> 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's not the same as saying that women are incapable of anything. Your pattern recognition engine has problems.

The people who read the above statement by Damore and think he meant that women can't be in tech/leadership positions is just confirming their own world view of full equality of outcomes.

So much so that they cannot even have a discussion with rational evidence and neutrality, of whether there are systemic biological differences that, in the aggregate, cause these unequal representations. The premise is dismissed immediately, and labelled bigotry or anti-feminist, discriminatory, sexist, and all manner of other derogatory terms.

I'm sorry that most of the other replies to your comment end with sass or sarcasm. However, you are misunderstanding that quote if you think it implies that women are biologically incapable of anything, or that _all_ women are biologically _less_ capable of anything. And by that I don't mean you're misunderstanding the intent or the subtext (what he really meant), I mean you are definitely not understanding the literal meaning of the quote.

I appreciate the measured response, thanks.

Nobody is claiming that Damore said it applies to all women, in fact, he hides his argument behind an appeal to averages. He says that no individual women is less capable than men, but on average, women are. The same way that a racist would say, "I'm not saying all black men are criminals, but on average, they go to prison more."

This is what I was referring to about weak-wording earlier. Damore claims that he's pro-diversity, then makes anti-diversity arguments. He gives the tone of a peer reviewed paper, but really it's a word doc with cherry picked citations. He claims that it's not all women, just distributed averages (so the typical woman) on a whole.

> The same way that someone would say, "I'm not saying all black men are criminals, but on average, they go to prison more."

This is unfortunate but also true. Which is exactly what Damore might say about the distribution of this or that attribute among women being shifted from that of men. I don't see the point of lining up a true statement with Damore's when I believe you are claiming his statement is false.

I also don't see what makes the wording "weak." There's nothing weak about trying to describe something in a nuanced way. And it's perfectly possible to be pro-diversity while also claiming what Damore has claimed, in the same way that it's possible to support BLM while also believing that more black people go to prison (your example).

> He claims that it's not all women, just distributed averages (so the typical woman) on a whole.

Please just say this next time. This is the hypothesis that Damore actually backed, and if it turned out to be true it wouldn't prove anything about any individual woman. It wouldn't even prove anything about any select subset of women, insofar as that subset was not selected randomly. It's positively tame compared to the claim that so many are quick to mis-attribute to Damore: "All women are less capable of X, Y, or Z"

The point of the this example:

>"I'm not saying all black men are criminals, but on average, they go to prison more."

Is that the underlying causation behind this 'fact' is that there is systemic bias against black men from law enforcement and the rest of society.

This is why we have diversity programs.

James Damore's argument is that diversity programs are moot because he says there is no systemic bias against women. Just as if a racist were arguing against diversity programs because they say there is no systemic bias against black men, because really, on average black men "just go to prison more".

Whether or not it's the average or the individual is a red herring. The point is Damore misrepresents data to argue against systemic bias - data which is inherently culpable to the same systemic bias he is arguing against.

> ...the underlying causation behind this 'fact' is that there is systemic bias against black men from law enforcement and the rest of society.

How is this rhetoric any better than Damore's? At best we can do studies that demonstrate the existence of bias, but we're nowhere near able to say that surely that bias is "the underlying cause of black people going to prison more" or that "this is why we have diversity problems". You're at least as bad as Damore. You want to believe that something is a certain way so you take inconclusive data and pretend like one hypothesis is not merely superior, but obviously, completely true.

> data which is inherently culpable to the same systemic bias...

How can data be culpable? And what data would this argument not invalidate? Has data every been collected by an fully un-biased society? Or can I, taking Damore's side, just throw out any data that shows that bias was the cause of a certain outcome and claim that, "this research is invalidated by the systemic bias in our society to attribute diversity problems to systemic bias."

> Is that the underlying causation behind this 'fact' is that there is systemic bias against black men from law enforcement and the rest of society.

No. The underlying causation by large consensus in the research community is that high crime rate is heavily caused by low social economic status.

Discrimination by law enforcement is not the primary cause of low social economic status. Racism in society contribute to lower social economic status for people of color but it too is not the main causation. Parents social economic status has the single largest impact on any individual social economic status and historical racism is the primary reason why African Americans as an demographic has lower social economic status than white Americans and why as a result, on average, African Americans commit more crime than white people. Programs which does not acknowledge and understand the critical relationship between social economic status and crime are unlikely to have any direct effect on crime or the rate in which African Americans end up in jail.

Which is why a lot of people in current time is arguing against diversity programs that tries to fix the problem by attacking the legal system. Its highly questionable if such programs can ever have any meaningful effect. A strategy that is more likely to succeed would be to address the social economic status issue through desegregation, social security, social economic support to parents, improving the education system in low social economic areas, access to health care, minimum wages, and other strategies that focus on the bottom 20% in the wealth hierarchy.

Different people can share the same goals but have distinctly different views on the causation and best strategy to achieve it. It does not mean it is a red herring or that they pretend to be against the goal. It just mean they have different ideas on how to reach it.

> no systemic bias against women.

Google pays women more than men..

Yet none of what you wrote supports an interpretation of "women are incapable of X" which is factually false and intellectually dishonest. Claiming he supports such a position is just dogwhistling.

>Damore claims that he's pro-diversity, then makes anti-diversity arguments

You choose to see any criticism of diversity (even constructive) as an ideological attack.

That is the real issue.

Beware of stating "he hides his argument"! A hidden argument is very hard to distinguish from an argument they didn't make in the first place, especially when it matches your preconceived belief. That's usually a sign that you're letting ideology blind you to observation, and serves in that sense a similar role to so-called "dogwhistles" that somehow tend to end up more audible and salient to one's enemies than allies.

It's the same as the Richard Stallman case, some person (deliberately?) misinterperts words to suit their ideological agenda, and gets reported as news. Intellectual dishonesty at it's worst.

The "abilities" mention in there is pretty tantalizing, since as far as I can tell, "ability" isn't actually mentioned anywhere else. The memo instead prefers mentions of a few personality-type differences that are less controversial, combined with some "maybes" about how these differences benignly explain the gender imbalances at the company. Biological IQ difference gets only a passing mention as "science denial by The Left." One wonders about the other kinds of "biological" differences that were edited out before the document was posted.

The preceding post overstates how strong the memo was in its rhetoric, but the whole thing is kind of a mess: it simultaneously argues that women are worse at negotiating salaries and raises and also that there is also no pay gap for equal work, it allows as how diversity might be important, but only for those "soft" UX-adjacent roles like design and testing (which are not really "tech" as opposed to software engineering), posits alternative "solutions" based around catering to its identified inherent differences for women but also undercuts each one, and just generally veers off onto wild tangents like the spending of taxpayer money, "violent leftist protests at universities," the superiority of capitalism over communism, and more.

One does get the impression that Damore came from a certain ideological milieu, yes. However, it still seems since he went out of his way to only make claims that he would actually defend, it seems wrong to round him off to one's suspicion of his intentions anyways. Limiting yourself to sourced, defensible claims should not be this pointless, or else fewer and fewer people will see the point in doing so.

I'm not a anything "apologist", but it seems like you can make the case you want without exaggerating for effect.

If I said women are biologically not as tall as men, does that mean women biologically incapable of being as tall as men? Or does that just mean that given a tall person, it's more likely to be a male?

Maybe a math example?

Let Female ~ N(161.8, sigma), Male ~ N(170.0, sigma)

Let's say someone is Tall if height > 170.0 cm

Then P(Male|Tall) > P(Female|Tall).

The entire argument is that given 1000 people, where 800 are men and 200 are women. Suppose that 1/10 is an exceptional engineer. There are going to be 80 men and 20 men who are exceptional. Suppose we want to only hire exceptional people. Trying to achieve 80 men and 80 women (equality) using the same pool will result in 60 unqualified women being hired. Now whether these incentives will result in the pool being rebalanced is a more nuanced discussion, but from a realist point of view, there is no reason to hire unqualified people.

Being tall isn't usually regarded as an ability. Also, if I remember correctly, he was talking about differences in the long tail, not differences in the mean.

If you're looking for biological long-tail distribution differences, sports world and Olympic record differences are probably your best argument. A combination of sexism and biological differences are to blame for there being very few female players in the NFL, NBA, and MLB, despite none of them currently having rules against female players. (I'm only aware of Ann Meyers Drysdale.)

In any case, virtually nobody argues against natural physical ability differences between men and women. Damore was clearly talking about mental abilities, so pointing out physical ability differences are a straw-man argument.

The population argument stands, whether differences exist or not.

Secondly, if you accept physical differences exist but refuse to accept mental difference exist? Physical difference are mental differences, biology is physical. If you accept physical differences then by definition you accept mental differences exist.

There are barely any white players in the NBA, is that the result of racism or more due to biological factors?

> Secondly, if you accept physical differences exist but refuse to accept mental difference exist.

If you're arguing about mental abilities, you should site studies about mental abilities. Yes, the mind is physical, but it's much more malleable than the musculo-skeletal system, so analogies break down quickly.

> There are barely any white players in the NBA, is that the result of racism or more due to biological factors?

Likely a combination of both biological and social factors.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm not saying you're right. I'm saying your arguments need improvement.

Edit: *cite, not site.

You need to read Debra soh's book if you really believe that nonsense.

Our brains work in very much the same way but their configuration is incredibly different.

Hell its development is primed on all sorts of hormones our whole lives to behave for a certain outcome.

I'm confused as to which statements you think are nonnsense. I count 5 statements in my post:

1. There exist studies of mental abilities

2. The mind is physical

3. The mind it's much more malleable than the musculo-skeletal system

4. The malleability of the mind makes analogies to the musculo-skelatal system fall apart quickly

5. The prevalence of African Americans in the NBA is likely a combination of both biological and social factors

My best guess is that you think it's nonsense that analogies between non-mental and mental abilities break down quickly because of the malleability of the human mind. If you feel that way, feel free to try and make some insightful inferences by analogy between physical abilities and mental abilities. I just don't think it's a fruitful avenue to explore.

For instance, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of naturally strong people who with 3 months training can bench press more than I could after 10 years of training. I doubt there many people out there who are smart enough to go from no computer training to programming better than your average 10 year veteran developer in 3 months. It's silly to use studies about weight training to make inferences about the effectiveness of mental training.

But, maybe you have other sorts of analogies in mind that make much more sense.

Edit: after looking up Debra Soh's book, it seems you've confused critique of arguments for critique of conclusions. I haven't made any statements one way or the other about if men and women differ mentally. I've just pointed out bad arguments. Faulty arguments don't necessarily even mean that the underlying reasoning is faulty. And faulty reasoning doesn't imply the conclusions are wrong.

I get this a lot, where people think I'm disagreeing with their conclusions just because I'm trying to get them to make better arguments and/or clean up their reasoning. I care less about this particular argument than I do about people learning to think and argue clearly. I get that it's a weird attitude, but I think the world is better off with us all reasoning and arguing better.