Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

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

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!"

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.

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.

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.

To be fair... How often do you create "a rigorous paper" before you engage in an internal discussion at your company? Is that the standard? And if so, when do you have time to do actual work?

Try at least not to have completely unreasonable expectations.

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.

I believe autistic people also score higher on that neurotic scale, so it's ironic someone who self-identifies as being on the spectrum would highlight that result and, given the general stereotypes, for it to be held up as a difference from other software professionals

I don't believe there is any other context to it. It is not at all clear to me that the author is not referring to neuroticism in the colloquial or clinical sense. If he did want to use such a potentially emotionally-loaded term in that sense he should have made it clear how he was using it.

Have a look at the comments its being taken as an insult.

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.

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.

> 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.

There's research that shows that some of the gender pay gap can be attributed to women being less likely to negotiate pay raises and promotions. I think if you were Google and you were trying to close the gender pay gap, it's reasonable to take a look at that data and start something like Stretch.

> ...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.

It is actually much better. First, they aren't using any biological explanation. The studies [1][2] I found are experiments and surveys. Furthermore, no one's arguing because studies show women to be less effective negotiators than men that we should give up. On the contrary, Google is offering to help them. Damore's argument is that some studies kind of show women might be somehow biologically predisposed against tech (the copious hedging here is because he makes all the connections himself; the studies he cites don't actually make his point and consequently can't at all quantify the effect), and therefore Google should replace the programs most effective at increasing diversity with initiatives that have no basis in science and are mostly just bad ideas like "more pair programming", "more part time work", and "make work less stressful".

So in favor of Stretch:

- Research directly addressing and quantifying the issue

- No biological explanation

- Google directly addressing the issue

Against Damore's initiatives:

- No direct research to justify a policy change

- Unsupported leaps from indirect research to "biological differences explain the gender gap"

- No direct addressing of the issue

- Replacement of programs that do directly address the issue with those that do not

> I think that is doubly sexist. First, it perpetuates stereotypes about women....

I think it's a good instinct to critique policies from a gender perspective. And I think on its face you're right, Stretch seems to assume that women are bad at negotiating and has a program based on that assumption.

But look at how the program came about. This isn't a program rooted in stereotype; it's rooted in research. And the result of the program is to help women become better negotiators, not to disadvantage them. In applying a feminist critique, we have to evaluate all these things, otherwise we often come to the conclusion, as you did, that any policy based on gender entrenches harmful stereotypes.

> 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 can't find any research showing that Black or White men are bad negotiators, so I think that's why Google didn't start a program to help them. There's also not a pay gap for White men so I don't know what the impetus would be there anyway.

> 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 think this is super interesting! I just read a piece in the Atlantic that offered the insight whereas liberals often argue for fairness of outcome, conservatives often argue for fairness of approach. I'm not saying you're a conservative or that that's what you're doing here, but I definitely feel some echoes.

The argument you make here is that it's unfair to treat people differently based on ascribed statuses (race, sexual orientation, gender identification, etc.). But I think exactly the opposite; I think you can't treat people fairly unless you take into account their ascribed statuses. For example, if we return to entirely gender-blind hiring practices, we'll see the gender gap skyrocket (see 538's article on affirmative action [3]). Or more directly, in order to be fair to women, LGBTQ people, and people of color when hiring, we have to know about their ascribed statuses and compensate, otherwise we won't hire them, and that's unfair.

This is how we combat our biases that are instilled in us because of our racist, sexist culture and society. To ignore or not adjust for these biases is what's unfair here.

[1]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1999....

[2]: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-00584-007

[3]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-what-happens-when...

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.

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?

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 be honest, the "social" sciences have rarely been interested in scientific accuracy, more than they have been interested in promoting specific political ideologies.

I doubt they will consider this a problem with their "science". To them it will probably be obvious that the problem here, again, is with society.

In short: When you're stuck inside a delusion, it's everything on the outside which looks crazy.

c'mon, pick a side ... you can't argue both ways. The constructive takeaway from this is not that women are a "lesser" value because they crave work-life-family balance. The takeaway should definitely be that we should figure out how to help the overworked individuals who work too much, find a better balance.

> women prefer a more of a work-life-family balance

You may want to rephrase that. Parallel construction, and all that.

You ask "Where did he say that?" and I'd be surprised if there's any one succinct place -- it's one of the two main topics of the whole memo, and the memo does not have a coherent topic sentence or even really a coherent argument, so I think it's likely absent.

But, like, Damore makes a case to the effect that "biological explanations can't be ruled out" and then reverses those weasel-words by suggesting that his biological explanations be used to guide policy by, say, encouraging pair programming which he supposes to be something that women are likely better at on average. This sort of move suggests that he thinks the biological effects that he's citing (see note [1]) are big enough to guide policy, which they're not. You don't need to take my word for it -- the main author of the article Damore is citing was asked to read Damore's memo and this is his take on it [2].

Of course the problem is even worse in that this article which Damore used to write his article is psychological; it is based on doing a personality test in a bunch of different nations. That makes it very hard to conclude anything biological about it, so every time that Damore mentions "biology" in his memo, that is an interpretation of his own devising. The original personality-study article also interprets its findings biologically but it is really tenuous [3]. In fact neuroscientists have also been studying the brain and they have not found a clear biological difference between male and female brains [4].

[1] He gives a summary of a Wikipedia summary of an article by Schmitt et al. (2008). The PDF is freely available by the university at http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf but the sample sizes were I believe later corrected as an erratum, so I am not sure which one this has.

[2] Schmitt, evaluating later research as well, summarizes by saying that sex differences are only "accounting for less than 10% of the variance" and that using this to guide policy is "like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm," in an article at http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-... .

[3] The argument in the article involves their surprise that the majority of the discovered effect apparently disappeared in Africa and East Asia. Their interpretation is literally that those cultures are so much less economically developed than we in the West are, that their women must feel so much less free to just be themselves, and therefore they act more like men as a sort of baseline survival tactic. Read the paper; it's a very 'you cannot possibly be saying what I think you're saying, can you?' type of experience.

[4] See the links in the article https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28584-a-welcome-blow-... for a nice summary.

People's humanity and civil rights are not topics that should be open for debate. But the people who want to debate that start with "science" as the thin end of the wedge.

Of course, the thing that's always up for question is the participation of minorities. It's never a guy saying, "Fellas, the science shows that men are poor at cooperating and highly prone to aggression and violence, so let's debate whether we men should be allowed to manage or supervise other people."

It's highly motivated reasoning.

It is in fact quite easy to do machine learning work and come out with what is effectively racist AI. People have already done plenty of it accidentally.

No. It is the same discussion, just revised for fancier modern science. But it's the same deal: "I, a man, have noticed a possible fact about women. That proves that the status quo is awesome, and let's talk about going back to a simpler time before civil rights were such a thorn in my side."

The reason nobody on the left will discuss biological determinism with you is because of its rich history as a tool of oppression. The discussion has happened a zillion times over hundreds of years.

It's the same reason that most people who understand evolution won't bother to debate with hardcore creationists: it's a fucking waste of time. The creationists will never come around and say, "Oh, gosh, guess I was wrong." Motivated reasoning driven by deep bias is just not a fertile ground for discussion. Anybody who's sincerely interested in the history of evolution or the history of racism or the history of sexism can take a class. That somebody wants to strongly argue a point without having done that work is a big sign it's useless.

> Anyone can take offense to anything and be “outraged.” What good does that do?

This is a fine example of motivated reasoning. Nicolashahn, who at least has the decency to write under his own name, was clearly talking about morally justified outrage. If you would like to argue that people on the receiving end of sexist and racist bias don't deserve to be upset, make the argument. But you can't slip it like this.

> Are you saying people on the autism spectrum shouldn’t be a part of the discussion?

No. But as someone on the spectrum, I will say you're an asshole for using me as a strawman in a dumb argument.

> Would you mind giving a modern example?

Oh, modern. You mean after racism and sexism ended? When did that happen exactly?

If you're serious about all this, open an account in your actual name, stop with the bad rhetorical techniques, and carry on with the discussion. But as far as I can tell, you're yet another bigot who popped on a mask.

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.

Bad Thing A doesn't justify Bad Thing B though, does it.

As for the high burden of proof, I invite you to suggest a model that estimates the effect size we should observe in gender representation in tech companies based on Damore's 'biological' differences

While this sounds reasonable on the face of it the reality is different.

Where are you sourcing these graduates from? In the USA computer science departments are barely above 10% women faculty, in China it's closer to 40%. Student numbers tell a similar story... so it matters where your graduates are coming from. For a multinational like Google this is a real question.

> If you force it to be say 70-30 then you are discriminating against men based on sex.

This is a loaded statement, based on the assumpions that (a) hiring if left alone is broadly meritocratic and (b) quotas are the only game in town. There's enough evidence to say that neither of those assumptions is true.

First of all, it's been proven many times that bias in hiring is a real problem and has a large effect. Hiring is not meritocratic. Second, Google doesn't use quotas, no bar-lowering occurs (Damore hinted at this but gave no specifics and no evidence... we have to reasonably discount it unless someone can prove otherwise). Instead diversity programs mainly exist around sourcing and trying to avoid false negatives in order to counteract systemic biases.

(Disclaimer, I work in this field and have written on this topic before: https://medium.com/finding-needles-in-haystacks/we-need-to-t...)

[edited to remove some text from parent post accidentally left at the end]

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

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

We've run a similar study and for the company we were hiring into we found blinding in that specific case had no effect on race or gender but drastically improved socio-economic diversity. The hiring company already had equitable hiring on gender & the candidate group wasn't racially diverse enough to make a conclusion.

Would I generalise that result to all organisations? No way, and neither should you.

If you can find the study you're thinking of I'd be interested to look at it.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The difficulty is that "this discussion" can be - and usually is - conducted in a way that is harmful to women, either on a broad scale (specious arguments / failure to understand systemic bias) or an individual scale (wrecking someone's day / making a formerly welcoming environment feel hostile).

Those real consequences are on the line every time someone hits "Post" in this sort of discussion, and are a really good reason for any thoughtful person to pause and contemplate before doing so... perhaps do some additional self-education, or take the time to pose genuinely explorative-questions rather than rhetorical-questions or flat-out conclusions. If more people did that, I think you'd eventually see a lot less fiery refutation and much better discourse.

"If the numbers are true and the gender distribution in STEM graduates is 80/20, and you are intent on increasing your number of female employees, you have two choices. You either lower the bar on the 20% or you raise the bar on the 80%. In the end, the net effect is the same. The employees from the 20% group had a granted advantage against the 80% group."

This logic assumes that the 80% and 20% are functionally equivalent? (Which can be so if there's, eg, no systemic bias, but seems rather less likely when such is present.)

Another option would be to realize the the 20% already had to overcome substantial hurdles to get where they are, and to factor that into your decision-making.

Its so easy to make up crap about how its impossible to fix the issue without (made-up strawman). How about turning our intelligence toward useful comments? E.g. you could look harder for truly qualified candidates from among the 20%?

(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.

Intel creates the diversity fund in 2015 for 125 million.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3047239/why-intels-capital-diver...

Then a year later in 2016, lays off 11% of their workforce.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c...

Then in 2017, Google hires Danielle Brown the VP who pushed the diversity fund at intel.

I'm beginning to think as a minority woman in tech, These diversity funds are worse than quotas.

Whats the point in being hired, then fired a year later.

I also suspect, every group is afraid of losing their job. Intel firing 11% of its workforce is scary example.

Presumably the programs Damore criticizes in his memo have been around for a long time. Do any of those involve the use of quotas?

Science is the right place to have this discussion, not politics. Scientists have theories, not agendas. True scientists are not ideologues.

> The google letter writer was attacked for his writing style and choice of discussion venue, not the contents of the letter

People have pointed to flaws within both his conclusions and his writing style. His defendants first claimed that media is mischaracterizing what he said; they said they do not understand why people are upset. Then, when someone starts citing his words, Damorians complain they're cherry picking, being nitpicky, or being a grammar nazi.

The way one writes a scientific argument is important. Peer reviewed research goes through many drafts before it's even presented to the public. Thereafter, it can still be the subject of much scrutiny. One cannot simultaneously claim that Damore's paper is both,

(1) Representative of a scientific consensus, and

(2) Undeserving of critique for his writing style simply because he didn't intend for it to be released

> people are still adamant about not discussing it

I find this comment ridiculous as we're discussing it right now, and this has been national news for weeks with hundreds of articles written on the subject, commentary from scientists, etc. If you mean "not discussing in in the right way", then I don't know what to tell you. You don't get to decide how someone else makes their arguments. "Why don't you see it my way?" is not a useful debate strategy.

> We can give people equal treatment before the law, but we need to recognize that differences in hiring ratios for not have to be indicitave of race or gender bias. It is possible for the numbers to be an emergent effect of group differences.

Many do recognize that racism or sexism don't always play a role. I don't work at Google, but, I don't see women assuming sexism every time a male coworker gives a bad review of a prospective female candidate. The question here is whether affirmative action is an appropriate strategy for reducing gender imbalances. I understand many conservatives feel it's not. But, when asked how to correct for various socialization factors (not all of which are sexist or racist -- they can just be habit), their solutions would seem to keep the status quo. One of Damore's suggestions is to "reduce empathy". I can't think anything more inhumane.

head explodes

So you're saying it probably exists, but then conclude it doesn't because it can't be quantified how much? I'm not even saying biological differences explain everything, or even a substantial part; just some part, but you deny that any aspect of difference between preferences in men and women is due to biology? I mean I cannot interpret what you're saying in any other way no matter how hard I try - you're saying that if we can't measure something exactly, it doesn't exist?

> This is weasel wording for "there are no difference".

Demanding research back up your claims is weasel wording? Okay..

> do you think there are any differences between men and women in what sort of activities and/or behaviour they prefer to do, take part in or be around?

Yup.

> If so, would it not be reasonable to assume that this would result in different preferences in job choice?

Yes, but not to the extent the differences affect gender capability overall in roles like tech or leadership, which is what Damore was talking about. That's far from the scientific consensus.

> does it then not follow that men and women would have different preferences?

Biology can play a role in forming different choices of two men. It does not follow that all men would be more suited, on average, than women for roles in tech or leadership.

> I'm not going to be lured into saying something specific about software

Not sure why you feel lured into saying something specific about tech or leadership. If you don't think there are differences there between men and women on average, then we agree.

> wouldn't it follow naturally from what you said (which is the uncontested scientific consensus) that women would, in the aggregate, prefer some other professions than men do, in the aggregate?

Perhaps, but research has yet to show it. I wouldn't assume this is true for things like tech or leadership.

> do you find it offensive when people say so?

No, however it is misleading to say there is scientific consensus about something when there isn't. If I had this kind of discussion with Damore in person, like some at Google did, and he persisted in believing that science says something it didn't, then I would believe he has some ulterior agenda. That politics was a primary agenda of his paper says something. Politics shouldn't be the basis for scientific discussion, in my opinion.

> Or do you feel that how people answer reflects on them as a person?

Everything does. Not much you can do about that is there.

> I get the impression that simple, factual things like this is really an identity thing for some - which I just cannot wrap my head around

I don't know how science is an identity. It can be discussed on its evidence, methods and conclusions. Identity doesn't need to play into it. Science can definitely be misconstrued. But I would say today's top peer-reviewed journals are all of high quality, and if you find a scientist who's published in that sphere, they can give a better overview of this subject than Damore did.

> So you don't think that singling out "leftist violence" in events where there were "alt-right violence" is choosing one side?

James's discussion of left violence is because Google is a left wing company.

If Google was a right wing company, then saying "Google has mainly right wing politics but has avoided the violence associated with far right groups" would indeed by apt.

On a different note, Damore chose to include mention of "leftist protest" because Google's culture is left-leaning – he's explicitly saying that Google is very left, while not so left as these violent protests. Mentioning "violent rightist protests" wouldn't be germane to his statement about Google here.

He "merely" says that Google is doing it, and that doing it lowers the bar. Therefore he's saying that Google lowered the bar. It's a pretty simple a = b = c scenario

>It looks like a logical conclusion to me. Care to explain why you think it's not?

Because women can achieve at the same level as men? I thought it was pretty obvious.

The passage in which that quote occurs clearly implies that the bar has already been lowered - in fact, the second half of the sentence offers the mechanism through which the 'bar had been lowered' ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate")

> No one would find it weird if I claimed that women aren't able to run a 100 as fast as men. Yes, there might be some exceptional cases where women can compete, but they are just that, exceptions to the rule. Most of the time women compete among themselves since they would never qualify for anything if they competed in the same category as men. Why is it unacceptable to make the same observation about intellectual endeavors, or programming specifically?

I guess I'm surprised that this is controversial (in response to your most recent comment to a sibling poster) - the reason we don't accept that women are worse programmers than men is... we don't have evidence that women are worse programmers than men.

There are data about physical strength (and amazingly clear biological correlates - most HN posters will never outmatch a top female athlete, and we only need to do a quick lab test to determine this). However, female/minority intelligence has been, and continues to be, a politicized issue - until the more overt instances of discrimination are eliminated, how can we jump from blaming the obvious societal barriers to blaming biology?