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Comment by mwytock | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people on "our side" did a bad job of simply refuting the argument presented. Its straightforward to do in one sentence:

"While there may be scientific evidence of differences between men and women, using these differences to conclude that women are biologically less inclined to engineering is a gross leap in reasoning that is not at all supported by the facts."

Then you can go on and explain why for historical and societal reasons putting forth this weak theory is highly offensive and damaging to a large group of people.

Of course, many feel that you shouldn't _have_ to explain this to people, but unfortunately in todays environment, you do!

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That is not true. The facts support the exact opposite conclusion: that prenatal exposure to androgens orients a person toward things/systems rather than people. [0]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/

I'm not sure what you are arguing, can you be more explicit? You're saying that you agree with the fundamental point of the memo?

I'm saying that the scientific research agrees with the point of the memo. Whether or not I agree is irrelevant to the facts.

I see. Well I'm saying it does not. Obviously we disagree about what the scientific research says.

Could you link to these research papers you are mentioning?

See citation above. I'm saying its much too strong a claim to go from this paper to the conclusion that women are biologically less inclined to engineering.

EDIT: To be consistent with my original statement (see child)

You are losing this argument because you aren't being consistent with yourself.

Originally you said, "using these differences to conclude that women are biologically less inclined to engineering is a gross leap in reasoning"

So you were talking about inclination and interest. You then claimed the facts were on your side, that it was offensive to claim otherwise, and the existence of anyone who doesn't already agree is "unfortunate".

After chongli pointed out that you're wrong about the facts, you have moved the goalposts. Now you're pretending you said "biologically ill-suited". This is not true. You said "less inclined".

As the memo in question didn't claim women are biologically ill-suited to be software engineers, only less inclined, your original statement was contradicted by science and your second try is not what anyone tried to argue.

Thanks for the play-by-play! I do disagree about winning/losing. I feel I've done a good job representing my views.

I fixed the typo in my statement, sorry for the confusion.

As I said, the fact that this memo is offensive to many people is evidenced by the huge outrage. I'm not sure how that is a controversial statement.

Nobody argued with the obvious fact that people expressed outrage and took offense at the memo. The argument started with your baseless claim that "women are biologically less inclined to engineering is a gross leap in reasoning that is not at all supported by the facts."

To summarize the reasoning path:

1). "Results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with Things versus People"[0]

2). "Boys and men prefer occupations related to objects (e.g., auto mechanic, chemist), whereas girls and women prefer occupations involving work with people (e.g., day care worker, art teacher).[0]"

3). "Our results suggest that typical women, who are exposed to low levels of prenatal androgen, participate less than do men in STEM careers partly because they are interested in working with people. This is consistent with evidence that women value communal goals, which are perceived to be at odds with STEM careers (Diekman et al., 2010) and that women who enter STEM careers often do so in people-oriented professions, such as medicine (Benbow et al., 2000)."[0]

It's the paper that is concluding women are biologically less inclined to engineering.

[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/

Thanks for summarizing.

I suggest you reread #3 and note the use of language like "suggest", "consistent with" and "perceived". Authors use language like this because its really hard to make definitive statements in this area. In addition, its really hard to quantify the size of the effect and how much is due to nature vs. nurture.

Furthermore, I'm relatively certain the authors are not experts on software engineering. As you have likely seen at this point, you could also claim that higher empathy actually should incline people to the job (see, e.g. https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...)

You start by saying something is not "supported by the facts" and then go on by talking about how it's "highly offensive" (i.e.: hurts your feelings). I just want you to meditate on this for a bit.

I'm not sure what the contradiction is here?

Also, I wasn't making any claim about my own feelings, the massive response shows that the memo was highly offensive to many people.

Something being offensive doesn't mean it's wrong or that it shouldn't be debated.

Well, saying things that are clearly wrong and offensive to large numbers of people is typically looked down upon amongst educated people and highly discouraged at the workplace.

For example, think of other stereotypes about other groups (blacks, hispanics, jews) and think about what the response would be if an employee was publishing 10 page manifestos with loosely connected scientific arguments in support of these views.

There is nothing that is clearly wrong about the memo in itself and lots of Googlers actually voiced support for it and agreed. So your comment would be equally offensive to them because you call them uneducated and their opinion invalid.

Creating a strawman argument around racial stereotypes is just an added layer of misdirection and tastelessness.

There is something clearly wrong about the memo: it uses the direction of various effects to make a qualitative argument to explain a quantitative difference in gender distribution. If he had instead used the effect sizes in his reasoning, and predicted the resulting distribution (allowing direct comparison with reality), it would be much easier to objectively determine where he is right and where wrong. I'm fairly convinced that some of the things he mentions have a large enough effect to measurably affect the gender distribution among Google's employees, but some are guaranteed to be smaller than the noise floor. As it stands, his argument is easily dismissed as a collection of mostly irrelevant trivia.

No, there's something wrong with your reading comprehension.

>things he mentions have a large enough effect to measurably affect the gender distribution among Google's employees,

That's not one of the points of the memo. One of (the primary) point is to potentially explain a gap instead of relying solely on the assumption that the sole cause is discrimination, or "bro culture" or whatever trash rags like Model View Culture are calling it.

The memo is not about the ability, nor the preferences, of Google employees, specifically. It's about the ability, and/or preferences, of a potential hiring pool. And, if you actually read it, you'd know that the author used a qualifier: "may." As in: "Women are more likely to have these personality types and these interests, and this may explain the gap." As opposed to "all women have these personality types, abilities, and interests."

If women are coming out of university with a related degree or solid references for a software engineering career, at rates approximate to their original distribution (half of the population), we could say that there's obviously some sort of discrimination going on. But they are not. If they were, I would be prominent among the many who are outraged about the distribution of women in these particular careers. I believe the author of the memo would, as well.

But, again, they are not. And it is unhealthy to blame it solely on sexism, if at all.

I'm not surprised at the outrage, really. You get that when telling faux-progressives, who worship at the alter of tabula rasa social science models, that the mind is not a blank slate.

You see it in the Scandinavian countries, where certain "gendered" career choices are more clear than ever. But if we listened to the outraged mob, you'd think that these countries were some patriarchal backwater. But that's obviously not the case.

Another thing you'd have to ask yourself, if you were being honest, is: why "engineering"? The gap is bordering on nonexistent, if at all, in fields like law or medicine. So why is that this deficit exists in these vaguely related (if only by name) "engineering" careers. That's another thing the author decided to ask, and was shit on for it.

It is amusing that you accuse me of lacking reading comprehension, but then read things into my comment that I explicitly did not include because I'm tired of listing all the ways I agree with the memo.

>>things he mentions have a large enough effect to measurably affect the gender distribution among Google's employees,

> That's not one of the points of the memo. One of (the primary) point is to potentially explain a gap

So one of the points is to potentially explain a gap, and I think his potential explanation involves mentioning some effects that might be strong enough to explain the gap. I'm not sure why you singled out that point to disagree with me.

I especially limited my statement to Google employees because for Damore's purpose of influencing Google's diversity policy, effects on software engineering in general only matter in so far as they affect Google. I have not excluded the possibility that the majority of the gap is "inherited" through the hiring pool (in fact I think it likely).

However, you should not be so quick to exclude discrimination from the possible effects that have to be taken into account. In fact, Damore himself alleges that discrimination is happening, just in favor of women instead of against them. Had he actually crunched the numbers to estimate the expected gender distribution and compare it to reality, it would have been easy to see whether discrimination is involved and in which direction. But he didn't (maybe the data isn't precise enough to allow it), and now we are left arguing about possibilities and what was said.

Lastly, while I mostly agree with the content of your comment, you would do better to exclude the name-calling. It doesn't help to convince anyone who doesn't already share your views, and it alienates others who would otherwise be willing to engage in a level-headed debate with you.

You made a blanket statement about discussing offensive things and I wanted to point out there are some limits, especially at the workplace.

In this particular case, I feel that leadership and everyone who disagreed with the memo should have at least stated explicitly (if briefly) what the flaws in the reasoning were, as I tried to do at the beginning of this thread.

Obviously, my explanation was not sufficient to convince you and you are still holding on to the belief that women are biologically ill-suited to be engineers. But at least now I have tried to make it clear to you where I think you are wrong. Thats pretty much all you can accomplish on some issues.

I'm all for people arguing against it, but your 'one sentence' doesn't argue the point at all, it just asserts it. It literally just asserts that it "is a gross leap in reasoning that is not at all supported by the facts". I'm all for someone arguing for the points in that quoted fragment, but you can't claim that they're true just because you've said them.

You're right, my one sentence is just trying to explain the basic point to people who may not get it. Its not trying to lay out a complete thesis in support. I'm not sure if thats a necessary exercise, especially for the CEO.

I think people have done a very good job of saying that. They just get drowned out by outrage from the right, and overly clipped soundbites from both sides.

My twitter feed has tons of very thoughtful pieces responding to the memo. They just never breach the front page of Hacker News.

Maybe. I don't think Sundar Pichai or Danielle Brown did though, they just said "this is not OK" and "code of conduct". Perhaps they felt they didn't need to engage with this kind of argument, but that mentality is exactly what has a lot of people upset.

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