The Google memo isn’t sexist or anti-diversity, it’s science

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manifesto-isnt-sexist-or-anti-diversity-its-science/article35903359

by 20100thibault • 9 years ago

592 567 9 years ago

theglobeandmail.com

dvfjsdhgfv3• 9 years ago

To people who are flagging this article: why don't you read it? It's important, and the author is competent.

marsRoverDev• 9 years ago

Because it doesn't align with their worldview, and the wrong kind of thought must be quashed.

c0nducktr• 9 years ago

Or maybe people are just tired of seeing constant posts about this story.

akamaka3• 9 years ago

This article is trash. Who is claiming that there are no gender differences across the population? Who is she arguing against exactly?

Maybe the author should have actually read the manifesto more carefully, because it is primarily an argument about Google's hiring practices and how to build the best workforce for a company, a topic which the scientific studies she cites do not address in the slightest.

avenoir• 9 years ago

Who is claiming that there are no gender differences across the population?

About a quarter of comments on the original manifesto thread here on HN were from people who explicitly stated that there are no differences between genders and wanted scientific proof if someone were to refute their statement.

jp_sc• 9 years ago

She is arguing against the way the memo was reported by the media. Like this piece http://gizmodo.com/men-have-always-used-science-to-explain-w...

UK-AL5• 9 years ago

Please don't flag the article if you simply disagree.

The key to changing minds is understanding the other side. Not shutting them out of the conversation.

return0• 9 years ago

Things like these don't belong to a corporate forum like HN

UK-AL5• 9 years ago

This issue effects the entirety of technology sector which this forum represents a large group.

Simply trying to deny the debate is not how you work things out. If anything that will just annoy the group more so.

wyclif2• 9 years ago

I submitted this article an hour and a half before this duplicate submission, and it got flagged to oblivion. Telling. But I'm glad to see it's back now.

abhi3• 9 years ago

I flagged it. How many times do we need to have the same repetitive discussion? This topic is crowding out other quality submissions.

wyclif2• 9 years ago

Stop flagging articles you don't agree with that discuss science. It's not how HN is supposed to work.

According to the HN guidelines, flagging is for spam or off-topic submissions. This is neither.

UK-AL5• 9 years ago

This adds additional arguments to the discussion from a person who has a Ph.D in the area, and is the of the opposite gender of the original author.

I have also seen articles about legal action being taken which was news to me, also being flagged down.

peoplewindow11• 9 years ago

How many times do we need Rust vs Go vs whatever debates? HN has quite a lot of repetitive discussions, and that's OK. When people get bored they'll stop voting things up.

"I am bored of this" doesn't seem like what the flagging mechanism is for, actually. Or would I be justified in flagging any story about Go because it happens to not be relevant to me and I think there's enough discussion of it already? Seems wrong.

ebola17173• 9 years ago

Yeah, this is the 8th article about the manifesto this morning, and adds nothing new to the conversation

tenaciousDaniel6• 9 years ago

If people weren't interested in responding and discussing, the article would disappear on its own. The fact that people are paying attention means there is more to discuss. It's really not up to you to decide. Flag all you want but that's a terrible metric to use to make your decision.

jshevek2• 9 years ago

Crowding out? Hardly. Are you opposed to allowing people to have this discussion?

mmirate5• 9 years ago

IIRC, flagging has a lower karma threshold than downvoting.

ainiriand• 9 years ago

Firing this guy was just a PR move in order to keep things under control. The memo was accurate and I know that Google is going to learn from it even if the guy has been sacrified.

sethish2• 9 years ago

Private companies are not free speech zones. Not firing this person would have been a Title VII violation and opened them to lawsuits.

xname2• 9 years ago

Not firing this person would have been accused a Title VII violation and opened them to lawsuits.

hepolz• 9 years ago

Not firing this person would have been a Title VII violation

I disagree. His manifesto is pretty clearly core political speech protected by the First Amendment, so Title VII would be unconstitutional as applied if it operates to force Google to suppress such speech. Unfortunately there is no precedent clearly establishing this, so the mere threat of lawsuits (and accompanying legal expenses) may have been a factor in Google deciding to fire him.

happyrock• 9 years ago

This is correct. There is a lot being made about Google trying to enforce ideological purity, and not enough being made about why Google feels obligated to have this company culture in the first place.

I speculate (without much evidence) that Google's intention is to manage PR and deflect attention away from their actual lack of diversity. http://time.com/4391031/google-diversity-statistics-2016

alecco• 9 years ago

Googlers got a very clear message: comply or you are out. The diversity crowd grabbed power and asserted it.

I don't see anything good coming out of this.

alkonaut10• 9 years ago

Why can't the memo be both sexist and science? Arguing that there are differences between genders that make one gender unsuitable for a task can be as scientific as you want, it's still sexist.

It's no different from doing the same but replacing gender with race - it's racist no matter how carefully and scientifically you worded it.

It's almost as if the person writing this article believes that if the manifesto is factually/scientifically correct then it must somehow not be sexist. As if sexism consisted of lies? I don't get it.

lanevorockz• 9 years ago

You are reading things that are not written there, take a breath and read it without bias. It talks about predisposition and how when you look into a collective you observe differences.

alkonaut10• 9 years ago

Right: I explained what I meant in another reply.

AnthonyMouse6• 9 years ago

Why can't the memo be both sexist and science? Arguing that there are differences between genders that make one gender unsuitable for a task can be as scientific as you want, it's still sexist.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/

Definition by motives vs. definition by belief.

jazzyk3• 9 years ago

So, as a male, should I sue someone who (correctly) points out that I cannot breastfeed for being "sexist", and for "perpetuating gender stereotypes"

blub2• 9 years ago

Sexism relates to prejudices, discrimination. It's a negative word.

And no one argued that an entire gender is unqualified for a task. Where do you come up with all this stuff?!?

alkonaut10• 9 years ago

OK: let me rephrase - he argues that women (for example) have lower stress tolerance and are more neurotic, and that could be a reason for the lack of women at the top. He never says outright that these properties actually make women unfit for those jobs, however.

jazzyk3• 9 years ago

Your analogy to race is wrong.

There is no research (to the best of my knowledge) claiming that there are biological differences between the same sex of different races.

But there is enough research about biological differences between sexes (and some differences are obvious, such as different hormones, etc) to at least warrant a debate.

"Sexist" is one of a handful of words that have become absolutely sacred in the US, at the expense of scientific discovery (or common sense, or both).

alkonaut10• 9 years ago

There is no research (to the best of my knowledge) claiming that there are biological differences between the same sex of different races.

I mean it's not controversial to argue that on average caucasian men are taller than asian men. I can't find a quotation for that exact fact right now but let's just assume it's true for the sake of argument. It's a toy example anyway.

If it's scientific doesn't mean I can argue without repercussion that I should be allowed to cut before asian men in the line in the cafeteria because as tall people we are always hungrier. Even arguing that would (rightly) be considered racist.

I tried to make a toy example but you get my drift - the use of a scientific fact in argument can be racist.

Even if you don't agree with my toy example (either the made up fact or the toy argument) - would you agree that IF scientific argument is found that e.g. one race has less cognitive ability than another that might be "good science" (although ethically questionalble science) - that most uses of such facts e.g in arguments would in fact still be racist? Or do you still insist that scientific facts make all arguments and actions based on them non-racist?

biggerbistro5• 9 years ago

There is no research (to the best of my knowledge) claiming that there are biological differences between the same sex of different races.

Actually there are numerous observed differences in physical ability that are attributed to race, such as Tibetans having better adaptability to high altitudes than most other groups[1]. Physical differences are relatively uncontroversial, the problem arrives when we start to discuss mental differences.

I see not reason why a difference in environment would not cause various mental adaptations to form along the course of natural selection of geographically separate groups of people. This is an inconvenient idea and has been vehemently suppressed in the scientific community whenever it is brought up [2]. Instead of pretending such differences cannot exist we should instead focus on overcoming these differences so that everyone can participate according to their own unique ability.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_adaptation_in_hu... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn#Reception

dvfjsdhgfv3• 9 years ago

Science by definition can't be sexist. In science there is no place for prejudices, beliefs and biases - only facts. It's human attitudes interpreting these facts that can be sexist, racist and so on. Second, the author didn't argue there are differences between genders or sexes that make one unsuitable for a given task. That's one of the most gross and unfair misrepresentations of the memo.

alkonaut10• 9 years ago

Science by definition can't be sexist.

Of course. But depending on context the use and quoting of it sure can. I'm sure there is plenty of evidence of physical difference betweeen races, and there are reasonable ways to use those scientific results - and there are racist ways of using them. Doesn't change that

Second, the author didn't argue there are differences between genders or sexes that make one unsuitable for a given task.

Wow I read the whole thing (which is rare) and that was what really jumped out. I wonder what I misunderstood.

unityByFreedom• 9 years ago

Second, the author didn't argue there are differences between genders or sexes that make one unsuitable for a given task. That's one of the most gross and unfair misrepresentations of the memo.

The memo wrote that women generally have a harder time leading. His cited sources don't back that up. How is it a misrepresentation to say he said women generally are not as good at certain roles, like leading? That statement is word for word in the memo,

"This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."

computerex2• 9 years ago

You are confused about what sexism is. Sexism is a prejudice based on lack of evidence and reasoning. Saying that women are inferior to men is a sexist remark.

Saying that on average, women prefer working in people oriented roles whereas men prefer working in mechanical/technical roles is not sexist, because this is a fact supported by real evidence.

The author's point about societies with the most gender equity having bigger gender gaps really drives this point home. In societies where there is gender equity, people aren't compelled to behave a certain way and instead gravitate towards the roles they really want to take.

Real, verifiable, reproducible truths are not sexist or racist. They are truths. The fact that the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalenjin_people#Sport dominate sprinting is supported by empirical evidence and also science.

So to be clear, racism and sexism are terms used to describe prejudices, lies and falsehoods about a gender or race. These terms shouldn't be used to describe real, empirically shown gender or race differences.

We as humans are all equal in worth, but that doesn't mean we are all the same.

alkonaut10• 9 years ago

Sexism is a prejudice based on lack of evidence and reasoning.

That's not a definition I have seen anywhere.

The usual definition is that it's "prejudice, sterotyping or discrimination based on someones gender".

If we have different definitions of sexism to begin with, of course we aren't going to agree on whether X is sexist.

So if I don't use the controversial S word: I thought his post was stereotyping and coming out against anti discrimination efforts.

So to be clear, racism and sexism are terms used to describe prejudices, lies and falsehoods about a gender or race.

Same again: something being true doesn't make it not racist (or sexist). The falsehood/lying isn't a necessary condition.

monochromatic10• 9 years ago

Reality isn't sexism.

kuschku2• 9 years ago

This article would be a lot more worthy of a discussion if it actually discussed the actual issues.

How much is nature vs. nurture? (many of the behaviours the manifesto attributed to genetics are actually purely environmental)

Should that even matter? Shouldn't hiring processes be purely meritocratic?

The fact that the author of the memo argued for affirmative action for hiring more conservatives shows that he doesn't have anything against discrimination, as long as he profits. If he wanted a science-backed solution, he'd have supported motions to remove the topic of gender, race, political affiliation entirely from the hiring process. (Anonymous job applications can help with that).

Many of the sources were also quite misleading, or links to blogs instead of papers. The memo wouldn't pass peer review at any journal, and can, frankly said, not be called science.

As we also just had a big discussion about this topic on HN, this article is misleading and from an outlet that previously has published hit pieces on diversity policies[1], I flagged it - this discussion belongs into the recent megathread, not as its own onto the frontpage again.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/will-trump-make-amer...

megous4• 9 years ago

It's a memo, not a scientific study. Goal is to point out issues for discussion.

jamesrcole6• 9 years ago

What disturbs me most about this incident is how many people's first instinct, when faced with views they strongly disagree with, is to try and suppress those views and the person speaking them. Not to engage with the argument or to try and argue against it, just to shut the other person down. It's a totalitarian kind of response.

and05• 9 years ago

Some people may have reacted that way. I think you're very intentionally trying mischaracterize people rolling their eyes the same way they always do as some sort of ignorant knee-jerk reaction.

I read the memo entirely. It was half-baked, ideologically, but also creepy. I've heard what it had to say a million times before and it's still stupid.

blub2• 9 years ago

You're basically doing it yourself. Trying to dismiss it with adjectives as "half-baked" or "stupid".

The point is, it's neither and I think it deserves a proper dismissal instead of ad-hominems and insults.

Surely there is someone that can perform a point by point analysis and disprove the memo? I have not seen one comment doing that. Not one.

So no, you don't get to say it's stupid and call it a day. Prove it.

tothepixel• 9 years ago

TIL science is creepy

jamesrcole6• 9 years ago

I think you're very intentionally trying mischaracterize people

That's a pretty strong accusation. What is your evidence for that claim? Show me what I wrote that attempts to do that.

yAnonymous3• 9 years ago

In my experience, most people who act like that lack the intelligence to make valid points in an argument or there are no good arguments that support their point of view.

I think a lot of this has to do with parenting. When crying always gets you everything, you don't learn to work hard or have a debate to get what you want. There's a whole generation of full-grown babies.

fiblye• 9 years ago

If the reason that people get enraged is because they lack the intelligence to dispute something, what are google and news agencies doing hiring such people?

I'm not sure whether it's lack of intelligence or a desire for self-gain/self-promotion (seeing as how loads of people proudly plastered their pictures and names in the ensuing twitter debates, trying to paint themselves as brave crusaders for whatever movement they want to lead).

tenaciousDaniel6• 9 years ago

I thought that way too for a bit, and was generally in favor of Jon Haidts interpretation (blaming helicopter parenting). But I've noticed there are plenty of people well into their 40's and 50's who actively encourage this kind of thing. I don't know what to make of it.

atilaneves4• 9 years ago

most people who act like that lack the intelligence

That's not true. _Everyone_ acts like this, including me and you (except we don't notice it when we do). The key factor is whether or not there's emotion involved in the beliefs that are challenged when presented with facts to the contrary, which then provokes cognitive dissosance. Look up "the backfire effect".

mcv3• 9 years ago

You follow different people than I do. I saw people engage with the arguments. Google's official responses explained how diversity was essential to their company.

jamesrcole6• 9 years ago

I saw people engage with the arguments.

That doesn't invalidate what I said. I said "What disturbs me most about this incident is how many people's first instinct..." I never said that literally every single person's response was like this. Are you trying to argue that there weren't a lot of people doing what I said?

TACIXAT2• 9 years ago

It's amazing how much personal experience affects how we interpret messages. I read the original document and, while I thought it was stupid that he was suggesting roles based on gender or genetics, I did think he brought up important issues on the culture of suppressing view points and having segregated groups, classes, and programs. I know that those are the issues I focused on because of who I am. I also think that having discussions is crucial in understanding other viewpoints. I really think we need to have more discussions and listen to everyone's perspectives, both minority and majority groups. That is how different groups will come to understand each other and work together to solve social problems. There is so much prescriptive advice, toxicity, and dismissal of viewpoints on all sides.

toptal• 9 years ago

This is actually a great scientific read.

Ajedi322• 9 years ago

Not much new here. This article is essentially just re-affirming all the scientific statements that were already made in the original memo, backed by links to scientific studies.

Only difference being that the author of this article has a PhD in sexual neuroscience (so people might have a harder time accusing her of not knowing what she's talking about) and is female (so some people might have a harder time of accusing her of sexism).

blusterXY4• 9 years ago

What astonishes me is that Google's VP of Diversity knows so little about the underlying science of her vocation that she confused statements of clinical fact (with the science even referenced in footnotes!) with personal attacks on women.

sp3326• 9 years ago

It was an attack on women, even if it used "science" as corroborating points.

daughart12• 9 years ago

The fact that you equate a few studies with "clinical fact" shows you do not understand how science works.

http://retractionwatch.com

52-6F-6214• 9 years ago

I personally never called it out for sexism. I called it out for regressive-thinking as a solution based on plain fact.

I can only be brief right now, but it's starting to get to me how so many people in an innovative sphere seem to have such a hard time with this. To me, it seems like it shouldn't be a second thought.

If the main argument is that women do not [by nature of our scientific understanding] have minds tuned to engineering prowess to the extent that men do for whatever cause, then just how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there?

Humans never evolved to fly, yet we do it all the time. By the same logic, if we weren't evolved to do it, we should probably just put our planes away because it's bad for us. Same with communicating long distances and sharing knowledge on a planet-wide scale. <sarcasm> I mean, they've caused problems themselves after all. I think we should put all these silly, limit-pushing ideas and practices aside and just go back to smashing rocks together. The ground has rocks. We all have two hands. It can work for us.</sarcasm>

TL;DR Why is a fact being accepted as sound basis for a totally disparate theory on why we should stop trying to exceed our limits? This guys post wasn't science. He used science to reason out a way to revert to a state of community where he stands to gain more. There was another theory like that, I can recall. I think it started with an 'e'.

edit: Wanted to add, a PhD of neurosexuality is probably one of the last people I would consult on philosophy, humanism or any kind of larger social issue. It's not exactly her scope. It does help to have an expert on the subject chime in on the science, though. It will help at least dispose of that less useful side of the discussion.

dionidium3• 9 years ago

"If the main argument is that women do not [by nature of our scientific understanding] have minds tuned to engineering prowess to the extent that men do for whatever cause"

The main argument isn't about prowess; it's about preference.

peoplewindow11• 9 years ago

The guy's post was science, according to scientists - 5 of them have now spoken up saying that. Maybe there'll be more.

With respect to "why not try to solve it", it's a reasonable question. The guy answers that too - he is all for trying to solve it. He even makes suggestions about new ways to do it, like encouraging pair programming.

But he feels the current solutions aren't working and are, in fact, causing bigger problems. They might also be illegal. That seems like a good reason to pause for a moment and re-evaluate if the current strategy is a good one.

He also made a wider point, that was actually his main point, that Google's strategy on women in tech was breaking the internal culture and causing a severe lack of other kinds of diversity, namely, political and ideas-based diversity. He said that people couldn't challenge ideas around gender diversity and the best way to fix it without intimidation and fear. Google claimed they totally support people having discussions like that, and then immediately fired him, which shows he was right.

rndmwlk• 9 years ago

If the main argument is that women do not [by nature of our scientific understanding] have minds tuned to engineering prowess to the extent that men do for whatever cause, then just how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there?

That's not the main argument and I think you should re-read the "manifesto" if that's what you walked away with.

blusterXY4• 9 years ago

just how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there?

You are the only one being "prescriptive". If a class of people doesn't prefer (in aggregate) to do the kinds of work you want them to do, what right do you have to insist that it is better for them if they are forced to do this work? When did it become feminist to lecture women about the sort of work environment they should want?

You write as if you know what is best for society, yet where do you get this knowledge? It seems to me you do not even understand the points you are criticizing. The author of the Google piece was arguing that Google should change its work environment if it is serious about changing its workforce composition. He didn't tell women what they should want or how they should behave -- you are the only one doing that.

psyc• 9 years ago

In fact, there's at least as much text in the memo devoted to ideas about how to help women in tech, as there is about differences between the sexes.

sandov• 9 years ago

If the main argument is that women do not [by nature of our scientific understanding] have minds tuned to engineering prowess to the extent that men do for whatever cause, then just how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there?

That's not the main point. We need to establish truth first, then act on it.

What is discussed here is the underlying truth, not how we should act on this truth.

mistermann19• 9 years ago

You are advocating for gender based discrimination, while (I think) saying and likely thinking you are not. To me, this is a very scary precedent as it will likely spread.

chourobin• 9 years ago

"He used science to reason out a way to revert to a state of community where he stands to gain more."

This is spot on right here and the main difference between the memo and this article. The memo might have cited real science but it arrived at grossly inappropriate conclusions.

iotb2• 9 years ago

Please define what's Regressive about plain facts...

it's starting to get to me how so many people in an innovative sphere seem to have such a hard time with this

The prevailing (cultural) attitude is clearly against plain facts. The question should be why the prevailing attitude is against facts and real solutions but embraces lies and bad solutions. That is what is getting to intelligent people no matter their sphere.

If the main argument is that women do not [by nature of our scientific understanding] have minds tuned to engineering prowess to the extent that men do for whatever cause

It's not an argument that women's brains are structural and chemically different than a male's brain. Also, there are time tested (1000s of years of history) of observations as to what these differences (generally) manifest in. This is also not an argument.

then just how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there

Socially, you can do whatever you want. However, each such action caries consequences. A company that silences inconvenient truths and doesn't promote those capable of root cause analysis but instead promotes group think centered on flawed thinking and those that skirt around root causes will face the consequences of such a decision. As far as I'm concerned, it's a self-correcting problem. There are plenty of giant corporations in history that are no longer known for similar such missteps.

The rest of your post is filled with hand waiving and appeal to extremes. One group is presenting facts backed by sound logic and science you're resorting to demonization, appeal to extremes, and asserting intelligent people are incapable of philosophical/humanistic conjectures whereas observation proves the exact opposite. What's isn't the scope of a non-intelligent uninformed person is any higher minded thinking or analysis yet they feel the need to constantly interject their half witted opinion into matters and strong arm intelligent people's more accurate and thought out commentary. In the age of intelligence, it will be the half witted opinions that get disposed of and the opinions of entities in support of it and for good reason so that we can truly explore our humanity and our reach without being stunted by those who seek to hold back the truth or progress that can be made embracing it.

jorgemf13• 9 years ago

If the main argument is that women do not [by nature of our scientific understanding] have minds tuned to engineering prowess to the extent that men do for whatever cause, then just how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there?

You are wrong in this assumption. I am going to try to explain it. We have group A and group B with different genetics. We measure everybody in the groups A and B in a particular skill and we get the average of A is lower than B. We are not saying everybody of A has lower skill than B (it could be the case but we cannot say anything without knowing the distributions). For this particular case the ranges of scores for A and B overlap a lot. It means that if you take someone from group A and someone from group B, it is more probably that the person from group B have a better score than the person of A, but you find a lot of cases where someone from group A is better than the person of group B. If you repeat this a lot of times and take the winners you would end up with more people from B than for A. But all those people are better than the one you don't selected and probably have the same average for the skill.

What does it means in tech? that you see less women in tech positions but the ones that are there are as same as good or better than the men. In other professions will happen the opposite.

Note: I am taking account only the genetic part, but there is one part that is based on the environment that can lead to sexim and alter the final distribution of the selected people. And this unfortunately happens and we should try to prevent it without having unrealistic goals in selection distributions.

weddpros3• 9 years ago

The problem is Google fired this guy for distributing WRONG information. Wrong is the important word here.

If the information is right, it completely changes the case, and the guy was fired for Wrong reasons.

I hope he'll sue and win his job back (yes, I think Google needs this guy more than ever).

jorgemf13• 9 years ago

edit: Wanted to add, a PhD of neurosexuality is probably one of the last people I would consult on philosophy, humanism or any kind of larger social issue. It's not exactly her scope. It does help to have an expert on the subject chime in on the science, though. It will help at least dispose of that less useful side of the discussion.

Please respect all the researches, they usually read out of their main topic to get more data and more opinions. She works in neursexuality and probably has read a lot more from philosophers, humansims and other larger social research than you.

hungerstrike• 9 years ago

...just how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there?

Why do we need expansion there in the first place and where is the science behind that?

kerbalspacepro2• 9 years ago

Wanted to add, an online commenter is probably one of the last people I would consult on philosophy, humanism or any kind of larger social issue. It's not exactly her scope.

AnthonyMouse6• 9 years ago

If the main argument is that women do not [by nature of our scientific understanding] have minds tuned to engineering prowess to the extent that men do for whatever cause, then just how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there?

It doesn't. There are just different ways to get there.

One way is to eliminate unjust barriers that discourage females from participating in the industry. Another way is to explicitly discriminate against males. The second category has been used in practice and people reasonably object to it.

Not creating bias against men doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't eliminate any existing bias against women.

But it's also possible that even if we do strike down all the unjust barriers, most women would still prefer to be veterinarians or nurses or psychologists. Are we then supposed to pass laws to coerce them to become programmers?

acchow• 9 years ago

This guys post wasn't science. He used science to reason out a way to revert to a state of community where he stands to gain more

I don't think we should dismiss the ideas because of the person presenting them. In fact, the original Google Memo was written by a man in tech, but this open from Global and Mail was written by a woman in academia. What does she have to gain from the state of tech? Regardless, let's not focus on the people but instead on the ideas.

how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there?

The call is not to stop pushing for an expansion there. It's that our approach is wrong. And we're not able to even see that our approach is wrong because in this liberal bubble we're not allowed to talk about the differences between men and women.

surge• 9 years ago

I'm just more of the opinion if Norway tried it and failed with the full weight of their government behind it from the educational level down, one of the most gender equal places on the planet, why does Google think it'll work?

http://vimeo.com/19707588

Their conclusion was ultimately that the more equality and freedom of choice you have for genders, the more uneven the split between genders in careers as preferences tend to skew by gender. You can't force 50% of women to like or want to be engineers. So the more they tried to give women a choice, have equal pay, etc, the greater the imbalance became. It certainly means many women can enter STEM positions when they want to and are just as good as their male counterparts, but the opposite was true as well, as they weren't just complaining about lack of women in STEM, but lack of men in fields like healthcare and teaching. The cognitive dissonance is that "equality" means everything has to be 50/50, and attempts to do so is naive and wasted effort.

That said treat people individually. If a coworker sucks at their job, stop thinking about it in relation to their gender, their are plenty of men in tech who just cruise or who are barely adequate or worse. Don't make it about their biology. But at the same time realize you can't force diversity either, it has to happen organically, all you can do is maybe let there be a little bit of fertilizer to help the process, and setting quotas or special programs just for certain people is not a formula for equality or natural increase in diversity or interest from typically under represented groups.

That said, its obvious Google is just as much trying to protect a legal position, these programs are in response to law suits or protection from law suits to say "we're doing something about this", even if they don't produce results. Just like the terrible sexual harassment videos and anti fraud videos you have to watch at work, that are more to check a box when legal issues arise then actually fix the problem (because in the end a company can only control a person's behavior or choices so much).

monochromatic10• 9 years ago

backed by links
PhD in sexual neuroscience
female

There's a LOT that's new here, relative to Damore's memo.

thrden• 9 years ago

the first was cited as well, though news sources removed the citations.

titanix2• 9 years ago

Credit given to a quote shouldn't be based on the sex of the speaker. To some extend this is an application of the "your point is invalid" meme: you're a man so your point is invalid. This way of thinking is very damaging to the public debate.

mseebach• 9 years ago

Why does it matter what education a person has, besides as an ad-hominem attack, if the facts they use are correct?

And for the gender of the person advancing an argument to matter seems only to strongly confirm the memos points about discrimination against men.

Counter-factuals are always difficult, but it seems unlikely that we would ever have heard about this memo, much less seen its author fired, had the exact same text been written by a woman.

Ajedi322• 9 years ago

backed by links

Oops, sorry I guess my comment was worded a bit confusingly there. When I said "backed by links to scientific studies" I was referring to the original memo. The Gizmodo article which originally leaked the memo omitted those links, but they're present in the original document: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

PhD in sexual neuroscience
female

These qualities are helpful for getting other people to take the article seriously instead of just immediately dismissing it as an "anti-diversity screed", but they don't in and of themselves affect the factual accuracy of the statements being made. As I said, this author is mostly just re-affirming the same points that were made in the original memo; those underlying points are equally valid regardless of who's making them.

coryfklein4• 9 years ago

backed by links

I regularly see psueodo-science blog posts that are "backed by links". Let's pick one of Soh's claims that are backed by a link:

As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone – higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated[1] by men.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883140

Soh uses [1] to claim that Holland Categories and STEM interest have a causation for employment in related fields. In fact, the article merely supports the claim that women have statistical preference for certain Holland Categories and STEM interests.

So why did she use this as a reference to support her claim about employment in the field? It's certainly a reasonable logical step to make, but the citation should be moved back one sentence.

Besides, I'm very curious how that source controlled for cultural influences. Women are regularly discouraged from expressing STEM interests culturally, so it's no surprise to me that they don't express a preference towards it.

foolrush6• 9 years ago

For the record, the "facts" cited in her post are indeed questionable. A decent sociological analysis has been making the rounds, including https://ifstudies.org/blog/five-facts-about-women-and-men-in... and https://ifstudies.org/blog/what-the-google-engineers-manifes... among others, including a presenter at Google https://twitter.com/histoftech/status/894418661741649920

Even a brief analysis of sociology would reveal a deeply seated counter argument to much of the "fact" present in the screed and the OP link.

brighteyes4• 9 years ago

There are reasonable arguments on both sides, which rational people can debate.

That's the bigger point here. Not that there is a slam dunk argument on the side of biology or society, but that we don't know where the exact truth lies, and we need to be open to discussion about it in order to find out. As scientists have been saying all along, both biological and societal factors matter.

What I hope we can all agree is unreasonable is to fire someone for just trying to discuss this.

kenjackson4• 9 years ago

The issue with the original article was two-fold:

1. It used strawman arguments. Notably that the world is looking for a 50/50 split in gender ratios. Most reasonable people believe that even in ideal equilibrium state that this is not the expected outcome (although I'm sure there exist some people that push for 50/50 or greater). But that the current ratio is not the ideal equilibrium state. The author of the paper seems to point out that 50/50 isn't likely the expected ratio -- and then jumps to trying to dismantle affirmative action.

2. He selectively uses research and data from research. For example the impact of stereotypes and individuating. But the research shows that while individuating is effective when it shows clear discrepancy, it isn't effective when there is any ambiguity. That is Maryam Mirzakhani will likely make someone who thinks women aren't good at math think, "But yes, she's actually quite good." But when it comes to more nuanced decisions and decision with a lot less data (which is more commonplace in the workplace), individuating isn't so effective. Determining who should be promoted to lead or VP from a group of pretty strong candidates, will often have the stereotype bias still play a role (and in fairness, depending on exactly the role -- it can benefit females too). This is meant to be an example of research where in the memo one part of the story is told, but not the other. Based on my limited investigation, I don't trust him being impartial in presenting these facts. In much the same way that climate change deniers often point to facts too -- its what they don't point to that is worrisome.

Lastly, there is a difference between speaking truth and how you speak truth. This seems obvious to most people outside of engineering. Putting "Catherine has big boobs and I'd have sex with her, if she consented" as part of your sig may be completely factually she true. In fact, it may be obvious to everyone who reads it, but there is a time and a place. If I were a female, I'd have a hard time reporting to Mr. Damore. If I didn't get a promotion, I don't think it would be out of line, to consider what he wrote in the memo. If Mr. Damore ignores my suggestion in a design review, I'd have to again strongly consider if he did so because of my gender. If he rejects all of his women interview candidates -- is that a problem or not? The context of what he wrote, even if done in good faith, creates a more difficult working relationship.

My hope is that if Mr. Damore wrote that in good faith, he will take this feedback and make things better for everyone, male and female. He certainly won't have trouble getting job offers (if he wrote it in good faith or not -- there are enough people in tech who don't like women in the industry) -- and if his end goal was to create the environment for the discussion, then he's done that too.

humanrebar6• 9 years ago

So with part of all that is something you'd fire someone over?

Before you say "hostile work environment", keep in mind that lots of people find firing someone for this to be hostile as well.

Chris204812• 9 years ago

the world is looking for a 50/50 split in gender ratios. Most reasonable people..

This exact target has made it into more than just a few institutions.

He selectively uses research

In inviting discourse, he is also inviting "the other side" of the argument to do as much the same. I think his effort was big enough without raising the bar - why not bear the burden of evaluating the evidence alone? This memo is explicitly a work in progress, the choice to cherry-pick sources that support his conclusions is purposeful, since he is trying to demonstrate the that the status-quo might be wrong.

climate change deniers often..

There is something of an active debate on that topic, I haven't heard of any tech worker fired for discussing the issue.

but there is a time and a place

Did he not release to the correct forum? What is the correct time and place? I'd also note: statements have implied/pragmatic meanings. A statement like "I'd have sex with [Catherine]" would be assumed to have an implicit meaning. The memo, in contrast, is pretty explicit in its stated aim.

then he's done that too

Well, maybe. He certainly lit a match..

Lon75• 9 years ago

Lastly, there is a difference between speaking truth and how you speak truth.

Yes, this seems to be the thing that most people are missing. He didn't release a study in a scientific journal, he shared a document with his coworkers while at work. The things he talks about are what his Women coworkers are living through. He made this about their experience. It doesn't matter how much is true, it was incredibly unprofessional and absolutely something you can be fired for.

panda888885• 9 years ago

1. It used strawman arguments. Notably that the world is looking for a 50/50 split in gender ratios. Most reasonable people believe that even in ideal equilibrium state that this is not the expected outcome (although I'm sure there exist some people that push for 50/50 or greater). But that the current ratio is not the ideal equilibrium state. The author of the paper seems to point out that 50/50 isn't likely the expected ratio -- and then jumps to trying to dismantle affirmative action.

What is the expected outcome? It's somewhat of a rhetorical question, but I am curious. I guess it's somewhere between status quo and 50, but how do we know if we have reached equilibrium?

If anything, isn't status quo an equilibrium based on all current inputs to the system? So at what point do we stop tweaking inputs to the system and declare done? I would love to hear some kind of target/KPI that the Google diversity initiative is trying to hit.

Edit: also, if we don't know what the expected outcome is, how do we know when the process has been over compensated and is actually skewed in the other direction?

haberman• 9 years ago

It used strawman arguments. Notably that the world is looking for a 50/50 split in gender ratios. Most reasonable people believe that even in ideal equilibrium state that this is not the expected outcome (although I'm sure there exist some people that push for 50/50 or greater).

It's hardly a strawman; even people in this thread believe that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14970828

"mainstream gender equality says there should be a roughly equal split"

"50/50 split might be naive. It assumes men and women should be equally represented and that makes liberally minded folks feel good. But what's the alternative? Status quo? A different and arbitrary split? I don't see any good arguments against equal representation."

deepnotderp2• 9 years ago

Only difference being that the author of this article has a PhD in sexual neuroscience

Original evil evil author had a PhD/MS in Biology from Harvard

daughart12• 9 years ago

He studied mathematical biology. A PhD/MS should never indicate expertise outside of the field of study.

zimpenfish7• 9 years ago

He lied about having a PhD and his MS is presumably in "Systems Biology" (same as his claimed PhD), ie "the computational study of biological systems".

Beltiras• 9 years ago

Women used to be more prevalent in STEM fields. In the 80's there were actually more female programmers than males. Something changed in the mid 80's and the culprit might have been gender stereotypes in advertising. If the reason for less women in STEM is biological, they would never have outpaced males at any timepoint.

tzs2• 9 years ago

You are assuming that the change in the 80s was something that made programming less attractive to women. But that's not the only change that could explain what happened. It could be that one or more other fields changed to become more attractive to women.

Until people stop focusing on where there women aren't, and instead focus on where the women are, we aren't going to figure out what the problem is in programming, or even figure out if there actually is a problem with programming.

There's a graph here [1] showing percent of bachelor's degrees going to women in several different fields over time, from 1970 through 2010.

The decline in women getting CS degrees starting in mid '80s really stands out. However what also stands out is that nothing else seems to have gotten a noticeable bump around the same time, so assuming that those women who are missing from CS did not leave college entirely, where are they?

It's possible that there is a bump but we just can't see it. There were only about 40000 BS CS degrees granted per year in the middle '80s. Some other fields beat that by a large factor, and so it is possible the missing CS women could have been absorbed into a few of those big majors where the bumps might be small enough to be lost in the noise.

Another interesting thing is that if you look just at CS, the total number of CS BS degrees was growing through 1985, then started falling [2]. If you look at just men, and just women, the same thing happened for each. For both, from 1970 to 1985 they were on an accelerating growth curve (almost exponential), and then for both it turned around and fell quickly (also almost exponentially) then leveled off.

During that growth phase the women's growth curve was accelerating more than the men's curve. During the decline phase, the women's decline was faster, too.

[1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...

[2] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/it-careers/wome...

kerbalspacepro2• 9 years ago

It may also have been the type of computing that was going on. Pre-80s computing involved mainframes, data entry... secretarial tasks. Post-80s computing involved building businesses, getting heavily involved in the science, and generally hiding out in a dark room programming alone for weeks at a time.

What evidence is there for advertisement stereotyping being the causal factor? Wasn't advertisement stereotyping just as powerful in non-STEM fields like law? medicine? journalism? Why did they break the gender curse whereas STEM did not?

bryanlarsen• 9 years ago

The problem with scientific studies is that they're great at describing a population, but generally have very little predictive power at the individual level.

For example, one of the studies that showed boys were better than girls at math showed that if you chose a random boy and a random girl, there was a 55% chance that the boy was better at math. Not very much different from flipping a coin at an individual level, but quite significant in a population.

zzalpha3• 9 years ago

I'm just gonna copy another comment I made elsewhere:

The problem is that the gender differences cited cannot, in aggregate, explain the 70/30 bias toward men in the industry.

There's a real similarity to the global warming debate, here. There are many factors that affect global mean temperature. For example, over the very long term, the sun will get brighter. But that can only account for an astonishingly tiny fraction of the warming observed on the planet.

Someone who wishes to debate honestly would admit that, while there are many factors that affect global mean temperature, the rise on CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is significant, and has a demonstrable effect on temperature, making it by far the strongest influencer.

Someone who wishes to debate dishonestly will use these other explanations as a method to muddy the debate and try and turn attention toward lesser factors that cannot explain the whole effect.

Now, if you look at this current "debate", yes, there are undoubtedly biological gender differences that can explain some male/female bias in engineering (among many other disciplines).

But no serious psychologist or sociologist would claim that those differences can account for the dramatic real world bias in the industry. It simply doesn't follow.

So to claim those gender differences lie at the root of bias in the industry is a distraction. At best it's a gross misunderstanding of the science and statistics. At worst, it's a deliberately dishonest attempt to muddy the waters and confuse the debate. Personally, my bet is it's more the former than the latter.

rwcarlsen8• 9 years ago

I don't think he has a gross misunderstanding of the science. If you look at the example cartoon distributions he draws for gender differences - there is huge overlap. From my reading, he is advocating for non-discriminatory methods of trying to fix that gap. He's basically saying we shouldn't try to fix discrimination (that we think is bad) with discrimination (that we excuse as good).

computerex2• 9 years ago

But no serious psychologist or sociologist would claim that those differences can account for the dramatic real world bias in the industry. It simply doesn't follow.

What's your evidence for this? Debrah Soh, the author supposedly has a PhD in sexual neuroscience so one would think she is qualified to make comments about this. And although I can't confirm this myself, the article does say that societies with greater gender equity also have greater gender gaps due to the differences in what each gender values.

rbehrends2• 9 years ago

Not much new here. This article is essentially just re-affirming all the scientific statements that were already made in the original memo, backed by links to scientific studies.

It's not the biological claims, it's the conclusions he draws from it.

Here's the thing. Let's stipulate that all the biological (and esp. neuroscience-related) claims are 100% true. What follows?

Let's look at nursing. Clearly, it should be a male-dominated profession, right? The work-life balance (all the night shifts) is horrible and the stress is high (lives in the balance and all that). This is a profession that women should not want, right?

Same for accounting. Few professions are less about people and more about things. No room for "gregariousness". Again, a man's job.

In contrast, management positions (at least mid-level leadership positions) should be a great fit for women. All about interacting with people and that "gregariousness".

Obviously, this is not how the real world works. My point is that we're dealing with wishy-washy criteria here that you can use to argue whichever way your personal biases lie. They are inherently unfalsifiable and hence, unscientific. It's like the story about the blind men and the elephant [1], drawing bold macrosociological conclusions from fairly raw biological and psychological data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

david38• 9 years ago

Very little of nursing is like that. Most nursing doesn't have lives in the balance most days. It does require being somewhat social with patients though.

You are forgetting one huge thing. Lots of women doing something make it automatically attractive to women just because it'll be common in their circles.

kamaal2• 9 years ago

>The work-life balance (all the night shifts) is horrible and the stress is high (lives in the balance and all that).

I think nursing trades stress for job security.

There are many places like this in tech world as well. SDET positions in most big web companies. First 1 - 3 line support groups in big outsourcing firms etc etc.

The job is stress full, but the return for that is not money, its job security.

dapreja• 9 years ago

This horse is going to get beaten to death like the MNIST dataset with AI tutorials.

slitaz• 9 years ago

So I read this article and do not see any merit or value.

The article mixes up genetics with what people end up doing in life.

monochromatic10• 9 years ago

In fact, research has shown that cultures with greater gender equity have larger sex differences when it comes to job preferences, because in these societies, people are free to choose their occupations based on what they enjoy.

snowwrestler2• 9 years ago

The article hides a common but incorrect assumption. Look at this paragraph:

As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone – higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men.

The assumption here is that employment in STEM industries fundamentally and solely involves "mechanically interesting things".

The reality is that tech companies are composed of people and make products for people. Google themselves have found through their own research that the best managers are defined by their people skills, not their technical skills. So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

Strong technology is important for success, but so is leadership, market fit, team dynamics, understanding the customer, etc. The hardest question in tech companies is not "how" to build, but "what" to build. This is essentially a people-oriented problem, since customers are people.

EDIT: this tweet puts it succinctly:

WEIRD how none of these guys ever argue that because our ladybrains are better at communication and teamwork we should be paid more

https://twitter.com/kelliotttt/status/894770623611682818

UK-AL5• 9 years ago

I don't he denied that though did he. He specifically said women would prefer those roles.

dsfjksdf6• 9 years ago

But that is not related to "shortage of women in tech/STEM". More women in management wouldn't change that.

Maybe it is just difficult to put managers without experience in the trenches in front of people? That is, managers who have no tech skills as such?

rexpop• 9 years ago

without experience... who have no tech skills

Sorry, who are you describing? What group?

omikun10• 9 years ago

Maybe it is just difficult for a women to manage a bunch of guys? Maybe if the team has more women, this wouldn't be a problem?

zamalek• 9 years ago

That is, managers who have no tech skills as such?

There was an article on the front page earlier about how you simply shouldn't put people with no tech expertise in charge of people who have - so far as tech goes.

There is another problem here: the wage gap across industries. Some of our most important workers (teachers, nurses) are paid a pittance, whereas one industry that invents problems to solve is paid the most. The solution is to treasure the work that everyone does - irrespective of what industry they might be in. This would allow people to pursue a respected career in whatever industry they desire, regardless of what gender is typically motivated to engage in that industry.

Tech has been historically awful to women (and some places continue to do so); yet you can find industries where all genders are discriminated against (some being a social stigma) and nobody seems to give a damn about them.

One thing I can say for certain is that, as an extremely young equal society, we seem to be making a heroic effort to improve. We have a very long way to go and the extremes are probably going to be visited multiple times as the pendulum settles to the center.

DarkKomunalec• 9 years ago

So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

Higher levels of programming may be composed of more work with people (coordinating a team, extracting requirements from clients, etc.), but the lower levels, and the education leading up to there, is tech focused. And it's from there that managers are sourced.

Smaug1234• 9 years ago

What's the proportion of people who work their way up to management from code-monkey, versus being hired directly into a management role?

If it's highly skewed towards "promoted from code-monkey", then there's a big barrier to entry if you're the kind of person who loves managing and dislikes code-monkeying.

koonsolo• 9 years ago

So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

From my experience, women in technology have a higher chance of reaching manager level than men. I worked with plenty of female managers, and their people and communication skills were the reason that got them in those positions. Women with families, women working 4/5th.

So yes, I do think they can rise up with those skills, from a European perspective.

Cthulhu_5• 9 years ago

So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

The article does mention something about stress resistance, which would be an explanation. Of course, the best managers are able to avoid stress altogether by being effective managers.

There's also something I read elsewhere that men are / can be more competitive; both would explain why there's more men at the top, alongside blatant sexism / gender discrimination.

yomly• 9 years ago

Isn't being competitive pegged with testosterone levels?

belorn• 9 years ago

this tweet puts it succinctly:

When people have a scientific theory and that theory can be shown to not be good at predicting the world, it is still science. The point is to find a better theory, one which predictions better match observational data.

So what other theories are there? One that the memo mention in that controversial list is that men are pushed (incentivized) to seek higher earning. So lets put out a few predictions here. At average, jobs with higher risk and higher earnings should have more male applicants seeking them. Promotions that results in pay increase should be demanded by men more even if that risk their current job position. When there is a choice between benefits or increase pay, me should be statistically biased towards increased pay.

Is that theory better or worse? depend on the observational data that can either confirm or dispel the predictions. Personally I am more convinced by the second theory than the first, but that is purely based on the data. Make a better theory and provide convincing data and I would instantly change my mind. At that point the second theory should be abandoned with the same speed that I abandoned the first one.

jorgemf13• 9 years ago

So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

In competitive environments men are more willing to fight than women, so they are more likely to get the jobs because women are more likely to give up. And I think we should try to change this because as you said "people skills" have a lot of value in management. We need both skills and try to represent both in management roles.

WEIRD how none of these guys ever argue that because our ladybrains are better at communication and teamwork we should be paid more

There are profession typical for women like nursing that they have less salary than tech jobs. The reason is economical, tech companies produce more money. But I strongly thing the nursing job is as important as a tech job and we should try to remove the gap between professions. But with a capitalism system you cannot do this easily.

Note: I am one of the persons who agree with the biology differences between male and female.

creshal• 9 years ago

The assumption here is that employment in STEM industries fundamentally and solely involves "mechanically interesting things".

It's not. Read the original memo.

He especially mentioned that women gravitate to the more social jobs in STEM environments, but Google's diversity programs were trying to force them into the "code monkey" jobs instead, to spread them more evenly.

Strong technology is important for success, but so is leadership, market fit, team dynamics, understanding the customer, etc. The hardest question in tech companies is not "how" to build, but "what" to build. This is essentially a people-oriented problem, since customers are people.

Absolutely. So why waste your people-oriented employees on jobs that aren't people-oriented?

snowwrestler2• 9 years ago

I was writing about the article linked here. But since you mention the memo, I'll say this.

The current state of science suggests associations between gender, brain development, and career preferences. But women who are applying to Google for coding jobs are clearly stating their own individual career preferences. People apply for jobs they want.

Using population studies to try to contradict clearly expressed individual preferences is nonsensical; that's not how statistics works. It's like the old joke about the guy who carries a bomb onto a plane for safety, because "what are the chances that there are TWO bombs on one plane?"

And obviously associative data about preferences doesn't tell us anything about individual capability or qualifications.

Finally, if you actually ask women in STEM fields why they left or are considering leaving, career preferences are not the only answer. One also hears about disrespect, harassment, abuse--the glass ceiling. Again, this is real data that can't be lightly set aside just because it doesn't fit a narrative of biological determinism.

isk517• 9 years ago

I would imagine it is the Peter Principal to blame for lack of woman management. Even tech companies cannot seem to grasp the idea that management is its own separate skill set and simply promoting your best developers isn't going to guarantee you quality management.

humanrebar6• 9 years ago

I didn't read a specific causality claim like that.

I think there was a purposeful gap in the logic since the causality is too convoluted to be definitive about.

1. "Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our _interests_ and _behaviour_... our _interests_ are influenced strongly by biology, as opposed to being learned or socially constructed."

2. It might be reasonable to wonder if a biological mechanism is at play here.

3. ??? some combination of things, including innate gender characteristics, but not limited to sexism ???

4. Women are significantly less likely to work in technology.

_ Accenting mine, not in the article.

MarkMc2• 9 years ago

Google themselves have found through their own research that the best managers are defined by their people skills, not their technical skills. So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

That's a great point. So maybe Google should have said, 'This memo makes sense for programmers but not for managers'. Instead they said, 'You're fired!'

jcranberry• 9 years ago

I upvoted this comment since I think you made a good, salient point, but I also think that you elided the important baseline point that programming is simply more "mechanical" than work done in HR/Sales or by managers.

My impression is that most managers in the tech industry already have a good amount of experience in "mechanical" (development, etc) roles, and to even get there you need an education or experience in relevant skills (correct me if I'm wrong). I don't know about whether the proportion of women vs men with managerial roles in tech is fair, but if what the author of this article is saying is true, the required educational or professional pedigree just to get into the tech industry is probably one of the biggest causes of men vastly outnumbering women in tech already.

smrtinsert• 9 years ago

Cognitive differences observed in GENERAL != bad engineers for ALL.

The memo was a rambling incoherent mess.

verulito• 9 years ago

My company has an anonymous internal forum and I don't even like asking simple HR questions on there! I once complained about my disuse of my dependent care FSA going unnoticed. That's as far as I'm willing to go.

A touchy subject like this from someone with a technical background to a large group of people... I guess Google has a lot of employees and it was bound to happen eventually but seriously, how do you hit send on something like this without some twinge of anxiety?

riffraff2• 9 years ago

AFAIU, but I cannot reference, this was sent to a limited group of people, got forwarded and then became viral.

monochromatic10• 9 years ago

bad engineers for ALL

He didn't say that all (or even most) women were bad engineers.

megous4• 9 years ago

What I find interesting about all this is how many people take personal offense from statistics. (and conclusions drawn from statistics)

The author seems to put an effort into explaining statistical distribution and what it means and what not. He's explicit that statistical observations can't be used to judge particular individuals. Draws a graph of overlapping distributions to drive the point home even more.

I'm not sure why would anyone get offended by statistical observation. It's not personal by definition.

tenaciousDaniel6• 9 years ago

Also interesting is that it's one of the things social justice activists constantly criticize others for. I can't count how many times I've heard the following: "when we say men are privileged, we don't mean any and all men are privileged to the same extent." Or "when we say white people are racist, we're not talking about every single individual white person."

And it makes sense. Yet when it comes time for someone to say "the statistical average for career interests in females tends to lean away from technology", all observable nuance is thrown to the wind.

stillkicking• 9 years ago

Worse, with social justice this usually takes the form of a motte and bailey argument. The statement that "we don't mean all white men" and "we mean a system of systemic biases/practices" is usually a defense in response to being called out for dismissing someone for being white or male.

"Mansplaining" is the clearest example of this. Supposedly it's only used to describe a man condescendingly explaining something a woman already knows, but in practice it's used to belittle and condescend any man criticizing a woman or women as a group. i.e. "Google employees are furious following the internal distribution of a memo mansplaining away low diversity in tech"

The only constant is the preconceived notion that they always know who the victims are ahead of time. The reasoning is then reverse engineered to suit the situation.

A man is talking based on feelings and anecdote? He's ignorant and pathetic, and probably needs to get laid. A man is citing scientific studies and making a cohesive argument? He's a mansplaining dudebro here to dogwhistle sexism and racism. If it's woman though, she's respectively sharing her lived experience and fighting the endemic patriarchy by being forced to work twice as hard as any man.

atilaneves4• 9 years ago

The difference is that the "on average" vs "the individual" in the memo is scientific. Which doesn't mean it's the gospel truth, by all means go and criticise the papers linked to. But at least it's science. In the case of privilege or the lack thereof, it's an opinion. As far as I know anyway, I'd be happy to be pointed in the direction of scientific studies on privilege.

dionidium3• 9 years ago

Human brains simply aren't very good at thinking statistically. You can say something totally factual and benign, like, "Most nurses are women" and someone will immediately chime in, "My uncle is a nurse!" It happens every time. It's practically a law.

We're good at noticing patterns and exceptions to those patterns, but, for whatever reason, we're just not good at distinguishing statements about populations from statements about individuals. For most people, breaking this intuition takes a lot of education and training.

So, yeah, you shouldn't really be surprised when some random person on Twitter fails to grasp the argument. It's disappointing, but it shouldn't be surprising.

sethish2• 9 years ago

The manifesto didn't stop at citing statistics.

megous4• 9 years ago

Sure, but many reactions were directly related to statistical claims. I'm finding these interesting.

dmartinez• 9 years ago

Because people do not understand statistics. A great example of this is the Gambler's fallacy [1].

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

crispyambulance• 9 years ago

    > She's explicit that statistical observations can't be used to judge particular individuals.

That's perfectly fine but there's a lot more to it than the statistics, even if they're valid. Moreover statistics doesn't necessarily suggest a clear conclusion and course of action for organizations and decision makers.

That didn't stop the author of the original manifesto, however, from proceeding to make a bunch of bogus smug prescriptions for what google needs to do like "de-emphasize empathy" etc. These were way above his pay grade and I find it hard to believe that diversity has harmed this person.

The fact is, Google is doing just fine. They're not in a downward spiral because of diversity initiatives. They're thriving. At a minimum one could argue that Google's diversity programs aren't hurting the performance of the company.

The author of the manifesto clearly violated Google's Code of Conduct and got fired for it.

agarden7• 9 years ago

It's not personal by definition.

In my own experience, when one tries to talk with a woman in an impersonal way about something that is personal to her, she will tend to find that very offensive. Infuriating even, because one is ignoring her emotions, treating them as if they don't matter. And to her, her emotions really matter.

From talking to others and based on what I've read, things tend to trend this way. In fact, there was a woman neuroscientist who gave a talk at Google[1] on the differences between the male and female brains and in that she gave an example of this kind of thing. She says that when she comes home and is frustrated about a problem she has been having, her husband wants to go straight to an objective solution to her problem. It drives her nuts. She just wants to hear that he understands how she feels. Before he tries to provide a solution, he is supposed to say, "Honey, I understand how you feel."

I think Damore made this mistake. He has a footnote about the need to be objective instead of emotional about these kinds of things. And so he wrote a very objective, detached memo. I suspect that was a significant part of the problem. It's a male approach to a hot issue. He instead needed to write in a way that was very emotional about how great women are and all the unique gifts they bring to the table and how he wanted to empower them to be free to be themselves at Google and create an environment that was welcoming to all that is special about women. It could have had almost all the same content but lead with positive emotions. Had he done that, he might not have faced such a backlash from furious women.

Men, too, need to know that you care about them before they care whether or not your facts are factual or relevant. But most men do not find an impersonal approach offensive per se, the way that many women do.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu_uGr1ZOn4

Lon75• 9 years ago

Do you really find that interesting though? Isn't that incredibly obvious?

My biggest problem with all this is how the author gave absolutely no thought to how his female coworkers would be affected by this. These are REAL women who have to interact with him every day. They are not just statistics who are on average less likely to be good engineers than he is. They are supposed to be on the same team. I can't see how any of his women coworkers wouldn't think of him differently after this.

This was not a paper released on the internet with no ties to his coworkers. By sharing it at work and tying it in with google he made it personal. The women reading it have no choice but to make it about them, because it is about them! They are the ones who interacted with programs that he is against. Everything he talks about is stuff they actually experience. And throughout the entire thing he shows that he does not care at all about these women.

megous4• 9 years ago

Yes, really. It's not obvious to me why would people jump to conclusions like that. For example if I wanted to take things personally from my perspective from that memo, I could also find several points that I can misinterpret and get annoyed about.

Perhaps some people are more likely to see themselves in general statements and fill the missing info with their speculation. It may be the same reason why some people are susceptible to horoscopes or fortune tellers, except that this would be more subtle.

threatofrain• 9 years ago

I attribute this to lack of citizen sophistication. If you expect a public discourse to have clarity or nuance on statistical terms, then it probably means paying for statistics training for every citizen, even if it's just a little statistics unit as part of a larger civics course.

quxbar• 9 years ago

Maybe i'm offended because, as a white man, it leaves me open to all kinds of statistics about how white men are overwhelmingly likely to be serial killers, compared to other groups. And it would follow that we could do a better of catching serial killers by assuming white men are unable to control their murderous impulses, and adjusting how our laws work so white men are diverted from jobs involving human contact. That way we don't lower the bar for the safety of our lawful citizens.

Zeklandia• 9 years ago

Where he goes wrong is that he conflates statistical significance with clinical significance. Yes, his sources show that there are differences between men and women. However, the measured difference is so minute, there is little to no practical distinction.

staticelf• 9 years ago

Well if your beliefs is that the statistics are incorrect, I guess these kind of people would be offended by people who are simply stating the facts.

typicalbender2• 9 years ago

As an additional perspective, here's an interview from James' perspective[1]. The interviewer is clearly fairly bias and holds the same viewpoint which is unfortunate but I think hearing James' perspective on the purpose of the document is interesting.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agU-mHFcXdw

holtalanm2• 9 years ago

This is an interesting video to listen to, but as you said, the interviewer is most definitely leaning a certain direction.

That being said, I am not informed enough on the topic of gender differences to actually weigh in on who is right or wrong in this situation.

typicalbender2• 9 years ago

I am certainly not either, I just think people grabbed their pitchforks impulsively and painted him as a misogynist monster without hearing his side of the story. From the interview it sounds like the document was sparked from an internal diversity meeting that was dubious in its intent. Whether that is actually truth or not who knows but I get the impression James was trying to have a discussion and present some evidence but ended up getting roasted instead of having the discussion he was hoping for.

The issue aside, the hypocrisy in this whole situation is really what pisses me off. James appears to be soliciting discussion and trying to consider both point of views while the masses simply took whatever the media headline was an ran with it without considering both sides.

skoocda• 9 years ago

Here's the full interview[1] - the above comment linked a shortened version.

For reference, this is Dr. Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto professor who was fired a few months ago for his stance on using gender pronouns. He's a strong proponent of free speech, which he touches on in this discussion.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU

hefty• 9 years ago

was fired a few months ago for his stance on using gender pronouns.

He wasn't fired. The university sent him two warning letters and then backed down from taking any action. He's still teaching psychology there.

major505• 9 years ago

Welcome to the left. Where we are democratic, and suport free-speech, as long as agrees with our views. :)

riffraff2• 9 years ago

does the right differ? Is it non-democratic, against free speech, or happily accepts contrarian views?

I doubt being close minded is specific to any political group.

malnourish• 9 years ago

Welcome to the internet. Where we make generalizations about large swaths of people.

This could keep up until the end of time. I'm an incredibly liberal person in most regards but I find suppressing unwanted speech to be disgusting at a base level.

I think it's unfair to make that generalization; further, it contributes to the false dichotomy that exists through "left/right" politic.

yAnonymous3• 9 years ago

Generalizations can be useful and many arguments won't go far without them.

As for this specific generalization: I think we wouldn't have this argument if it wasn't legitimate. The political left increasingly consists of hypocrites who advertise free speech and liberalism, but act like fascists.

mistermann19• 9 years ago

If a generalization is objectively correct, what is the harm? One could argue that suppressing such comments contributes to sustaining mental illness.

AlexandrB2• 9 years ago

I think you mean "Welcome to modern politics". Suppressing free speech you don't agree with is a time-tested tradition of most mainstream political thought. However, it's most disappointing to see from people you otherwise agree with.

monochromatic10• 9 years ago

In modern days, suppressing free speech is 90% a leftist thing.

SippinLean2• 9 years ago

Quite a dangerous falsehood to parrot. I am strongly critical of many of the more conservative values espoused by the practitioners of major religions in the US; their view on these matters do NOT agree with my own.

I will, however, fight for their right to express these views and practice their religion in my country (up until the point it infringes on another's rights).

root_axis4• 9 years ago

I flagged this comment because it's a low-quality political attack made in bad faith which can only serve to start a political flamewar.

occultist_throw2• 9 years ago

Ive had a handful of previous Democratic voters, whom are classify themselves a Liberal, observe the same actions.

"We support free speech, as long as you agree with the core tenants of Political Correctness, Affirmative Action, Feminism, and Liberalism."

Whereas, Republicans/Conservatives have a much greater variance of ideas. There's the RINOs, the Moderates, the Libertarians, Tea Partiers, and more. Yes, there is infighting.

But in the end, they all acknowledge each other as Republicans. They may have spirited "discussions", but they are all allied with the same goals in mind. Reagan taught them that well.

dyarosla2• 9 years ago

Left/right is a spectrum. No need to further segregate groups with comments like this even if it is in a half-joking manner.

dang3• 9 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14968871 and marked it off-topic.

jpmattia3• 9 years ago

I'm surprised greater attention is not focused on the fact the "science" is in the midst of a reproducibility crisis. This is a big issue in the hard sciences; I can only imagine what it's like in the squishy science of gender behavior.

Tying your reputation to such a soft foundation is just inviting trouble.

josephg• 9 years ago

The people-things orientation has an extremely large effect size for social science. The Su et al. meta-analysis from 2009 found an effect size of 0.86 with N > 500,000 participants. Lippa (N > 200,000) found an effect size of 1.40.

http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

If you don't believe the research is solid, please post some convincing counter studies.

jpmattia3• 9 years ago

If you don't believe the research is solid, please post some convincing counter studies.

It sounds like you don't understand the reproducibility crisis: It's not up to me to produce counter studies, it's up to you to produce replications of the already published work, using the exact same methods and techniques.

So far, the reproducibility in the psychological sciences has been pretty poor. Nature summarized the original test a couple of years ago: 61 out of 100 replications failed in the test.

https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-...

pat2man• 9 years ago

I'm sure for every article like this one there are solid arguments coming to the opposite conclusion: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/differences-between-men-women...

dsfjksdf6• 9 years ago

If you are not bisexual or asexual, you are sexist by definition.

Smaug1234• 9 years ago

Your definition is demonstrably unusual. Remember, something is true "by definition" if it's not true for any other reason.

dsfjksdf6• 9 years ago

According to Google, the definition of sexism is "prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex."

So if you don't consider dating somebody because of their sex, by that definition you are sexist?

monochromatic10• 9 years ago

Let me know when your definition makes it into a dictionary.

sctb• 9 years ago

Please don't troll on Hacker News. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14968843 and marked it off-topic.

root_axis4• 9 years ago

Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behaviour.

This is obvious and not the point of contention. The crux of the other side's disagreement is in the assumption that differences in brain chemistry attributable to sex necessarily account for all or the majority of the differences we observe in career distributions. I think the insane reaction to this memo is unfortunate because the author does appear to make an earnest effort to discuss this topic, but the memo's defenders are not doing the argument any favors by arguing against the weakest version of the opposing argument.

piokoch• 9 years ago

I am always surprised that well educated people who are definitely not "creationists" but consider evolution as a way human kind developed are ready to ignore evolution when it comes to gender.

Clearly man and woman are different physically and mentally as for millenias they played different roles. Why "gender people" keep ignoring that and are claiming that sex is not something inborn and is a "cultural" phenomena is hard to understand.

For me gender studies are just new incarnation of Lysenkoism. Lysenko strongly belived (and thousands of soviet scientist) that weeds could spontaneously evolve into food grains because is should cooperate with communistic party.

Those who were against that obvious stupidity and claimed that genetics is the way to understand plant evolution were fired or put to jail or executed.

Similarly absurdal ideas were brought by soviet lingustics - if any one wants to have good fun, there is no better reading then Stalins's "Linguistics".

SippinLean2• 9 years ago

I think they acknowledge that our society differs from that of our evolutionary ancestors, and that this context matters in determining social policy, and does not amount to "ignoring evolution".

markdog122• 9 years ago

Was literally reading about this last night in "The Gene, An Intimate History": https://www.amazon.com/Gene-Intimate-History-Siddhartha-Mukh...

Couldn't help but think of this troubling incident while reading about it.

omikun10• 9 years ago

You're confusing the way things are versus the way things should be. Evolutionary biology explains the way things are. Diversity measures combats that with the goal of getting us to the way things should be. There are a host of reasons why things are the way they are now. The memo tries to offload some of that to biological explanations and cites studies. Then he makes a leap of faith and recommends the should based on that. The studies only explain why things are the way they are, not whether that is a good or a bad thing.

Specifically, he says at the top of the memo "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business." I'm not aware of any studies that backs this up.

hasenj2• 9 years ago

Without further clarification or elaboration, your comment does not seem to make much sense.

Consider the extreme case of children vs adults. Should we advocate for policies that force companies to employ children because we think it's more equal that way?

I'm not trying to say women are children or anything like that, just taking your position to it's absurd conclusion to show that it's at least questionable.

vowelless3• 9 years ago

Evolutionary biology explains the way things are. Diversity measures combats that with the goal of getting us to the way things should be

Who specifically told you how things should be? I fear I am witnessing the birth of a new religion here and I'm not done recovering from the teachings of the imams I grew up with...

golemotron• 9 years ago

Specifically, he says at the top of the memo "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business." I'm not aware of any studies that backs this up.

The unfairness is implicit. If more men are temperamentally inclined to 'thing' based work, it is unfair to push them toward work that they feel less affinity for. Society should support our freedoms, not impair them.

biggerbistro5• 9 years ago

Actually, diversity measures make things worse by promoting below-average candidates unfairly based on their superficial attributes (skin color, sex etc). This actually achieves the opposite of what is intended as it reduces fitness selection of whatever genes make someone good at/interested in STEM topics. By going against meritocracy you are harming the vulnerable groups by giving them a crutch to rely on.

pdkl95• 9 years ago

I am always surprised when well educated people misunderstand or misrepresent opposing arguments, or reuse data points that seem to support their side as some sort of argument-winning trump card.

claiming that sex is not something inborn

Literally no serious[1] person studying gender makes that claim. The reason it's hard to understand is because the actual argument has always ben that both nature and nurture play important roles. As for why "culture" applies, remember that while sex involves genetics (and hormones, etc), gender is performative. Performance happens in a setting, thus acting masculine hap[ens in a culture/setting that defines what "masculine" means.

Clearly man and woman are different physically

Obviously true in general, but there are surprises in the details.

and mentally

That is technically true, but presupposing that is bad science. Historically a lot of stupid crap was invented to justify the two predefined[2] categories. More importantly, anybody claiming there is a difference needs to explain the specifics of which traits they are talking about, because for most attributes the bell curves overlap significantly.

Lysenkoism

If you want to be paranoid, you will find ways to interpret your experience as being persecuted. Instead, I suggest actually listening to the actual arguments being made.

[1] I'm sure you can find examples of almost any claim in forum comments.

[2] Science should create categories from the observations. If you're starting with the two categories [M, F] and then trying to prove or disprove that, you're doing it wrong. These concepts are more complicated than a simple Boolean flag.

dm319• 9 years ago

But sexism isn’t the result of knowing facts; it’s the result of what people choose to do with them.

We know that men are taller than women. I can see you agreeing, but actually this statement is ambiguous, because these two are not the same thing:

  A man is taller than a women

  On average, men are taller than women

Sexism is taking a random male and a random female, and claiming that despite all the facts presented to you, the male is taller than the female. It doesn't matter that in a specific case a female is taller than a male.

The same can be applied to any group and their respective stereotype. The *ism happens when we fail to assess an individual on the data given to us, preferring to fall back on mentally-lazy stereotypes/generalisations even when what we can see says something different.

   A single study, published in 2015, did claim that male
  and female brains existed along a “mosaic” and that it
  isn’t possible to differentiate them by sex, but this has
  been refuted by four – yes, four – academic studies since.

  This includes a study that analyzed the exact same brain
  data from the original study and found that the sex of a
  given brain could be correctly identified with 69-per-cent 
  to 77-per-cent accuracy.

Well I'd argue that isn't great accuracy as 50% is what you'd expect from chance (though I haven't read those references). In fact, I might expect a similar accuracy from a machine-learning technique to predict sex based on your height.

I haven't touched on the causes of population differences. With height, I don't think anyone thinks it's anything other than genetic (by way of testosterone levels). For interests and skills, the proportion that is caused by testosterone versus culture/environment is still unclear.

If we believe there is still a cultural effect, then I think positive discrimination is justified to counter this.

As an anecdote, we were wondering why our four-year old son suddenly lost interest in 'Frozen'. He told us this week that a girl had told him at nursery that 'Frozen' wasn't for boys. Cultural stereotype reinforcement is alive and well, and starts early!

agarden7• 9 years ago

Sexism is taking a random male and a random female, and claiming that despite all the facts presented to you, the male is taller than the female. It doesn't matter that in a specific case a female is taller than a male.

Upvoted for this. Great definition of sexism.

Well I'd argue that isn't great accuracy as 50% is what you'd expect from chance.... In fact, I might expect a similar accuracy from a machine-learning technique to predict sex based on your height. ...With height, I don't think anyone thinks it's anything other than genetic....

If the method is probably as good at predicting sex as one based on height, which everyone agrees is genetic, then why isn't that great accuracy?

Chris204812• 9 years ago

our four-year old son suddenly lost interest in 'Frozen'

As a counterpoint, if society was as clear that "My little pony" was also not for boys, Bronies might not exist..

daughart12• 9 years ago

There is a tremendous environmental component to height. Women in South Korea have gained 8 inches in height, on average, in the past century. They are now taller on average than Korean men a century ago, despite no genetic differences.

kartan• 9 years ago

Women work in the Berlin Post Office with calculators, 1928: http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-women-work-in-the-berlin-po...

The managers, a more people-oriented activity, are all men. But the people working with actual calculators are women. And it was not just this office, this was happening everywhere. Working with a calculator was a woman's job.

More: http://www.history.com/news/human-computers-women-at-nasa

There is a lot of factors to why STEM is dominated by men. Testosterone may be one, for real, but it is not the only one. And it doesn't justify such a big difference in numbers.

I don't know if the engineer wrote something awful or not, but this article is just a justification for the difference as if nothing can be done. And that is not true.

hackinthebochs2• 9 years ago

What does mechanically typing into calculators have to do with anything? Clerical work was not the precursor to modern STEM jobs.

cpncrunch3• 9 years ago

I don't know if the engineer wrote something awful or not

Perhaps you should read it then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14969705

this article is just a justification for the difference as if nothing can be done. And that is not true.

No, the memo did actually give suggestions for getting more women into programming (e.g. pair programming).

zach• 9 years ago

Data entry has always been a strongly female occupation. Even sixty years later, data entry workers were 92% female: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1987-08-02/news/870226065...

It seems concerning that the de-emphasis of data entry in programming in the 1970s and 1980s may have caused the loss of entry-level opportunities for women and help lead to our field's gender imbalance.

kaffeemitsahne• 9 years ago

Funny that she calls it "the Google manifesto", as if it were endorsed by Google.

burner11• 9 years ago

Why is it that nobody wants to fix the gender gap in nursing?

gkya2• 9 years ago

Because programming pays higher. That's the response you eventually get from the feminist folks. I do believe this gender gap thing is good intentions, but there's just an enormous huge colossal amount of ignorance in the general effort itself and its perpetrators. The emotion-drivenness of the online audiences is not helping either.

rtx• 9 years ago

Greed, people want a piece of this boom.

rhcom2• 9 years ago

People do: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/men-dont-w...

Cthulhu_5• 9 years ago

Scores lower on goodwill points. Diversity is often used as a marketing tool.

Mind you, that industry needs a lot more men - nurses move people around, people are heavy, and nobody's denying that generally, men can lift more weight than women. That's a much more obvious biological distinction than in the more brainy areas like STEM.

Melchizedek• 9 years ago

There is money in tech so women have an interest in playing victim to gain advantages. There are also a few males who hope to gain status for themselves and securing their own position by taking the women's side (while keeping other men down).

Men who play (or are) victims on the other hand are generally ridiculed or ignored, so there is no advantage in doing so.

Behind ideas there is usually self interest.

ythn• 9 years ago

Or social work, education, etc.

A: money

biggerbistro5• 9 years ago

How about female coal miners? Female construction workers? This isn't about fairness it is all about browbeating people from a perceived moral high ground so that wages can be lowered for all (more supply of programmers = lower cost). The "useful fools" here likely have the best intentions but are being used by people without good intent.

alexholehouse• 9 years ago

As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone – higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men.

And why we see fields like law being dominated by women, right?

EDIT: I, and I suspect most other scientists wouldn't disagree that there are [edit - had this as aren't previously, woops!] physiological differences between men and women, but as I read the memo, that was not what was being argued. What was being argued was that those differences were the reason for the gender imbalance in tech (i.e. women are predisposition to be less interested/capable in STEM fields), in other words, the effect size associated with biological sex is larger (and indeed must be significantly larger) than any/all combined societal/'nurture' effects.

UK-AL5• 9 years ago

This is anecdotal. But a testament on how difficult this problem is.

I have two nieces and 1 nephew, all of which I've tried to encourage into programming. I have tried to get my nieces interested in programming with great difficulty but my nephew has taken to it almost instantly and effortlessly.

I suspect I am framing the activity wrong.

scaryclam• 9 years ago

This is also anecdotal. I'm a female working as a technical lead. When trying to describe what I do to non-tech-worker female friends that ask, I often find that they get a look of slight confusion and state things such as "wait, that actually sounds like an interesting job!". It's as if their entire experience of computers, maths and tech is boring, so they think working with them must be as well.

I think how girls get introduced into STEM subjects has to change. I also think it would be worthwhile continuing to encourage adult females to give things like programming a go as well, even if they've tried in the past and didn't like it. Most of the barriers to interest seem to be how the subjects are talked about, as opposed to the subjects themselves.

brighteyes4• 9 years ago

We do see people-focused fields like psychology dominated by women. Perhaps law is somewhere in the middle.

The memo didn't say biology was "larger than any/all combined societal/'nurture' effects". In the memo there is a section with this title:

Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech

Note "possible". No one knows the exact combination of causes of the gap, it likely has many factors. The memo is saying there may be non-bias factors too, and that Google is blind to those, so it's pointing those out. That's not the same as saying non-bias factors are larger than everything else.

tzs2• 9 years ago

We do see people-focused fields like psychology dominated by women. Perhaps law is somewhere in the middle.

Law is a broad area. I'd expect the combination of interests and skills that lead to one becoming, say, a corporate tax lawyer are quite different from those that lead to becoming, say, a public defender, or a patent attorney, or a real estate lawyer.

It would be interesting to see what the gender distribution is for these various areas of law.

tptacek10• 9 years ago

This defense of the "manifesto" is flawed just like the others. It picks out a small subset of the claims made in the document, discards the context and all the other claims, and then harangues us for having a problem with "science". I could argue "water is composed of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule, so women are bad at software development", and my argument would just be a difference of degree worse than hers.

We can talk straightforwardly about what makes the document problematic: whatever the validity of the "scientific" claims it makes about gender differences, there is no support (and likely no validity) to the connections it then makes to software development work. Despite that unjustified leap, the document goes on to suggest strongly that women working at Google are less qualified than men. There is no science Debrah Soh can cite to back up that assertion, however much she might want to.

Anyone can wrap an incendiary statement up in a pile of banal sentiment and ambiguous appeals to social science. When challenged, refocus the debate on the truisms and the footnotes and pretend you didn't write the nasty stuff you hid in the middle. And, as we can see, plenty of very smart people will fall for the trick.

Gender equity has been improving in the United States for several generations. As that has occurred, female participation in STEM fields (and in the professions, like medicine and law) has expanded dramatically. Many science fields are now approaching parity. Most have more than twice as much participation as computer science. That includes the field of mathematics, which is closely related to computer science and is certainly more intellectually challenging than "computer science" as practiced in the industry.

Among all STEM fields, computer science is distinguished for losing the participation of women over the last 10 years.

Unless the women of 1950 are somehow biologically different from those of 2017, the author's theory will somehow have to address the fact that her argument would have predicted the fields or law, medicine, biochem, mathematics, astronomy, statistics, accounting, and actuary would all be bereft of women over the 20th century --- obviously, the opposite occurred, despite the sexual revolution that was immediately to come.

The author of this article discusses a correlation between increasing gender equity and decreased STEM participation that does not appear in the evidence. There's a reason she does that: if you don't stipulate that correlation, the argument against gender bias in computer science has to confront another damning fact, which is that gender disparity in the field isn't global. Unless women in Asia are somehow biologically different than those of the US, her argument needs some way to address the fact that women make up the majority of STEM majors in many of those cultures.

Reading this article and then this thread, I find that there's really only two aspects of it that HN finds persuasive: the headline's appeal to "science", and the footnote observing that the author is a female scientist. That's not enough. Everything in between those things is wildly off.

In discussions about gender parity in CS, the word "preference" is a coded appeal to the Just World Hypothesis. There is a yawning chasm between neuroscience findings about "agreeableness" and "stress tolerance" and suitability for any particular kind of white-collar symbol-manipulation work. Ms. Soh must intuitively understand that, but mentions it not once in her piece, instead pretending that observations about the kinds of toys children play with allow us to reflect participation statistics directly into real preferences about work. Shenanigans.

monktastic14• 9 years ago

Consider the Medium piece she cites:

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

Point #1: "I’m not going to spend any length of time on (1); if anyone wishes to provide details as to how nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect,¹ and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it. But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else."

In other words: "I have no relevant expertise, but I just know it's wrong."

We would never tolerate that from "the opposing side." I can point you to other articles that do the same.

This is the rallying point for a lot of people, and it's the wrong place to take a stand. It's worth pointing out.

tptacek10• 9 years ago

You haven't so much responded to my comment as used it as a coat rack to hang an unrelated argument on. I didn't cite Zunger's blog post and don't really understand why people like it so much. I'd prefer not to discuss it here, and thank you in advance for not demanding I do so.

mwytock2• 9 years ago

Well said, it's a massive leap to go from biological gender differences to differences in aptitude for engineering.

The gross oversimplified claims from the document that attempt to make this leap are textbook stereotypes.

renaudg3• 9 years ago

massive leap to go from biological gender differences to differences in aptitude for engineering

For the n million-th time : the memo said nothing about aptitude for engineering, just preference.

renaudg3• 9 years ago

the argument against gender bias in computer science has to confront another damning fact, which is that gender disparity in the field isn't global. Unless women in Asia are somehow biologically different than those of the US, her argument needs some way to address the fact that women make up the majority of STEM majors in many of those cultures.

There is research finding that the more advanced a country is in terms of gender equality (by generally accepted metrics), the more pronounced the occupational gender gap actually is in most fields.

One proposed explanation is that women in advanced economies are freer of constraints and higher up in the Maslow pyramid of needs, and can afford to go into jobs they actually like, rather that whatever they feel is their duty/more lucrative/otherwise rewarding. Kind of like yuppies (of either gender) dream of exiting the corporate world to set up an organic food shop. That would certainly explain the very different STEM gender gaps in the US/Sweden vs India/China, for example.

I don't have the reference handy, but if someone can provide it, please do !

tptacek10• 9 years ago

It's 1950, in a parallel universe differing from ours in exactly one way: scientists, using methods inferior to ours today but aided by good fortune, have generated essentially the same results about innate psychological preferences Debrah Soh cites in this piece, results we will stipulate as accurate.

We can predict the next 50 years with perfect clarity, having lived through them ourselves.

According to Soh's logic, as gender equality increases dramatically throughout the next 30 years, we should see reinforcement of "preferences" to avoid science fields. And yet the opposite thing occurs.

Why has Soh's hypothesis failed to predict? Why is it more trustworthy today?

yeahforsureman• 9 years ago

This explanation is put forward for example in the Norwegian science documentary series Hjernevask, see episode 1 (The Gender Equality Paradox), available on YouTube. I don't have the time to hunt down the references right now but you should be able to find them through that one.

Lon75• 9 years ago

Thank you for this great response. I think you've covered why the 'manifesto' cannot be supported on a scientific basis very well. There's another issue with the manifesto that I don't think is talked about as much. And that's the human element.

All the cited science in the manifesto is irrelevant in my opinion. As an engineer you work with other people. You probably spend 40 or 50 hours a week with them. They may or may not become your friends, but they will have a huge impact on your life, and you on theirs. Many of these people will be women. They are REAL people that you interact with everyday. What he did when he decided to share this manifesto at work is show that he thinks of these women as statistics, and that on average they are not as capable as he is. He has turned the women he works with everyday into a technical problem that he can solve with his intellect. That is incredibly insulting! He's shown an incredible lack of empathy and understanding towards the women he works with. He's turned them into numbers. He's shown he does not care about them as individuals. This is absolutely unforgivable.

If he had simply released this as a research project or something on the internet then it wouldn't be a problem. But he didn't do that. He didn't make a distinction between the general population and the women he works with. He shared it at work.

tptacek10• 9 years ago

I understand the arguments about how valuable interpersonal skills are to software development, but I don't like talking about them for a couple reasons:

1. The effect sizes we're talking about are tiny. A randomly selected cohort of men and women can routinely be expected to produce more women innately skilled at math, or more men innately skilled at negotiation. It's one of the more galling aspects of the debate about this stupid "manifesto", which at one point redraws a well-known chart about the overlap in ability between men and women to exaggerate the difference between the sexes: at no point do any of the advocates of the "manifesto" address effect size compared to the observed disparity in the field.

2. Very little about computer science as it is practiced in the industry is tied with any rigor to any particular skill. For the most part, software development is a standard white-collar symbol manipulation job in which productivity is defined mostly by meticulousness and generic learning and pattern matching. Attempts to break down aptitude by gender tend to imagine computer science in terms of compiler theory and algorithm design, when in reality 90% of all software development is repeated iterations of "wire this database column into this UI table".

jahaja• 9 years ago

This is what I don't understand in all these HN threads. How can some kind of vaguely related science paper(s), albeit perhaps accurate per se, make people so absolutely sure that there's some kind of _causal & scientific_ cause to the issue at hand - as it requires a really long jump. I assume it's just confirmation bias wreaking havoc. Thanks for a good summary too.

lackbeard• 9 years ago

Scott Alexander posits a theory which addresses why programming has a high gender disparity but law, medicine, biology and (undergrad) mathematics don't: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger....

Doesn't address why the number of women in programming has fallen since the 80's though...

tptacek10• 9 years ago

This piece is fatuous. Alexander perpetuates the "women like people, men like things" trope that is common to every message board discussion of CS gender disparity. He then explains away the fact that women excel in science fields by saying "what do women do with math degrees? They become teachers." He ignores that the effect remains in graduate-level math studies (women do not get math PhD's to become high school teachers) and in other STEM fields (women do not get biochem masters to become high school teachers).

He's contrived a just-so story that appeals to his audience. Which is par for his course.

sethev• 9 years ago

One of the bizarre things about this controversy is that even if you grant all of the memo's assumptions (something that I won't do except hypothetically), it still wouldn't follow that _Google's_ policy was bad for Google. Google is a big company but it only employs a small fraction of software developers. They could very well decide that it's good for them to have more women represented regardless of whatever the "global" distribution is.

blahblah32• 9 years ago

Just to respond to a few specific points:

Despite that unjustified leap, the document goes on to suggest strongly that women working at Google are less qualified than men

Can you elaborate on this? Just because FEWER women may be qualified to work at Google doesn't mean that the ones that are are any less qualified than the men. The fact that fewer women are tall doesn't mean that tall women aren't tall for example.

I could argue "water is composed of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule, so women are bad at software development", and my argument would just be a difference of degree worse than hers.

I fail to see how the science discussed in the memo is as irrelevant as you make it out to be. Is it really that far fetched that psychological makeup (as expressed in big-5 characteristics) and interests play a role in what people choose to pursue and what they like to do? Because software engineering is different than other occupations (such as law and medicine), it makes sense to think about what might attract one to one profession over another. Many intelligent women I know chose careers such as medicine over cs. And why not? It pays better and doesn't involve staring at a computer all day (something that not everybody enjoys). The same could be said for law and finance (investment banking, private equity).

Among all STEM fields, computer science is distinguished for losing the participation of women over the last 10 years.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/truth-women-stem-ca...

If you scroll down to the two bar charts in the link above, you'll notice that while the % of bachelor degrees earned by women in CS has gone down, the % of PHD degrees earned has actually gone up (looks to be about 40% higher compared to 1991)! I think you would agree that earning a phd in CS is much more difficult than a BS, and I think this actually shows that women are being given more opportunity to excel academically in the subject.

As for bachelor degrees in CS, it seems like it has converged more to the % awarded in engineering. Speaking more on the differences between CS (i.e Bachelors level CS that leads to SWE jobs) and Math, I would say there is a qualitative difference between the two, and certainly one can have personal preferences. Software engineering is much more about creating systems that work and solve real-world problems. It also involves a lot of programming. Pure math (and theoretical CS) is more about investigating an abstract world and looking into interesting patterns and connections. It actually has a lot of similarities with philosophy in this regard. Some of the female math/science majors I knew actually didn't really like programming and ended up being highly successful in other fields even if they went into industry (medicine/finance/business).

There's a reason she does that: if you don't stipulate that correlation, the argument against gender bias in computer science has to confront another damning fact, which is that gender disparity in the field isn't global. Unless women in Asia are somehow biologically different than those of the US, her argument needs some way to address the fact that women make up the majority of STEM majors in many of those cultures.

In fact, people have done cross-cultural studies. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23179757_Sex_Differ...

"Regression analyses explored the power of sex, gender equality, and their interaction to predict men's and women's 106 national trait means for each of the four traits. Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality."

From my personal experience (which I agree is less convincing than the numerous empirical studies that have been done on the topic), I'll say that many women in asian countries are pushed into studying cs/programming even if they don't like it, because those fields often provide a straightforward path to making a decent income.

program_whiz2• 9 years ago

I have a question to further this debate.

Would people consider it sexist to administer a completely automated test of technical and personality questions which was used by an unbiased program to hire only the best qualified candidates?

What would you say if the results were essentially the same as the status quo?

By the Article's Author's account, she believes that we would probably maintain the status quo with such a test, because she thinks people are self-selecting out of STEM. Others seem to think that there is some other barrier to entering -- would a test like this fix the issue, or is there something else going on?

Cthulhu_5• 9 years ago

There's already a number of companies that do blind reviews of resumes, or applicants that intentionally hide or change their names - not sure if it makes a big difference, also because there's just less female applicants in general.

Actually, how many female software developers can't get a job nowadays?

durgiston2• 9 years ago

The problem isn't that women aren't getting jobs (the market is currently in too serious of a demand for hands on keyboards for that) but that they aren't getting as good a job as you would expect from their qualifications and/or that they aren't being paid as much.

durgiston2• 9 years ago

Well, first of all, such an unbiased test does not and probably cannot exist. People have to write the test, and despite their best efforts, they will likely still be biased. And how do you determine what 'unbiased' is in the first place? Such a test would likely give us the status quo or close to it because most hiring managers are acting in good faith already (at least, I chose to believe that people don't mean to perpetuate sexism/racism etc, they just aren't necessarily trying NOT to do it.)

notacoward7• 9 years ago

What would you say if the results were essentially the same as the status quo?

OK, I'll bite. I'd say that's both surprising and interesting. Then I'd ask why the status quo is even relevant. "Best qualified" at the time of taking the test might not mean "most productive a year hence" when a candidate's circumstances might have kept them from reaching their full potential. Indeed, circumstances might have kept them from making it as far as the test at all. When there are statistically valid predictors of these things likely having happened, why couldn't - or shouldn't - Google take advantage of that knowledge? Also, no individual test can account for the common phenomenon of diverse teams outperforming monoculture teams. Hiring the best individuals is not the same as building the best teams.

Thus, even if such a "unicorn test" could exist, and even from the most hard-hearted "Google shouldn't consider social justice" perspective, the test would only be one input for selecting candidates. There would still be sound business focused reasons for overriding its results some of the time.

program_whiz2• 9 years ago

Not being sarcastic, is there evidence that more diverse teams are better? There seems to be some anecdotal evidence going both ways (i.e. more diverse viewpoints vs team cohesion). I can imagine that there's a balance point as well. You could have one extreme where people are so similar that its basically a one-person team with 8 arms. You could also have a team so diverse they can never agree, have no common language and no shared cultural aspects, or even shared goals. An interesting balancing act really.

Someone• 9 years ago

I think it is unfair to call this "the Google manifesto".

If I state here that it is scientifically expected to see more foos than bars on HN, and then get banned because of it, that wouldn't become HN's manifesto, either.

I fear that, a few years from now, people will say it represented Google's official standpoints (which it doesn't) or those of a significant portion of its employees (which may or may not be the case, from what I know)

"Google employee's manifesto" or "James Damore's manifesto" are better names.

mistermann19• 9 years ago

By firing him they took ownership.

Cthulhu_5• 9 years ago

Or they firmly distanced themselves from the author, just like what happened to both sides in Donglegate.

Not sure if the author can sue the company though, I mean on what grounds was he fired?

apeace• 9 years ago

No matter how you debate the validity of the science, I hope people pay attention to one suggestion the 'manifesto' author made: that his company should do more pair programming.

Pairing has always struck me as a great way to get programmers communicating better. Without addressing any other points in the manifesto, I think he's correct that encouraging pairing would be a good way to make development environments more collaborative.

tlogan• 9 years ago

The sad thing is that people do not even understand why the memo is bad.

The problem: You cannot invoke science to tell somebody: I'm better than you. Period. That causes wars.

dustinmoris2• 9 years ago

I just CTRL+F the entire memo for "better". It was only used in two sentences:

Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts. 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).

So where again does it say the he is better than someone else? These type of statements is what's causing the huge divide, because people put words into other people's mouth as and when they like just to support their own argument or agenda at the expense of everyone else.

Show me a quote where he actually says what you claim he says.

Delmania11• 9 years ago

From below (I wanted to make sure this didn't get hidden under a downvoted comment):

I fail to understand how a memo calling for MORE diversity can get headlined as "anti-diversity memo" on all big media outlets. Do journalists even do independent research anymore or are they just regurgitating whatever reuters send their way without scrutiny?

The author is referring to psychological diversity, in other words, Google should be more receptive to diverse viewpoints. This is both true and not true. Yes, we should listen to others and understand, but that does not mean we should accept and value everyone's viewpoints. To invoke Goodwin's Law, perhaps we should be more sympathetic to the viewpoints of Nazis? How about white supremacists?

There are viewpoints that do harm people within society, and this is one of them. Strip this down, this is the basic "woman's nature" argument that was used for years in the past to keep women barefoot and in the kitchen. The underlying claim that women are bad at tech is ridiculous. As mentioned below, the early programmers and data entry workers were women as it was considered "office work". I'll also throw out names like Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace. Read a site like Godel's Lost Letter, and Lipton always points out women who have made contributions to the field. I even recall an article about a house wife who researched new fractals. Women have been engaged in science, technology, engineering, and math (and medicine) since the beginning. They were male dominated because people held the viewpoint the author does, which is essentially, "It's not a woman' place". Bullshit, plain and simple. This memo does not call for more diversity. It may cite scientific research (yes, men and women are different physically and psychologically), but it calls for the same status quo that initiatives like the ones the author lambasts are trying to overcome. Are they perfect? No. but they are a step in the right direction. We need to understand these difference and adapt to them not use those differences as a way to exclude.

Cthulhu_5• 9 years ago

To invoke Goodwin's Law, perhaps we should be more sympathetic to the viewpoints of Nazis? How about white supremacists?

There's a movie on Netflix at the moment, a German movie called "Er Ist Wieder Da" ("look who's back") about Hitler returning in modern-day Germany. It's part movie, part documentary - the actor playing Hitler travels around the country and talks to people about politics and the like, and finds there's a lot of people agreeing with some of the standpoints.

The nazis crossed a huge number of lines and had some batshit people at the helm, but I'm sure you could find some points that a lot of people would agree with even in these days. Same with white supremacists, some of which have toned down their racism and become more politically correct.

Mangalor• 9 years ago

So...we should value the opinions of Nazis? Are we really at that level?

brighteyes4• 9 years ago

perhaps we should be more sympathetic to the viewpoints of Nazis? How about white supremacists?

Practically no one is saying that. We should cast out the tiny minority of Nazis.

What people are saying is that the views in the memo are not of a tiny minority. They are accepted by a significant part of society, by reasonable people. They are considered factual or at least debatable by many scientists. And many of the core principles are accepted by conservatives, i.e., a large wing of US politics.

What will happen to society if we aren't willing to listen across the political aisle? And if we aren't willing to listen to reasonable scientific debate?

This memo does not call for more diversity.

It literally does call for more, including of gender and racial minorities:

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more

You can disagree with its practical suggestions - I do, I think many of them are harmful - but it's unfair to say it's not calling for more diversity.

TACIXAT2• 9 years ago

To invoke Goodwin's Law, perhaps we should be more sympathetic to the viewpoints of Nazis? How about white supremacists?

Honestly, I would argue yes (with a big asterisk on your word choice of sympathetic). You need to engage with people and discuss their views in order to change them. Most people when attacked will double down on their views. If you can engage with those people, present evidence, and change their opinions then you are doing something meaningful to remove a piece of hate from the world.

SCAQTony• 9 years ago

I think science is a bit hyperbolic a term for this fiasco. More like mere statistics at best and we know how statistics can work out.

Calling psychology or psychiatry a science is a generous proclamation. None of the above practitioners, including a neuroscientist, neurologist, or a cognitive scientist, can explain completely why someone can look at a shot of whiskey, know it is an expensive whiskey, know how to balance the shot to their lips, then prepare for the burn, and then swallow it while hoping they will get "lucky" tonight but feel lousy tomorrow all at the same time.

We're not there yet when it comes to classifying humanity into "phylums" or categories via science.

dcre• 9 years ago

This could have been one sentence long. "He's right! (I have a PhD.)" No content.

gkya2• 9 years ago

This stuff is going all-medieval, with witch hunts and pseudo-rogues. People are going back to emotionally responding to facts and following who shouts louder. Fixing gender issues is one thing, suppressing facts yo dislike is another.

We wouldn't have a percent of liberties and developments also in the anti-patriarchal quest without science and rationalism.

markdog122• 9 years ago

Was horrified to see this flagged. Why would anybody flag a scientific viewpoint from a credible source with citations? Refute and discuss it, sure, but why flag it?

brl• 9 years ago

Why would anybody censor the viewpoint of a woman scientist in this particular debate? How much cognitive dissonance is too much?

ebola17173• 9 years ago

If all this science were the end all be all, the low level engineers would be men, and men with their evolutionary handicap for empathy would be none of the managers, leaders, designers, product managers. That's how it is right?

cpncrunch3• 9 years ago

No. Try actually reading the memo and learn a bit about statistics and bell curves.

mmirate5• 9 years ago

Independent of the other things wrong with your argument, I find it curious that you think that designers are among those who benefit from empathy. Given knowledge of aesthetics, psychology and the general identity of the target audience, empathy should be all-but-unnecessary for a designer.

(Edited for clarity; namely, the italicized clause is new.)

ebola17173• 9 years ago

? Understanding the psychology and thought process of your target is what empathy means.

nyxtom• 9 years ago

The base of her argument rests on this:

"In fact, research has shown that cultures with greater gender equity have larger sex differences when it comes to job preferences, because in these societies, people are free to choose their occupations based on what they enjoy."

Jim Flynn's study has unequivocally proven that raising the standards of modern introduction and access to equal education, living standards, and nutrition show increases in overall propensity for cognitive achievement. Though, if you talk to an anthropologist the nature of the term "intelligence" and "cognitive ability" is used in the mixed usage term but says nothing of the nature of intelligence.

Nevertheless, the entire debate is whether we are actually in an egalitarian society to begin with. The nature of even measuring cognitive ability with the g-factor is that it is derived from relative populations. Gender differences might indeed be more amplified in these type of societies but the debate is whether we are already there and to what degree sectors of our large country have access to that.

I would argue, as others have, that the distribution of equal treatment, based on the evidence of exodus from the field of technology speaks far larger volumes about the industry as a whole than it does about biological differences.

Indeed, let's even take into account those biological differences that are being discussed here. Just because one has the propensity to behave a certain way in front a social group of men, and different when a female is around (this too has scientific backing), you could argue that the change in behavior over time would be a product of how distributed those groups are (in thought and in numbers). Food for thought.

It's also interesting to note that creative endeavors tend to lead to high correlations of neuroticism as well. If there are biological differences that show that women are, on average, tend to be more neurotic than men, it doesn't really say much about the nature of interaction or the way we behave with one another. Furthermore, to even attempt to use this as reasoning that women may not last within male-dominated environments is insulting in itself. What it really actually proves is that the inequality in both the diversity thought and in numbers only reinforces the problem. The logic is rot with flaws, (I'm paraphrasing several sections with lines of reasoning; i.e. de-emphasizing empathy) "due to the nature of the tendency for behaving a certain way, we should not make attempts at empathizing with one another because of the heightened sensitivity." Not only is this flawed logic, it's not scientific in the least bit. I would've fired him on that alone.

Indeed, you can also conclude from similar studies that creative endeavors have the tendency to being higher activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661315...) Due to the nature of mulling over problems, the tendency is that this often is indicitive of a higher threat sensitivity (real or otherwise); hence the neurotism. This doesn't say anything about the gender differences therein, but rather the brain itself when it comes to problem solving in general.

Of course, the greater problem here is about the nature of social interaction. We can take into account how men tend to behave around other men, or in the presence of women, or women around other women, or in mixed groups; we can take into account innate differences (however pronounced or not); we can even take into account the debate over the access to a population which is educated enough to enter the field of study. Even taking into account the meta-analysis study on things-people, it is a bit presumptuous to think that parity is not obtainable or necessary in STEM.

The nature of STEM revolves around the problems that are being solved. One would hope that those problems are about solving them for PEOPLE. One would hope that software engineers employ creativity and artistic nuances when architecting and collaborating with others. The base of that study only speaks about the anthropologic nature of how people behave within those fields. One can speak of the people-oriented nature of mechanics, engineering, and just about all fields of study. I find it a bit simplistic to categorize STEM as a whole as purely mechanics; it's reductionist and frankly insulting.

blahblah32• 9 years ago

Seems like a lot of the controversy around these types of discussions comes from the consequences of bayesian inference.

If you know that men and women differ in a distributional sense with respect to some trait, that gives you a prior to work off-of when you meet a new individual. This is rational from bayes theorem, so simply saying "you should treat everyone as an individual" is not nuanced enough.

However, as you acquire more information about a particular individual (such as passing a difficult google interview, or knowing that they've succeeded in a reputable CS curriculum), this should quickly "swamp" the prior, causing it to contribute very little to the final inference.

The problem is the humans are not great at adjusting like this: we're not perfect at applying bayes theorem in our heads. We tend to overstate the influence of various priors when there are stronger signals at hand. Nevertheless, incorporating prior distributional information is NOT irrational, but generally overdone.

Therefore, it seems like the approach of some is to shout down information that would suggest biological distributional differences, to try guarantee that people don't overuse prior information.

Lon75• 9 years ago

I don't think many people have a problem with any of the science or the statistics. That's not the problem with the 'manifesto'.

The author of the 'manifesto' seems to think that no one else reads these studies. I can assure you that everyone who is working on these issues has already read and understood the studies. The people in charge of these programs agree with them. He presented absolutely nothing of value. There is not a single new idea in what he wrote.

All the manifesto showed was that he thinks he you can just apply studies to your coworkers. He took a bunch of women he works with and turned them into statistics, into a problem that he alone can solve. It's incredible ignorant and arrogant.

The science, or understanding of statistics is not the problem, it is his approach to solving it that is the problem.

notacoward7• 9 years ago

As with many defenses of the Damore memo (and more than a few attacks against it as well), this completely misses the point. Let's say for the sake of argument that there are differences in ability and/or preference between men and women. Let's even say that the magnitude of those differences is sufficient to explain a 4:1 ratio between male and female engineers at Google (which is clearly not true). My response is still SO WHAT? That outlandish premise still doesn't even begin to justify his tone, his complaints, or his policy proposals.

* Differences in ability do not support his accusation of silencing. They're unrelated.

* Phrases like "the left tends to deny science" and "extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians" are inflammatory, prejudicial, and discriminatory in their own right, independently of whether gender differences exist.

* Diversity is provably good even in the presence of gender differences. Many studies have shown that the effect of mixed teams outperforming single-gender teams far outweighs any individual differences.

I could go on and on about other ways that Damore comes across as a radically intolerant jerk, a hypocrite, etc. but I'm trying to stay on one point. The "science" part of Damore's memo, which the OP is meant to support, is practically irrelevant. That's not the only part that's offensive, or dangerous, or in violation of his employee agreement. It's not even the only part that's unscientific, since sociology and economics are involved as well as biology and he doesn't even try to engage honestly with those. His belief that women are less fit to be engineers is abhorrent, but so separately are his other beliefs. Even the strongest refutation of that one point doesn't make a dent in the memo's total start-to-finish toxicity.

Smaug1234• 9 years ago

To clarify: your point is that the question of whether or not he's right is irrelevant; he shouldn't have said what he said, because what he said is abhorrent and/or dangerous?

notacoward7• 9 years ago

No, that's a total misrepresentation of what I said. I'm saying whether he's right on that one point is irrelevant, because he tries to make a hundred others that are just as bad. But thanks for showing how Damore's supporters are just as guilty of "virtue signaling" as they accuse others of being.

likelynew• 9 years ago

magnitude of those differences is sufficient to explain a 4:1 ratio between male and female engineers at Google (which is clearly not true)

I had obtained numbers for number of pull requests in github and participation in competitive coding contests some time back. Gender ratios are close to 10:1 on both of the places. It's relevant because there is neither any barrier nor lowering the bar due to gender in these.

notacoward7• 9 years ago

There's no lowering of the bar in the sense of denying hires/promotions, but I think it's fair to say that there are still significant disincentives to female participation. Also, I know this is heresy, but GitHub is not necessarily representative of software engineering in general. It emphasizes pure code development over ops or design, it emphasizes a very particular style of open source, it's skewed toward certain project types and sizes, etc. How many of those "male" commits were women hiding their gender, or senior males acting as the upstream conduit for an entire mixed team working against a repo elsewhere? Competitive coding contests probably skew even more heavily male, for reasons that I should hope are obvious.

It's a data point, and I thank you for that, but it's not exactly a complete refutation of contrary findings by others. It's also kind of beside the point in exactly the same way as the OP.

Joeri• 9 years ago

I have always felt very ambivalent about affirmative action. It is a form of discrimination and therefore furthers the message that discerning based on gender or race is acceptable. You can make a strong argument that it is harmful, which is what the memo did.

However...

In the kingdom of Belgium at some point the rule was introduced that half of all political candidates for election must be women and had to receive equally prominent placement on ballots (by alternating male and female candidates). People were still free to vote men into office, but the idea was that it would give women a fairer chance. The same criticisms were said. Before you saw a low percentage of women in politics, like most countries. This was attributed to women having less of an affinity for politics. And yet, after a few election cycles this caused a shift in mindset as well as quality of female candidates and who was elected. Women are no longer perceived to be less suited for politics, the most popular politician is a woman, and gender has gone away as a divisive issue in politics. So, it actually worked. By making people so used to women politicians the issue went away, and you could probably get rid of the quotas and still see a 50% split in the next election.

So maybe our genetic predispositions matter far less than we think, and we can change mindsets through affirmative action. But it has to be all-in 50/50 % split, so that it will change people's perception of normal.

jorgemf13• 9 years ago

50/50 will imply to force people to join even when they don't want to. It works for politics because the number of politics is significative small compared to the total population. But the work force is really a big number and close the to total population.

In more gender equality countries like Norway the ratios are the worse ones for things like tech. Before a huge measure like this one you should understand by gender equality countries trend to have less diversity than less gender equality countries. This is very counter intuitive and needs an explanation (for some is biology) -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVaTc15plVs

notacoward7• 9 years ago

I have always felt very ambivalent about affirmative action.

Part of the problem is that "affirmative action" takes many forms. Some people assume that it means quotas and lowered standards, but those approaches have been deprecated (and sometimes outlawed) for a long time. Outreach, anti-bias education, and support programs are generally preferred precisely because they don't lead to the same untoward outcomes that tokenism does. Sure, some people still get left out. I was "discriminated against" in that way once, but I thrived despite that and have learned to appreciate how that policy was just overall even though it was unjust to me.

There is no perfect affirmative-action policy, including lack of any explicit policy. The best we can do is ensure that the burden of any policy is as small as possible, and distributed as fairly as possible.

mbfg• 9 years ago

My experience has been that i get about 10-1 resumes from men vs women. Is it possible that they are being unfairly filtered by head hunters before i receive them? Could be.. i wouldn't think so, but i don't know. Of the candidates resume's i receive, the candidates that are women tend to be good, probably better than the average male candidate i get. But they are not 10x better, so at the end of the day, following the natural course there wouldn't be an equal base of candidates.

Being just one sample, mine, it is completely statistically irrelevant. But it's the only thing i personally can go on. I want good candidates, if you can find me more good women candidates, that would be great.

throw2016• 9 years ago

This is not rational science. Without specific measures on every single person in Google, and a 'bar' and methodology that meets scientific rigour no can can rationally make any claims about 'lowering the bar'.

Speculation not from a social scientist as their job but a worker within Google apart from being grossly misplaced begins to sound eerily similar to the ravings of self obsessed supremacists cherry picking science. This is what hostility looks like.

And women then should be rightfully wary of all these fragile men who will watch them like hawks looking for any excuse to confirm their bias.

Google should send a memo explicitly stating anyone who thinks women or any group lower the bar should leave. This is not a place for bigots. It's a place for mature educated well adjusted adults to work together.

Anyone who supported that letter should in good conscience leave the organization which is 'lowering the bar', a definition no random individual not suffering from extreme hubris is 'qualified' to set and the prerogative of the organization and experts qualified for it.

If you are obsessed with diversity lowering the bar you can become a 'measuring the bar expert' and invest the time required educating yourself to become an expert before presuming to speak with authority you do not possess about a scientific field that does not trade in certainties.

StrangeOrange• 9 years ago

I think it's important for us to gain some kind of perspective here. Whatever current science (or "science") says on the matter, that's not the point. These arguments seem to be of the following: women are inherently less capable of being good engineers, therefore they should be underrepresented in engineering.

Okay, now let's extend that argument out from the engineering sphere.

Using the same logic, the following attitudes should be accepted: 1. physically disabled people are inherently less suited to being mobile, so we shouldn't put in effort to allow them to be as mobile as non-disabled people 2. Men are inherently less suited for child care, so we shouldn't put in effort to help them be as good at child care as women

I wouldn't be surprised if some of you endorsed the attitudes I've just presented, but that would make you immoral by modern standards, so you could then assume that you're being immoral on the gender diversity issue.

This whole thing comes down to a fundamental lack of empathy. If you're not going to have empathy for women in tech, there's no reason that anyone should have empathy for you in areas that you're not suited to. So, if you accept one, accept the consequences of the other.

gormo2• 9 years ago

women are inherently less capable of being good engineers

The memo never argued that, no one defending it argues that. I urge you to read the original document.

cpncrunch3• 9 years ago

women are inherently less capable of being good engineers

The article doesn't say that at all. It just says that on average women have certain traits that mean they are less likely on average to want to go into an engineering job.

Men are inherently less suited for child care, so we shouldn't put in effort to help them be as good at child care as women

But men are inherently less likely to want to go into child care, for obvious reasons. However nobody is saying that they shouldn't be allowed to do so.

I think the main problem with the memo is this line:

"Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race"

I don't see any problem with those programmes myself, and I think he would have gotten more empathy and less hostility if he hadn't advocated removing those programmes to help women.

daughart12• 9 years ago

Anyone who wants to use "science" in this way needs to read "The Golem" by prominent sociologists of science Collins and Pinch. It's a short, enjoyable read. One of the things you'll learn is that science can only ask the questions humans want to ask, and science often says exactly what people want it to say.

https://www.amazon.com/Golem-Should-About-Science-Classics/d...; online link: http://cstpr.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/collins_the_gol...

foolrush6• 9 years ago

Thanks for the piece. Sadly never came across it.

virgilp• 9 years ago

There was a joke in communist times about the 5 commendments. I guess James Damore just learned them:

1. Thou shalt not think

2. If thou thought, thou shalt not speak

3. If thou spoke, thou shalt not write

4. If thou wrote, thou shalt not sign

5. If thou signed, thou shalt not act surprised.

mygodgoogle• 9 years ago

I'm very disappointed with Google and no longer hold the company in such high esteem as I once did.

lawtguy• 9 years ago

Some additional data taken from the National Center for Education Statistics (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_318.30.a...)

Bachelor's degrees by sex from 2013-2014:

Mathematics, general: 43.9% earned by women (7,420 out of 16,914) Chemistry, general: 47.7% earned by women (6,556 out of 13,730) Physics, general: 18.7% earned by women (1,124 out of 6,002) Computer Science: 14.5% earned by women (1,914 out of 13,220)

It seems like all of the gender differences pointed out about women in the diversity memo would apply equally to Physics and Computer Science as they do to Mathematics and Chemistry, but they gender ratio of Mathematics and Chemistry degrees is much closer to 50/50. So why the big difference?

t0mbstone• 9 years ago

Google says they want to hire a diverse collection of employees, so that the solutions they build in the future aren't one-dimensional, possessing only the stereotypical white male's mindset and approach.

The fact that they stated this very desire proves that they believe that women are different than men, and that women might theoretically approach a problem or solution differently than a man.

But if someone writes a manifesto which points out that, "Hey, maybe men and women are different, with different traits and mindsets (when considered across the whole average)", suddenly that person is sexist.

Google wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to pretend there are no tangible difference between the way males and females work and think, but they also want a diverse culture that can benefit from the different ways how males and females work and think.

habosa• 9 years ago

Does it matter? Ask a woman you know, preferably one in tech, to read the memo and tell you how she feels.

The women in tech that I've asked felt somewhere between offended and furious and, more importantly, would not feel comfortable working with someone who wrote such a memo and distributed it to his colleagues.

HeavyStorm• 9 years ago

It seems to me that we are moving from gender equality, i.e. equal rights, to "gender sameness".

ArenaSource• 9 years ago

So, this is science too:

Inmate Gender - Male: 93.3% Female: 6.7% [1]

"In view of these overwhelming results measures must be taken to remove men from jobs where their predisposition to crime may have negative repercussions on society."

[1] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_gende...

jonssons• 9 years ago

exactly

pmlnr• 9 years ago

551 points, 23 hours, and this is already not on the first 5 pages of HN.

Can someone please tell me, why?

The Google memo isn’t sexist or anti-diversity, it’s science

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