Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

And for the record, I did not get any aggressive tone from his paper. I thought he was as polite as he needed to be and made the necessary caveats. I think many people were just so unprepared to hear any argument from an opposing viewpoint that they read into it what they wanted to.

This was addressed in the article. This burden has fallen on women since they were teenagers. To expect them to do it yet again, to have to defend themselves at work this time, is ridiculous.

> [W]hen I go to work, I go to work, and not to a debate club. Some people at Google reacted by saying “well if he’s so wrong, then why not refute him,” but that requires spending a significant amount of time building an argument against the claims in his document. On the other hand, if I remain silent, that silence could be mistaken for agreement. I should not be forced into that kind of debate at work. (Ida)

> I’m just exhausted by having this same damn argument over and over again since I was a teenager and the amount of time and energy I keep having to spend to counter it. (Edith)

Also, none of the "quoted phrases" that you criticized appear in TFA or in any parent comment.

A 10-page manifesto, regardless of the content, when circulated internally without management's consent is in itself hard to view as anything but an act of mutiny.

I'm talking about handling what Damore claimed in an intellectually honest way. You can't dismiss his points just because you're tired of talking about them (or what you think are the same points you've always been talking about, but I think Damore's comments on each gender's preference and pressures for picking careers had something worth discussing). What he said had at least some spark of originality and insight, otherwise it wouldn't have gotten nearly the attention it did. Consider, would we be talking about the memo if it were about how he thought Sundar Pichai was a lizard man?

Those who disagreed with Damore already won the battle. They kicked him out of Google and doubled down on their diversity initiatives/echo chamber. We should be able to talk about his arguments honestly and rationally without falling back on gendered reasons at this point at least.

I'm not flaming, just wondering what the best-case way forward would be that mollifies both sides.

Sure. But people on the wrong side of the Google monoculture feel like they have to be closeted at work. They don't want to feel that way either. There has to be a way for everyone to be professional and honest here.

You (along with many others) seem to be conflating the major point of the memo between interests and abilities. Not liking something does not mean you're not capable of doing it.

Let's just agree on two things then.

_Every woman at google has every right to be there.

&

_The number of women at google relative to the number of men is not the result of mostly imperceptible, malicious actions by men, but rather due the fact that the personal interests between the sexes varies substantially on average, and this results in skewed sex ratios throughout the entire workforce that match nearly perfectly with what scientific evidence shows us.

Women are more interested in working with people and nurturing professions and men are more interested in working with things and abstract, theoretical, mechanical and spatial professions.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

It does help identify those cases when women do speak out, though. My view is we should listen more to them about what sexism is and how it works.

Women that work in the field should definitely be respected as much as anyone else. They should be free of sexual harassment, and mistreatment. On the flip side, if only 20% of graduating classes in targeted STEM fields are women, and women represent a disproportionate amount of college students... then maybe the issue is broader than the affect of men on the field at that level.

I think part of it may be natural inclination... another is probably the role of movies and media. The latter likely a much bigger role on the impressions of the work and the likely types to fulfill those roles.

--- Edit:

Big example Daisy/Quake from Agents of Shield... started off as a badass hacker, best of the best... as the show moved on, the role was relegated to brawler, and the impact of intellect or technical ability was largely sidestepped, or made secondary and less.

Media portrayals of technical professionals all around are usually very unbalanced... and that doesn't even begin to go into the other fields that are disproportionately male or female, or the hindrance of men in higher education.

There is a long tradition of this kind of memo inside Google. Many products you probably use every day are better because of one or another.

This genre is not exactly encouraged, but lots of good stuff comes out of them.

Whatever else that memo was, the genre is common, and the genre itself not considered mutinous within Google.

Assuming you're asking in good faith: because of the idea that diversity hiring effectively lowered the hiring bar.

Imagine for a second you have imposter syndrome. Now imagine that you've been told (not necessarily by Damore) that you're the (not quoting you here) "diversity hire". Imagine how much worse that imposter syndrome now is.

We are and lots of people are doing so, but another point made in this post is that the workplace isn't the venue for this.

For example, that line of reasoning would go: Damore saw practices he feels are discriminatory based on the available evidence. His silence could be mistaken for agreement. He should not be forced into that kind of debate at work.

The memo in question explicitly supported the goal of improving diversity and provided concrete suggestions on how to do so.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't try to get more women into tech, or into trash collection, or construction, or every other male dominated occupation, or men as nurses, etc... however, that doesn't mean having to change the rules for men or women. And pointing out that there are differences between men and women shouldn't instantly start of with a storm of hate.

"the average woman is shorter than the average man" ... "typical misogynistic cis white male patriarchal bullshit" ...

I'm not saying that everyone is volatile and prone to fits of excessive rage in response, but it really feels like there's no place for civil discussion or discourse with a growing portion of the population.

1. Malicious actions by men. This undoubtedly happens, let's not pretend otherwise. However, it might not be very common.

2. Non-malicious but annoying behavior from men directed towards women. This could include unwanted flirtation, accidental condescension, inappropriate jokes, etc.

3. A male-oriented culture. Even if the guys don't act in an annoying way, being in a significant minority is usually less appealing than being in a situation where you have a more even gender split.

4. Boys and girls are nurtured in different ways, which can drive them towards having different interests as adults.

5. Biological differences between men and women. Personally, I think this is one of the least important factors, and it's also the only one that we can't change.

Whether or not (5) is an issue, (1-4) can and should be addressed, so that women who are naturally inclined to CS are not nudged away from the industry by their life experiences.

https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

i can't help but feel that this is more and more just a boo-word that doesn't actually mean much.

Would you intuitively think that someone who loves their job are going to be more interested in bigger challenges and doing great work, or someone who doesn't care for the job?

But he didn't do that. He brought up scientifically baseless, insulting and emotionally immature rationales for an important and sensitive topic. Working around people in a professional environment requires nuance and tact. He showed none of this.

The fact that so many in IT seem to miss this point and defend him explains so much about why many men and women stay away from this field.

You can, and some people have, and that's okay. It's not clear whether you're making the implication here, but commonly it's implied that "if you walk away from the debate therefore you are wrong", which is fallacious. Nobody owes you a debate.

> I'm talking about handling what Damore claimed in an intellectually honest way

Then the initial argument needs to start from a place of "intellectual honesty".

Damore presented evidence to support his claim that women are on average less able than men in areas relevant to engineering. He didn't discuss veracity, or contradictory evidence. That's textbook confirmation bias, not intellectual honesty.

Damore then started making HR policy proposals. We use a 50/50 gender ratio as an indicator that a particular field is free from bias. It's one thing to propose that 50/50 is not the natural ratio to end up with, but until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number then proposing HR policy changes put the cart before the horse. This indicates that the policy changes are what James in interested in, not the evidence. More confirmation bias.

Further, Damore's proposals discuss diversity as a whole (race not just gender) without a single word of justification, let alone evidence. That's either more confirmation bias or conscious sleight-of-hand, either way, it's certainly not intellectual honesty.

I don't bear Damore any ill will, he should be forgiven, but this memo was a mistake and showed poor judgement and more than a little bias. These studies may be good science, but stringing them together to confirm a conclusion you'd already set your sights in making is bad science.

So ? That's the company's choice to make.

Many companies take the longer term view that having a more diverse workforce is more important than hiring the most technically adept candidates. Especially since having different viewpoints can aid in innovation and creativity.

Finding the approaches and views that are most coherently grounded in reality is obviously a continuously difficult task.

We shouldn't treat people poorly just for being wrong, unless their expressions of views is actively harmful. Making that determination can also be very difficult.

Lastly, as a slight tangent, no human knowledge is or ever will be 100% certain and robust (although in some specific domains we can attain incredibly high confidence). We should keep this uncertainty in mind when we act.

I've actually heard where this exact thing has happened at Google, in a very high profile team. This isn't just a hypothetical, it's a reality.

You abhor discrimination during hiring. But yet you want to be able to discuss the differences between men and women in order to use them to discriminate.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-m...

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/08/10/the-google-memo-what...

I wouldn't assume someone's interest level based on their demographics. I would, you know, talk to them.

[citation needed]

I think there are definitely a few companies out there who are playing with the hiring bar to improve diversity in an easy but ultimately harmful way. Probably not google, but these bad actors poison the well in these discussions, so to speak.

I said that hiring on diversity over merit was wrong. That's it... I never said anything about sex in terms of merit. The only place any discussion of sex or diversity belongs is in terms of messaging and in terms of possibly promoting jobs that are disproportionate to natural propensity towards a given role.

If you can't discuss, review, document, test or otherwise examine bias in terms of nature, environment, upbringing, educational exposure and other factors, then you can't force equilibrium at the end of a long process.

You can't hire 50% women in an industry, where only 20% of those educated for that field are women. Also, so long as choosing a field of study or work is voluntary, the best you can do is maybe have a more fair representation of a given gender in a given field that doesn't show only above average looking women wearing glasses with a few geeky quirks, then relegate them to more personality quirks, or make them less capable over time.

And MAYBE it's okay to have a field where most of the people in that field are of a given sex. I don't see the SJWs trying to get women into garbage collection, or throwing a fit over the gender bias in nursing.

Sorry, this is wrong.

Direct quote (emphasis added): "I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes"

See Damore's own mirror: https://firedfortruth.com/

Regardless, I'm not sure how that's related to my comment - the memo was discussing relative interests in software engineering (and other disciplines), not capabilities of people being able to do code better than others.

Well from a strategic perspective, that's a losing attitude though. You start in a defensive position in a debate you didn't call. You are stuck in the specific frame the author has decided to limit his own argument. He also restrict the time you have to prepare such a refutal piece as every minute he spend with his argument unchallenged, the weaker the counterarguments look.

Sure the average Google employee is more fact minded than emotionally driven, but it is a loaded subject in general but even more in IT.

What's the best possible outcome of crafting such a reply anyway ? Shutting down one single guy because nobody will engage in a friendly debate after live shots have been fired.

Also, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not.

I actually don't think the public response suggests insight or originality on his part. I would attribute much more of that to the social context.

However, biological traits and abilities != career ability. Even more so since these are average indexes with vast overlap between groups.

I guess what I'm saying is when there's even a feeling that there is a system that is diversity over merit, people will assume that people they don't like who are minorities, are somehow less able to do their job, even when that's not the case.

Take my example. I have not read the memo. I shouldn't say the memo is unscientific and homophobic because I have no clue what it says.

In your example was the person in question hired because of their sex or race?

Don't agree with number 2 at all.

Half of all new attorneys are women. There is nothing "nurturing" about the profession--it's adversarial and conflict-oriented by nature. And you spend most of your time dealing with abstractions, not people. More than half of accountants are women. That profession isn't any more people oriented than programming, and you work entirely with abstractions. 70% of tax preparers are women. 60% of insurance underwriters are women. Etc.

Conversely, professions we think of as "people-oriented and nurturing" are dominated by men in other countries. E.g. teachers in India are 80% men.

I don't believe the person was hired because of their sex or race. But again, even here, all minorites have to prove it, while the majority are assumed to be there on merit.

If you purport to be a (competent) scientist in the 21st century then personally I expected you to be highly aware of biases such as publication bias & confirmation bias and act accordingly. That speaks either to his discipline/understanding or his honesty, I don't know which.

> Whether or not his claims are true, Damore presented a much more metered and reasonable argument than virtually all of his detractors or even published social pundits.

Damore was metered, but understandably triggered a threat response in the people who his memo targeted as being below "the bar".

You may have read a selection of counter-arguments, some of which will be less "metered and reasonable" than his. Unfortunately the emotional tenor of an argument is not the measure of its merit.

You can't have it both ways. If you don't want to get involved in the argument, you don't have to, but getting involved and then doing any of the things GP is decrying is actively toxic.

I agree, but just because there has to be a way for everyone to be professional and honest, that doesn't mean that what Damore did was professional and honest.

"The distribution of preferences and abilities of different groups differ."

Note the binding emphasis to both sides of the 'and'.

Also the focus on any specific cause for that difference should be addressed elsewhere, if at all. Not in an over-simplified singular soundbite.

Edit: what flavor of markdown hell is HN using... I always forget.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20403143?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0091732X01700126...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tl.37219924906/fu...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tea.3660270906/ab...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4283768/

Furthermore he attacked 'diversity' hires as a whole, but only presented evidence on male/female differences not racial ones... so there's significant precedent for him making points that aren't backed up directly. I don't think he should get the benefit of the doubt there with regards to subtlety of meaning.

The brute problem is that it's too long to be addressed in a reasonable and productive debate, and because it was posted on an internal company messageboard it is his responsibility to ensure that it can be responded to in a reasonable and productive way. If he presents his complaints in a format which is likely to cause problems, he can be penalized, and a manifesto is certainly such a format because it lends itself so well to "viral" sharing, and it was precisely such "viral" reposting of the document that made it a practical problem for Google in the first place. Had he made his points in an ordinary discussion thread, it would have been harder to publish it everywhere as a unified whole, since discussion threads by their nature will contain counterarguments.

For example, if I think another employee is biased against me in code reviews, it does not do me any favors to write a multi-page manifesto indicting said employee on a variety of points for his/her alleged biased review practices. Good debates do not generally come from duelling essays, and it is unfair to participants -- practically unfair, in that it drives them from the debate and so deprives the conversation of their contributions -- it is unfair to participants who do not have the time to invest in researching every point of a ten-page document that they feel they must address the whole awful thing in order to say anything. In fact I try to limit the length of my HN comments for this very reason: long comments are hard to respond to well.

Internal company messageboards do not lend themselves to the publication of manifestos, and it is not reasonable to expect them to.

I deeply disagree with this approach. You're essentially saying that unless you can come up with an alternative scientific theory, complete with predictions, it's not possible to criticise an existing theory about the world.

There's many plausible explanations why an absence of a 50:50 gender representation could be caused for reasons other than bias or average ability. That's enough to put a nail in that model of discovering bias. Coming up with a way of predicting what the right ratio is, isn't necessary to discard that metric.

The workplace was the venue for this, because 'this' was evidence was that Google(his workplace)'s diversity initiatives and censorship were harming the company. He attempted to go through the proper channels (HR) as discussed in another part of the comment section for this very article.

Completely ignored by HR, and after some watercooler discussion in which he received confirmation that he was not the only one to have such thoughts, he decided to organize his thoughts into a memo, which from his perspective, introduced ideas that could explain the gender employment gap at Google and help make the company better by erasing the notion of being a 'diversity hire' among other things.

What it did not do was claim that his female coworkers were inferior. I feel the need to reiterate that because that seems to be the disinformation that many take home with them and use for their arguments against him. With it, they vilified and ousted him.

Going back and reading it now, it's hard to believe such a seemingly harmless claim (women aren't as well represented in tech because they're not as interested in it) has created such outrage. I blame this mainly on Gizmodo, and those who piggybacked their original article (that blatantly lied about what he wrote and presented his memo which they had quietly edited). Some credit also needs to go to whoever leaked the memo, which Damore probably did not mean to leave the relatively small group of people he originally introduced it to, at least at that point in time.

Really, what he presented and how he presented it were not very controversial. It easily could have been addressed internally by HR, or discussed within the company by its employees without the dishonesty and witch hunting. My point is, what he presented should have been acceptable in the way he did it especially given Google's claims of free speech and the historical precedent of memos like these, but dishonesty and close-mindedness distorted it until it looked like he was calling for repealing women's suffrage.

You hit the nail on the head, and it isn't limited to this memo. We have a serious intolerance problem in this country that goes far beyond Nazis and racists. Over the last 25 years our culture has warped to the point where opposing viewpoints are considered by many to be offensive. Kids have been raised in an environment where they are told that they (and their opinions) are always worthy of respect (no matter how uninformed or ignorant those opinions might be). Those who show insufficient respect (in the eyes of the person being "disrespected") are seen as hateful aggressors who must be attacked or silenced. In today's society, many people (especially young people) don't want vigorous debate between those of opposing views. They don't want to live in a marketplace of ideas where logic, morality, and the ability and willingness to articulate and defend your beliefs in a public forum are valued. These younger people have been conditioned to appeal to authority when they are offended or their beliefs are challenged, rather than answer the bell and debate the merit (or lack of merit) in an idea or statement.

Unfortunately this withering of public discourse is a bellwether for authoritarianism. You need look no farther than the recent outcry against the ACLU for their defense of free speech. There are very dark days ahead.

It's complicated by the fact that sexist & racist people will try and use reasons as justifications, that they will use their misunderstanding of statistics to short-circuit decision-making in a faulty and biased way.

But we shouldn't outlaw talking about reasons all the same. The reason we shouldn't outlaw talking about reasons, in spite of the risk of odious people using them as justifications, is that you would otherwise proceed unscientifically. Reasons relate to theories about the world, and if you discard reasons, your theory about the world is wrong.

This is complex because people desire for fairness and respect in incompatible ways. If we analogize away one of those problems, of course the right decision seems obvious.

EDIT: I think the incompatibility is a result of some rules and norms that need changing. I don't think the conflict is a law of nature.

The Google firing was a really bad move if outreach programs are a good idea.

At least for some kinds, there is a lot of non-adversarial human interaction. For example, in patent litigation you are usually part of a team and spend a lot of time working closely with the other lawyers on your side, paralegals, outside experts, inventors, and other people involved with the patent on your side.

>paradoxically insists that authoritarianism be treated as a valid moral dimension, whilst firmly rejecting any diversity-motivated strategy that might remotely approach it.

Even if we admit this is wrong he still does a good job, particularly on points #1, #3, #4, and yes, #8. I think it's important to call out the subtle racism whereby Damore attacks gender and racial diversity programs without actually providing any justification on the racial element. But I think this point (#9) is clearly wrong because if we accept it on its face it means that we cannot tolerate discussing any system of morality (in this case authoritarianism) which we do not want to see implemented, which is clearly wrong. I also cannot agree here:

>But in general, Google has done magnificently well without resorting to the binding [conservative] values — and let’s hope it continues to, because an authoritarian, fanatical and puritanical Google that dehumanizes outsiders would be very, very bad news.

First of all I don't think Google has ever truly avoided the binding values -- in fact the identity "Googler" has been more intentionally constructed, I think, than "Microsofter", "Facebooker", "Appler", etc -- and second I don't think that implementing them is necessarily "fanatical and puritanical", any more than implementing compassion is necessarily inviting to louts.

In which case the attorney may double as a councillor of sorts.

This dual role is common in lots of jobs though. Maybe defending people is more appealing than maybe mentoring junior devs.

Maybe accounting is due to stability? In western countries you always need an accountant. You could probably make an argument about women not being risk takers.

Your last point is why statistics in developing countries are always brought up. At least one thing is clear, we can change the environment to get more women into STEM.

Everyone has to be closed at work; it's a part of being in a professional environment. For example, you can't go up to your co-worker and tell them you think they're a complete idiot even if you think so.

In social settings this is possible because relationships can just end, but that's not the case for a business where you are expected to interact with the same people often.

Next time your engineers are scheduled to interview someone and they see a female name on the resume, they'll form an opinion (even if slight, and even if overridable by interacting with the person) about who the candidate is. Depending on how tired/stressed/bored they are that day, that opinion will play a smaller or bigger role in what they write down in the candidate report.

That bias, by the way, exists today. Trying to justify it on the base of biological differences does nothing to fix it.

Why waste your time with those who don't seem genuinely interested in opposing evidence?

I didn't find his tone aggressive but he didn't at all seem interested in having a discussion. If I remember correctly he didn't rebuke any opposing points, let alone present them, which makes me think he didn't bother looking for them.

It's like hey I have this point I want you to listen to but I'm not even going to make an attempt to look up answers and instead force you to listen to me before I listen to you. It's like trying to answer someone's question without even understanding what they're asking, which I am sad to say I have seen far too often at Google.

Is a Diversity executive actually impacting the bottom line of the company? Are there any actual quantitative facts that indicate that "diversity" improves a business's profitability? I am not arguing against diversity, please don't misunderstand. But it feels to me that this violent desire for diversity is something rather unique to SV tech. For example, the lack of men in the mental health professions barely raises any mention aside from the quadrennial NY Times think piece. The lack of men kindergarten teachers also barely makes a dent in the national discussion. The lack of women in building trades (despite those jobs being extremely well paying compared to "white collar" mid-level marketing jobs often dominated by women.) There's also not a big emphasis on the lack of women working in aviation or firefighting, despite those also being very well paid positions.

But for tech, for some reason it's a "big deal."

Fighting discrimination is obviously important as a basic matter of human rights, but much of tech's diversity push isn't about fighting discrimination as much as it's about actively recreating the balance of men and women in the field based on an arbitrary desired ratio.

If men and women are different, then it follows that they will have different desired vocations to a similar degree that they are different. If we argue that men and women are exactly the same, then why aren't more men working in mental health or social work -- those fields are about 80% women. We can't use the discrimination argument because that would imply that women discriminate against men -- and that doesn't fit the narrative that the straight white male is the bane of society.

He didn't. He just claimed that they are on average less interested in those areas. There is no mention at all of ability in the memo, only in the manipulated press pieces.

Some have already decided that the REASON for gender imbalance in tech is rampant bias and male privilege, which they have publicly committed themselves to stamping out. Whether or not this is true, questioning the validity of that reason is considered an attack on their identity and value system.

Edit: I'm not sure it's clear from my comment, but to clarify, I am NOT SURE what the reason for the observed gender imbalance is. I'm not saying that it isn't bias/privilege/etc. I don't think the case has been proven one way or the other, but the personal attacks & utter misrepresentations I've seen used to try to shut down discussion is driving me pretty hard emotionally to one side at the moment.

Yep. Not because CS is a popular field where there is a shortage of skilled professionals, but because she's a woman. She was so upset by it that she chose something else entirely.

People who don't feel like sharing probably won't feel like getting talked at, so there won't be much listening in the other direction either.

His claim was that women are statistically less likely to be interested in computer science. He said nothing about ability.

>It's one thing to propose that 50/50 is not the natural ratio to end up with, but until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number then proposing HR policy changes put the cart before the horse.

He gave lots of numbers. 20% is about the percentage of female computer science graduates. Targeting anything above that would necessarily require discriminating against men.

>Damore's proposals discuss diversity as a whole (race not just gender) without a single word of justification

I don't see any mention of race in the memo. When Damore is talking about "diversity" he always is talking about gender diversity.

>>He didn't discuss veracity, or contradictory evidence. That's textbook confirmation bias, not intellectual honesty.

>This indicates that the policy changes are what James in interested in, not the evidence. More confirmation bias.

>it's certainly not intellectual honesty...

>stringing them together to confirm a conclusion you'd already set your sights in making is bad science.

I've been asked to edit my comment to make it less argumentative. Could you do the same for yours? Calling someone you disagree with "intellectually dishonest", etc, is not good taste.

It's very easy to learn about biases like confirmation bias, and fall into the trap of only applying that knowledge to other people. "He only disagrees with me because of confirmation bias. He's just intellectually dishonest."

You can't possibly know the thought process behind another person. As far as we know Damore did the research and found these facts convincing and developed his view. Not the other way around. Or at least someone presented these facts to him and then he developed the view he has.

In any case, this is how all debates work. People present evidence for their beliefs and the other side responds with refutations and evidence for theirs. There is nothing wrong or intellectually dishonest about this.

You're holding him to an unbelievably high standard that is never applied to those making the case that gender disparities are due to societal discrimination.

I can't imagine you're being driven to apply this standard to him by anything other than a preconceived notion that women are underrepresented in engineering due to sexism and that anyone that disagrees is a misogynist.

>Damore was metered, but understandably triggered a threat response in the people who his memo targeted as being below "the bar".

Damore did not target anyone as below the bar. He made a statistical observation about the distribution of personality types among gender groups and how that would play out in gender representation in various occupations, to counter the discrimination-as-cause-of-disparity narrative. No individual was cast as below the bar due to their gender. The threat response was immature.

"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."

I've asked this around HN many times over the last week. Most of them boil down to letting people who probably disagree with you edit your thoughts before you release them. Or not releasing your thoughts in any meaningful way.

If you were Damore, what would have been a healthier way to start a broader discussion on the issue?

When you spend 12+ formative years telling kids to sit down, be quiet and do nothing but listen to authority or else, they aren't going to somehow come out of it as stellar, well-rounded debaters.

They will, of course, project how they were treated onto others, by holding deeply ingrained beliefs such as, "When someone is being disruptive they need to be punished."

This seems to assume that the only way to measure or achieve equitable hiring is to measure the representation of identity groups across a given position and make sure it tracks their makeup in the general population. It's not clear to me that there aren't other acceptable methods of trying to make things equitable.

For example, you could check that applicants from different identity groups succeed in being hired at about the same rate. That's a practice that should direct an organization towards equitable results whether the reality is that women are underrepresented because of sexism in hiring or the reality is that women are represented in different proportion because of the endeavors they tend to prefer. And also for a reality that's a mix of both (which I suspect is the way of things).

Also: if the primary accepted standard becomes to match representation in a position with an identity's representation in the population, it seems pretty likely that over time it would become more difficult over time to predict a "natural" ratio.

It is the primary inspiration for the movie "The Matrix". When Neo takes the disk from the hacker at the beginning he actually puts it in a hollowed out version of this book.

Anyway Post-Modernism has lots of fascinating points and sub-topics and skilled writers, however if you read too much into it you can quickly become a very annoying person.

Great stuff, but read in caution and in moderation.

You presupposed that the bias is why the disparity exists in the first place. Its plausible that we completely fix all biases in the industry and the gender ratio does not change whatsoever, or even gets worse.

Ok, no one owes anyone a debate, unless you're going to call it wrong, sexist, harmful, etc. Then in that case, I'd like some reasoning behind it. Either don't debate, or do and do it right.

> women are on average less able

Please don't do this. What he claimed was that women have less inclination to go into tech due to various pressures, some biological. If you're referring to his referencing the 'big five' personality traits, you'll note that he addresses both positively and negatively associated traits of both men and women in regards to working with software. He never stated that the combination of differences makes one gender better than the other.

>until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number

Why? All he did was put forth evidence and suggest that 50/50 might not be ideal, why must another number be presented in order to have a discussion on the subject? Speculation on my part, but is it because it's an easier target to shoot down if you can point to an exact number and claim it's wrong for your own variety of reasons?

Obviously, policy changes are going to be a goal if Damore's evidence is proved right (Policy is at the root of the problem according to Damore). Why are you presenting them like two separate things? You're not even considering the fact that the evidence might support his conclusions.

>diversity as a whole(race not just gender)

Because whenever diversity is discussed, it is almost done so as a whole. Obviously Damore wanted to focus on gender, but diversity initiatives virtually always include both. It would seem awkward to avoid race entirely. And he never made any claims on just race, go to the memo and ctrl-f "race". Every time it appears, it's accompanied by "and/or gender". In several of these cases, it's because a study he's citing mentions both. I would call that being thorough, not intellectually dishonest.

>These studies may be good science, but stringing them together to confirm a conclusion you'd already set your sights in making is bad science.

You can make this claim about any paper that claims something not trivially arguable from scientific studies. To say this, you have to go through piecewise and show why the connections he's making from solid scientific studies don't apply to his arguments.

You might be wrong, you might be right, either way that does mean forfeiting the debate. It's like folding in poker -- yeah, you might have great cards, but you folded, and nobody owes you any of the money on the table.

> Then the initial argument needs to start from a place of "intellectual honesty".

Uhm, no. Might as well say assuming a 50/50 ratio to be free of bias is not intellectually honest, so "they started it". And then those could in turn point to someone else, and so on.

A corporation may not be the best place to bring up these topics, if your goal is to avoid getting fired. Otherwise, it is a place full of smart engineers and the guy probably had some fantasy that he can have a constructive conversation in a corporate setting about a policy which Google as a corporation faces external and internal pressure about.

But as far as receptiveness, yes Google was a great venue for this, given who works there. Do you think hacker news is a better venue in that respect?

Even on this very board, that same exact seemingly harmless claim, given and elaborated on in a talk about men and women given by a professor of psychology at FSU, was downvoted and bashed in a TL;DR manner:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844777

It fared better a year ago, but not by much:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8909954

EDIT: curious, why the downvotes?

This was originally just posted to the Google Skeptics group, with the implication that it would be (fairly) contested and debated.

People keep presenting it as a "manifesto" but that's a term that Gizmodo used, not him. I really would like to have seen what would have come from it being fairly critiqued by his peers and edited until it was presentable to the public (if that's even possible).

That's the standard method you use for refuting arguments presented in essay form.

I think the larger problem is that this is an overstatement. Women might not be interested in joining the current tech culture, but that doesn't mean they aren't interested in tech to a larger extent than the current numbers suggest.

Part of the disconnect is that these initiatives are aimed at changing the culture to be more attractive to women, and the people who really like the culture don't see the need.

Certainly the current tech culture is effective and fairly productive, but I certainly don't know that it will be more, equally, or less productive with these culture changes.

Why does research regarding this and the burden has to fall on women? If research is solid why does it matter if it was generated by a specific gender.

Privileged people feel they are above repercussion because to admonish them encroaches on their sense of entitlement to privilege.

This solves two problems: 1) the hiring process is blinded and 2) you can demonstrate to the whole world that it's blinded.

As a side bonus, you get to eliminate other implicit biases that are part of the hiring process, like people preferring people who act like them.

It's definitely horrible for people to feel like they don't belong. But I would argue that feeling like your job is at risk is a lesser threat than actually losing your job, no?

What in my comment tells you that? I made a conscious effort not to bring that up.

> Its plausible that we completely fix all biases in the industry and the gender ratio does not change whatsoever, or even gets worse.

This argument sounds like the global warming denier argument "What if it's not true? What if we make the world a better place to live for nothing?"

It is plausible, but right now we have no way to measure it. We do, on the other hand, know that unconscious bias is affecting prospective female candidates. Why don't we focus on fixing the existing problem first?

I don't think you can claim that "tech" and e.g. civil engineering have much in common in terms of culture, but they still share the lack of men/women parity.

I am not sure I follow exactly. Is there evidence that Google's diversity efforts hurt the company? I don't find the memo offers any evidence. If evidence, even anecdotal evidence, were provided of that harm and of the ideological intolerance I might find the memo more compelling. As it stands, it seems like a book report.

This is so wrong and so frequently asserted that I think a better approach to any gender/workplace convo would be to start here, recognizing the falsity of the monocausal career preference hypothesis and work backward from that toward the rest of the conversation.

These are just tough problems. How do you make up for a system that is biased against you? At what point are you disadvantaging the incumbent group? They didn't exactly choose to be in the incumbent group as much as the oppressed group chose their's.

It's hard to have an honest conversation because it's easy to police words, but tough to police thoughts and motivations.

As a white male engineer, I will tell you thing the that most white dudes like me fail to understand about micro-agressions- and the document was chock full of them-is that they are not really significant when they only happen once, in isolation, it is the constant, droning repetition of them that makes them harmful.

Asking someone where they're from isn't offensive when considered in isolation. But if 90% of the white people you meet ask you this immediately, while it comes up only occasionally or late in the conversation when meeting other people, it makes you wonder.

One thing my mixed race friends get asked a lot by white people is "what are you?". At first I found that hard to believe, but I've seen it happen over and over again--random chitchat at the park with a nice lady who stopped to pet my dog; for some reason she has to ask my friend "what are you?" She's too nice to say "not racist, how about you?" or anything harsh in response, but it makes my blood boil.

Imagine being expected to defend and define your presence everywhere you go.

So, yeah, the idea was harmless. The presentation was part of the constant barrage of gatekeeping behavior that women and people of color are sick of dealing with. That's why it's offensive, that's why people are angry.

Agree. In fairness to James, however, I believe HR solicited feedback.

"[T]he guy probably had some fantasy that he can have a constructive conversation"

Seriously, what a let down. The "Sergey" and "Larry" who created Google would not have stood for this. Either they have lost control of their company, or they have changed.

Working proactively to address racism/sexism/n'ism: Good, not evil Demanding orthodoxy of thought (or enabling those who do): Bad; EVIL

But here's the deal, a bunch of other really smart people think it did do exactly what you claim it didn't. Now what? Are they wrong, you're right? On what basis?

Besides which, if you write "effectively lowered the bar for 'diversity' candidates", actually yes you just claimed that women at Google are less qualified.

Many voices are loudly explain why this memo is offensive. Shelve your own ideas of what you think this memo is saying, and consider them.

As for the emotions, there's a huge veiled anti-woman slant to arguments that take the paper on it's "logical" face value and dismiss emotions. First off, dismissal of emotions is a classic anti-woman tactic. Secondly, you're a human male, you have as many emotions as anyone else. You can separate emotion and "rational" thought.

As a personality researcher, I feel obligated to chime in and clarify that the memo wasn't stating that women are "neurotic", neither in the colloquial nor clinical sense, but that they are on average higher in the trait of Neuroticism in the Big 5 personality dimensions[0], which is a very specific and well defined term, and the scientific literature actually does support that statement when it is presented using those academic definitions. There's nothing opinionated about this, just as much as saying that men on average test higher in the trait of 'Conscientiousness' according to the same model; they're just population statistics based on the most reliable personality measure we have in the field of psychology today. It is a plain misunderstanding of the academic term to suggest that the memo says women are "neurotic" in any other way.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

You would know all this if you did some fact-checking. The carelessness with which you approach his claims is typical and indicative of a much larger problem.

Of course it's a fact about the document. Damore does not say this. If you claim he did, you should easily be able to prove it by quoting him saying it. No one has done that, because the accusation is false. The burden of proof is on the accuser. The accuser is not presumed to be telling the truth on the basis of their social standing, gender or the emotional intensity of their reaction.

>But here's the deal, a bunch of other really smart people think it did do exactly what you claim it didn't. Now what? Are they wrong, you're right? On what basis?

On the basis of the content of the memo, they are wrong.

I think part of the problem is what the memo says and what it doesn’t say. It’s entirely plausible that the ‘natural’ ratio is not exactly 50:50. But as of last year, among Google tech workers, the ratio was 81:19, and that’s with all the affirmative-actiony programs Damore wanted to back off on; in the past it was higher. It’s quite a bit less plausible that intrinsic differences could explain all or even most of that big a discrepancy, especially combined with the many anecdotes of discrimination we hear about. Now, to be fair, the memo never explicitly claims that it does; indeed, at one point it specifically says “in part”. But the tone of the memo, the relative lack of time spent acknowledging the large role played by cultural factors, makes it sound like Damore thinks the natural ratio is at least pretty close to the current one. And that’s simply wrong.

I see it as honest call for discussion but everyone is treating this as some malicious attempt to exercise sexism. We are all educated and civil people please have some dignity and apply Hanlon's razor to these kind of things: "Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

"openness" and "freedom" are core values of Google. Even in a scenario where someone made effective arguments refuting all of James' key points, a "one strike and you're out" policy seems antithetical to Google's culture. Or any healthy culture for that matter.

If James wrote what you said he did above (I think you mischaracterize him greatly), and if his ideas are as poorly constructed as you suggest they are, surely Google employs someone intelligent enough to go point by point through his memo and really school him. Such a response would do more to build a case for the worldview you appear to espouse than the lazy, generalized retorts being lobbed his way.

2. totally true and I'll go on the limb to say that part of it probably because of men biological differences which force men to be eager to reproduce at all times

3. yes, but you already addressed malicious and non-malicious annoyances so this has to be "annoyances" where men treat women as other men. If men treating women as other men is a problem then this is proof that we are not the same and need different approach. (I am open to be completely wrong about it, please educate me if you think this is wrong or I misunderstood something)

4. Agree

5. This could be related to #2 and #3

Shouldn't women inherently be part of a conversation about systematically augmenting their gender's presence in the workplace?

Or do you believe that beneficiaries of affirmative action should not be expected to comment on its existence and validity from time to time?

Not a rhetorical question. Either position is potentially defensible IMO. Just want to know where you stand.

> Why don't we focus on fixing the existing problem first?

Sounds good.

> we have to be there to contradict the people who take it as justification for the (evidence-based) unlevel playing field in tech, sexism etc, and we will be the ones affected if we don't ensure that our colleagues and people we respect don't go therefore shrug and decide that everyone thinks that way.

If you are concerned about third parties being swayed if you stay silent, that makes it even more important to not engage in the behavior I am decrying. Doing nothing is unlikely to impact most people's opinions. Appealing to platitudes (or worse, actively misrepresenting your opponent) will be actively counterproductive.

And this, I believe, is the strongest possible argument against discriminatory hiring practices.

If I hire someone who's black, or female, or gay/bi, or any other 'protected group', I want them to know that I hired them for their ability, not to fill some quota. And the only way to do that is to hire based purely on ability.

By setting 'diversity hire' quotas, Google's own HR department is telling anyone who qualifies for any of those quotas that they're not good enough.

Note: I find it interesting/disturbing/sad/telling that I've been sitting here for a long time contemplating if I should even submit this message since I use my real name here. The fact that we, as a society, have come to a point where we are afraid to even have this discussion really makes me sad. I respect every one of my colleagues deeply, male and female alike. The idea that someone could twist my words and paint me as a misogynist is beyond troubling.

No. Not yet. women still tend to be underpaid. Women make 72 cents to a male's $1 of wages for the same job.

As a white male, I don't care to "discuss" if women are my intellectual inferiors - which is exactly the point Damore was making ... and the point that YOU are making.

I don't have discussions at work or at the bar wondering if women are inferior.

I really do think women are my intellectual equal.

OK :)

I think some of Damore's complaints were, on the surface, about Google. But they're all rooted in some old and incorrect ideas.

Damore advocates against Google's diversity programs, arguing that diversity programs can't be fully effective because fundamental biological differences between women and men are responsible for the gender gap, not social or cultural disadvantage, and further that these programs are discriminatory against men.

This is an old idea. Women's rights activists have heard this time and time again, whether it was for the right to go to school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_education_in_the_Uni...), the right to have a job (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights#Equal_employm...), or of course, the right to vote. The argument, every single time, is "women and girls aren't really interested in reading/writing/working/politics". But in each case, we discovered that women were discouraged (and often outright punished) in strong, varied, and complex ways from being involved in these things, and when we investigated and removed those impediments suddenly the "interest gap" disappeared.

The "discriminatory against men" argument is essentially a reverse discrimination argument, and I'll leave it to Jamelle Bouie to explain why those are wrong: https://www.thenation.com/article/race-millennials-and-rever....

But the main reason that Damore's argument is outrageous is that the arguments about interest and fundamental biological differences have been used to hold women and people of color back since the inception of the US. Reverse discrimination belittles and dismisses the experiences of women and people of color by falsely equating systemic sexism and racism with isolated incidents, or in this case with gender-conscious diversity programs.

I'd also like to address the free speech issue a little. The US concept of free speech protects citizens from government retaliation. It doesn't mean I have to tolerate speech of all kinds in my home, and it doesn't mean that businesses have to tolerate speech of any kind in the workplace. With that in mind, it's obvious that you can't say whatever you want at work even though e we may disagree on where the line is.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/04/...

Here's one example. Google has spent over a quarter of a billion dollars on diversity efforts in the last 3 years, and has barely moved the needle in terms of diversity in their workforce [0].

Some of that can be explained by long-term efforts that will take more than 3 years to show dividends, but not all of it, and given the lack of results, you'd think that it's worth considering if current efforts are addressing the actual problem or if they're just throwing money in the wrong direction.

You can't do that without questioning the current methods and examining other ideas, but when the reaction to questioning current methods and examining other ideas is to stifle discussion and say 'no, this is right, you are wrong, and btw you're fired', then you may well find you keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars, for little to no result.

You could argue that a quarter of a billion dollars is pocket change to Google (and it is) and therefore doesn't represent any real harm, but it's still a lot of money to throw around on something that might not actually solve the problem.

0: https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-l...

The memo is mostly about women, but race is mentioned several times in the memo - mostly in terms of training programs at Google that are only open to people of certain races.

The discussions are more like: is there a quota? Is the hiring bar being lowered? etc...

If you find it objectionable to change the phrase in such away, consider the fact that, as a computer scientist, I went to school and took classes with many mechanical, civil, and electrical engineers. I'm still friends with them today. The cultures are intertwined.

Lawyers work in teams, but programmers work in teams too. Having done both there is a lot more interactivity in programming teams (weekly status meetings, pair programming, dropping in on a neighbor to discuss APIs). (Legal teams are much smaller and cases are much less interconnected than large codebases).

These numbers do not show that the labour market is free of sex discrimination. However, they do suggest that the main problem today is not unequal pay for equal work, but whatever it is that leads women to be in lower-ranking jobs at lower-paying organisations."

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/08/daily-...

Most companies would - right or not - try to keep their dirty laundry indoors and the right way to deal with such stuff is to first try to take it up the chain and if you are ignored you can decide if you're brave enough to become a whistle blower with all the fine consequences that tends to have, one of the most likely results of which is that you will find yourself suddenly unemployed and if you're unlucky also unemployable.

This is the full quote, "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate." Latter emphasis mine.

I read this the same way that he writes it: that Google takes steps to reduce the false negative rate for diverse candidates but does not take these steps with non-diverse candidates. Policies like re-trying failed phone interviews, or automatically passing resume review for diverse candidates are examples of this (these are examples I've witnessed, I don't know if they in place at Google). They still need to pass the final interview loop, so they're not underqualified. But extra steps earlier in the interview process reduce the false negative rate.

Personally, I think these steps are an acceptable means of getting a more diverse group of candidates but I'd still respect my co-workers if they disagreed. To point out the fact that this results in some non-diverse candidates being denied when they could have gotten offers is factually correct. More importantly, to point this fact out is not to call the diverse candidates passed under such a system underqualified - as I pointed out earlier all candidates pass the final interview loop so all candidates are qualified.

This seems to be the common argument against diversity programs, but it strikes me as statistically true only if we assume a very even distribution between STEM graduates and prospective employers. Given tech's reputation as being relatively hostile to women, a company could theoretically find ways to advertise to prospective women employees that their internal culture was more welcoming of them -- that, in fact, they wouldn't be subject to the sexism that the female engineers in the linked article all said that they routinely face. This doesn't require the company to have different hiring standards between genders, or to pay women more. It does require them to change their recruiting practices in ways that acknowledge they may have to make specific outreach to women and other underrepresented minorities, but that doesn't strike me as having to be inherently discriminatory.

What you do with the information that science provides is your problem. If a society (such as a workplace) doesn't have the capacity to logically process the scientific facts, and uses them to enforce psycho-sociological diseases like racism or discrimination, the solution is not to deny the scientific facts or erase the question. The solution is to foster capacity in society to process and respond to scientific facts in a logical manner

Why did more people not mention this fact? The guy wrote on a topic that the corporation could not afford to indulge him on.

Now one of the valuable lessons one learns operating in any large institution is that yes there are stupid questions no matter if the policy explicitly states there aren't, and there are always unwritten rules. Failure to discover the unwritten rules leads to getting fired, let go, skipped by during a promotion, etc.

Just curious, what do you think would be a proper venue. Tweeting at Google HR publicly, private emails to owners / upper management?

It all depends on what kind of company, what product industry etc. and it might not be about gender or minority diversity but something completely different.

This is what I think is wrong with this whole discussion. Diversity has become a goal in itself yet no evidence to support it's positive impact.

So why do you think there is such a disparity in outcome?

Fix problems at the source, don't apply hack after hack to route around it.

To better illustrate what it means to reduce the false negative rate without admitting underqualified candidates, consider the following scenario:

* Phone interviews have a 50% false negative rate.

* On-site interviews have a 0% false negative rate.

* Neither type of interview has a false positive rate.

* Non-diverse candidates get one phone interview, and if the interview is positive they go on to an on-site interview. If the onsite is positive, the candidate gets an offer.

* Diverse candidates get two phone interviews. If either is positive, they move on to the onsite which, if passes, gets an offer.

In this setup, no candidates are underqualified since there are no false-positives in either the phone interview or the onsite. Non-diverse candidates have a 50% false negative rate; 50% are erroneously disqualified at the phone interview stage. Diverse candidates have a 25% false negative rate. Since they go through two phone interviews, there's only a false negative if both (0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25) phone interviews are false negatives.

Edit: Google says that their diversity platform is non-discriminatory because they're not changing their standards, but rather looking harder for qualified diversity candidates (paraphrasing). This makes the gargantuan and probably unwarranted assumption that there are a lot of these candidates not applying and that 'looking harder' will find them.

According to the PDF(0), it states on page 6, footnote 6

...Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done)....

The smoking gun here is "which is illegal and I’ve seen it done"... Well, shit. That seems to answer your question, "YES".

However... On James Damore's official website(1), it states the following from the same quote area.

...or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal).....

Which is illegal. No more claim of being a witness. How interesting. That would not validate your claim/question.

(0) https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

(1) https://firedfortruth.com/

Until you remove social blockers that prevent women from entering tech, you cannot claim legitimacy of any social survey in regards to that. This letter belongs to a time when a generation of women are equally pushed to enter tech as men. Then we can debate whether it's their lack of interest of not.

it works rather effectively.

(seriously, the dh0 "u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!!!" is a terrifying force, when seen and used as in a group or mob.)

I agree with this too. There were issues of perception since the Gizmodo version had no sources, links or charts. Later leaked version had the charts and a full version was put up on diversitymemo.com (which no redirects to Damore's official website).

So a lot of people didn't get the full version, even if they read the whole thing. Overall I thought we was pretty tactful and did his best to express what he knew would be an unpopular viewpoint.

Nor does Damore.

In Damore's memo, the table of left vs right bias was ridiculous, even if we agree on those biases, which we don't, I'd argue why use those, and why pick n number of biases and leave out others? This isn't a rigorous paper.

The toy hypothetical following the table is such a overly simple contrivance, are we supposed to be taking this seriously? So many assertions...

Perhaps the bar is too low at Google.

Thank you. I have been noticing this for the past year, both here and in almost all other online forums. And it's not just the ability to troll or make a comment that you know might push a few buttons.

It's questioning whether it's even safe to post a logical argument against any of the narratives deemed sacred these days by the left.

The fact that the worst offenders in this new witch hunt are the same ones who have massive amounts of data on all of us is terrifying.

Choosing to recruit only from pools where the proportion of women is greater than 20% isn't quite the same as lowering the bar. The bar is at the same height for men and women, just with a skewed population. You're artificially excluding pools of people who would make good candidates, but since both women and men can bypass your outreach efforts by going straight to you, you're not refusing to hire anyone who is both qualified and motivated enough to apply directly.

I think proponents of the google diversity programs are arguing that they do this. I'm not sure whether they do. I think the real situation might be a hodgepodge of systemic factors and biases in both directions that sum up to something unpredictable, plus a few largely ineffectual diversity programs, and a massive question mark around why there are so few female CS grads in the first place (biology! sexism! gender roles! c64 ad campaigns! inertia!). Nevertheless, it's a bit more complicated than just lowering the bar for women.

This is true, but California presciently has other laws in place to protect workers that want to discuss potentially illegal behavior in good faith. This is why Damore is suing Google, and why it's quite likely that he will win.

Would this have happened if the paper had been written by a woman?

Why aren't men disadvantaged by the fact that women outnumber men as Speech-language pathologists, Dental hygienists, Physical therapists, Counselors, Nurse practitioners, Hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists?

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

Also: regardless of the actual outcome, going to court is not a guarantee either way.

Which of these divergent sex ratios are caused by "problematic environmental pressures," and which aren't?

[0]https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

You're ignoring that girls are socialized to think they're bad at math, science, etc. Boys are told the opposite and are pushed in this direction. I certainly was. My parents were drilling me on math by age five.

(1) was written as a public statement by the center of the current moral panic. As such, it has to be hugely more careful about making unsubstantiated claims. Regardless of the truth of the matter, if he has no corroborating evidence of discriminating based on protected status, he can't make a public allegation of such without opening himself up to a defamation lawsuit.

When I was a student in computer science more than 30 years ago, in our class of more than 30 students there was only one female. There was no entrance selection or any filter or money involved (not in USA).

We are dealing with overlapping gaussians.

Girls and boys are today educated without making a difference through all their childhood, and I think that this may give the false impression to them that there is no difference. But whoever had children or has seen many children will see that some differences in behavior and interest are blattan and can't be socially induced.

I do not deny that blocking MAY exist and some men are sexists, I have seen such discusting behavior. I considr them disfunctional. But this is not 100% the cause of gender imbalance in tech.

There is no blocking to contribute to OSS, and good programmers get hired regardless of gender. You should read back the [Donner Kruger effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect) to remind you of you own bias when evaluating your competence.

Imagine..."She thought black people should not have to sit at the back of the bus. She told authorities who just remained silent. She should have sucked it up and moved to the north!"

This is pretty interesting. At this point I accept that I'm both racist and sexist because of the culture I grew up in. But there was a time when I took the suggestion that I was racist or sexist as a deep assault on my character and intellect.

I think it's hard to admit, probably especially for software engineers, that we're biased in some way, but the truth is that this stuff is insidious. It's somehow true that boys are called on more than girls, and they're given more positive feedback for participation in the classroom. Or like earlier in this thread I referenced Dr. Sadedin's Quora post and someone responded to it assuming that she's a man. Or I remember a prominent woman feminist on Twitter talking about how she was confused why a woman flight attendant was talking about the weather forecast, potential turbulence, and landing time when she realized the woman was actually the pilot.

No one's immune from this. It's pernicious, it's embedded in our culture, and it pervades our entire society.

> At what point are you disadvantaging the incumbent group? They didn't exactly choose to be in the incumbent group as much as the oppressed group chose their's.

This is a fair point. I think (to use a corporate term I kind of disdain) we need buy-in from white men and we don't have it right now. Most of us don't believe that a problem exists, or that we are sexist and racist (importantly, just like everyone else), or that we personally need to do anything about this. Until that changes, we'll still feel cheated by pro-diversity policies, and issues like this will keep flaring up.

I think the fix is simple but not necessarily easy (oh no, accidental Rich Hickey reference haha), and it's to just keep talking about these issues. Not, of course, in the workplace, but in your social circles. And if you can't learn about this stuff in your social circles, do some research online or broaden your social circle to challenge yourself a little (I use theflipside.io and it's been surprisingly illuminating). Because the facts are that current US society and culture puts over 2/3 of us at a significant disadvantage, and the sooner the dominant group (straight cis white men) gets wise to it the sooner we can fix it.

I hadn't heard about people asking "what are you?". That is indeed infuriating. I don't think such people deserve any answer beyond "human".

I sincerely don't think that anyone is proposing that there is no difference between men and women, the discussion is over the extent of the differences.

We are dealing with overlapping gaussians.

The question is the extent of the overlap. If the overlap is very close on many abilities, men exceed women on some (like say maths), and women exceed men on some others required for a programming job (like say, empathy), then you'd expect distribution of jobs to be around 50% with slight variations. There is no indication that they vary by the amount required to explain the disparity of jobs in tech, indeed, this is easily refuted by looking at the number of women in technical jobs in the US in the 70s.

PS It's Dunning-Kruger

You should really just google 'gender difference education' and you'll see there's dozens and dozens of papers that say education is very gendered. The experience of girls in pre-college (and college too for what it's worth) is very different from that of boys.

> I do not deny that blocking MAY exist and some men are sexists... [b]ut this is not 100% the cause of gender imbalance in tech.

The "percentage" thing is something that comes up in global warming discussions too; people will ask "what percentage of global warming is caused by humans", and because the issue is extraordinarily complex, the answer comes out sounding like equivocation.

You're probably right, social cues are probably not 100% the cause of the gender gap in tech. But the issue is complex; it's not like you're gonna see a pie-chart of simple gender gap explanations and then say, "we'll just 'allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive' and crank up pair programming and part time work; that should cover 80% of it".

You can get complex reasons though, i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/dec/14/many-women-i.... But good luck fixing "balancing work-life responsibilities" and "workplace culture"; those are complex issues that deal with early education, social and cultural expectations of women (and men), federal and state social policies and workplace policies, politics, and deep-seated gender roles. There's not really a knob you can turn to fix this stuff, and that's why we don't use percentages to talk about it.

Sorry I'm unfamiliar with California state law, and besides I don't really know why it pertains to a misunderstanding of speech protected under the 1st Amendment.

Or if he wrote it about short people, that they, on average, were worse coders. I am sure you could find some semi-reasonable sounding studies showing some correlation between height and some definition of success.

That's right, but what's the cause of that?

Is it solely down to sexism and discrimination, or are there other causes?

For example, studies have shown that the more egalitarian a society becomes, the greater the difference in personality between genders is, which affects things like job and career selection. This makes sense because in an egalitarian society, men and women are more free to choose careers based on interest rather than on preordained acceptable roles based on gender [0].

I'm not saying this is what's happening in tech, but there's enough research around it that it's a plausible explanation for some of it. And if you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars but are not in any way interested in investigating (or even contemplating) whether this might be one of several factors leading to a decline in women entering software engineering, then that's probably a problem.

0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

I don't think I made that claim, but still it has merit. Women face challenges in workplaces where there are few of them, sometimes benefits don't handle birth control, or maternity leave is non-existent or laughably short, or there are few women in leadership roles, or there is a workplace culture that is overtly sexist, or there are persistent sexual harassment problems, or they get paid way less for the same work, or they get stuck with "women's work" and treated like secretaries and assistants.

> Why aren't men disadvantaged by the fact that women outnumber men as Speech-language pathologists, Dental hygienists, Physical therapists, Counselors, Nurse practitioners, Hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists?

Men actually do face their own set of challenges. Consider all the jokes in popular culture about male nurses or male cosmetologists. Or consider Mississippi v. Hogan where a man sued successfully for the right to be admitted to the Mississippi University for Women School of Nursing, a historically all-woman school: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1981/81-406

I'm not super clear if I understood your question, let me know if I didn't get it right and I'll try again haha.

these are the results:

"there are 48840 males, we will pick only 25000(51.187551187551186%)"

"we will pick all females to represent the company reaching out to them"

"let's say the company is going to hire 5000"

"hiring based on competence and taking females when equal"

"results:"

"male: number: 3505 percentage: 70.1% average score: 123.81256204767604"

"female: number: 1495 percentage: 29.9% average score: 123.75346343448992"

"if we force the 50% ratio"

"the average male score: 126.26036797470225"

"the average female score: 119.60577230318559"

so forcing a 50% ratio does indeed lower the bar. data for males and females were generated using the same function so arguments about biological factors are not even needed.

the code:https://jsbin.com/nogujuqewe/1/edit?html,console,output

That's a straw man. You're suggesting I disapprove of criticism, which is not so. I disapprove of demands for policy change when you don't even have a hypothesis for what your target should be.

Unless Damore (or someone else) can reasonably estimate whether their theory around 'biological' differences result in a natural 10/90 ratio or a natural 49.9/51.1 ratio then there isn't really a case to be made to change actual real-world HR policies on that basis.

Being able to reasonably estimate that 'natural' ratio is a massive task. You'd need to account for parenting, education, popular culture, socio-economic group, dozens of biasing factors. I'd expect that model to go well beyond what's possible.

Yes, that may impose a high hurdle on criticism of HR policy via this argument, but that's also the intellectual leap that Damore has claimed to have made from the evidence presented. How exactly he's managed that leap is problematic. He certainly hasn't demonstrated full knowledge of all of the factors involved.

> There's many plausible explanations why an absence of a 50:50 gender representation could be caused for reasons other than bias or average ability. That's enough to put a nail in that model of discovering bias. Coming up with a way of predicting what the right ratio is, isn't necessary to discard that metric.

Of course, and it's certain to be a combination of factors, some historical, some current that pushes representation away from 50:50. I don't think anyone is pretending that bias alone is responsible. But there's a mountain of direct evidence that bias is a significant problem. On the other hand the chasm between this biological source evidence and an actual hypothesised effect on representation is vast.

The argument in the memo is: hire on equal standards and if that results in less women than men then it's caused by X and here is what you can do about X instead of discriminating at the point of hire.

Not sure why, but I know one possible explanation.

In developing countries, people are pressured by their basic needs. An engineering job generally pays well. People in such countries are less likely to do what they want and more likely to do what pays well, so gender ratio in engineering is close to 50/50.

In developed countries, people are guaranteed to survive even without a profession or job. Less financial pressure, more freedom of choice, less women in engineering.

You could make your point stronger if you propose an explanation to what changed since then. It's very unlikely that men (and society in general) become more sexist, if anything we have made a lot of progress.

I can tell you what the opposing side says though. They say women had little choice back then and just did what was needed. Today women have more choice, freedom and there is less discrimination so they feel free to pursue what is interesting to them which is not tech more often than in case of men.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

If you'd correct this, we'd appreciate it, because these discussions are hard enough to keep substantive without people taking swipes at each other.

Studies show prenatal testosterone affects differences in that men tilt towards an interest in intresting things, and women in insteresting people. Damore has the scientific literature behind him (which others can then dispute if they'd like). Also look to scandinavian attempts to flatten out differences. Thousands were involved, and the diffrences were simply exasturbated. Interesting talk on just this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSIEs1ngNiU Loads have very much taken the social aspect into account. What I think everyone in the dominant culture seems to miss, are the relevant scientific biological and psycological findings.

No. Damore had to win. His opponents just had to not lose.

Google has invested massive resources and thought into their hiring process. The debate for change was started clumsily. Damore triggered a threat response that caused a good portion of one side to walk away from the debate, but he was pushed out too.

So the status quo persists.

No, this is wrong. Societal discrimination is directly measurable at the point of hiring. There are a mountain of studies measuring this. It simply doesn't require modelling the effect as it propagates through society.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, nobody is claiming that bias is the only factor involved, but it's one we can measure and act on.

> Damore did not target anyone as below the bar... The threat response was immature

Aside from explicitly saying "lowers the bar", explicitly saying "I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes" and making multiple references to lower drive, mathematical ability, etc. Please.

As you know, threat responses aren't driven by 'maturity' they're driven by percieved threat. Damore's clumsy language caused people at Google to be afraid, and justifiably so. He may have intended to spark a dialog but his words are confrontational. Don't confront people on this topic because you'll often get a fight/flight response. Instead you must engage and build trust.

Or you solicit more resumes from the 20%. Or you randomly throw out some resumes from the 80%. Neither of those will move the bar.

There are still arguments to be made that either more aggressively recruiting women (fattening their pipeline, even if it's zero-sum versus other players in the field) or accepting a higher rate (yes, "lowering the bar", which most colleges do quite aggressively and people seem mostly okay with) could be positive moves on many axes.

More productive overall measures involve equalizing the educational pipeline, which IMO is the real solution. Google invests heavily in that, too, though, so I'm pretty happy with their multi-pronged approach.

A ("women in general are less interested") does not imply B ("woman job candidates are less interested"). A would only imply B if there were equal numbers of man and woman engineers. But there are fewer. It's entirely possible for "women are less interested in engineering than men" and "women that go into engineering are far more interested than men that go into engineering" to both be true.

So that hiring bias is based on non-logic in the first place. Considering the possibility of A does not legitimize B.

The worst offense though was that a lot of the assertions were completely disconnected from supporting the original claim that Google's diversity efforts were misguided. In order to have an honest intellectual discussion, first there would have had to have been an honest effort at putting together a coherent argument with such controversial/incendiary points/implications made. Damore failed that miserably.

The science behind it is well established.

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manif...

From what I've seen, much of the anti-memo invective is based on (a) not reading it, or (b) an extremist interpretation of what he says, or (c) outright denial of scientific facts.

It really is easier to join a lynch mob, than to say "Hmm... perhaps we want a cold, cautious examination of the facts"

See "Self made man" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book), for a real-life experience of living as a man vs as a woman. Her conclusion at the end was that women have it much, much, easier, and she would much rather live as a woman than as a man.

i.e. maybe work is sexist and makes women prove themselves more than men have to. But that's only one aspect of peoples daily lives.

You may ask why it's 80-20 among CS graduates. One hypothesis is that women are just less interested in tech and in presence of many other choices they choose different paths. In the past there weren't as many choices that's why women were forced to go into programming (that's why there were more women in programming several decades ago).

Medicine and law are not like engineering. Engineering is particularly gendered; you can look at medicine and see "caregiving", or you can see law and see "people" and "social issues". It's not easy to look at engineering and see any stereotypically female attributes there.

Girls are discouraged from pursuing math and hard sciences through pre-college education, explicitly, culturally, and socially. The social blockers between girls and engineering are particularly acute compared to those between them and law or medicine. You can look at college degree numbers for example. Women now outnumber men when it comes to college enrollment and graduation, but women are far more likely to pursue "soft sciences" like psychology or sociology.

> That's the point Damore was trying to make that people don't want to hear - there might be more to the gender gap than just social blockers, and if so, we should be aware of that at the same time we're working to solve the existing issues around bias, harassment, etc.

In fairness, Damore was advocating for the ending of Google's pro-diversity policies in hiring and minority support for employees. It wasn't just a "truth telling", he wantetd Google to dismantle programs that had a dramatic, positive effect on diversity. I'm not saying he didn't suggest alternatives, but those alternatives had no basis in research and felt pretty thin. Like "[a]llow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive"; honestly what does that even mean?

It's not because discriminating based on sex is illegal. If you lower the bar for white people because you take long term view that having more white people in your workforce is more important than hiring the most technically adept candidates then it wouldn't be "your call to make". In fact you would be sued into oblivion and rightly so.

>>Especially since having different viewpoints can aid in innovation and creativity.

Yes, that's why the memo mentions diversity of opinions. You don't get that by discriminating based on sex or race. You could get some of it by not firing people for expressing their views though.

I don't think that's a fair characterization. I think a lot of white men recognize that a problem exists. It's just that there are so many other problems in this society right now that it seems low on the totem pole. Personally, I'm more afraid of an outbreak of violence between neo-Nazis and radical Marxists. It's hard not to draw parallels to 1920s Europe.

It's like the government is indicting you for making gingerbread houses, and one of your employees argues against your policy prohibiting gingerbread in the workplace. Isn't it?

EDIT: Oh it's gender pay, not diversity. Then I really don't at all get the relevance, Damore only mentioned the pay gap in a footnote that was totally unrelated to Google.

If instead we're adding a 'fudge factor' based on race, gender, or other measure of 'privilege', we're just hoping that fudge factor in hiring makes up for problems elsewhere, and it can paradoxically make things even worse.

Think about a lot of the (often very well justified) complaints that minority and other hires have with the current situation: they feel like, or they feel that other people believe, that they are simply a 'diversity hire' that doesn't deserve to be there. They feel constantly pressured to 'prove themselves' under the suspicion that the bar was 'lowered to let them in'. And the entire structure of un-blinded affirmative action exacerbates the situation, because nobody is allowed to know how big the fudge factors are, neither the minorities nor the dominant group. Under that situation, how can there anything but suspicion and mutual distrust?

Under a provably blinded hiring process, none of those should be an issue, because the process is completely transparent and agreed to ahead of time.

Other people have said this much more eloquently than me:

https://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/05/12/the-amazing-1969-pro...

"Choosing to recruit only from pools where the proportion of white people is greater than 95% isn't quite the same as lowering the bar."

I don't think it would get much sympathy but it's an equivalent with race substituted for sex (both are protected and it's illegal to discriminate based on them).

>>Nevertheless, it's a bit more complicated than just lowering the bar for women.

If you own a pub and want only white waitresses so you only invite white women for interviews you can do that without lowering the bar as well. Still you are discriminating even if you put elaborate system out there which magically result in only (to make the point stronger, substitute with a ratio like 90-10 or 80-20 to make the situation equivalent) applications from white women at the end.

Although most claims of reverse discrimination are probably false, this doesn't mean that none are justified.

For example, Google apparently has a program called Stretch to help women become better negotiators. (Says Damore in his memo and I haven't seen anyone disagree.)

I think that is doubly sexist. First, it perpetuates stereotypes about women, maybe even using some hand-wavy biological explanation like "woman have less testosterone and are too timid to negotiate efficiently". That isn't really better than Damore's reasons for advocating more pair programming.

Second, it doesn't target the people it would help the most , but at best a subset. What about black men who are bad negotiators? Do they get their own program? What about white men who are bad negotiators? Are they left in the dust because white men good at negotiating are already privileged, so people who are superficially similar don't deserve any help?

I think it is both morally wrong and economically inefficient to have a program to help people get better at X that selects on any criterion other than their current ability to do X. I don't care whether you call it discrimination or something else, I just don't want to see this kind of divisive catering to interest groups identified by arbitrary lines.

Is this a common belief? Nobody I've read has claimed this, just that the known social effects are so large as to legitimise efforts to improve the situation regardless of whether or not there is some minor biological factor at play here too.

That's what I found strange about the memo. It spends lots of time arguing for the existence of biological differences between men and women and then draws the conclusion that diversity programs should be stopped. The existence of biological differences is not surprising to me or probably to the people who came up with the diversity programs and nor is it likely relevant to whether the diversity programs are a good idea or not.

to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices

[...] Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination​ [6]

[6] Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.

> But wasn't he arguing the opposite; that Google's efforts to comply with US law were working to the detriment of men?

And illegally so.

Seems like a bad tack to me - staying on topic is good enough for this kind of corrective comment.

also, may be due to backfire effect? Oatmeal did a brilliant job explaining it [0]

[0] - http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

But given that, how is it possible to discuss the possibility of gender differences? Without the discussion itself being a social blocker?

I'm not sure. Certainly by experts. And certainly around debate on legislation. Also in whatever social forums allow it. Such as here. But arguably not in discussion among staff at Google or wherever. There are likely no experts there, so it all comes down to bullshit. But among senior management, in private, sure.

Does Zimbabwe have better or worse gender equality than the USA or other Westernized nations?

Yeah things seem pretty fucked right now, and it's kind of hard to believe it all happened in less than a year. Not really confidence inspiring.

> I think a lot of white men recognize that a problem exists.

Honestly, I'd like to hear from them. Just look at this thread, the ratio of anti-Damore to pro-Damore people is like 1-to-10, and the other threads are even worse.

I will say I pushed it too far when I said "[m]ost of us". Looking at this Gallup poll 58% of White men support affirmative action for women and 52% of White men support affirmative action for racial minorities. The MoE is 5% and that's pretty close, affirmative action questions are subject to social desirability bias, I would assume numbers have dropped in the Trump era, and I don't necessarily think support for affirmative action translates into "I'm cool, and maybe even happy with the idea that a similarly qualified woman might get a job instead of me", but hey 58 is 58 :)

But I don't really accept the explanation that "there are so many other problems". This is a huge problem if you're a minority in the US. It's really an issue of perspective here.