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Comment by wsargent | Hacker News Reader

I don't know that there's a debunking of the thesis, because there's nothing very original in there -- it's repeats and retreads of other things that have been debunked over and over, so it all merges into a mashed up mess of points and rebuttals like a badly maintained wiki.

There are a couple of books which I can recommend that talk about why you see so few women in computing (as opposed to biology, math, etc) and also why you see so few black men and women:

    * Unlocking the Clubhouse: http://a.co/8oXDROX
    * Stuck in the Shallow End: http://a.co/9HXgvKW

These are not only well written, but they're also well researched and well thought out. They're worth reading on their own merits, but you may find them a useful debunking to the memo.

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TBH I'm not really interested in the wider issue at all. For starters I'm not even in America and we have our own issues here.

But this memo has dominated a lot of the internet that I use and figured surely someone has done the work to pull it apart.

I'm not going to read two books just to figure out some google guy's 10 page memo - call me lazy but perhaps nobody is going to read two books just for that purpose.

> I'm not going to read two books just to figure out some google guy's 10 page memo - call me lazy but perhaps nobody is going to read two books just for that purpose.

Well, if it's any consolation, I wouldn't read it for that either. The blog posts and memos do accumulate, though, and at some point it's worth it just to have the sources to refer back to.

Good point.

Also, the larger problem with debunking is that it just doesn't work all that well. It's like arguing with an antivaxxer -- they may ask for logical discussion but it has no effect. Ultimately, what convinces them is social pressure or a sudden intrusion of reality i.e. their child gets sick, they have a female friend who encounters discrimination etc.

My view is that in the absence of accessible ways to fact-check the memo people will only see the memo and the gnashing of teeth surrounding it. That leaves a really big hole to be filled - the memo is already out there in a big way.

The is Google lol, not some guy from i hate women dot com. Perhaps based on his platform alone we can consider it an honest attempt at conversation and debate it with our own honesty.

So you assume he worked this through from first principles and is thinking critically and has checked his sources... because he works (well, worked) at Google?

I can tell you that the norm among engineers, even at Google, is to receive lore and anecdotes from people slightly more educated as if it were gospel, and to repeat it uncritically until someone else more charismatic comes along. This happens so often that someone wrote a book called [The Leprechauns of Software Engineering](https://leanpub.com/leprechauns) about the unsourced commmon knowledge that engineers will blindly repeat without thinking about it.

They've only been "debunked" in the lazy, anti-intellectual corners of academia; that is, gender studies, cultural/social anthropology, critical race theory, etc. The factual points made by the author (re: gender differences only, no opinion on his recommendations for Google) square very nicely with scientific consensus [1]. The evidence has only piled on since the famous Pinker-Spelke debate.

[1] https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.htm...

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