> However, his overall claim that there exist personality differences between genders that differentially affect men’s and women’s interest in and aptitude for tech jobs, is what people are mostly getting mad at. And that’s a claim that seems plausibly true. Not obviously true, but also not a claim you would be justified in emphatically dismissing as false, as many people have, including Google, who called them “incorrect assumptions.”
This is quite well-put, and gets at the heart of what pisses people off.
There exists a large set of hypotheses which are plausible, and not just "spaghetti-monster God" plausible, but "> 20% chance this is the case" plausible.
Many of those hypotheses, however, are shouted down as "racist", "sexist", or some other "ist" when they come up, and all of their possible costs are then listed in a litany, with all possible benefits ignored.
It's intellectually stifling, and I'm no longer interested in enabling people who use that kind of rhetoric.
It's very sad to me that we as a society are not.. 'evolved' enough to discuss stuff like this as rational adults - it turns into a very personal argument very very quickly because people feel you are attacking their identity - rather than say, discussing things they have no control over because of the weird mix of nature and nurture that guides us into adulthood.
I'm hoping sincerely that the era of identity politics ends soon - we as individuals are much more than the things that could lead to an "-ism" or lead to someone being branded an "-ist".
These "facts" are used in harmful ways against individuals. Stereotypes are harmful. Unless a stereotype applies to literally 100 percent of a population then they ARE going to hurt those people who do not fit it.
The question in this particular case is, what exactly the benefits?
The costs are quite clear. An entire generation or more of about half the population feeling demolarized and incapable of doing certain tasks as well as their peers is a pretty huge cost.
It's an unpopular opinion, but I'm convinced that the reason women are under represented in tech has more to do with an inherent disinterest in it, than structural barriers to it.
We can do more/better to ensure that the women who do find their way to technology face less barriers though, ending the 'brogrammer' culture, making sure women are paid a fair and equal salary, and honestly some sensitivity training (on both sides) to help improve us geeks with poor social skills, getting rid of predatory leadership is also a required element.
I'd also suggest not framing this as "incapable", that's a gross disservice to everyone, different should never be treated as inferior - and also, there is no universality here.
There is no reason for feeling that way though, as Julia points out in her text. The memo wasn't about the individual abilities. We are looking here at very intelligent types of persons. Shouldn't they be able to actually grasp the difference (and realize that in fact the conclusions from the memo even do allow for a hypthetical outcome of women as the qualitatively better coders -> i tried to explain this here https://medium.com/@martinweigert/misunderstanding-probabili...).
But yes, let's say it's inevitable that many individuals nontheless respond the way you describe, considering that this was how the memo was summarized by most.
It's harder to speculate about the costs as they are less concrete in comparison, however migth be more far-reaching in the grand scheme of things. My suggestions:
- a bunch of people who share the core goals (diversity, equality) are being alienated because they disagree with the means that are being used to get there due to too big collateral damage. This is a problem if it keeps happening frequently, and that's at least my impression. One needs more allies, not less. more consensus, no less.
- a bunch of people are being pushed over the edge towards the right which gets more confirmed in their assumptions.
- general radicalization & division - which brought trump. this division will also cause massive internal trouble within the large tech companies. you don't want to have a crowd there which is terrified to bring up an opposing viewpoint.
- science is being weaponized and loses its trust, as people try to use science to prove, not to disprove ideology. i've had some discussions over the past days that clearly were in the realm of alternative realities. so far i was under the impression that this would not happen among the more educated and "well-rounded" groups of society. this realization actually shocked me, as it suggested to me that really nothing is "safe" from being lost.
- the principle that afaik was in place since the enlightenment, that more knowledge and open debates lead to better societies than the active limitation of knowledge and debates, is being sacrificed.
- to me, it is unclear how a democratic, free society can operate properly when a debate that is mostly about science is discussed mostly on an emotional and ideological level. everyone can see the erosion of the democracy rigth now, yet it seems that too few realize how this is connected to the directions discourse takes nowadays.
i firmly believe that people are not reading books. At least not the old books on important subjects. I rarely meet 'educated' people who read books.
I believe that the liberals in particular have lost their way intellectually post-World War II. There used to be Great Intellectuals and widespread public debates e.g. Isaiah Berlin. Today there is nothing. Maybe in place of that there is a smug contentment that we've the right answers, that probably is real.
In my internet travels I've seen that people will vehemently defend the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Yet they have not read it. It is a single page of text. It is easy to mythologize a text that you haven't read. I feel like modern Liberals are becoming like the folk who didn't know Latin but received audience from the priest.
If you can't read a single page but stick up for Human Rights, then you are an idiot in the most literal sense (the original meaning of the word 'idiot' from the Greeks). These people certainly won't have read J.S Mill's On Liberty, or the counter arguments.
I don't think its just liberals - I've met as many conservatives who repeat whatever nostrums and slogans the talking heads tell them to - but cant justify or explain why they are the correct answer - and just like liberals, they're certain of the righteousness and justness of their cause.
In my humble opinion, the problem is authoritarianism - left or right doesnt matter - its dangerous - the big concern I see, is historically liberals are rather effective at governing, so a left wing authoritarian movement has teeth, when a right wing one may not.
You're quite correct on the dogmatism, but I didn't mean 'Democrat' when I said 'Liberal'. I meant 'Liberal' in the old sense which is in a nutshell the politics of the upper middle class.
In my view Authoritarian is something in demand because of poor rulership. People sense that cracks are opening up in society and then they become more authoritarian because they sense that aggressive actions may be required to reverse the trend or prevent cracks from widening. If we have good rulers, we have reduced demand for it. We don't, the governing of Europe and the United States is shockingly bad in comparison to the past. That's not a reference to Trump, it's been a slow rot and it's been systemic. Thiel has been talking about this in his videos on Youtube, there is a basic decline in the ability of government to, putting it bluntly: get shit done.
I don't get this obsession with negating biology, rather than celebrating it. That men and women are biologically different is a 100% fact. Why do we have to try and make them equal?
The equality doctrines I learned growing up in India always came down to this: celebrate people as individuals. Give them freedom to do what they want and love.
Am I wrong in holding this belief to still be true?
> That men and women are biologically different is a 100% fact.
For anything that's biological, that's perfectly fine. You won't see anyone suggest men to go to a gynecologist either ;).
> Why do we have to try and make them equal?
Which inequality make sense to you?
> celebrate people as individuals
The goal is to help individuals be who they want to be and not be judged for the sex they were born with or their nationalities.
You are from India right? Perfect example, because of outsourcing, many people believe that Indian people aren't as good in development. You are probably really good, I don't doubt that. However, there may be some people that see on your CV that you are from India and quickly decide that because you are from there, you are less qualified than someone else. Maybe the stats does prove it to be right in general, mostly because outsourcing was a great way to boost India economy, but as an individual for you, they are wrong.
The thing is, changing theses bias are extremely hard and theses bias had a pretty negative repercussion over the years. We need to hire more of them to make sure that theses bias disappear and create an environment that won't make them fear it.
We need to be careful though not to lower the hiring requirement though in the process. We need qualified people that won't create worst bias with time.
This is why I firmly believe this is a case where actions speak louder than words. Pontificating about whether men are biologically predisposed to be software engineers is not a bad thing, marginalizing qualified female engineers because they are female is.
I love how you can talk about "celebrating individuals" while pointing to statistics that only talk about the population as a whole.
Unfortunately for you, no company I can think of does their hiring by uniform random sampling. If you're seeing unevenness the success of self-selected populations you're probably not dealing with issues of biology (since, if that was true those individuals never would have gone into, and succeeded in, CS in the first place).
Also, literally everything humans do is a celebration in negating biology. We fly, we go to space, we communicate at the speed of light through fibers buried deep under the ocean, we extend our lives through medicine and our cities through technology. If biology were "king" in human development we'd still be living in the jungle eating bugs.
>It's intellectually stifling, and I'm no longer interested in enabling people who use that kind of rhetoric.
Not only is it stifling, it is tearing our society apart. If a person believes one of these "forbidden hypotheses" they sudden find themselves to be the target of irrational hatred and hostile actions.
Everyone must understand that demonizing people creates demons who may one day seek violent revenge.
If not violent, we're creating the next generation of bigots.
The current people identifying with James Damore (=men who were promised they would be selected on skills) are as young as 15 years old. Do we expect them to be inclusive during the remaining 45 years before their retirement?
I don't even understand how I should adapt my expectations for career. If competence isn't the criteria anymore, what is, then? Do opportunities now depend on our ethnicity, gender and religion? "Sorry, we know the situation is unfair for males, we're only looking for males who don't mind never being promoted and who know how to shut up." Should I choose an education based on the male/female balance in that sector? In which direction should a white male adapt?
Accomplished Diplomacy is the skill of choice. If you can manipulate all those political warriors and fanatics to support propelling you on - against there own interests, you may have a career still.
Think of it, less like a race of skilled people- and more, like rising through the ranks of a political party.
The fundamental problem is- you where to succesfull. Society moved into your flat, and with society came the priest-caste and the various lords of various thiefdoms.
Competence was never the criteria for success in tech. At least as long as I've been around, so maybe we'll say certainly not in the 21st century. It's all about being male, preferably white, with a piece of paper from a good school that knows the right words to beat the culture fit.
So far in my career the only people I've see wax poetic about competence are the incompetent ones desperately stroking their own egos.
I had exactly the same impression with racism a couple decades ago in France: I met a few young guys saying on purpose a lot of racist clichés. I do not think they were really racists, just fed up with the hardcore demonization we had then.
By for some topics such as racism, I'm under the impression that the demonizing pressure is a bit lower than before, at least in France. So there is hope.
For what's happening in the US, it seems to be very frightening -- this guy has been fired for talking about some hypothesis! I wonder why the pressure is so high. Maybe because the "deep american society" remains much more sexist than in Europe, thus justifying a much stronger defense from feminists?
Also, “Google memo” threads seem to be buried very quickly on HN, which is the only place I imagine where this discussion can be held between consenting adults, how come?
The flamewar detector and flags from people who are fed up with the constant barrage of threads about the same topic. The threads about widespread sexism at Uber were treated similarly.
> Maybe because the "deep american society" remains much more sexist than in Europe, thus justifying a much stronger defense from feminists?
No my theory is that the USA is the home of these hyperleftist utopians. The US installed these uptopians as rulers in Europe after WWII.
The host always has the most immunity to the disease. The strongest critics and detractors of the uptopians also live in the US, and they are more visible as TV and movie villians in US media.
Biology isn't a simple 1-to-1 match. Nor is it merely an n-to-m mach either. Biology is really, really messy. Whether it's secondary and primary sexual traits or the color of your eyes it's mostly a statistically driven result and not one driven by a deterministic engine. DNA for all of its structure doesn't seem to give way to an easily structured expression of genes. I think this is the critical thing lost on folks (it was lost on me for years) because we're always working with something that seems very regular and systematic but when you break it down into smaller components it becomes clear how little of that is regular and systematic. So, to say that biology magically creates our minds as a whole or even in part doesn't work out. I'm not arguing for dualism but I am arguing that biology isn't so easy to model. And that we should, James Damore included, accept that our conclusions are easily overturned when we dig a bit deeper.
> they sudden find themselves to be the target of irrational hatred and hostile actions.
So who exactly is being doxxed and threatened over this? Who is doing the doxxing and threatening? Yes, the debate is being stifled by hatred and hostile actions. We should all oppose that, but some seem to be withholding their condemnation because the results suit them.
James Damore was summarily fired for honestly writing about the problems he saw with Google's personnel policies, backed with evidence.
That is pretty threatening in my book.
If society is being torn apart, then the era of peak togetherness was vanishingly small. I mean, we had our first non-white male president less than a decade ago. That's a really hyperbolic sentiment when a lot of sizable minorities have never or only very recently felt resonably included in society.
Psychologically, men and men are way more different than women and men are different between each other as groups (on the average, as tendencies), so this whole debate is ill-conceived. The reason why there is still a 'debate' and perceived 'fight' between men and women has to do with human reproduction drives (aka "sex") and its tabooing, and not with any kind of meaningful differences that would allow you to draw conclusions about particular cases.
We could just as well discuss whether short employees should be treated on a par with taller employees, or brown-eyed on a par with blue-eyed, and so forth. It's a spurious debate.
The problem is that there still are strong systemic biases at work. Once we get that fixed, maybe we can move on to the nitty gritty statistics of exactly what is nature/nurture etc. At this moment it's pointless.
1. The goalposts for how much systemic biases have been "fixed" are moved constantly and predictably.
2. Much of the argument for the existence of systemic biases comes from willful, repeated ignoring of the already extant evidence for nature/nurture.
3. When ignoring evidence no longer suffices, proponents of the systemic bias theory move immediately to unpersoning their opponents as racist/sexist bigots.
> Much of the argument for the existence of systemic biases comes from willful, repeated ignoring of the already extant evidence for nature/nurture.
I feel it is important to point out that this is an important consideration with regards to sex, not race. There is evidence of sexual dimorphism and hormonal differences between the sexes worldwide, but as far as I know there are no such trends between races. From what I understand, genetic diversity differs more within the races than between them.
If someone knows that people who are similar to them are less likely to have an aptitude for something, they may assume that they also aren't going to be good at that thing. It doesn't matter if the stereotype is true or not.
How do you think that relates to the issue of the strong systemic biases that my comment concerned? I don't see any particular connection.
I suppose you might say that freely discussing certain topics might bring this effect into play. That would be a downside. But as with everything there are certain positives and certain negatives. The question is what is the balance of these for a given option (suppress/not-suppress).
In my comment I was saying that I'm deeply sceptical that the balance of suppressing certain talk brings you out on top. Pointing out a single benefit (avoiding that effect) doesn't really tell us anything concerning the answer to that larger question.
> Many of those hypotheses, however, are shouted down as "racist", "sexist", or some other "ist" when they come up, and all of their possible costs are then listed in a litany, with all possible benefits ignored.
The research he alludes to isn't crazy. The policy changes he advocates for aren't crazy (although I disagree with many of them). What's nefarious is that they exist in the same document. Connecting the dots would indeed be sexist. So he doesn't, and leaves it as an exercise for the reader.
Let's not pretend that "just having the conversation" is a neutral thing. It's not. He doesn't bring up these gender differences for fun..
What I find frustrating is that so few people on either side of that one point seem able to separate that from the rest of the memo. There only seem to be two camps here.
(1) The biological-differences part is wrong, therefore everything else based on that is invalid.
(2) The biological-differences part is right, therefore everything else in the memo is also right.
Why do so many people who condemn (1) as unscientific then resort to (2) which is illogical? Conflating one part of Damore's argument with the whole is fallacious, and just as stifling as anything being done on the other side.
Sure that is true. But any public debate always reduces a topic to its least complex form.
The core question really is: do meaningful biologist differences exist?
I see this as a scientific question, it has metrics, and we already have the answer. It is yes.
From there you can have a discussion about the nuances, but in regard to those people who do not believe the answer is Yes, there's no more point in validating their arguments than those of creationists or communists. Sometimes they'll bring up interesting perspectives maybe, but they are basically just wrong.
If somebody brings up six points, addressing points two through six doesn't validate anyone's point on one. Refusing to engage on those is just way of running away from parts of the debate where you're less sure. Damore said far more than that there are biological differences. He made unfounded assumptions about how those differences apply to software engineering, and further about how they apply to software engineering at Google which is pretty obviously a special case. He made false claims about the motivations behind existing policies, and proposed alternative policies for which there is either no evidence or strong contrary evidence. And more. But nobody wants to talk about those flaws, because they know they can't. It's better for the anti-diversity agenda to keep the focus on the one part that they can hope to defend. Unfortunately, too many pro-diversity advocates are playing right into that.
I know I'm probably late to the party on this one but has gender become a synonym for sex? I keep seeing the word gender thrown around in relation to the topic but if genetics are being discussed then it seems like the meat of the argument is that social constructions like gender can influence behavior but not enough, when considered across a large population, to overcome the genetic predispositions that arise as a result of a person's sex.
> This topic is harmful to people and we shouldn’t discuss it
It would be so very refreshing to hear a company just say "let's not throw incendiary memos around at work; it upsets people", instead of feeding the fire with a rationalized social stance.
Actually, I _have_ seen great CEO's defuse situations like this. I don't understand why it's not done more often.
I take umbrage that its actually harmful - I'd totally get behind the idea that its a gross distraction.
I really believe truly that each gender (because of biology and societal gender roles) has been given some unique problems solving gifts - and that we're shoving square pegs in round holes to gloss that over - but there is no universality here - I've seen men that are amazing at 'people' problems - and women who are fantastic at 'thing' problems - gender in my opinion is just another factor - like experience, knowledge, personality, education (and even age - often in engineering older is better) and others that factor into whether someone is suitable for a role.
Right now, however, we as a society are not.. 'evolved' enough to discuss stuff like this as rational adults - it turns into a very personal argument very very quickly and ends up doing more harm than the (very real, but) small good that can be accomplished by taking into account what is inherent to us.
On the contrary, it's a sign of our "evolution" that sexist ideas like the one in your second paragraph are now increasingly subject to fierce rebuttal.
There is a different between refuting (proving it wrong) and rebutting (stating it is wrong) an idea - I've seen many rebuttals, but few refutals.
People being different should never be used as an brickbat to claim inferiority - all people are different, and equality is one of the most important values to be found.
Totally agree - but in my opinion, and in the knowledge that this will receive a lot of downvotes, such statements don't require refuting, only rebutting. In my opinion, again, only statements which bear at least a nugget of rationality require the expenditure of one's own rationality in the effort to refute them.
> sexist ideas like the one in your second paragraph
Calling something sexist and leaving it at that isn't a rebuttal, and the more people agree with something empty, the more they have to answer for, it doesn't give a gram of weight to the thing. But you're not wrong since evolution doesn't exclude regression.
It's an issue with your previous post. If everyone here was simply commenting "you're wrong," "no, you're wrong" with no explanations, then the conversation wouldn't go anywhere and the conversation would be pointless. If you comment saying someone is wrong, please explain so others may learn from your viewpoint.
I previously mentioned that in a previous life, I worked myself thru school --somewhat blue collar jobs.
People, predominantly older black and white, under-educated, had quite a few views people who go beyond high school might consider offensive or ignorant and stereotyping: about race, aptitude, gender, sexuality, weight, promiscuity, prowess, etc.
You know what --people worked, they joked, occasionally scuffled --and got over it. They made their money, they saved, they retired.
It could have been better. It could have been more professional. It could have been nice and bland (in a good way)
You know one thing people didn't shy away from was strong opinions on things, one way or the other. No one got fired for cursing, or being un-PC. You'd get sacked for theft, but they called their managers and bosses asses all the time. I can't imagine Googlers calling their bosses arseholes [even if deserved]
I sometimes miss blue collar candor. Of course, when you're in it, it gets tiresome, redundant and unproductive.
I find the idealism present in this thread both sweet and optimistic, and simultaneously incredibly naive. In a way, it's SV/startup culture in a nutshell. "Anything is possible if we work together and use our brains!".... "Move fast and break things!"... "What could possibly go wrong?"
The reality is that we are only a generation from a time when not hiring black people or women for jobs requiring intelligence or competence was standard operating procedure and saying out loud "You really think hiring a black/female engineer is a good idea?" would not have been considered especially controversial. Our parents (or grandparents for some of you) lived through this time, saw the incredible damage it did to millions of people, and wisely decided to seal it away with a powerful ward (laws + social taboo). This is of course an oversimplification of a process that started long ago and is not finished - but it will have to suffice as a metaphor.
Keep in mind, this process was (and is) a hard fought war with many casualties - friendships, families, and of course actual lost lives. When I chastise my 73 year old father for not being progressive enough, he reminds me that his mother, who grew up during the depression in the south, did not consider black people to be human. His outspoken support for civil rights caused a major rift in their relationship that never healed before she died.
Of course there are costs to this ward of taboos - as well as the similar ones we are presently building around LGBT people. Any time an avenue of discussion is cut off, we are all slightly poorer for it. I would argue however that we know what is behind that ward - awful things that hurt people - and I would argue that right now, it is just not worth it. Maybe in a century we will be ready to have more frank conversations about sex, gender, and race, but I am pretty sure we are not ready now.
But that's all that is there. It says "I would argue for X" and then doesn't argue for it, just claims that it must be so. So it is just that minus intellectual honesty.
I think part of the issue is that the pendulum may be swinging too far. Sexist sentiment against men and racist sentiment against whites is growing massively at a time when whites are soon to be a minority in the country.
You say "we are... a generation from a time when not hiring black people or women for jobs... was [standard]..." If this is the case and we truly aren't in a time when this isn't standard anymore, then why should we maintain practices that are discriminatory against whites and men?
What is this meme that whites will be a minority in the United States?
The Wikipedia article [0] on the demographics of the United States, Race and Ethnicity section, states the following breakdown for US populations: Whites are 63% of the population, Hispanics are 16.3%, African-Americans are 12.2%, Asians are 4.7%, other racial and ethnic groups fall under 1% of the population.
Am I missing something here that lends itself to this conclusion that 63% of the population, nearly 200 million people, will "soon become a minority group in the country?"
This is the case for five states right now: Hawaii, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Nevada.
That article suggests the whole United States will be majority-minority by 2043 and for children by 2019. (But a critique is that these studies treat somebody with any Hispanic, Asian, or Black ancestry as non-white.)
That's very interesting. Thank you. I had heard the term majority-minority before (around an election cycle, I'm sure) but had never given it much of a read or consideration. I don't have much time to digest the article right now but hope to return to it this evening.
I think this cuts to the heart of a changing landscape regarding what people consider a "good person".
Your father believes he's a good person because he made a sacrifice for what he believed in. He sacrificed his relationship with someone he loved, and likely felt a lot of pushback which greatly hurt him in many ways. Following the battle of Gettysburg Lincoln consummated the ground to all the soldiers that lost their lives fighting for what they believed in: those fighting for slaves and those fighting for slavery. Both sides were important in shaping the fabric of the US (in his view).
Today good and evil fall along party lines. There are no more martyrs, chastising others counts as being good and even small sacrifices for good are considered exceptional acts. Today change is expected to flow freely while speech is expected to be canned and regulated, a reversal of Lincoln's time.
The core of what he is asking, and failed to drilled into sufficiently in my view, is exactly what the OP says: what % of the gender gap in various fields can be explained (within that field specifically) due to demographically correlated population preferences vs other factors.
I think there are two unforced errors:
- Trying to tie things back to causation due to biological factors gave cherry pickers sufficient ammo to snipe him as some kind of supremacist, sexist, bigot, whatever. Explaining causation was unnecessary for his argument. All that was needed was highlighting statistical correlations measured on demographics which could influence career choice. The question then reduces down to "do these correlations actually influence career choice or not" not anything about causation. From there, it's easy to ask "if so, how much? Zero is an acceptable answer."
- He should have made a good faith argument of what the world looks like if you assume these demographically correlated attributes have no effect. It was important that he really highlight other potential explanations, since to people who disagree with his premise fundamentally, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Once illustrated, leave it to readers to decide on the absurdity or validity of that counter example. Some would consider it a sufficient "proof" by counter example to make his point, others would not be convinced but at least could digest his argument more likely as one of good faith not bigotry.
In general, a lack of empathy for the lens through which his biggest, most vocal critic will read his argument was his undoing. The best path to having this discussion (regardless of merit) would be to continually buttress the argument on all sides with qualifiers and signs of good faith to those who will read it in the worst possible light. He did some of that, but not nearly enough.
I would like to believe that if he had worded things better, things would have turned out differently. I don't know that it's true though. Sadly, I think a lot of the most vocal critics calling for him to be fired never even read the memo. And a lot of the reporting seemed to just cherry pick (and misrepresent) the most controversial parts.
Seems to me that his undoing was having a thought that couldn't be expressed in 140 characters.
Maybe. I think the parties he had to write it for were the cherry-pickers. Leave them no cherries to pick, first and foremost. As soon as that fails, you lose. If you clear that hurdle, now you at least have a good chance of people reading the paper. The next hurdle is to get them to actually reading it without flipping the bozo bit due to being offended by the voice in their head telling them this person is a bigot, etc.
I think there is lack of trust forbidding that empathy. If you don't trust that this guy has good intentions, it's very very hard to have any empathy towards him.
Yes, there may or may not be biological differences. Or cultural differences. In fact, it's almost certainly both, and it really doesn't matter.
The single most important argument people like this ex-Googler never seem to understand is that they're confusing what is with what ought to be.
If there's one defining characteristic of humanity, it's our ability to overcome biology (the 'hardware',so to speak), using our unique 'software' of self-awareness and abstract reasoning.
Even if there were jobs that women were less qualified for, or had less interest in, we would want lower the difference, with equal representation if possible.
Take politics as an easy example: it's a profession that is closely associated with a bunch of stereotypical 'male' characteristics, such as the pursuit of power and the willingness to engage in conflict.
BUT: even if women as a group had a lower propensity to seek elected office, they still have an interest in being represented somewhat proportionally.
That argument easily extends to leadership positions in the private sector, and it has become relevant for the IT industry because of the growing power of technology over all aspects of life.
If you wrote just the first three paragraphs, I would upvote you. I agree completely. But then:
> Even if there were jobs that women were less qualified for, or had less interest in, we would want lower the difference, with equal representation if possible.
Who are we to tell people what they should do? If people want or don't want to work in some field, they should have the freedom to do so. They shouldn't be forced to work in some field just so that the society could mark the 50:50 checkbox.
Now, you can say, there is "discrimination", and that's why that's somebody preference. But that shouldn't really matter, as long as you fulfill each individual's honest wishes. If I ask you about something, and there is no reason for you to lie to me, then that's your preference and it should be respected if possible. If it's respected, then there is no discrimination, doesn't matter what the group outcome is. Individuals matter, groups are just constructs.
(In fact, the reason why the whole nature vs. nurture debate gets invoked is that somebody has an agenda. You can see the same thing in reverse with gays. Some people want to believe that being gay is cultural, because if it's cultural, then it can be changed, and according to them, should be.)
So this worries me, by going against individual preferences, we are going to make people unhappy, just to satisfy some "higher" goal. There is always a tension like this, in the free market (which I don't believe in), the pay should resolve it, but why to add to it?
Sadly, there are some women out there who are vocal proponents of for example more women programmers (I actually wish for that too, because programming is just cool, but I can't force anybody) and want positive discrimination, but if you ask them personally, if they considered programming as a career, they will tell you that it doesn't interest them for one reason or another. It's incredible hypocrisy.
This isn't about telling anyone what they should do–at least not in any new way.
Everyone is in some way being told what to do by society, in that the needs of the economy are reflected in any number of mechanisms that influence peoples' decisions. I'd even say almost nobody actually gets to "work in the field they want to work in", simply because the demand for "highly paid beer tester" is lower than peoples' interest in the job.
> Everyone is in some way being told what to do by society
I do consider that a problem as it is, no need to add new "societal" goals to that.
The reason why I don't like "societal" goals (like many libertarians, although I am definitely not one) is that it's not clear who is asking. I am big proponent of direct democracy (even in the workplace), where the societal goal(s) are the sum of each individual's preferences, weighted equally. This is a clear mechanism.
However, who actually wants the 50:50 gender parity (or whatever ratio) in particular jobs? Especially understanding that it would lead to lower chance to land a job that you actually enjoy doing?
Of course, I understand that we need coal miners, even though it isn't people's preference, someone has to do it. But there are physics reasons for that, we need it to survive (well, not exactly in the case of mining, it's actually more nasty). Ideally, they should be paid well enough (and in better societies they somewhat are) for the trade off.
I'm not sure the ex-Googler would disagree with you on this, though. There's even a section titled 'Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap' that clearly indicates he at least is not opposed to reducing the gender gap.
I've been wondering about this. Say that we can prove the distribution of Male/Female interest in technology/no interest in technology, and for arguments sake say we can reliably measure that to be 75:25 male to female.
Then we look at the industry as a whole and we discover placement is 90:10, that'd be indicative of a gap, and it'd be equitable to ensure that people who's interests lie in tech are not prevented from perusing it.
First of all, even having that conversation would be a HUGE leap forward in terms of intellectual honesty.
The easy answer to you question (which I think many would agree with) is yes. However, reality is a bit more complicated. Is the 75/25 split in the total population or Google applicants? Are differences originating from things under Google control or from other parts of society? etcetcetc. This is the conversation that should be had. To see differences and honestly discuss them (including striking down on unfair discrimination), while also discussing what the goal should be and what trade-offs we might want to make to get there.
But all of this is impossible when a significant and loud part of the population answer with calling people "sexist" and firing anyone who tries to broaden and nuance the conversation
From how I'm interpreting it, ryan-allen is saying "If there are quantified differences between the sexes, and even with the biological differences taken into consideration we still see a gap, should we do something about it?" which is a fantastic question made more difficult by the fact that it won't ever be quantifiable.
There may be legitimate biological factors affecting career preference, but how do we determine when that stops and cultural suppression begins?
> Even if there were jobs that women were less qualified for, or had less interest in, we would want lower the difference, with equal representation if possible.
I agree that a 50/50 split in men and female software engineers seems like a desirable thing. If it existed today I would not consider it surprising, and I would consider it to be a great thing. That said: is this also true for bricklayers and construction workers, who are basically 100% male? What about nurses or child care givers, who are predominantly female?
How do you decide which jobs that have gender skew warrant specific attention towards a balanced gender ratio? All of them? The ones that don't involve physical labor? In sports we accept men on average have higher physical strength and endurance than women, hence league separation, so perhaps gender skew is expected here and uncontroversial for the same reasons? What about the jobs that are particularly high paying or high status? Should it be the case that everyone should get an equal share of the pie of value for these desirable fields, but less desirable fields do not matter because of their high supply? Perhaps its just the jobs that just don't seem to make any sense as to why gender would skew them that are the ones we should worry about?
I think answering this question concretely and consistently is a pre-requisite to having a constructive debate about this subject. There is nothing to me particularly special or interesting about software engineering in particular that makes it stand out among other fields that are heavily gender skewed that do not seem to cause nearly as much debate, other than that it seems counter-intuitive that there should be any such imbalance, given the nature of the work. Perhaps that is enough, a "gut check" if a field should be gender dominated. If the "gut check" says "that doesn't make sense", we should strive for equality.
But here we are, back at a facet of the original memo's thesis: when those gut checks pass they are probably based upon internalized models we have for gender preferences. If you are being uncharitable, stereotypes. If you are being nice, statistically significant correlations of preferences tied to gender, backed by evidence.
> is this also true for bricklayers and construction workers...?
No, it is not–and I tried to make that argument: you want female CEOs and politicians and software engineers not (just) for the sake of each of these CEOs and engineers. You want it because these roles come with power over other people, either directly, because they make the law or they design the software we all use. And also, quite generically, they are well-paid, and money is also power.
There are, obviously, no absolutes in this: I wouldn't for a second doubt that I, as a white male can be adequately represented by a black congresswoman.
But I can easily see that, for example, more women at the CXO level could lead to better company-financed childcare.
I think what's important to mention is that this isn't a zero-sum game where any advances by women create equal and opposite losses for men: when women fail to advance to the level that their skills would usually warrant (not just because they didn't get that top job, but also because they got the impression that they should rather go into nursing than medicine etc.), then we are, as a society, letting these skills go to waste.
To see this mechanism, just consider what would happen if we prohibited everyone born in the summer months to work: would that make it easier for the other 3/4 to find a job? Of course not: their loss of income would result in a loss of demand, and therefore jobs, of equal proportions.
This effect, together with the idea that higher diversity seems to also result in better performance of companies, should more than compensate any first-order losses that better representation may initially bring.
And, specifically to your question about bricklayers etc.: of course nobody complains about not having access to something that they don't want. But women being underrepresented in some of these labor jobs doesn't mean they're getting a better deal than men: the female overrepresentation in nursing alone probably makes up for it, considering how many nurses there are. And I'd even say us men have at some point collectively decided that housework is rather unattractive, and women do the vast majority of that.
By your separation of "direct vs indirect" power it seems hard to know where the line is. Arguably, my barista has more power over me than any software engineer, because my barista can poison me if they so choose. It seems like any argument can be made that if someone is in a field that can influence other human beings they have power, so it seems hard to pin down. (though i agree some roles are clearly power oriented, like executives and political roles.)
> "And I'd even say us men have at some point collectively decided that housework is rather unattractive, and women do the vast majority of that."
This to me is a pretty huge reach (and seems vaguely sexist) but if you accept this then I don't see how you can not just apply what you said here to other fields. Do you think women seek out housework?
> That said: is this also true for bricklayers and construction workers, who are basically 100% male? What about nurses or child care givers, who are predominantly female?
There are projects to fix the gender imbalances in each of those industries.
No doubt, but do they get comparable attention? Are they similarily controversial? I think compared to tech, hell no. Degrees matter and my point is understanding why those different levels of acceptability exist.
So are you suggesting equal efforts should be expended to equalizing the representation of men in nursing and women in bricklaying, as we do other fields? They are skewed worse than most, so perhaps more effort should be put there?
Are the skews in those fields equally unacceptable or somehow more acceptable? And if they are more acceptable, why? Based upon the public discourse, the commonly accepted answer seems to be they are actually more acceptable, since it's rare to hear about efforts for increasing men in nursing or women in construction work relative to other fields like medicine, law, or STEM.
So the question reduces onto "why are some fields with gender skew more acceptable than others?" and answering that question is basically the key to everything.
I'm simply making an ethical claim. Any` skew sounds unacceptable to me.
If we agree that any` skew is unacceptable, I'd suggest we take advantage of leverage and seek the greatest skew correction per resources allocated. That might well turn out to be in construction workers…
I guess there is also an inductive problem with not accepting any skew whatsoever. For example, the field of medicine has minimal skew, but if you drill into specialties, there is massive skew. At what level of granularity does skew stop mattering? It has to become noisy at some point, but good luck deciding on a concrete and consistent metric for determining where that is.
> If there's one defining characteristic of humanity, it's our ability to overcome biology (the 'hardware',so to speak), using our unique 'software' of self-awareness and abstract reasoning.
Sure, when there's a compelling benefit to doing so, we totally can.
There are obvious benefits to gender diversity when it comes to political representation. Women are still oppressed when it comes to healthcare in the US. They need representation to be treated fairly.
It's not as obvious that there is a need for equal representation in tech. If the current geek culture works quite well, and women by and large aren't interested in joining that culture, that's not obviously a problem as long as those who do want to join aren't prevented or discouraged from doing so.
Changing that culture so that it's more appealing to women might make it better, might make it worse, or might have no effect on the effectiveness of the tech sector.
It's certainly lowered productivity for now though, with all of us commenting on these frequent stories on HN!
One part is ok. This is not mainly about facts but value systems:
For example we can decide as a society that everybody born with equal rights, and some rights are inalienable, and work out the logical consequences. On this level differences do not matter (this is exactly the content of our value proposition). But this value proposition is not against the knowledge of the differences.
Knowledge may matter:
Factual knowledge of differences can help towards your goals independently of the nature of these goals.
If your goals are equal representation - facts help, if it is to suppress people than these facts also help. Facts do not have goals and can be equally useful for morally different goals.
One of the best ways to beat the averages is to use volunteers.
If you need 100 new firefighters and pick people by random, you get absolutely average firefighters. If you just pick people who apply, without any kind of testing, you beat the average with fat margin in the quality of firefighters.
Now if you would have a problem that not enough big people are applying to be firefighters, then you might increase the success rate greatly with publicity campaign with a message: "did you know that bigger people make great firefighters!"
What you probably don't want to do is to send a message that "we now have special training exclusively to people over 185cm tall!"
That sends two messages:
1. If you are short you might read it like this: You are doomed to be kind of "workhorse fireman". You get to do the dirty work, but the exclusive tall people club is permanently closed for you.
2. If you are tall you might read it like this: You are somehow naturally inferior to shorter people and that has to be compensated. But you get to join out of pity.
Now google has been sending the latter message. Now they also send a message, that they don't give too many shits about their employees. If they genuinely care about female employees and think that memo is serious crime against them, google should have fired Damore immediately after the memo started to circulate. If Google doesn't think like that, they should have stood up for their employee Damore.
This whole thing is failure from Google on quite many levels.
"Intellectual honesty" -- that's the phrase I couldn't think of. It seems to me the stronger the condemnation the greater degree to which his arguments were misrepresented.
I don't understand why it's such big news. No matter what's in it, it's just some random guy who happens to work at google. It's not a senior exec, it's not an official google position, it's.... nothing. I just don't understand why what this guy thinks warrants discussion?
But anyone can say or write something idiotic and inflammatory (just for the sake of argument, let's assumed that the memo was such), would it have become this huge thing if he didn't work at Google? If not, then why is Google placed on such a pedestal and why do we lionize and in turn pillory Googlers? I think part of the problem is the place Google occupies in the popular imagination. It's sort of this lightning rod and poster child of Silicon Valley. Had this happen at most company, it would have simply been an HR issue at that company.
It sparked a discussion with many participants inside Google (which is a huge company) and outside. The news was mostly related to the size of the group discussing it and then circled back to "what will the company execs do"
Author does good here, but perpetuates the same mistake most people talking about the memo do:
There were additional sections after the "hypothesis", which had specific policy suggestions--most of which were aimed at helping the situation for a broader class of people and for improving visibility into the process. That somehow keeps getting missed.
And he also pointed out that people are scared to actually talk about these things at Google. Considering he was fired, that seemed like a pretty on the mark observation.
If worked at Google and thought the evidence suggests that due to natural difference in the sexes, women are less likely to seek a job in tech -- that's not an ethical opinion on whether that is as it should be, but an opinion (whether right or wrong) on how things are -- then I'd be more scared than ever of voicing that opinion.
Yes, and if the evidence he was using was wrong the best thing Google can do is to explain why it is wrong to change the perception. Instead, they are basically telling people that if they look at the evidence and reach a similar conclusion, they stand a chance of being fired for talking about it.
If someone points to the fact that there are many more blacks in the NFL than can be accounted if football talent is randomly distributed in the population and points to some evidence that maybe there are biological differences behind those numbers, the worst thing you can do is try to punish them for thinking. If they are using bad data, address that. If they are making a logical error, address that. But you can't just try to punish them because they looked at the statistics and the evidence and reached a conclusion that you don't like, but don't want to explain why you think it is wrong.
The real tragedy in the discussion is this assumption, quoted from the OP:
"His hypothesis implies that personality differences mean a smaller percentage of women will be interested in and/or qualified for a Google job than men"
Empathy and social intelligence are actively disqualifying factors for a job at Google, or software in general? That is so wrong on so many levels.
I completely agree that communication and people skills are necessary to be a great programmer.
But consider that in order to get a job as a programmer, I first had to spend 4 years taking relatively intensive courses in math and computer science (even longer if you go back to elective courses in high school), and empathy was not an important factor in getting through my coursework or examinations. Sure there are other paths into the industry, but no matter how you get here, the fact is that learning to code is intensive.
Consider also that a large portion of the population can't pass a FizzBuzz programming interview (at least if Jeff Atwood is to be believed). And if you can't write FizzBuzz, no amount of empathy in the world is going to make you a good programmer.
So yes, "soft skills" are tremendously important. But "hard skills" take priority. And whatever the cause may be, the fact is that right now there is a larger proportion of men than women who possess those hard skills.
> But consider that in order to get a job as a programmer, I first had to spend 4 years taking relatively intensive courses in math and computer science (even longer if you go back to elective courses in high school), and empathy was not an important factor in getting through my coursework or examinations. Sure there are other paths into the industry, but no matter how you get here, the fact is that learning to code is intensive.
If you look at the number of maths majors compared to the number of computer science majors, this argument isn't very persuasive. The former had more than 40% women in 2012, the latter less than 20%.
Couple of thoughts on the percentage of female math majors...
First - a significant percentage of math majors eventually go into teaching. I wasn't able to find the exact percentage, but 3 of the 5 most common jobs for math majors are in teaching. Second - the types of math courses that undergraduate CS majors take is different from the types of courses that math majors take - especially math majors who are planning to go into teaching. CS degrees tend to focus more on discrete math and algorithms, whereas as math degrees focus on... well... I don't actually know what math degrees require. This is pure anecdote (and probably bound to piss off a few math majors), but I remember taking a group theory course in my 4th year and all of the math majors in the course seemed to struggle far more than the CS majors in the course.
So if you consider that math major often means teacher, then no I don't think that data point about 40% of math majors being female does much to dispel traditional gender stereotypes.
Here’s another fun thing you can do with this theory: understand why women are so well represented in college math classes. Women are around 20% of CS majors, physics majors, engineering majors, etc – but almost half of math majors! This should be shocking. Aren’t we constantly told that women are bombarded with stereotypes about math being for men? Isn’t the archetypal example of children learning gender roles that Barbie doll that said “Math is hard, let’s go shopping?” And yet women’s representation in undergraduate math classes is really quite good.
I was totally confused by this for a while until a commenter directed me to the data on what people actually do with math degrees. The answer is mostly: they become math teachers. They work in elementary schools and high schools, with people.
Then all those future math teachers leave for the schools after undergrad, and so math grad school ends up with pretty much the same male-tilted gender balance as CS, physics, and engineering grad school.
...empathy was not an important factor in getting through my coursework or examinations.
When you put it that way, it is a shocking indictment of how little the current educational system actually serves the needs of the software industry.
Most of us work on things that interact with, and affect, real people. Yet engineers are usually hired based on how well they can memorize data structures that they will almost never need in their actual daily work. It's frustrating for the engineers who expected to work on awesome abstract CS problems, and instead have to deal with messy systems that contain messy data that users care about.
That's obviously not true, as there are major differences between professions.
The work of an architect or event planner affects people directly and intimately in everyday interactions. The work of a mathematician or sociologist doesn't.
Programmers' work is closer to the former group, but educational and hiring practices pretend it's more like the latter.
Is it really though. Typically programmers do not interact directly other than with other of their kind (yes I used the tribalism adjective). software architects and testers neither.
This opposed to analysts, marketing who directly engage with clients and management who interact with their own group as well as at least people they manage.
If we're talking measurements then Empathy and Social intelligence are not a thing in modern psychometrics, but Extroversion and Agreeableness are, though (women score higher in men than agreeableness from what I remember).
And of course they are not disqualifying factors.
I think what he is referring to is that women in general prefer people to things, and that would naturally push more boys to computers. When I get home I'll update this comment with sources.
My guess is the implicit assumption is that 'gender in tech should be 50/50', but the memo author was arguing that studies point to that this would actually not be equitable.
> 2. Say “This topic is harmful to people and we shouldn’t discuss it” (a little draconian maybe, but at least intellectually honest)
This is so wrong in so many ways. Don't call back in question that the universe was created in 7 day, that the earth is flat, global warming etc. Because it is harmful to believers ?
It's not just a difference in personality. It's a difference in behavioral and intellectual capability. Denying or repressing it is plain stupid. This essay proves that something is totally wrong in the way people handle this issue. But this is sadly not a surprize.
I think it's fair for an employer to say to its employees. After all, you are there to get work done, not solve all of the problems in the world.
But in this particular issue I think that Google actually opened the door by implementing a diversity program that favors one group of people over another (note: I personally have no issues with affirmative action programs, but let's at least be intellectually honest about what they are), and forcing employees to sit through special training. Now he is complaining about workplace conditions. And firing employees for complaining about workplace conditions is not ok (and potentially illegal in California).
What happened to the good old days of vim vs emacs?
The real basilisk is believing basilisks exist. Heterodoxy strengthens us all and if you chose to exclude the smart people because their thoughts are unhelpful, or patently offensive, you might find yourself without any allies when you need them most.
> However, his overall claim that there exist personality differences between genders that differentially affect men’s and women’s interest in and aptitude for tech jobs, is what people are mostly getting mad at. And that’s a claim that seems plausibly true. Not obviously true, but also not a claim you would be justified in emphatically dismissing as false, as many people have, including Google, who called them “incorrect assumptions.”
I'm sorry, the last sentence is not true - Pichai was very careful not to say which parts of the memo were "incorrect assumptions".
Note that Sundar Pichai is very clearly in category 2, i.e. he does not dismiss the memo as untruthful or expressly voices disagreement.
What irks me is that the discussion in the main stream media ignores the fact that someone was fired for writing relevant information in a forum explicitely introduced by the employer to anonymously voicing workplace opinions (a "safe space"), not by "circulating a memo". Maybe discussions in this forum can be restricted to arguments about whether the fried chicken was particularly bad today.
What irks me is that the discussion in the main stream media ignores the fact that someone was fired for writing relevant information in a forum explicitely introduced by the employer to anonymously voicing workplace opinions (a "safe space"), not by "circulating a memo".
Citation on this point? I have been following the news on this story pretty closely and have not been able to find out much about how the "memo" was initially "published". I agree that if true, this would be relevant to whether or not he deserved to be fired.
Search for "The document was first posted to an internal company forum". I cannot find an authoritative source, but it seems much more plausible to me than James Damore mailing it to the global Google email list. If you know enterprisey social networks, posting on some forum there might send notifications to subscribers (IBM Connections does this, for example), but stating "James Damore wrote a memo" is very misleading.
Now, I don't deny that Damore is somewhat of a (smart and polite) troll, but he played fair within the rules set by Google by posting to a forum dedicated to workplace issues. His message to SJWs is clearly that he hates the game, not the players, but Google responds by banning an opposing player instead of honestly acknowledging the fact that they have a large part of the workforce with a conservative mindset who are silenced by company policy.
> His hypothesis implies that personality differences mean a smaller percentage of women will be interested in and/or qualified for a Google job than men, but that doesn’t mean any of the women at Google fall below the “qualified” threshold.
I think its fair to say that not everyone shares that view.
This is probably the key to controversy in my mind. You could read it that way.
However, you can choose to interpret the sections about 'Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate' and 'Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.' as 'some people we're hiring don't cut it, we should hire more white men'.
That's not what it says. You don't have to interpret it that way.
...but clearly a lot of people did.
My advice? Stop defending it. You can talk about these issues without this memo.
Forget the memo. The memo was stupid and misguided. Releasing it internally at work was unreservedly stupid. ...but what's done is done.
Do you want to spend the next year talking about the memo, and the specifics of 'did it or did it not technically say such and such', or the actual issues he was trying to raise?
He specifically said 'decreasing the false negative rate', not 'increasing the false positive rate.' That is explicitly worded (he could have been more succinct) to imply that all people hired by Google are good enough to work at Google. He is saying that IF you are already good enough to work at Google, then your odds if you are from a protected minority group are better than if you are not.
You are right that people interpreted that sentence differently, but those interpretations were wrong.
yeah, ok... but I mean, really, do you care what he said?
I mean, do you really care if people misinterpreted it? Is that what is important here? What someone did or didn't mean when they did or didn't say something?
I honestly couldn't care less if they were 'wrong' interpretations.
I mean, really, honestly, I don't give the slightest damn about this guy or what he says or thinks. Really. I don't know him, I don't care.
...but maybe the issues he's raised are worth talking about? maybe? I'm not sure.
...but that's certainly more interesting than digging over this document and what he may or may not have meant.
Forget what he said. Think on your own for a second.
Do you think that diversity programs necessarily result in lower quality candidates filling some roles, even if the program only forces a quota into the interview process?
Do you think that's a bad thing, that it has tangible negative outcomes for businesses?
How do you propose to address the issues around this stuff, or is diversity something you don't think is worth having?
Forget the darn document and have an opinion of your own for goodness sake (and be prepared to defend it and talk about).
Yes it is critically important what he said. He got fired, very publicly, from Google for what he said, or at least an interpretation of what he said. This probably killed his career in tech, if not generally, assuming he doesn't win a wrongful termination settlement. I think it matters a LOT if the reason he got fired was for a hysterical mob justice over a misinterpretation of something he didn't actually say. That is in fact the core issue over outrage -- that someone can get fired over making what is an objectively true mathematical argument. That has chilling effects.
IF he was worried about his job, why did he circulate a memo with highly controversial views around the company?
Hes a little entitled to think that people cared to not only hear his controversial view, but also read his memo about his controversial thoughts on this controversial subject within a private company.
What outcome was he expecting from doing this? Blaming google? Seriously?
> He got fired, very publicly, from Google for what he said, or at least an interpretation of what he said.
I don't care. I don't know the dude. Lifes tough, people get fired. /shrug.
> That is in fact the core issue over outrage -- that someone can get fired over making what is an objectively true mathematical argument.
Ah... so what you care about it freedom of speech and expression, nothing to do with diversity?
Well, at least I can appreciate your concern on that front; I'm not really that fussed about that issue, because imo he violated their CoC during work hours; he got fired for it. Tough luck dude.
If he'd been persecuted for doing that outside of work hours, I'd have an issue with it, but... fair enough. I can see why you care about exactly what he said in that case.
I think it's important to draw the distinction on what you're getting upset by though; because a lot of people (like me) don't care at all he got fired; but we're upset by the content his memo.
You literally don't care about people unless you personally know them?
Or if you do care about them, what's the reason you don't care about this person, nor any the effects of this situation on other people you don't know?
> Do you care that Bob down the road got fired for swearing at his boss? I bet you don't.
That's hardly a fitting analogy.
And yes, I for one do care about people including strangers, at least in the sense that I don't like hearing of bad things befalling others. Until they signal good reasons for ceasing to care about them like you are doing, in those cases I restrict my empathy to recognize their lack of empathy.
> Do you think that diversity programs necessarily result in lower quality candidates filling some roles,
Not all diversity programs, ...
> even if the program only forces a quota into the interview process?
... but if the "program" only amounts to setting a minimum quota, without any concrete plan for action on achieving the quota.
Say you believe the proportion of women in programming, given a fair hiring process, would be at least 30%, so you set that as a minimum quota all your interviewers have to fulfill. If you are right about the average, by pure randomness some interviewers will make their quota easily. But what about those who are unlucky and don't have enough qualified candidates to choose from? They will have to lower their standards to make the quota.
Fixed limits are just too blunt, they focus on the results a fair process would achieve, but fail to enforce that they actually come about due to a fair process.
> Do you think that's a bad thing, that it has tangible negative outcomes for businesses?
It depends on the concrete program in question and how much it misfires (or not), but the negative outcomes for the business will probably be relatively small. They might have to spend more money on training and get a higher turnover of employees, but Google is probably more selective than they have to, so they can afford to hire some slightly less qualified candidates.
> How do you propose to address the issues around this stuff,
I'm partial to blinded tests and outreach programs, since the combination can address both hiring bias and lack of interest.
> or is diversity something you don't think is worth having?
I think in terms of business value, gender diversity is overrated (as opposed to diversity of thought). Nonetheless, discrimination and harassment don't just affect aggregates like diversity, they also hurt individuals, so I think fighting them is important.
> 'Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate'
Imagine you have 100 people applying for 10 positions, and the demographic breakdown of applicants (based on current trends in tech) is 20 women and 80 men.
Let's also say that being male or female doesn't give you any special aptitude, and that the aptitude of all candidates regardless of gender follows a normal distribution along a bell-curve.
Because of that and because of Google's standards, let's say that only 25% of all candidates have the skills and qualifications necessary to work at Google, which breaks down to 5 women and 20 men.
Once again assuming a normal distribution with neither men nor women over or underrepresented in skill level, then without any sort of correcting for diversity, candidates would need to be in the top 10% of all candidates to receive a job offer (10 / 100). , this is 2 women and 8 men, leaving us with a false negative rate (i.e. people skilled enough to work at Google but who get declined) of 3 women and 12 men.
But with an eye for diversity, Google decides to hire all the qualified women (5), with the remaining positions taken by men, so 5 and 5, a 50/50 split.
Each of the candidates is qualified and capable of working for Google, but the false negative rate for women has been reduced from 3 to 0. This is what he meant by an effectively lowered bar by decreasing the false negative rate. The women now only need to be in the top 25% of all women candidates, whereas the men need to be in the top 6.25% of male candidates.
There's nothing false or wrong about that statement, it's just maths that happens as a result of the diverse hiring practices skewing the distribution of candidates, with the bar being 'effectively' lowered for the diverse candidates from top 10% to top 25%.
This has the unfortunate side effect that over time, if you are taking the top 6.25% from the non-diverse group (men in this case), but the top 25% from the other group then the non-diverse group will eventually have on average more high-performers (which affects things like salaries, promotions and more).
It's not to say that men are better, just that the hiring practices have been structured to select men from a higher performing percentage of the population. You would get the same results in favor of women if you were only selecting the top 6.25% of women vs the top 25% of men.
Your analysis assumes that it's always the best candidate that's hired. Given how much tech companies are afraid of false positives (i.e. hiring candidates that turnout to be bad), I'm not sure that assumption is warranted. It's more likely that there's a bar, and everyone that clears that bar could be hired, and then a (random) sample of those people are.
So in the above example, it's still top 25% of women and men that are hired, it's just that a top-25% woman has a higher chance of being hired (because of "fast-tracking" or other affirmative action policies) than a top-25% man.
Personally I find it hard to believe that the companiesdoing affirmative action manage to do it without lowering the bar, but it's definitely logically and statistically possible.
But you are correct in that my analysis makes several assumptions that might not hold up in real life, it was meant merely to show that the statement from the original memo doesn't mean (as many people incorrectly thought) that Damore was saying Google was lowering its standards for diversity hires.
> Personally I find it hard to believe that the companiesdoing affirmative action manage to do it without lowering the bar
Ok but even assuming as you do above that a random sample is hired such that "it's still top 25% of women and men that are hired," then you have lowered the bar for everyone from 10% to 25%.
Yes that still meets their own internal requirements, but is what the author meant when he said 'effectively' lower the bar by decreasing the false negative rate.
If the fact that the applicant population is slanted towards a particular gender means (or is caused by the fact) that it is harder for the other gender in that field, then the smaller population will in fact be better on average than the larger, because it will have taken them more motivation, determination, work and ability to win over others just to get them to where they are.
At least, this seems like the most likely explanation for the fact that individuals in the much smaller group of female startup founders outperform the male startup founders that has been reported in a number of places. e.g.
> For growing start-ups, those with female founders almost universally outperformed their male-only counterparts. The fastest-growing companies at 200%+ growth, are 75% more likely to have a female founder.
> Once again assuming a normal distribution with neither men nor women over or underrepresented in skill level
This is probably wrong, and if your hiring practices assume it in a scenario where it is harder for one gender to even make it to the applicant stage then they are unfairly discriminatory.
> means that it is harder for the other gender in that field, then the smaller population will in fact be better on average than the larger, because it will have taken them more motivation, determination, work and ability to win over others just to get them to where they are.
Do you have any studies or statistics to back you up or is this just what you believe? Also, how does it account for males that come from a poor/under-privileged backgrounds that also requires them to have more motivation, determination, work and ability to win over others and get where they are?
> The fastest-growing companies at 200%+ growth, are 75% more likely to have a female founder.
Revenue growth is meaningless without any sort of revenue numbers to compare it against - compare growing revenues from $5,000/year to $15,000/year (200% growth) with growing from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000 (100% growth).
As a corollary to your point though, how many women founders are there in unicorns?
Would such companies be more or less successful with female founders, I don't know, but I suspect gender doesn't really play much of a role, in much the same way I suspect that gender of founders doesn't play much of a role in revenue growth.
> This is probably wrong,
So you think that there is difference in ability based on gender?
> Do you have any studies or statistics to back you up or is this just what you believe?
I wasn't clear enough. There are some situations where smaller subgroups are overrepresented at the top of the field compared to their starting position, startups being one. This is something that can be observed as an empirical fact. The reason for it is perhaps a matter for debate as working out reasons is harder to study and I don't know of any that do in this case, but the most likely seeming reason to me is what I said - that in a field where the predominate culture has a preference, those who don't meet that preference will have to be better just to pass the bar for entry.
> As a corollary to your point though, how many women founders are there in unicorns?
I actually don't know, since it's difficult to find stats and there is a relatively small population of unicorns (meaning that any conclusion would have to be caveated), but I know of these unicorns with women on their founding teams: Ant Financial, Alibaba, GrabTaxi, Houzz, SunRun, Gilt Groupe, renaissance learning, lynda.com, cloudflare, kabam, 23andMe, fanduel, nextdoor, medallia, eventbrite, and there are a few unicorns that were spun out of other companies with women taking a lead role in that process.
FirstRound.com has an interesting article:
> companies with a female founder performed 63% better than our investments with all-male founding teams. And, if you look at First Round's top 10 investments of all time based on value created for investors, three of those teams have at least one female founder — far outpacing the percentage of female tech founders in general.
> So you think that there is difference in ability based on gender?
I didn't mean to make any statement on that topic. I was trying to say that if you assume that your applicants (not the population in general) have ability normally distributed regardless of gender, then you're probably wrong.
Recycling (and slightly modifying) a previous comment [0]:
Certain topics, that otherwise might be interesting to discuss, are surrounded by minefields. One such topic is the distribution of intellectual ability within subgroups of the population. This minefield was not put in place by a repressive government. Nor was it secretly put in place overnight by a fanatic band of social-justice zealots.
My observation, which I will offer without citation, is that this particular minefield was put in place, mine by mine, over a period of decades, through a process of fairly broad societal consensus.
To those who suggest clearing the minefield, thus permitting this topic to be discussed freely in public, I will invoke the principle of Chesterton's fence [1]: Before you talk of removing the mines, you need to show that you understand why the minefield was created in the first place, and you need to explain why now is the time to remove it.
> I will invoke the principle of Chesterton's fence [1]: Before you talk of removing the mines, you need to show that you understand why the minefield was created in the first place, and you need to explain why now is the time to remove it.
That's a bit different to what the Wikipedia page describes it as. It describes it as being to important to understand the reasons for X before trying to change X. It doesn't say anything about needing to show that you understand it, and needing to explain why now is the time to remove it.
Those two additional requirements seem unreasonable for wanting to talk about some topic. For example, I would imagine that, 50-100 years ago, in a lot of the world, the idea of discussing the legitimacy of gay marriage would have been mostly taboo in public. To say that anyone wanting to broach the topic needed to show why the taboo was created in the first place, and why then was the time to remove it, seems unreasonable to me.
----
As a sideline, that Wikipedia entry is, in its current state, pretty poor quality. Here is a quote from it:
History is full of examples of negative outcomes that resulted from the failure to understand this admonition. Pandora opened a box containing all the world's evils. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, despite God's admonition not to, and the whole world was plunged into original sin
You're correct that I went a bit further than Chesterton himself did. But not a lot further.
By the way, I linked to the wrong Wikipedia entry. The one I linked to (and that you found the strange quote in) appears to be an internal document, explaining the principle of Chesterton's Fence to would-be Wikipedia editors. I should have linked to the Wikipedia article instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27...
> That's a bit different to what the Wikipedia page describes it as. It describes it as being to important to understand the reasons for X before trying to change X. It doesn't say anything about needing to show that you understand it, and needing to explain why now is the time to remove it.
Sure it's uncomfortable to talk about but it's becoming increasingly important that we do. Without understanding why a phenomena like the STEM/leadership gap exists we can't hope to fix it. Diversity programs really aren't working - Google is at 80/20 for tech which is just about the same as the industry (78/22) (Department Of Labor). My policy is 'Fuck Chesterton Fences'(FCF). I don't want to live in a world of rusting fences.
> My policy is 'Fuck Chesterton Fences'(FCF). I don't want to live in a world of rusting fences.
I remember that policy from the time of rampant privatization here in Europe. "Why should the government provide this service .." - well, a few years later we knew why.
It's also quite often the mentality of people that say "you know what? Our software sucks and the architecture is stupid, I will build a new, far better one!" ... yeah, that usually doesn't work either.
I saw a comment the other day which sums the problem with that attitude up quite nicely (paraphrased, cannot find it right now): "Without inside knowledge it's hard to distinguish stupidity from good engineering"
> I remember that policy from the time of rampant privatization here in Europe. "Why should the government provide this service .." - well, a few years later we knew why.
Going roughly by what I assume to be the GP's logic then, there should be a minefield surrounding discussions of having the government provide public services at all, since, naturally, that will lead to Soviet-style communism and the deaths of tens of millions.
I'd also be wary of ascribing to large-scale political sentiment (not even shared by all) the kind of purpose and wisdom involved in engineering decisions.
As you quoted "Without inside knowledge it's hard to distinguish stupidity from good engineering" - in this case, there is no inside knowledge.
That's not the argument at all, because there was nowhere in Europe where the government provided no services[0]. Chesterton's fence isn't an argument in favour of non-intervention or laissez-faire economics, it's an argument in favour of inertia. If anything, it implies that the Soviet bureaucracy should have been slowly and carefully dismantled, which isn't obviously wrong if you read accounts of what happened after the dissolution of the USSR.
[0] At least in theory. Failing to provide a promised service is not the same as deliberately providing no service. It might not even possible for a government worth the name to do literally nothing.
Apologetics. Truth is always best policy. If you really want to live in a regime of repressive groupthink, Christianity has demonstrably better side effects this bullshit (it is possible to draw parallels to the evolution of virulence with these...). Still not as good as the truth.
It's better to let people discuss these topics rather than to try to stop them talking about them. If the sentiments exist and they are repressed they will simply go underground where you cannot see them. Don't you want to know what your opposition think?
Painting those you disagree with (whether you're wrong, or you're right) with the bigot brush is not going to bring any change, there's only two choices: violence or discussion, so let's discuss.
Part of the difficulty, in my view, is that we are thinking about this as a high level benevolent debate - in this scientific, clean and clear environment we think of where we can throw out all manner of idea and deconstruct it logically then there is no argument that is off limits.
Let me say straight up, I love that kind of discussion, I often have a good chat with my right/left/feminist/religious etc. close friends about usually off limit topics... I theoretically would want to be able to do that in the broader population and in broader society.
But the older I get, and the more I see where the internet has taken freedom of discourse, the more I believe that most people don't argue and debate like that. With "Fake news" and barmy political ideologies getting airtime and actually GAINING in backing, and with the quality of media dropping more and more every day with the volume of rubbish news getting regurgitated on social media as fact without journalistic standards in place, I'm more seeing that the majority of discourse is headlines and snippets thrown around with awful evidence and logic, people see it, get confirmation bias on it, or think it falls in line with their view, and then they share onwards.
A post/article/clickbait arguing against it, or proving its sources as incorrect is not nearly as shared and not nearly as widely disseminated and then you end up with a debunked viewpoint being spread wider than it ever should have, because there was no curation of the evidence.
The "Bigot Brush" perhaps played a part in stopping ideas being shared around that were fairly out of the normal discussion, though it also repressed peoples ability to discuss and expose their broader ideas that went against the grain too. It played its part in stopping aggressive ideas from circulating to a broad enough audience for it to damage people. (Not all the time of course, but more than it occurred in the past).
Now am I saying that curation and thought policing of ideas is a good thing? No, probably not. In many cases I think the media that aims itself at the soft left issues that have realised they can turn a buck through whipping up a frenzy on inconsequential "SJW" issues are to blame for pushing away a significant portion of the population towards their own barmy news sources, but I also think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and neither complete freedom without fear of reprisal, or significant policing/social shaming of ideals is a good place to be - and somehow we have ended up with a fair bit of both.
I liked it better when these people were confined to ugly subreddits, Daily Stormer, and Breitbart and not working in the White House and getting attention in popular media. I hope we send them back to hell ASAP and twist the lid on a little tighter next time.
In my experience, there are three problems with these debates (incl. the Google memo) that are huge enough that I believe it's best to avoid them entirely in the general public:
1. To many opinions in them are agenda-driven. There are racists and sexists, and if they are allowed to post pseudonymously they come out in troves. For example, the memo was recently discussed on /. and this turned very, very ugly.
2. Not enough people are aware that issues of social justice cannot be backed up by scientific facts in a straightforward way. They don't distinguish between preferences and capabilities, status quo and what would be desirable, etc. It's pointless to discuss such topics with anyone who isn't aware of these distinctions. Facts do not play the role in these debates that many seemingly scientifically-minded people believe they do. I can give examples, but don't want to do that now, because these would invariably stir up some unnecessary controversy. Well, I'll give one that is perhaps not so controversial: Many women did not express any desire to vote and considered suffragettes as too radical. The preferences of these women doesn't tell you anything about whether women should be allowed to vote or not, though. The status quo can be changed at any time if there is enough of a will to do so. Women used to be executed for adultery in Medieval Europe, and this is no longer so, because we have changed society to the better over the centuries.
3. The discussions are almost always based gross and insubstantial generalizations and an inability to describe tendencies correctly or draw adequate conclusions from small tendencies. The groups chosen are also often based on superficial differences or historical accidents.
I agree in general, but made an exception in this case:
1) The original comment appeared on a thread that fell off the front page soon afterwards, so not many people saw it;
2) I thought it offered an original point of view;
3) It received some upvotes, which I interpreted as meaning that it put into words something that others had been thinking, but hadn't quite figured out how to say.
Anyway, it has now had a chance to be viewed by an appropriately large audience, so I will happily retire it.
What? So according to this policy, you are now no longer allowed to complain about repeating comments, because you have now written that comment, once and for all?
It's a mine field only at work and in formal situations. Outside work, one hears slurs about women often. There's nothing "careful" about it. Women felt protected and comfortable at the work places because there were explicit and implicit rules that said you can't speak slurs, or even something that might look like a slur. Personally I don't think it's time to clear this "mine field" yet, but I think a valid argument would be "we're educated enough that both men and women today can debate about gender without the prejudices that plagued our ancestors". I don't think the valley companies are there yet.
I must have missed the part of the memo where he used slurs.
I've noticed this kind of statement often: "How can you say X about group A - don't you know group A suffers from Y??", as a way to try and associate X with (the clearly bad) Y.
> 1)/[sic]he never made a case for why we shouldn’t think other factors are even bigger
Really? The memo wasn't about answering life's questions, but to propose narrow solutions with based on pointed evidence. Preference or not, attacking the hypothesis because you want a different one answered is idiotic and is not a proper response. It's basically a common SJW ad hominem. "You just aren't smart enough to understand what's going on here!"
Julia might want to look at the nordic countries that have pushed the gender gaps even wider with some very sophisticated progressive social policies to prevent other factors.
In addition to people in favor of affirmative action and people opposed to affirmative action, there's the large class of people who are in favor of affirmative action, but against the political correctness pressure of having to act like they believe this in for the benefit of all instead of the explicit benefit of the affected minority.
This column is set in a modern edition of Baskerville, one of my all-time favourite typefaces and (unlike Garamond and Optima) one that has now transitioned beautifully to a pixel display. Ironically the first time I saw Baskerville on a screen it was the heavy glyphs of Google's early (ca.1998) logo, in which it seemed to me rather flabby and unwell. So it is delightful to see this variant, like an old friend showing up looking happy and healthy. I love the vitality of those broad-shouldered, energetic capitals, and the careful flourishes of the italic form that so gracefully engage us for asides and for emphasis! And that open bowl on the 'g' for which I am always such a sucker.
One day I hope there will be a usable screen variant of Garamond. I've had a tinker and I know it's beyond my own very limited design abilities to achieve.
The typography of the Google Memo, by contrast, is simply dismal and a sorry reminder of why I don't use Google Docs.
I don’t doubt that the writer of the memo had the best of intentions with this memo. And there’s even some parts that I could support.
But the main thing that gets to me is the idea of biological differences being partially to blame. He views males as predetermined to be better engineers. And he was a senior engineer who was in a hiring position. Someone who is hiring engineers, that views female engineers as biologically inferior for the job, allows for a system of discriminatory hiring to occur.
> that views female engineers as biologically inferior for the job
Did you read the article? Here's the money quote:
> His hypothesis implies that personality differences mean a smaller percentage of women will be interested in and/or qualified for a Google job than men, but that doesn’t mean any of the women at Google fall below the “qualified” threshold.
None of his expressed views lead me to assume that he'd think less of a female candidate that made it through the screening process -- and that's a viewpoint he's explicitly concerned about protecting. Even if some of his opinions did lead him to have biases at least he's open about them and interested in examining them which is the first step to fixing them.
>But the main thing that gets to me is the idea of biological differences being partially to blame.
The fact that something "gets you" doesn't in any way determine whether or not it's true.
>He views males as predetermined to be better engineers.
No he doesn't.
>that views female engineers as biologically inferior for the job
He doesn't appear to believe that either.
I feel like for you to believe what you do about the content of that memo you either didn't actually read it or have a serious lack of understanding of statistics. This chart from the memo will hopefully help. http://i.imgur.com/IaVS70v.jpg
You shouldn't have changed your comment, even if you are scared of reprisal. Your observation about people inferring motives and being hard to argue with was on point.
This is quite well-put, and gets at the heart of what pisses people off.
There exists a large set of hypotheses which are plausible, and not just "spaghetti-monster God" plausible, but "> 20% chance this is the case" plausible.
Many of those hypotheses, however, are shouted down as "racist", "sexist", or some other "ist" when they come up, and all of their possible costs are then listed in a litany, with all possible benefits ignored.
It's intellectually stifling, and I'm no longer interested in enabling people who use that kind of rhetoric.