Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

Interesting thoughts - I think the biggest misunderstanding thus far involves generalizations. You can accurately make generalizations about a group of people, without implying that a given individual necessarily falls under that generalization. For example you could say "80 percent of males are into action movies" - but you should not go up to an individual male and state "you are into action movies" if you care about factual accuracy. Whether or not Damore's generalizations are accurate is up for debate, but lets say for the sake of argument that they are. I do not think its harmful to say "10 percent of women are really into engineering currently" no more than it is harmful to say "50 percent of women are really into engineering currently." In fact, only a subset of the male population is into engineering, so it is preferential even within a sex. If anything, I think it makes it worth celebrating the women who ARE into engineering even more. So (hypothetically) you could say fewer women are interested in engineering, but it does not mean those who are into engineering are somehow less qualified than males.

I'll just refer to the women in the article:

> Assuming that it’s true that women on average are more likely to have trait X, why should any woman have to overcome the additional barrier of proving that she’s not like other women, or that if she IS like other women, that the trait has no bearing on her job performance?

(a) Because you're in an environment that has already selected for "not trait X"

(b) Because you don't have to prove anything to anyone, especially about trait X. All you have to do is your job.

(c) Everyone has something like that.

Statistics are statistics and I do not believe they should be censored on behalf of being unpalatable. That said, its how we interpret statistics that really matters. Like in my examples, a generalization is just that - a generalization, and thus not necessarily applicable to a given individual. To answer the question, a woman's (or man's) work should speak for itself. If they are a good worker and still facing scrutiny, then I would reexamine if the boss or manager questioning them is competent.

Do you agree that stereotypes affect peoples choices of careers?

Its definitely possible although I personally have yet to meet someone whose threshold for not taking a job was that a stereotype existed around it. I tend to go with Occam's razor: I think it is far more likely that peoples choices of careers affect stereotypes.

Right, but that's not how stereotypes affect career choice. It's not like someone is going to study 5 years for a career, and then at the last minute say "nah, dammit, that makes me look effeminate" or "hmm... I don't know, I'm a woman, I shouldn't be doing that." Like you, I have never heard of anyone doing that (I have heard of someone doing a postdoc in math and then giving up because he thought teaching was going to be boring... go figure.)

There's lots of good literature on how gender stereotyping actually affect people's choices.

I'm sure you can come up with a better argument. Assuming men are sexist and that you have to prove yourself to them is plainly hypocritical.

First, it's not my argument. As I said it was copied verbatim from the article.

Second, I do find interesting that you feel offended at the thought that women might assume men are sexist, but from your comment history you seem to be OK with Damore's memo which ascribes a number of traits to women.

Don't you think that is a bit hypocritical in itself?

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