragement for girls, but fewer boys would be pushed in that direction and as a result the difference between the sexes would decrease.
> Yet somehow, programming is considered a woman's job throughout vast swathes of India. China is much closer to parity in engineering as well.
More women choose engineering when they have fewer career choices, because they take the freedoms they can get; Iran also has a high ratio of female engineers. In virtually all countries where women are free to choose any career, they largely don't choose engineering.
The fact that in India and China (very different cultures) there are a lot of female programmers doesn't say anything about cultural influences in the West. Being encouraged to do maths at age 5 is not the norm (regardless of gender).
Seems like you're arguing semantics, as the phrase could easily be changed to "current engineering culture" to invalidate your point.
If you find it objectionable to change the phrase in such away, consider the fact that, as a computer scientist, I went to school and took classes with many mechanical, civil, and electrical engineers. I'm still friends with them today. The cultures are intertwined.
But why does the same trend persists across cultures? The same is true for any developed country in the world. Do you think your tech culture is also interwined with that of Australia, Poland, Sweden and Italy?
Yes, to an extent it is. But it's very difficult to quantify how big the effect on culture is on womens choices to not even pursue education in tech. It seems, for an example, extremely unlikely that a young woman basically anywhere in these countries, would say to herself, "hmm, I've heard that there's mansplaining at Google, so I think I'll go into law or investment banking or medicine instead".
The misogynism we're imploring ourselves to eradicate is so subtle, it's unconscious biases and micro-aggressions (that is, agressions you don't know you're committing). When we can barely detect them ourselves, how would they be able to embed themselves into the subconscience of millions of young girls across dozens of quite different cultures?
And that's without considering the quite numerous fields with a high degree of misogyny embedded as a broad popular culture trope. "Suits" does not envision a law-field that is particularly friendly to women, "Billions" : finance, "Scrubs" : medicine. Women have no issue with pursuing careers in those fields. That's not excusing bad behaviour, just observing that this behaviour, and broad knowledge of it, does not appear to deter women, and to serve as a counterpoint to the assertion that the far more subtle and much less broadly portrayed alleged misogynism of tech should be detering women.
I think focusing on "current tech culture" is likely to misdiagnose the problem. There are way more women in investment banking than tech, and I really struggle to believe that Wall Street has a better culture than Silicon Valley, at least a long the lines typically being emphasised, including misogyny, micro-aggressions and mansplaining. If the prevalence of these phenomenon are repulsive to women to the extent that they will forego even educating themselves in a field, much less join top companies in it (the underrepresentation of women in tech go all the way back to high school, it doesn't start at the hiring processes, biased or not, of tech firms), we would expect to see many fewer women in Wall Street. Instead we see many more.
I dunno I hate banks but when I worked for one I worked for a black woman who worked under a black gay man who worked under another woman and at that level she had 9 call centers under her and gave birth on a conference call. This really isn't their weak point.
(Also, the relevant number for Google is 20% of tech employees. They have 48/52 balance in non-tech. The BI link similarly provides business area breakdowns.)
it is probably true that women are less interested in current tech culture and this was his entire point. He literally stated how to change culture to be more welcoming to women and make them more interested in tech, for example make pair programming more common and have more part-time engineering positions... that's just small piece of possible changes and he welcomed honest discussion to figure out what is actually feasible for Google...
I would ask, using the current age of well placed woman engineers in Google, back when they were going through middle and high school to even college years, was the general view of society that women should strive for engineering degrees or that line of work common? The personal computer affect on society opened a lot of doors, the internet opened more because both men and women finally were exposed to more ideas and history than ever before.
I think being exposed to history in greater depth and variety was a greater boon than suspected because there have always been great women in science and engineering, they just rarely if ever got a line of mention in common text books. how was society to interest women in such careers? Television surely wasn't, it was always wives, nurses, and secretaries, for the most part.
i would love to see a yc article from the same women and more revealing their generation and what influences they experienced that led them to their career and where they think we are doing it right and wrong this day. we will eventually arrive at a time where memo's like this don't even come about
> but I certainly don't know that it will be more, equally, or less productive with these culture changes.
Nor does Damore.
In Damore's memo, the table of left vs right bias was ridiculous, even if we agree on those biases, which we don't, I'd argue why use those, and why pick n number of biases and leave out others? This isn't a rigorous paper.
The toy hypothetical following the table is such a overly simple contrivance, are we supposed to be taking this seriously? So many assertions...
To be fair... How often do you create "a rigorous paper" before you engage in an internal discussion at your company? Is that the standard? And if so, when do you have time to do actual work?
Try at least not to have completely unreasonable expectations.
Nope. You are wrong. Here's why: Damore is not the first time any of the women who work at Google encountered this sort of idea. He isn't even the hundreth person any of them would have encountered telling them that they are simply inferior.[1] It might have been the first time that HE argued it, but surely the female engineers he was talking about (but not to) have seen it all before.
So it was incumbent upon Damore to do a lot of work, and come up with something both rigorous and novel. If he didn't, and he still thought that rehashing a whole bunch of stuff that had been discussed before was sufficient to "advance the conversation" about such a controversial topic he is an idiot who deserved to be fired and forgotten.
The nicest way to say this is the way one of the women the TFA put it: 'a general lack of consideration for his female colleagues.' Then again, she has a lifetime of politely dealing with male chauvinist idiots, and has learned that calling them out doesn't get her far.
If you are going to write on such a controversial topic and don't want to be seen as a self absorbed attention seeking polemicist [1], you ought to be more careful. In other words, you need to hold yourself to a higher standard than normal office write-ups. Otherwise, you take an unnecessary risk drawing the wrong conclusions and do a lot of inadvertent harm to your fellow human.
[1] Still learning to politely deal with male chauvinist idiots.
Women aren't interested in tech because they grow up with social blockers, such as his memo. That's the point everyone seems to miss. Imagine a girl interested in tech when only a handful of her peers understand her interest. Then, she reads such an article and bullshit social studies passed on as evidence and gets socialised that tech really isn't for women.
Until you remove social blockers that prevent women from entering tech, you cannot claim legitimacy of any social survey in regards to that. This letter belongs to a time when a generation of women are equally pushed to enter tech as men. Then we can debate whether it's their lack of interest of not.
I strongly disagree with the claim that there is no gender difference (implied by what you wrote) and that imbalance in gender representation is 100% due to social blocking.
When I was a student in computer science more than 30 years ago, in our class of more than 30 students there was only one female. There was no entrance selection or any filter or money involved (not in USA).
We are dealing with overlapping gaussians.
Girls and boys are today educated without making a difference through all their childhood, and I think that this may give the false impression to them that there is no difference. But whoever had children or has seen many children will see that some differences in behavior and interest are blattan and can't be socially induced.
I do not deny that blocking MAY exist and some men are sexists, I have seen such discusting behavior. I considr them disfunctional. But this is not 100% the cause of gender imbalance in tech.
There is no blocking to contribute to OSS, and good programmers get hired regardless of gender. You should read back the [Donner Kruger effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect) to remind you of you own bias when evaluating your competence.
> Girls and boys are today educated without making a difference through all their childhood, and I think that this may give the false impression to them that there is no difference.
You should really just google 'gender difference education' and you'll see there's dozens and dozens of papers that say education is very gendered. The experience of girls in pre-college (and college too for what it's worth) is very different from that of boys.
> I do not deny that blocking MAY exist and some men are sexists... [b]ut this is not 100% the cause of gender imbalance in tech.
The "percentage" thing is something that comes up in global warming discussions too; people will ask "what percentage of global warming is caused by humans", and because the issue is extraordinarily complex, the answer comes out sounding like equivocation.
You're probably right, social cues are probably not 100% the cause of the gender gap in tech. But the issue is complex; it's not like you're gonna see a pie-chart of simple gender gap explanations and then say, "we'll just 'allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive' and crank up pair programming and part time work; that should cover 80% of it".
You can get complex reasons though, i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/dec/14/many-women-i.... But good luck fixing "balancing work-life responsibilities" and "workplace culture"; those are complex issues that deal with early education, social and cultural expectations of women (and men), federal and state social policies and workplace policies, politics, and deep-seated gender roles. There's not really a knob you can turn to fix this stuff, and that's why we don't use percentages to talk about it.
I strongly disagree with the claim that there is no gender difference
I sincerely don't think that anyone is proposing that there is no difference between men and women, the discussion is over the extent of the differences.
We are dealing with overlapping gaussians.
The question is the extent of the overlap. If the overlap is very close on many abilities, men exceed women on some (like say maths), and women exceed men on some others required for a programming job (like say, empathy), then you'd expect distribution of jobs to be around 50% with slight variations. There is no indication that they vary by the amount required to explain the disparity of jobs in tech, indeed, this is easily refuted by looking at the number of women in technical jobs in the US in the 70s.
>>indeed, this is easily refuted by looking at the number of women in technical jobs in the US in the 70s.
You could make your point stronger if you propose an explanation to what changed since then. It's very unlikely that men (and society in general) become more sexist, if anything we have made a lot of progress.
I can tell you what the opposing side says though. They say women had little choice back then and just did what was needed. Today women have more choice, freedom and there is less discrimination so they feel free to pursue what is interesting to them which is not tech more often than in case of men.
"You make your counterexample stronger by giving your opponents, who have proven they are uninterested in actual debate, something else to latch on to in order to try to make you look wrong or stupid"
Seems like a bad tack to me - staying on topic is good enough for this kind of corrective comment.
If your theory were correct, that it is "social blockers", then you would predict that as societies get more egalitarian, you would get more equal representation. The opposite happens.
And this is not about absolute levels, this is about the direction of the arrow, which is pretty binary, and the "social pressures" theory makes exactly the wrong prediction.
> interested in tech when only a handful of her peers understand her interest
Doesn't stop the guys interested in tech. Being a "nerd" or a "geek" is the surest way to social ostracism, and yet these guys do it anyway.
> Until you remove social blockers that prevent women from entering tech
Again, this experiment has been done, on a society level, and the outcome is the opposite of your prediction: as "social blockers" are removed, you get fewer women going into tech fields.
> the "social pressures" theory makes exactly the wrong prediction.
To be honest, the "social" sciences have rarely been interested in scientific accuracy, more than they have been interested in promoting specific political ideologies.
I doubt they will consider this a problem with their "science". To them it will probably be obvious that the problem here, again, is with society.
In short: When you're stuck inside a delusion, it's everything on the outside which looks crazy.
Studies show prenatal testosterone affects differences in that men tilt towards an interest in intresting things, and women in insteresting people. Damore has the scientific literature behind him (which others can then dispute if they'd like). Also look to scandinavian attempts to flatten out differences. Thousands were involved, and the diffrences were simply exasturbated. Interesting talk on just this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSIEs1ngNiU
Loads have very much taken the social aspect into account. What I think everyone in the dominant culture seems to miss, are the relevant scientific biological and psycological findings.
Is there any evidence that woman face more social blockers than men? Being a teenage computer geek comes with a range of negative social pressures from peers.
Please read this [1] and tell me if you still hold the same opinion. There is absolutely some social impact that lowers the number of women entering tech as a career, and we should work to fix it. However, there's more to it than just that, including studies on young children and statistics showing that other previously male-dominated careers (like doctors and lawyers) don't suffer from the same gender gap as tech. That's the point Damore was trying to make that people don't want to hear - there might be more to the gender gap than just social blockers, and if so, we should be aware of that at the same time we're working to solve the existing issues around bias, harassment, etc. Saying "nope, it's all social blockers and bad workplaces, and any other reasons are sexist falsehoods" is putting on blinders.
I agree with OP, I read that post, and I disagree with it.
Medicine and law are not like engineering. Engineering is particularly gendered; you can look at medicine and see "caregiving", or you can see law and see "people" and "social issues". It's not easy to look at engineering and see any stereotypically female attributes there.
Girls are discouraged from pursuing math and hard sciences through pre-college education, explicitly, culturally, and socially. The social blockers between girls and engineering are particularly acute compared to those between them and law or medicine. You can look at college degree numbers for example. Women now outnumber men when it comes to college enrollment and graduation, but women are far more likely to pursue "soft sciences" like psychology or sociology.
> That's the point Damore was trying to make that people don't want to hear - there might be more to the gender gap than just social blockers, and if so, we should be aware of that at the same time we're working to solve the existing issues around bias, harassment, etc.
In fairness, Damore was advocating for the ending of Google's pro-diversity policies in hiring and minority support for employees. It wasn't just a "truth telling", he wantetd Google to dismantle programs that had a dramatic, positive effect on diversity. I'm not saying he didn't suggest alternatives, but those alternatives had no basis in research and felt pretty thin. Like "[a]llow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive"; honestly what does that even mean?
> Girls are discouraged from pursuing math and hard sciences through pre-college education, explicitly, culturally, and socially. The social blockers between girls and engineering are particularly acute compared to those between them and law or medicine. You can look at college degree numbers for example. Women now outnumber men when it comes to college enrollment and graduation, but women are far more likely to pursue "soft sciences" like psychology or sociology.
This point keeps getting brought up, but the actual statistics are quietly ignored.
Women make up over 40% of math and statistics graduates; A majority of accountants and biologists are women; Chemistry majors are evenly split between the genders.
If girls are socially discouraged from pursuing math and hard-sciences, why does this not actually manifest itself across fields requiring math and hard science? Does a math major require less mathematics than an engineering one? Is accounting not mostly about math and numbers any more? Are chemistry and biology no longer considered hard sciences?
I'm not saying the cause is necessarily not societal pressures, but this popular assertion being repeated ad-nausea seems to be, at best, incomplete. Women that have been told their entire lives that math is for boys seem to have no problem pursuing a higher-education in math in droves; Why?
We must have taken away different conclusions and data from that post. It goes to great length to refute exactly the point you just made. As slavak also mentioned in his reply to you, engineering is not unique among professions in requiring math and hard science, but it is unique in its gender imbalance. Math and science teachers - people who literally use math and science every day - are 44% female nationally, and over 60% female in Texas, a socially conservative state [1]. Women represent a solid 50% of accountants, and I'm having a hard time fitting "caregiving", "people", or "social issues" to that profession. How about lab technicians, who sit in a lab all day doing science? 53% women [2].
> Girls are discouraged from pursuing math and hard sciences through pre-college education, explicitly, culturally, and socially.
The data simply does not support this statement. Take a look at [3]. Relevant quotes for you: "Girls are equitably represented in rigorous high school math courses.", "Girls outnumber boys in enrollment in AP science", "Girls are evenly represented in biology and outnumber boys in chemistry, but are underrepresented
in physics." Even when it says "In AP mathematics (calculus and statistics), however, boys have consistently outnumbered girls by up to 10,000 students." this is only about a 5% difference.
> he wantetd Google to dismantle programs that had a dramatic, positive effect on diversity
What dramatic, positive effect are referring to? Google's self-reported numbers on the impact of its programs are laughable. We're talking single percentage point increases at best in percentage of women and minorities in tech positions and leadership roles [4]. Damore wanted Google to take a long, hard look at its diversity programs and have an open discussion about whether they are actually 1) the right tool for the job, 2) accomplishing what they are trying to do, and 3) making progress without alienating existing and new hires.
> honestly what does that even mean?
I thought it was fairly clear, actually. He pairs statements like that with suggestions to encourage more collaborative workplace practices, like pair programming. The idea is that Google and other tech companies should encourage and reward individuals who cooperate with each other on teams, help train and mentor each other, and actively try not to alienate anyone for arbitrary reasons. The negative alternatives are to have a workplace with a bunch of lone wolf technical workers who don't help each other, or to have a workplace composed of cliquey groups that ostracize individuals who don't fit norms (ex. "brogrammer" culture fit).
You seem to be creating your own narrative here, which I interpret to be, "women are socially discouraged from pursuing careers that don't involve at least some stereotypical female qualities, and that's why we don't see them entering tech." But the equally plausible alternative interpretation is, "women don't want to pursue careers that don't involve at least some stereotypical female qualities, and particularly don't want to pursue engineering, thus expecting there to be gender balance is unrealistic."
> Saying "nope, it's all social blockers and bad workplaces, and any other reasons are sexist falsehoods" is putting on blinders.
Is this a common belief? Nobody I've read has claimed this, just that the known social effects are so large as to legitimise efforts to improve the situation regardless of whether or not there is some minor biological factor at play here too.
That's what I found strange about the memo. It spends lots of time arguing for the existence of biological differences between men and women and then draws the conclusion that diversity programs should be stopped. The existence of biological differences is not surprising to me or probably to the people who came up with the diversity programs and nor is it likely relevant to whether the diversity programs are a good idea or not.
Yes, there are certainly "social blockers" for women interested in technical and scientific careers. I mean, they're pervasive in Western societies. And it's even worse in some other societies.
But given that, how is it possible to discuss the possibility of gender differences? Without the discussion itself being a social blocker?
I'm not sure. Certainly by experts. And certainly around debate on legislation. Also in whatever social forums allow it. Such as here. But arguably not in discussion among staff at Google or wherever. There are likely no experts there, so it all comes down to bullshit. But among senior management, in private, sure.
> it's hard to believe such a seemingly harmless claim (women aren't as well represented in tech because they're not as interested in it) has created such outrage
His claim is much stronger: he claims that women _working at Google as engineers_ are less interested in tech than their male colleagues. This debate is about stopping internal diversity programs within Google, not about women in general in tech.
> women _working at Google as engineers_ are less interested in tech than their male colleagues
I wonder if this argument could be made? Stats show that men work more hours than women whereas women prefer a more of a work-life-family balance. So given that, you could say that the women in tech there are less interested. At least, in terms of hours and dedication to the job. I don't think it holds too much water. You can be interested in the subject matter but not work as much. But there is some truth to it in a way.
> You can be interested in the subject matter but not work as much. But there is some truth to it in a way.
c'mon, pick a side ... you can't argue both ways. The constructive takeaway from this is not that women are a "lesser" value because they crave work-life-family balance. The takeaway should definitely be that we should figure out how to help the overworked individuals who work too much, find a better balance.
Who are you to decide what the right balance for other people should be? If they are happy working 11 hours a day while you only work 8, what is wrong with that? Are you actually intervening because you are concerned for them or are you simply worried that their choice to work more than you will result in them correctly being valued more than you by your mutual employer?
They can continue to do so just fine ... but I much prefer employers who don't overvalue overworking their employees, thereby implicitly creating a de-facto requirement. Of course, sometimes overtime is needed, believe me I've done it plenty of times to hit a deadline or release. However, I'm just plain happier working for employers, and with colleagues who don't create a hostile working environment for people with families.
Many of these [biological] differences are small and
there’s significant overlap between men and women, so
you can’t say anything about an individual given these
population level distributions.
That would imply that there will be women at Google who are more inclined towards software engineering than some of the men.
As a measure of how easily talk of averages degenerates into talk of individuals, let me point out that the comment you're replying to is talking about averages and you are talking about individuals. Your response to "hey this memo is talking more specifically about women at Google being less suited to tech on average" is to say "well I mean there are these weasel words about individuals standing out so I don't see how Damore could be talking about women at Google on average" -- I mean, no, that's exactly what Damore is talking about, averages.
You ask "Where did he say that?" and I'd be surprised if there's any one succinct place -- it's one of the two main topics of the whole memo, and the memo does not have a coherent topic sentence or even really a coherent argument, so I think it's likely absent.
But, like, Damore makes a case to the effect that "biological explanations can't be ruled out" and then reverses those weasel-words by suggesting that his biological explanations be used to guide policy by, say, encouraging pair programming which he supposes to be something that women are likely better at on average. This sort of move suggests that he thinks the biological effects that he's citing (see note [1]) are big enough to guide policy, which they're not. You don't need to take my word for it -- the main author of the article Damore is citing was asked to read Damore's memo and this is his take on it [2].
Of course the problem is even worse in that this article which Damore used to write his article is psychological; it is based on doing a personality test in a bunch of different nations. That makes it very hard to conclude anything biological about it, so every time that Damore mentions "biology" in his memo, that is an interpretation of his own devising. The original personality-study article also interprets its findings biologically but it is really tenuous [3]. In fact neuroscientists have also been studying the brain and they have not found a clear biological difference between male and female brains [4].
[1] He gives a summary of a Wikipedia summary of an article by Schmitt et al. (2008). The PDF is freely available by the university at http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf but the sample sizes were I believe later corrected as an erratum, so I am not sure which one this has.
[2] Schmitt, evaluating later research as well, summarizes by saying that sex differences are only "accounting for less than 10% of the variance" and that using this to guide policy is "like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm," in an article at http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-... .
[3] The argument in the article involves their surprise that the majority of the discovered effect apparently disappeared in Africa and East Asia. Their interpretation is literally that those cultures are so much less economically developed than we in the West are, that their women must feel so much less free to just be themselves, and therefore they act more like men as a sort of baseline survival tactic. Read the paper; it's a very 'you cannot possibly be saying what I think you're saying, can you?' type of experience.
But, like, Damore makes a case to the effect that
"biological explanations can't be ruled out" and
then reverses those weasel-words by suggesting that
his biological explanations be used to guide policy by,
say, encouraging pair programming which he supposes to
be something that women are likely better at on average.
But the very fact he made that suggestion implies that he also wants to narrow the gender divide. By your logic, if he wanted to reduce the number of women in tech, he'd be advocating less pair-programming.
It also seems to me that the pair-programming idea was plucked out of the air to be used as an example to further a discussion, not a solution to be implemented.
This sort of move suggests that he thinks the biological
effects that he's citing (see note [1]) are big enough
to guide policy, which they're not
I'm inclined to agree with that. But his memo was written in response to policies that are already being implemented, which he thinks are bad.
I'm really not concerned about whether his ideas are good or bad - the experts on this subject can work that out between themselves. What concerns me is that, while he was confident enough in his theory to put it forward for wider scrutiny, the makers of the policies he is objecting to weren't. And when they were presented with a counter-argument anyway, they had to set an example to everyone else who might wish to speak up by having its author fired and smeared with accusations of bigotry.
I don't think it was just the "harmless claim" that was the issue. Many of his points were objectionable if not outright offensive. The obvious example of an offensive claim is that women are more prone to be neurotic. Also, can you really assert that you've checked your biases if you claim that people who agree with you (conservatives) are "pragmatic" while those who disagree (liberals) are "idealistic". I'm sorry, but that is complete and total BS. It's not hard to see that there are pragmatists and ideologues in both the liberal and conservative political movements.
As a white male engineer, I will tell you thing the that most white dudes like me fail to understand about micro-agressions- and the document was chock full of them-is that they are not really significant when they only happen once, in isolation, it is the constant, droning repetition of them that makes them harmful.
Asking someone where they're from isn't offensive when considered in isolation. But if 90% of the white people you meet ask you this immediately, while it comes up only occasionally or late in the conversation when meeting other people, it makes you wonder.
One thing my mixed race friends get asked a lot by white people is "what are you?". At first I found that hard to believe, but I've seen it happen over and over again--random chitchat at the park with a nice lady who stopped to pet my dog; for some reason she has to ask my friend "what are you?" She's too nice to say "not racist, how about you?" or anything harsh in response, but it makes my blood boil.
Imagine being expected to defend and define your presence everywhere you go.
So, yeah, the idea was harmless. The presentation was part of the constant barrage of gatekeeping behavior that women and people of color are sick of dealing with. That's why it's offensive, that's why people are angry.
> The obvious example of an offensive claim is that women are more prone to be neurotic.
As a personality researcher, I feel obligated to chime in and clarify that the memo wasn't stating that women are "neurotic", neither in the colloquial nor clinical sense, but that they are on average higher in the trait of Neuroticism in the Big 5 personality dimensions[0], which is a very specific and well defined term, and the scientific literature actually does support that statement when it is presented using those academic definitions. There's nothing opinionated about this, just as much as saying that men on average test higher in the trait of 'Conscientiousness' according to the same model; they're just population statistics based on the most reliable personality measure we have in the field of psychology today. It is a plain misunderstanding of the academic term to suggest that the memo says women are "neurotic" in any other way.
He uses this result to claim they are less able (on average) to deal with stress and that's why men have better paying jobs though.
I believe autistic people also score higher on that neurotic scale, so it's ironic someone who self-identifies as being on the spectrum would highlight that result and, given the general stereotypes, for it to be held up as a difference from other software professionals
Well he does cite "the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist". If that's true, the female employees at Google themselves contributed to a meaningful statistic behind the claim.
He goes onto mention that men take on dangerous high stress jobs in far greater numbers than women, such as coal mining and fire fighting. If men account for 93% of work related deaths, it says a lot about their drive for that sort of work.
Quoting from the memo itself, "Women, on average, have more: [...] Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)".
I don't believe there is any other context to it. It is not at all clear to me that the author is not referring to neuroticism in the colloquial or clinical sense. If he did want to use such a potentially emotionally-loaded term in that sense he should have made it clear how he was using it.
I looked up the memo (assuming I have the found the original version; I checked several and they all claim to be the unedited version) and it links to a general Wikipedia article about the term.
Women on average score higher on neuroticism. This is uncontroversial. Neuroticism is associated with some positive outcomes, like longer lifespan. It is not a negative trait, as you might think by the connotations the term has in nonclinical contexts.
You would know all this if you did some fact-checking. The carelessness with which you approach his claims is typical and indicative of a much larger problem.
Yes but Seenti has a good point, it's not necessarily a negative trait. The memo could have explained this, if he didn't want so much outrage. The guy is methodical and very clear, but probably could have padded out the information with some disclaimers. His interviews since clearly show him as respectful and a nice guy, not at all the kind you'd expect to be sexist or bigoted.
I think this is a very good post. It's too bad people seem to have seized on the fact that you weren't aware that "neurotic" is a technical term in psychology. Since it's a word that has also been part of popular culture for decades, with a rather derogatory connotation, I think this is understandable, and I don't think Damore should have used it.
I hadn't heard about people asking "what are you?". That is indeed infuriating. I don't think such people deserve any answer beyond "human".
> because 'this' was evidence was that Google(his workplace)'s diversity initiatives and censorship were harming the company.
I am not sure I follow exactly. Is there evidence that Google's diversity efforts hurt the company? I don't find the memo offers any evidence. If evidence, even anecdotal evidence, were provided of that harm and of the ideological intolerance I might find the memo more compelling. As it stands, it seems like a book report.
> Is there evidence that Google's diversity efforts hurt the company?
Here's one example. Google has spent over a quarter of a billion dollars on diversity efforts in the last 3 years, and has barely moved the needle in terms of diversity in their workforce [0].
Some of that can be explained by long-term efforts that will take more than 3 years to show dividends, but not all of it, and given the lack of results, you'd think that it's worth considering if current efforts are addressing the actual problem or if they're just throwing money in the wrong direction.
You can't do that without questioning the current methods and examining other ideas, but when the reaction to questioning current methods and examining other ideas is to stifle discussion and say 'no, this is right, you are wrong, and btw you're fired', then you may well find you keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars, for little to no result.
You could argue that a quarter of a billion dollars is pocket change to Google (and it is) and therefore doesn't represent any real harm, but it's still a lot of money to throw around on something that might not actually solve the problem.
You're analyzing this problem independent of context: women graduating in software engineering is decreasing over time, and they are more likely to exit the profession.
So then the solution would be to search for ways to make more women graduate, instead of hiring more from a pool that becomes smaller every year (not sure if the decrease is in absolute or relative terms, it doesn't really matter if the end goal is a 50/50 gender balance).
That's not because women are incompetent. It's because the workplace is putting so much pressure on engineers that even some men prefer to be promoted to management level after a decade of technical work.
> women graduating in software engineering is decreasing over time
That's right, but what's the cause of that?
Is it solely down to sexism and discrimination, or are there other causes?
For example, studies have shown that the more egalitarian a society becomes, the greater the difference in personality between genders is, which affects things like job and career selection. This makes sense because in an egalitarian society, men and women are more free to choose careers based on interest rather than on preordained acceptable roles based on gender [0].
I'm not saying this is what's happening in tech, but there's enough research around it that it's a plausible explanation for some of it. And if you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars but are not in any way interested in investigating (or even contemplating) whether this might be one of several factors leading to a decline in women entering software engineering, then that's probably a problem.
I think he was just asking official investigation to see if there are problems:
1. he made point about ideological echo chamber and wanted everyone to look to see if it's true
2. he saw potentially illegal practices, produced what you call a book report and asked this to be officially discussed to figure out if there is any merit to it
I see it as honest call for discussion but everyone is treating this as some malicious attempt to exercise sexism. We are all educated and civil people please have some dignity and apply Hanlon's razor to these kind of things: "Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding."
Your '2' all by itself if you are not invited to do so by your employer is most likely going to get you fired especially if you document said potential illegal practices in a widely shared memo.
Most companies would - right or not - try to keep their dirty laundry indoors and the right way to deal with such stuff is to first try to take it up the chain and if you are ignored you can decide if you're brave enough to become a whistle blower with all the fine consequences that tends to have, one of the most likely results of which is that you will find yourself suddenly unemployed and if you're unlucky also unemployable.
This type of discussion is protected by law, which is why Damore is suing Google. Also he didn't leak the memo, merely posted it on an internal board which has the intent of discussion; someone else made it public.
When you write a memo and distribute it to a group as large as he did you can bet that it will go much further and in fact the usual goal of writing such memos is to aim for widespread distribution.
So, tip for future memo writers: stay in control of the narrative. That's easier said than done.
> Is it still fair to fire the original author?
That's a moot point, companies do not like political activism within their ranks whether or not it spreads to the outside world and affects the image of the company in a negative way or not. But when and if it does you can be pretty sure heads will roll.
Second tip: If you do wish to write that memo try to get buy-in from your higher ups (and in writing) before releasing your memo to your peers.
Third tip: don't do it. Unless your position is absolutely ironclad and you don't care about your future employment writing memos will probably not make a difference in a positive way and there is plenty of downside with the memo writer holding the bag in almost all cases, especially when such memos target controversial subjects, they will almost certainly end up being used for political football.
The memo doesn't offer direct evidence of Google's diversity initiatives causing harm because the original audience for the memo solely consisted of employees of Google (who would have seen its effects and formed their own opinion from first hand experience). It's often forgotten that the memo wasn't originally meant for the general public.
Damore should sue Gizmodo. Big companies like Google and IBM and the military though, they usually have CoC requirements that essentially boil down to don't embarrass them in public.
Unless I've misunderstood your tone, you seem to be implying complicity even conspiracy. Surely the obvious explanation is "anyone could have leaked it and it's very hard to prove who did it"?
It isn't a question of whether it's the right place to have it.
A corporation may not be the best place to bring up these topics, if your goal is to avoid getting fired. Otherwise, it is a place full of smart engineers and the guy probably had some fantasy that he can have a constructive conversation in a corporate setting about a policy which Google as a corporation faces external and internal pressure about.
But as far as receptiveness, yes Google was a great venue for this, given who works there. Do you think hacker news is a better venue in that respect?
Even on this very board, that same exact seemingly harmless claim, given and elaborated on in a talk about men and women given by a professor of psychology at FSU, was downvoted and bashed in a TL;DR manner:
"A corporation may not be the best place to bring up these topics, if your goal is to avoid getting fired"
Agree. In fairness to James, however, I believe HR solicited feedback.
"[T]he guy probably had some fantasy that he can have a constructive conversation"
Seriously, what a let down. The "Sergey" and "Larry" who created Google would not have stood for this. Either they have lost control of their company, or they have changed.
Working proactively to address racism/sexism/n'ism: Good, not evil
Demanding orthodoxy of thought (or enabling those who do): Bad; EVIL
Google was being already investigated/accused of extreme gender pay discrimination. I'm not sure how anyone could think they'd want to engage in any kind of discussion that could be interpreted as discriminating to women while being under investigation for discriminating women. sigh
Shutting down an honest discussion of something because there is an investigation and it might be revealing is pretty high up there on the immoral scale.
I think your mixing two separate things here. The discussion was shut down not because it "might be revealing". It's plain and simple because they think is more harmful to have the discussion at a point when they're in legal trouble (with the corresponding financial penalty) than the argued loss of honest discussion (whatever exactly that means for you). It's because work is not a frigging politics/social debate club. You go to work to do whatever it is you were hired to do, not to discuss topics that may actually reduce productivity on your diverse work force for feeling discriminated.
I understand there's an inevitable social/political aspect of working together, but is not the focus and if you don't agree with the political views/decisions of a company, and you can't get them (through proper channels, your manager, HR) to change, no one grants you the right to say whatever you want in the work place, especially when what you say is widely considered (by the company) as harmful to their interests.
No. I think you're jumping to conclusions. It only implies they may need to look harder to find equally skilled people in a smaller talent pool (e.g minorities interested in tech). Sure, it'd be somewhat cheaper to not worry about those constraints (if the laws were different), but I think in the grand scheme of things the different in cost is largely irrelevant.
> What it did not do was claim that his female coworkers were inferior. I feel the need to reiterate that because that seems to be the disinformation that many take home with them and use for their arguments against him. With it, they vilified and ousted him.
He didn't say it directly, but he strongly implied that female coworkers were inferior. Among other things he claimed that women were less able to handle stress and have a harder time speaking up.
The document claims a lot more than just "women aren't interested in tech".
> I'm still making up my mind on this one, but for the sake of argument, I'll disagree with you.
OK :)
I think some of Damore's complaints were, on the surface, about Google. But they're all rooted in some old and incorrect ideas.
Damore advocates against Google's diversity programs, arguing that diversity programs can't be fully effective because fundamental biological differences between women and men are responsible for the gender gap, not social or cultural disadvantage, and further that these programs are discriminatory against men.
This is an old idea. Women's rights activists have heard this time and time again, whether it was for the right to go to school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_education_in_the_Uni...), the right to have a job (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights#Equal_employm...), or of course, the right to vote. The argument, every single time, is "women and girls aren't really interested in reading/writing/working/politics". But in each case, we discovered that women were discouraged (and often outright punished) in strong, varied, and complex ways from being involved in these things, and when we investigated and removed those impediments suddenly the "interest gap" disappeared.
But the main reason that Damore's argument is outrageous is that the arguments about interest and fundamental biological differences have been used to hold women and people of color back since the inception of the US. Reverse discrimination belittles and dismisses the experiences of women and people of color by falsely equating systemic sexism and racism with isolated incidents, or in this case with gender-conscious diversity programs.
I'd also like to address the free speech issue a little. The US concept of free speech protects citizens from government retaliation. It doesn't mean I have to tolerate speech of all kinds in my home, and it doesn't mean that businesses have to tolerate speech of any kind in the workplace. With that in mind, it's obvious that you can't say whatever you want at work even though e we may disagree on where the line is.
> Reverse discrimination belittles and dismisses the experiences of women and people of color by falsely equating systemic sexism and racism with isolated incidents, or in this case with gender-conscious diversity programs.
Although most claims of reverse discrimination are probably false, this doesn't mean that none are justified.
For example, Google apparently has a program called Stretch to help women become better negotiators. (Says Damore in his memo and I haven't seen anyone disagree.)
I think that is doubly sexist. First, it perpetuates stereotypes about women, maybe even using some hand-wavy biological explanation like "woman have less testosterone and are too timid to negotiate efficiently". That isn't really better than Damore's reasons for advocating more pair programming.
Second, it doesn't target the people it would help the most , but at best a subset. What about black men who are bad negotiators? Do they get their own program? What about white men who are bad negotiators? Are they left in the dust because white men good at negotiating are already privileged, so people who are superficially similar don't deserve any help?
I think it is both morally wrong and economically inefficient to have a program to help people get better at X that selects on any criterion other than their current ability to do X. I don't care whether you call it discrimination or something else, I just don't want to see this kind of divisive catering to interest groups identified by arbitrary lines.
I should start out by saying what I know about Stretch I learned from Damore's memo.
> For example, Google apparently has a program called Stretch to help women become better negotiators. (Says Damore in his memo and I haven't seen anyone disagree.) I think that is doubly sexist.
There's research that shows that some of the gender pay gap can be attributed to women being less likely to negotiate pay raises and promotions. I think if you were Google and you were trying to close the gender pay gap, it's reasonable to take a look at that data and start something like Stretch.
> ...maybe even using some hand-wavy biological explanation like "woman have less testosterone and are too timid to negotiate efficiently". That isn't really better than Damore's reasons for advocating more pair programming.
It is actually much better. First, they aren't using any biological explanation. The studies [1][2] I found are experiments and surveys. Furthermore, no one's arguing because studies show women to be less effective negotiators than men that we should give up. On the contrary, Google is offering to help them. Damore's argument is that some studies kind of show women might be somehow biologically predisposed against tech (the copious hedging here is because he makes all the connections himself; the studies he cites don't actually make his point and consequently can't at all quantify the effect), and therefore Google should replace the programs most effective at increasing diversity with initiatives that have no basis in science and are mostly just bad ideas like "more pair programming", "more part time work", and "make work less stressful".
So in favor of Stretch:
- Research directly addressing and quantifying the issue
- No biological explanation
- Google directly addressing the issue
Against Damore's initiatives:
- No direct research to justify a policy change
- Unsupported leaps from indirect research to "biological differences explain the gender gap"
- No direct addressing of the issue
- Replacement of programs that do directly address the issue with those that do not
> I think that is doubly sexist. First, it perpetuates stereotypes about women....
I think it's a good instinct to critique policies from a gender perspective. And I think on its face you're right, Stretch seems to assume that women are bad at negotiating and has a program based on that assumption.
But look at how the program came about. This isn't a program rooted in stereotype; it's rooted in research. And the result of the program is to help women become better negotiators, not to disadvantage them. In applying a feminist critique, we have to evaluate all these things, otherwise we often come to the conclusion, as you did, that any policy based on gender entrenches harmful stereotypes.
> Second, it doesn't target the people it would help the most , but at best a subset. What about black men who are bad negotiators? Do they get their own program? What about white men who are bad negotiators? Are they left in the dust because white men good at negotiating are already privileged, so people who are superficially similar don't deserve any help?
I can't find any research showing that Black or White men are bad negotiators, so I think that's why Google didn't start a program to help them. There's also not a pay gap for White men so I don't know what the impetus would be there anyway.
> I think it is both morally wrong and economically inefficient to have a program to help people get better at X that selects on any criterion other than their current ability to do X.
I think this is super interesting! I just read a piece in the Atlantic that offered the insight whereas liberals often argue for fairness of outcome, conservatives often argue for fairness of approach. I'm not saying you're a conservative or that that's what you're doing here, but I definitely feel some echoes.
The argument you make here is that it's unfair to treat people differently based on ascribed statuses (race, sexual orientation, gender identification, etc.). But I think exactly the opposite; I think you can't treat people fairly unless you take into account their ascribed statuses. For example, if we return to entirely gender-blind hiring practices, we'll see the gender gap skyrocket (see 538's article on affirmative action [3]). Or more directly, in order to be fair to women, LGBTQ people, and people of color when hiring, we have to know about their ascribed statuses and compensate, otherwise we won't hire them, and that's unfair.
This is how we combat our biases that are instilled in us because of our racist, sexist culture and society. To ignore or not adjust for these biases is what's unfair here.
> I can't find any research showing that Black or White men are bad negotiators, so I think that's why Google didn't start a program to help them.
Unless you assume that all Black or White men are good negotiators, then the grandparent's argument holds: you're helping only at best a subset of people who would most benefit from it.
I agree with the grandparent: a program to help people become better negotiators should target people who are bad negotiators to begin with, and nothing else. Ruling out entire groups of people solely based on their gender is discriminatory.
> There's also not a pay gap for White men so I don't know what the impetus would be there anyway.
Do you really believe that all White men are paid equally?
> Unless you assume that all Black or White men are good negotiators
The context of all this is "addressing the gender pay gap", which policies like try to do using the salaries of men as the baseline. We already know that women are working as hard and as effectively as men, but that they're getting paid less and we're looking for reasons why.
When you argue to also help men that may be bad negotiators you're missing the point, which is that these policies address the gender pay gap.
> Ruling out entire groups of people solely based on their gender is discriminatory.
Discrimination is not necessarily a bad thing. Policies intended to address gender issues need to be gender conscious. For example, affirmative action policies at universities need to know information about ascribed statuses like race and gender, otherwise they can't be effective. And they have absolutely been effective; public universities are some of the most diverse institutions we have in the US.
The point isn't to be gender-blind. That only entrenches the favored statuses that men already enjoy. The point is to be aware of the challenges women (and LGBTQ people and people of color) face in order to compensate for them.
> > There's also not a pay gap for White men so I don't know what the impetus would be there anyway.
> Do you really believe that all White men are paid equally?
Again this is in the context of the gender pay gap. I'm sure there are pay gaps between White men, but please don't derail a discussion about the gender pay gap with other issues. And further, please don't advocate against policies that help millions of women because they don't help everyone.
Or, more concretely, feel free to start your own thread about pay gaps between White men and start advocating for programs based in research to address the causes. This isn't a zero sum thing.
Since when has this thread been about the gender pay gap? In my experience, threads on HN tend to be about whatever the people commenting in the thread choose to comment on.
Personally, I only care about the gender pay gap insofar as it signals that some people are being underpaid, which I think is unfair. If there is a chain of causality leading from "X is a woman" to "X is a bad negotiator" to "X is underpaid", then the ones that deserve help are underpaid people first and foremost.
They can be helped by attacking any mechanism of causality (including those that are not mentioned above): preventing bad negotiators from being underpaid (e.g by helping bad negotiators become good negotiators) and preventing women from becoming bad negotiators (e.g. by specifically mentoring them). But the farther removed the factor you are targeting is, the less efficient your efforts become. I think it is shortsighted to limit a program to women when it could just as well be applied to other people (unless something about Google's negotiation training is explicitly gender-specific).
> And further, please don't advocate against policies that help millions of women because they don't help everyone.
I'm certainly not advocating that women shouldn't get help with negotiating if they need it, but I am advocating that other people should also receive that help.
> Since when has this thread been about the gender pay gap?
We're discussing Stretch, which is a Google program designed to narrow the gender pay gap by teaching women negotiating skills. You're the one who initially brought it up:
> For example, Google apparently has a program called Stretch to help women become better negotiators.
> Personally, I only care about the gender pay gap insofar as it signals that some people are being underpaid, which I think is unfair. If there is a chain of causality leading from "X is a woman" to "X is a bad negotiator" to "X is underpaid", then the ones that deserve help are underpaid people first and foremost.
Sure, OK. This whole thread is (I thought clearly) about gender issues. If you have thoughts about how to address the pay gap between various different groups of White men, feel free to advocate for them. But don't derail a conversation about gender inequality like this; this is not a zero sum issue. We can have programs that address this issue for women and programs that address this issue for other groups too, or programs designed to address this issue for all groups. But this thread is about gender, so let's not stray too far OT.
> Please don't derail a discussion about the gender pay gap with other issues
This discussion, as initiated by the original parent, is about the gender pay gap and other issues. It's somewhat ironic that you'd accuse me of derailing this discussion.
> And further, please don't advocate against policies that help millions of women because they don't help everyone.
Please don't put words in my mouth.
>>> There's also not a pay gap for White men
> I'm sure there are pay gaps between White men
> feel free to start your own thread about pay gaps between White men
> The argument you make here is that it's unfair to treat people differently based on ascribed statuses (race, sexual orientation, gender identification, etc.). But I think exactly the opposite;
I have been thinking about it and I believe that neither correct or wrong. It seems it is about how one defines fairness: Is is fairness of opportunity or fairness of outcome?. I would like to know more about this. Is there any paper, book, analysis that tries to tackle with it? I would love to learn about philosophical approaches, attempts to resolve it based on solid rational reasoning in the context of some moral values. Anyone?
It's very simple. It's morally wrong to enforce fairness of outcome, for a few reasons:
1. Doing so requires taking away from those who have, whether property or opportunity. This is theft and oppression.
2. Doing so requires an unbiased party to make judgments about what shall be taken from whom and to whom it shall be given. Humans are biased, so this cannot be done fairly.
3. Doing so restricts others' freedom.
Those who want to enforce equality of outcome want to rule over others, because they think they are qualified to make such decisions. By calling for it, they have already decided that there is a problem, and that they have the solution, and that everyone else is wrong.
In contrast, those who want equality of opportunity do not want to rule over others. They want power to be decentralized so people can make their own decisions.
It's left as an exercise for the reader to determine who is more trustworthy: he who would decide for you, or he who would have you decide for yourself.
I'm glad that Google's reasons for their diversity efforts are supported better research than one guy found in his free time. That said, [1] says in its abstract "... the overall difference in outcomes between men and women was small ..." which reminds me of the point about distributions and averages made in the memo. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a long tail of men who fall below the average woman for a variety of reasons (e.g. autism?).
> Furthermore, no one's arguing because studies show women to be less effective negotiators than men that we should give up.
I'm sure a lot of people would argue that, but since neither I nor you nor Damore seem to argue that, I agree with the connotation.
> initiatives that have no basis in science and are mostly just bad ideas like "more pair programming", "more part time work", and "make work less stressful".
There seems to be a lot of science on the benefits of pair programming (although maybe not in a gender context). I read https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/16/interactions-of-individu... just today. I don't know about part time work and making work less stressful, but they don't seem like universally bad ideas either.
> liberals often argue for fairness of outcome, conservatives often argue for fairness of approach
I'm not sure where I'd place myself on the liberal-conservative plane, but I'm definitely arguing for fairness of outcome here. If you observe that some people are worse negotiators than others, then to achieve fairness of outcome, you have to offer them help. (Alternatively, sabotage the good negotiators, but I don't support that.) Helping only women is better than nothing, but it is not optimal, because you are adjusting the wrong variable.
> I think you can't treat people fairly unless you take into account their ascribed statuses.
If someone is already taking their status into account, sure, you need to take that into account to counteract their biases. But that's a kludge and hard to balance correctly, if you can instead remove the influence of that person altogether, you should do that.
> For example, if we return to entirely gender-blind hiring practices, we'll see the gender gap skyrocket (see 538's article on affirmative action [3]).
The article is about racial bias and not the gender gap, the alternative is not completely race-blind, and it doesn't show any skyrocketing. In fact, the effect is much weaker than I'd have expected. The situation for Hispanics looks more like noise. Maybe there aren't many affirmative action programs for Hispanics even in states that allow them?
Personally, I think that affirmative action in college admissions shouldn't be based on race either. As I understand it, most racial differences in the distribution of applicants are due to economic reasons. In that case, it would be more appropriate to support students from low-income households, rather than sorting them into arbitrary buckets based on ethnicity.
> To ignore or not adjust for these biases is what's unfair here.
I agree that biases shouldn't be ignored, but I don't like it when the countermeasures assume that disadvantages only happen across a few categorizations. There are all kinds of reasons some people have worse outcomes than others, and to only pay attention to them when they coincide with membership in one of your favorite protected groups, is a kind of bias in itself.
> > Furthermore, no one's arguing because studies show women to be less effective negotiators than men that we should give up.
> I'm sure a lot of people would argue that, but since neither I nor you nor Damore seem to argue that, I agree with the connotation.
I only mean that Damore's argument is (roughly, mind you) "studies show the gender gap is likely due to biological differences so we should give up", and if we're comparing Google's pro-diversity hiring initiatives to Stretch, it's important to note that when Google noted the research on women and negotiating, their response wasn't "oh it's biological differences, we should give up". I don't know if Stretch is effective, but at least it's a proactive, supportive response rooted in research.
> There seems to be a lot of science on the benefits of pair programming... I don't know about part time work and making work less stressful, but they don't seem like universally bad ideas either.
I don't think they're universally bad ideas, but Google's gender gap is something like 70-30. There's no research to support the notion that pair programming, part time work and low stress jobs can address a 40 point spread like that, but there is research that pro-diversity hiring and support policies do, so I think it's actively harmful to advocate for replacing the latter with the former.
> I'm definitely arguing for fairness of outcome here. If you observe that some people are worse negotiators than others, then to achieve fairness of outcome, you have to offer them help. ... Helping only women is better than nothing, but it is not optimal, because you are adjusting the wrong variable.
Sure that makes sense, but the goal isn't to get every employee's negotiating skill to a certain level, it's to narrow the gender pay gap. In that context, it makes sense to work only with women.
> If someone is already taking their status into account, sure, you need to take that into account to counteract their biases. But that's a kludge and hard to balance correctly, if you can instead remove the influence of that person altogether, you should do that.
It is really hard to quantify, definitely. But these issues aren't limited to "that person"; we're all, every single one of us, subject to unconscious bias when it comes to race, gender identification, sexual orientation, and other ascribed statuses because of the culture and society we grew up in. Therefore we all need to adjust, and pro-diversity policies and affirmative action policies help us do that.
> The article is about racial bias and not the gender gap, the alternative is not completely race-blind, and it doesn't show any skyrocketing. In fact, the effect is much weaker than I'd have expected. The situation for Hispanics looks more like noise. Maybe there aren't many affirmative action programs for Hispanics even in states that allow them?
Sorry "skyrocketing" was a poor characterization (it was laaaaaaate :) Here's what 538 says about Black enrollment:
"...only two research universities in states with affirmative action bans have at least the same proportion of black students as the state’s college-age population, and one of those, Florida A&M University, is a historically black college or university (HBCU). ...only one school, Florida International University, has at least the same proportion of Hispanic students as the state’s college-age population.
...
Researchers looked at the effect race had on admissions and saw a 23 percentage point drop in the chance of admission for minority students in states with bans, compared with a 1 percentage point drop in other states, relative to nonminority students."
That's rough, no matter how you look at it.
> Personally, I think that affirmative action in college admissions shouldn't be based on race either. As I understand it, most racial differences in the distribution of applicants are due to economic reasons.
538 addresses this too:
"Opponents of affirmative action argue that aiming for diversity in areas other than race, such as socioeconomic class, can ensure sufficiently diverse student bodies. The most common race-neutral policy used as an alternative to affirmative action is a plan that the University of Texas already uses, in which a percentage of graduates from every high school get automatic admission. These policies have been shown to increase racial and ethnic diversity on campus, but research[1] on whether they’re as effective[2] as more explicit race-based affirmative action policies has been mixed[3], and critics say that it doesn’t make sense to use a proxy when so many colleges continue to struggle with racial diversity."
There are similarities between the experience of lower income Americans and Americans of color, but not all Americans of color are lower income, and policies that focus on evening out the income divide overlook the disadvantages people of color face because of their race.
> I agree that biases shouldn't be ignored, but I don't like it when the countermeasures assume that disadvantages only happen across a few categorizations. There are all kinds of reasons some people have worse outcomes than others, and to only pay attention to them when they coincide with membership in one of your favorite protected groups, is a kind of bias in itself.
Agreed, but at the same time, I don't think we need to show up at every discussion about gender issues and remind everyone that men also face challenges. We can advocate for policies that help straight cis White men who may be disadvantaged for other reasons without derailing discussions about race and gender issues.
> The US concept of free speech protects citizens from government retaliation.
This is true, but California presciently has other laws in place to protect workers that want to discuss potentially illegal behavior in good faith. This is why Damore is suing Google, and why it's quite likely that he will win.
Why would that apply here? He didn't discuss anything illegal.
Sorry I'm unfamiliar with California state law, and besides I don't really know why it pertains to a misunderstanding of speech protected under the 1st Amendment.
The memo itself describes at least some of Google's diversity efforts as potentially illegal. Firing Damore for speaking up about illegal actions committed by management is a no-no.
But wasn't he arguing the opposite; that Google's efforts to comply with US law were working to the detriment of men? I thought the US' case was essentially "Google is overwhelmingly White and Asian men", and Damore's case is "policies that decrease the numbers of men have got to go".
It's like the government is indicting you for making gingerbread houses, and one of your employees argues against your policy prohibiting gingerbread in the workplace. Isn't it?
EDIT: Oh it's gender pay, not diversity. Then I really don't at all get the relevance, Damore only mentioned the pay gap in a footnote that was totally unrelated to Google.
to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several
discriminatory practices
[...] Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal
discrimination [6]
[6] Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better
environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it
done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.
> But wasn't he arguing the opposite; that Google's efforts to comply with US law were working to the detriment of men?
I worked at Google. I've seen this before. "Desired" candidates (women, especially black and Hispanic) were hired on two occasions where the interviewing team gave them an average of 2s. Upper management took the "best" they could get of a certain "highly desired" demographic...I'm not sure how these two individuals made it past the hiring committee but they did...
>But the main reason that Damore's argument is outrageous is that the arguments about interest and fundamental biological differences have been used to hold women and people of color back since the inception of the US
What you do with the information that science provides is your problem. If a society (such as a workplace) doesn't have the capacity to logically process the scientific facts, and uses them to enforce psycho-sociological diseases like racism or discrimination, the solution is not to deny the scientific facts or erase the question. The solution is to foster capacity in society to process and respond to scientific facts in a logical manner
Why are women disadvantaged by the fact that men outnumber them as programmers, but women aren't disadvantaged by the fact that men outnumber women as Mechanics, Architects, Electricians, Sheet metal workers, Engineers, and Lawyers?
Why aren't men disadvantaged by the fact that women outnumber men as Speech-language pathologists, Dental hygienists, Physical therapists, Counselors, Nurse practitioners, Hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists?
> Why are women disadvantaged by the fact that men outnumber them as programmers, but women aren't disadvantaged by the fact that men outnumber women as Mechanics, Architects, Electricians, Sheet metal workers, Engineers, and Lawyers?
I don't think I made that claim, but still it has merit. Women face challenges in workplaces where there are few of them, sometimes benefits don't handle birth control, or maternity leave is non-existent or laughably short, or there are few women in leadership roles, or there is a workplace culture that is overtly sexist, or there are persistent sexual harassment problems, or they get paid way less for the same work, or they get stuck with "women's work" and treated like secretaries and assistants.
> Why aren't men disadvantaged by the fact that women outnumber men as Speech-language pathologists, Dental hygienists, Physical therapists, Counselors, Nurse practitioners, Hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists?
Men actually do face their own set of challenges. Consider all the jokes in popular culture about male nurses or male cosmetologists. Or consider Mississippi v. Hogan where a man sued successfully for the right to be admitted to the Mississippi University for Women School of Nursing, a historically all-woman school: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1981/81-406
I'm not super clear if I understood your question, let me know if I didn't get it right and I'll try again haha.
The gist of the question was that if you follow that link you can see that it is the case that most jobs have a sex ratio that is far off from 50/50, jobs with a ratio closer to 50/50 are the exception rather than the rule. I don't think this is a problem, or "problematic" as the kids like to say. I think this is just the way things are. You can learn a lot about the world just by looking.
The interesting thing that I raised in the question above is that some people do think these divergent sex ratios are "a problem," well sort of, the interesting thing is that they think in only a narrow selection of occupations is this a problem, totally ignoring that there is nothing particularly unusual about a divergent sex ratio for a given job. This may not be the case for you, but for the vast majority of problem addicts it is a very narrow focus on just a few occupations, totally ignoring the fact that it is a totally natural and normal thing.
It's like saying that something broadly true about the world is a problem. I can see the Vox headline now, Asians like rice, that's a problem
I don't like this constant grievance mongering worldview where everything is looked at through this lens of who has a "disadvantage" what is "problematic," why can't we just accept the world as it is? The people constantly going out and raising a ruckus about this or that issue would do far more good for the world by simply putting their own lives in order first.
> The interesting thing that I raised in the question above is that some people do think these divergent sex ratios are "a problem," well sort of, the interesting thing is that they think in only a narrow selection of occupations is this a problem, totally ignoring that there is nothing particularly unusual about a divergent sex ratio for a given job.
This is a misrepresentation of the "pro-diversity" argument. The vast majority of the "pro-diversity" posters do not think that every industry needs to have a 50/50 ratio. They don't even think the tech industry needs to have a 50/50 ratio. A better summary of the argument is this:
1. The tech industry has a tendency to be sexist towards women (which comes in many forms: whether they are subconscious cultural biases, or explicit sexual harassment, or sexist behaviors).
2. This tendency causes the gender ratio to be lower than what it would otherwise be in a "sexism free" tech industry.
3. We should work towards reducing these sexist tendencies because that is a worthy goal in and of itself.
4. If we succeed and reduce the sexism in the tech industry, the gender ratio will increase. It will not necessarily land at 50%, because there are other reasons that the gender gap exists.* But that is okay, because that was never the goal to begin with.
(Note that this is much different from saying "the gender gap is bad and is caused by sexism".)
> I don't like this constant grievance mongering worldview where everything is looked at through this lens of who has a "disadvantage" what is "problematic," why can't we just accept the world as it is?
Because the "world as it is" with regards to the tech industry tends to be sexist towards women, and we should work towards fixing that?
* Yes, I do think lack of interest is a valid reason for this. But it's not the only reason, and attempting to reduce such a complex issue into a single root cause is rather misguided.
Pretty sure the question was "why is this tech discussion board always focusing on women in tech and not some random other industry, and is this evidence that nobody really cares about equality and it is all just a horrible conspiracy to make people think tech has issues with gender equality?"
Well that's very obvious, it's just that it's uncomfortable to say it out loud: tech jobs are nicer and more desirable than most. We have very nice working conditions of many types and get well paid for it.
No significant amount of equal-rights activists will ever take up the torch to fight for <insert discriminated group>'s to be able to have more of said undesirable jobs. It's hypocritical but entirely understandable.
People, especially groups used to enjoying privilege, always mistake what “free speech” is. Free Speech is the right to be free from GOVERNMENT suppression of speech, not prevailing attitudes, not private companies and institutions and not public sentiment. Expressing racist, homophobic and sexist ideas in a private company that has employee guidelines that forbade expressing hurtful speech has just consequences.
Privileged people feel they are above repercussion because to admonish them encroaches on their sense of entitlement to privilege.
You're confusing free speech and first amendment. Free speech is an Enlightenment ideal much like the golden rule, i.e. "treat others the way you want to be treated". It's a good thing to strive for in a society, whether the first amendment exists or not.
So, you say "what it did not do was claim his female coworkers are inferior". First off, that's your opinion of the paper, ok? That's not a fact about the document. That's your assessment. You might believe it in so strongly it's basically fact to you.
But here's the deal, a bunch of other really smart people think it did do exactly what you claim it didn't. Now what? Are they wrong, you're right? On what basis?
Besides which, if you write "effectively lowered the bar for 'diversity' candidates", actually yes you just claimed that women at Google are less qualified.
Many voices are loudly explain why this memo is offensive. Shelve your own ideas of what you think this memo is saying, and consider them.
As for the emotions, there's a huge veiled anti-woman slant to arguments that take the paper on it's "logical" face value and dismiss emotions. First off, dismissal of emotions is a classic anti-woman tactic. Secondly, you're a human male, you have as many emotions as anyone else. You can separate emotion and "rational" thought.
>First off, that's your opinion of the paper, ok? That's not a fact about the document.
Of course it's a fact about the document. Damore does not say this. If you claim he did, you should easily be able to prove it by quoting him saying it. No one has done that, because the accusation is false. The burden of proof is on the accuser. The accuser is not presumed to be telling the truth on the basis of their social standing, gender or the emotional intensity of their reaction.
>But here's the deal, a bunch of other really smart people think it did do exactly what you claim it didn't. Now what? Are they wrong, you're right? On what basis?
On the basis of the content of the memo, they are wrong.
He claimed that Google's diversity policy lowered the bar for hiring, how can you read that and not think he was claiming that a portion of his female/minority coworkers were underqualified for their jobs?
> He claimed that Google's diversity policy lowered the bar for hiring, how can you read that and not think he was claiming that a portion of his female/minority coworkers were underqualified for their jobs?
This is the full quote, "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate." Latter emphasis mine.
I read this the same way that he writes it: that Google takes steps to reduce the false negative rate for diverse candidates but does not take these steps with non-diverse candidates. Policies like re-trying failed phone interviews, or automatically passing resume review for diverse candidates are examples of this (these are examples I've witnessed, I don't know if they in place at Google). They still need to pass the final interview loop, so they're not underqualified. But extra steps earlier in the interview process reduce the false negative rate.
Personally, I think these steps are an acceptable means of getting a more diverse group of candidates but I'd still respect my co-workers if they disagreed. To point out the fact that this results in some non-diverse candidates being denied when they could have gotten offers is factually correct. More importantly, to point this fact out is not to call the diverse candidates passed under such a system underqualified - as I pointed out earlier all candidates pass the final interview loop so all candidates are qualified.
No matter what qualifiers he tries to put on it, saying the bar is being lowered implies there are people at Google that he thinks do not deserve to be there.
The author deliberately stated that the "lowered bar" only goes insofar as reducing the rate at which qualified and diverse candidates are rejected. Disregarding the words that the author intentionally wrote - likely to prevent the interpretation that underqualified candidates are accepted - is a significant disservice, in my view.
To better illustrate what it means to reduce the false negative rate without admitting underqualified candidates, consider the following scenario:
* Phone interviews have a 50% false negative rate.
* On-site interviews have a 0% false negative rate.
* Neither type of interview has a false positive rate.
* Non-diverse candidates get one phone interview, and if the interview is positive they go on to an on-site interview. If the onsite is positive, the candidate gets an offer.
* Diverse candidates get two phone interviews. If either is positive, they move on to the onsite which, if passes, gets an offer.
In this setup, no candidates are underqualified since there are no false-positives in either the phone interview or the onsite. Non-diverse candidates have a 50% false negative rate; 50% are erroneously disqualified at the phone interview stage. Diverse candidates have a 25% false negative rate. Since they go through two phone interviews, there's only a false negative if both (0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25) phone interviews are false negatives.
It is under the section talking about the harm to Google. How is decreasing the rate at which qualified candidates are rejected harmful?
He is saying that this is harmful to Google, so he is saying it shouldn't be done, so he is saying that certain people who have been hired should not have been hired.
No matter what qualifiers you put on the statement he is saying that some of his former coworkers should not have been hired.
At most he's saying some of his coworkers would not have been hired and the non-hire decisions would be incorrect. I think the harm comes in as follows: suppose you have a way to drastically reduce false negatives without increasing false positives. Suppose you also have difficulties hiring enough engineers. Should you apply these programs to improve the demographics of your company (potentially to reduce lawsuit risk) or should you apply these programs more broadly to reduce the hiring shortage and reduce overwork and stress on all the engineers in your company that are on teams with people shortages? I think that's a question that can at least warrant a conversation, although I see good arguments for both sides.
His claim was that "lowering the bar" was hurting Google, not that Google should "lower the bar" further by expanding those policies. Using the term "lower the bar" has negative connotations and he is using it in reference to minority employees.
He also doesn't cite any proof that these hiring policies he is against actually exist, or even define what policies he believes exist. There is just some undefined diversity policy that he is against.
That would be a false positive rate, and it would be a reasonable interpretation if you deliberately ignored the rest of the sentence. There is no justification for ignoring the rest of the sentence.
He tried hard not to say that. But if he had, so what? Maybe he'd have been right?
If Google has lowered the bar for women in various ways, why should it be impossible to point that out? Just because some women would be offended by it? So what? Nobody has the right to be offended by facts.
> Nobody has the right to be offended by facts.
What are the "facts"?
He doesn't back up his claim with any data at all. Where is his supporting data that Google's hiring practices in regards to minorities hurts Google? He's just making a baseless claim that doesn't logically follow from any of the evidence he provides before it.
These things are talked about at the workplace, however. Just around the water cooler in private rather than out in the open. It is getting super weird and awkward these days where many people claim to adhere to the accepted diversity story in public but obviously don't in private.
I think it's a weird dance we play with polite society and reality. Sometime last year it was pointed out that being called a racist is worse than actually being a racist. After years of political correctness, racist people have "learned the language" but you still see conscious and unconscious racism all the time. Does that fix systemic racism? Is it a step forward or a step backward?
These are just tough problems. How do you make up for a system that is biased against you? At what point are you disadvantaging the incumbent group? They didn't exactly choose to be in the incumbent group as much as the oppressed group chose their's.
It's hard to have an honest conversation because it's easy to police words, but tough to police thoughts and motivations.
> Sometime last year it was pointed out that being called a racist is worse than actually being a racist.
This is pretty interesting. At this point I accept that I'm both racist and sexist because of the culture I grew up in. But there was a time when I took the suggestion that I was racist or sexist as a deep assault on my character and intellect.
I think it's hard to admit, probably especially for software engineers, that we're biased in some way, but the truth is that this stuff is insidious. It's somehow true that boys are called on more than girls, and they're given more positive feedback for participation in the classroom. Or like earlier in this thread I referenced Dr. Sadedin's Quora post and someone responded to it assuming that she's a man. Or I remember a prominent woman feminist on Twitter talking about how she was confused why a woman flight attendant was talking about the weather forecast, potential turbulence, and landing time when she realized the woman was actually the pilot.
No one's immune from this. It's pernicious, it's embedded in our culture, and it pervades our entire society.
> At what point are you disadvantaging the incumbent group? They didn't exactly choose to be in the incumbent group as much as the oppressed group chose their's.
This is a fair point. I think (to use a corporate term I kind of disdain) we need buy-in from white men and we don't have it right now. Most of us don't believe that a problem exists, or that we are sexist and racist (importantly, just like everyone else), or that we personally need to do anything about this. Until that changes, we'll still feel cheated by pro-diversity policies, and issues like this will keep flaring up.
I think the fix is simple but not necessarily easy (oh no, accidental Rich Hickey reference haha), and it's to just keep talking about these issues. Not, of course, in the workplace, but in your social circles. And if you can't learn about this stuff in your social circles, do some research online or broaden your social circle to challenge yourself a little (I use theflipside.io and it's been surprisingly illuminating). Because the facts are that current US society and culture puts over 2/3 of us at a significant disadvantage, and the sooner the dominant group (straight cis white men) gets wise to it the sooner we can fix it.
Most of us don't believe that a problem exists, or that we are sexist and racist (importantly, just like everyone else), or that we personally need to do anything about this. Until that changes, we'll still feel cheated by pro-diversity policies, and issues like this will keep flaring up.
I don't think that's a fair characterization. I think a lot of white men recognize that a problem exists. It's just that there are so many other problems in this society right now that it seems low on the totem pole. Personally, I'm more afraid of an outbreak of violence between neo-Nazis and radical Marxists. It's hard not to draw parallels to 1920s Europe.
> It's just that there are so many other problems in this society right now that it seems low on the totem pole. Personally, I'm more afraid of an outbreak of violence between neo-Nazis and radical Marxists. It's hard not to draw parallels to 1920s Europe.
Yeah things seem pretty fucked right now, and it's kind of hard to believe it all happened in less than a year. Not really confidence inspiring.
> I think a lot of white men recognize that a problem exists.
Honestly, I'd like to hear from them. Just look at this thread, the ratio of anti-Damore to pro-Damore people is like 1-to-10, and the other threads are even worse.
I will say I pushed it too far when I said "[m]ost of us". Looking at this Gallup poll 58% of White men support affirmative action for women and 52% of White men support affirmative action for racial minorities. The MoE is 5% and that's pretty close, affirmative action questions are subject to social desirability bias, I would assume numbers have dropped in the Trump era, and I don't necessarily think support for affirmative action translates into "I'm cool, and maybe even happy with the idea that a similarly qualified woman might get a job instead of me", but hey 58 is 58 :)
But I don't really accept the explanation that "there are so many other problems". This is a huge problem if you're a minority in the US. It's really an issue of perspective here.
> Honestly, I'd like to hear from them. Just look at this thread, the ratio of anti-Damore to pro-Damore people is like 1-to-10, and the other threads are even worse.
I'm white and I agree a problem exists, although I'm not American. I'm also basically on the "pro-Damore" side in this thread, although I don't necessarily agree with everything he wrote in the document. You seem to take this as an indication that I'm sexist or denying sexism exists, and I think a big part of the problem is exactly this kind of "you either agree with me or you're a sexist pig" approach.
A person can be pro-equality and even for encouraging more women to go into tech, without agreeing that all gender differences are caused by social conditioning or that affirmative action is the proper way to fix it.
> I'm white and I agree a problem exists, although I'm not American.
Oh cool, hi!
> A person can be pro-equality and even for encouraging more women to go into tech, without agreeing that all gender differences are caused by social conditioning or that affirmative action is the proper way to fix it.
Sure, alright. What do you think about the problem? I guess, what are your ideas for addressing the gender gap without pro-diversity policies and affirmative action?
Sure, alright. What do you think about the problem? I guess, what are your ideas for addressing the gender gap without pro-diversity policies and affirmative action?
I'm not the person you asked this question but I'll give my take:
I don't think the gender gap is the problem. Sexism and harassment are the problems. The evidence for that is very clear from the first-hand accounts of women in industry. The gap itself, on the other hand, is not evidence of sexism. There are many, many factors that go into people's choice of career path long before some entitled boss decides not to keep his hands to himself.
> Honestly, I'd like to hear from them. Just look at this thread, the ratio of anti-Damore to pro-Damore people is like 1-to-10, and the other threads are even worse.
How is not smearing the guy who said there is a problem equal to not wanting to accept there is a problem?
Shouldn't employers abstain from controversial subjects as well, then? It seems one sided to hold employees to that standard but not the corporations and bosses they work for.
Every day the "pro-diversity" (in the sense of preferentially hiring practices) don't abstain... they tell you a viewpoint and force you to adopt it even when you disagree. The fact people keep their mouth shuts shouldn't be a surprise. That doesn't make the pro crowd any less controversial. It's just they don't get fired for their controversial opinions.
I entirely disagree. Of course this is personal preference but I firmly believe that the best way to fix a broken or flawed system is to place as much stress on it as possible in order for it to break down completely which in turn will force action to be taken by whoever is in charge of it which leads to a system that won't suffer from the same flaws.
I feel it we owe to society that we should try to improve it at every opportunity and allowing ourselves to adapt to a bad system instead of trying to break it is doing society a disservice. In other words: I feel it is our duty to try and provoke changes to what we perceive as bad instead of exclusively trying to adapt to the conditions presented.
In this case, he felt the system in the workplace is wrong then he should try to stress it into breaking so it can finally get fixed.
Another example: lets say that because of a bad bureaucratic process a certain action causes long queues on some service. I feel that it's everyone's responsibility to do that very action in order for the service to stop working entirely, which would force a change to it by whoever is in charge. I see it as "voting with your actions".
The interesting thing is it seems on the surface that Google did invite these kind of discussions in their forum probably by the nature of forum, the explicit rules about sharing ideas to improve the company, the product etc.
Now one of the valuable lessons one learns operating in any large institution is that yes there are stupid questions no matter if the policy explicitly states there aren't, and there are always unwritten rules. Failure to discover the unwritten rules leads to getting fired, let go, skipped by during a promotion, etc.
Just curious, what do you think would be a proper venue. Tweeting at Google HR publicly, private emails to owners / upper management?
The workplace shouldn't be the venue, except many companies are kind of forcing this issue into the workplace by making valiant and public-relations-tinged efforts at diversity. I think Google even has a Vice President for Diversity -- which to me seems a bit silly because unless there's a business case to be made, it's just feel-good self-congratulation for how "progressive" you are. Perhaps having a diversity manager -- but an actual Vice President level executive? That seems like that should already be in the portfolio of whomever is in charge of Human Resources -- certainly not a separate executive role.
Is a Diversity executive actually impacting the bottom line of the company? Are there any actual quantitative facts that indicate that "diversity" improves a business's profitability? I am not arguing against diversity, please don't misunderstand. But it feels to me that this violent desire for diversity is something rather unique to SV tech. For example, the lack of men in the mental health professions barely raises any mention aside from the quadrennial NY Times think piece. The lack of men kindergarten teachers also barely makes a dent in the national discussion. The lack of women in building trades (despite those jobs being extremely well paying compared to "white collar" mid-level marketing jobs often dominated by women.) There's also not a big emphasis on the lack of women working in aviation or firefighting, despite those also being very well paid positions.
But for tech, for some reason it's a "big deal."
Fighting discrimination is obviously important as a basic matter of human rights, but much of tech's diversity push isn't about fighting discrimination as much as it's about actively recreating the balance of men and women in the field based on an arbitrary desired ratio.
If men and women are different, then it follows that they will have different desired vocations to a similar degree that they are different. If we argue that men and women are exactly the same, then why aren't more men working in mental health or social work -- those fields are about 80% women. We can't use the discrimination argument because that would imply that women discriminate against men -- and that doesn't fit the narrative that the straight white male is the bane of society.
But it is when the problem he was trying to address was the effect of diversity politics at google. Where else should that be discussed than in a small closed group of people.
Exactly. If Damore had focused his comments purely on hiring practices, quotas, discriminatory policies etc he would still be there and almost all would've found his comments constructive.
But he didn't do that. He brought up scientifically baseless, insulting and emotionally immature rationales for an important and sensitive topic. Working around people in a professional environment requires nuance and tact. He showed none of this.
The fact that so many in IT seem to miss this point and defend him explains so much about why many men and women stay away from this field.
From what I've seen, much of the anti-memo invective is based on (a) not reading it, or (b) an extremist interpretation of what he says, or (c) outright denial of scientific facts.
It really is easier to join a lynch mob, than to say "Hmm... perhaps we want a cold, cautious examination of the facts"
> You can't dismiss his points just because you're tired of talking about them
You can, and some people have, and that's okay. It's not clear whether you're making the implication here, but commonly it's implied that "if you walk away from the debate therefore you are wrong", which is fallacious. Nobody owes you a debate.
> I'm talking about handling what Damore claimed in an intellectually honest way
Then the initial argument needs to start from a place of "intellectual honesty".
Damore presented evidence to support his claim that women are on average less able than men in areas relevant to engineering. He didn't discuss veracity, or contradictory evidence. That's textbook confirmation bias, not intellectual honesty.
Damore then started making HR policy proposals. We use a 50/50 gender ratio as an indicator that a particular field is free from bias. It's one thing to propose that 50/50 is not the natural ratio to end up with, but until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number then proposing HR policy changes put the cart before the horse. This indicates that the policy changes are what James in interested in, not the evidence. More confirmation bias.
Further, Damore's proposals discuss diversity as a whole (race not just gender) without a single word of justification, let alone evidence. That's either more confirmation bias or conscious sleight-of-hand, either way, it's certainly not intellectual honesty.
I don't bear Damore any ill will, he should be forgiven, but this memo was a mistake and showed poor judgement and more than a little bias. These studies may be good science, but stringing them together to confirm a conclusion you'd already set your sights in making is bad science.
Damore then started making HR policy proposals. We use a 50/50 gender ratio as an indicator that a particular field is free from bias. It's one thing to propose that 50/50 is not the natural ratio to end up with, but until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number then proposing HR policy changes put the cart before the horse.
I deeply disagree with this approach. You're essentially saying that unless you can come up with an alternative scientific theory, complete with predictions, it's not possible to criticise an existing theory about the world.
There's many plausible explanations why an absence of a 50:50 gender representation could be caused for reasons other than bias or average ability. That's enough to put a nail in that model of discovering bias. Coming up with a way of predicting what the right ratio is, isn't necessary to discard that metric.
I think part of the problem is what the memo says and what it doesn’t say. It’s entirely plausible that the ‘natural’ ratio is not exactly 50:50. But as of last year, among Google tech workers, the ratio was 81:19, and that’s with all the affirmative-actiony programs Damore wanted to back off on; in the past it was higher. It’s quite a bit less plausible that intrinsic differences could explain all or even most of that big a discrepancy, especially combined with the many anecdotes of discrimination we hear about. Now, to be fair, the memo never explicitly claims that it does; indeed, at one point it specifically says “in part”. But the tone of the memo, the relative lack of time spent acknowledging the large role played by cultural factors, makes it sound like Damore thinks the natural ratio is at least pretty close to the current one. And that’s simply wrong.
How do you know it's wrong? If the ratio among CS graduates is 80-20 then it's natural it's still 80-20 when hiring at Google (not taking into account other factors which may tilt it even more in direction of men).
You may ask why it's 80-20 among CS graduates. One hypothesis is that women are just less interested in tech and in presence of many other choices they choose different paths. In the past there weren't as many choices that's why women were forced to go into programming (that's why there were more women in programming several decades ago).
> I deeply disagree with this approach. You're essentially saying that unless you can come up with an alternative scientific theory, complete with predictions, it's not possible to criticise an existing theory about the world.
That's a straw man. You're suggesting I disapprove of criticism, which is not so. I disapprove of demands for policy change when you don't even have a hypothesis for what your target should be.
Unless Damore (or someone else) can reasonably estimate whether their theory around 'biological' differences result in a natural 10/90 ratio or a natural 49.9/51.1 ratio then there isn't really a case to be made to change actual real-world HR policies on that basis.
Being able to reasonably estimate that 'natural' ratio is a massive task. You'd need to account for parenting, education, popular culture, socio-economic group, dozens of biasing factors. I'd expect that model to go well beyond what's possible.
Yes, that may impose a high hurdle on criticism of HR policy via this argument, but that's also the intellectual leap that Damore has claimed to have made from the evidence presented. How exactly he's managed that leap is problematic. He certainly hasn't demonstrated full knowledge of all of the factors involved.
> There's many plausible explanations why an absence of a 50:50 gender representation could be caused for reasons other than bias or average ability. That's enough to put a nail in that model of discovering bias. Coming up with a way of predicting what the right ratio is, isn't necessary to discard that metric.
Of course, and it's certain to be a combination of factors, some historical, some current that pushes representation away from 50:50. I don't think anyone is pretending that bias alone is responsible. But there's a mountain of direct evidence that bias is a significant problem. On the other hand the chasm between this biological source evidence and an actual hypothesised effect on representation is vast.
> Unless Damore (or someone else) can reasonably estimate whether their theory around 'biological' differences result in a natural 10/90 ratio or a natural 49.9/51.1 ratio then there isn't really a case to be made to change actual real-world HR policies on that basis.
I agree with your argument but fail to see how it allows you to defend a discriminating policy. It's the other way around: You can't discriminate people without evidence that what you are doing is reasonable. You're the sexist in this case.
You can't defend a discriminatory policy by saying you understand it's discriminatory but to keep it because no one can tell how much.
This line of reasoning is inconsistent unless you are only opposed to discrimination of some groups. In that case I think we sadly have to agree to disagree.
I'm sorry to hear you feel that way, that was not my intention. Could you explain when you find the time? I reread your posts and don't see where i am putting words in your mouth.
Do you agree with my argument apart from whether it applies to you or not?
I'm not a fan of the trend for sorry-you-feel-that-way apologies. On the other hand it's possible I let this seemingly-unending argument get to me and got defensive, thanks for not taking it badly. Suggest we move on. For reference (no need to explain) the trigger was "You're the sexist in this case" which I now assume was hypothetical rather than accusatory.
The words you're putting in my mouth is defence of specific policies. I'm not aware that I'm defending any specific policies.
One policy that's come up (not sure which thread, I've lost track and can't be bothered to reorient) is Google's policy (as I understand it) of ensuring 'diversity' candidates get considered, reducing the false negative rate. This was inaccurately described by Damore as lowering "the bar", which is quite inflammatory. That policy is designed to specifically redress two things; (a) decreased confidence in under-represented groups resulting in low numbers of applicants, and (b) unconscious bias in hiring processes resulting in fewer under-represented groups getting through.
While there are more elegant solutions (vested interest disclaimer here) this type of policy tries to address measurable issues and does not reduce quality of hires.
Perhaps it leaves fewer roles open for others, but ultimately you have to make a choice between Hire A benefitting from a diversity program or Hire B benefitting from hiring bias in their favour.
You're right, I assumed you defend the type of policies I disagree with without clarifying whether that is the case - I'm sorry for doing that, you were right.
Regarding your reply: I agree with most of your reply and enjoyed reading your blog post. I feel I understand your position much better now and can see where you are coming from.
> Is there a different policy you want to discuss?
I'd like to clarify whether we agree or disagree on the original argument - hypothetically, regardless of any specific policy. I hope I don't misrepresent your views in the following.
In your blog post you seem to argue that feelings of unfairness by the over-represented group in response to positive discrimination are built on a misconception [1]. My original reply to you was in the same vein and I'd like to understand where exactly we disagree on that.
I believe discrimination based on group membership is not justifiable. The only way in which positive discrimination can be justified is therefore if its application does not actually cause discrimination but only corrects for existing discrimination.
As we don't know for sure yet how much of the representation gap can be attributed to discrimination, we should not use positive discrimination to correct for it as we potentially do more than correcting for it but actually discriminate.
Hypothetically, if the split would be 45/55 in a perfectly just world, aiming for 50/50 through positive discrimination would in practice discriminate and not just correct for discrimination.
Please note that I agree with the outcomes of positive discrimination until the effect of the original discrimination is canceled out - I just don't feel we can distinguish both cases and should not dismiss feelings of injustice in response to that as "built on a misconception".
[1]
> In any discussion of positive discrimination there’s a risk that the overrepresented group (usually white men) may feel threatened. Unsafe. People aren’t born aware of their comparative advantage or disadvantage, and sometimes never see it, so when other groups seem to be given a leg up it can feel unfair.
> Feelings of injustice may be built on a misconception, but they still exist and are natural
It was pointed out in this thread many times: one good way to approximate what the ratio should be at the point of hire is the ratio among CS graduates. It's 80-20 so it's natural it's also 80-20 among Google employees. If you force it to be say 70-30 then you are discriminating against men based on sex.
> It was pointed out in this thread many times: one good way to approximate what the ratio should be at the point of hire is the ratio among CS graduates.
While this sounds reasonable on the face of it the reality is different.
Where are you sourcing these graduates from? In the USA computer science departments are barely above 10% women faculty, in China it's closer to 40%. Student numbers tell a similar story... so it matters where your graduates are coming from. For a multinational like Google this is a real question.
> If you force it to be say 70-30 then you are discriminating against men based on sex.
This is a loaded statement, based on the assumpions that (a) hiring if left alone is broadly meritocratic and (b) quotas are the only game in town. There's enough evidence to say that neither of those assumptions is true.
First of all, it's been proven many times that bias in hiring is a real problem and has a large effect. Hiring is not meritocratic. Second, Google doesn't use quotas, no bar-lowering occurs (Damore hinted at this but gave no specifics and no evidence... we have to reasonably discount it unless someone can prove otherwise). Instead diversity programs mainly exist around sourcing and trying to avoid false negatives in order to counteract systemic biases.
> Damore then started making HR policy proposals. We use a 50/50 gender ratio as an indicator that a particular field is free from bias. It's one thing to propose that 50/50 is not the natural ratio to end up with, but until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number then proposing HR policy changes put the cart before the horse.
This seems to assume that the only way to measure or achieve equitable hiring is to measure the representation of identity groups across a given position and make sure it tracks their makeup in the general population. It's not clear to me that there aren't other acceptable methods of trying to make things equitable.
For example, you could check that applicants from different identity groups succeed in being hired at about the same rate. That's a practice that should direct an organization towards equitable results whether the reality is that women are underrepresented because of sexism in hiring or the reality is that women are represented in different proportion because of the endeavors they tend to prefer. And also for a reality that's a mix of both (which I suspect is the way of things).
Also: if the primary accepted standard becomes to match representation in a position with an identity's representation in the population, it seems pretty likely that over time it would become more difficult over time to predict a "natural" ratio.
I completely agree, which is precisely why I think believe the role of the employment process ought to be to screen everyone by fair (in a way that everyone agrees on) and transparent metrics. 'All fronts' hopefully means fixing every issue encountered simultaneously at the local level.
If instead we're adding a 'fudge factor' based on race, gender, or other measure of 'privilege', we're just hoping that fudge factor in hiring makes up for problems elsewhere, and it can paradoxically make things even worse.
Think about a lot of the (often very well justified) complaints that minority and other hires have with the current situation: they feel like, or they feel that other people believe, that they are simply a 'diversity hire' that doesn't deserve to be there. They feel constantly pressured to 'prove themselves' under the suspicion that the bar was 'lowered to let them in'. And the entire structure of un-blinded affirmative action exacerbates the situation, because nobody is allowed to know how big the fudge factors are, neither the minorities nor the dominant group. Under that situation, how can there anything but suspicion and mutual distrust?
Under a provably blinded hiring process, none of those should be an issue, because the process is completely transparent and agreed to ahead of time.
Other people have said this much more eloquently than me:
'Fair & transparent' and 'blind' are two different things, and neither are subsets of each other.
A 'blind' hiring process _can_ be akin to, faced with a densely connected graph, focusing only on the most immediate causal relationships.
I do agree that 'fudge factor's are clumsy at best, where all candidates are hired, and then an arbitrary number is added to candidates based on race/gender/etc.
However, 'fudge factors' have already existed in history. For a completely different example outside of hiring practices: redlining[1] was an explicit practice of denying services/mortgages to city neighborhood based on its racial makeup.
So, what now? There have been decades of racist 'fudge-factoring' in real estate and urban development. Is the right approach to fudge-factor the other way? Or is it to be 'blind' and to look purely at the financials of each individual/organization?
Obviously this is a different scenario than hiring, and cannot necessarily be directly applied back onto hiring practices. However, we can separate out a) one way to correct for historical/systematic 'fudge factors' from b) whether or not this can apply to hiring.
I would argue that yes, you need fudge factors to correct previous problems.
It should be fair and transparent, I agree, but it will not be very clear-cut. In complex systems (densely connected graphs of causality), the only clear-cut processes are creating problems, or ignoring them. Fixing complex problems are always messy.
As many people have pointed out before, making the hiring process blind doesn't do what you seem to think it'll do. There was a famous study (can't find it right this second on mobile) where researchers found that the ratio of black hires to white hires decreased when their resumes were submitted with all identifying information scrubbed.
The results of studies like this depend strongly on the context... both the method used, and the existing hiring environment you're comparing to.
We've run a similar study and for the company we were hiring into we found blinding in that specific case had no effect on race or gender but drastically improved socio-economic diversity. The hiring company already had equitable hiring on gender & the candidate group wasn't racially diverse enough to make a conclusion.
Would I generalise that result to all organisations? No way, and neither should you.
If you can find the study you're thinking of I'd be interested to look at it.
I don't know the answer but if I cared to guess, it might be because the talent pool for orchestra performers had significantly more gender parity than the talent pool competing for elite engineering jobs at Google.
Edit: Google says that their diversity platform is non-discriminatory because they're not changing their standards, but rather looking harder for qualified diversity candidates (paraphrasing). This makes the gargantuan and probably unwarranted assumption that there are a lot of these candidates not applying and that 'looking harder' will find them.
Maybe there is pressure to hire from minority groups then. It makes sense that minority candidates are on average less qualified objectively if there is an affirmative action earlier in the process (for example at school admission level).
Google's hiring rate between men and women does seem to match the relative rates that men and women graduate with CS degrees, which suggests that they're at least not discriminating at that level.
There are still arguments to be made that either more aggressively recruiting women (fattening their pipeline, even if it's zero-sum versus other players in the field) or accepting a higher rate (yes, "lowering the bar", which most colleges do quite aggressively and people seem mostly okay with) could be positive moves on many axes.
More productive overall measures involve equalizing the educational pipeline, which IMO is the real solution. Google invests heavily in that, too, though, so I'm pretty happy with their multi-pronged approach.
Damore presented evidence to support his claim that women are on average less able than men in areas relevant to engineering.
He didn't. He just claimed that they are on average less interested in those areas. There is no mention at all of ability in the memo, only in the manipulated press pieces.
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
Google apparently already had a women-only program that was predicated on the assumption that women have a harder time leading than men. So it doesn't seem like Damore's claim was particularly unusual within Google.
"but this memo was a mistake and showed poor judgement and more than a little bias"
"openness" and "freedom" are core values of Google. Even in a scenario where someone made effective arguments refuting all of James' key points, a "one strike and you're out" policy seems antithetical to Google's culture. Or any healthy culture for that matter.
If James wrote what you said he did above (I think you mischaracterize him greatly), and if his ideas are as poorly constructed as you suggest they are, surely Google employs someone intelligent enough to go point by point through his memo and really school him. Such a response would do more to build a case for the worldview you appear to espouse than the lazy, generalized retorts being lobbed his way.
> If James wrote what you said he did above, (I think you mischaracterize him greatly)...
By all means ignore the part relating to honesty/competence, I'd probably apologise to him for that if I met him so probably shouldn't have written it.
Most of my comments however speak to his actions so are not a matter of characterisation.
> ...surely Google employs someone intelligent enough to go point by point through his memo and really school him
They do. They have. However, Damore violated Google's code of conduct and by extension his conditions of employment. That's not a line any employer of thousands can play coy with in the name of educating one individual.
> Such a response would do more to build a case for the worldview you appear to espouse than the lazy, generalized retorts being lobbed his way.
Ok, no one owes anyone a debate, unless you're going to call it wrong, sexist, harmful, etc. Then in that case, I'd like some reasoning behind it. Either don't debate, or do and do it right.
> women are on average less able
Please don't do this. What he claimed was that women have less inclination to go into tech due to various pressures, some biological. If you're referring to his referencing the 'big five' personality traits, you'll note that he addresses both positively and negatively associated traits of both men and women in regards to working with software. He never stated that the combination of differences makes one gender better than the other.
>until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number
Why? All he did was put forth evidence and suggest that 50/50 might not be ideal, why must another number be presented in order to have a discussion on the subject? Speculation on my part, but is it because it's an easier target to shoot down if you can point to an exact number and claim it's wrong for your own variety of reasons?
Obviously, policy changes are going to be a goal if Damore's evidence is proved right (Policy is at the root of the problem according to Damore). Why are you presenting them like two separate things? You're not even considering the fact that the evidence might support his conclusions.
>diversity as a whole(race not just gender)
Because whenever diversity is discussed, it is almost done so as a whole. Obviously Damore wanted to focus on gender, but diversity initiatives virtually always include both. It would seem awkward to avoid race entirely. And he never made any claims on just race, go to the memo and ctrl-f "race". Every time it appears, it's accompanied by "and/or gender". In several of these cases, it's because a study he's citing mentions both. I would call that being thorough, not intellectually dishonest.
>These studies may be good science, but stringing them together to confirm a conclusion you'd already set your sights in making is bad science.
You can make this claim about any paper that claims something not trivially arguable from scientific studies. To say this, you have to go through piecewise and show why the connections he's making from solid scientific studies don't apply to his arguments.
> Ok, no one owes anyone a debate, unless... I'd like...
This is still just about what you'd like to happen. The rest of that argument is circular.
> Please don't do this. What he claimed was that women have less inclination...
Damore specifically mentions "abilities" although others have debated his exact intention in that line. I don't see value in reopening that.
Regardless, what you're missing is that interest, ability and environment are far from mutually exclusive traits. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15026234
> Why? All he did was put forth evidence and suggest that 50/50 might not be ideal...
Because Damore went as far as policy changes. To make an HR policy you need objectives, or at least direction... to know whether you should be aiming for a 49:51 gender ratio or a 10:90 gender ratio. If there's no proposed effect size how does Google's HR team know if they're heading in the right direction?
Some people may not want employers like Google to get into 'social engineering' as Damore puts it, but the reality is that there's a mountain of evidence that hiring bias has a large effect, so the idea that a company like Google wouldn't try to measure and optimise in that area is clearly not going to fly.
Having unconscious bias or otherwise being incorrect doesn't make you intellectually dishonest. Whether or not his claims are true, Damore presented a much more metered and reasonable argument than virtually all of his detractors or even published social pundits.
> Having unconscious bias or otherwise being incorrect doesn't make you intellectually dishonest.
If you purport to be a (competent) scientist in the 21st century then personally I expected you to be highly aware of biases such as publication bias & confirmation bias and act accordingly. That speaks either to his discipline/understanding or his honesty, I don't know which.
> Whether or not his claims are true, Damore presented a much more metered and reasonable argument than virtually all of his detractors or even published social pundits.
Damore was metered, but understandably triggered a threat response in the people who his memo targeted as being below "the bar".
You may have read a selection of counter-arguments, some of which will be less "metered and reasonable" than his. Unfortunately the emotional tenor of an argument is not the measure of its merit.
>That speaks either to his discipline/understanding or his honesty, I don't know which.
You're holding him to an unbelievably high standard that is never applied to those making the case that gender disparities are due to societal discrimination.
I can't imagine you're being driven to apply this standard to him by anything other than a preconceived notion that women are underrepresented in engineering due to sexism and that anyone that disagrees is a misogynist.
>Damore was metered, but understandably triggered a threat response in the people who his memo targeted as being below "the bar".
Damore did not target anyone as below the bar. He made a statistical observation about the distribution of personality types among gender groups and how that would play out in gender representation in various occupations, to counter the discrimination-as-cause-of-disparity narrative. No individual was cast as below the bar due to their gender. The threat response was immature.
> You're holding him to an unbelievably high standard that is never applied to those making the case that gender disparities are due to societal discrimination.
No, this is wrong. Societal discrimination is directly measurable at the point of hiring. There are a mountain of studies measuring this. It simply doesn't require modelling the effect as it propagates through society.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, nobody is claiming that bias is the only factor involved, but it's one we can measure and act on.
> Damore did not target anyone as below the bar... The threat response was immature
Aside from explicitly saying "lowers the bar", explicitly saying "I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes" and making multiple references to lower drive, mathematical ability, etc. Please.
As you know, threat responses aren't driven by 'maturity' they're driven by percieved threat. Damore's clumsy language caused people at Google to be afraid, and justifiably so. He may have intended to spark a dialog but his words are confrontational. Don't confront people on this topic because you'll often get a fight/flight response. Instead you must engage and build trust.
As I understand it, the data about discrimination in hiring are mixed, but I'm interested in learning more.
Your threat response point seems like dressing up a group's overreaction to make it justifiable. It's also another example of different standards being applied to liberal groups vs conservatives groups (offending conservative groups is basically a sacrament, but saying anything that can be remotely twisted into an offensive statement toward a liberal group is nearly criminal). I've never seen anyone make any sort of threat-response/justifiable-offense argument when conservatives are upset about, say, "blasphemy day" or just the constant misrepresentation in the media. In particular though, there's nothing which should remotely cause offense, even in the selection of quotes you shared (but good on you for quoting and not taking offense at strawman--very few of Damore's critics have been so kind). Damore's arguments (however factual) were better than I could make, but it's ridiculous that the criticism is that he didn't successfully prevent everyone from taking offense. He couldn't have done more to prevent offense without damaging his own case. I think this is another case of the left refusing to be pacified by anything less than complete political capitulation. Meanwhile any sort of expression from liberal groups, even defamation or riots, are defended, and any one who criticizes them have impossible standards. The double standards here should be unbelievable.
> As I understand it, the data about discrimination in hiring are mixed, but I'm interested in learning more.
Great, do that.
> Your threat response point seems like dressing up a group's overreaction to make it justifiable.
Your overreaction point seems like dressing up a group's threat response to make it seem unreasonable.
There are threat responses and irrational behaviour on both sides (whichever side you naturally agree with) and failing to recognise that means that you're not empowering yourself to engage with this topic on any useful level.
> Your overreaction point seems like dressing up a group's threat response to make it seem unreasonable.
I think it is unreasonable. Damore took every precaution to avoid offense without changing his position. Perhaps more importantly, we go so far as to censor someone who makes any statement that can possibly be spun as a criticism of women, yet we permit and even encourage all manner of absurd, anti-male speech.
> There are threat responses and irrational behaviour on both sides (whichever side you naturally agree with) and failing to recognise that means that you're not empowering yourself to engage with this topic on any useful level.
First of all, I'd like not to use "threat-response" as a synonym for "taking offense", because the former could be easily conflated with an actual threat (damage to person or property vs damage to hubris). That said, Damore went to every conceivable length to avoid causing offense; I think you and his other critics are effectively asking him not to criticize at all. Not speaking about a sensitive topic at all is hardly empowering oneself to "engage this topic on any useful level".
I think it's also worth pointing out that the left has nurtured a culture in which some groups are encouraged to take offense, and this is used to silence and shame other groups. I think that's what's happening here--a lot of people have been relentlessly fed propaganda about privilege and patriarchy and oppression have been trained to see it everywhere. I think this is a better explanation for the events that transpired than "Damore is evil/insensitive/etc".
> Damore took every precaution to avoid offense without changing his position
Perhaps every precaution within his ability. Unfortunately he made plenty of provocative mistakes. I highlighted some in the Medium post I linked to.
> First of all, I'd like not to use "threat-response" as a synonym for "taking offense"...
If you think that's what I'm doing then you're mistaken. I'm talking about stress hormones, cortisol, fight or flight.
There are probably better [primary] sources, but Tania Singer & her team at the MPI in Leipzig do a lot of work with stress responses caused by things other than "damage to person or property".
When you use the language that Damore used, in a confrontational way as opposed to a collaborative way, that reaction can be the result. Threat responses are caused by threats, including threats to identity groups, or to future prosperity (something that significantly affects the life chances of any offspring).
Whether you consider it "unreasonable" or not is irrelevant. My advice is to approach the debate in a collaborative way, instead of being confrontational like Damore, and you'll more likely avoid that outcome.
Maybe being a world class communicator could have helped Damore avoid some of the ire, but it's plainly wrong to attribute this drama to him instead of the reactionaries who were so giddy at the opportunity to take offense that they needed to invent content and context to be outraged about. Seems like blaming the woman in the full burqa for being raped--if only she had better covered herself, she might not have caused this response in her rapist.
Damore did everything right here. Whatever you think, his post was collaborative, not confrontational (he remained focused on what Google could do to improve, repeatedly affirmed his commitment to the common goal, etc).
> Maybe being a world class communicator could have helped Damore avoid some of the ire...
So, women are a portion of society who've spent hundreds of years fighting for equal treatment, a portion of society who weren't allowed credit cards until the 1970s, who have been told their brains were too small for serious things like voting... a portion of society who still face discrimination today (although today it's usually more nuanced and less overt). Damore said openly that Google were lowering the bar to let them in and amplified ideas that make it harder for the women (and other 'diversity' hires) already in Google, and you're surprised people got cross. Really? That surprises you?
Damore did the equivalent of walking into Jerusalem, picking a side, then immediately spouting policy changes he wanted to see... then acting all hurt when he got punched in the face and kicked out of Israel for causing trouble.
This isn't about being a world-class communicator, this is about an adequate communicator for the problem he was trying to solve.
How would you react if I told you your views were biased and extreme? Even if I think they are, telling you that in the introduction of my memo (like Damore did) is not going to get the reaction I want.
> ...but it's plainly wrong to attribute this drama to him instead of the reactionaries who were so giddy at the opportunity to take offense that they needed to invent content and context to be outraged about.
Not so plain as you think.
A scientific approach to determining the 'natural' gender balance would require a lot more 'biological' data and be able to combine it in a model with cultural factors and understanding of biases. Damore does not have that evidence, and doesn't indicate that he understands it.
A model like that would need to be able to predict why womens participation in computing dropped in the 80s. It would be able to explain why women are only 10% of computer science faculty in the USA, but 40% in China.
Without that model, leaping to conclusions about how many women to expect in a company like Google is bad science, and making HR policy changes on the back of this would be bad management.
No such model exists, but Damore leapt past that stage and in doing so abandoned any hope of scientific support.
He used inflammatory terms like lowering the "bar", accused Google of bias and fostering extreme views, talking about womens biological interests and abilities, and spoke in absolutist language rather than collaborative language.
Damore wanted to effectively reduce the number of women in the workplace, that's a threat. And he used inflammatory language while doing it, so the threat was as clear as day. I find it amazing that you're surprised by the reaction.
> Seems like blaming the woman in the full burqa for being raped--if only she had better covered herself, she might not have caused this response in her rapist.
I'm not going to respond to that, but I consider that comment both inaccurate and inappropriate.
> Damore said openly that Google were lowering the bar to let them in and amplified ideas that make it harder for the women (and other 'diversity' hires) already in Google, and you're surprised people got cross. Really? That surprises you?
So you agree it was the content and not the presentation? At any rate, Damore didn't say that Google lowered the bar, he said that diversity policies can devolve into that, but some people are addicted to outrage and will hear what they want.
> Damore did the equivalent of walking into Jerusalem, picking a side, then immediately spouting policy changes he wanted to see... then acting all hurt when he got punched in the face and kicked out of Israel for causing trouble.
No, Damore worked at Google; his everyday life is affected by Google's policies and rhetoric and general ideological-bubble-ness. He didn't "walk in and start espousing policies". It's also worth noting that he posted in response to a request for opinions on a skeptics message board; he didn't shout it from a mountain. Your analogy is completely divorced from reality.
> This isn't about being a world-class communicator, this is about an adequate communicator for the problem he was trying to solve.
This still sounds like victim blaming. Maybe we shouldn't be critiquing the guy who pointed out a few injustices and maybe we should look at the people who feigned outrage to silence him.
> Without that model, leaping to conclusions about how many women to expect in a company like Google is bad science, and making HR policy changes on the back of this would be bad management.
Yes, but he wasn't "doing science", he was posting on a message board. Besides, his point isn't "Here's a model that explains the disparity"; it's "the current model--discrimination hypothesis--has inconsistencies". Finally, being wrong (even about a contentious topic) doesn't merit public damnation, slander, excommunication, etc. That his model is incomplete is a red herring; he wasn't at fault, Google, Gizmodo, and the hoard of slanderous SJWs here and across the Internet are at fault.
> He used inflammatory terms like lowering the "bar", accused Google of bias and fostering extreme views, talking about womens biological interests and abilities, and spoke in absolutist language rather than collaborative language.
Sorry, none of this remotely merits the response he received. In fact, if anyone else spoke in this manner about any other topic, it would be a significant improvement. If the discrimination-theory folks were held to this standard, it would be a massive improvement. I'm not going to punch a guy for being in the 98th percentile of communicators instead of the 99th, especially when his critics and opponents are largely shouting lies and profanity.
> I'm not going to respond to that, but I consider that comment both inaccurate and inappropriate.
That's fine, but that's basically what's happening here. Damore went far above and beyond what was reasonable, and you're blaming him for not doing more. This is inappropriate.
> So you agree it was the content and not the presentation?
No... I don't agree.
Both Damore's content and the way it was communicated contain serious flaws. The content contained conclusions unsupported by evidence, and the communication (amongst other problems) contained pointlessly divisive and inflammatory comments that he really didn't need to make to address his concerns.
> At any rate, Damore didn't say that Google lowered the bar, he said that diversity policies can devolve into that, but some people are addicted to outrage and will hear what they want.
Oh please. Damore literally used those exact words.
He said Google policies "effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate".
The most generous interpretation of that statement is that a greater percentage of candidates from under-represented demographics are hired, but that bends the word "bar" to mean something other than its actual meaning... i.e. turns an otherwise weak point into inflammatory rhetoric.
> ... the people who feigned outrage to silence him.
I'm curious. So you think a large group of people is pretending to be outraged about something they're not actually outraged about? Does this behaviour require coordination or happen naturally? If it's coordinated, where is the evidence of collusion, is there an email list? If this collective outrage-feigning happens naturally then under what other human circumstances do humans exhibit this group mock-outrage behaviour, other than when the 'right' complaints about the 'left'? How do you know this outrage is "feigned" and not real?
Why should I believe this is more than just partisan bias on your part? Outgroup biases are well documented, after all, and your use of 'SJW' seem to put you in or near one of the right/alt-right/gamergate/white-supramacist camps, no idea which.
> Sorry, none of this remotely merits the response he received.
What do you mean by the response he received?
If you mean the loss of his job... then in no other context would someone be able to retain their job after undermining so many of their own colleagues or causing so many negative news headlines for their company... let alone both.
If you mean something else then I don't feel a need to be part of that discussion.
Yeah, the outrage is fake or they wouldn't have to invent statements he didn't make. Fake outrage is pervasive among progressives. It mostly spreads as ideology. It seems to be attractive to exaggerate one's hardships to amplify the perceptions of one's accomplishments while diminishing the accomplishments of those you hate.
Regarding the response received, I was talking about the firing and public flogging. And Google created the headlines for firing him so questionably.
The public flogging bit was figurative. You're mistaken about my claims, but since you're resorting to ad hominems, I feel pretty good about my case. I think you're more determined to have an unproductive conversation than I am to salvage it, so I'll let you have the last word, but I won't stick around to read it.
> If you purport to be a (competent) scientist in the 21st century then personally I expected you to be highly aware of biases such as publication bias & confirmation bias and act accordingly. That speaks either to his discipline/understanding or his honesty, I don't know which.
I've never been on a discussion board where this was the norm. More importantly, and to repeat my earlier point, this isn't even the norm for well-regarded, published content on the subject. It appears the standards are very high for dissenting opinions.
> You may have read a selection of counter-arguments, some of which will be less "metered and reasonable" than his. Unfortunately the emotional tenor of an argument is not the measure of its merit.
Maybe, but given that Damore's memo is largely criticized for causing offense (despite doing more than what is reasonable to avoid it), it certainly seems pertinent that other points of view aren't held to the same scrutiny.
> Damore was metered, but understandably triggered a threat response in the people who his memo targeted as being below "the bar".
Probably, but he did a much better job of mitigating it than I could have, and we never, ever hold liberal viewpoints to this standard. In particular, it's positively mainstream to publish absolutely brutal criticisms of men; we don't even feign sensitivity.
You may well have a point that people too readily make scathing assessments of 'men' as a group.
Bad Thing A doesn't justify Bad Thing B though, does it.
As for the high burden of proof, I invite you to suggest a model that estimates the effect size we should observe in gender representation in tech companies based on Damore's 'biological' differences
>Bad Thing A doesn't justify Bad Thing B though, does it.
No, but I don't think stating an observation about a group as politely as possible is a bad thing. It's not like saying "women may be less interested in tech" or "diversity quotas can lead to bar-lowering" are even unflattering or absolute observations. We just live in a culture of professional victims who are ever-primed to take offense at anything. The moral thing isn't to critique Damore's communication--better communication wouldn't have helped; only capitulation. The moral thing to do is to oppose the victimhood culture.
> As for the high burden of proof, I invite you to suggest a model that estimates the effect size we should observe in gender representation in tech companies based on Damore's 'biological' differences
I don't have that model, and I never claimed to. Moreover, no one needs a model to point out inconsistencies in the current model, especially inconsistencies which are mutually harmful.
Scott Alexander has a pretty good one in the link referenced in the post. But why spend time investigating when challenging the discrimination hypothesis can cost you your job, reputation, etc.
> Scott Alexander has a pretty good one in the link referenced in the post.
I must have missed where he proposes a model. By all means point that out. Specifically one that can predict how many women should work at Google in California, and in Boulder, and in New York, and in London, and in Mumbai... year by year.
> *But why spend time investigating when challenging the discrimination hypothesis can cost you your job, reputation, etc.
Challenging a hypothesis didn't cost Damore his job. Undermining his own colleagues by promoting negative stereotypes cost Damore his job. That was totally unnecessary to his argument... he could have just based it on CS graduate numbers and left the 'biology' out of it.
>Damore presented evidence to support his claim that women are on average less able than men in areas relevant to engineering.
His claim was that women are statistically less likely to be interested in computer science. He said nothing about ability.
>It's one thing to propose that 50/50 is not the natural ratio to end up with, but until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number then proposing HR policy changes put the cart before the horse.
He gave lots of numbers. 20% is about the percentage of female computer science graduates. Targeting anything above that would necessarily require discriminating against men.
>Damore's proposals discuss diversity as a whole (race not just gender) without a single word of justification
I don't see any mention of race in the memo. When Damore is talking about "diversity" he always is talking about gender diversity.
>>He didn't discuss veracity, or contradictory evidence. That's textbook confirmation bias, not intellectual honesty.
>This indicates that the policy changes are what James in interested in, not the evidence. More confirmation bias.
>it's certainly not intellectual honesty...
>stringing them together to confirm a conclusion you'd already set your sights in making is bad science.
I've been asked to edit my comment to make it less argumentative. Could you do the same for yours? Calling someone you disagree with "intellectually dishonest", etc, is not good taste.
It's very easy to learn about biases like confirmation bias, and fall into the trap of only applying that knowledge to other people. "He only disagrees with me because of confirmation bias. He's just intellectually dishonest."
You can't possibly know the thought process behind another person. As far as we know Damore did the research and found these facts convincing and developed his view. Not the other way around. Or at least someone presented these facts to him and then he developed the view he has.
In any case, this is how all debates work. People present evidence for their beliefs and the other side responds with refutations and evidence for theirs. There is nothing wrong or intellectually dishonest about this.
The memo is mostly about women, but race is mentioned several times in the memo - mostly in terms of training programs at Google that are only open to people of certain races.
Your comments have been crossing into incivility and flamewar. Would you please make a u-turn and fix that? These threads are divisive enough without careless commenting.
This exchange is likely to get lost in the noise, but I just want to tell both of you how much I appreciate your willingness to give and receive this kind of feedback. It is so hard to get messaging just right when text is your only medium. This kind of back and forth makes it easier to focus on what we mean rather than what was perceived.
> His claim was that women are statistically less likely to be interested in computer science. He said nothing about ability.
Sorry, you're mistaken here. (1) Damore said "I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes". (2) Damore made references to women being less able to cope with leadership positions due to anxiety (3) Studies show ability, interest, motivation and external environment are not mutually exclusive independent things like you might think. Read some of Carol Dweck's research on this for more.
> He gave lots of numbers. 20% is about the percentage of female computer science graduates. Targeting anything above that would necessarily require discriminating against men.
'in the USA' is missing from your sentence.
In China, 40% of faculty are women, and graduate numbers are similar. The largest democracy in the world, India, also has a similar story, close to 50% of graduates.
Google hires across the world, not just in the USA.
> I don't see any mention of race in the memo. When Damore is talking about "diversity" he always is talking about gender diversity.
It's there, look again. And you don't get the unique right to interpret the true meaning behind Damore's words. He specifically references race-related hiring policies as unfair off the back of a discussion about gender.
> I've been asked to edit my comment to make it less argumentative. Could you do the same for yours? Calling someone you disagree with "intellectually dishonest", etc, is not good taste.
I consider my comment pretty factual. Intellectual honesty has a specific meaning; the 'intellectual' isn't just there as filling. It's a method of problem solving that among other things explicitly disconnects your personal beliefs from the pursuit of the facts. I was explaining that Damore's actions were not consistent with intellectual honesty, as implied by the commenter I replied to.
Damore leapt over a vast chasm to get from 'biological' differences to HR policy. He could be right about every single thing in his memo and it still wouldn't be intellectually honest because the evidence provided doesn't explain the observable facts.
Why did representation of women in computing drop suddenly in the 1980s? Why does the USA have 20% (and falling) women CS graduates and India have closer to 50%? Why are 10% of US CS faculty women and in China 40% CS faculty are women? Why do girls interested in computers during childhood suddenly drop their interest?
It ultimately doesn't matter what his thought process is, perhaps I should have left that aspect out. Until Damore can answer those kinds of questions, leaping straight to HR policy is intellectual dishonesty. Unless I'm missing something that's an indisputable fact.
...and we haven't even opened the Pandora's Box that is less biased hiring techniques, but perhaps that's for another time.
[Edit: missed a bit:]
> In any case, this is how all debates work. People present evidence for their beliefs and the other side responds with refutations and evidence for theirs. There is nothing wrong or intellectually dishonest about this.
This is how debates work on topics that aren't emotive. In this case, Damore promoted stereotypes of lower ability (yes, ability), and explicitly claimed that Google is lowering the "bar" to allow diversity candidates in.
That effectively tells his colleagues hired through those programs that they don't deserve to be there, and that he wants fewer people like them hired in future.
That's never going to happen like a discussion of whether the button should be #4285F4 or #3285F4. It's a threat to peoples future prosperity, and the prosperity of their familes, daughters, etc. That conversation requires empathy and trust. Instead, Damore came out guns blazing, with accusations of bias and extremism. He triggered a threat a response.
Nothing he's done makes him inherently a bad person, he had some mistaken views and was clumsy about engaging, but he made a big mistake and left no alternative for this to be a disciplinary matter. I hope he learned this lesson, but given his engagement with MRAs and his new "Fired for Truth" branding I suspect he hasn't.
> commonly it's implied that "if you walk away from the debate therefore you are wrong", which is fallacious. Nobody owes you a debate.
You might be wrong, you might be right, either way that does mean forfeiting the debate. It's like folding in poker -- yeah, you might have great cards, but you folded, and nobody owes you any of the money on the table.
> Then the initial argument needs to start from a place of "intellectual honesty".
Uhm, no. Might as well say assuming a 50/50 ratio to be free of bias is not intellectually honest, so "they started it". And then those could in turn point to someone else, and so on.
> ...you might have great cards, but you folded, and nobody owes you any of the money on the table.
No. Damore had to win. His opponents just had to not lose.
Google has invested massive resources and thought into their hiring process. The debate for change was started clumsily. Damore triggered a threat response that caused a good portion of one side to walk away from the debate, but he was pushed out too.
His opponents have egg on their faces, and they just keep spreading it around more. Like that cartoon dog reading sitting in a burning house saying "this is fine". That's what I see. They painted themselves into a corner they're now too cowardly to get out of, and other cowards is all they now have. Damore on the other hand is still a bright young (and cute) guy with his integrity intact.
You may be right, but my point was the ideas he brought up merited discussion. The social timing of it may be what caused it to blow up so much (that and the misrepresentation by Gizmodo), but at least personally, I had not heard the argument made before in a way that allowed it to be discussed as widely as it is.
As some one who took a sociology 101 class in junior college... nothing in his memo is original/new/insightful. This is a classic nature vs nurture argument.
Just because someone makes points that have some relationship to facts doesn't mean they can't still be held responsible for disparaging things you say. Imagine if he had written a 10 page paper about how they shouldn't hire so many fat people because they cost more in health insurance, with all sorts of facts and numbers to back up his claim.
Or if he wrote it about short people, that they, on average, were worse coders. I am sure you could find some semi-reasonable sounding studies showing some correlation between height and some definition of success.
The argument is though that what Google is doing is hiring disproportionately from a smaller group of candidates. The argument would apply as well if they "looked for more fat candidates without lowering the bar" or "looked for more short people without lowering the bar". Those statements describe discrimination of people who don't belong to pointed group.
The argument in the memo is: hire on equal standards and if that results in less women than men then it's caused by X and here is what you can do about X instead of discriminating at the point of hire.
Could not have agreed more. I do not think they should have fired him because it further validates one of the points he made about "being on the right side" (I am talking about the statement at the beginning that all women seem to agree with, do not have the exact quote on me atm.)
> What he said had at least some spark of originality and insight, otherwise it wouldn't have gotten nearly the attention it did.
The memo is being discussed so much because it is controversial, which does not require originality, nor is it necessarily insightful. It shows the perspective of someone in an exclusive position which I believe adds (considerably) to the reasons it's being discussed, but to make the conclusion that it's being talked about because it adds to the discussion is incorrect.
>Those who disagreed with Damore already won the battle.
It's about the attitude. As a woman in Tech, there are so many men you don't feel like you belong. Men think you are really not very feminine anyway, you are a geek who likes programming. With memos like this more young women are going to rethink a career where they will feel alone and may have their biological identity questioned if they are successful
> Those who disagreed with Damore already won the battle.
No. Not yet. women still tend to be underpaid. Women make 72 cents to a male's $1 of wages for the same job.
As a white male, I don't care to "discuss" if women are my intellectual inferiors - which is exactly the point Damore was making ... and the point that YOU are making.
"According to data for 8.7m employees worldwide gathered by Korn Ferry, a consultancy, women in Britain make just 1% less than men who have the same function and level at the same employer. In most European countries, the discrepancy is similarly small.
These numbers do not show that the labour market is free of sex discrimination. However, they do suggest that the main problem today is not unequal pay for equal work, but whatever it is that leads women to be in lower-ranking jobs at lower-paying organisations."
Would you please not cross into incivility when commenting here? Plenty of people are arguing the same views as you without doing that, while you've been doing it pretty regularly.
If you'd correct this, we'd appreciate it, because these discussions are hard enough to keep substantive without people taking swipes at each other.
Isn't the onus on Damore to put forth supported arguments? He made a lot of claims that were completely unsupported.
The worst offense though was that a lot of the assertions were completely disconnected from supporting the original claim that Google's diversity efforts were misguided. In order to have an honest intellectual discussion, first there would have had to have been an honest effort at putting together a coherent argument with such controversial/incendiary points/implications made. Damore failed that miserably.
Why would this mean anyone already working in the field needs to bring any burden to the table in terms of defending themselves? The subject was centered around the probability that some recruiting assumptions may be wrong, and that there may be better approaches to recruiting or improving the situation in general.
Women that work in the field should definitely be respected as much as anyone else. They should be free of sexual harassment, and mistreatment. On the flip side, if only 20% of graduating classes in targeted STEM fields are women, and women represent a disproportionate amount of college students... then maybe the issue is broader than the affect of men on the field at that level.
I think part of it may be natural inclination... another is probably the role of movies and media. The latter likely a much bigger role on the impressions of the work and the likely types to fulfill those roles.
--- Edit:
Big example Daisy/Quake from Agents of Shield... started off as a badass hacker, best of the best... as the show moved on, the role was relegated to brawler, and the impact of intellect or technical ability was largely sidestepped, or made secondary and less.
Media portrayals of technical professionals all around are usually very unbalanced... and that doesn't even begin to go into the other fields that are disproportionately male or female, or the hindrance of men in higher education.
> Why would this mean anyone already working in the field needs to bring any burden to the table in terms of defending themselves? The subject was centered around the probability that some recruiting assumptions may be wrong, and that there may be better approaches to recruiting or improving the situation in general.
Assuming you're asking in good faith: because of the idea that diversity hiring effectively lowered the hiring bar.
Imagine for a second you have imposter syndrome. Now imagine that you've been told (not necessarily by Damore) that you're the (not quoting you here) "diversity hire". Imagine how much worse that imposter syndrome now is.
I suffer from imposter syndrome all the time... but that's on me, not someone else. If you hire someone because of diversity alone over someone with a higher level of merit, then that was wrong. Also, telling someone that they were hired for diversity reasons alone is probably a bad move as well.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't try to get more women into tech, or into trash collection, or construction, or every other male dominated occupation, or men as nurses, etc... however, that doesn't mean having to change the rules for men or women. And pointing out that there are differences between men and women shouldn't instantly start of with a storm of hate.
"the average woman is shorter than the average man" ... "typical misogynistic cis white male patriarchal bullshit" ...
I'm not saying that everyone is volatile and prone to fits of excessive rage in response, but it really feels like there's no place for civil discussion or discourse with a growing portion of the population.
You know you are being completely hypocritical, right ?
You abhor discrimination during hiring. But yet you want to be able to discuss the differences between men and women in order to use them to discriminate.
When did I say that I want to be able to use differences between men and women to discriminate?
I said that hiring on diversity over merit was wrong. That's it... I never said anything about sex in terms of merit. The only place any discussion of sex or diversity belongs is in terms of messaging and in terms of possibly promoting jobs that are disproportionate to natural propensity towards a given role.
If you can't discuss, review, document, test or otherwise examine bias in terms of nature, environment, upbringing, educational exposure and other factors, then you can't force equilibrium at the end of a long process.
You can't hire 50% women in an industry, where only 20% of those educated for that field are women. Also, so long as choosing a field of study or work is voluntary, the best you can do is maybe have a more fair representation of a given gender in a given field that doesn't show only above average looking women wearing glasses with a few geeky quirks, then relegate them to more personality quirks, or make them less capable over time.
And MAYBE it's okay to have a field where most of the people in that field are of a given sex. I don't see the SJWs trying to get women into garbage collection, or throwing a fit over the gender bias in nursing.
You're missing the point that there is a positive feedback loop at the source of the problem. The reason that women (or minorities for that matter) don't get into some fields of STEM is because there are no role models that tell them it's a good idea to do so. So there is a chicken and egg problem, and the only way do break the cycle is to give priority to such minorities. Is it fair to the members of the majority? Perhaps not. But in the end, I believe, it will justify the investment. Consider it a small price to pay for the millennia of oppression.
No there isn't positive feedback loop at the source problem and no giving priority to minorities does not make any sense. You don't have to. There is enough fight over the talent that anyone who actually has talent will get a job.
Having worked in tech for 20 years and hired and fired all sorts of people I am unconvinced there is a problem in tech as big as it's being claimed.
The idea that you can only have role models if they are your gender is really really absurd and if people are really falling for that then they have a problem not the tech-scene.
There is no actual evidence that diversity in gender does anything for a company besides creating more complex work environments. There are far more important types of diversity to strive for.
There's a difference between the two words, "reason" and "justification". I think you're confusing the two; if someone talks about X as a reason for Y, you think they're using X as a justification for Y.
It's complicated by the fact that sexist & racist people will try and use reasons as justifications, that they will use their misunderstanding of statistics to short-circuit decision-making in a faulty and biased way.
But we shouldn't outlaw talking about reasons all the same. The reason we shouldn't outlaw talking about reasons, in spite of the risk of odious people using them as justifications, is that you would otherwise proceed unscientifically. Reasons relate to theories about the world, and if you discard reasons, your theory about the world is wrong.
This is an extremely valuable insight, but I don't think it's the root cause of the screaming match we're currently observing.
Some have already decided that the REASON for gender imbalance in tech is rampant bias and male privilege, which they have publicly committed themselves to stamping out. Whether or not this is true, questioning the validity of that reason is considered an attack on their identity and value system.
Edit: I'm not sure it's clear from my comment, but to clarify, I am NOT SURE what the reason for the observed gender imbalance is. I'm not saying that it isn't bias/privilege/etc. I don't think the case has been proven one way or the other, but the personal attacks & utter misrepresentations I've seen used to try to shut down discussion is driving me pretty hard emotionally to one side at the moment.
Sure. But I think the reason people are so attached to this explanation, I think, is that other possible reasons sound like justifications for bias. I think both good and bad people get confused between the two.
I was at an all hands meeting at a previous employer when the big boss was introducing new employees. After he introduced a new female employee, he went into a long speech about how diversity was important to the group. That was just super awkward, and whether true or not, made it feel like to everyone the employee he just introduced was a diversity hire.
I think there are definitely a few companies out there who are playing with the hiring bar to improve diversity in an easy but ultimately harmful way. Probably not google, but these bad actors poison the well in these discussions, so to speak.
My sister was considering going into CS, until the career adviser at her school told her it's a great idea to go into CS since companies have gender quotas and someone will have to hire her so going into CS basically guarantees her a job.
Yep. Not because CS is a popular field where there is a shortage of skilled professionals, but because she's a woman. She was so upset by it that she chose something else entirely.
Ya, a lot of crap like that is why the imposter syndrome has so much fuel. But we aren't really allowed to talk about it, and anyways, it involves bad actors acting in bad faith.
I think going into robotics, 3-D printing, or drones (but be prepared to work outside the US) is a much better field nowadays than CS/programming etc. (Of course, if you're so inclined healthcare/physical therapy is also a great field for the foreseeable future)
One point that I do wholeheartedly agree with Damore on is that putting quotas in OKRs is a very bad idea. It's an easy feel-good number that can have all sorts of negative consequences. It casts doubt on every female hire, and IMO almost certainly invites bias in the interviewing process.
> Imagine for a second you have imposter syndrome. Now imagine that you've been told (not necessarily by Damore) that you're the (not quoting you here) "diversity hire". Imagine how much worse that imposter syndrome now is.
I've actually heard where this exact thing has happened at Google, in a very high profile team. This isn't just a hypothetical, it's a reality.
And that's in incredibly poor taste to disclose... I'm not a fan of jobs going for reasons beyond merit, but it's not fair to the hire to put that on them... and I never meant to state that it is. I'm only saying diversity over merit is wrong.
It wasn't even disclosure. The person that said it wasn't involved in hiring if I understand correctly, but basically didn't like the person and thought they were unqualified, and said that.
I guess what I'm saying is when there's even a feeling that there is a system that is diversity over merit, people will assume that people they don't like who are minorities, are somehow less able to do their job, even when that's not the case.
I never said I believe in hiring based on diversity over merit, but I also don't mind looking for candidates in different places.
I don't believe the person was hired because of their sex or race. But again, even here, all minorites have to prove it, while the majority are assumed to be there on merit.
As someone without a formal education working with peers that have PhDs, there are lots of things one has to overcome in terms of perception in a given role. The majority of my coworkers for the past several years have not been white; however, most have been men (about 1:6 to 1:4 or so)
> Imagine for a second you have imposter syndrome. Now imagine that you've been told (not necessarily by Damore) that you're the (not quoting you here) "diversity hire". Imagine how much worse that imposter syndrome now is.
And this, I believe, is the strongest possible argument against discriminatory hiring practices.
If I hire someone who's black, or female, or gay/bi, or any other 'protected group', I want them to know that I hired them for their ability, not to fill some quota. And the only way to do that is to hire based purely on ability.
By setting 'diversity hire' quotas, Google's own HR department is telling anyone who qualifies for any of those quotas that they're not good enough.
According to the PDF(0), it states on page 6, footnote 6
...Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done)....
The smoking gun here is "which is illegal and I’ve seen it done"... Well, shit. That seems to answer your question, "YES".
However... On James Damore's official website(1), it states the following from the same quote area.
...or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal).....
Which is illegal. No more claim of being a witness. How interesting. That would not validate your claim/question.
(0) was written as an internal discussion piece by an employee at Google.
(1) was written as a public statement by the center of the current moral panic. As such, it has to be hugely more careful about making unsubstantiated claims. Regardless of the truth of the matter, if he has no corroborating evidence of discriminating based on protected status, he can't make a public allegation of such without opening himself up to a defamation lawsuit.
They hired new chief diversity officer, Danielle Brown -
Brown talked with NPR last year, while at the chipmaker Intel. “I think maybe two or three specific things that explain our success,” she said. “The first thing is accountability. Setting these goals, communicating the goals, tying pay to the goals. I think that’s been key.”
She was at an important place at an important time. Intel had decided to do something no other tech giant had done before: publicly state how many women and underrepresented minorities it wanted to recruit, and how many it managed to retain. Of all new hires, Intel told the world, at least 40 percent would have to be women or underrepresented minorities.
I think you're making some pretty big assumptions here. For starters, she was hired 2 months ago. Has she even had time to put any new programs in place yet? Second, you're assuming that whatever she did at Intel, she's intends (and will be able) to do the same at Google.
Presumably the programs Damore criticizes in his memo have been around for a long time. Do any of those involve the use of quotas?
> because of the idea that diversity hiring effectively lowered the hiring bar
So ? That's the company's choice to make.
Many companies take the longer term view that having a more diverse workforce is more important than hiring the most technically adept candidates. Especially since having different viewpoints can aid in innovation and creativity.
The idea of gender diversity in a company itself being good has absolutely no evidence in reality.
It all depends on what kind of company, what product industry etc. and it might not be about gender or minority diversity but something completely different.
This is what I think is wrong with this whole discussion. Diversity has become a goal in itself yet no evidence to support it's positive impact.
It's not because discriminating based on sex is illegal.
If you lower the bar for white people because you take long term view that having more white people in your workforce is more important than hiring the most technically adept candidates then it wouldn't be "your call to make". In fact you would be sued into oblivion and rightly so.
>>Especially since having different viewpoints can aid in innovation and creativity.
Yes, that's why the memo mentions diversity of opinions. You don't get that by discriminating based on sex or race. You could get some of it by not firing people for expressing their views though.
But it's a fact that many companies and colleges lower standards to increase diversity attendance. I think this is a good thing, but it's not a false thing.
If the numbers are true and the gender distribution in STEM graduates is 80/20, and you are intent on increasing your number of female employees, you have two choices. You either lower the bar on the 20% or you raise the bar on the 80%. In the end, the net effect is the same. The employees from the 20% group had a granted advantage against the 80% group. The better solution is to change the 80/20 distribution of graduates. Personally, I'm unsure of the 'proper' way to accomplish that goal.
Note: I find it interesting/disturbing/sad/telling that I've been sitting here for a long time contemplating if I should even submit this message since I use my real name here. The fact that we, as a society, have come to a point where we are afraid to even have this discussion really makes me sad. I respect every one of my colleagues deeply, male and female alike. The idea that someone could twist my words and paint me as a misogynist is beyond troubling.
I think there's something wrong with this argument. Companies don't recruit randomly from a big sea of 80/20 applicants, they recruit from a chosen set of pools, where the average of every pool they could possibly recruit from is 80/20.
Choosing to recruit only from pools where the proportion of women is greater than 20% isn't quite the same as lowering the bar. The bar is at the same height for men and women, just with a skewed population. You're artificially excluding pools of people who would make good candidates, but since both women and men can bypass your outreach efforts by going straight to you, you're not refusing to hire anyone who is both qualified and motivated enough to apply directly.
I think proponents of the google diversity programs are arguing that they do this. I'm not sure whether they do. I think the real situation might be a hodgepodge of systemic factors and biases in both directions that sum up to something unpredictable, plus a few largely ineffectual diversity programs, and a massive question mark around why there are so few female CS grads in the first place (biology! sexism! gender roles! c64 ad campaigns! inertia!). Nevertheless, it's a bit more complicated than just lowering the bar for women.
>>Choosing to recruit only from pools where the proportion of women is greater than 20% isn't quite the same as lowering the bar.
"Choosing to recruit only from pools where the proportion of white people is greater than 95% isn't quite the same as lowering the bar."
I don't think it would get much sympathy but it's an equivalent with race substituted for sex (both are protected and it's illegal to discriminate based on them).
>>Nevertheless, it's a bit more complicated than just lowering the bar for women.
If you own a pub and want only white waitresses so you only invite white women for interviews you can do that without lowering the bar as well. Still you are discriminating even if you put elaborate system out there which magically result in only (to make the point stronger, substitute with a ratio like 90-10 or 80-20 to make the situation equivalent) applications from white women at the end.
I'm not defending or attacking affirmative action itself, since the topic is so politically charged that arguing about it on the internet with strangers is futile.
My claim is a much narrower one, that you can hire a disproportionate amount of female developers without lowering the bar if you bias your incoming hires. It can be simultaneously true that Google's diversity policies are harmful to quality (because they restrict where Google hires from) while their female developers are as qualified as their male developers (because they came from the same place and meet the same standards).
Yes it might be although it's very unlikely to happen. I wrote about it in another comment but in short: once you start hiring more (proportionally) from a smaller pool then that pool become less qualified on average (because you fished out better candidates). Over time this can only result in you doing more and more to overlook candidates from the bigger pool if want to sustain your policy.
If more companies are doing that then it's impossible to sustain without lowering the bar. If only you are doing that there is no point because then others will hire more men (as there is more qualified men left proportionally as you took bigger % of qualified women).
I am saying that the policy of "we don't lower the bar, we just look more into avenues to hire more women specifically" is somewhere between pointless and dishonest (dishonest as in created to hide the discrimination based on sex).
EDIT:
As to affirmative action: I agree it's not the place for debating ethics of it. I am saying that affirmative action = lowering the bar either directly or indirectly and there is no way around that fact (at least industry wise, you can maybe sustain it locally if you are ok with others skewing their ratio in the other direction).
that pool become less qualified on average (because you fished out better candidates)
This rests on the assumption that hiring from a given pool exhausts it. It seems intuitive that hiring students from a university or bootcamp would have the opposite effect, as would hiring students from a particular academic background, since unemployment/pay metrics and prestige would drive more students there.
dishonest as in created to hide the discrimination based on sex
Since the clearly stated goal of affirmative action is to hire less of a majority group, it seems more likely that such a policy would be created to prevent imposter syndrome and "my male co-workers think I'm incompetent because of all the diversity hires" syndrome. With such a policy, nobody is a diversity hire.
> I am saying that affirmative action = lowering the bar either directly or indirectly and there is no way around that fact (at least industry wise, you can maybe sustain it locally if you are ok with others skewing their ratio in the other direction).
So it implies lowering the bar unless it doesn't.
Companies can put more effort into finding woman candidates without caring whether the whole industry does so. If some companies bias toward women (without lowering the bar), and some companies don't bias, then the overall effect is that qualified women can get hired instantly, and more of them might be encouraged to enter the industry.
If the numbers are true and the gender distribution in STEM graduates is 80/20, and you are intent on increasing your number of female employees, you have two choices. You either lower the bar on the 20% or you raise the bar on the 80%.
This seems to be the common argument against diversity programs, but it strikes me as statistically true only if we assume a very even distribution between STEM graduates and prospective employers. Given tech's reputation as being relatively hostile to women, a company could theoretically find ways to advertise to prospective women employees that their internal culture was more welcoming of them -- that, in fact, they wouldn't be subject to the sexism that the female engineers in the linked article all said that they routinely face. This doesn't require the company to have different hiring standards between genders, or to pay women more. It does require them to change their recruiting practices in ways that acknowledge they may have to make specific outreach to women and other underrepresented minorities, but that doesn't strike me as having to be inherently discriminatory.
"Note: I find it interesting/disturbing/sad/telling that I've been sitting here for a long time contemplating if I should even submit this message since I use my real name here. The fact that we, as a society, have come to a point where we are afraid to even have this discussion really makes me sad. I respect every one of my colleagues deeply, male and female alike. The idea that someone could twist my words and paint me as a misogynist is beyond troubling."
The difficulty is that "this discussion" can be - and usually is - conducted in a way that is harmful to women, either on a broad scale (specious arguments / failure to understand systemic bias) or an individual scale (wrecking someone's day / making a formerly welcoming environment feel hostile).
Those real consequences are on the line every time someone hits "Post" in this sort of discussion, and are a really good reason for any thoughtful person to pause and contemplate before doing so... perhaps do some additional self-education, or take the time to pose genuinely explorative-questions rather than rhetorical-questions or flat-out conclusions. If more people did that, I think you'd eventually see a lot less fiery refutation and much better discourse.
"If the numbers are true and the gender distribution in STEM graduates is 80/20, and you are intent on increasing your number of female employees, you have two choices. You either lower the bar on the 20% or you raise the bar on the 80%. In the end, the net effect is the same. The employees from the 20% group had a granted advantage against the 80% group."
This logic assumes that the 80% and 20% are functionally equivalent? (Which can be so if there's, eg, no systemic bias, but seems rather less likely when such is present.)
Another option would be to realize the the 20% already had to overcome substantial hurdles to get where they are, and to factor that into your decision-making.
I wrote some shitty code based on the official data of cs graduates in 2015-2014, every candidate was assigned a random competence score based on a Gaussian distribution with a mean of 100.
these are the results:
"there are 48840 males, we will pick only 25000(51.187551187551186%)"
"we will pick all females to represent the company reaching out to them"
"let's say the company is going to hire 5000"
"hiring based on competence and taking females when equal"
"results:"
"male: number: 3505 percentage: 70.1% average score: 123.81256204767604"
"female: number: 1495 percentage: 29.9% average score: 123.75346343448992"
"if we force the 50% ratio"
"the average male score: 126.26036797470225"
"the average female score: 119.60577230318559"
so forcing a 50% ratio does indeed lower the bar. data for
males and females were generated using the same function so arguments about biological factors are not even needed.
Silly. Those 20% are currently shelved in low-end dead-end jobs. If your company were to offer a friendly environment for them, they would flock to you. You'd have your pick of top-flight people.
Its so easy to make up crap about how its impossible to fix the issue without (made-up strawman). How about turning our intelligence toward useful comments? E.g. you could look harder for truly qualified candidates from among the 20%?
Note: I find it interesting/disturbing/sad/telling that I've been sitting here for a long time contemplating if I should even submit this message since I use my real name here.
Thank you. I have been noticing this for the past year, both here and in almost all other online forums. And it's not just the ability to troll or make a comment that you know might push a few buttons.
It's questioning whether it's even safe to post a logical argument against any of the narratives deemed sacred these days by the left.
The fact that the worst offenders in this new witch hunt are the same ones who have massive amounts of data on all of us is terrifying.
So what did they do instead to increase diversity? Do they pay disproportionately more to certain groups? Or do they have some other way to attract more 'diverse' candidates to achieve their quotas?
Yeah, this is why bar-lowering policies are bad. If that's not what Google is doing, then Google should explain their approach to employees so said employee doesn't need to question his or her qualification unduly.
Daisy/Quake - she was great as a hacker, and I'm so sad about that electricity guy who died, but wow, someone who can fly and break bones or collapse buildings, that is not just a brawler, that is objectively more awesome than being a hacker and I'd trade my scripter job for being able to fly in a heartbeat.
The burden of responding to something that is (at the very least presented as) evidence? I don't think it's possible to have a discussion if you don't expect and allow pro-affirmative-action stakeholders to respond with their own evidence and reasoning, in turn.
It's not just "pro-affirmative-action stakeholders" that are expected to respond. _As referenced in the article_, it's extending to expecting women to come up with responses just because they are women. You're talking about a situation where one side (the side of the manifesto) has dropped an "evidence bomb", some of which may be valid, some not, and is now complaining "why won't you have a discussion?" They weren't invited to a discussion, they weren't talked _to_, they were talked _at_, and are now being looked to as the defenders of their gender when they just want to do their damn job.
This is exactly it. Women in spaces (virtual, in-person, in their workplaces) are being forced into this conversation to defend ourselves, because this "bomb" was dropped/leaked, outside of all relevant context, and now hype and focusing illusions have made it our job to make evolutionary psych-based arguments against it. I don't know what Damore's intent was, but the effect was to put people who disagreed with him, and especially women who disagreed with him, at an immediate disadvantage, rather than to reach out to them for the sake of a conversation.
It seems like the disadvantage fell squarely on Damore's shoulders here, considering he was the one who was actually fired.
It's definitely horrible for people to feel like they don't belong. But I would argue that feeling like your job is at risk is a lesser threat than actually losing your job, no?
this is textbook tone policing. it's an essay, not a spoken dialogue. you could say this about, say, a published study about climate change projections.
You can throw buzzwords designed to shut down discussion at me all you want, that's irrelevant. He claims his goal was to have a dialogue, the fact is that he chose a very poor way of doing that. Either his goals aren't what he claims or he misunderstood how to accomplish them.
Considering this is one of the most explosively discussed topics on HN and in the industry I would say he's been wildly successful at starting a discussion.
I can start a discussion about racism in the US by going on TV and yelling the n-word, that doesn't mean that I did a good job of opening a constructive dialogue.
He could have brought up his concerns to hiring authorities in the company, whose job it is to refute diversity myths. Not expect people who have had this burden placed on them for their entire adult life to do it yet again.
The result from HR was silence. He never intended for the memo to go public, but he did want feedback from his colleagues. If HR didn't want the issue going further, they should have actually responded to him.
But he saw a problem and wanted to fix it. You're basically saying he should have left the problem where it is and pretend itsr not there, which is not what engineers typically do. Can you blame him for that?
Not just engineers...That kind of mentality does not advance society.
Imagine..."She thought black people should not have to sit at the back of the bus. She told authorities who just remained silent. She should have sucked it up and moved to the north!"
You (along with many others) seem to be conflating the major point of the memo between interests and abilities. Not liking something does not mean you're not capable of doing it.
Would you rather hire someone that likes what they do or someone who doesn't?
Would you intuitively think that someone who loves their job are going to be more interested in bigger challenges and doing great work, or someone who doesn't care for the job?
I optimize for productivity first, that doesn't always equate to someone who likes their job.
Regardless, I'm not sure how that's related to my comment - the memo was discussing relative interests in software engineering (and other disciplines), not capabilities of people being able to do code better than others.
By perpetuating the stereotype that "women are less interested in engineering" and suggesting that your chances of getting a good female candidate are lower, Damore is introducing an unconscious bias against women. After all, "it's likely that she doesn't really like this", "she probably went into engineering because her parents pushed her", "maybe she's great now, but she'll lose interest once anxiety kicks in."
Next time your engineers are scheduled to interview someone and they see a female name on the resume, they'll form an opinion (even if slight, and even if overridable by interacting with the person) about who the candidate is. Depending on how tired/stressed/bored they are that day, that opinion will play a smaller or bigger role in what they write down in the candidate report.
That bias, by the way, exists today. Trying to justify it on the base of biological differences does nothing to fix it.
>By perpetuating the stereotype that "women are less interested in engineering" and suggesting that your chances of getting a good female candidate are lower, Damore is introducing an unconscious bias against women. After all, "it's likely that she doesn't really like this", "she probably went into engineering because her parents pushed her", "maybe she's great now, but she'll lose interest once anxiety kicks in."
A ("women in general are less interested") does not imply B ("woman job candidates are less interested"). A would only imply B if there were equal numbers of man and woman engineers. But there are fewer. It's entirely possible for "women are less interested in engineering than men" and "women that go into engineering are far more interested than men that go into engineering" to both be true.
So that hiring bias is based on non-logic in the first place. Considering the possibility of A does not legitimize B.
> That bias, by the way, exists today. Trying to justify it on the base of biological differences does nothing to fix
You presupposed that the bias is why the disparity exists in the first place. Its plausible that we completely fix all biases in the industry and the gender ratio does not change whatsoever, or even gets worse.
Well, really, the bias is the problem, not the disparity. So if we fix the bias, sexual harassment, and sexist behavior, that is a good outcome in and of itself, regardless of the gender ratio.
> You presupposed that the bias is why the disparity exists in the first place
What in my comment tells you that? I made a conscious effort not to bring that up.
> Its plausible that we completely fix all biases in the industry and the gender ratio does not change whatsoever, or even gets worse.
This argument sounds like the global warming denier argument "What if it's not true? What if we make the world a better place to live for nothing?"
It is plausible, but right now we have no way to measure it. We do, on the other hand, know that unconscious bias is affecting prospective female candidates. Why don't we focus on fixing the existing problem first?
The problem with this view is that you assert such unconscious biases exist, but provide no evidence. Moreover it's a classic "she's a witch" kind of accusation. Nobody can refute it because the entire theory is that everyone (or every man) is guilty without even realising it.
You should know that unconscious bias training has been shown to make no difference to outcomes. The science is dubious. Of course, you can always try to fix the theory by claiming the impact is minimal but ... if the impact is so tiny, why worry about it?
Diversity initiatives have long since left the realm of debatable science and fact and turned into a new religion. Science is replaced by faith. I don't think I'm biased, I can't perceive any bias in myself, but I KNOW it's true. I must believe.
> You (along with many others) seem to be conflating the major point of the memo between interests and abilities
Sorry, this is wrong.
Direct quote (emphasis added): "I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes"
On what basis do you think that preferences and abilities are two mutually exclusive traits?
We know interest is influenced heavily by environment. We also know that ability is influenced by both interest and environment. Carol Dweck's work is a good source for this type of study.
It also seems intuitive that ability influences interests, although I'm actually not aware of what studies exist in that area.
I don't think you're standing on as solid footing as you think when you're making accusations of others conflating topics.
There's another conflation between skill and ability. Lots of people can do lots of things, some are better because they're more interested (leading to more practice, etc).
Just because interests and abilities influence each other does not mean they are not exclusive. You can do a lot of things that you probably have never even considered before too.
Plus where is the outrage when newspapers title: "A scientist proves that women can do two activities at the same time" and "What makes women better at management"?
Many women believe they're statistically more intelligent than men and less violent, by fate of biology.
The important point here is that Damore triggered a massive threat response in the colleagues he characterises as being below "the bar". He explicitly talks about that bar being lowered, which by implication undermines a proportion of employees at Google (and people that are inclined to defend that group).
Furthermore he attacked 'diversity' hires as a whole, but only presented evidence on male/female differences not racial ones... so there's significant precedent for him making points that aren't backed up directly. I don't think he should get the benefit of the doubt there with regards to subtlety of meaning.
>This burden has fallen on women since they were teenagers. To expect them to do it yet again, to have to defend themselves at work this time, is ridiculous.
Why does research regarding this and the burden has to fall on women? If research is solid why does it matter if it was generated by a specific gender.
Why would women need to "defend themselves"? He wasn't attacking them. The entire point of it was, that for whatever reason, women are statistically less likely to be interested in computer science. He never said anything about their ability.
"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."
> This was addressed in the article. This burden has fallen on women since they were teenagers. To expect them to do it yet again, to have to defend themselves at work this time, is ridiculous.
You can't have it both ways. If you don't want to get involved in the argument, you don't have to, but getting involved and then doing any of the things GP is decrying is actively toxic.
Women don't have a choice as to whether we participate. It comes up everywhere. It comes up in our workplaces, and as the minority group in conversation, we have to be there to contradict the people who take it as justification for the (evidence-based) unlevel playing field in tech, sexism etc, and we will be the ones affected if we don't ensure that our colleagues and people we respect don't go therefore shrug and decide that everyone thinks that way.
Nothing in your comment is a reason you have to participate.
> we have to be there to contradict the people who take it as justification for the (evidence-based) unlevel playing field in tech, sexism etc, and we will be the ones affected if we don't ensure that our colleagues and people we respect don't go therefore shrug and decide that everyone thinks that way.
If you are concerned about third parties being swayed if you stay silent, that makes it even more important to not engage in the behavior I am decrying. Doing nothing is unlikely to impact most people's opinions. Appealing to platitudes (or worse, actively misrepresenting your opponent) will be actively counterproductive.
> This burden has fallen on women since they were teenagers. To expect them to do it yet again, to have to defend themselves at work this time, is ridiculous.
See "Self made man" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book), for a real-life experience of living as a man vs as a woman. Her conclusion at the end was that women have it much, much, easier, and she would much rather live as a woman than as a man.
i.e. maybe work is sexist and makes women prove themselves more than men have to. But that's only one aspect of peoples daily lives.
IIRC at the end of those 18 months Norah Vincent had to check herself into a psychiatric hospital because of the severe depression she developed.
Besides saying that men don't really have it better[1] she also commented[2] "When you mess around with that, you really mess around with something that you need that helps you to function. And I found out that gender lives in your brain and is something much more than costume. And I really learned that the hard way," which is less "women have it much, much easier" and more "women, living as women have it much, much easier".
[1]: gender stereotypes hurt everyone, and in [2] she spoke about how "They don't get to show the weakness, they don't get to show the affection, especially with each other. And so often all their emotions are shown in rage"; but they can't be discounted because of this.
[2]: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Entertainment/story?id=1526982
to have to defend themselves at work this time, is ridiculous.
Let's just agree on two things then.
_Every woman at google has every right to be there.
&
_The number of women at google relative to the number of men is not the result of mostly imperceptible, malicious actions by men, but rather due the fact that the personal interests between the sexes varies substantially on average, and this results in skewed sex ratios throughout the entire workforce that match nearly perfectly with what scientific evidence shows us.
Women are more interested in working with people and nurturing professions and men are more interested in working with things and abstract, theoretical, mechanical and spatial professions.
> Women are more interested in working with people and nurturing professions and men are more interested in working with things and abstract, theoretical, mechanical and spatial professions.
Don't agree with number 2 at all.
Half of all new attorneys are women. There is nothing "nurturing" about the profession--it's adversarial and conflict-oriented by nature. And you spend most of your time dealing with abstractions, not people. More than half of accountants are women. That profession isn't any more people oriented than programming, and you work entirely with abstractions. 70% of tax preparers are women. 60% of insurance underwriters are women. Etc.
Conversely, professions we think of as "people-oriented and nurturing" are dominated by men in other countries. E.g. teachers in India are 80% men.
Doesn't that vary a lot depending on what kind of law you practice?
At least for some kinds, there is a lot of non-adversarial human interaction. For example, in patent litigation you are usually part of a team and spend a lot of time working closely with the other lawyers on your side, paralegals, outside experts, inventors, and other people involved with the patent on your side.
Litigation is explicitly adversarial, and that includes many kinds of law that might seem "softer" at first blush. When you do housing law, you might spend a little time talking to an evicted old lady, but your real work is suing the landlord. Transactional is less overtly adversarial, but while the business guys are thinking about team synergies the lawyers are focusing on how the parties could try to screw each other if expectations don't pan out.
Lawyers work in teams, but programmers work in teams too. Having done both there is a lot more interactivity in programming teams (weekly status meetings, pair programming, dropping in on a neighbor to discuss APIs). (Legal teams are much smaller and cases are much less interconnected than large codebases).
Do men and women go equally into all fields which an attorney can practice in? As in, do corporate attorneys have the same gender ratio as family law attorneys? Do environmental attorneys have the same gender ratio as IP attorneys?
Law could be nurturing. There must be thousands of people that need legal help but can't afford it, or aren't in a position to seek it out even if they need it eg victim of abuse or assault.
In which case the attorney may double as a councillor of sorts.
This dual role is common in lots of jobs though. Maybe defending people is more appealing than maybe mentoring junior devs.
Maybe accounting is due to stability? In western countries you always need an accountant. You could probably make an argument about women not being risk takers.
Your last point is why statistics in developing countries are always brought up. At least one thing is clear, we can change the environment to get more women into STEM.
The 50% number applies to new large firm lawyers, not just "public interest" law. And your examples are unrealistic. Sexual assault victims don't get legal counsel. They might have (minimal) contact with the prosecutor, who is statistically likely to be a man. The accused rapist, meanwhile, might have (again, minimal) contact with a public defender, who is equally likely to be a man or woman. Both of those positions are primarily adversarial. Public defenders don't have time to nurture their clients--they try to get they are facts necessary to argue in court or negotiate a plea.
Can't agree on number 2, because it's a false dichotomy. The gender imbalance cannot be simplified to being because of any one specific cause (like a difference in personal interests). There is a whole cluster of causes, including:
1. Malicious actions by men. This undoubtedly happens, let's not pretend otherwise. However, it might not be very common.
2. Non-malicious but annoying behavior from men directed towards women. This could include unwanted flirtation, accidental condescension, inappropriate jokes, etc.
3. A male-oriented culture. Even if the guys don't act in an annoying way, being in a significant minority is usually less appealing than being in a situation where you have a more even gender split.
4. Boys and girls are nurtured in different ways, which can drive them towards having different interests as adults.
5. Biological differences between men and women. Personally, I think this is one of the least important factors, and it's also the only one that we can't change.
Whether or not (5) is an issue, (1-4) can and should be addressed, so that women who are naturally inclined to CS are not nudged away from the industry by their life experiences.
This is a great point, and it highlights something about these types of conversations that is so strange to me. So many parts of the gender/workplace conversation are quite sophisticated. But when it comes to explaining why certain industries ended up with gender imbalances, people are content to assume a monocausal theory of career "preference" on the part of women. As if that "preference" isn't shaped by problematic environmental pressures.
This is so wrong and so frequently asserted that I think a better approach to any gender/workplace convo would be to start here, recognizing the falsity of the monocausal career preference hypothesis and work backward from that toward the rest of the conversation.
I'm having trouble following the logic here. There are different gender ratios in various career fields, therefore (!?) attribute all imbalances in all cases exclusively to womens preferences and ignore any other casual inputs.
It would make more sense to say that different careers are affected by different dynamics that need to be analyzed on their own terms, with the environmental constraints that affect "preferences" being different in each case.
Super interesting. I'd love to see people in this thread comment on this. It is a little odd how "diversity in tech" is so over represented in the public debate when there are clearly many other jobs that are even more heavily skewed and in both directions, i.e., plenty of jobs with >80% men AND plenty of jobs with >80% women.
I don't think "diversity in tech" is actually overrepresented in the public, although the current affair has temporarily made it more prominent. But if you are in tech, you are more likely to hear about debates that involve tech. Diversity in tech, JavaScript fatigue, the Rust Evangelism Strike Force, whatever. Just because it's popular on HN doesn't mean it's popular everywhere.
I was about to write a reply saying whilst that might be true I'd never heard of big well funded initiatives to get women into firefighting, but then I decided to double check on Google and found this:
If you’re ever trapped in a burning building, just pray the firefighter climbing up to rescue you isn’t Rebecca Wax. Or someone like her, who’s been given an EZ-Pass through firefighting training for the sake of gender equity.
This week Wax, who repeatedly flunked the rigorous physical test required by the New York City Fire Department, will graduate anyway, The Post reported.
All over the nation, fire departments are easing physical standards, in response to litigation to increase the number of women firefighters.
2. totally true and I'll go on the limb to say that part of it probably because of men biological differences which force men to be eager to reproduce at all times
3. yes, but you already addressed malicious and non-malicious annoyances so this has to be "annoyances" where men treat women as other men. If men treating women as other men is a problem then this is proof that we are not the same and need different approach. (I am open to be completely wrong about it, please educate me if you think this is wrong or I misunderstood something)
This. Attempting to reduce such a complex issue into a single root cause ("oh women simply aren't interested in this field") is deeply misguided, not to mention intellectually lazy.
> [W]hen I go to work, I go to work, and not to a debate club. Some people at Google reacted by saying “well if he’s so wrong, then why not refute him,” but that requires spending a significant amount of time building an argument against the claims in his document. On the other hand, if I remain silent, that silence could be mistaken for agreement. I should not be forced into that kind of debate at work. (Ida)
> I’m just exhausted by having this same damn argument over and over again since I was a teenager and the amount of time and energy I keep having to spend to counter it. (Edith)
Also, none of the "quoted phrases" that you criticized appear in TFA or in any parent comment.
It seems like you're holding a significant double standard here, which is exactly why Damore feels his views are systemically quashed.
For example, that line of reasoning would go: Damore saw practices he feels are discriminatory based on the available evidence. His silence could be mistaken for agreement. He should not be forced into that kind of debate at work.
Ideally, the one whose views are the least congruent with reality in a harmful way should feel more pressure and less freedom to express their opinion (because people won't be interested in hearing nonsense).
Finding the approaches and views that are most coherently grounded in reality is obviously a continuously difficult task.
We shouldn't treat people poorly just for being wrong, unless their expressions of views is actively harmful. Making that determination can also be very difficult.
Lastly, as a slight tangent, no human knowledge is or ever will be 100% certain and robust (although in some specific domains we can attain incredibly high confidence). We should keep this uncertainty in mind when we act.
This would be a reasonable take to me if the issue he took up could reasonably be described as significantly affecting his everyday work life; the key difference I see in your "double standard" is that the woman can't walk away from being a woman in a male dominated profession.
> [W]hen I go to work, I go to work, and not to a debate club.
Sure. But people on the wrong side of the Google monoculture feel like they have to be closeted at work. They don't want to feel that way either. There has to be a way for everyone to be professional and honest here.
> Sure. But people on the wrong side of the Google monoculture feel like they have to be closeted at work. They don't want to feel that way either
Everyone has to be closed at work; it's a part of being in a professional environment. For example, you can't go up to your co-worker and tell them you think they're a complete idiot even if you think so.
In social settings this is possible because relationships can just end, but that's not the case for a business where you are expected to interact with the same people often.
> For example, you can't go up to your co-worker and tell them you think they're a complete idiot even if you think so.
Sure you can - if you are supported Trump, or were even just he prevailed over Hillary, thousands of people in Google either called you an idiot or agreed with the statement. You should have heard the tone of conversation on the 9th. Between that and the cry-ins that were hosted, it was an absolutely disgusting, pathetic display of personal bias and lack of understanding of a large swath of America.
>There has to be a way for everyone to be professional and honest here.
I agree, but just because there has to be a way for everyone to be professional and honest, that doesn't mean that what Damore did was professional and honest.
I'm not prepared to fault him because I don't see how he could have been both professional and honest in discussing this issue. I think workplace norms need to evolve in one direction or another.
I'm not sure anyone can come up with a better way to discuss the issue. I'm open to ideas if you have any.
I've asked this around HN many times over the last week. Most of them boil down to letting people who probably disagree with you edit your thoughts before you release them. Or not releasing your thoughts in any meaningful way.
If you were Damore, what would have been a healthier way to start a broader discussion on the issue?
The "diversity culture" Left has been very succesful in a kind of cultural engineering where any deviation from accepted consensus is inches from being labeled "hate". Lone wolf kamikaze-type performances will only strengthen it.
What the fucking alt-right has been doing about this is trying to ignore the facts altogether, which may have populist impact but will alienate the professional/intellectual circles where this consensus takes root.
Maybe it's worth looking at the much-cited-in-this-thread Wired piece that agrees with Damore about everything substantive and then in full non sequitur condemns him.They're doing something effective.
----
Frankly, I have no idea of what to do about the toxic change in culture we have been experiencing. I try to avoid this kind of thining altogether -- it's a huge distraction from just trying to become the best version of me, etc. But I do understand that indignation and anger on our side is a windfall for theirs. If you're really willing to take them on you need to think seriously about strategy.
Good. People who think we don't need diversity efforts or that think studies of aggregates should be applied to determine efforts for smaller specialized populations or individuals should keep it to themselves. I wouldn't want a racist to feel comfortable quoting Bell Curve "research" or criminal population composition numbers at work,for many of the same reasons.
So you're saying that any research or argument that comes to a conclusion you disagree with should be equated with the research and arguments that Neo-Nazis use? How progressive, open-minded, and forward thinking.
That this is a widely held viewpoint on these things ought to be more disturbing than the memo.
Am I correct in understanding that you think he's a conservative who is lying about supporting diversity? What led you to this conclusion? It seems odd to me to believe a conservative who doesn't support diversity would write a memo that ascribes negative consequences to right wing viewpoints and provides suggestions for improving diversity.
I sympathise with the woman saying she'd much rather just focus on code rather than social justice debates. But, as flippant as it is for a guy to say it, it's their cross to bear isnt it? Women in tech. Because, if they don't speak up, then what? Where does that leave us? Should the "other side" also not speak up? Just focus on code? Should they suppress real emotions that they're feeling?
I'm not flaming, just wondering what the best-case way forward would be that mollifies both sides.
This seems roughly cognate to "There are people who want to do their jobs, and there are people who want to poke the people in Group A with sticks. Should an employer constrain Group B from poking the people in Group A altogether just because Group A doesn't want to participate?" I think most people would easily answer, "Yes, we should prevent people from going around poking unwilling coworkers with sticks, and they should also be prevented from getting around the rule by throwing sticks around and just 'happening' to hit those coworkers, because it's not useful to have people doing that in your workplace and it disrupts Group A." I don't think anybody would really say, "Getting poked with sticks is just Group A's cross to bear."
Fair points, and as I said, even I tend to fall in the camp of "work is for work" a lot of the times. On the other hand, to play devil's advocate, I think you're being uncharitable by comparing them to "stick pokers" as if they've nothing better to do. I tend to believe that the topic is important enough that, "just let me do my work" isn't an adequate answer, and trivialises the concerns of a sizeable swathe of even Google employees.
Except that people are just discussing ideas in a rational way, at least aspirationally. There aren't any physical sticks.
This is complex because people desire for fairness and respect in incompatible ways. If we analogize away one of those problems, of course the right decision seems obvious.
EDIT: I think the incompatibility is a result of some rules and norms that need changing. I don't think the conflict is a law of nature.
I don't care if the women I work with don't speak up. If I see sexism I will (and in fact have on more than one occasion) call it out. I use discussions with my wife and with women I've worked with in the past regarding how sexism in the workplace works to help me identify it in cases where it may be ambiguous or even something I'd never considered to be sexist.
It does help identify those cases when women do speak out, though. My view is we should listen more to them about what sexism is and how it works.
I actually know people who are still working on refutational evidence bombs like that. The problem is that actually finding sources and addressing his points in all their "but I really meant" vagueness is a huge piece of work, and people have day jobs. In the meantime, his shit is out there. If it's ok for anyone to read and agree with it without going through to confirm his "facts" and "citations" on the spot, then it's equally ok to read and disagree with it.
Exactly. One of the biggest wastes of time I incurred last week was trying to argue with someone here who wouldn't specify what the memo said, but would deny anything I said about it with "but he never said that!" It went on for days.
Workplaces are not free speech zones. Employers have a legitimate interest in maintaining internal harmony and making people feel comfortable. There are lots of things that you should be able to say in general that have no place in the office. E.g. you should be able to maintain a blog detailing your sexual escapades, but emailing those descriptions to all your coworkers is quite reasonably grounds for termination.
This would be good. I've seen 0 criticism of it that falls into this category so far. For the most part, it's essentially just been "I don't like the conclusion so I'm going to call you a sexist and make a straw man of your argument while ignoring the details."
I'm not sure I agree. I don't think we read the same memo. Additionally, while this isn't entirely rational, it's hard to take anything seriously that gets started with trying to tie it to a "covert alt-right agenda". Someone who starts off with a variant of the "you're a Nazi" argument does not come across as someone without significant ideological biases.
I think Sadedin does a great job with the biology, and is a little weaker on the morality. The one point where he really goes wrong is here:
>paradoxically insists that authoritarianism be treated as a valid moral dimension, whilst firmly rejecting any diversity-motivated strategy that might remotely approach it.
Even if we admit this is wrong he still does a good job, particularly on points #1, #3, #4, and yes, #8. I think it's important to call out the subtle racism whereby Damore attacks gender and racial diversity programs without actually providing any justification on the racial element. But I think this point (#9) is clearly wrong because if we accept it on its face it means that we cannot tolerate discussing any system of morality (in this case authoritarianism) which we do not want to see implemented, which is clearly wrong. I also cannot agree here:
>But in general, Google has done magnificently well without resorting to the binding [conservative] values — and let’s hope it continues to, because an authoritarian, fanatical and puritanical Google that dehumanizes outsiders would be very, very bad news.
First of all I don't think Google has ever truly avoided the binding values -- in fact the identity "Googler" has been more intentionally constructed, I think, than "Microsofter", "Facebooker", "Appler", etc -- and second I don't think that implementing them is necessarily "fanatical and puritanical", any more than implementing compassion is necessarily inviting to louts.
I take issue with at least Slate Star Codex's 08/07 post because it focuses on interest like some black box and pre-college education as perfectly non-gendered. There is a lot of research (see below) that shows that pre-college education is very gendered.
> I did not get any aggressive tone from his paper. I thought he was as polite as he needed to be and made the necessary caveats.
I agree with this too. There were issues of perception since the Gizmodo version had no sources, links or charts. Later leaked version had the charts and a full version was put up on diversitymemo.com (which no redirects to Damore's official website).
So a lot of people didn't get the full version, even if they read the whole thing. Overall I thought we was pretty tactful and did his best to express what he knew would be an unpopular viewpoint.
> Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking ...
Well from a strategic perspective, that's a losing attitude though. You start in a defensive position in a debate you didn't call. You are stuck in the specific frame the author has decided to limit his own argument. He also restrict the time you have to prepare such a refutal piece as every minute he spend with his argument unchallenged, the weaker the counterarguments look.
Sure the average Google employee is more fact minded than emotionally driven, but it is a loaded subject in general but even more in IT.
What's the best possible outcome of crafting such a reply anyway ? Shutting down one single guy because nobody will engage in a friendly debate after live shots have been fired.
You're under no compulsion to refute the author or to engage them in a debate, except that you've taken issue with their statement of their position and you've chosen to attack it.
Do you feel that viewpoints that you disagree with should not be allowed to be stated publicly and remain unopposed?
>Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem).
The brute problem is that it's too long to be addressed in a reasonable and productive debate, and because it was posted on an internal company messageboard it is his responsibility to ensure that it can be responded to in a reasonable and productive way. If he presents his complaints in a format which is likely to cause problems, he can be penalized, and a manifesto is certainly such a format because it lends itself so well to "viral" sharing, and it was precisely such "viral" reposting of the document that made it a practical problem for Google in the first place. Had he made his points in an ordinary discussion thread, it would have been harder to publish it everywhere as a unified whole, since discussion threads by their nature will contain counterarguments.
For example, if I think another employee is biased against me in code reviews, it does not do me any favors to write a multi-page manifesto indicting said employee on a variety of points for his/her alleged biased review practices. Good debates do not generally come from duelling essays, and it is unfair to participants -- practically unfair, in that it drives them from the debate and so deprives the conversation of their contributions -- it is unfair to participants who do not have the time to invest in researching every point of a ten-page document that they feel they must address the whole awful thing in order to say anything. In fact I try to limit the length of my HN comments for this very reason: long comments are hard to respond to well.
Internal company messageboards do not lend themselves to the publication of manifestos, and it is not reasonable to expect them to.
That's not the way to do it. The right way to do it is to pick one statement (the weakest one) from his argument and refute that one solidly. Then repeat the process with the next weakest, the second next weakest and so on. You only have to do that about four or five times before you have established that the author is full of shit.
That's the standard method you use for refuting arguments presented in essay form.
I seriously question whether that was a minority viewpoint expressed in the memo. I went to school with loads of people like that. I think the reason such viewpoints get blowback is because they basically argue for the status quo when the system is not serving large swaths of the population.
It's very difficult to convince people who aren't interested in being convinced. There are too many people out there with a different, maybe wrong, opinion.
Why waste your time with those who don't seem genuinely interested in opposing evidence?
I didn't find his tone aggressive but he didn't at all seem interested in having a discussion. If I remember correctly he didn't rebuke any opposing points, let alone present them, which makes me think he didn't bother looking for them.
It's like hey I have this point I want you to listen to but I'm not even going to make an attempt to look up answers and instead force you to listen to me before I listen to you. It's like trying to answer someone's question without even understanding what they're asking, which I am sad to say I have seen far too often at Google.
You have to remember that this was a rough memo that he never meant to spread as widely as it has been. More like "here's some ideas I've been kicking around and some evidence for them, someone want to take a look and see what I'm missing or mistaken about?"
This was originally just posted to the Google Skeptics group, with the implication that it would be (fairly) contested and debated.
People keep presenting it as a "manifesto" but that's a term that Gizmodo used, not him. I really would like to have seen what would have come from it being fairly critiqued by his peers and edited until it was presentable to the public (if that's even possible).
> I think many people were just so unprepared to hear any argument from an opposing viewpoint that they read into it what they wanted to.
You hit the nail on the head, and it isn't limited to this memo. We have a serious intolerance problem in this country that goes far beyond Nazis and racists. Over the last 25 years our culture has warped to the point where opposing viewpoints are considered by many to be offensive. Kids have been raised in an environment where they are told that they (and their opinions) are always worthy of respect (no matter how uninformed or ignorant those opinions might be). Those who show insufficient respect (in the eyes of the person being "disrespected") are seen as hateful aggressors who must be attacked or silenced. In today's society, many people (especially young people) don't want vigorous debate between those of opposing views. They don't want to live in a marketplace of ideas where logic, morality, and the ability and willingness to articulate and defend your beliefs in a public forum are valued. These younger people have been conditioned to appeal to authority when they are offended or their beliefs are challenged, rather than answer the bell and debate the merit (or lack of merit) in an idea or statement.
Unfortunately this withering of public discourse is a bellwether for authoritarianism. You need look no farther than the recent outcry against the ACLU for their defense of free speech. There are very dark days ahead.
When you spend 12+ formative years telling kids to sit down, be quiet and do nothing but listen to authority or else, they aren't going to somehow come out of it as stellar, well-rounded debaters.
They will, of course, project how they were treated onto others, by holding deeply ingrained beliefs such as, "When someone is being disruptive they need to be punished."
I blame postmodernism. Really. Postmodernism says that all discourse is about power, not truth. People are starting to act consistently with what they've been taught.
Currently reading "Simulacra and Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard. This is a really fascinating book, probably one of the biggest in Post-Modernism.
It is the primary inspiration for the movie "The Matrix". When Neo takes the disk from the hacker at the beginning he actually puts it in a hollowed out version of this book.
Anyway Post-Modernism has lots of fascinating points and sub-topics and skilled writers, however if you read too much into it you can quickly become a very annoying person.
Great stuff, but read in caution and in moderation.
Arguably the most important of the Jedi mind tricks: to install a gatekeeper wherever you know one is needed. Having one watching this hot/cold dial is important I recon. Knowing you can do this and that you have a choice about how you feel while thinking is something that ought to be taught.
I'd argue that it's objectively aggressive. His twitter handle "@fired4truth" makes the intention to be so rather obvious (the content he's promoting on that handle is an entire additional ball of wax)...
A 10-page manifesto, regardless of the content, when circulated internally without management's consent is in itself hard to view as anything but an act of mutiny.
One of the basic contexts of the debate is the question of whether tech workplaces are hostile to women. The tone of the email making claims about women in the workplace is relevant.
I disagree. He mentioned in an interview[1] that he was looking to be proven wrong which is what led him to share it with the Skeptics group at Google, which is when the document propagated. He had actually wrote the document weeks prior but was unsatisfied with the lack of discussion on his document.
That seems an odd approach tbh. Many 'Skeptics' groups (Skeptic / Rationalist YouTube) online at least would agree with his reasoning. It strikes me as odd that he was seeking to take down an ideological echo chamber but published it initially in the echo chamber most likely to agree with him.
His first group he sent it to was a diversity group. I think it reasonable that a skeptic group who, ostensibly, would side with reason would be a next logical step.
Would someone please explain what this means, wouldn't an anti-regressive be a progressive? If so, why not state it that way?
Also, I thought the term "skeptic" had been hijacked by conspiracy wackos. When I think of a classic skeptic, I look to James Randi and the like; critical thinkers who expose quackery. But, for the last 15-20 years, conspiracy theorists have taken the term over (e.g. vaccine/climate/GMO skeptics). I fall into the Randi group of skeptics, but I sure as hell don't describe myself using that word, for fear of being lumped in with the second lot.
Real skeptics tend to be progressive, conspiracy skeptics tend to be regressive.
Based on the spelling, I'll assume emsy is a Brit... maybe things are different over there, but Randi was always more popular in England than in the US. I'm missing something.
I'm German. The skeptics I were talking about and presumably the comment I answered on, were the YouTube skeptics. What I meant with anti-regressive was that these skeptics mostly tackle so-called progressives that use racism and sexism for their arguments or policies.
I've never heard the conspiracy theorists called skeptics, so I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.
> If that's odd, then what is firing just to prove him right?
Google is a company with shareholders and P/L. It's not a thought experiment, a family, a social commons, or a debating society. It exists to make money.
Google took the decision to fire him based on what was likely to create a conducive atmosphere for its workers.
His memo, however construed, made it likely that he could no longer be able to contribute as effectively to some teams.
Google's responsibility to Damore begins and ends at their mutual alignment of economic interests.
> Google took the decision to fire him based on what was likely to create a conducive atmosphere for its workers.
They did the opposite, someone said it's not okay to shame people into silence, and then they did just that.
> made it likely that he could no longer be able to contribute as effectively to some teams.
What does "as effectively" mean? What are "some teams"? If someone sweats a lot, and a million other things, the above would also be technically true. Or hey, if a company fired someone over something like this. That will make a lot of bright people, both male and female, think twice before even giving Google a consideration.
> Google's responsibility to Damore begins and ends at their mutual alignment of economic interests.
It's not about responsibility to him, but about their responsibility for themselves to not shit the bed like they did.
Then Google's calculus is simply different to yours. For what its worth, I don't think Google's response to this is going to have a significant impact on Google's ability to hire talented people, or that white, heterosexual, cisgendered people are going to feel that their opportunities at Google are likely to be curtailed. Females, I would say, or any other minority within Google, are even less likely to.
I think a large number of people in tech simply have a straight-to-the-point style of talking. They don't follow through with the HR-like "we appreciate your thoughts and comments, but going forward, we must politely decline to touch base again" style because the expectation is just to say "you're wrong and here's why." What's inviting to some people is insincere to others. What's straight-faced discussion is rude and problematic to others. It's hard reaching a middle ground, because when you try finding a middle point for a group the size of the whole tech industry about such a divisive topic, at least one person will accuse you of trying to appease (insert enemy political group here) and see it as worse than just taking a side.
It was apparently a live-document (like etherpad) and the intention was get feedback directly in-line if I understood correctly. Not an unusual way of doing things for an engineer.
It's usual for an engineer to understand something outside their field of expertise by submitting a draft of what they know to others who aren't domain experts, either?
Wouldn't an actual engineering process have started by submitting a document for feedback from somebody whose field of expertise deals with unequal gender representation in the workplace?
As someone with a very debate-loving personality, I disagree. Saying how I'm wrong is the best way to start discussion.
Now of course, not everyone will be the same. But for those that like to debate and have discussions, then just tell me why you think I'm wrong and we can go from there. I don't need you to coddle me.
One thing I find problematic about the memo is that it conflate three issues: Google's diversity programs, Google's echo chamber, and the left/right politics.
If you want to talk about diversity programs, the other two appear to be attempts to shut down further discussion. If you want to talk about the problem of living in an echo chamber, diversity is, or ought to be, an example, not the focus. If you want to talk politics at work, don't.
I read the full memo ( https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso...) and it didn't seem like that at all. Saying that discrimination exists but differences in gender representation aren't necessarily caused by discrimination didn't seem like 'you're all wrong', not do the 'suggestions' seem like something someone writing authoritatively would make. Not a female engineer so appreciate I may be missing something - what is it?
The first page or so is not about gender diversity, but about "Left biases" and "Right biases" and the statement that "the media, and Google lean left".
He then follows with "Google's left bias has created a politically correct monoculture".
So the difference is between these two statements:
a. I believe X, and
b. You are all leftists. Leftists believe Y. Y is wrong. The answer is actually X.
Saying Google's culture leans left doesn't mean everyone in Google is a leftist. Nor does acknowledging bias imply that people with that bias is wrong - just biased, Eg looking at a specific part of a larger picture. There's a difference.
Be honest here -- do you _really_ think there's a way to present the argument that --gasp-- men and women might be different in their abilities that _wouldn't_ trigger a meltdown? I think this memo really highlights the fact that there are Some Things You Just Can't Talk About.
No, you can't, because there isn't evidence that biological differences cause people to choose different careers.
Why would put forth a theory that is opposed to a company's values of equality if you don't have proof?
Most evidence points to socialized factors, not biological ones.
If Damore really cares about this issue, he should study biology and make his case there. He will do more to move the debate forward from within the relevant scientific community by gathering evidence than from the outside.
"Most evidence points to socialized factors, not biological ones."
I'm loathe to post in discussions like this because it's so useless, but points like this make me wonder if I'm just living on a different planet. Do you have children? Of different genders? Because literally every parent I know who has both boys and girls has the simple, non-ideologically-biased experience that boys and girls are vastly different, even if you treat them just the same. My youngest is a boy who was surrounded by pink fairy castles and butterfly coloring books until he was 2 or 2,5. And yet the moment he got his hands on a stick, he'd use it as a play weapon.
And from that observation that boys and girls are different, I wouldn't call it a stretch to assume that men and women might not be exactly the same, either. Why is this not blindingly obvious? I mean, how is saying otherwise not the very essence of "post truthiness"?
I have a similar experience with my children. From an extremely early age, my daughter has "tucked in" toys to bed, rocked them to sleep, etc. She was NOT taught to do this, but just did this as play. My sons can't seem to find a toy that cannot be used as a sword or a gun, to my wife's constant annoyance.
Even with the SAME toys, they are used very differently. For example, all of my kids play minecraft. My daughter loves to build houses with kitchens and bathrooms, bake, and invite people into her house for dinners and parties. My sons fight the monsters, build elaborate towers and castles, and play with explosives.
The question is: Who has tucked in your children? You or your wife? Children know which parent has the same sex and they like to play grown up.
Regarding the shooting and the building, are you sure that you have encouraged your daughter the same way as your sons? Have you looked your daughter into the eyes and smiled when she first tried to fight with you?
And even if you were all supportive in that development, it's still not a fair experiment. As long as your children have friends with traditional values and your children watch TV with advertisements that present pink female princesses and male worriers and builders, children are locked down into their roles.
Well this one is easy to answer, because there have been (over the last 6 years) less than say 50 occasions where we didn't put them to bed together; apart from those 50 occasions, my wife travels a few months out of the year, in which periods I put them to bed. So overall, there is no doubt (no matter how subconsciously biased my 'accounting' might be) that I did the majority of the putting to bed. (to bed putting?)
And well of course there's always the no true scottsman argument - no matter what, one can always put the 'true' equal treatment to question. If you're asking whether I ran a double blind experiment in my home, no I didn't. But we're nit talking about a tiny difference in one observation here. We're talking massive differences in dozens of families (from my observations). And this is for a social context where the ratio if dads and mums and the school gate is roughly 50% (yes I count sometimes), and where the lowest level of education is a bachelor's degree and the median is a PhD. Meaning, we're not talking about representative sample of the population, which you would expect to show the same properties as the population overall; we're talking about a population here that shows high levels of gender equally along many metrics. And despite that, the children show (very) unequal behaviour.
"Equal treatment" is not enough to remove socialization factors.
Kids learn from what their parents do. If a boy's dad is a truck driver, he may prefer playing with trucks, even if given a choice of truck vs. doll. The boy could similarly pick up non-verbal gestures from the dad or mom handling a doll vs. a truck.
Research is often inconclusive or difficult to replicate for these reasons.
Putting forth a theory that gender, on its own, impacts career choices is pretty useless. It probably does, but not in a way that we can adequately quantify. It depends on too many things.
"Putting forth a theory that gender, on its own, impacts career choices is pretty useless. It probably does, but not in a way that we can adequately quantify. It depends on too many things."
head explodes
So you're saying it probably exists, but then conclude it doesn't because it can't be quantified how much? I'm not even saying biological differences explain everything, or even a substantial part; just some part, but you deny that any aspect of difference between preferences in men and women is due to biology? I mean I cannot interpret what you're saying in any other way no matter how hard I try - you're saying that if we can't measure something exactly, it doesn't exist?
> you deny that any aspect of difference between preferences in men and women is due to biology?
head explodes
I don't know how you can read what I wrote and come away with that interpretation. I said it probably does.
I said links between biology and occupation are extremely difficult to measure and there isn't research that does so. This is why a lot of research focuses on babies.
The question has been answered. The dimorphism in gender preferences has been demonstrated (a decade ago) in a very similar fashion in primates who are really not inculcated with "traditional values" or "cultural role models":
I don't think that the study directly answers the question. Choosing role models is different from choosing toys.
If anything, the study suggests that women are equally capable of becoming engineers:
>Unlike male monkeys and like girls, female monkeys did not show any reliable preference for either toy type.
If you follow the pattern of the study, then men would reject 'female' jobs but women are interested in both 'male' and 'female' options. Women not only tuck in toys but also like playing with guns.
However, according to that article, male monkeys like to play more. You could argue that IT is all play and thus it's a better environment for men.
Do you teach your children everything, or send them to school / daycare?
> And from that observation that boys and girls are different, I wouldn't call it a stretch to assume that men and women might not be exactly the same, either
It is a giant leap in logic to conclude that a slight difference in average personality must undermine women's professional abilities in software engineering.
There is no scientific consensus that toy preferences are linked to prenatal testosterone or career choice. Those who say they are linked, such as Damore, are pushing scientism– using undercooked research to back up the status quo.
For me personally, my children went to daycare since they were 3 months old, but for people I know who stayed at home until the children were 2.5 or 3, it's the same. So from observation, I don't find your argument convincing.
I mean, let's be clear here - are you saying that if boys and girls would be kept in isolation, well at least not exposed to the outside world which would fill them with tradtional gender role behaviours, until they are say 3 years old, you're claiming that boys and girls would end up both playing with dolls and playing dressup, and play fight with sticks and climb trees, in equal amounts? Or at least that the ratio of boys/girls having a preference for one thing or another would be the same? Because to me that sound just as preposterous as denying climate change, and it requires a similar level of fact distortion to believe.
As to the second point, I'm not going to argue here what this google guy did or did nit say, I didn't read the thing and frankly I don't care much either. But if one would assume (humour me here) that men and women and not the same (as in, have different preferences - not morally or so), how would that not logically lead to some professions being more preferred by one gender? It would be an extraordinary claim that despite differences, the outcome would be that every profession had people to a ratio matching society in general, along many axises - gender, skin color, etc.
I realize that it's easy to spin my argument as saying that some people are good managers and others can run very fast and that's just the natural order of thing, but that's not what I'm saying at all, so let's all spare ourselves the effort of going there.
And then finally, if some people with certain traits prefer one thing over another, is it then not perfectly obvious and even inevitable that there will be more people of that group doing that thing, and just as inevitable that that does not mean that those who are not like that, aren't automatically unqualified? If you combine two normal distributions, with different modes, isn't the outcome then a mathematical certainty? Including an explanation for the statistically expected properties of each individual?
I'm not saying anything here about software engineering, just trying to establish a baseline to understand your argument. Because you seem to be saying that there can be no differences ever, which is so obviously non-intuitive and irrational that I can't believe this would actually be your standpoint.
> you seem to be saying that there can be no differences ever, which is so obviously non-intuitive and irrational that I can't believe this would actually be your standpoint
Where did I say that?
The notion that either biology or environment determines everything is outdated, according to one environmental biologist [1]. She says modern research is based on the view that "neurological traits develop over time under the simultaneous influence of epigenetic, genetic and environmental influences. Everything about humans involves both nature and nurture"
That said, it's a huge leap to assume that sex differences can determine whether or not someone is likely to be a good software engineer. You said you didn't read it. Well, Damore wrote this,
"I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."
"This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."
He goes on to claim that there is a scientific consensus showing this, however, it's easy to see from his sources that there is no scientific basis for that claim.
"There is no scientific consensus that toy preferences are linked to prenatal testosterone or career choice"
This is weasel wording for "there are no difference". But just in case, let me ask flat out - do you think there are any differences between men and women in what sort of activities and/or behaviour they prefer to do, take part in or be around? If so, would it not be reasonable to assume that this would result in different preferences in job choice?
"Everything about humans involves both nature and nurture"
Well yeah that was obvious I thought, but at least we agree on this. So then, if preferences and behaviour are at least partially explained by biology, does it then not follow that men and women would have different preferences? Otherwise, to reach parity, the 'nurture' part should cancel out the nature part.
Again, I'm not going to be lured into saying something specific about software, but wouldn't it follow naturally from what you said (which is the uncontested scientific consensus) that women would, in the aggregate, prefer some other professions than men do, in the aggregate? Furthermore, even if you for some reason say no, do you find it offensive when people say so? Or do you feel that how people answer reflects on them as a person? Because to me, it's like liking hot dogs or not - something that does absolutely nothing to the way I think about someone. Whereas I get the impression that simple, factual things like this is really an identity thing for some - which I just cannot wrap my head around.
>> "There is no scientific consensus that toy preferences are linked to prenatal testosterone or career choice"
> This is weasel wording for "there are no difference".
Demanding research back up your claims is weasel wording? Okay..
> do you think there are any differences between men and women in what sort of activities and/or behaviour they prefer to do, take part in or be around?
Yup.
> If so, would it not be reasonable to assume that this would result in different preferences in job choice?
Yes, but not to the extent the differences affect gender capability overall in roles like tech or leadership, which is what Damore was talking about. That's far from the scientific consensus.
> does it then not follow that men and women would have different preferences?
Biology can play a role in forming different choices of two men. It does not follow that all men would be more suited, on average, than women for roles in tech or leadership.
> I'm not going to be lured into saying something specific about software
Not sure why you feel lured into saying something specific about tech or leadership. If you don't think there are differences there between men and women on average, then we agree.
> wouldn't it follow naturally from what you said (which is the uncontested scientific consensus) that women would, in the aggregate, prefer some other professions than men do, in the aggregate?
Perhaps, but research has yet to show it. I wouldn't assume this is true for things like tech or leadership.
> do you find it offensive when people say so?
No, however it is misleading to say there is scientific consensus about something when there isn't. If I had this kind of discussion with Damore in person, like some at Google did, and he persisted in believing that science says something it didn't, then I would believe he has some ulterior agenda. That politics was a primary agenda of his paper says something. Politics shouldn't be the basis for scientific discussion, in my opinion.
> Or do you feel that how people answer reflects on them as a person?
Everything does. Not much you can do about that is there.
> I get the impression that simple, factual things like this is really an identity thing for some - which I just cannot wrap my head around
I don't know how science is an identity. It can be discussed on its evidence, methods and conclusions. Identity doesn't need to play into it. Science can definitely be misconstrued. But I would say today's top peer-reviewed journals are all of high quality, and if you find a scientist who's published in that sphere, they can give a better overview of this subject than Damore did.
But it would likely cover topics which would suggest differences in gender. This entire debate is absurd. The link between gender and behavior is beyond plausible. Something as simple as psychological effects of being physically smaller than another gender could affect behavior; there are hormonal differences, and we know that decision making is influenced by hormone response. If physical differences between men and women are so obvious, why can't people accept the possibility of sexually dimorphism in psychology? How can one claim to be rational or objective while denying such a possibility?
> why can't people accept the possibility of sexually dimorphism in psychology? How can one claim to be rational or objective while denying such a possibility?
I don't see people denying the possibility that biology plays a role. I see people saying it hasn't been determined to play a role in determining which sex is better or more likely to choose complex modern professions such as software engineering. Damore makes it sound as if this has already been demonstrated by science:
"I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."
"This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."
The latter is a conclusory statement. Meanwhile, he continues to claim that his essay is fully backed by research. He denies that anyone has made a proper rebuttal, despite many scientists directly refuting his claims, including one he cited.
But there is nothing to rebut for a scientist without an agenda. Look around you; the plan of egalitarianism transitioned from experiment to propaganda decades ago. We do have scientific evidence of predictable gender differences in ability, the issue is that people like you are SO DESPERATE to deny these cracks in equality theory that such research into gender or racial differences has become taboo. Which means the scientific establishment has been biased and subjective in handling this topic.
Want more proof of bias? The google letter writer was attacked for his writing style and choice of discussion venue, not the contents of the letter. His subject was taboo and so people are still adamant about not discussing it, because in their mindminds, the science is settled. Thats the propaganda talking.
We can give people equal treatment before the law, but we need to recognize that differences in hiring ratios for not have to be indicitave of race or gender bias. It is possible for the numbers to be an emergent effect of group differences.
> But there is nothing to rebut for a scientist without an agenda
Science is the right place to have this discussion, not politics. Scientists have theories, not agendas. True scientists are not ideologues.
> The google letter writer was attacked for his writing style and choice of discussion venue, not the contents of the letter
People have pointed to flaws within both his conclusions and his writing style. His defendants first claimed that media is mischaracterizing what he said; they said they do not understand why people are upset. Then, when someone starts citing his words, Damorians complain they're cherry picking, being nitpicky, or being a grammar nazi.
The way one writes a scientific argument is important. Peer reviewed research goes through many drafts before it's even presented to the public. Thereafter, it can still be the subject of much scrutiny. One cannot simultaneously claim that Damore's paper is both,
(1) Representative of a scientific consensus, and
(2) Undeserving of critique for his writing style simply because he didn't intend for it to be released
> people are still adamant about not discussing it
I find this comment ridiculous as we're discussing it right now, and this has been national news for weeks with hundreds of articles written on the subject, commentary from scientists, etc. If you mean "not discussing in in the right way", then I don't know what to tell you. You don't get to decide how someone else makes their arguments. "Why don't you see it my way?" is not a useful debate strategy.
> We can give people equal treatment before the law, but we need to recognize that differences in hiring ratios for not have to be indicitave of race or gender bias. It is possible for the numbers to be an emergent effect of group differences.
Many do recognize that racism or sexism don't always play a role. I don't work at Google, but, I don't see women assuming sexism every time a male coworker gives a bad review of a prospective female candidate. The question here is whether affirmative action is an appropriate strategy for reducing gender imbalances. I understand many conservatives feel it's not. But, when asked how to correct for various socialization factors (not all of which are sexist or racist -- they can just be habit), their solutions would seem to keep the status quo. One of Damore's suggestions is to "reduce empathy". I can't think anything more inhumane.
Not sure what got you downvoted. There's even a South Park episode about it where Kyle has a surgery to become a black basketball player, which kind of goes in the same direction.
I was just thinking about height. Of course biology affects career choice, and a lot of other things. Doesn't mean men are engineers and women are nurses, but to pretend biology doesn't affect anything is more than hilarious. Which makes people who think that laughable, and they probably don't like it. But hey, you can't prove obedience by agreeing that the sky is blue or a circle is round, it's gotta be something more, like "biology doesn't affect career choice". So whatevs, if it's not that it's something else ^_^
I don't see what's wrong with an "evidence bomb" and I've never seen the complaint that someone's position had too much evidence behind it. If Damore had no evidence, he'd be dismissed as a misogynist with no evidence. When he presents evidence, you dismiss him as an evidence bomber.
It wasn't "let's have a chat", it was "here's an evidence bomb of how you're all wrong".
We shouldn't really take someone's degree of divergence from reality as somehow being a point in favor of their argument.
When people remove themselves so far from reality, ignoring significant mounds of evidence, nearly anything not divorced from reality is going to have the effect of an "evidence bomb."
> I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.
I'm a huge proponent of the principle of charity, but I found it impossible to apply to the Google Memo. Not because I'm deeply mired in political correctness (I have a range of views people in my circle consider right-wing) but because it's so badly reasoned it makes it hard to presume good faith on the part of the writer.
Damore points to studies showing that, e.g. women are more agreeable and more people-oriented. From that, he concludes women on average are less likely to prefer programming. We can diagram this reasoning as follows (the arrow with the line through denotes a contraindicator):
Women -> (agreeable + people-oriented) -> [???] -\-> programming
As you can see, there is an unstated premise:
(agreeable + people-oriented) -\-> programming
Damore's argument thus reduces to a bit of begging the question. We assume that programming is a "masculine" profession. Thus, being agreeable and people-oriented, which are feminine traits, must be contraindicators for preferring a career as a programmer. We have no studies that show this--we just assume it.
Edith, by the way, demolishes that assumption: "For example, students and professors I met in college that grew up in the USSR thought engineering was stereotypically women’s work." That demonstrates how the "gender" of various professions is a social construct. In India, where men are over-represented in teaching, it's not considered a job for "agreeable" "people-oriented" women. It's men's work. Law was historically considered men's work (it's analytical and adversarial, and could be called "people oriented" only if you hate people). But that view has been redefined as more women enter the profession. Likewise for medicine, accounting, etc. Accounting is an archetypally "masculine" profession (locked away in a back closet crunching numbers), but today more than half of accountants are women.
The moral of the story is that if you're going to make a controversial point, it had better be a good point. Damore's memo wasn't just badly written, it was badly reasoned, and deserved the scorn heaped on it.
> Damore points to studies showing that, e.g. women are more agreeable and more people-oriented. From that, he concludes women on average are less likely to prefer programming.
"Although women have nearly attained equality with men in several formerly male-dominated fields, they remain underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We argue that one important reason for this discrepancy is that STEM careers are perceived as less likely than careers in other fields to fulfill communal goals (e.g., working with or helping other people). Such perceptions might disproportionately affect women's career decisions, because women tend to endorse communal goals more than men. As predicted, we found that STEM careers, relative to other careers, were perceived to impede communal goals. Moreover, communal-goal endorsement negatively predicted interest in STEM careers, even when controlling for past experience and self-efficacy in science and mathematics."
"Participants were 333 introductory psychology students (193 women) who participated for
partial course credit, and 27 paid participants (14 women) from STEM classes. The majority (86.94%)
were of European American descent. The median age was 19 years, ranging from 18 to 43. "
"For each of the core careers, participants rated how much the career fulfills agentic goals (“power, achievement, and seeking new experiences or excitement”) and
communal goals (“intimacy, affiliation, and altruism”; definitions from Pohlmann, 2001). Participants rated goals according to “how important each of the following kinds of goals is to you personally."
I really found this study not very compelling as jumping from point A to conclusion B. It seems more than they've proved that women from the small subset in this study prefer more "communal goals" and the STEM careers are not perceived that way.
I can say as a women in STEM, I sort of choose tech on a whim. I came to see coding as a tool for many of the creative aspirations I had. If anything, I think some of the STEM career paths are poorly understood and marketed to women. Though I probably would have answered my questions about my career decisions in one way when I started college, it would have been different by the end of it. And after understanding what to expect out of a career, being years into my career, I would answer what's important to me in yet another way. So I really question this study.
Let me just say this is why "show me the study" is never a productive line of debate.
If someone agrees with the point the study seems to support, they say, "Hah! Studies!" and call anyone who disagrees "anti-science".
But if someone disagrees with the point, they pull up the study, pick out some section of it where any type of subjective judgment call was made (usually the details of the sample, because that's the most clearly subjective thing, making it the easiest thing to criticize), and say "There are real problems with this study, how about a real study? [that is, a study that agrees with my point]". Also popular is "Yes, but this author is affiliated with former employer x, y, or z".
This is true of all sides, all the time. Very rarely do you see a study actually impact anyone's opinion about an important topic. It is usually only the impression that more studies support a specific position (that is, "the consensus", aka social pressure to appear studious and informed, which affects academics as much or more than it affects non-academics), that does it.
> But if someone disagrees with the point, they pull up the study, pick out some section of it where any type of subjective judgment call was made (usually the details of the sample, because that's the most clearly subjective thing, making it the easiest thing to criticize), and say "There are real problems with this study, how about a real study? [that is, a study that agrees with my point]". Also popular is "Yes, but this author is affiliated with former employer x, y, or z".
This is virtually impossible to do effectively unless one is an expert in the field. Studies that have been published by reputable journals have gone through a rigorous peer review process. A layperson criticizing such a study is highly unlikely to discover any valid points that have escaped the experts.
Given the power we see in 100+ study meta-analysis in medicine, I think we have to move towards a model where research grants in other fields (psych, sociology, etc.) are jointly awarded to multiple independent groups to jumpstart the meta-analysis for a given new topic from the outset. How to keep the "independent" groups from colluding will be a challenge unfortunately. As will funding for the extra replications. For the reasons you cite, single, stand-alone studies are almost useless these days.
That study doesn't support either of Damore's premises. It doesn't address biological tendencies--it was conducted on adult women. Nor does it address traits actually linked to professions. It focuses on perception. That's an important distinction. In the age of the internet, software is much more about fulfilling communal goals--e.g. helping people communicate with family and friends--than many women-dominated professions like accounting. To the extent women perceive the opposite to be true, a strong argument can be made that it is the result of a male-dominated profession characterizing itself as such, rather than anything inherent about the profession.
Peoples' perceptions of various professions are the result of socialization. For example, my mom grew up in a society where teaching was a male profession--it was characterized as being about instilling wisdom and discipline in children. She found it very upsetting that teachers in the US were overwhelmingly women.
> Peoples' perceptions of various professions are the result of socialization.
But interests come first. If women on average perceive technology as not fulfilling communal goals and therefore avoid the field, they must first be interested in communal goals. It's also not controversial that interests have some biological component. So both here and in your original comment, I'm not sure exactly what specific criticism of Damore you're making. Maybe a quote would help?
Generally, you raise the possibility that software engineering could be a very people-oriented profession now but misportrayed as such by male engineers. But surely there must be some non-people, thing-oriented job that is just hours of long hacking at a keyboard with zero to minimal social contact, completely male-dominated, which women on average would tend to avoid. Why wouldn't that be some form of software programming?
> Since the Communist Revolution of 1917 and during the ensuring Soviet times, the role of women in engineering and engineering education was strong with almost 60% of the engineers being women. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian women in these engineering careers has fallen to below 40% of the engineering workforce with a continuing downward trend.
I had completely forgotten about this - my own mothers' class in Moscow Aviation Institute (rocket engineers) in early 80s had more women studying than men.
does this not provide support for Damore? Once Russian women had a greater choice of career opportunities in post-soviet russia STEM participation declined.
Absolutely not - Russian women had less choice following the collapse as the country's economy declined.
The paper I cited does not claim that USSR had managed to transform an otherwise very prejudice society into an equal egalitarian one. Instead, soviets focused on full employment AND full Labor participation as part of ideology, leaving less room for contradictions such as gender discrimination on employment or education itself. Salary and promotion discrimination remained as there ideology provided less cover. Following the collapse, Russian society reverted to its old prejudice self. Lookup домострой if you don't believe me.
Another less from USSR for gender/family stays equality is that childcare access makes a huge difference. In USSR, parents were guaranteed state funded care from the point maternity leave ended to college. On paper that still exists, but in practice it's a shadow of what it used to be.
The role of women in Russian society is very complex, but its not accurate to say that Russian women have more choices post-USSR. The best way to understand the situation is Soviet idealism against the reality of longstanding Russian patriarchy. The Soviets were at the forefront of encouraging women to enter the workforce, making abortion legal in 1920, making divorces easier, providing child care, etc. Those policies suffered fits and starts (Stalin rolled back abortion from 1936-1955) but were still in many ways far ahead of Western Europe. Post-USSR the idealistic stuff died out and there was a strong reversion to patriarchy (not to mention per-capita GDP dropped by half and only returned to peak Soviet levels in 2008).
Sometimes if you are wrong enough and offend enough people you are guilty of violating a code of conduct. No one is sending him to hell or even jail. He just lost his job. We are not schoolboys. We are adults with a responsibility to follow the code of employee, or face the consequences.
The memo attempts to use references to what the author sees as well accepted science. If you have a disagreement with the science, you can disagree. However, the method the author to used construct the memo, i.e. referencing studies, is the correct method. At worst you could attempt to call it bad science mixed with ignorance.
Well said. I thought the memo was well written with poor reasoning as to causation. Though the memo said there were influences outside of biology, it spent no time exploring them.
I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.
You are completely right, but on the other hand if you are going to invoke "science" and you present your writing as scientific (he did), you have a higher bar. If you fail to be objective (see semi-related assertions about Marxism), or your writing obscures the point you are attempting to make, then you've failed as a writer of scientific content.
If your writing isn't good enough, then don't release a memo to your workplace of tens of thousands of smart and ideological people. Put it on a blog, write it anonymously, but expect whatever criticism you get.
It seems to be completely lost on a lot of HN people that Damore's memo was not very scientific at all for the subject matter he was tackling. It was written in a certain intellectual language that often provides a veneer of authority for those who agree with his conclusions and lack the domain knowledge to understand the nuances of why he's wrong. But a lot of these "bio-truth" type of arguments do the same thing.
Google had plenty of reason to rethink his employment, not just because of his poor judgement, but because of the fact that he tackled a new (to him) science is such an unreasoned and unscientific way.
All it would have taken was for him to run the essay past a couple of people with solid domain expertise, and they would have pointed out the dozens and dozens of problems with his assertions, reasoning and perspective.
As people have pointed out on HN before, there is something about computer science that leads people to believe they can out-think experts in other fields at their own game. And while reaching outside of your expertise is to be encouraged, it should come with a certain humility that is not common in our industry.
>>All it would have taken was for him to run the essay past a couple of people with solid domain expertise, and they would have pointed out the dozens and dozens of problems with his assertions, reasoning and perspective.
I don't think this squares with truth. There is at least one PH.D psychologist who mentioned the memo was generally correct.
The people he cited told reporters they disagree with his interpretations of their research. There's a wired article going around with direct quotes but I'm mobile and can't find it easily.
Of course they did. When the press is on a witch hunt, and somebody is made to be the scum of the earth, people want to distance themselves from them. And if they hear what said person said framed as an "anti-diversity manifesto" (as if that was what it was), "sexist" etc, they would obviously say they "disagree with his interpretations of their research".
No, I'm mentioning a common reaction during witch hunting / moral panic / etc scenarios.
(Plus I don't consider people as solid blocks. One's reaction towards the media is not representative of the integrity of their work, one's family life is not representative of their public persona, and so on. Galileo bowed to the Inquisition, but his work is still solid).
Doubly so if, as it often happens, what they were asked to comment on were not the writings themselves in full, but a straw-man summarisation of them by journalists and related pundits (on which everybody seems to argue about).
Your third source claims that there is evidence of gender gap being due to biological differences that result in different interests. But Damore also made the claim that there is a biological difference in ability. Your source strongly disagrees, saying that "gender differences in math/science ability, achievement, and performance are small or nil." So they agree with some of Damore's memo and were careful to point out that they disagree with his claim about ability. If Damore had been that careful, he might still have a job.
Your fourth source includes one of the scientists who Damore cited. David P Schmitt's take is that "using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm."
Hardly "many agree with him". And it bears repeating over and over that cherry-picking science facts (or even the opinion of scientists who agree with you) is not science. It's the same exercise those who believe in chem trails engage in. Let's stop. If you want information about the population Google hires from, do research on that population not the general public. You would be studying the smartest of folks, who are likely to graduate from the elite universities of the world. Studies of biological differences in the general population might have little bearing on the specific population Google hires from.
> he tackled a new (to him) science is such an unreasoned and unscientific way
So very much this. He presented very few facts and a tiny bit of cherry-picked research. He decided to tackle a big-boy subject with a sixth-grader's game.
Pro-tip: Don't dress up your opinions as fact.
Pro-tip #2: Don't tackle large or sensitive topics with an air of authority
Pro-tip #3: When addressing your colleagues find people who disagree with you or question you and incorporate their feedback.
#3 is the most difficult step. If you perform true self-reflection it can often lead to abandonment of the argument you were attempting to make because you realize you were wrong or simply that you don't know much about the topic.
> there is something about computer science that leads people to believe they can out-think experts in other fields at their own game.
This is very common among many fields of expertise. Go ask any physicist at your local university about crank papers claiming to have overturned Einstein (and possibly all of science). First of all they'll have a drawer full of them. Secondly you'll see over half are written by someone with an engineering degree.
Your response is the kind of response that just builds support for him more.
What have I seen since this memo came out, from people who disagree with it?
His words are offensive. Poorly written. Yes there's science but it was cherry picked. He's a "sixth-grader" and "not a pro". He's wasting work time. He's naive. He's a bad person. He's "alt right". He wrote his memo with an air of authority that he should not have used. He doesn't understand the topic. OK, he's studied biology but not the right kind of biology. He said women suck compared to men. OK, maybe he didn't but he implied it. His memo was too long. Or maybe it was too short, because he cited 'very few facts'. Why is he "evidence bombing" people. He should have known readers would misinterpret it and that's his fault. He shouldn't have given interviews to YouTubers I don't like. OK, he interviewed with the WSJ but he was wearing a dumb t-shirt. He's the face of Silicon Valley sexism. Some women are offended and that's enough to stop discussing it. It's ridiculous that anyone agrees with him. He posted it to the wrong forums. Maybe he posted it to the right forums but he should have known it'd go viral. Why is he so naive? He deserves everything he gets.
These are all excuses to shoot the messenger. I am tired of reading them. They do not advance the debate at all, they are just ways to try and shut it down. And every time I see someone attack James Damore, or his writing style or whatever, instead of talking about the actual issues, I feel these people are losing the debate.
No one outside of science should be able to talk about scientific subjects or reference science? Really? Do you apply these arguments equally to people you agree with as those you don't?
As far as I can tell, nothing in the memo was wrong or "cherry picked". He presented some evidence that women have statistically different personality traits than men. That's absolutely correct! That's not very controversial. Then he suggests that different personality traits might lead to different choice of professions and interests. That shouldn't be a terribly controversial idea either.
I don't understand why this means that Damore shouldn't have shared his opinion.
We absolutely should not construct a credentialist edifice that says only people certified to have gone through brainwa---err, regent-approved programs--- can comment on a topic. That would prevent discussion on most topics, as virtually all topics of interest are complex and have many years of study behind them.
Overall, these comments are still criticizing the how instead of the what, which is what people do when they don't know how to criticize the what but want to express their offense anyway. It's much easier to criticize delivery and in fact it will always happen whenever anyone cares, because delivery is inherently contextual/subjective.
If Damore's paper was rejected from Nature or another peer-reviewed journal, that'd make sense, as it is not a rigorous academic work. It's just a conjecture on the state of diversity hiring and it expresses his reasoning for believing the way he does. If he is so wrong, it should be simple to disprove him, and we can all move on without anyone having to get fired.
>I don't understand why this means that Damore shouldn't have shared his opinion.
"Shouldn't have shared his opinion" and "should have shared his opinion in a different way" are two completely different things, and I don't see many people saying the first.
I think "should have shared his opinion in a different way" is moving the goalposts too far. I think anything that would have placated critics on this point would have neutered Damore's position.
Can someone produce a "diversity culture" critic (for lack of a better term) who provides a good example for Damore? One that is well received across the board?
To be fair to Damore, his paper wasn't intended for wide publication. It was a quick internal write-up intended to generate discussion among people who already had some frame of reference for Damore's background and professional trajectory. There was very little chance he would've been mistaken for a biology professor within the Google Skeptics discussion group.
A big four-paragraph disclaimer at the beginning would've been a big waste of everyone's time, and it could just as easily be interpreted as a sign of hostility or malfeasance. If people want to dislike something, there is an infinity of potential nits to fixate on.
I've always been brash so I've been through the "delivery ringer" many times. The conclusion I've reached is that frequently, the only way to avoid it is to be so opaque and listless in your communication that people aren't sure what you meant.
If you say something people don't like in a non-ambiguous way, they will be mad, and they will insist on finding a reason to dismiss it.
Damore shouldn't have shared his opinion (the way he did) because there is a huge gap between what he claims to aim for and what he actually does. He claims that open discussion, diversity and helping to improve the situation are what important to him. But in practice he does right the opposite: creates a hostile working environment with perverted reasoning, loads of bias perpetuating harmful stereotypes, ignoring how his tone will affect others and pretty agressive promotion of these views instead of politely sharing a well thought out intellectually honest opinion.
Given the sensitivity of topic he tries to discuss, 'how' is an extremely important part of 'what', still he manages to twist his declared 'what' to the 180 degree with his 'how'. It seems that he was fired exactly for showing strong intention to continue the promotion of his highly biased opinions while completely ignoring what it actually does to people around him. Disproving the memo wouldn't help to stop it if this was the case.
First, you've crossed over from criticizing delivery into criticizing content, so it's clear that's actually the part that offends you. What you're saying is that Damore shouldn't have delivered his opinion unless it was first made to match something reasonably close to your own opinion. There is nothing inherently "dishonest" or "perverted" about Damore's memo; that is a subtext that you are choosing to read in because you disagree with its conclusions.
If Damore had pined on the tragedy of the modern economic structure while exhaustively disclaiming every potential discriminatory implication before he began the memo, I guarantee people would've read just as much "intellectual dishonesty", "perverted reasoning", and "loads of bias" as they did now. In fact, they very likely would've read more, taking the content that initially appeared friendly to their POV as a sign that Damore had malicious intent and that he was attempting to hoodwink people by pretending to be "on their side".
As discussed below, if someone wants to dismiss something they don't like, airy, abstract terms like "perverted reasoning" will get bandied around no matter what. These terms are great precisely because their subjective interpretation allows the writer to sound semi-credible in their condemnation without having to specify further.
Damore was fired because once this hit the mainstream press, it was the only way for Google to preserve a strong defense against inevitable discrimination suits.
> Google had plenty of reason to rethink his employment, not just because of his poor judgement, but because of the fact that he tackled a new (to him) science is such an unreasoned and unscientific way.
This is emphatically not the issue. Suppose for argument's sake that he had made an air-tight case. Wouldn't he still be advancing "harmful gender stereotypes?" It wouldn't void a single one of Sundar Pichai's points when he fired him.
And turn it around; suppose an activist had sent around a poorly argued pro-diversity screed that "cherry-picked" shoddy research on implicit association tests, stereotype threat, etc. Would Google seriously be rethinking her employment for tackling research in an "unreasoned and unscientific way?"
Damore is out because he took on the left's sacred beliefs.
I'm glad to see that people are admitting that the memo wasn't a screed after all, and pointing out that Damore brought up some good points that are worth discussing.
But I would like to push back on the idea that it was poorly written.
Is he an expert in these fields? No.
Was his memo completely unassailable? No.
Did he anticipate every possible response? No.
But he was still quite careful about the conclusions he was trying to draw from the research, and a number of scientists from different fields have all defended the research he cites (to be fair, many criticize the research, too).
If his opponents and critics truly value dialogue, they'll show it by actually engaging in dialogue.
Your criticism is that he shouldn't have released a poorly-written memo to an enormous company. I would agree, however, I don't think that's what happened. I thought he brought it up in the internal Google Skeptics group, and then it got leaked and went viral. I doubt he wanted such an enormous audience for this draft, but I'm open to hearing statements to the contrary.
That wired article was excellent. And it proves one thing to my mind. Regardless of everything else, Damore's memo has lead me to vastly expand my knowledge of the debates in this domain, through just being a curious observer watching it all unfold. It's been wonderful, if extremely provocative, in generating proper debate on the subject, focussed on all possible angles, from writing style, to science, to hiring policies.
Amidst all this, Google firing him is the biggest shame.
Different strokes I guess. I liked that the authors took great pains to stick to highlighting the nuanced nature of the debate. They agreed with Damore where pertinent, but also disagreed with a lot of the conclusions that he derived.
I.e. the authors had to concede to Damore on the science, but proceeded to claim the conclusions where worthless because the science sucks. Note that the Slate Star Codex articles that have addressed the science in detail point out these are actually strong, large N studies and not just nitpicking. (They are, besides, echoed by studies in other fields showing that _gibbon and chimpanzees_ already present similar gender-behavioral differences re: which toys very young individuals prefer.)
Wired even feels the need to add a parenthetical reinforcing climate change is true because this is the general strategy of climate deniers: they have to accept the laws of physics and the general mechanism of GHG warming and hold on to the nonsequitur conclusion of "huh uh but this isn't the consensus/established science/it's just a theory" and come up with their own conclusions.
(Edit: GHG warming, not GHC. GHC is actually getting cooler all the time.)
The Wired article gets quotes from researchers cited by Damore and their interpretations vis-à-vis Damore's presentation of their work. In my opinion they remained respectful throughout but firm in their assessment that Damore really didn't go about using scientific research in a responsible way and drew rather specific conclusions from broad research.
On the flip side, his memo wasn't meant for wide release and he had to act as sole writer, editor, and fact-checker. So I can forgive his mishandling of facts to an extent. But he's been stirring the pot a lot since his firing and I don't think this will end well for him.
In what relates to winning the respectability game, he's already lost. He could have definitive algebraic proof; it wouldn't matter.
I haven't seen a single thing that Damore has said after the firing (I haven't seen the memo either; I don't care much for the subject, it's the reaction that bothers me) -- but I'd bet a burger with fries that he's going the Milo Yanopopopopoulos route: a provocateur that's admired for being a provocateur.
It's a living. How long has Ann Coulter been around?
'Page' argues that because Damore didn't mention that men score higher on aggression and lower on cooperation, this is evidence of motivated reasoning.
Counterpoint: Damore only lists personality traits that lead to interest in engineering, thus leading to an imbalance in the talent pool from which Google hires. Rarely is an extremely high propensity for agreeableness a motivating factor for getting an engineering degree at Stanford.
One interesting point that hasn't attracted much attention is that the author self-identifies as being on the autism spectrum [1]. If this fact were better-known, would accessibility advocates defend his memo — and possibly even attack its detractors for not being sensitive to his neurological differences?
He uses high neuroticism as part of his argument against female software engineers, high neuroticism is associated with autism. So it seems that even he isn't being sensitive to his own neurological differences.
Apart from say the bit where he said women couldn't cope with stressful jobs as well as men and that's part of why they're underrepresented at Google i.e. the bit about neuroticism, that I was talking about.
I'd actually say just the opposite - the memo seemed to be written as well and in as conciliatory manner as it could be written and the memo made good (or at least plausible) point and bad points. But the bad points were so bad that it was appropriate and necessary to fire Damore.
Essentially, as analogy, there's no way for a person to say "Black people are inferior and shouldn't be hired", as a message broadcast through their entire workplace, and not have that person be creating a hostile work environment for African Americans. If that person says "I don't mean in general, I mean inferior just for this occupation, I don't mean inferior, just 'differently talented, they've got great rhythm'", it doesn't matter, if that person says "here's a study which says this, we should consider this in an open minded fashion" it doesn't matter. The message is unacceptable. That person is done, that person should be done.
Damore never said that women were worse engineers or that biology makes them worse engineers. There was no implied inferiority.
It is largely the PC crowd who read implied-inferiority into any study of biological differences between male and female.
If you look carefully at some of the comments from female Googlers after the memo was leaked, they talk about fears of being perceived as less capable based on their biology.
See the memo itself isn't only dangerous, it is what it could lead to.
Do you understand what's happening here? Whether or not google "lowered the bar" (i.e. had distinct hiring criteria for men or women) is a fact and only a fact. It may be a true fact, or it may be a false fact. But it is not an opinion.
But somehow it gets turned into "This means he thinks women are worse, therefore he's insulting women, therefore it's a hostile workplace, therefore he got fired." That reasoning is a major leap, and it's not Damore's leap.
Taking a fact and turning it into a hostile-workplace-opinion is the real problem.
You are completely incorrect. Whether or not Google did in reality lower the bar to hire more women is a matter of fact. That Damore felt that in order to meet the goal of hiring more women Google had to lower the bar is his _opinion_, and it is a telling opinion about how he thinks about the capabilities of women.
"You had to buy inferior wood to get enough to build this house. I don't think there's enough good wood to build the house, therefore in order to get enough you had to buy inferior wood."
The fact of the quality of the wood is separate from the opinion of the availability of quality wood.
If the supply of qualified female candidates ready to be hired now is thought to be restricted (so that the bar must be lowered), that does not imply the same thought about the capabilities of women. The problem with diversity could be thought to be in the talent pipeline: young girls wanting to be programmers, gaining interest and experience in high school, going to college to study computer science, staying the field to reach higher levels, and so on.
In fact, we find that the field was way more diverse before the 1990s, and the talent pipeline for female programmers only started choking in the late 80s (for reasons we could argue, but one popular theory involves boy-oriented PCs and video games).
Except no, he did not say google "had to lower the bar." If you read the memo, he says :
"Google has created several discriminatory practices: ...
Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" [Mind you _lower the bar_ is a hyperlink, to a gdoc I don't have access to, so he's citing another document as evidence of this practice].
So he is in fact arguing a factual claim, that google has applied inconsistant standards in practice, as I suggested in my prior post.
You say he didn't say that Google had to lower the bar, then you quote where he says explicitly that? "Google does X. X lowers the bar."
>So he is in fact arguing a factual claim, that google has applied inconsistant standards in practice, as I suggested in my prior post.
Yes. Re-read my comment. Whether or not they apply inconsistent hiring practices is a factual claim. The idea that the only way to achieve the goal of hiring more women is to apply inconsistent hiring practices is his opinion.
I don't know what you're arguing anymore. I'm thoroughly convinced you either haven't read the relevant sections or have forgotten them since this discussion started.
Please show me where he says anything like "The idea that the only way to achieve the goal of hiring more women is to apply inconsistent hiring practices is his opinion."
>Yes. Re-read my comment. Whether or not they apply inconsistent hiring practices is a factual claim. The idea that the only way to achieve the goal of hiring more women is to apply inconsistent hiring practices is his opinion.
It looks like a logical conclusion to me. Care to explain why you think it's not?
I made this comment a few days ago, but I think a lot of readers are getting tripped up in his (likely very artfully deployed) wording and avoiding his underlying messages.
The passage in which that quote occurs clearly implies that the bar has already been lowered - in fact, the second half of the sentence offers the mechanism through which the 'bar had been lowered' ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate")
> No one would find it weird if I claimed that women aren't able to run a 100 as fast as men. Yes, there might be some exceptional cases where women can compete, but they are just that, exceptions to the rule. Most of the time women compete among themselves since they would never qualify for anything if they competed in the same category as men.
Why is it unacceptable to make the same observation about intellectual endeavors, or programming specifically?
I guess I'm surprised that this is controversial (in response to your most recent comment to a sibling poster) - the reason we don't accept that women are worse programmers than men is... we don't have evidence that women are worse programmers than men.
There are data about physical strength (and amazingly clear biological correlates - most HN posters will never outmatch a top female athlete, and we only need to do a quick lab test to determine this). However, female/minority intelligence has been, and continues to be, a politicized issue - until the more overt instances of discrimination are eliminated, how can we jump from blaming the obvious societal barriers to blaming biology?
He "merely" says that Google is doing it, and that doing it lowers the bar. Therefore he's saying that Google lowered the bar. It's a pretty simple a = b = c scenario
>It looks like a logical conclusion to me. Care to explain why you think it's not?
Because women can achieve at the same level as men? I thought it was pretty obvious.
> "Google has created several discriminatory practices: ... Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"
Please note the last 5 words. Damore wasn't saying that diversity candidates got jobs in spite of being below the bar. He was saying that decreasing the false negative rates for certain groups is discriminatory towards those who don't belong to said groups.
E.g., the point is that focusing on decreasing false negative rates for group A but not for group B, will mean that, on average, more people who are close to the bar will be hired from group A than from group B. This is unfair to group B, since they are much less likely to get "the benefit of the doubt".
In essence, the quote relates to how Google deals differently with uncertainty depending on the gender of an individual.
>Because women can achieve at the same level as men? I thought it was pretty obvious.
No one would find it weird if I claimed that women aren't able to run a 100 as fast as men. Yes, there might be some exceptional cases where women can compete, but they are just that, exceptions to the rule. Most of the time women compete among themselves since they would never qualify for anything if they competed in the same category as men.
Why is it unacceptable to make the same observation about intellectual endeavors, or programming specifically?
You claim that women can achieve at the same level as men. Let's assume they can for now. However, your gripe is with the under-representation of women at tech companies. So that claim doesn't really help you, you would need to show that women perform as well as men on average. Can you?
>Why is it unacceptable to make the same observation about intellectual endeavors, or programming specifically?
Because the observation is inaccurate. There is no evidence that it is true.
>However, your gripe is with the under-representation of women at tech companies. So that claim doesn't really help you, you would need to show that women perform as well as men on average. Can you?
We have no evidence they can't, why would we assume that to be the case?
> it is a telling opinion about how he thinks about the capabilities of women.
No, assuming that men and women who applied have the exact same distribution of 'good qualities', you have twice as many male applicants as female applicants, and you want to hire as many women as men, you have to lower the bar for women.
That's a completely made-up scenario. Google themselves have said that the way they're trying to hire more women is by looking harder for qualified candidates, not by lowering the level that meets "qualified".
If we really dig for an example - mountain climbing guides for Mount Everest, certain groups of people have evolutionary advantages that make them more suited for the job.
In an extreme environment where advantages of the tail end of population distributions are important then it's less likely the market will choose a diversified workforce.
> He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities.
He basically said the opposite, but people have been so interested in triggering off the 'lowered the bar' phrasing to show their outrage that they're (seemingly willfully) ignoring the rest of the sentence which completely changed the meaning.
But 'by lowering false negatives' is hugely important. Google's hiring process has a lot of false negatives. These are qualified engineers who weren't hired that could have been successful at Google. This allows for 'lowering the bar' without sacrificing quality by not subjecting minority/female candidates to the more arbitrary/capricious stages of the Google hiring process that eliminate so many otherwise-qualified candidates.
Imagine if one of the ways that we chose to address diversity in the tech workplace was to exempt qualified female/minority H1-B candidates from the lottery and automatically approve their visas? It wouldn't make them any less qualified, since they could've gotten their visa through the normal lottery process. But it would 'lower the bar' by making it significantly more likely that they'd get visas. The post-interview stages of Google's hiring process are similar in their often-arbitrary selecting of who gets through.
It's also, on Google's part, a smart move to address their PR concerns. It allows them to increase female/minority hiring, thereby satisfying public calls for more diversity, without sacrificing quality. All they have to do is look into their process at where qualified diversity candidates are getting rejected and stop doing that. It's a luxury that other companies with fewer surplus potential hires don't have when trying to improve the diversity of their workforce. But possibly more importantly, it's not helping to improve the diversity of the industry as a whole, it only helps to make Google's stats look better. Google's standards for engineers mean that their false negatives can usually get jobs elsewhere without much difficulty. By taking this approach to diversity hiring, they're just shifting their own workforce demographics without helping the industry as a whole do the same.
If he didn't mean to say that, he should retract that phrase and apologize for saying something he didn't mean to say.
You getting "triggered" by people using the standard definition of a common idiom isn't helpful.
Parents often tell their children that a lie about what they did is worse than the original crime. I hope Mr. Damore didn't take this smug "I didn't actually say that women were inferior, it's all about preferences" tone that seems to be the first line of defence online, in his HR meetings only to be asked "So, what's this bit about race and the "science" of IQ you mentioned? Is IQ a preference?"
I'll note that the argument you present about Google only diversity-washing themselves at the cost of others having lower diversity, is the same argument that people make about their green energy efforts. In that area at least they've gone to great lengths to ensure that they actually improve the whole industry, not just steal the glory for themselves and I wouldn't be at all suprised if they had some very smart people ensuring the same was the case in this instance.
He should call out his mistake, yes. But apologize? Expecting that from him seems beyond the pale. Language isn't like contracts where any mistake by the author gets to be interpreted however the reader chooses. Instead, we're supposed to look for the intended meaning, either using context or by asking for clarification. If you use the definition you cited, his sentence becomes self-contradictory and, thus, requires clarification, not an immediate rush to judgment. Instead, everyone has assumed the worst about what he said, gotten him fired and vilified him. I'd have a hard time apologizing to people who overreact like that.
Had the reaction been one of kindness, understanding and a desire for cohesiveness where people tried to point out misconceptions and alert him to how his language was being received ("when you say 'lowered the bar' it makes me think 'less qualified', so perhaps you didn't meant that?"), this whole blow-up could have been avoided. Instead people reacted with righteous indignation and jumped to labeling him a misogynist and a bigot. At that point, all hope of a productive outcome, for him and Google at least, was lost.
For my part, I'm less interested in whether Damore really is bigot and a misogynist or any virtue of his opinions. I'm only defending what he could have possibly meant because I see so many people jumping to their own incomplete conclusions. This whole incident, to me, was more about how unproductive our reactions are to anything relating to a sensitive subject. People are so quick to trigger off anything resembling an assault on one of their sacred cows that they never take the time to figure out the intended meaning. I'm so sick of walking on eggshells knowing that I have to watch every single sentence and word choice because they'll be taken out of context and used against me. We're losing nuance in our discussions and it's creating a polarization of thought on each side that I find dangerous and divisive...there's no room for middle-ground thinkers to participate without being attacked by one or both sides. This makes those people either gravitate towards one of the extremes or disengage entirely.
This is the type of resentment / thinking that he wants the company to steer away from. If they do encode 'lower bar' policies, it's an inevitable and rational conclusion to draw, which is incredibly toxic I agree. By taking other approaches to diversity at different stages in the funnel, that toxic inevitability is avoided.
I'm not sure how you're privvy to his thought process.
Also, the idea that finding ways to employ more women+minorities leads to poorer employees is exactly what many people don't after about - essentially, your argument is taking his opinion as fact, while I only wanted to point out the underlying message to his words.
>He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities. I think it's awfully charitable not to infer that he considers the women/minorities at Google (on average) to be inferior engineers.
Yes, but that's simply how statistics work. If you require one group of people to score 90 on some test in order to be hired, and another group to score 80, then among successful applicants the second group will have lower average scores than the first. There's no getting around that.
The argument should be over whether or not Google's hiring practices lower the bar for particular groups of people. If they do, then the above conclusion about the average talent of various groups is inescapable.
> If you require one group of people to score 90 on some test in order to be hired, and another group to score 80, then among successful applicants the second group will have lower average scores than the first.
That's not necessarily so; you could require mice to be heavier than 90 grams, and elephants to be heavier than 80 grams, and still have your elephants be heavier on average.
(I don't want to wade into the bigger argument, just pointing out that "that's simply how statistics work" only under certain conditions (which most likely apply here, but you wrote "there's no getting around that" when there is)).
Indeed, however Google have said that their hiring practices for minority groups involve looking harder in those groups for candidates, not hiring candidates who don't meet the usual standards.
He does however claim he'd learned of questionable/unethical hiring practices as part of a "secret" diversity hiring meeting he'd been invited to attend, and this is what prompted the memo in the first place.
What I inferred from this, is that he learned that at least in some cases, there's aspects to Google's diversity hiring that they'd rather people not know about.
Now I don't know if this is false, true, or true within a small subset of Google; but his claim of the secret meeting does change the narrative somewhat in his favour.
I mean yes, one needs to be skeptical of "secret meetings". But it doesn't actually change his argument, it just reduces the validity of certain claims of subtext that he believes his female coworkers are inferior.
Basically, you're asking for evidence so that he can prove himself plausibly innocent of a crime that there's no evidence for in the first place.
I think this is the fallacy of hiring that every startup makes, the idea that only Linus is good enough to write your CRUD app.
Incidentally, we do not know whether his statement is true, or whether the changes to Google's hiring practices have changed the employees' operational capability.
In the absence of this information, with such a clearly (if somewhat subtly) stated opinion, it's natural that one would be offended by his words.
Before accepting a statement like his, it would behoove us to know what the actual policy changes are.
You're just saying "He couched the point well-enough", he didn't say they were worse engineers, he just said they weren't naturally inclined to work with things. Sure that doesn't literally state that women as worse, it just casts an equivalent shadow on a woman wanting to be an engineer.
He didn't imply that either. Are there no criticisms that don't depend on mischaracterizations? He's citing a study of gender differences which purportedly shows gender differences which might explain part of the gap. The point is that the data don't unanimously support the discrimination hypothesis and it might merit looking at other hypotheses.
> It is largely the PC crowd who read implied-inferiority into any study of biological differences between male and female.
He mentions aptitude right here,
"I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."
That doesn't imply inferiority. There are a lot of characteristics in which men exhibit more variance than women, but the average for both genders is the same. It might just mean there are more men at the top and bottom, not that women are inferior.
The memo makes a whole case against "the Left" (capitalization from the memo) and how "leftists" are violent. That doesn't sound like "conciliatory manner" to me, especially considering he makes a blanket statement about Google "leaning left."
The blanket statement that Google leans left is empirically true. You also seem to have misread his comments about violence, as he claims the left tends to be more compassionate. Did you read the memo?
> While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment.
What he does is list "compassion for the weak" as a "left bias". That's not necessarily a statement in support of leftist ideals when combined with this two assertions:
> In addition to the Left’s affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females.
> The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness[11], which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause
(Which, BTW, is right before the first thing I quoted.)
What's your point? The same could be said of "conservative parties are a platform to neo-Nazis and white supremacists" it doesn't imply all conservatives are neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but... "the implication."
So you don't think that singling out "leftist violence" in events where there were "alt-right violence" is choosing one side?
Or accusing "PC authoritarians" of stifling diversity of opinion? (violence is not just punching people)
Or accusing "the Left" of denying science regarding biological differences between individuals? (there's a huge difference between "taking with a grain of salt, considering there's a lot of societal factors that might play a bigger role" and "denying")
Damore does a really good job of adding a lot of disclaimers and caveat emptors around a lot of his arguments, but he really didn't put that much effort into hiding his derision for "the Left."
You still haven't acknowledged that you wrote something that has since been proven incorrect. I'm reluctant to continue the conversation because of that, but:
> So you don't think that singling out "leftist violence" in events where there were "alt-right violence" is choosing one side?
James's discussion of left violence is because Google is a left wing company.
If Google was a right wing company, then saying "Google has mainly right wing politics but has avoided the violence associated with far right groups" would indeed by apt.
Those are different statements. The memo didn't say "liberal parties are a platform to authoritarians and antifascists". If it had, I would agree with your characterization. The strawman arguments in this drama are staggering. I guess Damore couldn't have been all wrong if his critics depend on mischaracterizations and other fallacies.
Oh really? Left and right imply different sides from a center. Do you have evidence that google "leans left" versus merely embracing majority positions? A sizeable majority of Americans believe in things like LGBT rights and the value of diversity. Those aren't "leftist" positions, they're widely popular American values.
Left and Right alike favor diversity, it how you get there where they disagree.
Diversity does not mean supporting the thought police, encouraging mob mentalities, and adopting zero tolerance attitudes.
A sizable majority of Americans do support gay marriage by almost 2:1, but they are very closely divided on other LGBT issues, particularly around what should and shouldn't be funded by the tax payer, etc.
And while Americans value diversity they also value freedom.
Scientifically the role of biology in gender behavior is not a settled issue, despite the many wishing to declare it so. I do not agree with the conclusions to which Damore jumped, nor do I feel strongly that biology was particularly relevant to the point he was trying to make. But it amazes me how even broaching the discussion triggers people.
Today's left has went a far way from socialism and whatnot. It's funny how today's far right cares about "common man" and labour rights more than far left which is busy with identity politics.
For example, in Europe more and more labour is voting for right wing parties. While left is becoming more and more rich/educated urbanite.
I don't want to go into a whole politics discussion about it, but while I do agree with you regarding the left/right switch on the working class voters, I don't necessarily agree that it comes from the right being about "working people" but rather about working people feeling threatened by recent cultural/economic changes brought by globalization. It's not a coincidence that both American and British people voted against their own interests because they were concerned about "immigration".
In any case, it's not a discussion for HN, but I wouldn't mind having it over a few beers/coffees.
Eh, HN has went enough political recently... But personally I enjoy a diverse set of reasonable people to talk politics with. There're little places with not much echo chamber AND not much shouting at each other at the same time...
The major question is what does count as being "about working people". Is it claiming you're for equality/diversity/whatever? Or working to make working people life better?
Labour feel threatened by globalisation, migrants and so on. Today's left is very clearly for that. Thus labour feels left is no longer working for their interests. The right, which is against migrants, feel much ore for their interests.
Of course, there's an economic theory that migrants help the host country's economy and everyone end up being better off. But a "working man" only see his wage stagnate due to increased competition and his rent raise. Or his work place gone completely due to outsourcing.
The left just declaring that they're for the working man is not enough. Their recent actions very clearly don't ring a bell for the working man. The feels (as much as I don't like that) is very important in politics. People are tired of politicians talking about several-degrees-removed benefits. Although sometimes (but, as we can see, not always) politicians are totally right and it is actually the right thing to do, public needs at least some direct benefits right away. Although this is frequently called as populism in a derogatory way, I believe it's a crucial part of democracy. And it especially rings true to less educated and less well off people which happened to be core electorate of the left.
Which is not a sign of "bigotry" or being "backwards" or whatever. Better off people have more wiggle room, can take more risks (e.g. voting for people who offer few-degrees-removed benefits in the future) and generally care about higher level stuff in Maslow pyramid. The labour don't have this luxury.
Right. Anytime I read or hear someone stress the left or right (lib/con, etc) in an argument, it is often a warning sign that the person watches too much corporate television and that a low-quality argument is on its way.
Women are more "left" than men generally. They're also less violent than men, so a) you'd think that would make the right more violent, and b) it puts his stated goal of more right-wing thought at Google in direct opposition to hiring more women.
> While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment.
Also, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "simply a factual statement" when there were a bunch of alt-righters participating in the violence. Ever heard of alt-right hero "Based Stickman"? People pay for his tickets to go incite violence across the US. Such a symbol of peace!
Huh, I was going to complain about it being a direct cut and paste from the document, but it does look like I managed to stick an 's' in there after I copied the text. Sorry, didn't notice.
The actual quote is:
> While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftist protests
Still doesn't change the meaning, my point being that the "violent leftist protests" he talks about don't happen in a vacuum. On the other side of the 'violence' there's always been lovely people like the alt-righter "hero" Based Stickman inciting violence.
To me, his choice of side to blame for the violence is pretty telling of what he thinks about "the Left". Whether correctly or incorrectly identifying them as the culprits of the violence, he's making a statement about the "movement" and not the particular instance of violence.
On a different note, Damore chose to include mention of "leftist protest" because Google's culture is left-leaning – he's explicitly saying that Google is very left, while not so left as these violent protests. Mentioning "violent rightist protests" wouldn't be germane to his statement about Google here.
His point isn't to compare the left and the right, so it doesn't make sense to bring up the right. "Google is an ideological bubble that suppressed free speech and we should change that." "Yeah, but conservatives are bad too, and therefore we should continue being a bubble".
> "Yeah, but conservatives are bad too, and therefore we should continue being a bubble"
I'm curious, why do you think Damore's position is "right" but that position is not? Aren't the coworkers and higher-ups entitled to an opinion just as much as Damore?
I don't think his position is right, I'm pointing out that it's not dishonest to omit irrelevant details. That said, others don't need to change their opinions in order to become a more diverse, tolerant workplace, they simply need to not go out of their way to shame and intimidate those who are different from them.
That's a really inflammatory and totally inappropriate analogy.
Downvoters, please cite which part of Damore's essay you think is comparable to overt racism. He explicitly said that he thinks women are capable, and should be hired.
"the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)"
IQ has no relevance to a discussion on gender gaps, so, why mention it?
The quote's context is politics. In that context, IQ has recently been used in discussions over racial differences [2].
It begs the question, is Damore being honest about his views on race? If we replace "IQ" with "race", would that change the meaning he meant to convey?
> in as conciliatory manner as it could be written
Strongly disagree. I think emphasis is a really big deal here. Here's a key line from the memo:
> Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.
This runs right into the Jon Snow line, "everything before the word 'but' is horse____." It comes across that the author doesn't think workplace bias is as important as [other stuff], or maybe that he doesn't think it's important at all, which is understandably hurtful to tons of people. Maybe that's an uncharitable reading, but can you really write about something like this and ask your readers to be unusually charitable to you?
"Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems."
This is conciliatory to you? Implying that the opposing side is blind to the truth and such blindness is preventing them from actually solving problems? Because to me this comes across as hostile and condescending.
No. Note that my post makes no argument as to whether the claim "all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination" is accurate or not. I could have left that part out, but didn't want to only quote half a sentence.
My only point was that the sentence, as written, was hostile and condescending and does not represent a conciliatory approach to conversation.
you were opposing "not all ..." as a construct that was hostile and condescending.
I don't think that cherry picking one line out of a 10 page document with significant number of disclaimers, and which was originally presented in a way and desire to evolve and gather opinions represents the overall intent and tone of the document.
> Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence
> but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology[7] that can irreparably harm Google [[ citation talks about Communist/Marxist ideals, directly equating Google with a Communist/Marxist organization ]]
> Google’s left leaning makes us blind to this bias and uncritical of its results, which we’re using to justify highly politicized programs.
> Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased [[ says this without citing any evidence at all of this happening ]]
The "tone" of the document is pretty aggressive, even if Damore throws a lot of fluff and "but I don't mean..." in the mix. In general it sets it up as "Left is bad and violent, Google is left, FIX IT."
Is it really that much different than a great deal of feminist propaganda, statements or actions? It doesn't mean the entire message is bs, or that there's no opportunity for discussion.
Please, quote feminist propaganda with the same level of invective that has been circulated at Google and maybe we have something to talk about. Otherwise, you are just trying to justify the author of a memo that was released at a work place by suggesting there's literature released elsewhere that is as inflammatory.
Some go beyond propaganda and get close to calling for violence. Quotes include: "…you deserve what's coming to you." and "Yes this is silencing. I intend to silence these views. They are violently offensive."
As far as I know, none of these people were fired for their posts.
On the other hand, their names were leaked so that now alt-right trolls can make their life miserable. Don't you think that's a way of silencing people?
Sure, but that's a totally different argument. The one I was responding to was:
> Please, quote feminist propaganda with the same level of invective that has been circulated at Google and maybe we have something to talk about.
I showed a half-dozen examples of Googlers being far more insulting and threatening than Damore's memo. As far as I know, none of them were fired. The double-standard could not be more obvious. Damore was fired for the ideas he expressed, not the tone he used.
You might view it as cherry picking (even though it's not the only line in the memo written with a condescending tone), but to me it is a big clue that the memo was not written in good faith to solicit discussion, but rather to push a pre-conceived agenda. As one of the interviewees says in the original article:
There’s a difference between “let’s have a discussion” and “let me tell you what’s up, all you wrong people.”
there are plenty of left-leaning memos and examples that show similar tone towards right-leaning and/or conservative or libertarian thinking. That doesn't imply not being open to discussion so much as showing one's bias. There's definitely a matter of levels to one's opinion, experience and yes, some level of conflict.
When going into a situation where you've been at the back hand of such bias, specifically in a workplace, it's often hard not to show at least some condescension. Look at any number of public feminist actions and statements, for example.
Unfortunately for him, he did basically say that about African-Americans.
How else am I supposed to take it when a self-identity right wing person claims the left don't believe some science related to IQ in the context of a diversity memo.
What "science" could he possibly be referring to other than the Bell Curve BS?
Didn't he also refer the bell curve studies that claim that despite the same average intelligence, there are less 80 IQ women than men and there less 120 IQ women than men? So why wouldn't it be reasonable to assume when he was talking about IQ differences, he was talking about that?
Why do you jump to the conclusion he must be talking about ethnicity? Afaik ethnicity wasn't referred to at all in his memo.
He repeatedly refers to race in the context of diversity in his memo, at least 9 times the word "race" is used for example. Notably, he doesn't seem to feel the need to back any of that up with science, apart from (maybe!) the casual reference to IQ.
Sometimes you'd think there were two completely different memos under discussion given the lack of basic agreement on facts as relate to the memo itself, never mind it's arguments and sources.
Though, I guess you're right, he may have left it ambigous about exactly which IQ differences he believes in that "the left" don't. People seem to think it's wrong to complain about his communication style, but as this example illustrates, peppering a memo with alt-right buzzwords and then being ambiguous about which particular controversial IQ studies you support can just as honestly be interpreted as dog-whistling rather than incredibly high levels of naivety. I think most people suggesting his communication skills are lacking are actually just giving him the benefit of the doubt.
It's entirely possible for an argument to be correct, but too narrowly focused.
If you're saying "group X is inferior and and I can prove it mathematically", that's still wrong because those people don't have a choice about being a member of that group and still exist in society. Discriminating against them drags society down. It's a prisoners dilemma. If everybody hires fairly then the relative drag is spread across the entire economy and everyone comes out better in the end. If they try to cheat then they'll have a local advantage but in the end it only encourages everyone else to cheat and you end up in the worst case scenario with the massive drag on society as a whole.
So the only rational solution for these corporations is to pretend to be as inclusive as possible while secretly trying to cheat as much as possible, which is exactly what we see. When some dumbass publishes a paper to the entire world saying "Hey, we should openly cheat.", of course he's going to get fired.
Or you can just move most of your operations to Asia or Eastern Europe where they don't have these western liberal ideological impediments to business. And Ironically provide a higher percentage of highly qualified Women in STEM professions.
Well what do you know, I think you just proved that the ratio of qualified women in STEM professions in the Western world is due to cultural discrimination or disincentivisation instead of inherent capability!
Point being it is too complicated to nail down a biological factor that was determined from birth.
No culture is completely free from environmental influence. As we age, the influences from our youth act like compound interest. These can change the way we think. Nurture impacts nature, and vice versa. The generally accepted view these days is the process is cyclical,
"neurological traits develop over time under the simultaneous influence of epigenetic, genetic and environmental influences. Everything about humans involves both nature and nurture" [1]
Men are impacted the same way. The argument in the memo is that (1) tech jobs are passion jobs for men to a greater degree than women, hence in societies where people are more able to follow their passion you'd see relatively more men in tech (2) men compete on financial success to a greater degree than women, even if this is not required for survival, so in affluent societies you'd see relatively more men in tech. This would explain why the difference is greater in societies where there is less economic pressure, even though those societies are on average more egalitarian.
> If that person says "here's a study which says this, we should consider this in an open minded fashion" it doesn't matter. The message is unacceptable.
Ah, the famous, "I don't agree with it so it must be wrong" argument. I can see how the smart and well-reasoning people on HackerNews would use that. Yes...
Again, like many others you are confusing "less people from this group are qualified" with "people from this group are less qualified". The first doesn't say anything about single individuals, and doesn't suggest any discriminatory practice against the group. The second does.
One of the women in the article addresses that very aptly:
> Assuming that it’s true that women on average are more likely to have trait X, why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women, or that if she IS like other women, that the trait has no bearing on her job performance?
Creating a stereotype generates distrust in the individuals that are part of the group described by the stereotype. You yourself had to delve on the wording of the phrase to explain why you think it's different. Do you think the average person would put as much thought on the wording?
99% of humanity wouldn't get hired at Google, male or female. As long as the hiring bar is kept high enough, there's no reason for Google employees to especially distrust women over men.
And yet, this is my opinion, the software quality could be a lot better at google. For example google docs was broken in Firefox for over a day for me. Google Maps crashes on certain routes preventing me getting a route. Whatever they are doing isn't enough. Also the UX at google is a mess.
Sometimes poor UX seem to be for a reason. Be it Facebook or Google, I feel like extorted product rather than the user. I wish someone created a search engine that I could pay for.
Women, or better, individuals, don't have to overcome any "additional barrier". They have to prove they have the qualifications for the job they want, as everybody else. Each person is a different individual and has to be judged as such, as simple as that.
And yet, stereotypes do play a role in generating prejudice. In a utopic unprejudiced society, where all people are treated exactly the same by everyone and where there's no pre-conceived notion of "gendered careers", then each person would stand for themselves and their choice of career wouldn't be affected by externalities.
As is, this is 2017 and we have white supremacists chanting about Jews and ramming cars into people. Clearly, we are not even close to that Utopia.
That in companies like Google people are not treated the same, and in what measure, is something that is open for debate, not an assumption.
But besides that, if the solution is to dedicate any special effort in hiring from this or that group, then employees from that group will feel they have to prove they really are at the same level as the others. Which is the opposite of what you wanted, and exactly what the female engineers in this interview complain about.
I can understand this. But things can be offensive and still be true. It's a possibility. I'm not particularly fond of pointing out, or even researching, possible differences between groups of people; however, the insistence on the opposite, when it's not perceived as backed up by substantial proofs, ends up provoking a response from those who value truth at least as much as harmony.
Are you saying that even if it is true the message is unacceptable and you cannot say it? I think you just made the point that we cannot talk about some things.
I'm always amazed at how touchy discussions on that topic are, even more so than the Male/Female ones. I personally wouldn't bring up any studies/factual-statistics regarding it in polite conversation with a member of the relevant race being present.
There is a whole wikipedia article devoted to it with a range of information on the topic:
"I personally wouldn't bring up any studies/factual-statistics regarding it in polite conversation with a member of the relevant race being present. [links to studies]"
Which is to say you either A: don't consider hn polite conversation or B: don't imagine the "relevant race" is present.
I am well aware of my inabilities to tackle this issue properly, so ... I don't write a big document about it and circulate it. Discretion is an issue here too. If you are not capable of addressing an issue in a productive manner, then don't, especially if it's not even related to your job. James was hired as an engineer to work on engineering stuff; he wasn't hired as a sociologist to work on diversity stuff. He made the choice to inject himself into something in an ill-advised manner when he could've instead simply not done so.
To be fair, from his perspective it appears he was trying to discuss discrimination taking place against him. I'd think long and hard before I told a woman to shut up if they were talking about the same. There's actually a reasonable argument that his document is protected speech and Google violated federal employment law by firing him.
He was like it or not thrust into it though by the choices google has made, or appeared to make. When your hiring demographics do not roughly match graduation demographics you are not being honest. There is every appearance that google is discriminating against males in their efforts to search out women. This might be best for google overall, but he is a male which means it is not in his personal favor.
If they were thinned out in primary, middle, high school, or in university, how does Google bring those women back with their hiring practices? The premise here did involve "biased graduation demographics", which I assume to mean proper educational credentials for the job.
There are still more qualified women making it through university than Google could possibly hire. Google just has to try a bit harder to find them.
Example: Men and women are equally qualified by nature, but the graduating class contains 800 qualified men and 200 qualified women due to unfair "thinning". Google needs to hire 200 people, so they hire 100 men (1 out of 8 in the graduating class) and 100 women (1 out of 2 in the graduating class).
But to do that they have to consider and then discriminate using the gender of their applicants. The position in your example seems to be that two wrongs make a right - discrimination favored men at some point and so discriminating against men in the hiring practice is reasonable.
I strongly disagree with that position - as far as is possible that conversation has been had and settled; companies shouldn't be discriminating on gender. I dunno what the law in California is but my stance is that discriminating on gender should be illegal. Even if the people doing the discriminating might feel they have a moral right to it :P.
Google has to compete with all the other companies for the same pool of talent. They can out compete them with more money, but that would raise eye brows after awhile. Something has to give somewhere when supply is constrained.
The only real solution to the gender gap involves fixing the talent pipeline and then waiting N years for the talent to start coming through. Everything else is just a stop gap that is bound to create distortions.
It would be different if there was lots of talent that just couldn't get jobs because of overt discrimination (e.g. as is the case with ageism), but the gender gap is not that easy of a problem.
Much of Google's diversity work goes toward fixing the talent pipeline by working with students. In the memo Damore criticizes these attempts by saying something like these programs are misleading female students into thinking that programming is more people-oriented (i.e. suitable for women) than it is.
Sure, but that is a different point entirely. Even if Google was getting that wrong, it isn't really that controversial to almost all of us; programming has always been prone to misrepresentation and taught in wrong ways to both boys and girls.
Incidentally, working in a big corp, programming these days is more of a social activity than it once was for reasons completely unrelated to gender. The day of the lone wolf programmer is long past!
> The day of the lone wolf programmer is long past!
I wish this disastrous extrovert invasion were more clearly disclosed. It took me a long time to realize that my maddeningly arthritic big corp experience wasn't just an outlier.
Yes, your answer is clear but isn't correct. It doesn't actually correct any biases, it doesn't create female talent out of thin air. It only moves them from other companies to one company.
It's not the quality, it's the intent. He went for an adversarial debate, not a discussion.
The memo reads as him knowingly and intentionally starting a fight. My assumption, from reading the memo, was that he was expressing an opinion he knew to be controversial, knew would upset people, but wanted to make a point of proving he was right anyway in the face of those upset people. It reads a lot like the vaguely provocative way people write about such things on twitter/reddit/here.
In a work environment, that approach can and will get you fired. It should cause you career problems even if you do it for mundane things like type theory, or memory management, or distributed systems. Do it on something controversial and cause a huge problem for the company, and of course they are going to fire you. Especially since in this context adversarial = hostile work environment.
Why is a debate worse than a discussion? We strive for debate on all other topics? If you actually want to challenge assumptions you must debate and evaluate the merits of someone else's argument. A discussion would just be you think x and I think y. A debate puts warrants behind the claims in those beliefs.
Adversarial debate is worse than discussion for reasons that these interviewees said:
>The discussion around this has followed the trajectory of most of the polarizing mass discussion in the last few years; everyone comes out the other side with their opinions more calcified than ever, and more convinced than before of the intractability of the other side.
Damore wasn't walking into this ready to discuss and/or learn, he wanted to blast his opinion internally with no intention of attempting to change it.
I've reiterated what the person said in the article. If your burden of proof is word semantics, then do I really need to elaborate to you more on the definitions of debate vs discussion?
1. All parties are experienced with debates and enjoy debates. In particular, they can partake in a debate and then, afterward, dispassionately evaluate the arc of the debate; OR
2. The setting is inherently adversarial and there is a third party who will ultimately decide the outcome.
Almost all workplace conversations -- and indeed almost all life conversations -- do not fall into one of these two buckets. In particular:
1. Making use of debate in a search for truth is a difficult and non-universal skill.
For individual debaters to get something out of a debate, they need to know how to disengage from their advocacy and evaluate the arc of the debate from an objective vantage point. This is a skill that requires training. Discussions, on the other hand, allow people to perform this switching between viewpoints as the discussion unfolds. This is much more natural.
2. Adversarial settings create emotional attachment. In debates, people very often become emotionally attached to their arguments and advocacy, causing ego to get in the way of a search for truth. In contrast, discussions do not require a stable advocacy, they are non-adversarial, and no one "wins". These characteristics de-emphasize ego and place the emphasis on whatever actually important issue is at hand.
3. Debates often end up confusing quality of argument with ground truth.
It's always important to remember that constructing arguments is a skill and is time-consuming. It's certainly possible to "win" a debate and still be dead wrong about ground truths -- either by refining debating skill or by throwing more resources into argument construction.
4. Most people don't enjoy debates. I don't have any evidence here, but I think it's probably true. And in a work place, keeping your co-workers happy is probably a lot more important to achieving the company's goals than whatever epsilon benefit debate has over discussion.
Maybe if universities looked more like The Academy everyone would be competent and comfortable in debates, and also understand their inherent limitations as a mechanism in the search for truth. But that's not the world we live in.
So, although I enjoy a good debate as much as the next person, I've found that debates are a truly terrible method for making decisions in most professional settings.
I'd say that this conversation fits under the first criteria I listed for circumstances where debate makes sense. Do you disagree?
If you read my post, it's immediately apparent -- from the very first sentence!!! -- that I am not stating that debate is always worse than discussion. I'm providing a list of reasons why debate is often not preferable to discussion, and particularly in workplaces (e.g., bullet point 4).
So I'm not trying to stifle this debate at all. In fact, exactly the opposite. I explicitly identified one class of circumstances -- which encapsulates this thread -- where debate actually works very well.
Rather, I'm explaining why debate is an objectively bad communication mechanism in many circumstances, and particularly in typical work places.
> stifle debate
Return to your original comment.
WHY is stifling debate bad? Basically, because debate forces us to substantiate our beliefs+. Why is substantiating our beliefs good? Presumably because we're interested in truth. So debate is not some inherent good; it's a useful and indeed sometimes indispensable tool for finding truth.
But I've claimed (points 1-4) that debate, in some circumstances, actually actively harms our search for truth. Again, not all circumstances, but some.
So it's very unclear to me why you would claim that stifling debate is a bad thing without responding to my four critiques of debate as a mechanism for finding truth.
Is having debates more important than finding truth? Is robust debate more important than getting things done? ++
> you think is so self evident that it does not need any
Oh cool, now I get to yell at you about dubious unwarranted claims ;-)
--
+ It's possible to have non-argumentative discussions in which everyone is forced to substantiate their claims; this is about good communication and critical thinking, not debate vs. discussion. Backing off from a combative tone is only equivalent to "stifling" when your communication skills are sub-par.
++ Finally, on a personal note, this realization that debate is often counter-productive was a huge turning point in my career and in my personal life. Identifying when debates are and are not appropriate is an important professional and life skill. E.g., I never, ever start a debate when I'm trying to convince someone to change a workplace policy. It's totally and completely unsurprising to me that doing so backfired in a big way, because the same thing has happened to me.
I don't get any of that from the memo. Neither did the woman developer who made me aware of it's existence. She marveled at the media response, saying she found nothing provocative or adversarial about the memo.
See for example "Edith's" point in the linked article "Edith: There’s a difference between “let’s have a discussion” and “let me tell you what’s up, all you wrong people.”"
To me, it's really hard not to imagine the author being the type of person who would have a "I'm an Atheist, debate me" shirt. It's written in that style.
Beyond that I don't really know what to say. Technical discussions unfortunately frequently end up this way too, so maybe its easy to get used to it. But its counter-productive.
And note, I'm suggesting why it pissed people off at google and should have got him fired. It isn't an explanation of the media reaction per-say because in the context of a public discussion there is no precept that you are cooperating with people (unlike your co-workers) and your audience isn't going to repeatedly interact with you. So adversarial arguments are common and generally accepted. It would have been fine as an op-ed in a news paper (though IMHO doesn't make the quality bar). Its not in a discussion with co workers.
Many people initially responded angrily because it was reported on by the media as an anti-diversity memo and purposely mischaracterized Damore's intentions. Also the versions initially published had all citations removed making it look like he was just pontificating.
I don't get any of that from the memo. Neither did the woman developer who made me aware of it's existence.
If we're going with anecdote, the memo sure read as a hostile dropped-bombshell to every female Googler I've talked to on the subject.
Regardless of whether it was the author's intent to do harm, or to be antagonistic, he absolutely did - both to individuals and the company as a whole.
The memo suffered from a lack of 2nd order thinking. If Google really is using its diversity programs to "lower the bar", that's what should have been proven and addressed, whether men and women have innate differences in talent for certain occupations is irrelevant. It's Google's perogative/obligation to find and retain the best talent. I suspect that's what the purpose of their diversity programs are for. If they're not, and they are truly attempting to "lower the bar" for ideological reasons, then by all means call them on it, but the labor market will punish them for you. The whole memo was an irrelevant red herring to the topic of Google's hiring practices.
I don't see the correlation between diversity programs and retaining the best talent. Not because diversity isn't important, or because it's a negative thing, but because in general diversity programs function by more closely examining/attracting a subset of a larger total population of workers. You could still of course find the best talent within those subsets, but the implication is still that you could just as easily miss the top talent that isn't in those subsets.
Why is it binary? I'm pretty sure you can focus on both. Also, it's not hard to get candidates that are non-diverse, almost by definition the status quo favors their hiring, hence the diversity programs.
I didn't mean to imply that both can't be done at the same time. I thought you meant that diversity programs were an inherent part of finding the best talent when you wrote
> "It's Google's perogative/obligation to find and retain the best talent. I suspect that's what the purpose of their diversity programs are for."
To me this meant that to find the best talent it's more effective to focus on subsets of the total talent pool, which didn't make sense to me.
The purpose wasn't to prove that Google is using its diversity programs for nefarious purposes; only to raise the question that Google's diversity aims might be misguided and even potentially harmful per their stated goals. He supports his argument by pointing to studies that suggest men and women may be differently interested, in which case we shouldn't expect 50/50 distribution.
Perhaps whether or not Google's diversity programs are lowering the bar is the more important question; it's also one he likely wasn't well-positioned to tackle (it requires a lot more resources to prove/disprove bar-lowering compared to writing a memo to express a concern).
I've always assumed this was an official rule of Hacker News commentary, but now that I look for it, I don't see it explicitly mentioned in the guidelines. Yet it somehow seems to be woven into the fabric here.
The opposite is to paint your opposition as despicable as possible to show that you are righteous and just. I feel like I've been getting way too much of this from Facebook in the last couple weeks.
There is some irony there, because a common tactic for derailing complaints of sexism towards women is "maybe you're right but you said it in a way that hurts people's feelings, so we're going to ignore you. Try again next time."
I think the challenge is there is disagreement about who is the aggrieved party. Are women aggrieved because the memo made them feel unwelcome, or is Damore the aggrieved party because he was raising a grievance?
I think Damore is aggrieved because Google leadership had chances to provide more constructive criticism, missed those chances, then resorted to a draconian resolution.
Also, I don't know why aggrievement needs to be exclusive. More than one party can be aggrieved.
My main criticism of the memo has been the external discussion it provoked. Like anyone who's been following the story I obviously have my own feelings on it. But, what seems to be missing is the social context to judge if he was out of line in how he delivered his memo or simply because he delivered it at all.
I don't know how often memos of this nature circulate around google and that's important context because a lot of the discussion really seems to boil down to "How do we feel that this guy got fired". Do other employees send out memos that also contemplate diversity in tech/google with similar length and calls to action? If so, do those employees send out their messages via the same channels that this employee sent out his memo? Without understanding more about the social context the employee was operating in a lot of necessary context is missing imo.
What I understand from this situation is that he ran through a minefield and stepped on a few mines. Could someone else have run through that minefield and not stepped on any mines... probably. Is it reasonable to expect some one to be able to run through a minefield and not step on mines? No. Should we prevent people from running through the minefield...?
Is it worth it? As far as I can tell, it's a voluntary initiative by Google which is well meaning. And I question if it really "hurts" anyone. Hiring processes are never perfect but Google seems to do a good job out of anyone.
I think the most empathetic comment on the memo that I read was that it would have been to everyone's benefit if Damore had showed it to several more experienced engineers and incorporated suggestions. No matter who you are, you can use an editor.
I don't think you can honestly say publishing it to 10's of thousands of readers constitutes editorial consultation and advice.
Editing and review consists of find a small (one handful) number of trusted friends and mentors whose insight you value, having them read it and make suggestions and comments, perhaps multiple cycles, and only then publish to people you don't know and are hoping to persuade.
It troubles me that this kind of (IMO) disingenuousness shows up again and again in regard to the memo. Not just in this specific comment, but multiple times whenever someone points out a flaw there is always a response of "but he really did do that, you just took it wrong". No, I didn't, and neither did others. He screwed up.
As I understand it Damore did seek out feedback from smaller groups of people before releasing it company wide but even if he didn't, who cares? It's very common to publish documents to the entire world asking for review. That's what the RFC processed for digital standards is, that's what arXiv does for academics.
You are the one being disingenuous with this inane critique of the specifics of how Damore sought out feedback for his ideas. He really did do that, he really sought out criticism and continues to do so, you didn't take it wrong though... you're just critiquing it in an inane way. If you disagree with his points, then engage with the points. If the way in which it was written is so deeply flawed then it shouldn't be hard to refute them.
> As I understand it Damore did seek out feedback from smaller groups of people
Not in the least the same thing as seeking editorial comment from a set of volunteers who know what they're reading. But I can see you are insistent that he did in fact do something he didn't do, which is the definition of disingenuousness.
I wish you good fortune in your future HR counseling sessions.
To wit, basically no one did read it, or at least no one responded to it. Until it was leaked to the media and became the media storm we're now witnessing.
From outside, there's no fundamental difference between a good argument and a persuasive one, even though they're ideally orthogonal. If there's an argument that seems good, and you don't understand why people don't accept it, the delivery is the simplest (or perhaps just least well understood) thing to update.
Most importantly to me, it was written directly as a response to a request for comments on the subject. People made it out to be a rant someone just threw out there, but it wasn't. It was also published a month before, and internal polls at Google found it to be non-offensive.
That doesn't stop people from whipping up mass hysteria about it.
Personally, I like how the criticisms have shifted from outrage over statements Damore never made (and contexts in which he never posted) to sharp criticisms of his "unprofessional delivery" as though a post on a discussion board needed to be better than most published academic content. I can't frankly imagine a more conciliatory delivery. Of course, we mustn't blame the folks who are cultivating faux outrage; this is clearly James' fault... /s
I agree that we need to treat James as a human being who is allowed to be flawed, but there's something to be said about why he added the biology component to his argument that wasn't necessary and simply distracted from the core argument. I would simply say that if he had cut that portion out, the conversation that is happening right now might become more productive and focused on hiring practices outside of Google.
While I do agree that sometimes these new practices fail, it has done more good for organizations implementing similar practices than bad.
Speaking as a minority engineer, I don't like the fact that I have to constantly prove myself just to have people then assume that my beyond-the-norm performance is simply middling for my ethnicity; I've had to eat a lot of crow, but I take solace in the fact that others are able to come on-board because of these moments where you take the hits.
I don't known if I'm being clear, I empathize with Edith and all about having to "overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills" and I wish there was a better way but I feel like there is some cultural requirement that we have to bear the burden for the people who come after.
> there's something to be said about why he added the biology component to his argument that wasn't necessary and simply distracted from the core argument. I would simply say that if he had cut that portion out, the conversation that is happening right now might become more productive and focused on hiring practices outside of Google.
I'm not sure I agree. First of all, the article by Scott Alexander referenced in this post makes mostly the same arguments, and the post praises its content for being better presented. I can't tell much of a difference in presentation; certainly not one that justifies praise for Alexander and crucifixion for Damore. Secondly, 99% of Damore's critics are outraged about things he never remotely said; it was only after their accusations were thoroughly debunked that they shifted their criticism to his presentation. I seriously doubt any of the outrage is sincere; it seems far more likely that Damore made a suitable target for folks projecting their insecurities or even their legitimate victim experiences.
We'll have to agree to disagree then, I'm not trying to compare what he has written to others; I realize that others are reacting more strongly, but I only mentioned that point to move past it. The rest of what I said is more towards how it feels as a minority and how it feels to me being affected by diversity policies (that isn't to equate what every minority, race/gender/etc., experiences in the way of adversity, etc.).
> I’m just exhausted by having this same damn argument over and over again since I was a teenager and the amount of time and energy I keep having to spend to counter it.
This is a human being and a colleague. I really think people ought to satisfy a very, very high evidential and expressive bar before they do this to other people. I don't say this as a dictum or law, but as an ethical suggestion.
There are socially appropriate ways to start a discussion. Taking your concerns directly to a senior leader -- who can explain the other pieces that are being missed here, such as empathy for end-users -- provides a wider view of why diversity programs exist and why companies consider them critical to success.
If you want to build products exclusively for men, by all means, staff your teams with all men. But bringing a diversity of experience into all levels of a company makes that company's products and engagement experience better for everyone. This is especially true when you're talking about a consumer-focused product (like many of Google's products are).
> I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion.
And perhaps it shouldn't! It might, however, limit their ability to write at length about sensitive, culturally-deep issues at work without getting fired and having their career stained.
Similarly, perhaps one's ability to write code shouldn't disbar them from a hackathon, but if they write a bunch of hacky code for a quadcopter and it flies into the audience, well, then they're in a bit of a pickle indeed.
I strongly agree. The double-standard is remarkable though. Merely questioning the liberal position with less than a perfect rhetorical command is nearly criminal, but if you endorse a liberal position, you can be incorrect and even downright hateful toward your position, and lots of respectable (sometimes powerful) people will defend you against any criticism. I always catch a lot of flak for calling out liberal advantages (I'm a moderate liberal, for whatever that's worth), but pretending they don't exist hasn't exactly been doing wonders for the tone of our political discourse either.
Interesting is that all Google related news (in the last two weeks) got flagged/hidden ("it's the algorithm", "it's the user", blabla). And now HN had time to post their own opinion piece - this one stays.
That's false and nasty. You've made up so many groundless insinuations against us over so many years that at some point I'm just going to give up and ban you; I don't think it's reasonable to expect patience with false accusations to be infinite.
In the meantime, here are three comments that explain how moderators had nothing to do with this.
I don't think it's false and nasty. I was thinking the same thing ... quite objectively. There were at least two discussions that I thought were very reasonable, and they got flagged into oblivion very quickly. So I don't know why the YC link gets to be the exception. It feels wrong.
Maybe it is due to the users, but if that is so, it feels wrong enough to give me a pretty big loss of faith in the dynamics of the community.
Re-reading my comment I realize that the context was obviously missing, so here's some context.
The issue isn't that you or other users had that perception; that's natural, which is why I've posted half a dozen explanations of what actually happened, i.e. moderators didn't touch the post (other than in one routine way I described) and its prominence on the front page was because user upvotes dramatically outweighed flags. It was purely a community response.
The reason I used the word 'nasty' is because this user has a long history of insinuating that we're lying (("it's the algorithm", "it's the user", blabla)), when they have more reason than any other HN user to know we don't do that. I've spent hours personally, patiently explaining this to him over at least a dozen occasions where he has made stuff like this up (most often, accusing us of moderating HN to be shills for Microsoft, which is silly). Good faith doesn't act this way.
It occurs to me, maybe this is another instance of the left engaging in silencing tactics and maybe that is a weakness in the flagging algorithm.
I can't vote "don't flag this". So if there are approximately two sides to a discussion, and one side wants to flag it to silence the discussion, then the discussion is going to get flagged no matter what.
So the side that wants to silence just selectively silences the opinions they don't agree with, and they win.
Interesting you say that Jonathan. As someone who you would identify as part of the left, I noticed the pro-diversity posts were always flagged. I assumed it was by the right or whatever group you identify with...or maybe people on HN want to avoid the shouting matches that always come with these topics.
I've personally flagged far more articles on this topic than I usually do. However I am not "on the left". I consider my politics to be slightly right of centre. I have expressed no public view on the content of the Damore memo. But there's been so much sound and fury that only the strongest signal is now welcome in my feed. I did not flag this YC posting; it is, by contrast, very low noise.
I thought you can repudiate a flagging, isn't that the "vouch" control? I'm not familiar with exactly when it is or isn't offered.
The silencing happens because there is a huge left/right discrepancy on this site and because silencing your opposition became acceptable, due to victimhood culture.
One thing I would be very curios to know is the age distribution of people advocating silencing and no platforming.
I suspect that younger people support this due to the helicopter parent style they were more likely to have grew with, where the parent suppresses anything discomforting for the child instead of letting the child deal with it on it's own. So when that child grows it's normal for him to demand 'the state' or 'the corporation' to do the same thing, because only his comfort and views matter.
If you look at the full range of such 'discrepancies' people report perceiving on this site, it's unmistakeable that they are in the eye of the beholder. Each side says HN is dominated by the opposite site. It's a cognitive bias: the comments you dislike stand out more and seem more prominent than the ones you like, leading to the impression that the community is against you. Both sides feel this way (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15027667, in the same thread!) and the irony is that the impression gets stronger, not weaker, the closer the community is to evenly divided.
You don't typically comment, so I'm unsure if I should consider this as some sort of a (pre?) warning.
I'm a leftist. But what I see right now on the left deeply concerns me and makes me reconsider, stuff like black people advocating black only areas or events, which is ironic, because in the 60 they were fighting exactly against this, or leftists justifying and advocating violence against the extreme right, using the all time favorite excuse that "bad people deserve to be beaten".
FWIW I also got the impression that certain kinds of articles quickly disappear from the front page, and you can see on them more comments than upvotes, which is in general unusual and which suggests heavy downvoting. So to me it doesn't appear that the community is balanced. Which is not to say that this is a bad thing, many times some views are better than others.
I didn't intend the comment as a warning. Note that the word 'please' did not appear :)
No, it's really just that this misperception is so universal that I can't help but answer it even though I know it will do no good. Maybe it's a Beckett play.
I've wondered about the whole flagging algorithm. I've never tried flagging anything; I just move on.
However, flagging does seem to serve a purpose while at the same time it could be abused. Could a throttle for flagging be introduced to slow down abusive flaggers? What I mean is maybe the ability to flag postings is only possible if you haven't flagged something in say 7 days.
This interview is literally a criticism that says very little about his style of writing. When they talk about "how" he approached this subject, it has to do with overall tone and the medium of delivery, not the nuances of his writing style.
> If he had spoken with some of them individually and spent some time trying to better understand their views on the issues, I suspect he would have done a better job choosing words that would have inspired debate rather than hostility.
That's it. He didn't talk to a single woman at Google about this manifesto before spreading it like gospel. All he had to do was talk to other people.
I have some people at work whose opinions I value highly that I occasionally run ideas and documents by before disseminating things to a wider group. It's very helpful, and has sometimes caught potential damaging misinterpretations before they were spread too widely, allowing me to reword things.
I definitely agree that if he'd simply had a few women he knew and trusted at work read it before he disseminated it widely then this all might have been avoided. If he didn't know any women at work that he trusted with this then that itself is a huge problem.
For what it's worth, he did run the document by others at Google and -- based on what I've read -- they were the ones who spread the document, not he. That's not to say he didn't intend to do it at some point, but that it was through his efforts to get said feedback that the fire started.
> If he didn't know any women at work that he trusted with this then that itself is a huge problem.
Given the fact that he was fired over this, i.e. Google thinks it's very bad, and assuming he had a hunch this was so, is it reasonable to believe he should be able to trust a female coworker with this memo not to file a complaint?
Put more generally: is it reasonable that one should expect one's coworkers to keep silent about a fireable offense?
Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.
Advice Damore would have done well to heed when writing his essay. You should also note there are serious questions about its validity - this is not just a matter of tone or style.
So I read that, and it's not so much "serious questions about validity" as "overall weak agreement disguised as rebuttal". The main takeaway in the form of disagreement is that social science findings are mostly untrustworthy/not usable?
The point I took away was that this is not settled science at all and he was cherry picking results in order to buttress a conclusion which he'd already made, but also that the differences between men and women on average simply are not large enough to explain the disparities in tech, not even close. There are many other rebuttals which focus on other points, for example if the reason for disparities in women and men in tech is biological, why was the balance significantly altered within a few decades from the 70s to now?
Please don't post ideological snark to HN, regardless of what your underlying point is. It poisons discussion and we can all use less poison right now.
A common criticism by each four of the female engineers is how the memo effected them in their job and how they had to prove themselves afterward. This strongly reminds me of about a case a year ago when a kindergarten teacher was tried and charged for rape against several children. After a lot of media attention, many male teachers all over the nation reported to constantly having prove to parents and fellow female teachers that just because they are male and chosen that profession it doesn't mean that they are criminals or are higher risk employees. Not only that, but many school implemented procedures that limited what male teacher were allowed to do, furthering pushing a second class status on them. Many also received threats of violence, and since both the left, the feminist movement, and the right fanned the flame against male teachers, many just gave up and left the profession. If memory is right, one news article ended with "I just wish I could go to work and do my job, but that is no longer possible".
I would very much like to see a discussion on how to solve this kind of problem.
The feminist movement as a whole is very much against gendered norms about who should and shouldn't be a kindergarten teacher. Which feminist movements did you see fanning these particular flames?
To be fair, movements are generally made up from people self-identify as members and thus movements get judged based on what those people say.
This happened in Sweden, and in one article I recall reading the comment that "there is no need for male kindergarten teachers" from local politician from the left block which identify as feminist (current left block call themselves as a feminist government). The left block was also in power during that time which created those restriction for male teachers. One argument used to defend those restriction was that science showed that most criminals of this kind is male, and thus argued that male employees were higher risk.
It would be hard to say anything about "The feminist movement as a whole". At the time, no movement was stepping up in support of the male kindergarten teachers.
Like with all movements, there are a lot of people who join on and don't seem to really understand it. Intersectionality is catching on among feminists, but "men bad, women good" is still a way too common sentiment.
Please keep ideological talking points off HN. If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
If you could point out to us here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism where it says that all so-called or self-described third wave feminists see men as second class citizens that would be super helpful in this debate.
Please don't take HN threads further down generic ideological rabbit holes, or rather black holes. Nothing good comes of them and the thread never returns.
I desperately want make male childcare workers for my children. I honestly could careless about women in tech. Installing a more even view of gender on our kids will prob do a lot more good for women in tech in the long term than any amount of screaming now.
I've known of at least one child care/early education facility that employee fairly equal numbers. It's interesting how some kids (male and female) just respond better to men.
Yeah, I am a good mom and all, but the kids do interact somewhat differently to my husband. I support diversity. It's good to be diverse jsut in general, life is more interesting that way, and it really bugs me how in such a critical period of a person's life, their exposure is so so so not diverse.
This was my first thought on the male childcare thing,too Could not make it past the first 30 minutes, felt so much empathy for Mads' situation and anger at the teacher/administrator for assuming guilt immediately. The fact that the director/writer gave us an omniscient view point with the sex acts happening in front of the child at home sort of forced one into Mads' corner right away.
I suppose this is the one point I always find myself pondering when these women in tech arguments arise, why is there no push to for women in the oil-manufacturing industry? How many women do we have working on oil rigs? It's a very well paying job with a lot of opportunity for people with less than stellar backgrounds, but trying to get their life on track. There are lots of jobs out there that are close to 100% male, and some don't even require a lot of physical strength. Where is the outcry?
Maybe you have a point, I should look into this and see if there are forums where women are trying to push into this field. I have family that works on off-shore rigs, and I've never heard a peep about it. But that is anecdotal.
This so much; after a pedophile case hit in Amsterdam, where a day care worker molested 80 kids, a lot of male daycare and elementary school workers either lost their job or quit from all the distrust. There's rules everywhere that men aren't allowed to be alone with children.
>both the left, the feminist movement, and the right fanned the flame against male teachers
I find it hard to believe that this would be generally true. Source?
Edit: obviously you're always going to have some twats doing things like that, but that's true for everything. I'm looking for evidence that it's more than average here.
I think it is a lot of crazy moms that fan the flame, just from my observation. Adn the crazy moms are fanned by the media of creepy dudes. Do you know how frequently on my mommy group will be some dude's photo show up "this guy was taking picture of my kid!!!" ....... all the other moms are like. OMG OMG OMG!! Call the police.. Then there are always a few moms go like, FOR WHAT??!! for being a dude and taking some pictures at a public place.. You know there hasn't been a child missing in this neighborhood since 1995.... Then all the other moms yell at the reasonable mom..etc etc. There is a mix, I don't think it's limited to leftist or conservative moms. If anything, I found the really really rich moms (not conservative per se, but lean that way more) to be a bit more crazy in terms of thinking the world is dangerous and if their kid scrap their knee they need to go to the ER..
I second the request. I spent several years as a K-5 teacher, I didn't perceive this dynamic at all. All US teachers are rightfully extremely wary of being alone with any child, and from what I've seen that is a concern for teachers of all genders.
The specific case was in 2015, Sweden, Kristianstad (if you want to search for sources). The media storm grow a bit extra since the individual had worked as a substitute in 26 different schools and the potential list of victims was very large. Now in 2017 I hope that most of the male-only restrictions are gone. People forget, new fears replaces old fears, and risk assessments get realign.
It was a couple years ago and I could not hope to find all the media articles from that time, including radio and TV reports. But I wish that no teachers should ever need to be wary of being alone with a child. It seems similar when I hear people that they should be wary of being alone with female coworkers in fear of being accused of sexual assault.
Edit: I did consider when I wrote the above comment yesterday that I might be doing the exact same harm that the Female engineers in the article was worried about by bringing up the case. At the same time it was one of the reasons why it so strongly reminded me of this case. As a teacher, do you find it that writing this on HN is harming teachers by bringing up pedophilia in the context of kindergarten teachers?
I really enjoyed the well reasoned discussion. I think a lot more constructive dialog is happening now that people have calmed down.
Of all the sentiments expressed in the article, I mainly disagree with the comment that Damore did the company harm.
He posted his thoughts on an internal discussion board and someone else leaked this internal document to the press. The leaker did harm to Google not Damore. In fact, I think the memo had been posted for a week or two before it was leaked. If your argument for firing Damore is that he did the company harm, you should look at the person who took an internal company document and made it public.
There are many people who believe he should have been fired anyway for offending his female coworkers and perhaps making them feel unsafe, but that is a different argument all together with its own merits and faults depending strongly on your stance on what constitutes tolerable speech.
Lets assume that we're in an alternative universe where the document was never leaked.
The document still did harm. Just read this quote from the posted article-
> When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have? How do I prove myself to people one way or another? The additional mental and emotional burden on me just to do my job is not negligible at all, and it’s also a pretty crappy way to start every day thinking: “Will the team/manager/VC I talk with today realize I’m qualified, or will they be making stereotypical assumptions about my abilities and therefore make it harder for me to do my job?” To me, that absolutely makes for a hostile work environment, and it’s an unequal burden my male coworkers don’t have to deal with every day.
That quote wasn't caused by this going public in the way it did, it was caused by it being posted in the first place. There is real harm done if women who work at a company don't feel they are welcome there.
> When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?
Your perspective is that this is harmful because the memo caused self doubt, so the memo was the problem.
From Damore's perspective, if there were no quota/diversity hiring programs at that place of employment, the woman in question would have no reason to suspect the latter. The hiring policy was the problem.
Totally different interpretations of cause and effect.
I've met engineers who have expressed a belief that women are often hired if the recruiter found them attractive, and that those women shouldn't have been hired. While those engineers are able to find employment there will always be places where women don't feel welcome, even with diversity programs in place. It is simply the case that some engineers are grossly sexist and will always think a woman has been hired for some other reason beside technical merit if they have an opportunity to. If Damore can't see that then he hasn't enough experience to be talking about hiring.
Google doesn't operate that way, they has strict hiring policies and procedures. Recruiter or anyone else has no way to influence hiring without doing something shady (doing selective interview like what Damore claimed they were doing).
He said "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate".
He did not say they were lowering the bar, but that by rejecting (proportionally) a greater number of qualified male candidates than qualified female candidates, the bar is effectively lowered.
If what he says is true, that there is a higher false negative rate for men, it's hard to imagine a system where the bar isn't effectively lowered.
The one possibility I saw argued elsewhere is that you could take all qualified men, and randomly reject some of them. At that point, you would expect the bar to be level.
If however you rejected qualified men in a non-random way, which is more plausible, the effect would be to change the bar.
I hadn't ever really thought about this kind of selection effect on the statistics of populations, so would love to hear if this sounds wrong or what the real expected outcome should be.
> Your perspective is that this is harmful because the memo caused self doubt, so the memo was the problem.
It's not about self-doubt, it's about creating a stereotype by which other people (managers, peers) will prejudge you even before you write the first line of code. This prejudice already exists as is, Damore's memo doesn't do anything to help it. If improving women's opportunities at Google was his objective, he failed miserably at it.
I don't think the memo does that. I've not been convinced by anything I've read trying to indicate that it does. I am convinced that people saying it does seem to read more into it and are upset by perceived implications.
If I felt the memo implied or created that stereotype I'd denounce it as well.
It is widely acknowledged that there are social factors that might affect the number of women entering the field. He could've made as valid an argument about the hiring practices affecting diversity, without bringing up the supposed "biological" factor altogether. Not bringing it up would have probably put him in the right side of the Code of Conduct.
At best, it was poor judgement for him to bring it up when it didn't add anything to the conversation. At worst, it betrays a certain level of misogyny. Those of us who tend to assume the worst, might be more inclined to believe the latter, but I wouldn't blame people for believing the former.
I appreciate your response and insight into how people might arrive at a more negative conclusion based on what values they read into the text.
One takeaway I have from this is that discussion about biological differences between sexes is often misused, so should be avoided in discussion related to diversity if you want people to not form an emotional reaction.
The whole thing was a meandering stroll of possible reasons. I absolutely don't see this memo creating a hostile workplace or illiciting the pushback it has garnered simply by what I read in the text. I read a document referencing population level differences between sexes(relevant in the context of attempting to explain differences in preferences that account for the difference in size of the groups) that have no bearing on individual differences between sexes(not even slightly relevant in hiring)
My internal reader probably filled in the benefit of the doubt.
> One takeaway I have from this is that discussion about biological differences between sexes is often misused, so should be avoided in discussion related to diversity if you want people to not form an emotional reaction... I absolutely don't see this memo creating a hostile workplace or illiciting the pushback it has garnered simply by what I read in the text
Right! There's been enough people using biological differences as excuses for all kinds of things before, so it's probably better to resort to that argument only once all other factors have been removed. I believe that's one of the biggest reasons people reacted so badly to this memo. It certainly was the first thing that popped into my head as soon as I started reading his reasoning.
A bit of context is important. Anonymity on the internet has facilitated a rebirth of the "men's rights" movement. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a place for "men's rights" when it comes to recognizing that sexual abuse happens to men too, which is what some of the groups got started, but some of the notorious forums (like the now banned "TheRedPill" subreddit) are virulently misogynistic. There are people openly defending rape, calling women "inferior" and posting fantasies about what they'd do to women who they perceive as "pushy" or holding some power over them. Feminists are demonized to no end. A lot of the rationalization around their rhetoric builds on some of the same bases Damore used for his "biological argument." I'll leave it to your judgment to decide if Damore giving one of his interviews to Stefan Molyneaux - known men's right activist - has anything to do with that or not.
It's that context that made my internal reader go for the worst possible scenario instead of giving him the benefit of the doubt. I guess I'm way more jaded person than you :)
The author of that quote clearly wasn't describing her fears that she had been hired only because of affirmative action, but the claims about her innate inabilities, however slight.
Yes, but this raises the issue of affirmative action causing bias about innate abilities, and that's absolutely true.
If you knew there were a lower bar for people who had red hair, for example, because there's a pay gap and their population ratio isn't represented equally, every time you'd have someone on your team with red hair, you'd wonder if they were there because of the exception made for them or if they got there on pure merit. Thus, affirmative action causes people to question that merit (bias).
Worse, the redhead who got in never knows if they got accepted based on merit or based on some quota, which contributes heavily Impostor syndrome, negative self image and confirmation bias based on that negative self image.
You combine these two things over time and there is absolutely an impact.
Damore's ultimate points were: let's discuss this and, by the way, please don't ignore me just because my opinion is unpopular.
You can flip this argument on its head. As a man I'm often thinking about why the unequal gender distribution of roles and salary within my company is the way it is. I often wonder how much of my own success is due to opportunities and encouragement that women generally don't receive.
The memo didn't cause self doubt, the memo was intended to inspire others to look for doubt (hence the "lowering the bar").
The memo specifically targeted diversity hires as a lower bar. Imagine if a memo started circulating that asked everyone to question whether or not you were hired for your skill. That's a terrible environment to create.
Lowering the bar for a cohort is going to create different distributions of skill in that cohort, this person wasn't the first and won't be the last to come to this conclusion. I think damaging organizational cohesion is never the right choice but both sides of this argument contribute to that damage.
I'm telling you in plain mathematical terms that the way you go about hiring effects the distribution of candidates skill if you introduce any bias into the system regardless of whether or not its a literal or figurative bar or a bias on any parameter. I don't think anyone is going to disagree that biases exist on both sides of the aisle. Arguing about what google does or does not do is futile exercise I made zero claim about google and only believe they have introduced some biases in their hiring in some form.
The thoughts of one twenty-something engineer posted to an internal message board (for these kinds of discussions I might add) does not create a hostile workplace or harm Google in any way.
Basically, in any other context we expect people who have vastly differing views to be able to put them aside and work together. The only exception to this rule seems to be around leftist issues, where if you disagree you are out of luck.
You would expect, for example, the Jewish people and the Islamic people at a company to work together.
The idea that toleration for one memo form a nobody employee marks an entire company as unwelcome is insane. This zero tolerance attitude is a recipe for disaster.
> The thoughts of one twenty-something engineer posted to an internal message board (for these kinds of discussions I might add) does not create a hostile workplace or harm Google in any way.
Considering how all sixteen of my female teammates were pissed off about it, I'm going to go ahead and say you are demonstrably wrong.
How many men take offense to hiring quotas but keep their mouths shut so they don't end up like Damore? You just set up an environment where how someone feels is more important than logic/reason/truth and that is never a good position to be in.
Some people take offence to the fact humans are related to apes and that the earth is more than 6000 years old. Doesn't mean we should tip toe around their ridiculous sensitivities.
Does your workplace have a very large group of young Earth creationists? Does it go out of its way to recruit them? If so, have you posted a ten page memo that says that the hiring bar has been lowered by that effort?
Ok, what happened to Demore would be like me working at a company of young Earth creationists who had an internal message board for discussing controversial religious subjects and then firing me because I brought up natural selection. Is it wrong for me to bring up natural selection or is it wrong for my hypothetical company to entrap me?
Yes, it would be wrong of you to do that. You remember how in the Big Lebowski, Walter asks The Dude "Well, am I wrong?" and The Dude replies "You're not wrong, Walter. You're an asshole."
The problem is that 'asshole' is completely subjective. You can have someone state a fact that a tiny hurts a tiny group of peoples' feelings and they will think he/she is an asshole. That can't be a fireable offense.
Suggest that a piece of code is un-maintainable and that the group should rebuild it and there is a good chance someone will think that makes you an asshole.
You can't go around firing everyone because some idiot gets triggered.
I wouldn't even think about bringing up natural selection to my young Earth creationist coworkers. Not touching that with a 10 foot pole, it would only end badly. There's a reason they say don't talk about politics or religion with your coworkers. Harmony is good for getting work done and I go to work to work.
I'm saying that as some who has actually worked with young Earth creationists before.
I won't speak for all young Earth creationists, but I don't have a problem with natural selection as a means of selecting from existing genetic diversity within a kind, especially as that process is observable and repeatable around us.
Where I contend with evolutionists is the typical narrative that the existence of natural selection implies a process that creates said (structured, positive) genetic diversity from which to select. This latter process is disputed, not the former.
I would be curious to hear your colleagues perspective.
The post I was responding to said that it did not create a hostile working environment. I explained how it did do that. Are you trying to claim that causing offense to a large group is not creating a hostile working environment?
It's too fickle a criterion for fairly firing someone. Especially if you consider he likely didn't mean to offend anyone.
If you think he did mean to offend people, the firing makes more sense.
I don't think "he should have known better" is very fair when neck deep in a discussion about diversity. Sometimes diversity looks like someone not knowing cultural rules.
Hostile work environments are created because of impact, not intent. It doesn't really matter what you meant to do if your actions made thousands of women feel diminished in the workplace.
I also don't think Damore's totally naive when it comes to diversity issues. He did a lot of research and evidently even discussed his concerns with HR. I think it's pretty clear he knew what he was getting into.
(let me just disclaim right away that I'm pretty liberal)
> So it's objective and fair? Or it is too fickle but it doesn't matter?
Whatever the ideological or scientific opposite of Damore's memo is, I would never publish it to anyone -- not even a single person -- at work. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that discussing race or gender issues at work is out of bounds, regardless of your position.
> I think he would have hired a publicist and lawyer before publishing the memo if he knew what was coming.
Aha that's probably true but I'm not talking about the backlash. I'm saying he knew he wasn't just asking to be proven wrong about migratory patterns of ducks. He's aware diversity is a sensitive topic.
> I don't think I'm alone in thinking that discussing race or gender issues at work is out of bounds, regardless of your position.
But most tech employers already broach the subject in many ways. It's not right that employers get to have controversial opinions, including during work hours, but employees do not.
Things like this need to be addressed if we want corporate power to be moderated.
> But most tech employers already broach the subject in many ways. It's not right that employers get to have controversial opinions, including during work hours, but employees do not.
What controversial opinions are you talking about?
Well, apparently all this is still controversial. There are rumors that Zuckerberg might be running for office. CEOs and other leaders giving speeches about politics and participating in political demonstrations. Lobbying the government about political issues unrelated to the core business of the company.
To be clear, I don't think all those things are necessarily bad. But I think letting corporations and corporate leadership have free reign and a big microphone while expecting employees to censor themselves is inconsistent to say the least.
One person taking offense is not demonstration of anything. Sixteen out of sixteen taking offense comes a lot closer to demonstrating that it was offensive, though.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? We're trying for a higher level of discussion here. (Trying and failing, but we can always fail a bit better.)
>You don't get to determine how people receive a message. You
>can only take care to send it in a way that would be
>received well. If everyone in a large and diverse group >
>receives the message poorly, the problem is not with the
>group.
>If you're worried about an angry mob firing you, start
>communicating with care.
This is absolutely false I do get to tell the group how to receive the message. When a group is intolerant the problem is with the group. When people were against interracial marriage and intolerant of other opinions the problem was with the group. When people were against African Americans riding in the front of the bus, the problem was with the intolerant group.
No candy coating, sensitivity training, or messaging was required to tell the angry, intolerant mob that they were wrong, just like they are here.
Suppose that fifteen of them were pissed off and one was not. Would the sixteenth have felt psychologically comfortable in your team expressing the fact that she was not pissed off?
I am saying that they shouldn't have been so pissed off. The bar shouldn't be so low for defining a hostile workplace. Anyone could then get an intolerant mob together and get someone fired for expressing themselves.
You don't get to determine how people receive a message. You can only take care to send it in a way that would be received well. If everyone in a large and diverse group receives the message poorly, the problem is not with the group.
If you're worried about an angry mob firing you, start communicating with care.
Apparently one of the things that prompted the memo is that google is not diverse. There are plenty of different skin colors and genders, butit's an ideological echo chamber.
Additionally people are not protected from offense in the workplace. They're protected from harassment and an abstract memo that doesn't single out individuals is not harassment.
> You would expect, for example, the Jewish people and the Islamic people at a company to work together.
No one wrote a memo claiming that Google hires too many Jews who don't meet the same quality bar due to diversity efforts.
No one wrote a memo claiming Google needs to have mandatory anti-terrorist training because they've recruited a lot of Muslims lately (putting aside the fact that white christian terrorists are far more likely to be your cause of death in the USA).
>Basically, in any other context we expect people who have vastly differing views to be able to put them aside and work together.
Yeah and the way this works is not to bring up potentially offensive or sensitive topics except with coworkers you know really well. When you do bring it up acknowledge other people's viewpoints and ask lots of questions instead of making grand pronouncements.
All workplaces are political. Software development is about working with people and that is inherently a political activity. Took me a very long time to realize that but it is 100% true. The quicker you accept it the further you will go in your career.
>The idea that toleration for one memo form a nobody employee marks an entire company as unwelcome is insane. This zero tolerance attitude is a recipe for disaster.
What if his memo was arguing that black people aren't suited to be engineers period?
What if his memo argued that black people should be sent back to Africa and that the USA should be for white people only? What if he said he only believes this should be the law but so long as it isn't the law we must respect that and treat people equally until the law is changed?
Should Google "tolerate" someone being openly racist simply because they haven't called for violence?
Let's make this even more abstract: what if an employee openly states they think the company is evil and they disagree with the entire mission and direction of the company? Do you really think they won't spread cynicism and negativity? Do you really think they can be effective? Is there really no risk to morale?
Even if he were completely correct (he wasn't) by doing such a sorry ham-fisted job he made himself a liability. Even if he only angered or offended 10 other engineers that alone is reason enough to get rid of him. Hiring and training engineers is expensive.
Corporations are not free speech zones. If you become a liability the company will drop you like a hot-potato and don't you ever forget it.
>(putting aside the fact that white christian terrorists are far more likely to be your cause of death in the USA).
This is not true. Even ignoring the 3,000 people killed in the twin towers, the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting alone killed more people than all right-wing attacks since 9/11/2001 combined. And that includes non-Christian attackers. And such things as neo-Nazis killing pedophiles in prison.
When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?
Isn't this an argument against any form of different hiring practices based on race/gender? Even if distributions of abilities are equal in nature, if a college has a lower bar based on gender, then abilities won't be equal among graduates of that college. Conversely, even if abilities are on average different, if a college has the same bar and same standards based on gender, then you won't have to question if a graduate really deserved to have that credential.
Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still.
In an interview, Damore said part of the "lowered bar" is extra interview rounds for minority candidates. You could call that "more energy", but it also reduces the chances that a given candidate suffers from bad luck.
Consider a 90% free throw shooter vs. a 50% shooter. To get the job, you have to make 3 shots. But the 90% shooter gets 3 shots and the 60% shooter gets 5 shots. All of a sudden the 60% shooter is more likely to get the job.
It highly depends on the details of the interview process, which I don't know, but just to discount it with that logic is impossible.
This analogy doesn't work at all. 3/3 shots is 100% success rate whereas 3/5 shots is 60% - you're literally describing lowering the bar for the 60% shooter.
Additional rounds of interviews are more like trying to accurately diagnose a condition using multiple different tests because the initial test is known to have poor sensitivity and will produce false negatives. Doing multiple rounds may, of course, increase the chance of false positives (reduce specificity); but the assumption in this case is that when hiring minorities the sensitivity of the interview process is much worse than the specificity.
Right, that's why I said it depends on how the interview process is done. Some companies do thumbs up / down by round.
On a reread, Damore actually implies that Google's policies as applied to their interview process are "decreasing the false negative rate" for minorities. Whether this is harmfully discriminatory or not is open to opinion, but what I think is clear there is that the statement is favorable and understanding of his minority peers - the policies did not let anyone through who should not have been. I certainly don't think he should be fired for having given that statement.
I don't see how you don't recognize this as effectively lowering the bar (if not intentionally).
>Additional rounds of interviews are more like trying to accurately diagnose a condition using multiple different tests because the initial test is known to have poor sensitivity and will produce false negatives.
The difference is that what they're testing for isn't a binary proposition (do you have the disease or not), but a spectrum (what is your skill level). Viewing this in terms of false-positives or false-negatives is insufficient. If we think of programming skill as a spectrum, we can ask what is the average top-% of candidates who pass the interview (we might guess its top 5% of all developers). If everyone has the same test then the average top-% is unchanged regardless of any efforts to get more minorities to take the test. But once you start giving more tries to minorities your average top-% necessarily reduces.
Whatever your test is designed to admit (say you're interested in hiring only the top-10% of developers), the average of those who pass will be higher precisely because of the chance factor. Being significantly better than the intended cutoff gives you a better chance at passing and so those who pass skews towards better than the intended cutoff.
I'm not saying whether this is a good or bad thing, but the average skill of those who pass must reduce. It is very straightforward to see this as effectively lowering the bar.
Imagine that if you're a minority, you have nearly a 0% chance of getting hired if you're the only minority in the hiring pool [1]. As an employer, wouldn't you want to counteract that by making sure that the decision to hire/not-hire isn't affected by status-quo bias, so you don't overlook qualified candidates?
> Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still.
That has a very pernicious effect across the industry though. Think about what that policy does to other companies.
The other companies won't have as many high quality women because Google scouted and hired them already, but will have just as many low and medium quality women who aren't good enough for Google, and more high quality men who were displaced from Google. Which skews the gender ratio even more and creates the impression that women at those companies are lower quality than the men there or else they would have been hired away by Google -- because it causes that impression to be the truth.
And you can't fix it by having all companies adopt that policy, because it would still transfer high quality women from lower tier companies to higher tier companies, causing problems for all the women who don't get to work for the companies in the highest tier. Even the high quality women who are still in second tier companies.
The lower tier companies are where almost everybody actually works -- small and medium companies employ more people than huge companies because there are so many more of them.
Google is being quite selfish with a policy like that.
Only if you assume that finding qualified minority candidates is just as easy as finding other qualified candidates. Or that hiring chances are equally distributed.
HBR found there's an innate bias against any minorities in hiring pools [1], and considering that women make up a much lower percentage of potential CS positions, the deck is probably stacked against them. This means that for other companies, they have already passed on hiring the qualified minority candidates. Speculatively, Google could be trying to counteract this by diverting more energy into finding minority candidates.
Also, is it Google's responsibility to make sure other companies have the best candidates, minority or not?
> Only if you assume that finding qualified minority candidates is just as easy as finding other qualified candidates. Or that hiring chances are equally distributed.
Nope, it's independent of any of that, because the effect is relative to what other companies do rather than any of those things.
And when you do that experiment in the real world rather than a lab, you get the opposite result anyway:
> Also, is it Google's responsibility to make sure other companies have the best candidates, minority or not?
It's not about who gets the best candidates -- presumably the men who are displaced are of equal quality and then go to work for the same other companies. The problem is that it creates an unfair black mark against every woman who doesn't get hired at Google despite Google having a special preference for them, and then leaves them in an environment with an even worse gender ratio than it was already.
And these other companies feed into Google. Plenty of women get their first jobs there and go work for Google later. If Google makes it harder for the women there and increases the number who drop out as a result, that's bad for everyone including them.
Suppose there are 5,000 women and 20,000 men with CS degrees who are seeking new employment right now. 500 women and 2000 men are above the 90th percentile, 500 women and 2000 men are between the 80th and 90th percentiles, etc.
Google has 2000 job openings. If they hired without gender preference they would end up with 1600 men and 400 women, but they make an effort to seek out women specifically and instead they hire 1200 men and 800 women. They've now hired all of the women above the 90th percentile and 300/500 between the 80th and 90th.
The gender ratio below the original 80th percentile is still 4:1, but above the 80th percentile it's 14:1 and above the 90th percentile there are no remaining female job seekers. People notice things like this -- that none of the available top engineers are women, even though there are still less talented or experienced female applicants. It creates stereotypes. It deprives the women below the 80th percentile of their role models and mentors. People start expecting women to be worse on average, because of those available to hire, Google has actually caused that to be the case.
And things go downhill from there very quickly if more large companies do the same as Google.
It's not a hypothetical, it's arithmetic. The only hypothetical parts are the number of job seekers and the number of hires, but change them to whatever you like, as long as the proportion of women hired is different than it is in the applicant pool the effect still persists.
And then watch out if your company bases its diversity targets on numbers from the rest of the industry. All the good ones may be taken (in order to get to the mythical 50%), but now we want to follow suit (to get to 50%), but what's left? What a mess.
Proof for what? Smaller number of available women? That's obvious. That if larger companies hire the best of them, the remaining supply/quality will shrink? That's obvious too.
It sounds like they kept meetings deliberately off-the-record, but then again here on https://www.google.com/diversity/index.html there's stuff like "we’re committed to making our workforce more reflective of the world we live in". Number goals are unlikely to be published for obvious liability reasons.
This argument reminds me of the "waterboarding is not torture" argument, both suffer from slothful induction fallacy.
If waterboarding is not torture then why would you apply it to detainees to confess information they otherwise wouldn't?
Equally, if diverting more energy in to finding minority candidates is not lowering the bar for them then why would you need to divert more energy to find them?
"If waterboarding is not torture then why would you apply it ..."
This applies to any sort of interrogation tactic along the spectrum between The Comfy Chair and Execution. Each step would not be applied if the detainees confessed at the next-below step.
>Equally, if diverting more energy in to finding minority candidates is not lowering the bar for them then why would you need to divert more energy to find them?
reply
The point is to find the ones that can pass at a higher rate than you normally would. No bar is lowered, and your representation increases.
That doesn't follow if they're passing the same hiring process. It's not hard at all to get a contact for a phone screen with Google: I've been contacted by Google recruiters on linkedin with a barely filled out profile with one or two unremarkable positions listed. If you're counting the initial discovery phase as part of the hiring process, you're mistaken.
> ...it’s an unequal burden my male coworkers don’t have to deal with every day.
Maybe. There's a lot of diversity within the male gender.
I know I'm an outlier at work due to my politics, my religious beliefs, and other details of my background. I sometimes wonder which of my coworkers have something against me. I know all of them don't (or at least they are professional regardless), but people from my background are absolutely in a minority and are publicly ridiculed on a regular basis, including in HN comments.
I don't care to compare my experience to being a woman engineer, but the feeling described isn't foreign to me.
> I know I'm an outlier at work due to my politics, my religious beliefs, and other details of my background.
Right. Now imagine being an outlier due to your biology in a way that's impossible to conceal. I'm an outlier in some ways from my peers as well. But I just don't talk about those beliefs or those parts of my life. You don't have the option to do that if you're female or a visible minority.
Critical difference that you fail to understand is that you have a choice as to how you are perceived. You have a choice about whether to blend in where a woman or visible minority would not.
The only way to not have to feel discriminated like that would be if you could control minds of all relevant people in the workplace and make absolutely sure they don't have any bad thoughts towards you. Otherwise if you're a type of person who worries about what others think about you, you'll always have a reason to feel crappy, imagining whatever negative thought may be going through other people's minds.
Way out of this is to find a way not to care so much about what others think. Or if you suspect particular person of actual discrimination, talk to them, or report them specifically if you can't do that or it doesn't work.
Solution is not to suppress discussion by firing people for discussing diversity. That just creates a truly hostile environment of fear of being fired for others. And discussion is not really suppressed anyway. Quite the opposite.
>When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?
That is a result of affirmative action, not of the memo. Shooting the messenger, if you will.
Exactly. Affirmative action causes everyone, including the person, to question whether they got there on merit or based on filling some quota. Multiple biases are created.
> Affirmative action causes everyone, including the person, to question whether they got there on merit or based on filling some quota.
Affirmative Action does not require
having quotas (and, in fact, they are in mlst contexts explicitly illegal, even in venues required to have Affirmative Action policies). So, insofar as it “causes” the that result, it is largely by interaction with false information deliberately spread by its opponents.
> Affirmative Action does not require having quotas (and, in fact, they are in mlst contexts explicitly illegal, even in venues required to have Affirmative Action policies).
Fair enough -- quotas aren't the issue, but affirmative action is the issue.
> So, insofar as it “causes” the that result, it is largely by interaction with false information deliberately spread by its opponents.
That's a concrete conclusion based on unprovable/shaky reasoning.
And even if that were true and you could prove it, it wouldn't change the fact concerning affirmative action (in this case, lowering hiring standards for certain groups) causing bias for both coworkers and the employee. How do coworkers know an individual got there on their own merit? How does an individual who is on/above par, yet who happens to belong to an affirmative action group, shake the internal/external stigma that they got there based on the lowered bar? These things contribute to bias whether or not we like the overall idea behind affirmative action (which is to level the playing field). Nothing comes for free.
Do you completely reject the prescence of existing biases, conscious or unconscious, that give an advantage to males? I would hope not, since such biases have been clearly shown in blind studies by e.g. swapping names on resumes, etc.
But unless you do, you should agree that the choice is not between some biased "affirmative action" and a perfectly unbiased, meritocratic alternative, because the latter does not exist. The real choice is whether we try, in some least-bad way, to level the playing field or not.
>Do you completely reject the prescence of existing biases, conscious or unconscious, that give an advantage to males?
What the glass ceiling builds, the glass cellar destroys. Biases that exist when looking up reverse when looking down.
>swapping names on resumes, etc.
Recent study found an interesting result doing this.
>to level the playing field or not.
And thus some groups will always be looked at, internally and externally, as having the benefit of a better playing field. Perhaps that cost is worth it, but we shouldn't blame the ones pointing out the cost as if they were the source of it.
Affirmative action is strictly a US federal government policy. Google cannot implement affirmative action, however it can implement pro-diversity hiring policies. I honestly don't know what those policies are though, and reading through the thread it's unclear.
Affirmative action isn't actually a specific policy directive, so it's not like a checklist or a set of guidelines for hiring or anything. Every department does it differently. But the main idea is that Kennedy and later Johnson told the government to get its diversity house in order, and it did. Some private institutions choose to implement pro-diversity policies, for hiring and otherwise, but they're not in any way related.
What you're referring to is tokenism, which is an old concept: people of color, LGBTQ people, or women feel like they're only there because of their minority status. It's a familiar trope, especially amongst people of color because they've often been exploited that way.
It's certainly the case that at some point, someone gets a job or gets into a school because they're a minority. That's gotten a lot of play in this thread and in the broader debate. But what I haven't seen, and this happens far, far more often, is that minorities don't get jobs because they're minorities. It is hard to get a job as a software engineer if you're Black, if you're a woman, if you're a Black woman, or at all queer.
This happens far more often than White men losing out to "diversity hires", and I think we should start focusing on the fact that for minorities, you're often occupy a space between discrimination because of who you are, or tokenism because of who you are.
But at least with tokenism you have a job. I'm in no way saying we should settle for this; the situation's unacceptable. But let's stop acting like tokenism is the worst thing in the world for minorities and then use it as an excuse to get rid of pro-diversity policies and affirmative action; policies that have probably done more for minorities than any other policy initiative past like, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments, the 19th Amendment, and the Civil Rights Acts.
So if I say "the average women is shorter than the average man", am I now liable for being fired for creating a hostile environment for my female coworkers?
That leap of logic - taking a general statement and interpreting it as a personal attack - strikes me as something I'd read in Dilbert. It strikes me as a justification for the outrage people want to feel.
Well, I agree with the spirit of your argument. However:
> So if I say "the average women is shorter than the average man", am I now liable for being fired for creating a hostile environment for my female coworkers?
You wouldn't just be saying that. You'd be saying, "we know about implicit/explicit biases, but maybe short people are less interested in tech and that helps to explain the hiring gap." That and a series of studies about how short people, on average, have biological qualities that differentiate them from taller people, which you use to bolster your supposition. In effect, you'd be saying that, on average, short people are possibly just less interested in technology because they like other things, respond differently to stress and don't have the drive for status that tall people do.
So, while you wouldn't necessarily be _wrong_ for supposing that and people would be wrong to impute any further meaning than is represented (such as, short people aren't fit for tech, short people are not as good as tall people, etc.), you might be at least partially wrong for not being as clear as possible in your phrasing ... but not much else. Mainly, because his intention isn't to say women aren't fit for tech, but to point out why they might, on average, be less interested in tech, which would help to explain the gap in STEM interest.
But Damore didn't do anything to make women think they were hired only because of diversity initiatives. It's common knowledge that Google makes an effort to hire more women. That was already the case, and Damore merely brought attention to the negative aspects of it.
There's a huge difference between increasing outreach and lowering the hiring bar. One shields more candidates, the other one increases the chances of hiring someone from the same pool of candidates. The reason why Google (and many other companies) are increasing outreach is because they want to maintain a high-quality of engineers, otherwise they'd just open the floodgate and let everyone in and solve their diversity problem once and for all.
Damore's memo states a lot of things about Google's recruiting practices that are still to be proven truth. Lowering the bar is one of them.
> His reaching out to alt-right media and having a "Goolag" shirt on the very first interview suggests that he was kind of ready for it.
Which alt-right media did he reach out to? I've been paying pretty close attention and I saw him being interviewed by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, but they are not alt-right media. They are both classical conservatives.
> As anyone who's worked for Google (I have) will tell you, that's highly discouraged. You don't want to put Google or yourself into a weird legal position for posting publicly about this (for example, Google would have to track you down and make sure to archive all your internal emails moving forward for possible discovery, etc.)
Then all we have to go on are theories and the question: what's to be gained from him lying about this?
His very first interview was with Stefan Molyneaux, a self-described "fighter for men's rights" (yeah, I know.)
> what's to be gained from him lying about this?
I don't think he was outright lying, I think he was just uninformed and made a lot of assumptions and drew
conclusions (biased by his own political views) out of those assumptions. I do think his inflammatory approach to accusing Google and Googlers of "leftist bias" was a way to get attention.
About what's to be gained? Well... he's been interviewed by the New York Times and he'll probably get a book deal out of it, plus whatever money he might get if he manages to successfully sue Google.
I've been told that his first interview was actually with Jordan Peterson. The Stefan interview with simply the first to be published maybe, or widely seen.
> Damore's memo states a lot of things about Google's recruiting practices that are still to be proven truth. Lowering the bar is one of them.
That's true and an excellent point. If he's lying about Google's recruitment practices, either by misunderstanding or by outright false accusation, then large parts of the memo are moot.
On the other hand, I would make the counterpoint that the only reason his honesty has come into question is because of the negative reception his memo has had. Also, what are the odds that Damore misunderstood things? I'd say low.
Additionally, I have yet to see any fellow Googlers publicly calling him a liar, but we shall see.
> I would make the counterpoint that the only reason his honesty has come into question is because of the negative reception his memo has had
I'll be honest, that's what ticks me about Damore: after presenting the ideas in his memo a couple times and not getting any traction, he made a case of sharing them publicly inside Google. Not with a group of friends, not with the diversity team, but publicly. As you say, he's not a dummy, so he probably expected this whole controversy. His reaching out to alt-right media and having a "Goolag" shirt on the very first interview suggests that he was kind of ready for it. I'm not 100% sure he's being honest about his intentions to "help Google."
> Additionally, I have yet to see any fellow Googlers publicly calling him a liar, but we shall see
As anyone who's worked for Google (I have) will tell you, that's highly discouraged. You don't want to put Google or yourself into a weird legal position for posting publicly about this (for example, Google would have to track you down and make sure to archive all your internal emails moving forward for possible discovery, etc.)
Damore advocates removing "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar", so he's actually proposing a solution to this problem. Also, he himself isn't stereotyping women as crap engineers. He says "Many of these differences
are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women".
Quoted argument doesn't make sense. If the hiring standards are the same for women an men then you know that any women at the company is as qualified as any men at least until you get to know more about them, there is just less of them - no reason to prove anything.
If on the other hand any kind of affirmative action is in place then you would be right to assume average women is less qualified than an average man because that's what affirmative action is: lowering the bar for certain groups.
The very presence of affirmative action ("diversity efforts") should be the reason for women at the company to feel unsafe because then the prejudice against them becomes rational.
This should be obvious in my view. The place to take action is in early schooling to get more women interested in tech or give them more opportunities to get involved not in hiring more of them from already smaller job seekers pool.
If what you say is true then in workplaces without affirmative action programs we should not expect to find any workers who thinks the women that work there are less qualified than the men who work there. (Because the "cause", affirmative action, is not in place.)
Do you really think that is the case?
> The place to take action is in early schooling to get more women interested in tech or give them more opportunities to get involved not in hiring more of them from already smaller job seekers pool.
Yes, this is what many of Google's diversity programs are intended to do.
>>If what you say is true then in workplaces without affirmative action programs we should not expect to find any workers who thinks the women that work there are less qualified than the men who work there. (Because the "cause", affirmative action, is not in place.)
Sadly that's not the case. Affirmative action makes prejudice rational but it's not the only reason people display prejudice.
If A implies B then removing A doesn't make B false.
>>Yes, this is what many of Google's diversity programs are intended to do.
Good for them. They really should keep discrimination when hiring away from it. "We don't lower the bar but we look for more candidates among X group" is discrimination.
The same way "We don't lower the bar but we look for more candidates among white people" is discrimination based on race.
Simply put, unless you are mindful of someone's "subjective feelings" you will never be able to have a "factual discourse" with them. People are individuals and not statistics. You can quote statistics and average all day long, but if you offend, anger, or harm someone with your words, that person will not listen to you.
The situation is more dire than that link suggests.
It isn't just that some people are too emotionally reactive to be directly involved in a reasonable conversation.
We are currently shutting down even the possibility of a conversation among any set of a large group of people, because some people in that group are uncomfortable with it.
They aren't even willing to sit out the conversation that makes them uncomfortable, they are insisting that nobody else be allowed to have the conversation within the larger community.
No, not really. For this specific example, Damore knew the issue is a divisive one. If he didn't, then he does need to have some basic sensitivity training. From what I remember reading, he did acknowledge the issue was contentious. In that respect, there are ways and techniques to have that conversation. What Damore did was not that way. He should have consulted a resource like Crucial Conversations (https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-...) first.
Damore self-identifies as autistic [1]. Are you seriously suggesting that the proper course of action is that a mentally ill individual should receive training on how to speak and think from his corporation? What has the world come to where this is sanity.
Liberals today: "Embrace diversity of thought, color, and sexual genitalia! Wait I don't like that thing he said, fire him. Wait, he's mentally ill and thus persecuted, he needs to be protected. Wait, autism isn't a metal illness, he's fine just the way he is. Wait, he's a white male, he's not fine just the way he is, he's evil. Wait, he's self-identifying as autistic, he's not really autistic, a doctor has to diagnose him. Wait, no, that's different than self-identifying your gender, that's totally fine."
That's victim blaming. His claims that he supports diversity are nothing more than false virtue-signaling. I have yet to find a person who would say there are no biological gender differences. The problem is assuming those differences are the underlying cause for why women and minorities are under represented in technology. Were you aware the first programmers were females? There are -many- reasons why women and minorities are underrepresented. The biological differences are not a significant one.
> Were you aware the first programmers were females?
That was when there were some low thousands of software engineers in total. Hardly statistically significant to compare with today's population.
The first few engineers were female because of sexism in the 1970s. The only mainstream jobs they were allowed to have were teaching and programming. There are fewer females now because of lack of sexism not due to it. As society became liberal, women started becoming doctors and lawyers, which matches with their interests much more than programming.
The problem is anger and offense are caused by, and mechanisms for dealing with, having our minds changed. The only things you can attempt to persuade someone to change his mind about, without making him angry, is something he doesn't much care about in the first place.
Thanks for the link, but I disagree with your interpretation and the analogy here. I interpreted this link as saying "don't speak in absolutes", not "don't hurt someones feeling". More often than not, there's information you find out later, and its very likely that you could be wrong. EG: nobody can run a 4 minute mile.
>The sloppy scientist says, "on average, across populations, left to its own devices, this group is [not as skilled] [neurotic] [hard to work with] [not as smart] [not as strong] [slower]" etc. They make assumptions without sufficient data, and the rigor is missing.
Here's the line:
>The first problem is that human beings aren't averages, they're individuals.
His core argument was that there are biological reasons why women are under-represented in technology and that the initiatives taken by Google to reach out to females were illegal and discriminatory. He attempted to use science to justify his beliefs. That would lead many women, who already are self-conscience about their position, into wondering if they are present to their own merit, or because Google is trying to fill a quota.
In this case, it's not about "should factual discourse be allowed or not," that's a false dichotomy. It's whether the author of the memo knowingly took an approach to interpretation of the "facts" he selected that was actively harmful to his co-workers by creating a toxic and hostile work environment.
I believe he did, and the parent you're responding to seems to as well, but they didn't say anything about "spar[ing] factual discourse." You seem to be reading that into their comment.
And I would definitely say there are factual discussions that can be had privately between individuals who already trust each other that are better kept private in order to spare the feelings of non-participants. Other humans have feelings, taking them into consideration is not weakness.
"by creating a toxic and hostile work environment" can only be defined as such by those within it. I could say anything was toxic and hostile for any subjective reasoning. And it becomes "true" by your definition if enough people agree with me?
I'm arguing that line of reasoning is not constructive, and the collective's agreed upon opinions should not act as a barrier for scientific discourse. (which is what the memo was asking for)
This is not the case, strictly speaking. It instead results from people perceiving there to be a lower bar for diversity hires; whether or not it is rational to describe things in that manner based on empirical data or what not is ultimately inconsequential. In that context, it is entirely possible for a poorly formulated memo to cause this type of damage, and likewise entirely possible for this perception to be perpetuated if institutions like Google do not properly back up its practices with compelling arguments to people who might otherwise have doubts.
I would say that women already know that affirmative action hiring practices negatively affect people's perception of the abilities of those who benefit from them. And even if they didn't know, the hostile work environment[1] would already exist in the stereotypes women overcome, so publishing the memo would only give the opportunity to fight it more effectively for women who do not realize they face discrimination.
[1] I am not certain the extent to which this stereotype exists, so I am not sure it rises to the level of making the work environment "hostile", but I see that it could be the case.
I suspect both sides of the debate are now realizing what a hostile work environment preferential-hiring and rampant PC-culture is causing. One side has to walk on egg-shells scared of what they might let slip in conversation if they don't share the prevailing opinion of the loudest among-them. While the other side is constantly forced to question their abilities because preferential hiring appears to devalue their individual abilities, experiences and achievements.
As far as I have been able to put things together as a non-Googler he went to an unrecorded "diversity summit" about a month and 1/2 ago, where, according to his statements in the Jordan Peterson interview, practices where put forward that he considered to be potentially illegal. He then wrote the document in his free time and posted it to a forum dedicated for feedback to the summit (? or more general diversity related). After engagement has been nothing to low he also posted the memo to an internal Google Group called "Skeptics" because he wanted to be proven wrong. Shortly after that the memo was leaked to the public (either without citations or the citations were then removed by the respective media), indicating that someone from this community did so.
I'd appreciate if someone could confirm/deny or add anything to this timeline.
1. He went to the summit, which wasn't recorded mostly to allow people to be open and share their private stories without fear
2. Something about that summit didn't sit right with him, so he wrote up this document and send it as feedback directly to the organizers (not openly)
3. When he got no response back (it's arguable if organizers should reply to every single feedback, but you can also argue that this was a pretty big one), he posted it to an open but not huge discussion board (skeptics) specifically made for people to argue ideas and have discussions.
4. Eventually, it caught some attention outside of the board and it blew up across the entire company
You were pretty close but just wanted to clarify a couple small points.
I have no factual information, but I know that when I write papers where I want to invite discussion, I don't make blatant statements based on a subset of the evidence I have and then expect people to dispassionately pick them apart for me.
Rather, I present my honest assessment of the strengths of the various pieces of evidence, pro and con. If I "want to be proven wrong", I certainly wouldn't present a falsely certain argument. That is not arguing in good faith.
And that's how I would argue a scientific question, not an argument about my coworkers ability.
I am 100% certain that the trackiest company in the world is perfectly capable of knowing exactly who leaked it. They have chosen to protect that person, for reasons unknown at this time.
How? Presumably tens of thousands of employees read it; how can you possibly know which needle in that haystack converted it to a different format and then sent it to a reporter? Especially if it was done over Tor or similar? How exactly do you track that? There are technologies that work that allow for anonymous means of communication.
Is there some positive net benefit of Google releasing the details of the person they fired for leaking the internal information? Companies rarely mention details about firing employees for misconduct.
Well, they didn't and it resulted in a war of leaks. Now anyone with inside information knows they can settle scores by doing it. I think we will see a lot more of it. Good for justice, not so good for Google...
I find it frustrating that this is being downvoted - this is about the most universal piece of advice to be given to anybody in any job that uses computers to communicate with each other. I literally just read this exact line in "The Hard Thing About Hard Things," a book recommended to me on this forum.
Those that are downvoting, why do you disagree that this statement is not relevant to the current discussion?
Again, only if you believe a line was crossed, or whether he wrote a well-intentioned memo with the goal of supporting and increasing diversity that had some dubious conclusions based on controversial research.
He is also young and just starting his career. If this had been addressed calmly maybe he could have learned from this situation. Zero tolerance for a young man's folly instead turned him into a sympathetic figure and an alt-right star. It has reinforced the perception that the PC left is oppressive and reactionary. And worse of all he will never learn from his experience because the reaction confirmed his natural bias.
I guess there is no cutting people a break anymore in this era of shouting into the ether, virtue signaling, and political hellfire.
It's extremely charitable to assume that he is naive enough to not understand the implications of his associations with those alt-right sites. If he had been on techcrunch or some other media platform it would be one thing but he immediately started showing up on those websites with interviews.
Would you please not poison the discussion like this? Regardless of how correct your underlying points might be, it amounts to arson in a fire zone, and we ban accounts that do it.
Plenty of other users are able to express similar views to yours without violating the site guidelines. Please follow in their footsteps and post only comments that make the forum better, not worse.
I agree, and I suspect the attitude of cooler heads may act in Damore's favor when all is said and done.
The number of leakers has to be quite the headache for Google's StopLeaks folks. Between people leaking Damore's memo because they were upset by it, and people talking to Breitbart because they were angry he was fired, there's been a LOT of leaks. How Google approaches handling this issue is going to be interesting, there's a lot of hurt feelings on all sides.
Yep. No one is stopping them from having personal black list and refuse to work personally but they were claiming to ruin people's career inside and outside of Google and they were proud of it which is scary. Also someone was proposing public blacklist...
That's a huge one. I can easily see anyone who operates an internal "blacklist" of other employees as creating a hostile work environment. And from my understanding, those who did posted as such under their real names, so there's no investigation needed to track down who is doing it.
If there's an employee conduct we should all be able to agree is hostile, blacklisting coworkers would be it.
If I had been passed over for promotion or denied an internal transfer I was well qualified for, especially if I had gotten good performance reviews, I'd certainly be looking to have a judge subpoena those lists. That those managers felt so bold as to brag about it indicates that most of them are at it, or that they have tacit support from HR. And if I wasn't on one of the lists revealed, then we'd have to keep digging, or suspect someone had destroyed the evidence.
If you distribute material like that, it will get leaked. That should be taken foregranted. If I got that memo I probably would have leaked it to the press, too.
LinkedIn doesn't allow one to differentiate between being enrolled in a PhD program, or having completed a PhD program
The common practice when enrolled in a PhD program is to list using a future completion date, making clear that you have not yet completed the program.
Google knew he was enrolled in this program when they hired him.
> There are many people who believe he should have been fired anyway for offending his female coworkers and perhaps making them feel unsafe.
I feel unsafe as a Man when people advocate that employers should engage in gender discrimination against Men to enforce an arbitrary ratio of Men/Women the workforce.
Do I have the right to feel safe? Do Men have the right to get Women fired because they feel unsafe and threatened by the ideas they express?
There is a double standard and institutional bias that is being perpetrated by corporations like Google. I see no attempt to address these issues in away that changes there institutional bias and affords equity to the opponents to these ideas. This is simply damage control.
> He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups. Such misrepresentation is harmful to those of us at Google who have to overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills.
This to me is the most interesting question that hasn't been answered about the memo. There seems to still be two camps, those who believe Google does not lower the bar for women and those who do. They can't both be right and I'd imagine if we could take a look at Google's hiring practices it wouldn't be too hard to tell which is which. Of course, we can't Google keeps its hiring practices, at least the ones relating to diversity very hush hush. This was actually Damore's impetus for writing the memo, he attended a diversity summit at Google where he learned about his employer's hiring practices and also observed that this summit was, unlike other meetings at Google, not recorded for later viewing. Damore's conclusion was that the hiring processes were unethical and likely illegal, although afaik he's yet to say specifically what it was that he observed. Still I don't think it's very reasonable to say that Damore has caused harm with this misrepresentation unless you can show conclusively that it is indeed a misrepresentation, and so far I haven't seen anything conclusive that shows that.
Though if you read the memo carefully, Damore doesn't actually make the claim that Google lowers the bar for women in the sense that they hire women who are less capable. His complaint is that Google lowers the bar in the sense of reducing the number of "false negative" rejections of diversity candidates by paying more attention to those applications. He was calling for an end to this practice not because it was allowing unqualified people to be hired, but simply because he feels that the special treatment is unfair.
The devil's in the details on this stuff, and unfortunately we don't have the details so it's hard to say exactly how much devil there is in them.
How do they lower the false negative rate? A sibling comment mentioned Google's practice of giving diversity candidates a second interview if they fail the first. This would mean if you have a false negative rate of `n` your false negative rate would become `n^2` (which is lower because n is hopefully much less than 1). However, this also increases your false positive rate from `p` to `1 - (1 - p)^2`. So in effect, this is lowering the bar as it's giving certain groups a better chance of being hired when they're not qualified than others. I would be very interested to hear about a hiring practice that lowers false negative rate without affecting false positive rate. I can't think of one right now but it seems like it should be possible.
That's not really moving the bar though - false positives are undesired errors. Also, at Google hiring decisions are made by committees using feedback collected from the interviewers. Presumably they don't discard the first interviews, but instead consider all of them.
The way I understood his overall point was that in a perfect world were there is not socio-economical bias and a large enough sample size, we would still not have 50/50 split in every single field.
Now, even with that being true, that doesn't mean that whatever percentage we have right now is equilibrium either, but from my understanding, he was trying to say that we should be careful pushing too much towards 50% split.
He specifically mentions in an interview that minority interviewees get assigned to a second interviewer if one interviewer doesn't like them in the first round. He saw this as a 'second chance' when the committee might just be controlling for interviewer biases. Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion.
> Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion.
Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind.
I'd ask a few questions about this interview practice though.
1) Is this the entirety of Google's diversity practices in hiring? I'd be surprised if it is. So even if this isn't lowering the bar it still doesn't prove conclusively that's not what they're doing. Again I'd like to see a more complete accounting of what exactly it is they do. However, I'm certainly not saying that you need to provide this in order to have a legitimate argument, you don't have access to this information any more than I do.
2) This practice seems to have a somewhat narrow view of what a interviewer bias looks like. In particular it only tries to eliminate bias in the case of a minority being rejected. What would happen if we were to instead attempt to detect interviewers who were prone to bias by randomly giving rejected candidates second interviews and seeing which interviewers wound up frequently disagreeing with their peers? If the assumption that bias only effects minority candidates is true this would have much the same effect.
3) What if it wasn't a second chance but 100 chances? I.e. if you're a minority you get to interview for Google 100 times and if any of those say yes your in. White people only get 1 shot. Unless you think Google's false positive rate is 0, this would have to lower the bar wouldn't it?
"Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind."
So let us extend him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't extend the hiring committee? How about we extend the benefit of the doubt to everybody involved, which would result in him never writing this memo and second guessing the hiring process.
The rest of your points seem to be just a whole lot of speculation, which you just told me not to do. The article shouldn't have been written without clarification on these points and conclusive evidence. Maybe go talk to the hiring committee about their motives/state of mind first Mr. Damore?
We're not extending Damore any benefits by not speculating about his state of mind. We're just avoiding discussing a topic about which we can't hope to learn the truth and which isn't necessary to understand whether or not Google's hiring processes do indeed lower the bar.
My "points" are indeed speculative, that's why they were presented as questions. I don't know the truth and it's impossible for us to talk non-speculatively about Google's hiring process because we simply don't have that information.
The original memo (not article, this distinction matters) did indeed cite a great deal of evidence, you may or may not consider it conclusive, I found it quite compelling. But I think it's important to remember that the memo itself was a request for clarification, posted to an internal message board for skeptics in the hopes that somebody would be able to tell him why he's wrong.
It was a lot of scientific studies he cited (since contradicted by meta studies), nothing about Google's processes. Another commenter on this thread seems to suggest that almost all interviewers can get second shots, which (albeit anecdotally) makes his argument weaker (showing restraint here in not calling him an outright liar)
I know with my (again anecdotal) experience with large SV firms, if Google had these kinds of holes in their hiring process they would be standing alone in the valley. Also, "lowering the bar" is not consistent with their absolute global market dominance.
He also claims in the same interview that he had already done his fact and opinion finding, and incorporated feedback into the memo by the time he posted it[1], so I don't know how much of this was a "request for clarification". He even had action items.
I've yet to see a meta study which contradicts those studies. Would be interested to see one. I've seen studies that say in X% of studies about differences between men and women the differences found are negligible. That's not a contradiction though, and it's not really meaningful at all. The % of studies which find negligible differences can be arbitrarily inflated because it's simple to find as many axis along which there are no gender differences as you want. It doesn't matter how many you find, even if it's .000001% of studies that find a difference if those differences happen to be particularly important that still means there's a meaningful difference. Scott Alexander has a more in depth explanation of this here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
If all interviewees have the same access to second interviews then I agree that it does nothing to lower the bar. In general if a policy doesn't concern itself with the identity of the candidate I don't see a way that it could be lowering the bar. However, my understanding, based on previous comments, is that diversity interviewees get a second chance immediately while the others must wait 12 months before they get a second chance. If that's the case then Damore's argument (and mine) stand.
I don't think Google's market dominance can be used as evidence of good hiring practices since I believe in the early days they didn't have such practices and wound up with a very undiverse company. This didn't seem to stop them achieving market dominance, draw from this what you will about how much they need diversity to succeed.
I'm having a bit of trouble understanding how you simultaneously believe that he "had already done his fact and opinion finding, and incorporated feedback into the memo by the time he posted it" and "The article shouldn't have been written without clarification on these points and conclusive evidence." It seems to me that not only did Damore make an honest effort to seek out clarification but that you're well aware of this fact.
Tonnes of speculation. So I'm just gonna stop refuting all that.
"had already done his fact and opinion finding, and incorporated feedback into the memo by the time he posted it"
I didn't claim this, he did (see: Youtube link). My point is that he didn't actually look into or ask hiring committees why they were doing what they did. Instead, he made bold recommendations, that (like the OP link shows) made women in tech feel like they didn't belong.
He wasn't open to a discussion as many characterize, in his mind, he'd already had discussions and incorporated feedback (his words)
The bar for all candidates at a non-Google company: Pass your first interview.
The bar for white male candidates at Google: Pass your first interview.
The bar for minority candidates at Google: Pass your first or second interview.
Of course it lowers the bar for hiring. Maybe it's justified, but it's certainly not raising it. It's not keeping it the same. Maybe it's still tougher to get hired as a minority candidate than as a white one, but that doesn't change what the policy does.
Google seems to track which candidates, even if you're white and male, have done well enough in the interview process where they think it's a false negative, and give you another interview after 12 months.
It's not just minority hires that interview more than once at Google, so there's no bar lowering. There's just trying again, and everyone can try again.
So really it's what you'd expect:
The bar for all candidates at Google: Pass your interview.
It's trading off the false positive vs. false negative rate in the hiring signal. The question is what your assumptions are about the sources of error in that signal.
If you assume that the variance consists exclusively of false negatives due to discrimination, then the extra interviewers will work as Google claims and no bars will be lowered.
If you assume that the variance consists of randomly distributed error that's the same for all interviewees, then the second interviewer is just some statistical sleight-of-hand that's, on average, equivalent to lowering the bar.
Of course it's possible that the truth is in between.
>Of course it's possible that the truth is in between.
In this case, isn't the finding the truth pretty straightforward? Pull the performance reviews of the second chance hires. Check to see if there's a clear correlation in review and find a pattern.
Are we assuming that Google, which specializes in using data, does not bother to mine its own data with regards to its hiring practices?
It is an attempt to get past the type of issues that Dan Luu wrote about almost three years ago[0], where he referred someone to Google as one of the most impressive engineers he ever met in any field and that person didn't get past the phone screening as "not technical enough".
That definitely sounds like something that would lower the bar. If I was playing H.O.R.S.E. with an NBA player, if I got two chances to hit a shot for every one chance that an NBA player got, I might look competitive, even though I'm not very good at basketball.
> those who believe Google does not lower the bar for women and those who do.
That part aside - why does it matter? If you want to recruit for diversity and there is a smaller selection of one group, you are very likely to have to recruit the weaker candidate from the smaller group.
But why is that a problem? The whole argument behind striving for diversity is
that "A diverse team is stronger than a non-diverse one". So the argument must be that regardless of whether you recruit the strongest individual or not, you are building the strongest team.
There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding that a) The strongest team is built by having the strongest individuals, or b) that the strongest candidate has a right to be recruited even though the team is not the strongest if he is.
>If you want to recruit for diversity and there is a smaller selection of one group, you are very likely to have to recruit the weaker candidate from the smaller group. But why is that a problem?
Well, from the linked article, one of the women stated that "When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?"
Thus, if a company engages in affirmative action-like hiring practices, whether or not the bar is actually lowered, inevitably some employees will feel that some exceptions are being made to fill a quota. As a result, all personnel who fit those sought-after demographics might be considered suspect, and unfairly labeled by some minds. I would absolutely not want my company to start recruiting weak candidates who resemble my general physiological description; I wouldn't even want them to announce they are considering it.
That said, you are right, there are merits to diversity. And I would rather err on the side of too much diversity than not enough. However, this is a complex problem which merits open discussion, otherwise we are bound to settle for suboptimal solutions, or worse.
> Thus, if a company engages in affirmative action-like hiring practices, whether or not the bar is actually lowered, inevitably some employees will feel that some exceptions are being made to fill a quota. As a result, all personnel who fit those sought-after demographics might be considered suspect, and unfairly labeled by some minds
I think this is impossible to avoid, but I also think it's an issue coming from the same flawed thinking, which is that people can be individually measured for their strengths. That's only true to a certain extent. Once people are qualified "enough" - the strength of the team is what's important. And if you want diversity you subscribe (whether it's correct or not!) to the notion that a diverse team is a stronger team than a non-diverse team. That also means that a diverse team of slightly weaker individuals is a stronger team than a non-diverse team of slightly stronger individuals.
The bottom line is: the company doesn't want the strongest individual, and the strongest individual donesn't automatically have a "right" to the available position. The strongest candidate is the one that would give the biggest improvement to the team, not (necessarily) the one that scores highest on tests, has the best experience or education, or that would be the best contribution to any set of other teams. Only the team in question matters.
For a (poor-ish) analogy: a college soccer team could select the 11 individually strongest players, and still not be the strongest team. If the 11 strongest players in the school were all defenders it's likely that the team would be terrible. Among the defenders recruited would be players that are individually "weaker" than some of the rejected attackers. The rejected attackers would complain that the defenders were recruited to fill a quota of defenders in the team. And they'd be right.
Frances: ...if I remain silent, that silence could be mistaken for agreement.
I should not be forced into that kind of debate at work.
And then
Frances: ...I’m also disappointed that the men I know,
including most of my male colleagues, remained silent
on the topic.
Frances: ...Many powerful men in Silicon Valley have
huge bases of social media followers. By remaining
silent on this topic or tweeting support for Damore,
they are sending a message that philosophical arguments
and principles take precedence over the lived
experiences of many smart, talented female engineers
and technical founders.
So, what? Is it just impossible to stay out of the issue if my silence is sending a message that philosophical principles and whatever matter more than women in technology? What if I just want to work my 9-5, treat all my coworkers well regardless of sex or gender, and let the PC warriors duke it out in the streets away from me? Can't even stay silent without sending a message.
While I agree with much of what is said in this piece, I find this pretty demonstrative of the "damned if i do, damned if I don't" situation I'm in as a male trying to survive in this PC crucifixion culture.
what I realized is that I am older, more world wary and far more cynical about anyone looking out for me than your average young millennial.
I think the dividing line is in that cynicism. I have never felt like anyone looked out for me.
"How do I prove myself to people one way or another?"
I have stopped trying to prove myself. I do what I think is right and am very wary of external validation that is not based on engineering data. Asking how you prove yourself seems very foreign. You always risk being wrong. You always risk being cast out.
If young social activists were less strident about how society stacks the deck for all white people- even the ones who have been abused, who had a shitty childhood, who have had bad relationships, who are suffering from depression or chemical abuse or other problems, then I think we'd stop running into this very boring and predictable conflict.
Everyone is suffering on some level. Stop talking about white men like we've never experienced pain.
I do think the memo was foundationally stupid. Compassion is needed on all sides.
>"How do I prove myself to people one way or another?"
I don't think this was about generic proving-to-others. I think it's about being prejudged by others at first glance which minorities in tech get in every interaction they have. I think that it's valid to say that's a significant struggle.
I have no expertise in this field of social ethics, so I'm hesitant to critique your comment when I'm as uninformed as anyone else, but I also think that your following comment shows an ignorance of that struggle:
>I have stopped trying to prove myself. I do what I think is right and am very wary of external validation that is not based on engineering data. Asking how you prove yourself seems very foreign. You always risk being wrong. You always risk being cast out.
If I'm interpreting this correctly as "This is what I did in response to my impulse to prove myself. This is what women in tech should do about their's as well.", then I think you are not considering the fact that you have the privilege of not needing to prove yourself. When people meet you, they don't assume a baseline level of incompetence. This same strategy that you use wouldn't apply to minorities who always feel like they need to prove themselves because of what they look like.
So I think this need to prove yourself stems from a serious, real issue, and so it's wrong to downplay this issue by equating minorities' perpetual feeling of needing to prove themselves with your feelings, to conclude that the problem exists inside them, and not outside them.
Apologies if I misinterpreted your words, but if not, I'd like to hear your response, because this is something I've been thinking about lately.
> I think it's about being prejudged by others at first glance which minorities in tech get in every interaction they have. I think that it's valid to say that's a significant struggle.
> When people meet you, they don't assume a baseline level of incompetence.
In a way they are prejudging him though. They consider the baseline for him to be one who assumes they're incompetent. He has to prove otherwise. Or perhaps not quite as severe, he is assumed to have privilege which you yourself stated.
It seems to be a problem with assuming things about an individual from population distributions. Perhaps we've forgotten how to treat others as individuals and be treated by others as an individual.
You are very cautious in your interpretation of my comments, and I think that is extremely valuable. Thank you.
>>If I'm interpreting this correctly as "This is what I did in response to my impulse to prove myself. This is what women in tech should do about their's as well."
I am very explicitly avoiding saying what someone should do. I try to celebrate different approaches than what I would have taken to the same problem. But I reserve the right to have an opinion bout the effectiveness of the approach. In this case, I think the outrage and fury directed towards a straw-filled white man has negative consequences. Maybe these activists will get what they are struggling towards, but not without consequences on how the quiet people perceive them. There is no monolithic group that will universally accept a position. Being restrained in your position will make people feel safe about expressing opinions that challenge your own.
>>So I think this need to prove yourself stems from a serious, real issue, and so it's wrong to downplay this issue by equating minorities' perpetual feeling of needing to prove themselves with your feelings, to conclude that the problem exists inside them, and not outside them.
I am not sure I agree that it is "wrong" to downplay it. This model has worked for me. Seems unhelpful to keep that perspective a secret. I have achieved a level of success I did not expect in my career.
> Stop talking about white men like we've never experienced pain.
What kind of discourse are you referring to? I hate that there's this notion that trying to hire talented people from underrepresented communities somehow requires oppressing white people.
With respect to messaging tone, there are feminists and social justice people who end up being so tone deaf that they alienate otherwise sympathetic people.
> Is it just impossible to stay out of the issue[...]?
Yes, it's impossible to stay out of this issue. It's impossible to stay out of most issues. Certainly the ones that affect ourselves and our colleagues in everyday life.
You don't have a moral obligation to throw yourself into "the fight" on one side or another, but you do have a moral obligation to consider the impact of your behavior. If you were to witness a coworker being discriminated against, silence is not the same as ignorance.
To keep your head down and not get involved is going to favor one sides' agenda. If you want to do that, it's your right, but you should own that. We all have the capacity to get involved at whatever level we happen to be on. In our social circles, in our companies or in the public discourse. By interacting with those spheres, by choosing what we mention and acknowledge and consider we push on one side or the other.
It's fine to not be, "in the streets," but it's not fine to pretend these issues have nothing to do with you.
Edit: I've read some accounts suggesting people ask their parents what they were doing during the civil rights movements of the 1960s. People might have protested, they might have been appalled from afar. They might have thought it was much to do about nothing. Ten years from now, how would you explain how you felt today at a cocktail party? However you see it, I think we all have a responsibility to decide and not simply drift through society.
I would love to offer my support against misogyny and harassment in technology but I'm frankly terrified of saying the wrong thing and being vilified for it. This is such a sensitive subject that saying nothing is safer than saying anything, even words of support.
All i got from the memo, besides the echo chamber part, which google, and others managed to prove almost immediately, was that the author thinks there are biological differences between men and women, which lead to women being less interested in the field, thus being under-represented, and that google's sexist practices won't change that, only make people resent the diversity hires.
Was i reading the wrong memo? Because everybody, including the 3 interviewees, no matter if they seem calm and collected, keep attributing malice, and talking about how the author said women are less suited to being good engineers, and that women shouldn't be encouraged to get interested in STEM. Where was that stated?
> I disagree that it’s possible to write what he did about general populations, then walk it back to say “but of course it doesn’t apply at an individual level.”
She goes on to say that people will likely misapply the ideas and judge her. It seems a lot of detractors think Damore should have known better and he takes responsibility for how his ideas affect people.
Another says:
> I don’t really see how it’s useful to have a discussion of general group traits in a work setting. Assuming that it’s true that women on average are more likely to have trait X, why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women, or that if she IS like other women, that the trait has no bearing on her job performance?
Again, she's not really disagreeing with Damore in this snippet. She's saying the ideas themselves are counterproductive and shouldn't be discussed.
Sure, but it's the hypocrisy of saying, "stereotyping people by group is productive sometimes (when hiring and trying to hit quotas)" but any criticism of it is unproductive, in fact, how dare you even discuss it at the workplace."
> why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women.
Well, she only has to prove it to men that she assumes are sexist or incapable of understanding population distributions. I mean, really? Let's fight sexism with sexism.
This again? The memo is out in the open for you to read.
> "Women, on average, have more:"
> - "Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs"
> - "Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness"
> - "Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men..." (Ironically, this is a good thing for an engineer to have)
> the author said women are less suited to being good engineers... Where was that stated?
DAMORE: "I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."
And I think it's important to point out here that this argument is probably wrong. It is one of the many examples where Damore cites research, but puts his own spin on it. One of the researchers Danmore cited is David P Schmitt. Here [0] David states:
"But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm. Moreover, men are more emotional than women in certain ways, too. Sex differences in emotion depend on the type of emotion, how it is measured, where it is expressed, when it is expressed, and lots of other contextual factors."
A lot of the science that Danmore cites is correct. But he goes beyond what the science says in his memo. He misinterprets it to prove his point. This is my main problem with the memo, and why someone may call it sexist.
So he's wrong. People in google should have worked that out, made a point of pointing it out to others, and got on with their work. Instead they freaked out, leaked to the media, and got this guy fired.
Fact: women and men have varying distributions in abilities and traits - due to biology
Fact: women and men aren't distributed equally in tech and leadership.
And your conclusion is that anyone who presents these facts and says that maybe one causes the other means that women are "less suited" for engineering?
There is no logical basis for this. He didn't say what you are attributing to him.
As a woman I can say "women are less inclined to be engineers" is only a skip and hop away from "women are not suited to be engineers.
I would say don't even bother with the biological argument because as a woman you likely know all too well how it's mainly used. Anyway, its not really the business of a company to argue such abstract matters.
It's one thing to be teased about these things but it's another to have people in authority making an opinion on such abstract things. No matter how tame it was. Woman know they are capable of doing anything so they don't really want anything less than that entering the discussion.
So, honest question. Suppose you work at a hospital, and 70% of the nurses are women. And you're coming under fire, and a lawsuit is pending, because this indicates discrimination.
Now suppose a coworker writes a piece saying roughly "Way fewer men apply for these positions. I suspect men are less interested in being nurses, so we have fewer male nurses, but we can't lower the bar just to make it 50-50. I think it's even possible that men just biologically enjoy nursing less on average, so trying to be 50-50 isn't a reasonable goal"
A) Should this coworker be fired for expressing this idea?
B) Is this argument a skip and hop away from "men are not suited to be nurses" ?
C) Does whether or not there actually are biological factors have any bearing on questions A/B ?
Sure, honest answer. First off, saying 70% nurses are women does not indicate discrimination. Plenty of the jobs I've applied for as a woman are small startups with over 70% men but I've never thought that this was due to discrimination. We're talking here about a policy that Google engages in voluntarily.
So we know that according to the memo that Google seeks to reduce the number of "false negative" rejections of diversity candidates by paying more attention to those applications. This could be to help counteract discrimination that occurs during the process. This ends up with about 20% qualified women in these positions.
There is nothing here to indicate that the bar is being lowered (the interview process is just as grueling) or that 50-50 is the aim. But if men were being discriminated at when trying to get these nurses jobs, I'd have no problem whatsoever with the respective companies trying to reduce the number of false negatives during the hiring process. Or even just trying to hire more men to create an environment of more diversity among nurses. Those men who are hired there are still there because they want the job and are qualified to do it.
The problem with the biological argument is that historically it hasn't been used to say that "women are not inclined to do x,y,z" but rather "women are not suited to do it". So if there was a historical parallel with nursing and men and people in the past did not think they were capable of doing this job - I'd say people should be more sensitive about what they say in the work environment in our modern day.
A - Generally no, but if the memo was broadcast to the whole company and touched on this points due to the reasons expressed above - I think its ok for the company to take action in the way it deems appropriate.
B - Could be, if that was the prevailing belief system. Realistically though, its not a true parallel because I don't think many people believe that men are not capable of being nurses.
C - Not sure what this means. Whether they are biological factors or social ones should not be something thats asserted by a company. That's going into way too grey territory imo.
>> First off, saying 70% nurses are women does not indicate discrimination.
Totally agree.
As for 70%, that's a completely contrived number in this case. Think of it as 90% or whatever line-in-the-sand we need.
So Damore was concerned the bar was being lowered, and was concerned the goal was 50-50 ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by
decreasing the false negative rate" - links to document I don't have access to) ("Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we
don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."), which is where I came up with those elements.
>>> Or even just trying to hire more men to create an environment of more diversity among nurses.
I think we agree that it's probably okay to hire extra minority candidates, even for diversity sake. Not sure I'd do it, but I don't have too strong an opinion.
>>> A - Generally no, but if the memo was broadcast to the whole company and touched on this points due to the reasons expressed above - I think its ok for the company to take action in the way it deems appropriate.
This is where we go out of sync. It's my understanding that "broadcast" is a mischaracterization, as the memo wasn't sent to anybody, but posted on a public forum for open discussion. I also understand that google actively discussed such policies as diversity efforts, so I suspect he wasn't the only public memo.
And I also support the notion of at-will-employment in the abstract. That said, in practice when I think I see somebody saying X and getting fired because it's easy to misread X as Y, it scares me.
Regarding B, I guess my point is maybe those two propositions are close in your head ('women on average might not like engineering as much for biological reasons' VS 'women can't be engineers'), but they're miles apart in mine. And it's a scary world to me if you can be fired for saying something that isn't sexist, but seems like it leads to a slippery slope of sexism.
Addendum to my sibling comment, since HN won't let me edit it:
So the parent's concern does seem justified. It seems conceivable that Damore didn't have any beliefs that most would consider sexist, and didn't have any ill intentions, but was still fired. Hence the throwaway -- it feels like us men have to be extremely cautious when discussing gender.
But again, I recognize that discussing P risks promoting Q, which is the harmful stereotype, so perhaps it's for the best that we don't discuss the topic more freely.
You both make really good points, and I think you're both right.
Let P = "women are less inclined to be engineers" and Q = "women are not suited to be engineers".
For the sake of argument, let's assume the best in Damore. Assume he believes P but not Q, and that he was earnestly criticizing some company practices with the aim of improving them, not seeking attention or controversy. (I realize that many doubt this, but no one can definitively prove his intentions one way or another, so I don't think there's much point in debating it.)
Given those assumptions, can we all agree on the following?
- P is true, though it may be a socialized thing rather than an innate thing.
- Q is false, based on lots of anecdotal evidence.
- P does not imply Q.
- But Q, if it were true, would imply P. That is, hypothetically, not being skilled at engineering would give women a reason to avoid the profession.
- Consequently, to someone who hasn't entirely ruled out Q yet (either due to bias or lack of experience), P(Q|P) > P(Q).
(If the logic isn't clear, consider the analogy of P = "it's cloudy" and Q = "it's raining". It's currently cloudy but not raining. If someone hasn't been outdoors and I mention that it's cloudy, the probability of rain given their limited information increases.)
- So reinforcing P risks reinforcing Q, even if it isn't intentional. Since beliefs in Q can be very harmful to women, we should tread carefully when discussing P.
- Damore believes P.
- Damore's stance on Q is less clear. His essay had a blurb ("the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ") which seems to imply Q, or some variation thereof.
- If we give Damore the benefit of the doubt, we could interpret his stance on Q as follows. Men and women have various biological differences, and surely some of them have some effect on engineering ability. It's just unreasonable to assume that the aggregate difference in zero. It might be totally negligible though. It might also be in favor of women rather than men. Perhaps women are better at juggling multiple tasks, or their social skills make them more effective engineers within an organization.
- Although no one can say with certainty what Damore's intentions were, here's my take. He didn't realistically expect his essay to change Google's practices, but figured it would start an interesting debate. He knew it was a sensitive subject, but didn't expect a reaction of such magnitude, since his essay was mainly establishing P, and the facts are on his side there. He generally avoided the subject of Q, but he could have done a better job. Since his argument only depends on PνQ, he should have explicitly declared Q false (or at least irrelevant) and focused entirely on P.
- Morally speaking, it seems wrong fire employees based on uncertain interpretations of their intent. So he shouldn't have been fired for his stance on Q, because it wasn't clear what that stance was exactly. And he shouldn't have been fired for intentionally stirring controversy, because it's not clear if that was his intent.
- Even if Damore had the best of intentions, it's still possible to justify his firing based on negligence about the effect of his essay. I don't think he was grossly negligent though, since he sent his essay to a mailing list where controversial discussions are common.
So firstly - let me say that this has been one of the most level-headed responses to the memo that I have seen so far. I personally found it very constructive. Bravo to the author and the interviewees.
I did want to discuss one particular line of thought from the interview though:
I can see that there are wide swaths of people who would refuse to work with him
Two of the interviewees gave this justification for why he should have been fired, and I have seen it elsewhere as well. I disagree, though. I have worked with with people in the past with whom I have ideological differences. But it has never stopped me from at least trying to get along and work productively with that person.
We just don't know from the evidence presented thus far what James Damore is like to worth with. Maybe he's a sexist asshole who is incapable of treating women fairly (in which case he does deserve to be fired). Or maybe we can take him at face value when he says he appreciates diversity and prefers to judge people as individuals rather than as a group. We just don't know.
On the other hand, if there are employees at Google who despite having never met James Damore before are telling their managers "I can't work with him based on this thing he wrote or this idea he believes", aren't they also in the wrong here?
If you can't put aside your personal feelings based on someone elses political views to get work done, YOU are the one with the problem.
I'm sure plenty of us have worked with people who have lifestyles, beliefs, and demonstrated actions we personally deeply disagree with.
Heck, I've worked with people where we legitimately disliked each other.
Yet when I come into the office to work, we sit down together and get stuff done.
Now, my personal opinion is: leave your politics at home, don't spend company time on such things. I'm glad you think of work as a family, but it's not (regardless of the HR feel-good marketing).
However, if they are asking for commentary and feedback on diversity initiatives, and you provide it honestly, it's extraordinarily poor form to then fire you. They had the responsibility to respond to him, and address it privately. I think the more troubling problem was as others have commented: the fact that it was leaked from an internal conversation and turned into such a contentious issue for google.
So the takeaway is: you should become extremely proficient at writing memos and back them up with vast amounts of research, or be fired. But all of the above applies only if your memo expresses conservative ideas. I don't consider myself a conservative but I find all of this disturbing.
Maybe the takeaway is: you shouldn't write "memos" that generate a lot of noise and lost productivity in your work environment and affect your company's external image. If you have political points you want to make, go find a group of like-minded individuals and discuss with them first.
As far as I understand, the memo was submitted to an area of google's internal google+ that was specifically meant for controversial/contrary opinions and discussions.
It's not as if he submitted the article in an inappropriate place in an attempt to shock and offend. He spoke his mind in a place that was seemingly designated for that purpose... Yet another person leaks the memo to drum up outrage and that's somehow ok..?
I'm really disappointed in the culture of mob outrage that's been taking over the Internet in recent years...
In that case you have an off-line discussion with a group of friends to validate your idea. If there seems to be a consensus, you raise the point at the next TGIF (the internal Alphabet-wide gathering every Thursday), tactfully and without making generalizations about gender and without inflammatory arguments against your perceived political leanings of the company.
I was there during the whole Nest reorg/culture drama for crying out loud. I've seen people lob really hairy questions at the TGIF panel and I don't recall a single one of them getting fired.
> In that case you have an off-line discussion with a group of friends to validate your idea.
He brought it to the Google Skeptics group for precisely that reason.
> If there seems to be a consensus, you raise the point at the next TGIF (the internal Alphabet-wide gathering every Thursday), tactfully and without making generalizations about gender and without inflammatory arguments against your perceived political leanings of the company.
> He brought it to the Google Skeptics group for precisely that reason
That's not an off-line resource. That's a public mailing list reachable by any employee. It's not even remotely what I am suggesting.
> What point would that be?
"I believe our current hiring practices might be affecting certain candidates because A, B and C mechanism stop/hinder/disproportionally-favor X, Y, Z groups" No need for building an argument about biological differences between men and women, no reason to build an antagonistic recount of what you think the motivations are, no need to call your peers and higher ups "Leftist." State the facts, ask the question, move on.
Assuming he really cared about hiring practices (which is purportedly the reason he wrote the memo), that would've gotten everyone's attention and I can guarantee that nobody would've gotten fired.
One of Damore's concerns is that Google has already taken an internal, political stance that he is uncomfortable with. If everyone else is allowed to have a political opinion, why isn't he?
Damore isn't a conservative either by any stretch of the imagination. He's a liberal that wandered into some conservative ideas. FWIW I don't think any amount of proficient writing or research is going to yield a different response.
If Damore is a "liberal" then I defy you to find any sitting Democratic party representative who would endorse his views. The definition of the word "liberal" itself basically conflicts with his views.
A classical liberal would have views similar to his own. Let people follow their own preferences, rather than trying to shape the world how you think it should be.
That's issue here. He isn't against diversity, but he is against trying to shape society towards some 'ideal' using rules, and regulations.
As for the memo itself, I think it's a bit of a Rorschach blot: people are seeing what they want to see in it, largely because the writing is so poor that the author fails completely to get his own points across in a coherent manner.
The conversation about "women in tech" is severely hamstrung by folks conflating issues of sexual harassment with the hiring pipeline. These are two very different problems requiring two very different conversations.
Lastly, I found Dr. Charles Isbell's comments via Ian Bogost in The Atlantic to be very interesting. This is majorly paraphrasing, but he's essentially pointing out that conversations about diversity have a tendency to end up focusing on women to the exclusion (accidental or otherwise) of black men, hispanic men, etc.
I'd like to think it's everyone seeing what they want to see in it, but that's not really a fair description.
The writing's not ideal, but truly if opponents can read even this and frame it as "women have inferior genes," then this is a discussion that can't be had. There is no way to make the case that sexism and oppression are not the only causes for inequal representations in tech that will not be an "anti-diversity" position that makes some coworkers uncomfortable.
I think it's interesting how the Edith stated Damore had said women were worse at their job, while one of the other women explicitly said he didn't, and the other only mentioned interest in programming.
This is similar to the divide I've seen in the media. I have not read the memo in it's entirety, but since the impression I got from reading a few news stories was that Damore had only made his controversial statements in regard to the population, not skill of programmers, I'm curious what causes this disagreement.
I also wonder why Edith felt the need to mention gender not being binary in a discussion partly about whether biological sex influences choice of job, considering that as far as I know biological sex is indeed binary, you either have at least one Y chromosome or you don't. (I'm not a biology nerd so feel free to correct me on this.)
Some people are intersex (typically this means they have ambiguous genitalia or internal sex organs). Therefore, there are people who are neither entirely male or female biologically. You can have an XY person who outwardly has female genitals, but has internal testicles (Androgen insensitivity syndrome)
There is also some question whether some things we don't consider intersex are actually a form of intersex, such as homosexuality. A lot points to homosexuality being innate, not learned, and I personally think this points to it being a form of intersex that affects the brain, not the genitals.
Some disorders can cause both. For example, females with Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) can have ambiguous genitals and also are more likely to be lesbian.
> I also wonder why Edith felt the need to mention gender not being binary in a discussion partly about whether biological sex influences choice of job, considering the fact that as far as I know biological sex is indeed binary, you either have at least one Y chromosome or you don't.
I think she refers that gender is not binary as you can be straight male, straight female, gay male, gay female, bisexual, asexual, etc.
I am not completely sure but I think there can be mutations where you have 2 chromosomes X and 1 Y. So XXY [1]
Sex, sexual orientation, and gender are different things. By gender spectrum she means that most people's behavior is somewhere along a continuum between completely masculine and completely feminine and that virtually nobody is at one extreme or the other.
I think the point she's making is that while men and women have different interests as groups, there are plenty of women who are interested in what are perceived as masculine things (in this case probably computer programming) and vice versa.
By gender, she's referring to gender identity which is certainly not binary. There is a pretty high correlation between someone's chromosomes, "equipment", and gender identity but it's not 100% and any of those can vary on a spectrum.
I've been doing some reading on transgender individuals, and the current knowledge is that gender identity has some kind of durable biological basis, we just don't know quite what it is yet. It's not simply a delusion and a refusal to accept your "real biological gender" based on your chromosomes, etc. Some people don't identify as either gender.
And like the other poster mentioned, there are genetic outliers like XXY chromosomes (intersex), and other things that can happen such as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (XY females due to lack of response to testosterone).
Emphatically defending the wrong ideas in a debate forum, and seeing what points do and do not withstand scrutiny, is a very traditional and pure form of discourse. I claim that this process is even at the heart of scientific progress.
I disagree. Making arguments by selectively withholding counter-evidence you are aware of to see if those arguments "withstand scrutiny" is not scientific process.
Certainly, arguing about which evidence is more important, or how to resolve apparent conflicts between various data, is perfectly fine. But if you are making arguments that you know don't hold up to evidence, you are not arguing in good faith. For that to be a legit argument, you have to motivate why that evidence should be discounted.
> Making arguments by selectively withholding counter-evidence you are aware of to see if those arguments "withstand scrutiny" is not scientific process.
Indeed, but I didn't read Damore's memo as being intellectually dishonest in this way. He presented (with citations) some views that are held by most psychology researchers. And then he drew a few of his own (possibly flagrant) conclusions and speculations.
This sparked debate, and it is getting us talking. Damore wrote some great points (especially on free speech and intellectual diversity) and some terrible ones. This is the kind of free exchange of ideas that a successful and vibrant tech company should encourage.
Of course it isn't. When establishing narratives and complex causalities, you don't use scientific (inductive) reasoning, you use abductive reasoning. You use inductive and deductive reasoning to fill in points, but you have to use abductive reasoning to reach a broader conclusion.
Having read and just reread the memo, I don't think a better starting point for this discussion could've come from somebody on his side if Google had specifically asked for it. Maybe a professional journalist or someone with too much time could've spent some time dancing around the issues to make it less offensive, but I don't think that would've been productive.
EDIT: Apologies for answering a question before it's been asked, but to clarify my point I don't think the quality of writing is that amazing (or relevant). I'm more speaking towards the general tone and content of the memo, which is far more polite and open than most editorials I read by professionals.
This is literally what almost all persuasive writing is about. I cannot recall the last time I saw someone write or heard someone speak the words "let's have a discussion" to people who didn't already agree without really meaning "you people need to shut up and listen". I actually find it refreshing when people say that instead. But seriously who is writing to this standard we seem to have suddenly adopted for this one thing?
> I’m also disappointed that the men I know, including most of my male colleagues, remained silent on the topic. And the ones that did participate, either seemed to support Damore or demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding for the issues women engineers are faced with and care about.
...means she's frustrated that more men weren't saying what she was thinking. So "speak up" also means agreement.
And, as an aside, I've seen lots of men criticizing Damore. I don't know what more needed to happen. Maybe she has particular people in mind.
The author opens the memo explaining that google needs to have a discussion and subsequently starts the discussion.
again critics of the author actually agree with him.
anyone who supports "let's have a discussion" can not support google who the author believes (and seems to have been proven right) does not want a discussion.
Absolutely. This and the suggestion that he phrase his ideas as questions and more openly invite discussion helped me put into words my own discomfort with the memo. Of course the conclusion he draws that because of biological differences women are less suited to software engineering work remains the biggest problem.
I've tried asking evenhanded questions in the past (on other topics). They usually get corporate-speak responses that don't really say anything.
Pointed questions provide more information at the expense of goodwill.
What I'm saying is that I think people ask these kinds of questions and don't get honest answers. At least the firing of Damore was a concrete answer, though it was a partial one.
>Twitter is the worst way to have this debate but that’s where it mostly was taking place (with a sprinkling of medium posts and malformed news pieces to complement it).
This is why I really appreciate HN. The discussion here was fairly reasoned and people could be pretty open. I appreciate the perspectives provided in this blog post too. Thanks to you all for making such a high quality community.
Most submissions about this topic have been flagged or moved off the front page. That this article hasn't been flagged and remains on the front page is because of it's provenance.
Now, the discussions do tend to be good on the whole - but many users here are fed up with the topic and want to get back to hacking. I'm glad to see more reasoned discussions happening, and hope that people could look back at themselves when this thing first occured and see how they reacted then.
> That this article hasn't been flagged and remains on the front page is because of it's provenance
I'm not sure what you mean by provenance but people should know that HN moderators haven't touched this article (other than to turn off the flamewar detector, because the thread, against all odds, is not a flamewar). We're surprised that it made it to #1 and delighted that the discussion has mostly remained respectful, at least compared to the tire fires of the last couple weeks. IMO this has a lot to do with the care that Cadran and the other authors put into crafting the post.
Could you please at least try to think how this looks to people with other opinions on this subject? This kind of attitude makes people move further in the other direction. I wish HN to still be a place for rational discussion.
Remember, the content here is made by the users. For free.
I'm afraid I'm not following you. I see plenty of opinions on this subject in this thread, as in the other threads. The main difference in this one is that the comments are more civil and substantive across the spectrum of opinions. That's a great thing.
Perhaps it feels to you like HN moderation is ideologically driven, but that's not so. It does feel that way, unfortunately, to most ideologically committed users. There doesn't seem to be anything we can do about it; everyone jumps to the conclusion that the deck is stacked against them, and the comments about this tend to be much the same regardless of the ideology of the commenter. Indeed the evils of HN moderation seem to be the only thing they all agree on! This bothered me for a few years but eventually there's little sense in being bothered by an optical illusion.
Those threads were all extremely active and most if not all spent significant time on HN's front page, so I'm not sure what your point is? More generally: these perceptions are strongly in the eye of the beholder. I guarantee you that someone with opposite views to yours sees the opposite bias on HN. This obviously doesn't vary with HN, but it does vary with the perceiver—specifically with the perceiver's beliefs and their intensity. It comes down to sample bias and other cognitive biases. Even the most perfectly even-handedly moderated site (which I'm not saying HN is!) would get all the same perceptions and accusations.
They might have been discoverable via the "comments" link (lots of active comments still going on) well after the stories have dropped off the front page.
I have also been checking the Algolia "Last 24h" view to find flagged discussions that I missed, however.
"Provenance" means origin, which in this case is the Ycombinator blog. It's very unlikely that anything from the ycombinator blog would get removed, given that this is itself a ycombinator site.
Why has this topic exploded like it did now especially in the software engineering context? Whatever talent or affinity to abstract and inanimate things we do or don't assume being correlated with gender, isn't software engineering just a lighter version, compared to mathematics and physics?
Did math and physics communities already have their internal crisis/debate on these things, perhaps a decade or two ago? Or have they been able to cope without lighting such a fire?
> Why has this topic exploded like it did now especially in the software engineering context?
Theories:
- Especially acute gender gap
- Tech getting attention for its gender gap affecting corporate policies
- Culture of valuing merit of people and ideas. Coders generally think the best idea should win, regardless of where it comes from.
- Software engineering is probably more collaborative (on many scales) than research science. Teamwork is a day to day reality and culture issues are more important.
- Top talent in research science isn't as concentrated as it is in the case of software talent. Big companies literally buy small companies for the market share of talent. Culture issues in the big software companies will get much more attention.
- Software engineers are online more. The memo was originally a Google+ post, I gather. It's probably easier for electronic discussions to leak onto the internet.
The math and physics communities aren't dominating business in the US. Four of the top five companies by market cap (Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon) are exclusively software or employ an oversized number of software developers compared to similarly sized non-technology companies. If there are reasons that groups of people are being systematically excluded from employment in those companies and others like them, it's worth at least trying to understand why (race? gender? other factors?) and wherever possible, worth trying to correct it.
"Why now" is a lot more complicated than just that, but that's the reason I keep in mind why it's worth fighting for.
Hmm, anectodally, both math and physics communities have significantly larger percentage of actual women graduating and working. At least here in EU - it's somewhere between 40-60% split depending on generation.
I guess because of that there's actually more men used to actually working with women in those fields and they don't waste this much time trying to prove how women aren't worthy .
Right on the nose. And in fact, the proportion of women in computer science was tracking with other sciences until the mid-eighties, when it started to dive, while women's representation in other sciences continued to climb.
One of the more glaringly inconsistent observations with Damore's claims.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
Hmm, Computer Science is most definetly a science (which shares quite a bit with maths as expected). A lot of algorithms and data structures you use under the hood when doing engineering were born as a paper in academic CS sphere.
Of course, most CS graduates don't do science, but actual engineering work. That doesn't make CS any less of a science though, it just means that most people employed in private companies don't do it.
And thus employment of CS graduates should be compared with employment of Engineering graduates, except in the case of Academia, where it ought to be compared with other sciences.
You explained it yourself. It was initially a science, and in the 80's it became engineering and now, a get-rich scheme. Each era attracts a different set of people.
I mean, whatever propensity to mathematical-logical thinking, or being interested in working with things not people, we attach to software engineering, aren't these qualities useful even more when doing math and physics?
Lots people from math and physics have jumped over and become decent, some even great, software engineers. Not many software engineers have successfully switched over to math or physics.
So if gender is not so much an issue for a successful career in, I don't know, algebraic topology (math) or quantum field theory (physics), it surely should be less of an issue in software engineering ...when talking about whatever effects there may or may be at a biological level. So if it's not such a big issue in academia, the problems in software engineering must be more about what kind of workplace culture has grown around in software engineering, not the proposed underlying human biology.
Ezra Klein argued[1] that this is really a fear of the opaque power that software has in our lives. We know that software and algorithms run the world, and that only a few people will ever even see the algorithms, let alone understand them afterwards, and yet they determine so much of the world around us. This leads everyone to fear that the wrong sort of people (for whatever definition of "wrong" you hold) are putting their thumb into the algorithm.
This is why math and physics aren't getting the same level of attention. They don't decide what news articles get viewed and what don't. They don't decide what companies can advertise to customers and what companies are beyond the pale, etc.
Damore is planning to sue under the National Labor Relations Act or California's tough law against restricting political activity. The legal experts seem to think he might have a weak to a decent case. I would think Google would try to settle anyway, in order to prevent discovery and the release of their internal communications about the memo and their internal data about the performance of different groups on job interviews.
Is there anything that would prevent another Google (or Facebook, etc.) employee (with a lower salary or thinking Google is not for him anyway) from going completely by the letter of the law and suing when fired? That employee could make a more limited case that Google's diversity programs discriminate against white or Asian men in hiring, complain about diversity training sessions, say something about agreeing with Trump's policies and with the conservatives (to make it more explicitly about political activity), write about organizing other employees who agree, make sure to file an NLRB complaint before getting fired, bring up some IQ meta-analysis studies to make sure it's scientific, yet controversial enough to get him fired, state that he's happy to work with Googlers of all sexes and races and that he holds their skills in high esteem and hopes everybody else does too (to make a firing based on the employee manual less credible), use email (because that's what's specifically in the law), run it all through a lawyer first, and don't do any post-firing interviews as Damore has done.
Wouldn't that cause huge headaches for Google and other tech companies? If such emails get leaked, the bad PR would force Google's hand to fire him, as happened with Damore. It seems like companies that want to see themselves portrayed as socially progressive might end up between a rock and a hard place.
As a longtime female engineer at fintech startups, there was absolutely nothing new in Damore's memo. The only thing that gave these tired arguments any cachet at all was Google's name.
And I really wish Google hadn't fired Damore. Special projects exists?!
For years I have worked with and continue to work with guys who think just like this. In fact, thanks to Twitter, I now know all of my followers who also follow Damore. Thanks for that?
When I interview you and ask you a technical question, you don't meet my eyes and then you answer the guy sitting next to me. When I present my own ideas in a group, you ignore them; fine, I'll pregame males colleages and let them present my ideas instead. If I brainstorm as part of the group, you think I'm asking you to explain basic programming concepts to me. You probably think I'm not that smart. And that's OK. Good news: getting things done requires multiple skills. One of mine is overtaking you from behind.
Nobody ever thinks of promoting me first. Whatever I get, I work twice as hard and twice as long for it as you did. The existence of a female networking group does not represent an unfair advantage: it represents barely any advantage at all, on the basis of the ones I've attended. And anyway, I don't have time for that, I'm trying to figure out what's caused the unexplained performance reversion over the past two days.
Whether you think I am a diversity candidate or not, I am here to code. That is all. Statistically speaking, biology does give me one edge: longer life span. I'll imagine I will still be here doing just that long after everyone else has forgot James Damore exists. ;)
Everything you said that's wrong with the interactions you have with male engineers, I'm not sure that James Damore would disagree with any of it, or claim that it doesn't happen, or say that we shouldn't be trying hard to change it.
What James argued is that the efforts Google is making and the way they are doing it are in some ways contributing to and making all of those bad experiences you listed worse.
James also argued that women are biologically inferior for STEM fields, which is objectively and demonstrably incorrect. With that, I think he'd disagree with absolutely all of it. He clearly has a confirmation bias, and is actively cherry picking articles (from fucking Wikipedia I might add) and misrepresenting their contents to make women seem inferior.
I keep hearing people say this but didn't read it in the memo.
Can you point to the bit where he says they are biologically inferior, or the sources he links to that say it?
The best I can come up with is the bit where he says Google lowers the bar by reducing the false-negative rate, meaning that a greater percentage of qualified men are rejected than qualified women.
[Edit] Reading through again to see more about biology claims in the memo, this is the one that sticks out the most:
I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
This sticks out because it mentions abilities - and is indeed the only place where ability is mentioned at all. The wording doesn't say that women are "biologically inferior for STEM fields", but I can see how it might be read that way. I don't read it that way, but I can understand how others might. The surrounding context is pretty much all about the preferences that people have as well, so "women are biologically inferior" doesn't seem like a point that is trying to be made at all.
I think it comes back to how you read this part of the TL;DR. "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we
don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."
Google currently has an 80M/20F split. Does that mean that very few women have the traits to work in CS at Google? If so, another way to phrase that might be "the large majority of women do not possess the innate biological traits necessary to work in CS at Google". From which it's not a far leap to "the large majority of women are biologically inferior for CS work at Google." Etc.
Normally, one might soften that by asking what population the distribution is drawn from. Sadly, the memo author makes it explicitly clear that he thinks it's largely due to biology: "Be open about the science of human nature. Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to
discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition
which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems."
"When I present my own ideas in a group, you ignore them"
I've seen a lot of young or shy or not well spoken men get the same treatment. But - here is where I'll assume a lot about you - seeing what other people especially different people endure requires empathy and being a little less self-centered.
"Statistically speaking, biology does give me one edge: longer life span."
I would not be sure it is biology. I'd like to see the stats 50 years from now when people who bailed on the "sole breadwinner of the family" track are in. Gender roles are also disappearing for men. Slower but they're waking up to new opportunities this give them.
I am male engineer and I often get same treatment. I consider myself quite experienced, often more experienced than people getting preference. What I lack often is ability (and willingness nowaday) to prove myself in the eyes of others. Solution to that - side projects, businesses (which are still being dismissed by majority of people I know,) etc. If anything - it made me more resilient (but also pissed off often :))
When I give feedback on something important in the technology, I have to repeat myself, repeat myself, wait a week while you "think about it," and then finally have a male co-worker go over it with you so you can, in a 5 minutes' conversation, decide you agree ...
Honestly, I found the best way round this was to use IM or now Slack to pre-game my male colleagues one-on-one to create a "cloud of agreement". Typing helps! It really is the most neutral way to present.
That way, one of them usually presents my ideas himself, or all I have to do is provide the seed and the whole idea crystallizes.
If you have any experience with the Socratic method, it's highly useful for convincing your less woke male colleagues they thought of it themselves while allowing them the pleasurable coup of answering your questions in front of others. Think of it as being a midwife to thought: a grubby job but try to think of the lovely babies...
The downside of this is it takes your managers a lot longer to figure out that you are an original thinker. The upside to me is that it's more important to see my ideas executed than to wring my hands over the details of how they gained consensus.
Interesting thoughts - I think the biggest misunderstanding thus far involves generalizations. You can accurately make generalizations about a group of people, without implying that a given individual necessarily falls under that generalization. For example you could say "80 percent of males are into action movies" - but you should not go up to an individual male and state "you are into action movies" if you care about factual accuracy. Whether or not Damore's generalizations are accurate is up for debate, but lets say for the sake of argument that they are. I do not think its harmful to say "10 percent of women are really into engineering currently" no more than it is harmful to say "50 percent of women are really into engineering currently." In fact, only a subset of the male population is into engineering, so it is preferential even within a sex. If anything, I think it makes it worth celebrating the women who ARE into engineering even more. So (hypothetically) you could say fewer women are interested in engineering, but it does not mean those who are into engineering are somehow less qualified than males.
> Assuming that it’s true that women on average are more likely to have trait X, why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women, or that if she IS like other women, that the trait has no bearing on her job performance?
Statistics are statistics and I do not believe they should be censored on behalf of being unpalatable. That said, its how we interpret statistics that really matters. Like in my examples, a generalization is just that - a generalization, and thus not necessarily applicable to a given individual. To answer the question, a woman's (or man's) work should speak for itself. If they are a good worker and still facing scrutiny, then I would reexamine if the boss or manager questioning them is competent.
Its definitely possible although I personally have yet to meet someone whose threshold for not taking a job was that a stereotype existed around it. I tend to go with Occam's razor: I think it is far more likely that peoples choices of careers affect stereotypes.
Right, but that's not how stereotypes affect career choice. It's not like someone is going to study 5 years for a career, and then at the last minute say "nah, dammit, that makes me look effeminate" or "hmm... I don't know, I'm a woman, I shouldn't be doing that." Like you, I have never heard of anyone doing that (I have heard of someone doing a postdoc in math and then giving up because he thought teaching was going to be boring... go figure.)
There's lots of good literature on how gender stereotyping actually affect people's choices.
First, it's not my argument. As I said it was copied verbatim from the article.
Second, I do find interesting that you feel offended at the thought that women might assume men are sexist, but from your comment history you seem to be OK with Damore's memo which ascribes a number of traits to women.
Don't you think that is a bit hypocritical in itself?
> For example, students and professors I met in college that grew up in the USSR thought engineering was stereotypically women’s work. But ability to do those jobs?
Can anyone with similar experience comment on this? I am just surprised (if what one of the interviewees said is true) because I'd assume the math/engineering/science are highly regarded in the USSR and both genders would pursue that.
Side note: People in my country (from southeast asia) don't have a notion that girls are not as good as boys in math. In fact, when I was in (elementary/middle/high) school, I--along with most students in the class--always looked up to my female peers who are always the top 3 in the classroom (from among ~80 students). In fact, it's almost always natural to assume that girls would outperform boys in the class (meaning, more girls would become the highest ranked student in the class and/or more girls would be ranked as top ten in the nationwide high school exam--a.k.a. matriculation exam). As a result, engineering classes have plenty of female population (although, of course, the number of women in such classes is always fewer than that of men).
In general after WWII women had to take traditional men's roles since entire male generation was gone and from then on it became the new normal. STEM is not physically hard so it can be considered a more suitable field for women, also STEM paid less in USSR.
I am from one of ex-USSR countries and graduated in 2008. I did not see many gals in college in CS/Engineering degrees. They were presented, but in minority. About the same I see females presented in tech companies in engineering departments.
Please note that this is a comment on a specific remark, and is not meant to make it seem as though that invalidates the rest of the text - I’m mainly interested in the subconscious reason why things are the way they are.
> I wish more successful men in tech thought deeply about the advantages they’ve had
I think the reason many take annoyance with this particular opinion (at least I do), that men had it easy, is rooted in how “nerds” were viewed growing up, and how that has changed over time with public known successes such as Zuckerburg or Musk.
I’m only 24, and even I remember growing up with being interested in programming in no way being an attractive thing to be. If I revealed to people what I did I would be called a “nerd” with a bit of a disproving look. Luckily for me, I was quite good at socializing also, but many definitely didn’t have that and suffered social stigma for it. Even the friends I was gaming with didn’t quite understand my interest in that area, so I mostly relied on myself with few to no peers to discuss that particular subject with.
This is obsviously anecdotal and I would be interested in hearing how people had it growing up with these interests, from both sides obviously.
Now, that said, we are definitely in another age currently. These days with the success of Silicon Valley, Facebook, heck even The Big Bang Theory, our culture has shifted to a glorification of the field, and as such we have a clash of what the 24+ (or there about a) generation grew up facing, and them now being called privileged and being told they had it oh so easy, basically casting aside all those struggles they had growing up.
I guess my point is, with is a more general point, promoting equality by bringing down another group, is a fundamentally wrong way to go about things. You don’t get the bars at the same place by making it worse for one group, you do it by making it better for the other group (see they distinction?).
Anyways, I’m interested to know what people think :)
I had pretty much same experience, minus socialization skills. So you are definitely not alone in your experience. And I observed similar from (very) few friends in the same situation.
> Edith: I disagree completely and utterly that the (yes, real) average differences between men and women map to being better or worse at certain jobs. Interest in certain jobs, certainly.
This is, I think, the key. We can all recognize that there are REAL, average differences in interests between men and women, DEFINITELY driven by society/culture, and maybe by biology/genetics... BUT, this has absolutely no correlation with performance. If fewer women are, on average, interested in software engineering, this absolutely does NOT mean that women software engineers are, on average, worse at their jobs.
The error so many "Team-Damore" men make is that they zealously stand behind the argument that "Better-performing men are being overlooked in favor of worse-performing women/minorities." And yet there is absolutely no way to possibly back up that claim: can anyone clearly demonstrate over the course of a statistically significant number of hirings that most of the women candidates who were hired were A)chosen from a candidate pool that included at least one equivalently-or-more talented man; and B) that those men who were not picked would have been both better performing as individuals and better employees for the team/company as a whole? No. Nobody has shown this because it is, essentially, impossible to demonstrate. Citing studies of character traits or interests of men and women "on average" does absolutely nothing to support claims A and B. And so all these men end up doing is simply implying: "well, I BELIEVE that all these real women coworkers of mine are worse than the hypothetical male candidate that wasn't hired... on average." Which is clearly an insult to your existing coworkers and toxic to your work environment.
I can't speak to Google's hiring policy, but affirmative action indeed gives preference to underrepresented minorities at the expense of more qualified people on the basis of gender/race. If you want quantitative data, just look at test scores of underrepresented minorities vs white/Asian men at competitive high schools and universities.
You can sugar coat it all you want, but it's still discrimination on the basis of gender/race.
Sure, specifically race-related Affirmative Action programs may often (but not always) provide entrance to a minority who would on paper test lower than a non-minority. And this is intentional AND desirable. Consider it a long-term investment, or a direct attempt to break out of a feedback-loop. The historical shadow of racism is long, and even though the individual actors today (you, me) may not be explicitly racist, the trends are still there, hiding in our institutional practices, in our disparity of opportunity for the poor, and in our subconscious assessments of things that are different from us. Programs like Affirmative Action are conscious-level programs to battle subsconscious problems in our society. It's like making a chrome extension to block HN and Reddit during work hours because our subconscious habit of wanting to browse hurts our overall productivity. So we make a conscious-level decision to implement a practice that causes pain (deprivation of pleasure) in pursuit of a long-term goal (not being addicted to instant-internet-gratification and higher productivity). Affirmative Action will deprive some well qualified white students of positions at a single institution, (but not EVERY institution) and that may cause pain for an individual, but is beneficial for the society as a whole.
Diversity hiring practices may sometimes have a similar outcome, but I suspect the reality at most major employers is more often "these candidates are equivalent, give preference to the minority so our team can benefit from greater diversity." Because teams CAN have real tangible productivity/quality benefits from being diverse. It's not just black and white pure individual performance. By having a team with a broader set of backgrounds and experiences it may produce more thoughtful products/services for the diverse population of users who will ultimately consume them.
I won't ever argue that explicit programs like Affirmative Action and diversity hiring don't ever disadvantage any single individual - clearly, candidates get rejected. But I'm not going to join anyone's pity party over it either: there is real benefit for companies and society; in all cases, the party that gets rejected due to these policies is explicitly the party that statistically has the most opportunity in the ecosystem at large.
> in all cases, the party that gets rejected due to these policies is explicitly the party that statistically has the most opportunity in the ecosystem at large.
You are possibly discriminating people unfairly. The evidence on causes of the representation gap is not conclusive - i.e. we don't know beyond reasonable doubt it's nothing but white male privilege. Difference in interests - be it due to nature or nurture - seem to exist and could at least partially explain the gap.
I'm opposed to all discrimination - and as long as you can't prove beyond reasonable doubt that the enacted discrimination only counters privilege and nothing more you don't have a leg to stand on if your overall position is equality.
> But I'm not going to join anyone's pity party over it either
You dismiss a group speaking up against discrimination as whiners even though the evidence that would allow you to do so is inconclusive. This seems like an unreasonable position to take.
Any effort to hire more people with trait X where X is unrelated to performance on the job will lead to lowering the bar for people with X trait. Once you start hiring disproportionately from the smaller pool then that pool becomes less qualified on average. The more you "look for qualified candidates while not lowering the bar" the more you need to overlook qualified candidates from the other, bigger and more more qualified on average pool.
To see it clearly substitute women with race (for example white) and see how immediately racist the policy becomes.
> "Better-performing men are being overlooked in favor of worse-performing women/minorities."
That sentence is backed if there is a correlation between genetics and skills.
> this has absolutely no correlation with performance
if gender does not have correlation with performance, why do we split sports into male and female? Why physical strength, endurance is related with biology and the mind is not? when the brain is the most important organ in our bodies and in charge of controlling all the hormones which gives us more or less strength. In what facts do you support that claim?
The physical is different from the mental. Are you saying women are less mentally capable? I can't tell but this is basically exactly why women feel legitimizing this line of discussion is unproductive.
If you say that there is no relation between our biological features (like genes or hormones) and our mental capabilities, I have to disagree completely. And I want someone to support that affirmation with facts and research studies. As far as I know there are a lot of mental illness treated with chemicals and hormones and a lot of studies that link malformations in genes with mental capabilities. There are also philosophical studies that link the mind to the body and that claim that there cannot be intelligence without embodiment. So all this things and other papers lead me to think that biological traits are linked to mental skills.
At one point you're talking about malformations and in the next you're talking about perfectly healthy people. Academically, we see that women excel up to college with no barriers in their mental capabilities. What other evidence do you need?
I can tell you as a women in tech, there is absolutely nothing about tech that is that difficult to understand or comprehend. Nothing more than the many other professions women excel in and are equally represented.
you are having bias with the word malformation. It is not something bad per se, it only means it is not what you find in most people and that is have bad consequences (or what we want to classify as bad).
> we see that women excel up to college with no barriers in their mental capabilities
This doesn't mean anything. Performance is not only about mental capabilities but also in effort. There are mentally disabled people who can pass college, but it is so hard for them and they have to strive a lot to succeed, and this is why you don't see so many of them in college. So this argument doesn't probe anything.
These comments are largely directed at a straw-man, and in many cases actually agree with the memo, when they think they disagree.
"I disagree with...his arguments pointing to biological factors as a primary reason that there aren’t more female software engineers"
- straw-man - he argues that biology may in part explain the lack of 50/50 representation.
from the TLDR: "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women (and not “socially constructed oppression”) may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership"
"I disagree completely and utterly that the (yes, real) average differences between men and women map to being better or worse at certain jobs. Interest in certain jobs, certainly."
- you actually agree with the memo. From the memo: "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men...These...differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas"
"It seemed like he cherry-picked research that agreed with his views and didn’t seek dissenting research or opinions before sending the document to internal Google groups."
- The purpose of posting this memo was to seek dissenting research and other opinions.
"differences are so significant as to suggest that men or women are better or worse on average at any job that relies on mental work."
- straw man. men or women being "better" is not the concern of the memo.
"his skepticism of his own views deserves a much more prominent placement in the text than a footnote – had he led with this and made it clear he wasn’t sure whether he was correct and simply wanted to start a discussion (as he subsequently stated in a YouTube interview), he likely would not have been blasted the same way."
- the first "background" paragraph literally is this.
"Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups. Such misrepresentation is harmful to those of us at Google who have to overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills."
- the author is also concerned with harm to female employees in the form of increased tension resulting from hiring practices that are perceived as lowering the bar. Google obviously would not do this intentionally, but the author felt the practices "effectively" lowered the bar.
"It seemed like he cherry-picked research that agreed with his views and didn’t seek dissenting research or opinions before sending the document to internal Google groups."
- The purpose of posting this memo was to seek dissenting research and other opinions.
Pure gold. This is exactly what I was thinking when I read that.
The sad part about all this is that by presenting and alternative narrative to his own in good light with a question as to how the facts presented actually play out, we might have had a good discussion.
For example, even if it's true that on average women do worse in general in technical or engineering fields, that doesn't necessarily mean that the women in those fields currently are worse on average. There are a few possible reasons why they may be better than the average men in those fields.
Firstly, if we accept that women have different levels of aptitude in certain skill sets, there's no reason to assume they have the same variability. It's entirely possible that women on average are worse in certain skills, but that they have more exceptional outliers.
Secondly, even if there is not more variability in the female population for the skills in question, it's entirely possible that cultural and social pressure has resulted in those that choose careers on those skills having higher than average abilities in them. For example, if my family has a legacy of being fairly clumsy and uncoordinated, but my brother is a pro athlete, what's more likely, that he's a crappy athlete, or that perhaps the criticisms that apply well to my family do not apply accurately to him, for whatever reason?
Providing an olive branch can make all the difference in a discussion like this, and the fact that neither explanation put forth here is contradictory with each other or the premise that perhaps a 50/50 gender split isn't necessarily ideal makes this particularly lamentable, since we might have been able to have a good discussion about gender differences while minimizing the impact it has on individual members of that gender. Of both sides (there's plenty of fields where men face an uphill battle too).
"He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups."
-> so an employee accuses a company of illegal behavior, the company denies it, and that's it? It proves the company is not doing it? No need for investigating or anything?
Elizabeth Holmes and Travis are probably thinking: damn, I wish people thought like that for me too!
First off, nobody in tech, male or female is really "average". Second, everybody must prove they're good at their job by doing it well. But to suggest that there is absolutely no correlation that makes men or women disproportionately want to work in certain fields or have a higher aptitude to certain roles is a bit premature.
The vitriol and disdain in response by some from the original memo, completely discounting some of the reservations on opinion vs fact and presenting them as only a footnote is somewhat disingenuous.
"Ask a female engineer". That headline in itself implies that there are differences between males and females, as the memo states. Why would I otherwise listen to the opinion these engineers have over any other?
I'm from Sweden and our universities have fought for years with getting more females to study IT. Same goes for senior highschool. And it's not only to get you to study, it's while you study as well. Benefits just for women. Courses just for women. Meeting people from business, just for women. And so on. The last discussion was about whether women studying IT should pay back their study loans, even though the education itself is already payed for.
I think the questions we should ask ourselves are, is this improving diversity in opinions and thoughts? Is this beneficial for the field? Does this improve the state of the companies within IT?
Otherwise we're just pushing one gender over the other, for no particular reason, except gender. Choosing people for their gender, over their thoughts and performance is sexist and horrible.
>I maintain that when I go to work, I go to work, and not to a debate club. Some people at Google reacted by saying “well if he’s so wrong, then why not refute him,” but that requires spending a significant amount of time building an argument against the claims in his document. On the other hand, if I remain silent, that silence could be mistaken for agreement. I should not be forced into that kind of debate at work.
Anyone else see the hypocrisy here?
>the takeaway from the memo is literally that the onus is on me to prove to men in tech that I’m not an “average” woman
That's not the takeaway I got. What I got from it was 'Google's hiring practices are counterproductive and will increase people's questioning of each other's capabilities, based on their gender'.
Talk about changing the narrative and shooting the messenger.
I find it interesting how much the memo is misinterpreted even by folks who have read it multiple times and have been pretty engaged in discussions about it. Example:
"He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups."
This is what he actually wrote:
"Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by
decreasing the false negative rate"
I'll admit this is a surprisingly dense sentence. And the phrase "lowering the bar" is controversial for an obvious reason, so it was a really bad decision by Damore to combine such a phrase with such a dense line of reasoning. It's just a recipe for disaster.
Some things to note:
* The use of "effectively" here is critical and means that the bar is not directly lowered in interview or technical standards. Rather, it's lowered as a (potentially complex) side effect of other more indirect policies.
* That indirect policy is to decrease the false negative rate. This doesn't mean standards are actually lowered for minority candidates; rather, it means extra time and money are invested to make sure that a negative result is actually a negative result. This can cause the standards to be effectively lowered, because it means that extra time and money are not invested in non-minority candidates, who therefore must overcome a higher false negative rate -- and the easiest way to do that is to be so good that none of your interviewers might feel ambiguous about your abilities.
To state that second bullet point differently and in a way that totally avoids politics, if you imagine that the interview is producing a noisy estimate of your technical ability, and the noise is predominantly negative/subtractive, then the expected score of an accepted candidate is higher with the noise than without. But if you offer a second interview to candidates and let a candidate's final estimate be the greater of the two samples, then the negative noise is reduced (though not eliminated), which will lower the expectation (but NOT below the expected value you'd get by eliminating the noise entirely).
With this analysis in place, I think it's more helpful to rephrase it as effectively raising the bar for non-minority candidates rather than lowering it for minority candidates, though ideally I'd prefer to avoid any phrases about bars being lowered or raised in general.
Can anyone cite the parts of the document where he claimed that the biological differences mapped to job performance?
I read it, but definitely don't recall that association being made (he did talk a lot about preference and job satisfaction), but see numerous detractors citing that association as a criticism, so I'm a bit confused.
On pages 3 and 4 he claims that these differences exist (emphasis added):
- On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. ...the distribution of PREFERENCES and ABILITIES of men
and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why
we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
- Women, on average, have more: Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men
- These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.
- Women, on average, have more: Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).
- This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
And later proposes these solutions:
- We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming
and more collaboration.
- Make tech and leadership less stressful.
So he has 1) cited biological differences between men and women in their abilities (not simply preferences) and 2) claimed that these lead to suitability for different jobs and also indicated the specific jobs would need to be changed in order to be more suitable for women, which strongly implies differing performance levels.
For what it's worth, he addressed your first point in a reddit AMA. More or less, he thinks smart women are more verbally gifted, so they have more viable career choices on average. If that's true, they may they pick apparently nonverbal jobs (programming) less often.
"For high achieving women, they tend to be good at both quantitative and verbal skills. For high achieving men, they tend to be good at quantitative skills and proportionally not as good at verbal. Thus, high achieving women have more choices of careers (like being a lawyer), while men may have fewer."
Yeah, I still think that's transparently BS. His source there is another opinion piece.
That said, it does sound as if Google is engaged in illegal hiring practices.
As someone who went to a private engineering school, formerly boys only and co-ed in the past decade, there are many brilliant women in engineering. All of this spouting does them a huge disservice. As Damore himself admitted in one AMA answer, it might by "cultural." I believe that is a far more acceptable argument than evolutionary psychology and political ideology.
note that "differ in the distribution of abilities" does not mean the average is different, it can also mean the outliers are more extreme, and as I understand it research supports just that.
Nobody can because he never claimed that. This is what strikes me the most about the whole diversity memo gate: even the most high profile responses, including this one, contain straw man arguments and not many people seems to care. The engineer Edith goes as far and completly and uterly disagreeing with something that is NOT IN THE MEMO.
Honest question: Will this thread be quickly flagged by HN moderators or taken off the front page like many others on the topic (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967819 for more info)?
You seem to be mistaken about what's been happening. Moderators haven't been flagging those articles; users have. That's what '[flagged]' means.
The different outcome in this case is because of community response. There are still a lot of flags, but there are many more upvotes. That, plus the discussion quality (i.e. not a trainwreck) surprised us quite a bit. I emailed Cadran this morning that she should probably expect the post to get flagged the same way as others (by users) and that we wouldn't be able to intervene if that happened. Instead, it went straight to #1. That's fine by me because the discussion has remained relatively civil and substantive.
For completeness I should mention that we did do one intervention: we turned off a software penalty called the 'flamewar detector' that kicks in on discussions that get a great many comments. But that's routine: we always turn off that penalty when the discussion isn't actually a flamewar, and this one qualifies. Other than that, moderators haven't touched the post at all, so yeah I think it's fair to say no exceptions.
This mostly supports a highly biased reading of the memo so it will definitely stay on the front page for hours. There have been at least 3 other considerably more interesting follow ups written by women ("these are not my people" essay, the one by the physicist, and the one yesterday from the google recruiter that was "sick" of it) and all three got flagged to hell and disappeared. Anybody compaining got the stock "you are just another idealogue" admonisminet from moderators.
So at the top of the article, just before the interview starts, there's this:
> There’s been a lot of anger on both sides, but I haven’t seen many constructive discussions between people who disagree on these issues. I and all the women who have contributed in this post feel that there’s forward progress to be made by finding common ground and discussing different viewpoints without yelling. I hope this will be a good forum for that.
Do you feel like this article does this?
To me, it looks like three people (two of whom openly identify as having left-wing political views) mostly agreeing. That's still useful, but falls way short of "constructive discussion between people who disagree on these issues."
What troubles me is the resolution. Man who spoke out is fired everything is now fine at google. Google will remove anyone who dare speaks out. Managers will create blacklists now and singled out. Anyone with oppposing views will be pushed down and/or pushed out.
What troubles me is how easily this community, who typically values employer discretion in how they run their businesses, turns into labor-protection lefties when someone gets canned for crapping on half the workforce.
Everything I actually read about the memo (and I didn't read it besides some points) is:
- Some Points are valid
- Some Points are discussable (that's why this post was created, wasn't it?)
but nearly none addresses them as totally invalid.
I mean even in this post of ycombinator the person in question couldn't straight said "No! This is wrong" and back it up with data.
I just don't get the whole gender/race discussions, but if such a memo can exists and things like gender diversity programs do exists, than something is probably really really wrong.
But with one thing I disagree with her, firing him was not the right thing to do, at least not directly. I mean wouldn't it be better to just discuss this, probably in the open, with him, the company and even more and make a great discussion panel?
I mean with just firing him, they actually just ignored all points, even valid ones.
> Nevertheless, I maintain that when I go to work, I go to work, and not to a debate club... if I remain silent, that silence could be mistaken for agreement. I should not be forced into that kind of debate at work.
That, right there, is why Damore should've looked for a different outlet (and probably one that wasn't 50k+ people big) for testing his "dialectical skills." That's the very definition of creating a hostile environment, where people feel forced into actions they normally wouldn't engage into just for the gratification of a single person's whims.
But Google was and is a debate club - there is extensive information about Google's multiple discussion boards and lively cluture of dialectics. Why do you object/punish a single discussion that you happen to disagree with?
There's a slight difference between technical flamewars, pointed debates about expanding the amount of bathrooms available per building and Damore's post. If you can't see the difference, honestly I can't help you.
I'm amazed that, in all of the debates stemming from the Google Memo, I haven't seen anyone point their finger at the unhealthy tech culture as a female repellant.
Look at the work/life balance of your typical engineer in the tech industry. Compare this to the reality of a mother of small children. In our culture, women disproportionately bear the brunt of child rearing.
When there's a work emergency and the kids HAVE to be picked up at daycare, who goes? When a kid is sick, who stays home? When a child is born, who takes several months of leave to care for them?
Consider that many women leave the tech industry or stay away from the all-consuming work culture because they have or will eventually want a family life. It doesn't matter what are people's abilities when they see a job as incompatible and contrary to their life goals.
But that was part of point in the memo, he was proposing how to change tech culture to make it more appealing for women. Like one of his proposals was to introduce part-time jobs into Google among other things. He wasn't claiming to have all answers but wanted to start official conversation on this topic and figure out what is truly feasible at Google...
I'm leaving the industry for a while to take care of my 7 month old so my wife can get back into her career as a designer in the tech industry. We didn't really plan it like this, something happened, but in the end I think it's a good opportunity for our family (I get to bond with the kid, she gets to go back to developing her career).
How society judges a stay-at-home dad might be another issue, however.
I suspect the Protestant Work Ethic is so strong in the USA in all work places that to argue that working less can be good for a better life balance is almost tantamount to blashphemy.
Europe is better (Catholicism perhaps?) in their work life balance, where working hard as you can is not seen as a social and personal good.
I also feel its a function of age. Young recent graduates can work for longer, have more energy, have less of a life than people 10 years older with more life, children etc.
On a side note, I would like to thank the HN mods for allowing this discussion to take place. Previous attempts at discussion were quickly silenced by flagging, and while it's a little weird that a piece on YCombinator just happens to be the sole exception, I'm glad that an exception was made. These kinds of discussions are difficult but necessary, critical to the process of gaining a greater understanding of those we disagree with. I hope we're able to keep having these discussions going forward.
Thanks, but we didn't do anything different in this case and are as surprised as anyone that the post went to #1 and (better still!) the discussion remained as civil as it has. I don't want people to think that the ycombinator.com domain affects moderation on an article like this, since our first rule is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved [1].
I emailed Cadran to warn her that the post would probably meet the same fate as the others, but I was wrong—the community responded quite differently. That's fine by us as long as the discussion meets the site guidelines, which this one mostly has.
Edit: also, the community should know that it, not moderators, produced this effect. IMO that makes the thread more interesting.
Thanks for clarifying and correcting my assumptions. I'm guessing the content of the article in addition to the domain led users to view this as a more productive contribution to the debate. Apologies for assuming that it was HN favoritism on the part of the mods... very interesting that this happened organically.
(While I'm replying to you, one super trivial and completely unrelated feature request... if comment forms are being submitted via JS, could you guys add code to prevent duplicate form submission when the enter key is held down too long? Very low priority and I know you're busy enough, but just figured I would pass along the suggestion. I've had to go back and fix my own accidental dupes a few times.)
Could you email us about this at hn@ycombinator.com so it goes into our todo list? sctb and I just had an idea about how we might fix this and it's been an annoying bug for years.
"As a female engineer, you don’t get to just love coding, or love problem solving and hacking on hardware – you also have to figure out how to navigate men who seem to demonstrate with words and actions that they don’t consider you an equal, that they consider you less smart or capable, or that they assume you don’t have as much expertise as your peers."
Not picking any fights, I'd love to really understand this sentiment more. In my entire career I've dealt with co-workers who observably considered me less smart. To the point I barely think it was their innate nature but more so a by product of being a programmer. Too much isolation and brain reward circuitry leads to inflated egos.
I understand that the comment I quoted is speaking of sexist discrimination, but if I re-read it removing female and replacing men with people, it would be a pretty apt description of my life as a developer.
I believe that it would be hard to delineate whether it was discrimination or just work place egos if you weren't from a similar background e.g. minority groups
Sidestory: I'm an Indigenous Australian, plenty of times in my life I have seen family and friends make statements, that I'm sure plenty of you have also seen such as "You are racist" or "That's racist" when clearly to a third party the accuser seems way off the mark.
Wasn't that her point? Software development can be a hostile environment for both men and women because of the many socially inept caustic people who work in the industry.
I didn't read it as such and I wouldn't say it was the point I was attempting to make. (not your fault, I suck at writing sentences)
In short, apologetically generalising, I'm suggesting that humans by nature tend to barely get along ever, and sometimes it is hard to tell what is discrimination and what is just normal work crap.
> By remaining silent on this topic or tweeting support for Damore, they are sending a message that philosophical arguments and principles take precedence over the lived experiences of many smart, talented female engineers and technical founders.
In my world view philosophical principles generally take precedence over lived experiences of others. Lived experiences are not universal, cannot be relayed exactly (memories are often colored and retellings may be selective to make a particular point). If we want our ethical systems to apply to everyone, to be inclusive, we need principles that work for everyone, not just correctives for individual cases.
A lot of TFA appears to put emotion, form, "lack of consideration" and presentation over facts. I am abstractly aware that those things have quite an impact on people. But it is quite alien to me, in text form the factual content of argument is more important because text can be easily misinterpreted and it is not a dialogue where the writer can clarify and correct any misunderstandings.
That said, the response is still far more measured than the immediate news and social media response.
> Social skills are part of a professional skillset. It is important to learn how to handle difficult subjects in a workplace – we all have to do it. There are consequences for doing it in a way that causes problems for your employer
He was not the one who leaked it. It was those people who were so offended that they thought the world had to see it instead of engaging in a discussion with him.
If the issue is "causing problems for the employer" then aren't those others also guilty?
First, a summary: There are differences between men and women. There are also barriers to entry into tech for women. Let's try to fix those, and keep trying, without necessarily expecting that we'll have 50% of engineers being women when we've finally fixed (all) the barriers.
And one detailed opinion:
On Edith's reply to "What do you disagree with or find objectionable?": She complained about having to wonder whether people she encountered on the job felt that she was qualified. I suspect that quite a few male Google employees actually feel the same fear (call it imposter syndrome). The question to me is, does she feel the same fear as men and wonder if, in her case, it's because she's female? Or does she feel additional fear because of being female? (I don't know, and I'm not going to guess. I merely observe that, if you remove the male/female aspects, what she said sounds a lot like how people describe imposter syndrome.)
Are any of these engineers East Asian immigrants or Asian Americans? From my own circles both near and extended, it seems like there is a much more even split within especially East Asian H1Bs and to a less degree Asian Americans? This may be from my own experience of hearing Asian parents push children regardless of gender towards STEM.
It keeps leading me back to the idea that increased volition allows gender differences to propagate.
I've been trying very hard to find data for say H1Bs by race and by gender at Oracle. Any thoughts?
The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015
Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are H1Bs from India, China and other Asian countries, and Romania and other eastern-European countries. If you subtract their numbers then the difference is more severe.
There is something in the US culture that makes American women not want to take up tech. The diversity memo doesn't address the fact that more women take tech jobs when impediments are removed, as evidenced by the larger percentage of women in tech jobs in other countries.
I think the discrepancy between American women and immigrant women is interesting. I'm not sure we can conclude from the given evidence that the difference is reduced impediments. It could be that that the increased economic opportunity (or potential immigration benefits) makes up for other things.
I agree the increased economic opportunity could very well be the primary factor, but why is this not enough of a factor for white American women? Or are there other factors in raising a child in an economically stable society lead to more "do what you want, my child, regardless of your gender"?
> ...why is this not enough of a factor for white American women?
Working as an engineer in America is a bigger jump in economic opportunity for someone in India than for someone in America. Also, it's likely that Indians are better informed about what the pay for top notch engineers is these days. I suspect the average American underestimates what coding pays by quite a bit.
IIRC, some people say the opposite - that as standards of living and gender equality improve, lower proportions of women go into Engineering - which is why Iran, Zimbabwe, Thailand etc have >40% female representation in coding classes while Sweden, New Zealand, Canada etc are <30%.
> It keeps leading me back to the idea that increased volition allows gender differences to propagate.
And I'm looking hard for data just in Silicon Valley, which the SO link does help with a little. I think looking at East Asians should be enlightening too.
I think the problem with tech is that many of us are arrogant pricks (let the down votes start) because of this fact we are facing a lot of politics at the workplace - all with the common source of a desire to dominate. More women might create a more healthy atmosphere at most places, but who cares. However this is unlikely to happen because many women are not attracted by a heavily male dominated work environment.
The argument that women are inherently bad at tech is not based on historical evidence - lots of women in early computing. Believe me it is very tough to debug a stack of punch cards, much tougher than what we have today...
Are HR practices and PC the right way to solve deep problems? I don't think so. Maybe discussions of this sort can move some people, but most people only seek and find confirmation for their own position...
Does anyone know if there is anywhere with discussions with women who aren't engineers? I'm thinking find a dozen random women who were 95th percentile or higher on the SATs 6 years ago and ask them 1) Why they chose their field and 2) Why they didn't go into computer science.
At least at the college I went to, the ratio of women graduating in CS was slightly higher than the ratio of women enrolled in my freshman CS class (proportionally, slightly more men switched majors or dropped out than women).
Places like Google hiring more female engineers is good, and even helps with the pipeline problem, since role-models are one way of encouraging disadvantaged groups to pursue particular careers. However, it would be nice to know if there are interventions we could make directly earlier in the pipeline.
I live in the land of prestigious doctors - we all did well on the SAT. CS was not super prominent in my life despite me knowing some code in early high school, but my mom is a doctor, so that was obviously a viable option in my mind. The thought that it is a job that only lasts until you are 45 and I have to make as much money as I humanly can before being forced to retired at middle age is a bit unattractive. Also, the idea of doing stuff on computer all day looking for bugs, vs playing medicine puzzles was less attractive. LOL, medicine is fairly tedious as well now that I am in it, but yes, while I am more interested in programming to do a few practical things, I am not interested in working as a SWE. A lot of the med students have SWE spouses. We do sit around and lament about how we could have done it too with much better pay and some passes for interviewing, about the Google Hawaii powow and how nice the Christmas party as Museum of Natural History is, while we get a Christmad party at the local bar with the drunk emergency technicians. Tech has a lot of glamour now, medicine doesn'.t But in the end, I don't think I would choose differently. Female physicians really don't get any passes... Okay, if you are lady going into Urology or trauma surgery, and a dude going into obgyn, I hear there is a bit more help, otherwise we don't really get any bonus points for being a woman or minority.
I would like to hear more about why so many people feel it would be intolerable for a woman to be assigned to work with this guy. I'm a Jewish man, and I feel that I could deal OK with being assigned to work with a radical anti-Semite or a feminist who professed beliefs about men being evil, or with someone who held me in contempt and thought my technical abilities were subpar.
There's a difference between "starting a conversation" and blasting out an e-mail to 50,000 people that doesn't really even grasp the realities of modern software development. There's a chain of command about this kind of stuff for a reason. The author is simply mistaken on the requirements that make a good software developer: yes, it is true that on average, men are probably better at heads-down software development. But that's at most half of the job of software development, and it's honestly the least important part to get right.
On other metrics (such as interpersonal communication, conflict resolution, etc - all critical components of modern engineering) women are better on average. How many Silicon Valley startups fail because their product represents the problems that the team members (who tend to be mostly white men) are facing? How many investors went along with this because they too had the same problem?
Point is, you don't get to cherry-pick statistics that match your perceived criteria for the job and claim to be trying to start an unbiased dialog. I don't think it's intentionally disingenuous -- I think that the author of the original memo has a limited view of the job and the problems associated with it.
That's honestly the biggest problem here: white men very often believe their viewpoint is the only valid one, and don't even consider alternate viewpoints. I'm not saying this as "white men bad!" -- I'm totally empathetic to the fact that many white men feel they are under attack -- but that misses the point. Everyone who is not a white man has felt that way their entire lives in some degree. Every way you deviate from the "straight white male" archetype (by being black, gay, female, transgender, etc.) is another front you have to play defense on.
I think the right response is something along the lines of "Your viewpoint is valid, but please understand that it is not the only one that is valid." We have to be careful not to invalidate someone's lived experience -- that's exactly the problem we accuse white men of, and showing the same behavior right back isn't going to solve the problem.
If female engineers need to worry that, in the aftermath of the memo, people will wonder their genuine qualifications, they should not aim their blame toward the memo. The only people overtly and explicitly injecting non-qualification factors into hiring are affirmative-action type people. They created the quandary.
I've read the memo and I don't see the part where it says that women make worse engineers in general. It says that a lower proportion of women meet Google's expectations for engineering positions.
This is not the same thing at all. First, he explicitly rejects the idea of a gender binary, using an overlapping Gaussian distribution instead.
Second, he says that many positions at Google have expectations that favor men (competition, work-over-home, ...) even though these traits don't necessarily make better engineers.
>I’m also disappointed that the men I know, including most of my male colleagues, remained silent on the topic. And the ones that did participate, either seemed to support Damore or demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding for the issues women engineers are faced with and care about.
Interesting takes on the memo. This part stood out to me.
I'm not really in a situation where I have many coworkers around but, just knowing myself, I can say I likely would be someone that would have stayed silent on the topic unless it was specifically brought up. That's more about my personality than anything, I generally avoid starting conversations because I'm bad at small talk.
I'd like to know what I can do differently. My opinion generally mirrors the thoughts put forward by the female engineers but I feel like maybe I've let someone in my life down by not being more vocal and supportive. Really the only thing I've done is tried to encourage female coworkers in non-development positions to try it out, and offer them help. I've tried to nudge our hiring team to look at a more diverse crowd - though that's hampered by low wages and living very literally in one of the more remote parts of the country (our town has 3.5k people and is considered a large town for our region). I guess I'm saying I want to do more but I don't know what to do without seeming disingenuous.
Wow. I really feel like this was a missed opportunity to close the gap. I feel like some very unreasonable thing are being said in a reasonable/polished way.
>> A lot of people have used that argument in defense of what he wrote, as evidence that the memo was not harmful or hostile to the women he worked with. When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?
So it sounds like we're implying that anybody who presents facts to your coworkers that might enable them to come to stereotypical conclusions has made a hostile work environment? I find it absurd that an environment is hostile because "maybe people are thinking X." I would think hostility would require some form of visible action.
>> I disagree with his use of science and data to convert opinions into facts. It seemed like he cherry-picked research that agreed with his views and didn’t seek dissenting research or opinions before sending the document to internal Google groups.
Isn't the whole point of science is to move the debate away from opinion to fact. His views are certainly much more in line with the facts that what I've heard from his opponents. For example, I don't see anybody disagreeing that women score higher on "neuroticism" measures (wikipedia agrees).
>> There’s a difference between “let’s have a discussion” and “let me tell you what’s up, all you wrong people.”
Great, but that has nothing to do with this. The other side certainly would never extend him (or me) that civility. This is a power struggle and I don't know why we're pretending it's not.
---
As an aside, this whole debate has made me realize that I was kidding myself if I told myself SJWs were on the side of equality. They are on the side of politically advancing their own in-group-alliance (which doesn't include most minorities, nor the minority most in need - the lower class).
They have no interest in fact because they aren't trying to achieve a clear vision of a better world, rather it's because they are playing politics where facts are just another form of weapon.
The only reason they have so much power in tech (and not say, finance) is because we are altruists/optimists ourselves and tried to see something greater in SJW political games.
This issue is much hairier because discrimination in the work place can be criminal for companies, and employees are representatives of their employers. Whether or not he crossed the line, he was close enough that he got the axe.
> I feel like some very unreasonable thing are being said in a reasonable/polished way.
That's a decent description of Damore's memo.
> I would think hostility would require some form of visible action.
Nope. My dad's tech workplace in the '70s was hostile to black people even though there was almost no visible action.
> Isn't the whole point of science is to move the debate away from opinion to fact.
Yes, but cherry-picking results and selectively quoting articles isn't rigorous science. There is a long history of misusing science to promote preconceived agendas (tobacco industry, new age quantum garbage, eugenics, etc).
I apologize, I just can't understand the last half of your post. It sounds like you're saying the women who wrote this article are part of a powerful in-group-alliance?
>> Nope. My dad's tech workplace in the '70s was hostile to black people even though there was almost no visible action.
What do you mean? They didn't hire, fire, promote, or speak differently?
>> Yes, but cherry-picking results and selectively quoting articles isn't rigorous science. There is a long history of misusing science to promote preconceived agendas (tobacco industry, new age quantum garbage, eugenics, etc).
This is fair. Except from my side, I feel like I'm seeing cherry-picking by the other side. I studied psychology, and in college nobody seemed to dispute innate differences between men and women (I was taught of some in infants).
So since both sides feel the other is cherry-picking, we can either A) fire people for it B) talk it out like scientists.
>> I apologize, I just can't understand the last half of your post. It sounds like you're saying the women who wrote this reply are part of some powerful in-group-alliance?
I'm not suggesting there is an alliance of women. I'm suggesting there is a politically motivated core (SJW is the closest word I know for the group) at google and the larger public. The fact that this group is treating science as politics explains why:
- They are trying to fire people for ideas (because it's US vs THEM in their heads)
- They are deliberately lying about what Damore said (because it's politics, so no holds barred).
- They are not at all expressing a coherent vision of what "equality" would look like if they could make all the rules, but instead fighting for their own minorities (and disregarding Jews, Mexicans, ugly people, fat people, tattooed people, and all the other groups that certainly are slightly discriminated against)
> They didn't hire, fire, promote, or speak differently?
Sure, now prove it. Other than the lack of black engineers in his department and some comments made at non-work-related functions, there wasn't anything you could point to and say "a-ha!" It can be insidious.
> nobody seemed to dispute innate differences between men and women
I think everyone agrees there are innate differences. At least, the women who wrote this article do as well.
Now, do those innate differences make women inferior engineers? (I know, Damore never explicitly said this, but he implied it. Maybe it's just poor writing? I wish he'd run his memo past some interested women before posting internally so he'd have a chance to clarify.)
The "core" of which you speak is basically Google's exec staff. It's not a conspiracy, it's just the company.
They fired Damore because, whether it's due to unfair implications or just bad writing, his presence had become hostile to a good percentage of Google's workforce. He's not going to be in a position to manage many female engineers after posting that.
Personally, I wish Google could have condemned the memo and let HR handle it. Their reaction seemed over the top. Ah well, sometimes life isn't fair, even for white male engineers. :)
This I think is a problem with the culture and education system of our society, by the time we reach the point of hiring someone the damage is already done.
I don't think it makes a hell of a lot of sense to chose someone on the grounds of what minority or oppressed group they happen to be a part of - hire the best person for the job (this shouldn't simply take into account the skills of the individual, but also how well they can be expected to integrate into the group that they are becoming a part of).
We need to look into the underlying causes of the gender and race imbalances in the pool from which we are hiring.
For women, this means looking at why it is that girls seem to be disuaded from interest in the fields in question.
From my perspective my interest in the engineering fields emerged from being exposed to things as simple as transformers (the toys, not the modern explosion porn), while my sisters were playing with Barbies (a line of toys that I still consider vapid and pointless) I was marvelling at the fact that a few joints and pivots can be structured in such a way as to allow transition between vehicular and humanoid forms.
Allowing girls to think in mathematical and engineering terms without attaching a social stigma of acting boyish will help in this regard.
From the perspective of racial minorities, there is a multi-generational poverty cycle coupled with a far lower standard of education.
It cuts them off at the knees before they even get started.
Fix the education system and the discouraging culture in and of our society and things will balance out - eventually.
But the current way of doing things is a feel good solution that deals with the symptoms - and ignores the underlying disease.
I find it annoying how all these people get to freely debate this and voice their opinions, but the person who started it lost his job for doing the same.
> particularly his arguments pointing to biological factors as a primary reason that there aren’t more female software engineers
I believe it was just a reason. Not necessarily the primary one.
I should probably go back and reread it, but I also remember the biological points were primarily about interest rather than the suitability of those that are already interested.
It seems most of the disagreement on the memo are things he never said.
I just can't figure out why it is so difficult to even discuss the fact that men and women are not identical. It is really difficult to research and measure, but it is a really, really strong (and untrue) assumption that men and women are just exactly the same in every possible way.
Now if we accept that fact, even if we are not able to quantify it, also the demographics are going to vary by occupation, just by choice, even in a perfect world without discrimination.
Given how impossible this is to research, how are we to know whether occupational gender differences are good or bad? How do we know what's discrimination and what's just choice, knowing that the two are also related, and choice is also related with ability regardless of the gender.
We should fix discrimination by punishing the actors behaving that way, not by establishing countermeasures that are just discriminatory in the other direction. This is what I understood to be Damore's main argument.
* When women and men were both asked to "think like men" (article details how this was done) on a mental rotation test, they did about the same. When asked to think like women, there was a significant difference - around 1/3 drop of average score for women, 10% for men.
* Two groups were asked to take a test, but one of the groups was primed by the statement: “This is a genuine test of your verbal abilities and limitations due to various personal factors involved in performance.” - the test takers were given the impression that their score on the test was associated with their personal academic aptitude. The second group wasn't primed in this way. In the primed group, black people had a drop of performance of 2x (the number of items solved was halved).
Imagine having looked at studies like these. They show how severely people can be affected by stereotypes - orders of magnitude more than any statistically insignificant biological differences. If even the stereotyped are personally affected, imagine how much worse that can be in multiple-people situations (interviews, meetings etc) where the other people are not the target of the stereotype but has been influenced by it in their life...
So now a colleague is seemingly perpetuating stereotypes and those stereotypes are going viral. His argument may be more nuanced than that, but you fear that the stereotypes are all that people will take from it. For the most part that fear seems to be coming true. Whats the normal reaction there?
After having this sort of discussion with people, there seems to be a huge number of people, some very intelligent, that don't understand the relationship between sex hormones and behavior
Can't we just agree on that generalizing people in general is a pretty bad idea? Better to give equal opportunity, which in my opinion doesn't mean that you give anyone more attention because of physical factors like what sex a person have.
I am principally against using any form of discrimination even if the reason is to fight discrimination. Having for example courses only for women, hiring women only because there is a disparity is bad idea.
I honestly think if we just treated everyone with the same respect that we want to be treated ourselves a lot of these issues would disappear.
Maybe there will still be a lack of a specific sex in some jobs but honestly, who cares? I certainly do not and do not believe in the notion that a company is more successful because of a more mixed environment. I think the competence of each employee and their worldview and view towards another is way more important.
As I've written many times before, please just treat everyone the same.
I for one believe James Damore wasn't fired for his views on women, but Google fired him because he was a PR problem and that could affect their business/financial bottom line. Google probably understands the user base and decided they would rather not displease women (bigger group) compared to conservatives.
My analysis adds up to what James Damore had to say as to what happened in a WSJ article. He said his memo didn't bother many people until it was leaked, and the google HR got many complaints from the outside world.
I think the google management fired him not because of his view, nor were they worried that he questioned google's purported wasteful spending on diversity programs (which for Google is drop in the bucket if it is effective...if it is not effective I dont think they care, it makes them look good).
But google fired James because they thought he was bad for business (consumer base).
If thst were true, why didn't google negotiate a gag agreement (using a few million $$$, cheap for them) with Damore to make this just go away? The fact that they didn't take the easy way out makes me think that they didn't fire him for business reasons.
But that wouldn't appease the public who wanted him fired? If the public( let's say women's group) aren't appeased and they boycott google, it affects google ?
It is possible that google gave an offer to James D to be silent along with the pink slip, which he might have turned down?
There is a lot of anti-SJW sentiment these days that I'm sure even Google doesn't really want to tap into...the public is more broadly defined than one side of the story. Also, the longer this story goes on, the left isn't really appeased and the right grows angrier, very much a lose-lose situation for google right now.
The guy might have turned down a gag agreement, maybe they just didn't offer enough money? A non-disparagement ageement would also be on the table just for severence, but Google seems to have opted out of that already (you can't talk about the guy and expect that him not to talk about you).
The main issue I had with the document is that it read like an 80's USENET posting in alt.politics. I've seen this entire discussion play out over and over again, at multiple companies, with the same talking points, for all 35 years of my career.
My stepson just graduated from the same comp sci program I graduated from in the late 80's and I was startled by how fewer women there were in his graduating class than mine. I've watched my female classmates and colleagues leave the industry. I've watched the number of female candidates for my positions dwindle to the point where I recently hired three developers and there was a dearth of female candidates.
There is definitely a problem and the first step is to get beyond the point where smart, professionals in their late 20's think 80's reruns are adding to the debate.
I disagree that it’s possible to write what he did about general populations,
then walk it back to say “but of course it doesn’t apply at an individual level.”
A lot of people have used that argument in defense of what he wrote, as evidence
that the memo was not harmful or hostile to the women he worked with.
I strongly agree with this criticism and thought it was ridiculous that people even attempted to use this defense in the first place, so I'm glad it's being called out. When you are discussing statistical differences between populations as an explanation for certain behaviors, of course it is acknowledged by both sides that there are individuals that are outliers and that averages do not apply to every individual.
Fantastic interview, I relate to many of the things the engineers mentioned. I was also disappointed by the heat and rage from both sides, IMO this whole gender thing is not a debate, it's more like a cat fight that everyone gets hurt and become more hardened about their views. It's anti-productive and exhausting.
I hope that the silver lining here is that more people, particularly those who subconsciously share Damore's views on women, understand better about the real challenges of girls and women in the tech field. Cos it's not enough for a small segment to drive positive change, everyone needs to be onboard too. Let's shift the debate to that level now.
If Google would not have such diversity program in the first place, none of that would be happening. Reason why female engineers might have anxiety about what male engineers think about them is exactly result of having such program in place.
The government and society's (including workplaces) responsibility towards gender/race equity is to remove any legal/moral/social barriers for anyone (provided they have the interest and qualifications) to become anything. Going beyond that and trying to enforce a 50-50 gender quota/division in everything is itself ideologically motivated and an idiotic attempt at fighting biology. All you have to and should do is let anyone be anything. Whether this leads to a 50-50 division (gender-wise) is something biology and other factors will determine and should not concern us fundamentally.
This "ask" has an issue for me already: why would a female engineer know better than a male engineer?
As long as someone feels to have an informed opinion about the subject, he/she should feel free to present his view.
(I am a male (ex) software engineer, and I sure as hell have an opinion about it - to give you the TL;DR: his intention was to stimulate a conversation, he did it in an awkward way, and he's not perfect. And no, Google should have not fired him, but if you have ever worked in a large corporate environment, you might have a good idea why they did anyway).
>I disagree that it’s possible to write what he did about general populations, then walk it back to say “but of course it doesn’t apply at an individual level.”
I'd be curious to hear an actual defence of this line of thinking. I mean, it's simply a fact that group differences aren't particularly useful indicators of what an individual is like. Nevertheless, they're very good indicators of what populations are like. Is there any actual criticism of that argument, or is the objection more about how people feel about that argument?
I really enjoyed this interview, finally, some voices of reasons and not blind yelling at men for being sexist pigs just from reading some biased media's twisted headlines.
All these times around this memo, how many people actually cared to ask for female engineer's thoughts on this? All I see is women who don't work in engineering positions or men trying to interpret this memo from their perspective. How many actually cared what are the thoughts and impact on the main subject being discussed in the original article?
What bothers me most about this article is how all of us, when we feel threatened, tend to close off our empathy for the other side which prevents us from seeing clearly that they too feel threatened. We both come across as selfish and uncaring to the other and are completely oblivious to the fact that we are doing exactly the same thing ourselves.
Marshall Rosenberg used to say that “all objectionable behavior is a tragic expression of an unmet need”. That’s worth thinking about because it points the way towards an actual solution to the problem.
The simple “nonviolent communication” method that he developed was designed to help people to break down the barriers of hostility and connect in a fashion that enables both parties to achieve a mutually satisfying resolution and a closer and more fulfilling relationship. I have found it to work very well in my personal relationships.
As a general rule, when the other person feels that you genuinely care about their needs and are truly committed to helping them to meet them, they are very likely to return the favor. At that point the hostility fades and the seeking of zero sum solutions on both sides gives way to both sides working together to brainstorm a positive sum solution that fully meets everyone's needs. This is really quite a beautiful process and I wish more people used it because I truly believe it could make the world a far better place for all of us.
First off, sorry if it seems a bit incoherent, on a mobile so hard to keep an overview.
While it has (at least vocally) gotten a lot of backlash, the memo did give me an opportunity to have a deep conversation about both it, and sexism in general, not just in tech and not just towards one gender, with a female friend of mine that I study with.
We came into a lot of what annoys us both about the way the topic is treated in PC culture, and also gave us a bit of a better understanding of what types of things both gender face in society as a whole. Quite enjoyable conversation, but honestly you can do with someone you trust. So at least in that regard the memo “worked” for us.
One thing in the OP that stuck with me was
> When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have? How do I prove myself to people one way or another?
Which in my opinion is what happens when you go about “fixing” the gender disparity by such metrics as hiring. I really liked the suggestion to measure retention, how long they stayed and how happy they were, instead of some artificial quota for which you stop thinking after checking that box off. I really think we need to re-evaluate what works, and I hope at least the ongoing discussions bring us a little bit closer to that.
I'm baffled as to why these anonymous engineers or any female colleague would be offended by his memo. Some of the responses are quite condescending, calling him a "confused, questionably informed kid". Wow.
His memo is clear and reasonable. His interviews are reasonable and respectful, he approaches the topic calmly and scientifically, the exact opposite to the reactionary anger.
The only part of the memo I can see that could cause a fuss is this:
> "distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes"
Even if true, it should be mentioned that ability often stems from preference. We are driven to invest time and effort into our preferences, so our abilities in those areas will improve. In a population average, we should be able to graph this difference without failing any gender bias scrutiny.
As for "native ability", all else equal except gender, you will face opposition to the idea that your gender might start you at a disadvantage in given disciplines.
As soon as a child starts growing up and investing time in their preference, their abilities will cluster around those preferences. So it would be very difficult to prove that gender abilities are present before socialisation. Either way, it's a scientific question, and deserves respect rather than over-sensitive knee-jerk political reactions.
Thank you for posting this! Since that memo came out, I've asked myself several times - am I not woman enough because I love math and programming. I didn't know I would love either till I did a bit of deliberate slogging on both when I changed careers. Math, I deliberately learnt in high school simply because I no longer wanted to confused. Computing I learnt the slow hard way, again deliberately. But once I got a hang of it, it's been my passion!!!
I think it's a fatal mistake to underestimate the amount of discretion an employer has over its employees' behavior. In general, employment is at-will and relationships can end over personal differences.
One reason it might be shocking to be let go over a 'free-speech' issue is this individual was working at Google. If someone worked for their city government and mailed around a ten-page manifesto of either their genius findings or deluded beliefs (either way), it's not unreasonable that they might be let go without anyone reading it. (The action of sending around an opinionated piece of information without authority could be grounds for dismissal.)
In the past, there have been incidents like Steve Y's note where a smart person weathered a major faux pas for better or worse, which might make one think that all forms of speech are encouraged at this company. But I think Damore made some unique foibles when publishing this note and assumed that his outlook and motivation would be either respected or endorsed. Again, it is not a necessity for any corporation or organization to do so.
I also doubt that internal employee message boards or collective Word documents are the correct forum for this sort of debate. Given that the adversaries that Damore faces in this debate have most liked studied diversity and human resources at the graduate level, peppering survey references into a narrative argument will not be sufficiently persuasive of anything. The correct forum for this discussion is an anthropology thesis or something similar, or a very finely combed, deeply vetted, considerate action to a relevant party or audience.
As I understand it he was raising on an internal issue that was generally accepted as open for discussion (hiring and quotas). I think likening it to "mailing a manifesto out" is a deliberate mischaracterization.
This article is the first I've seen on this memo and by the spread of it inside and outside the company that's what it appeared to be. I'm not trying to mischaracterize the issue. In fact, I don't have all of the information.
For this conversation? A woman. He should have given that document to a female friend, told her it would probably offend her, and ask for her advice on how to improve it. He should have been there and watched her reaction as she read it. the single greatest fault of forums is that they do not give people a chance to read someone else's body language.
If it were a collective issue for employees, then it should be organized outside of work without using any company resources. There an upset employee could vent and strategize for change in a non-destructive way, and find support from his peers.
If it were an issue that needed to be specifically addressed by management, then it should be elevated to each level of management in turn (immediate superior, superior's superior, VP, CEO, board) in a tactful way.
There's no reason Damore couldn't have done both of these, and as was said by one of the female engineers, advertise his own opinions publicly himself as they apply to all companies. It's still possible that making so many waves like that would get him dismissed, but certainly not in the same way.
Reading the letter, this is clearly something that James is passionate about. If he can find a way to channel that in a professional and constructive way, maybe he can make positive change. But as it were, he did say some offensive things publicly.
Very few social and scientific studies offer room for the average individual to make links and draw conclusions outside the context of academic study.
For a random individual to not only draw conclusions these studies were not designed to support, that even their authors don't, outside of context of academic inquiry, and seek to apply it in the real world is an inexcusable transgression.
That some should fail to register this abuse of science and fail to notice the transgression is surprising.
What if someone circulates a memo citing studies saying introverts are not suitable for social collaboration roles, or aggression in males makes them unsuitable for collaboration roles and we should look for more 'suitable roles for males'.
Studies definitively show aggression is predominant in males but no one seeks to connect it to a real world workplace and that too without the credentials or expertise to. Is this science?
Seeking to apply social and genetic studies that are rarely as certain as the experimental sciences 1=1 to draw conclusions in the real world has traditionally been the refuge of supremacists and eugenicists.
That any well adjusted individual would seek to join this group in a workplace memo is an indiscretion too far. Individuals can't simply be reduced to genetics.
Why not have a real discussion about the environmental differences that influence interests and expectations. American society has very clear gender roles and expectations. Why are girls by age 6 conditioned to think "math is hard". Why are men encouraged to "crush it" or "kill it" and promoted if they do so at work, and yet if a women took a similar approach she would be criticized for being too pushy or bitchy.
The Economist really nails it imo. Pointing to some random stats that support your hypothesis, ignoring others, and speculating the significance of said stats is not science - it's motivated reasoning.
Here's another from an evolutionary scientist who gives a point-by-point response to Damore, using quotes from his text as a launching point for discussion [1]
She mentions that Damore brings up IQ,
"the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)"
IQ has no relevance to a discussion on gender gaps, so, why mention it?
The quote's context is politics. In that context, IQ has recently been used in discussions over racial differences [2].
It begs the question, is Damore being honest about his views on race? If we replace "IQ" with "race", would that change the meaning he meant to convey?
The very first answers about what they disagree with starts with
> I disagree completely and utterly that the (yes, real) average differences between men and women map to being better or worse at certain jobs.
If you look at just about any sport, there is a big difference between men and women. And that's not just for really physically intensive sports such as athletics. Even in chess, only 2 of the top 100 are women.
An important part of this discussion is using general population statistics, to describe programmers at Google.
Programmers at Google are NOT general population.
Without seeing that specific data, it may be that female programmers at Google are better than the males. I don't know, and it varies by project and role.
Then when we are talking about specific people, all the population statistics are irrelevant anyway.
>When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?
Damore never said he thought this way; this is merely an implication of something he did say.
What he did say was that he believes that - even though there are 4 times as many men as women at Google - the men who are there deserve to be there as much as the women. This implies that, were you to utilize quotas to achieve gender parity, then this same equality would not be true - men would now "deserve" their jobs more than women.
Conversely, if you think that gender parity through quotas would bring about equality of the sexes, then that implies that you think men employed right now are less capable then women. Men around you should then ask themselves the inverse question: how do they know which colleagues think they were hired purely because they are a man?
One of the most interesting things I got from this was referencing usage of the term TL;DR. While it's unclear where the Term "TL;DR" originated it certainly gained popularity in SomethingAwful and 4chan, two places that have long been known by the general society as havens for degeneracy. It's an interesting parallel when the term (which has obviously come a long way from where it originated) appears in a professional discussion alongside viewpoints that the original group of people who popularized the term would have considered widely abhorrent.
Not that it really speaks to anything about this particular issue, more to the fact that many people who use meme references are fully unaware that the cesspool of places like SA and 4chan are the originators/popularizers of the jokes that are repeated by one who might turn around and fully condemn those communities in the next sentence without skipping a beat.
> When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?
That's a question which will keep popping up as long as you have discriminatory practices in the hiring process.
In support of workplaces in which all employees know and feel the company is doing what it can feasibly to support them, regardless of who they are. I'm a man, I love women, and I'm a feminist.
So, despite my thought that it was utterly moronic for someone at Google to write out his beliefs in such a way that he would certainly get fired, unless he plans to go into politics, I'd like to respond to something one of the female interviewees stated in this interview:
"I also think that society should have room for the discussion of ideas that are not in step with what is considered acceptable at a given time. There is, of course, a difference between an unfounded opinion and the pursuit of scientific truth, but logically, we should not avoid pursuing a scientific truth for fear that the answer will not be aligned with currently accepted dogmas."
While these statements are incredibly close to my own, I call bullshit.
The pursuit of "scientific truth" in such a way to not be aligned with accepted dogmas is equivalent to having unfounded opinions in the sense that "scientific truth" itself is a lie, and has been so since the first "truth" was found to be "false".
Beliefs attributed to scientific work are beliefs, and modern science evolved from philosophers who established "truths" based on speculation.
To add to that, even what's been established is suspect, even if it were true once. Our minds believe things to be true from past experience that may not align with recorded history. People made mistakes when recording history. Therefore, according to "scientific truth" (which itself may be unwise!), we cannot assume everything we believe to be true to be true.
How then could the pursuit of a truth that could easily become a lie later any different than unfounded opinion or accepting dogma?
I'm considering a Paleo Diet now; that's full circle from our beginning.
1058 comments all descendents of hedgew's comment. First time I've ever seen something like that on HN.
Edit: FWIW, the best female engineers I've worked with were just as good as the males. But yes, distribution is a thing, and we see fewer female engineers compared to male engineers because of a pipeline problem. Lowering the hiring bar just to converge to an unrealistic and superficial hurts everyone. Maintain the hiring bar and address the pipeline issue by encouraging more women to get into this field.
Remarkably few comments on the actual linked article. I found most of the comments in the article calm, reasonable, nuanced and reflective. To me, this shows the benefits of conversation and long form text, which we often seem to forget in this age of short attention spans driven by social media.
We need more discussion like this. I for one would appreciate hearing more about how this discussion was facilitated. Is it a transcript of a face to face conversation, or was it done online, and if so, how?
It was basically a bullshit memo from the beginning written to appeal to a certain segment of the population. Google should have used this opportunity to educate the masses on diversity and should have fired him on the basis of hurting Google's brand & reputation and the ability to hire smart people in the future instead of citing code of conduct. Missed opportunity and a rookie mistake on Google's part.
I watched some youtube interviews of him, one on Bloomberg where he seemed pretty nervous and not as articulate or as relaxed as on this longer interview https://youtu.be/SEDuVF7kiPU with some Canadian professor who apparently has a bad rap of his own. Still an interesting discussion with some odd 3rd party alternate Googler in the background who speaks up every now and then but who has an obscure role in the context of the overall discussion. I was pretty curious too who this fella was that stirred up the hornet's nest.
Not the OP, but more and more it seems that if you are not 100% unequivocally clear, someone will attack you as if you agreed with a polemical point.
I think this is in part due to the "chilling effect". I've been there myself. I have to be super clear that I don't endorse nor necessarily agree with some point lest I find myself being equated with the worst of the worst...regardless if I agree or not with said point.
That's it in a nutshell, yes. And I agree that it's sad, but it's something I only tend to feel compelled to do on very divisive political topics, so it's not too bad, really.
Not the author, but: The psychology research literature is mostly garbage.[0] It's surprising to me that through all this, hardly anyone has dug into the supposedly scientific papers behind Damore's claims. Ultimately they come down to a massive leap of faith that job aspirations of psychology-major undergraduates can be generalized to a somehow biologically-driven preference for "people" jobs vs "things" jobs.[1]
The heterodox article is one of them, but they also link to several others they saw as reasonably backed up by the literature cited. The included counter points as well if they were written by people in that field.
I've only read one of them [1] in full, so it's hard to say with any depth my opinions of the others. Some of the findings listed in the abstracts have varying mentions of biological involvement. The larger point they were trying to make is that there are differences _now_, and given some of the research that's influenced as far back as at least middle school for the cultural part of it. Where the ratio is for nature/nurture they leave open for a future post (which they claim to be working on).
Sorry, you would probably need to read through the parent article (from the comment) for the broader context ...in which Scott makes the claim in the form of a rebuttal to another article by Grant, to which Grant replied (who also did not find biologically driven human female preference for "people" vs "things." convincing), and I gave you the link to Scott's reply to that!
A forward: Grant is a professor of Economics at Wharton, and Scott is a Psychiatrist and author of a popular blog - both agree that biological differences in ability are small (for the field of CS at large).
Scott contends:
> It’s a very common and well-replicated finding that the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality ... become (aggressiveness, horniness, language abilities, mechanical abilities, visuospatial skills, mechanical ability, tendermindness, assertiveness, comfort with body, various physical abilities ...)
Concomitantly, those countries display the worst gender imbalance in CS graduates while the countries with poor GDI do well on their ratios! Outright discrimination does not look plausible. Maybe its just socialization?
Scott looks backwards in time. Only 20% of high school students who take AP CS are women... which is about the number of US CS graduates. You can trace roughly equal numbers (in terms of interest) back to middle school and even earlier... and even to Rhesus monkeys apparently! However,
> One subgroup of women does not display these gender differences at any age. These are women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a condition that gives them a more typically-male hormone balance
Scott then applies the theory of preferences (objects versus systems) to other professions, such as medicene, where roughly equal numbers of women and men exist, but they dominate different specialties (women in Obstetrics, Pediatrics, Physciatry, Family Medicene, and men in Surgery, Radiology, etc). Women make up ~40% of US math grads, but they mostly go on to teach math! He contends women have left CS since the 70s out of personal preference, as it was one of only a few socially acceptable jobs for women at the time. Instead, they now choose to be a doctor or lawyer, and this OK.
edit: I also forgot to mention that he asks if discrimination/socialization are the chief culprit, why do they only affect CS and not other high status/high paying jobs (like being a doctor) which previously exhibited the same gender ratio.
Thank you. As a psychiatrist, Scott ought to know better than to cite these things as gospel...
"the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality ... become"
I suggest you read Lippa's papers and survey paper and draw your own conclusions. These inferences are drawn from very limited observations, and generalizing so far from the observational context is totally unconvincing.
What do Rhesus monkeys have to do with CS graduates?
The CAH studies I've been able to unearth are very underpowered. Maybe there are better ones, though. Also, CAH affects genitalia, which affects gender identity, which affects socialization. Not at all surprising that some CAH females would exhibit masculine characteristics, through socialization alone.
> why do they only affect CS and not other high status/high paying jobs (like being a doctor)
Outside SV and similar areas, CS has nowhere near the same status as medicine. How many TV shows can you list about software developers? How many about doctors?
Sure! It's solely based on my experience with commenters, who sometimes view statements like that as endorsements or as indicators that personal beliefs align with those who are being quoted or described.
As a person of color, I feel the need to give my perspective here, since I am part of an underrepresented group in tech, just like women. So I feel like I have some insight on the issue even though my reaction may still not be the same as what a woman would say about this.
When you are trying to make an effective argument, you have to anticipate what the responses would be. The biggest problem with Damore is that apparently he didn't take enough into account about what women felt about the issue, as mentioned in the article. People in the majority are naturally the ones with the louder voice, but it can be misleading if you are speaking on a minority group. You probably won't have the same experiences, and one or two studies is not enough to explain something as complicated as biology, psychology, or sociology. This is especially true if the science is easily refuted. I really wonder why Damore chose to write about the lack of women in tech specifically? It seems to me so that he could better support his proposal to not focus on diversity efforts or to face less backlash for not speaking on race. If this is the case, strengthening confirmation bias is not an effective solution because there may be a lot more than what meets the eye if you're not an expert on the subject.
So from this, the two biggest questions are was he right? and was Google right?
Was he right? Somewhat. I can't say yes or no 100%. He tried to explain his view as best as he could but he supported it terribly. It deserved the backlash. But he made some good points about it being unsafe to express his opinion. If he was smarter, he wouldn't have been fired. This is the bigger problem with the situation. A good engineer, in my opinion should be more flexible in thought, think more about surrounding outcomes, and be better at interacting with people.
Was Google right? Absolutely. The bigger problem is that many people think Google fired him for having a dissenting opinion, which I think is not true and unfortunate because it polarized America more between the left and the right. Damore should've been smarter and we would not have this discussion. I'm almost certain that Google wouldn't be where it is today without diversity of thought. You can have a differing opinion and express it without pissing everyone off. Google would have been dammed if they did fire him, dammed if they didn't fire him, but more dammed if they didn't. It got leaked and the media attention, complete with hostile arguments from both sides for a reason and it harmed Google's image and female employees. We can all mostly agree that Damore had some decent points to be made if he were a better writer and emphasizer. Would you still say that he was fired because Google is a left leaning organization?
You can't say women are not biologically suited for an engineering position at Google, face harsh backlash including termination from work and say that your views weren't respected. Come on. That's what sexism is. What if you said this about Hispanics, or Native Americans?
If you want to say that the diversity efforts at Google are misguided, then make a better argument than saying "we don't need diversity programs at Google". I would say not to strive for 50% women because not all of the engineers are 50% women. Strive for a closer percent of their actual representation. Google can't have 50% of all women engineers because some of them work for different companies. Google shouldn't use immoral or illegal hiring practices to achieve this number. But Google should still have diversity programs so that more women get into tech which would bring the number of women in the workforce in general closer to 50% and it could benefit everyone. Also keep in mind that a minority can possibly have more or less qualified people as a whole proportionally within the group. Hiring more of one minority group does not necessarily lower the bar.
Biases do exist, but it doesn't always mean it's bad. I told you I was a person of color at the beginning of this to make you form a bias against me. I want my voice to be heard in the hundreds of these comments when my probability of being read is lower because there are likely a lower percentage of women and other minorities posting. I don't think that I face tough obstacles, which turns people off of arguments like this, but I want to say that I do, however minor. Often times I act a certain way BECAUSE I don't want to be seen as "the black guy" and I've done this enough of my life that people say that I'm not the same as many other black guys. They don't say it in a negative way, because I still act "somewhat" black, if that makes sense to you.
I haven't read the whole piece yet, but I find that the first question I ask myself is: if the interviewees were males, would they have been given pseudonyms?
I don't have an answer to that question. It's all hypothetical. I'm just pondering.
Every thread about the Google Memo in the past weeks got flagged (?) promptly out of the homepage but this one stays at the top with just 400 points. I wonder what's the difference.
To speak bluntly, white guys in US (not me!) are being shamed as being misogynists. Now the hardcore left "liberal" groups and media turned its eyes on STEM. See how they treated that poor guy in LHC a few years ago. See how they ousted Brendan Eich from Mozilla.
Sure, the Uber CEO and that other VC cases are real and I support that. But those are used as spearheads to take control. Hundreds of YouTube content producers are being demonetized or their Google accounts frozen, like Jordan Peterson's recently.
Bernie Sanders was attacked by BLM as an old white guy. The leftist media turned on him, even though he was the most honest guy aligned with what they theoretically support. It's all a big joke. So people vote something else, whatever, even Trump. (And I think Trump is a media player and incompetent businessman, never mind President of US).
at current time, 1273 comments and _no_ mention of Jordan B Peterson? I'm disappointed in the community and lack of science based approach here. Leaving facts at a feelings fight, I guess?
Take the example of plumber, any girls are expected to be a plumber? Engineer is a bit alike as techical. The different part in google case is more mental but not physical.
Well, now this discussion should give the author of the memo enough data, to make a follow up memo with his arguments backed up by deep research if there is research.
> that these arguments about innate biological traits are complicated by trans, non-binary, and intersex folks.
2% (outliers) of the population does not invalidate the trends of the other 98% This is just wrong.
> I disagree that it’s possible to write what he did about general populations, then walk it back to say “but of course it doesn’t apply at an individual level.”
Gorillas typically have black fur. So no gorilla can have white fur? Wat?
> there have been some really fabulous responses, including many laying out a lot of research that counters what was in the memo
I'm interested in this research. I have not seen it, nor has it been made available. The following book, with 2 female authors who seem genuinely interested and informed in related topics:
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Arent-More-Women-Science/dp/15914...
Let's at least present the field studies/research, which can throw existing clinical views into doubt. eg Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences by Cordelia Fine is at least a rigorous critique of possible flaws.
It's a little saddening, to have this dialog represent the views of an average engineer.
>2% (outliers) of the population does not invalidate the trends of the other 98% This is just wrong.
This is a strawman. She said "complicate" not "invalidate".
>Gorillas typically have black fur. So no gorilla can have white fur? Wat?
What actions do you wish to take based on the fur color of gorillas? Damore didn't just reach scientific conclusions about differences in genders. He went further and suggested actions based on these population differences.
To continue your analogy, one could say that Damore's argument comes down to "We only want white furred animals in our zoo, and gorillas typically have black fur, therefore we should ignore gorillas and look for Polar Bears instead". Whereas the other side might be "Given that gorillas typically have black fur, and we think Gorillas are a valuable part of a zoo, we should do extra work to locate the rare white-furred gorillas that do exist".
That's true. However, the trends are not complicated by the outliers. Her statement was meant to throw trending into question and I overstated by taking a bad position (phrase-wise).
> What actions do you wish to take based on the fur color of gorillas?
Provide more shaded areas (canopy or artificial), of course. I'm not sure who this elaborate "analogy" (populations vs individuals turned into a warped "industry is a zoo" metaphor?) is supposed to help.
> However, the trends are not complicated by the outliers.
Well, but, they are. A gender binary is a simplification. A full analysis would really need to take a look at things like trans and nonbinary people and how they interact with the trends. But such an analysis would be more complicated than the binary trends in the original document. That is, such trends are an imperfect model of reality, and to better match reality, one needs a more complex model.
>I'm not sure who this elaborate "analogy"
Nor am I, you're the one that felt the need to bring up Gorillas. I felt that was a bad analogy, and that by continuing it, it would reveal why it was bad.
> Well, but, they are. A gender binary is a simplification. A full analysis would really need to take a look at things like trans and nonbinary people and how they interact with the trends.
How about this: the memo was about men and women. The 98%.
>This is a strawman. She said "complicate" not "invalidate".
To what extent do specialized species (like ring species) complicate the concept of species in general? It lets us know that there are outliers that are complicated, but it doesn't complicate dog vs cat at all.
I don't, but I was pointing out the annoyance of such a statement. You could probably scrounge up such a paper on google scholar.
For example, black lives matter 's point was simply that some specific white people were biogted, and yet all lives matter is a thing. Which is an example of the inverse (generalizing specific complaints, vs. in this case, specifying general complaints).
To be clear this was meant to be a tongue in cheek rephrasing to point out what was problematic about the gorilla statement and the google memo, I do not believe this.
I'm going to disagree with you there. 'PC' ideas and speech are those that are popular enough to be said in the company of a diverse crowd. This doesn't mean that they have to be bland or inoffensive to absolutely everyone; just popular enough that any dissenters will be a small minority and pressured against speaking up in fear of social punishment.
PC and popular are not at all the same. A vocal minority gets to define PC, and that minority happens to be on the left.
If the right were as aggressive as the left were about PC, they'd say "Talking about baby-murder [abortion] makes me feel unsafe as a mother and therefore if it is mentioned at work creates a hostile work environment"
I will absolutely agree that there's a minority a very vocal people, but they themselves could not maintain a PC atmosphere. If they were truly in the minority they would be easily dismissed as overly sensitive. It's the large body of moderate people, who in general agree with the idea, that provide the muscle for enforcing a PC atmosphere.
I think a vocal minority (10%) has bullied the silent majority into a position of "If you're not on our side you're hurting us and should be fired." They did this by controlling the language, by getting to define who's a victim, who's a minority, what's "offensive," what's a "safe-space."
We're seeing the backlash now, because people are finally admitting it's gone too far.
sure, you can find a niche (even if rather large) where this would be true and PC ideas are more popular. goes the other way around too though as there are plenty of places where today's PC ideas are frowned upon.
the kicker is - the PC crowd is so used to their opponents being quiet (primarily due to extreme intolerance of the "left" towards dissenting opinions - as illustrated by this whole memo ordeal) - that they actually start believing that their views are shared by just about everyone around.
just want to say thanks to all involved in this interview. This is exactly the kind of discussion that imho can change minds and move this issue forward. I have so much respect for these women.
I'm a bit baffled why the author isn't being criticized more for the childish sexism in that sentence. (This is coming from someone who despairs over the politically correct left).
based on all the sound and fury, one might think that somehow Google's hands are tied, that it has no control over who it hires.
but the reality is that it has total control over who it hires.
if Google can choose to fire Mr. Damore for expressing his thoughts about diversity, it can sure as hell extend tens of thousands of new job offers starting today to people in underrepresented groups. there's nothing to it. they have the money and the power. so do it already and silence the critics.
I actually thought the document was reasonably well written, using language that was not confrontational or aggressive, and providing some sources. So, from a superficial view, it looks well-thought, scientific and non-malicious. This is why I presume it gathered a lot of supporters.
The problem is when you actually look at the message and the information given. Some of his arguments are just wrong. And doing what he did was naive.
Biological differences between men and women are completely irrelevant to the very few highly competitive folks in the tech industry and more precisely in Google. Especially considering the huge chunk of the world who is illiterate, we simply cannot have any clue how biology is actually affecting us and how it plays with all the other variables in the game (such as being socialised for specific tasks when growing up, or just finding the workplace hostile). On the contrary, he shows lack of basic knowledge on history of computer science. Since women used to be the majority in the field some decades ago, there is no way evolution / innate difference could have worked its way in this fraction of time. It also makes me question what are his thoughts on people who are disabled and work for Google, for example? This discussion not only is not productive but puts him under a very bad light.
Secondly, he seems not to understand the role of Software Engineering really well. He argues that women are more focused on people and therefore don't feel attracted to high pressure rational fields, but choses to ignore how important people are to the career as a Software Engineer? It seems he is very attached to the idea that programmers are isolated nerds on a basement, which does not reflect at all the actual reality of successful people in the field.
Last but not least, as I said, he was very naive. He writes this 10 page thing about how women are maybe not interested in CS for these many reasons and criticises Google's approach to diversity, with the message that maybe it's not worth it, proposing we use even less empathy. Google has these programs after counselling with experts in the field, which he certainly is not. He says Google is an echo chamber and complains they are not listening. What he doesn't realise, however, is that by circulating that document he is shitting on the head of many of his female co-workers with his wrong arguments, and shitting on the head of whoever are the experts responsible for these diversity programs. And even if he was right, it would still be a bad idea. You don't circulate a document arguing that a certain gender may be in general unfit for the job, and expect people of said gender to be cool with it, even if you claim the people working with you are exceptions. Replace "women" with different groups and how his piece really hit me may be understood better. I don't want to hear "women are bad at math, irrational etc. but you are different, you are cool". Imagine saying to my happily married gay friends that gays are promiscuous but they are ok? He really did not think through how this would sit on people's ears. I felt really disrespected and I don't even work in Google, imagine the women who felt the same but actually had to work with him? It's a massive disruption to the workplace. Google had no alternative but to fire him. A bunch of people would quit if they didn't. I know I would. So Google made the right choice for the company. They put a lot of effort into hiring the best people. Losing one of them is better than losing credibility and losing many.
I'm not saying he's a horrible person and deserves to be fired. I'm saying he is wrong and he made a terrible mistake that offended many people and led things to where they are now at no one's fault but his own. Everything related to this document is really unfortunate, to him and to everyone else involved. It decreased morale of women at his workplace, it got him fired. It also got a bunch of alt-right nazis spreading hate about women using his document as a base, which I'm certain was not his intention.
If people were willing to apply such meticulous criticism and high standards to the Women in Tech movement in the first place, there wouldn't be an issue. While the sober opening and acknowledgement is a refreshing start in a sea of shitty takes, I have yet to see anyone bother to show the same kind of psychological concern for the men in tech and the same kind of rigor for scientific standards, when the shoe is on the other foot.
What would it do to your confidence and comfort to know you can't state certain scientific truths without being labelled a sexist and a misogynist? To know that there is a whole network of eager feminist writers ready to label you a troglodyte techbro and scoff at the notion you might have something interesting to say on an industry you've been part of for 10+ years? To know that, if speaking at a conference, every single word out of your mouth will be dissected for possibly implying the wrong thing, even as a first time speaker? To carefully weigh socializing with your coworkers against the chance of being accused of impropriety, with no practical defense accepted?
The people who complain about "an unequal burden my male coworkers don’t have to deal with every day" are showing an utterly stunning lack of empathy in the other direction. They are wilfully ignoring the disastrous effect these efforts can have on the people who do not share their views.
Similarly, if people are supposed to actively seek out dissenting views and avoid cherry picking research, why is it feminists are notorious for protesting anyone who dares to disagree? Seminars, men's centers, documentaries, ... really, their track record in silencing and misrepresenting dissent is impressively consistent, the Google Memo included.
The women cited in this interview feel "emotionally drained". "The onus is on me to prove to men in tech that I’m not an “average” woman". Strange, because all I hear from tech feminists is that men need to constantly prove themselves to be "good allies". No amount of previous piety is sufficient to avoid being lynched when you draw their ire. Their track record in eating their own is equally impressively consistent.
"Who might I talk to who could tell me about their experiences working within a system that is biased against them, so I can understand better?"
Start with James Damore, an autist who worked at a company biased against him, sharing his experiences, and getting roasted for it. They complain his memo wasn't written in an inquisitive enough tone, well guess what, that sort of difference in preferred communication style is exactly the kind of thing you should expect in a diverse environment.
On the other hand, the numerous articles in the style of "I'm a woman in tech, let me ladysplain the google memo to you" leave no question about who is actually parading around with the attitude of "let me tell you what’s up, all you wrong people."
Contemporary feminism is 90% projection, this article is more of the same.
> "I disagree completely and utterly that the (yes, real) average differences between men and women map to being better or worse at certain jobs."
Where did the memo say this? This is the most common strawman used to attempt to discredit the memo. The memo author never states that men are better at software engineering, just that these biological differences may help explain why women are underrepresented, choosing to pursue computer science and careers in tech less than men.
> "the takeaway from the memo is literally that the onus is on me to prove to men in tech that I’m not an “average” woman"
> "This is literally a discussion of whether half the human race is innately unsuited for a certain kind of work"
See above
> "I disagree that it’s possible to write what he did about general populations, then walk it back to say “but of course it doesn’t apply at an individual level.”
Essentially what you're saying is, "we're not allowed to talk about biological differences that make underrepresented minorities look bad". I disagree. No fact should be barred from mentioning, and it's not the author's responsibility to ensure that you don't misconstrue his facts to advance your own agenda of claiming oppression.
> "He did not address any counter arguments or research that opposes his views, or the validity of the studies he did cite and their reproducibility."
Did you address any counter-arguments in your research report? This is some dude's memo in an opt-in internet forum, not a comprehensive/rigorous discipline-defining research report seeking publication in an academic journal.
> "He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar."
I agree that he should have elaborated on this bold claim. Though it's not outrageous to suspect that this could be the case given that affirmative action policies in higher education do lower the bar.
> "Some people at Google reacted by saying “well if he’s so wrong, then why not refute him,” but that requires spending a significant amount of time building an argument against the claims in his document. On the other hand, if I remain silent, that silence could be mistaken for agreement. I should not be forced into that kind of debate at work."
The memo was posted in an opt-in forum, you didn't have to debate it. Silence does not imply that you agree with him.
> "I’m also disappointed that the men I know, including most of my male colleagues, remained silent on the topic. And the ones that did participate, either seemed to support Damore or demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding for the issues women engineers are faced with and care about."
Why do you think they remained silent? You said it yourself - anyone who disagrees with you is wrong. Damore got fired for stating a well-articulated opinion, why would any of your male colleagues jeopardize their jobs as well by speaking honestly on the matter?
> I wish more successful men in tech thought deeply about the advantages they’ve had – the situations in which they were more likely to be trusted, deemed competent, promoted, given raises, etc. as men than they would be as women. This exercise isn’t intended to place blame, but to inspire empathy toward those who feel the weight of their gender each day at work.
I wish more women in tech vilifying Damore would think about the advantages they have received (affirmative action), think about it from the perspective of a male in a field where we get no hand-holding or "women in tech" scholarships and are constantly accused of being sexist oppressors, and stop pretending like discrimination is the only or main reason women are underrepresented in tech. I firmly believe that women chose to pursue tech less than men and that this is the biggest driver of the underrepresentation (posted a little about that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15012364). If it is indeed the case that women are choosing to pursue the study of computer science less than men, then stop placing the burden on us males to increase your participation.
Before you automatically dismiss me and others with views differing to you as a misogynist, consider that most of us in the first world do not consider women as being any less capable than men at software engineering, let alone ANY discipline. Women used to dominate the field, and no reasonable man believes that women aren't fit for the job or shouldn't pursue this field.
> By remaining silent on this topic or tweeting support for Damore, they are sending a message that philosophical arguments and principles take precedence over the lived experiences of many smart, talented female engineers and technical founders
What does this even mean? It's just another way of saying "by not agreeing with me, you're wrong"
> I think he could have written it differently, so that people who chose not to read the whole 10-pages could have read the tl;dr and not immediately concluded he was sexist.
So the onus is on the author to ensure that people don't flippantly conclude that he's a sexist?
> This is an emotional topic
That's the problem, it shouldn't be.
> He was not fired for speaking truth to power, he was fired for mishandling a complex subject in a way that caused harm to his employer (and many of his colleagues).
He wouldn't have been fired if the memo argued the opposite viewpoint
It's a problem with phrasing, here. "Disagree with the specific methods he used", not "disagree with the fact that he used any methods at all". "Consider his particular use of science and data to be sketchy", rather than "consider that it was sketchy for him to use science and data".
> Consider his particular use of science and data to be sketchy
I can say this for any research paper I have read in my life as all of them are incomplete and doesn't include all the research done (because you fill the top limit pages only with the bibliography). Given that it is impossible to put all the references, I want to understand why his use of science was sketchy?
"Applied science incorrectly to confirm a bias or advance an opinion incorrectly" and "applied science to form an opinion" are different things. Damore did the former.
If someone approached this problem with a blank slated, looked at the evidence, formed an opinion, then wrote something to back their opinion, how could you tell them apart from someone who had an opinion and applied science to just advance their opinion? Assume both are average, and thus imperfect, writers.
Except "what is correct" is the whole point of the debate, so nobody knows which side is doing the former until everybody agrees, which they most certainly do not agree yet.
Mind you that to the other side, it looks to us like what you're doing is the former and not the latter (until some common ground is found).
He wrote the article as a research article. So every time he put an statement he referenced it with a research article which supports that statement. I don't understand why this is wrong. All research papers are written this way.
What? Research papers tend to also present data and research that arrive at different conclusions when such things exist, or show how the existing body of knowledge is deficient in some way. Usually the point is either accounting for the difference or showing how the authors' research refutes, modifies, or augments the body of knowledge as it stands. Damore didn't present a research paper. He presented an accusation of left-bias and poorly argued his case.
Yes, but they do it in the topic they are discussing. The manifest was focused in changing the diversity programs in the company and was presenting facts to consider that option. In no way it was focused in discussing the differences between gender as a lot of people is try to claim. And it makes quite clear the difference between average and individuals.
Let me offer what could be a controversial opinion, but one based on faacts neverteless.
When there is a war to fight, men are drafted far more than women (if any are drafted at all). This is true in pretty much every country. Risky construction jobs are mostly filled by men. The homeless and incarcerated are mostly men.
Obviously, survival and risk to life and working conditions and homelessness are major topics. So why isn't society talking as much about balancing men and women in these areas?
For example, in the USA, men are incarcerated 10x more often than women, despite making up something like 50% of the population. Why doesn't anyone claim this is prima facie evidence of systemic sexism? When it comes to race, such claims are in fact made, but not when it comes to sex. I believe the reason is that people really do believe that men are more prone to violence and the "population-level differences in biology" (to put it in the Google Guy's terms) are a totally socially acceptable answer. One that even liberals and progresives give.
Or take another example of where sex-based discrimination against men is not just tolerated but shrugged off, while the same would cause outrage if it was based on sex: clubs in the city. Men have to pay a cover and stand in line, ladies are ushered in. Men may come in if they have 2-3 good looking ladies with them. Imagine the same business model with white/black people. It wouldn't last.
So why is this happening? Because we all believe there are differences between men and women that come down to biology (whether it is "really" true or not). Our society contains many places where men are discriminated against, but they don't make a very good cause for an activist (well, there are men's rights activists, but not many).
Now here is what I think about the whole "women in tech" thing: it is too corporation-centric. People's lives consist of more than working in a corporation. A major part of life, for example, is raising children.
If you look at this aspect of life, we see women are favored in every society to be the primary caretakers of children. Most of this is explained by - wait for it - biological differences that supposedly make women better nurturers. States often say it is in the the best interests of the child for the mother to get primary custody of a child in a divorce.
The consequences are plainly laid out in the statistics. Women are much more likely to be the ones to devote their time and energy to raising children. This is basically another job which the men are not expected, by society, to have to do. Certainly, many do, but it is fr more optional for a man. These days, women are graduating college at higher rates than men, and make more than men out of the gate. But when women start having children, that's when the gender pay gap appears. This seems to be the largest factor that explains the gender gap
Someone has to raise the children, though. And this is why I say the argument is too corporation-centric: it assumes the goal for women and men is to earn a money in a large, hierarchical corporation. One can phrase it the other way: women are actually ahead of men in the work-life balance department, and we should try to help everyone achieve more of THAT goal.
This is bigger than men and women. How many families today have both parents working, or a single parent, sticking the kids into public school as a daycare center? (Read what pg wrote about high school as a prison.) How about putting parents in nursing homes? All for what?
So people can commute many miles (burning tons of fuel) to corporate jobs and sit on their butt doing something someone else wants them to do? Why is that considered the goal, when corporate world is only 150 years old and on its way out when automation hits? Work-life balance is way better. Small teams and self employment - that is what I want for more people, women and men alike!
My feelings as a white male...who happens to have 2 kids.
Sometimes my kids will "why?" "why?" me to death. They really don't care about the answer and can never be persuaded. They are just trying to stretch out the moment of truth before they actually have to do the thing they don't want to do.
Everyone: it is the 21st century. In the 20th century, we had that discussion and debate about whether or not half of the human race is biologically able comprehend CS.
At this point, there are some people who refuse to be persuaded. I feel that Google did the correct thing.
Q: "Is it o.k. for me to have these attitudes about a high percentage of (present, past and future) my co-workers?"
A: "No"
Q: "Why?"
A: "Because we are running the company and we said so."
Q: "Why?"
A: "We are done explaining this."
(Damore writes his memo)
A: "We said we are done explaining. Maybe you can get the answer you want at another company."
>> For example, students and professors I met in college
>> that grew up in the USSR thought engineering was
>> stereotypically women’s work
Um, no. I grew up in the USSR, too, and engineering never was stereotypically women's work. If anything, the enrollment of women in engineering programs was even more skewed than it is in the US today. We only had 2 women out of a cohort of roughly 40 people, and they barely managed to graduate. Ironically neither of the two works as an engineer, but then neither do most men from that cohort. Truth is, engineering is not actually the most lucrative occupation in today's Russia, so I can't blame women (or men for that matter) for not pursuing it.
Also, most people here probably don't know this, but Russian language is gendered, and the very word "инженер" is masculine, though it can be used unchanged to refer to women engineers. There is no special word form for female engineers.
Is there a biological basis for this? I do not want "Gender Studies" references. I want real BIOLOGICAL, you know code mother nature put in you.
Sex is basically binary in mammals (do you have the gene that triggers producing sperm versus the gene that triggers you producing eggs), the only exception being incredibly rare intersex disorders. Read more here: http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/why-sex-is-binary-but-gende...
Based on sex, people have different traits, physical and mental. Some of these traits are close to binary between the sexes (having a uterus, etc.). Some traits are a matter of distributions (such as differences in physical strength, or willingness to take risks).
Society then considers certain behaviors and traits more masculine or feminine, and creates norms and roles around these. Some of these norms and roles exist on a spectrum, some are more binary.
Gender for a long time was used either as a synonym for sex, or only this case of describing language (gendered pronouns). In the mid-1900s academics in the social science used it to mean "the social norms and roles society creates based on biological sex." Then more recently some academics have re-defined gender again to mean "ones own innate conception of one's male/female identity." There isn't any scientific proof that such a thing exists or doesn't exist, nor can there be, because we don't have mind reading machines.
Sexual identity has also been redefined recently. So now if you were born with the egg producing equipment, but are taking male sex hormones some people will now define you as of the male sex. Frankly, I find this redefining of words to be pretty Orwellian.
| Then more recently some academics have re-defined gender again to mean "ones own innate conception of one's male/female identity."
Nope. What you are talking about is Gender Identity. There is pretty good evidence for this being real and linked to prenatal testosterone exposure at certain periods in the womb, as with traits like digit ratio. Between cases like David Reimer's (a biological boy who was raised as a girl after a surgical accident as an infant, but whose gender identity stayed true to his birth sex - with tragic consequences) and the phenomenon of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (where genetically male XY are born with female-looking genitalia and raised as any other girl, but overwhelmingly continue to identify as women even after the condition is discovered in puberty), the existence of a gender identity that is separate from both chromosomal sex and social influence is not really in doubt.
It's not as simple as that. The word 'gender' has a history of being used for biology - think of every form you've ever filled out. The OED [1] says:
> Either of the two sexes (male and female)
before following up with:
> especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones.
And also notes:
> The sense denoting biological sex has also been used since the 14th century, but this did not become common until the mid 20th century. Although the words gender and sex are often used interchangeably, they have slightly different connotations; sex tends to refer to biological differences, while gender more often refers to cultural and social differences and sometimes encompasses a broader range of identities than the binary of male and female
If it's unclear, I'm not saying either is correct. Many people don't like saying 'sex' as its also a verb for copulation hence use 'gender' as a polite alternative. The idea of gender as an entity separate from biology is from Dr John Money, who has his own sad and controversial history [2], though his ideas have gained more popularity recently.
Webster's define (the relevant meaning of) gender, as:
"b : the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex
(...)
Origin: Middle English gendre, from Anglo-French genre, gendre, from Latin gener-, genus birth, race, kind, gender — more at kin.
First use: 14th century"
So it would seem gender has started out as a term that groups "indivuduals that are of a kind" - not necessarily based on (biological) appearance, but just as much on behaviour/social grouping.
Language is a living thing. The meanings of words change over time, and that's normally a helpful thing, which lets us express culturally relevant concepts.
In this case, it's pretty useful to have words which distinguish between biology and culture.
If you use “ascribed gender” and “gender identity” to describe the (external and internal, respectively) social traits, you avoid the confusion between the two and with the biological trait that comes with using bare “gender” for that purpose.
I wonder about this as well. Specifically, how does one define "gender" as distinct from "opinion", without being recursive (as in "a man is someone who feels like a man")?
Is it chromosomal, such that XY makes you male? Wrong. People with total androgen insensitivity are XY but look and act and feel female, because the androgens they produce never took effect. Their bodies and minds feminized, so they're female in every respect except their karyotype.
Your simple definition is only simple because you punted the complex part, and no amount of screaming about how words don't have meanings anymore is going to change the level of complexity surrounding this subject.
You are too ignorant to know what you don't know, so you think you're a goddamned expert.
Thanks for your reply. I rarely get a chance to learn from someone who feels so passionately about these issues.
These range of conditions are interesting, we are truly a varied species.
Let us do a thought experiment.
We have 10 humans and 10 monkeys. Now, let’s say 5 humans want to be called monkeys. Now, if I say the word “monkey”, what comes to mind? If the 10 monkey-monkeys AND the 5 human-monkeys does, then that means I no longer have a word to describe what I originally thought was a monkey! The word itself has been destroyed by making it stretch beyond the category which it originally described. Words by their very nature are to form categories, to differentiate is their power, and why we find them useful.
Now, we can both agree that the range of conditions you listed are rather rare, and this is the crux of the matter. If we use the word man to stretch beyond the more stereotypical definition, what does it even mean to be a man anymore? What does it mean to be masculine? That is, what do the WORDS mean?
The word man is, as words work, defined by the average man. The fact that it allows us to speak of a large category of people is what gives it its utility. That is why you can say things like “their bodies and minds [are] feminized”, you must have the words to express such a thought! If you proceeded down the self-identification path, how would you make that sentence? That is why we have words like “Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome”, which describes another idea.
First of all, let me say that I am in no way opposed to men dressing in women’s clothes, or men being effeminate, or women having sex with women, or any other non-conservative human expressions; they are what lend colour to humanity, and we would be much poorer without it, and without letting humans be fully expressed.
Now, what about the rarer cases, what do we do here?
But how should such a person describe oneself?
Just because a man cannot have the confidence to be effeminate and own that identity, does not mean that he needs to redefine the word woman to accommodate himself. I think the problem here is that people want to fit into categories that are traditionally recognised by society. Instead people should just appreciate that everybody is unique, and that they should be comfortable owning their own unique identities. They should not have to derive their own identities from the words that other people call them, worse off by forcing other people to use specific words, in a meaning that they want other people to use them in, because then everything is reduced to just noise.
> We have 10 humans and 10 monkeys. Now, let’s say 5 humans want to be called monkeys.
Bad analogy. Really bad analogy. The boundaries between species can be fluid, but they're nowhere near as fluid as the definitions of 'male' versus 'female' in either sex or gender.
My whole point is that even if you restrict everything to verifiable biological observation, with no reference to psychology, there are still myriad corner cases which cannot be classified in a simple dichotomy. Therefore, insisting the division is simple is obtuse.
The division is not simple, there's no way to make it simple, and bringing in this analogy with monkeys versus humans as your proxies for the sexes is misunderstanding the subject. There is no overlap between humanity and any species of "monkey" as the term is commonly understood, although I have known a biologist who would insist that "monkey" was synonymous with "ape" and therefore all humans are monkeys. That's not the common understanding of the term "monkey", certainly.
There is overlap between "male" and "female" regardless of what you define them to be, assuming you define them in any useful fashion. There is no boundary anywhere in this subject which is impermeable. That's why gender studies is an entire field of study, like astrophysics or English literature.
In short, you could write entire textbooks on one aspect of being "male" or "female" and still be incomplete even in terms of that aspect. So you'll forgive me if I'm not prepared to define either term in this forum, or bothered by how people describe themselves.
Linguistic precision is nice where you can get it, and we can't get it here. Not if we're being entirely honest.
There are several cultures that have arisen independently and have had more than two genders. Many of them are still extant today, despite the best effort of colonialists.
So that's gender down.
Intersex individuals exist. Intersex conditions range from physiological to karyotypes with variant sex chromosomes.
Transgender individuals are very varied but there are indications that it is partially heritable with genetics and the prenatal environment hypothesized to explain some of that.
And that's biology.
I could write a 100 page essay about how loaded your question was, the implicit assumptions in the way it was written, the way that "BIOLOGICAL" is implied to be a way to ignore social conditions, and the contempt for ""Gender Studies"". But I won't, it's very tiring and there will be 10 other people like you tomorrow.
Are intersex or transgender considered to be viable sexes though?
What seems reasonable to me is M/F/N where N is not capable of reproduction due to some kind of outlying error, so they cannot be a part of sexed reproduction. Are they omitted?
Sex and reproduction seem binary to me and most people. We should ignore technological or medical assistance and sort those results through the gender buckets which are more important to how they are perceived semantically, as you said.
Intersex traits cover a fairly broad range of things, and there's a reasonable argument that up to 1.7% of people are intersex. Visibly atypical genitals are fairly rare (1 in 1500 births or so), on the other hand, but don't cover the entire range of intersex traits.
Complicated, but simplest explanation is from wikipedia:
In biological terms, sex may be determined by a number of factors present at birth, including:
the number and type of sex chromosomes;
the type of gonads—ovaries or testicles;
the sex hormones;
the internal reproductive anatomy (such as the uterus in females); and
the external genitalia.
People whose characteristics are not either all typically male or all typically female at birth are intersex.
Sure, but what are the rates for things like that? And in the case of different chromosomes, what are the variations that still result in a fertile and "normal" human being?
My concern is that people are attempting to use the existence of intersex folks (at widely varying claimed incidence rates) to make faulty arguments about what is and is not normal physiology.
The criticisms are more about terminology than the core argument though - they mostly argue that "intersex" should only cover a small number of conditions that result in an arbitrarily substantial differentiation from a "normal" male or female, rather than any significant differentiation. So if the question is about sexual dimorphism, those criticisms are mostly irrelevant.
But here's a question: why is it important that they can reproduce? Gay men and women are unlikely to reproduce either, so should we ignore them in policy-making too? Are gay people abnormal?
It was a question about categories. Are there two categories of gender / sex? The answer is no. These people exist. They have entire lives which are as meaningful as any other. Why wouldn't they matter?
When it comes to policymaking, any prudent work requires the analysis of how many people would be impacted. It's not enough to just say "well there's like 100 people in a population of 300M we should change everything just for them".
The OP asked what evidence exists that gender and sex are non-binary. It's in reference to the words someone said in the article, not hypothetical policymaking.
A good example is Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH), which Slate Star Codex has made so much of in this debate. Excess androgens from CAH can lead to ambiguous genitalia.
Gender is usually considered indicative or coupled with cultural behavior and performative behavior, i.e. in the U.S. barbie dolls are 'toys for girls'. Sex begins and ends at the biological level and is strictly related to the organs and biological makeup you have and what you can do with those. I know less about how sex isn't binary, but in the case of gender it's fairly evident these days.
At least that's how I've understood it in layman's terms and with my very basic knowledge--it's very complex, as with anything worth studying. The seminal text on the issue in the eyes of many is Judith Butler's Gender Trouble--If you truly are serious about wanting to learn about this stuff I suggest you check it out.
Biology get's odd when you start looking at 0.01% cases.
Some people have both sets of reproductive organs at birth. Others lack many such structures which is arguably just sterility but in some cases no gender is closer to the truth.
Genetically you have XX (female), XY (male) but also XXY or XXXY. There are even Chimera where you can have both male (XX) and female (XY) cells in the same body.
The best explanation you will get is from a medical doctor. They will explain to you how there are multiple sexes. Gender is not biological so there is no biological explanation.
For people who are downvoting me and are either too lazy to talk to a doctor or use Google: Fine, here are some links. Please educate yourselves about simple biology you should have learned in school.
Would you please not break the HN guidelines by (a) arguing snarkily and superciliously or (b) going on about downvotes? Trainwrecks though these recent threads have been, we're still trying for a higher standard of discussion on HN, and comments like this one make take us all in the wrong direction.
Someone posts an ignorant comment. I provide a relevant, actually helpful and fact-based reply and get downvoted. So I get pissed off, say something pissy, and then provide a ton of supporting evidence in response. But it doesn't affect the votes, and probably hasn't changed any minds at all.
Comments are the problem if you find civility more important than rationality.
> Gender is not biological so there is no biological explanation.
There is considerable evidence of gender identity different from biological sex lining up with biological features in several areas more typical of the other sex, so it seems that gender identity is tied to biology.
Which, if you think about it, it has to be: humans are biological machines, everything about them is biology, on one level or another. All of psychology is, ultimately, biology.
Biology is the study of living organisms. Psychology is the study of the human mind and its functions. A mind is a part of an organism, not a discrete one itself. The study of the part is not the same thing as the study of the whole. Psychology is not biology. This is not a controversial thing, every person who has graduated college in the past 30 years should know this, besides it being illogical.
Your first sentence seems like it's conflating correlation with causation.
As for the second, saying psychology is ultimately biology is reductionist in a way that dismisses the context and environment biology gets expressed in. You would be a much different person if the same set of genes was born in a different place, or at a different time, or if your life circumstances were different in any mild way.
I wouldn't go that far, but there are many studies that have looked at the genetic (biological) basis for brain function/behavior [0]. Once you're at the level of gene expression, which some of those studies go into, you're at a level of acetylation, methylation, etc., which is easily categorized as chemistry.
The bigger argument I get into with coworkers is the blurry line between brain function/behavior stuff and psychology.
> by that same token, all of psychology is also physics.
Yes, it is, which would be relevant if someone suggested there was no physical explanation for a psychological phenomenon (which is, in fact, what they are usually claiming when they claim it is not biological.)
Are ten-page screeds on any subject welcome and most companies? Google was this guy's only job after academia. I value his opinions on Google and corporate life in the same way that I value the opinions of unmarried people or people without kids on those respective subjects. I wince a smile and nod and think, "check back with me in ten years when you've been around the block a few times". This is not a person to take seriously. He does not even know what he doesn't know
Are ten-page screeds on any subject welcome at most companies?
Probably not. I blogged just today about my opinion that if this 10 page screed had been about how Google was doing the office furniture all wrong, he likely still would have ended up fired, sooner or later, for being an egomaniac who cannot play nice with his corporate overlords, basically.
If saying that female applicants are given preferential treatment is harmful to female employees, then surely the people doing the preferential treatment (HR?) are the ones who are actually guilty, not the messenger? Why is there no complaints against those practices? Are they not real?
He shouldn't be criticized for raising concerns about discriminatory hiring because, right or wrong, he had a legally protected right to do that without suffering retaliation. If people don't like those ideas being mentioned, they should try to get the law changed because this is one of the very few things Californians can't be fired for yet it seems to be the main point of complaints against Damore.
Now imagine how "we just randomly throw away some of the resumes from black people but we are not lowering the bar" would fare in court of law or public opinion.
Sure, everyone would call that a bad policy. It's taking a minority that's biased against and making those biases worse.
But imagine it was "90% of our hires are white, so we're trying to change that by throwing out some white resumes". You'd get a much more mixed reaction.
Hence the fact that so many people are sick of the racism card and voted for Trump. As you point out, the same behaviour would be called bad policy (and possibly illegal) if it's against blacks but not against whites. That seems fundamentally problematic.
Sometimes local bias can make things fairer overall. The difference is that something anti-black is obviously making things worse, while something anti-white might be helping or hurting in various ways. You have to be intentionally myopic to think all bias is equally unfair. Especially consider how racist you can make desegregation sound, even though it's giving everyone the same treatment: "They're going to start sending most of the kids of one race to much worse schools!".
> Attitudes like this make me agree with the right-wingers who say that people who campaign against racism, sexism etc really just hate white men.
And what do you say about a person that ignores 90% of racism and sexism unless it harms white men?
The world is full of little biases. Ideally we'd get rid of all of them. But until someone invents a magic button we need to keep context in mind. Give charity to the people that have been mistreated and need charity, etc.
Do such people exist? I've never met anyone who ignores racism or sexism unless it harms white men.
And yes, the US Supreme Court has a habit of not applying the law as written, but that is itself rather controversial isn't it. Because the law doesn't say it's OK to be racist to white people, not even if the reasons seem well intentioned.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle for a while now. That's an abuse of the site, and we ban accounts that do it (regardless of how correct their underlying points may be), so would you please not do that? The spirit of the site is intellectual curiosity, and while there's some overlap with political topics, the battle thing is not compatible.
Anybody who sends out a political bomb like that to a large internal mailing list should expect to get fired.
And the memo was poorly thought out and the dude was not well informed. All this hand-wringing is silly. He deserved to get fired and he did not have any really salient points beyond "Could Google do MORE to encourage diversity?"
Isn't a ycombinator blog dedicated solely for women sexist. Isn't "Ask a Female Engineer" sexist? If ycombinator only had "Ask a Male Engineer" wouldn't they be attacked for it?
You appear to be using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's an abuse of this site and we ban accounts that do it, so would you please not?
> Or even more likely, you don't understand women very well
Personal attacks will get your account banned on Hacker News, so please don't post like this again.
It also looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's an abuse of the site, and we ban accounts that do it, so please stop doing that. More on this if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...
Even more harm is done by Affirmative Action for women now being implemented in all companies. Feminism has given up on the aspect of competing and turned to shaming all men. There are several professions where women dominate with > 80%. Where's all this fucking outrage in those?
Edit: since this account has been using HN just for ideological flamewar (and personal attacks), we've banned it. Doing this will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't do it.
Considering women make up >50% of college graduates, for every profession that has more men there are more profession that have more women (or a greater imbalance).
How about:
People are capable of choosing professions they like. Respect their choices and don't second guess them.
That doesn't account for the cultural pressure on girls throughout childhood to be princesses, like pink things and cooking and babies and ponies, while boys are supposed to like computers and engineering and guns.
We're still preparing girls to stay home, cook dinner and have babies while the men go out and earn the money.
This nonsense is being propagated by idiots. Nobody is now forcing dolls on girls and guns on boys. The aggression in men is built by evolution. Again, we only talk in averages. There are idiots again who point to aggressive females to try to make me sound sexist.
There are diversity efforts in the fields of teaching and nursing to hire more women, as the dominance of women in those fields in harmful in much the same way that the dominance of men in software engineering is harmful. Teaching especially needs more men, most especially at the elementary school level, as many children are not exposed to many positive male role models.
An important factor here is that software engineering is a highly desired and highly compensated field, which aren't true of nursing and teaching. Having an imbalance of gender in software engineering thus contributes to inequality in social status and compensation in a way that imbalances in female-dominated fields do not.
The right way for women to do that is developing interest in the field and being good at it and working hard. Thats how women/men got into fields they respectively dominate now. Not by forcing affirmative action and shaming.
Well, by the same token, being fired is a completely different beast than having to suffer the tragedy of being afraid a coworker might think a negative stereotype about you.
"The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness[11], which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause."
So it's not that "leftists are violent", it's PC that's complacent to violent PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming. A bit different.
Again, I have the impression that parts of this debate could be avoided by accepting some of the caveats and distinctions already made in the memo.
Edit: replaced angry outburst with more civilized one.
Would you please stop engaging in ideological flamewar on HN? I realize there has been a lot of this lately and it's not always clear where to draw the line, but you're definitely on the wrong side of it here.
The concept and term "cultural marxism" has been grabbed by such a huge swath of people, most of whom have absolutely no idea it is or could be anti-Semitic (because you have to be pretty out there to associate Marxism with Jews to begin with), that claiming all or most uses of it are anti-Semitic is wrong.
There's just no way to paint that huge of a group with that brush unless you think it's so double-secret subconscious that the majority of the people using it don't even know they're anti-Semites.
Cultural Marxism has been explicitly anti-Semitic from the beginning, and early adherents argued that it was necessarily anti-Semitic. So people who believe in the conspiracy now are either anti-Semitic themselves, or profoundly ignorant. Neither one is a good look.
Now extend your attitude to religous belief. All the parallels are there, including believing others are inferior (certainly islam). Should they be done as well?
You are infact imposing a moral belief system. Once upon a time it used to be wrong to not believe in god. Well similarly you are saying the same about gender differences.
For heaven's sake let's not take this into religious flamewar as well. (I'm sure you didn't mean to, but we know empirically what sort of effect this has.)
Ok, but to me it is as plain as day that there is a double standard here and taking the debate on to that kinda territory is the only way to convince the other side about what they are doing... i.e. shutting down people who don't share their belief (you should believe ...). Once upon a time it was you should believe in god. If it is ok to persecute (or at least censor) people who don't believe in various forms of equality then it is ok to do the same to those who don't believe in a god.
Certainly the fact that some people believe in supernatural things (ridiculous, right?) but are allowed to state these beliefs despite the fact that on the face of it they are far more extraordinary than the extremely plausible some people are better than others in someway due to the differences in their genetics...
The answer is of course that the prevailing pc mainstream does not feel threatened by these daft belief systems (beyond fighting creationism in schools).
Anyway, you may be right that it is currently irreconcileable.
Of course we should all have equal opportunity to express our feelings, just as we should have equal opportunities to become software engineers.
That said, I don't think it's true in general that men have a hard time stating (like this, pseudomously, in an interview) that they are hurt/offended.
And a brief look at comment-threads should illustrate that it's hardly easy for women to state such things in public. The power mild statements by women can have to bring out raging trolls with death and rape threats would be absurd if it wasn't such a sad indicator of how far we still have to go toward a free/equal society.
All that said, part of the structural repression of women tend to be repression of certain traits in men as well - limiting gender roles in society is in general not good for anyone.
I think Dar Williams puts it well in her song "When I was a boy":
I'm not sure which world people live in where men are not expected to defend their ideas against the great misunderstanding masses who don't accept them on pronouncement, but it sounds lovely. Can I move there?
> Women and POC will continue to be the scapegoats until culturally we decide that "success" isn't about being an individual that becomes rich or powerful.
I am a "POC". I would very much like it if you and others of your ilk (leftists/liberals) stop speaking for me. I am not a scapegoat and have never been one. I take ownership of where I am in life.
> Instead of facing the truth: the game is stacked against you, you may just not be that good etc., it is far easier to devise some sort of massive conspiracy or pseudo-science to justify your prejudice.
I suspect that you do not see the irony in this statement.
Are women not taught to compete? I do not remember girls being any less competitive (in school, in sports, etc.) Almost everyone wants to stand out and be better than others in some aspects and is proud when they can achieve that.
Life is very competitive, I am not sure why need to de-emphasize it to much. Making it "us" vs "them" is the more problematic part, but individual competition is a pretty constructive force overall, for men and women of all colors.
Poker is a niche hobby, not some metaphor of competition in life. That picture says more about poker as a way to spend time than about competing. You might as well show pictures from a fly-fishing competition. I don't play poker, yet I am pretty competitive in many aspect of life. All I know is that pretty much every woman I have talked to wants to be more popular, more famous, more successful. And I have seen girls compete for influence, and grades, and victory in sorts from a very young age.
Everyone is taught to compete. But I don't think competition is the sole driving force, or even the major one that makes sense for humans. Collaboration seems to always be better for people than conflict.
> "success" isn't about being an individual that becomes rich
Independent of the rest of your comment: the quoted concept is trivially false as long as resources are scarce. (i.e. the foreseeable future; barring severe, draconian and arguably-unethical controls on population size)
("Powerful" being an additional non-redundant qualifier, is merely a consequence of the monopoly called "government".)
Resources aren't actually that scarce and haven't been for quite a while. The Breadbasket of America can feed everyone. Population growth isn't really a scarcity problem, it's an organizational and structural one. Unless you think we're at max efficiency!
Food is one resource. Energy and topsoil are others, needed for food production. Thanks to (U.S.) government subsidies for farming, farmers can purchase those resources unusually easily; some argue that this will lead to faster depletion of those resources since farmers aren't under sufficient economic incentive to conserve them.
The term "diversity" already implies that there are differences between genders, otherwise we would have to call it "more of the same". Everyone who insists on valuing diversity while also insisting that man are women are equal is contradicting herself.
The thing that gets me though is how much people WANT to argue about this shit. So many people on this site want to defend that guy and his ideas like they gain something from it. It's weird.
It really doesn't matter if the memo had any truth to it or not. At the end of the day, that really is immaterial to the result. What happened because of the memo is it managed to piss off virtually every woman in the company. You don't piss off 20,000 of your coworkers in a completely avoidable manner and keep your job.
I agree with what you said, but what if the reason they were pissed off was because of external manipulation and manufactured outrage over something the author neither said nor implied?
> I disagree completely and utterly that the (yes, real) average differences between men and women map to being better or worse at certain jobs. Interest in certain jobs, certainly. And we know – and many of us have experienced – that interest levels are also heavily influenced by social and cultural factors.
This is the key point. Even if you accept that there are average genetic differences, they are far outweighed by socio-cultural factors. Reducing people to their genes is lazy psuedo-science.
It's absolutely necessary that we start to break down ideological echo chambers, but I'd argue that Damore's memo and his subsequent actions ('Goolag' etc) haven't done much other than entrench people in the positions they already have.
this highlights the insanity of the response to this memo.
What Edith "completely and utterly disagrees with" is actually not in the memo. And she actually agrees with what is in the memo "Interest in certain jobs."
>> Even if you accept that there are average genetic differences, they are far outweighed by socio-cultural factors. Reducing people to their genes is lazy psuedo-science
If you are a man I dare you to use that argument to get yourself appointment at gynaecologist's :)
That wasn't the point. I think that Americans in particular are too obsessed with their "American dream", their belief that "you can be whoever you want if you work hard enough" that they cannot even accept basic facts from their own biology.
There's a reason why all sports, including non-physical ones, like chess, have separate competition for women - and when there is mixed competition women get places below 100th. Try to explain that with "socio-cultural factors" or other gender pseudo-science.
> A team of researchers from the UK has shown that the under-representation of women at the top end in chess is almost exactly what would be expected, given the much greater number of men that participate in the game at all. Researchers Merim Bilalic, et al., have published their research on this statistical sampling explanation in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
> In the study, the scientists also discussed the question of why so few women participate in chess at all. While it's possible that there exists a self-selection process based on innate biological differences that leads women to drop out of chess early on, this argument rests on a controversial assumption, the researchers say. That is, it requires that there is an innate difference between genders in the intellectual abilities associated with chess - an assumption that has little empirical evidence to support it.
Luckily, people have studied this, and in the case of chess, it's simple. More men play chess. And did you just dismiss the entire field of sociology?
I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.