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As with many defenses of the Damore memo (and more than a few attacks against it as well), this completely misses the point. Let's say for the sake of argument

As with many defenses of the Damore memo (and more than a few attacks against it as well), this completely misses the point. Let's say for the sake of argument that there are differences in ability and/or preference between men and women. Let's even say that the magnitude of those differences is sufficient to explain a 4:1 ratio between male and female engineers at Google (which is clearly not true). My response is still SO WHAT? That outlandish premise still doesn't even begin to justify his tone, his complaints, or his policy proposals. * Differences in ability do not support his accusation of silencing. They're unrelated. * Phrases like "the left tends to deny science" and "extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians" are inflammatory, prejudicial, and discriminatory in their own right, independently of whether gender differences exist. * Diversity is provably good even in the presence of gender differences. Many studies have shown that the effect of mixed teams outperforming single-gender teams far outweighs any individual differences. I could go on and on about other ways that Damore comes across as a radically intolerant jerk, a hypocrite, etc. but I'm trying to stay on one point. The "science" part of Damore's memo, which the OP is meant to support, is practically irrelevant. That's not the only part that's offensive, or dangerous, or in violation of his employee agreement. It's not even the only part that's unscientific, since sociology and economics are involved as well as biology and he doesn't even try to engage honestly with those. His belief that women are less fit to be engineers is abhorrent, but so separately are his other beliefs. Even the strongest refutation of that one point doesn't make a dent in the memo's total start-to-finish toxicity.

Smaug123 9y ago
To clarify: your point is that the question of whether or not he's right is irrelevant; he shouldn't have said what he said, because what he said is abhorrent and/or dangerous?
- notacoward 9y ago
  No, that's a total misrepresentation of what I said. I'm saying whether he's right on that one point is irrelevant, because he tries to make a hundred others that are just as bad. But thanks for showing how Damore's supporters are just as guilty of "virtue signaling" as they accuse others of being.
  - Smaug123 9y ago
    If you want people to understand you, you should avoid attacking them when they try. I will not converse further with you.
    - notacoward 9y ago
      Good. If you had wanted to engage constructively, you wouldn't have led with a strawman. The response - not attack - was no more or less than such a non-contribution deserved.
likelynew 9y ago
> magnitude of those differences is sufficient to explain a 4:1 ratio between male and female engineers at Google (which is clearly not true) I had obtained numbers for number of pull requests in github and participation in competitive coding contests some time back. Gender ratios are close to 10:1 on both of the places. It's relevant because there is neither any barrier nor lowering the bar due to gender in these.
- notacoward 9y ago
  There's no lowering of the bar in the sense of denying hires/promotions, but I think it's fair to say that there are still significant disincentives to female participation. Also, I know this is heresy, but GitHub is not necessarily representative of software engineering in general. It emphasizes pure code development over ops or design, it emphasizes a very particular style of open source, it's skewed toward certain project types and sizes, etc. How many of those "male" commits were women hiding their gender, or senior males acting as the upstream conduit for an entire mixed team working against a repo elsewhere? Competitive coding contests probably skew even more heavily male, for reasons that I should hope are obvious. It's a data point, and I thank you for that, but it's not exactly a complete refutation of contrary findings by others. It's also kind of beside the point in exactly the same way as the OP.

Smaug123 9y ago

To clarify: your point is that the question of whether or not he's right is irrelevant; he shouldn't have said what he said, because what he said is abhorrent and/or dangerous?

notacoward 9y ago
No, that's a total misrepresentation of what I said. I'm saying whether he's right on that one point is irrelevant, because he tries to make a hundred others that are just as bad. But thanks for showing how Damore's supporters are just as guilty of "virtue signaling" as they accuse others of being.
- Smaug123 9y ago
  If you want people to understand you, you should avoid attacking them when they try. I will not converse further with you.
  - notacoward 9y ago
    Good. If you had wanted to engage constructively, you wouldn't have led with a strawman. The response - not attack - was no more or less than such a non-contribution deserved.

likelynew 9y ago

> magnitude of those differences is sufficient to explain a 4:1 ratio between male and female engineers at Google (which is clearly not true) I had obtained numbers for number of pull requests in github and participation in competitive coding contests some time back. Gender ratios are close to 10:1 on both of the places. It's relevant because there is neither any barrier nor lowering the bar due to gender in these.

notacoward 9y ago
There's no lowering of the bar in the sense of denying hires/promotions, but I think it's fair to say that there are still significant disincentives to female participation. Also, I know this is heresy, but GitHub is not necessarily representative of software engineering in general. It emphasizes pure code development over ops or design, it emphasizes a very particular style of open source, it's skewed toward certain project types and sizes, etc. How many of those "male" commits were women hiding their gender, or senior males acting as the upstream conduit for an entire mixed team working against a repo elsewhere? Competitive coding contests probably skew even more heavily male, for reasons that I should hope are obvious. It's a data point, and I thank you for that, but it's not exactly a complete refutation of contrary findings by others. It's also kind of beside the point in exactly the same way as the OP.