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>Mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action? He never said that. Could you cite the portion where he lite
by kentrado 9y ago
>Mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action?
He never said that. Could you cite the portion where he literally says women are less capable?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- KirinDave 9y agoHe says women will benefit from making coding more social. Pair programming. Remember?
- nailer 9y agoThat's not the same thing as telling an individual they're less capable.
- KirinDave 9y agoWhy? What positive connotation could be drawn from it?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yorwba 9y agoWomen are better at pair programming?
- therebedragons 9y ago> What positive connotation could be drawn from it? IMHO that is the wrong question. Connotations aren't something anyone can argue for or against - one can have bad connotations for all sorts of words. Actual example: my ex hated the word "negotiate" in any personal discussion as she saw negotiations as something where you tried to screw the other person over (she was a lawyer). This was to the point where she refused to negotiate anything - including where we would have dinner. How can anyone live without negotiating? Hence, ex :) I think a better question than one about connotations would be: If we accept that women have a preference for people over things, what would encourage women to want to do a "things" job? The memo's answer: more peer programming i.e. adding a people element to a things/systems job. That is internally consistent, I think, with the evidence presented on average female preference. Honestly, I find all this inferior/superior talk really troubling. Different != inferior, or superior, it is just DIFFERENT. Is a hammer a better tool than a saw? Depends what I want to do... I find it even more troubling that people against labelling others superior/inferior see everything that way. Personally, I think vive la difference!
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoThe "different = inferior argument" is strongly implied. If you accept the premise that there's such a thing as a male-dominated work culture with stereotypically male values, then attitudes and actions that match those values are considered better ("normative") by default. Anyone who has different requirements or interests will always be considered an outsider who will to have allowances made for them while receiving special treatment. This would also be true of hypothetical female-dominated cultures with stereotypical female values where men would be considered the inferior outsiders who need special treatment. (Do such cultures exist? At work - sometimes, but not often. Outside of work - perhaps.) The topic is an unholy mess because there are so many implications and assumptions on both sides, and so much outright ranting and bullying too, that useful debate is practically impossible. My view is that corporate culture isn't stereotypically "male" so much as stereotypically totalitarian. More women won't change that. It might rein in some of the more obvious abuses, while running the risk of replacing them with some new ones. But real economic and political freedom could only come from equal opportunity at a scale that most (tacitly neoliberal) feminists seem uninterested in.
- aaronblohowiak 9y agothe context of that suggestion was to make the activity more appealing in order to entice more candidates, not to compensate for a skill deficiency. My interpretation of this point should not be taken as an endorsement of it or the document as a whole
- KirinDave 9y ago> My interpretation of this point should not be taken as an endorsement of it or the document as a whole I was hoping not to discuss the document as a whole myself. I largely avoided the last pseudoscientific cesspool of a thread.
- lsaferite 9y agoYou: Suggesting pair programming is an insult because you think I'm less capable. Author: Pair programming may be one possible way to bring more social women into programming by appealing to their interest in people vs. things He wrote one thing, your read another. Who's the one with a problem here exactly? The author or the reader?
- mpweiher 9y agoNo. First, the section is "Non-discrimnatory ways to reduce the gender gap". You cannot reduce the "gap" by aiming at the women who are already at Google. This should be obvious. They are already there. To make a dent in the gap, you need to attract more women who currently do not choose to work in tech or not at Google. So nothing he writes is about his colleagues at Google, or by extension women who are already in or interested in tech. It is about potentially attracting those who are not currently interested in that career. Second, this is about subtle differences in the distribution of preferences in populations with huge overlaps. So when you have an individual in front of you, you simply cannot tell whether they will exhibit this trait more or less by inference from the population statistic. And you certainly can't say "all X have more of this property than all Y". He even has a nice graph for this. Third, it's not about ability, but about preference. "Women on average show a higher interest in people..." How do you get from "preference" to "ability"? Fourth, you are assuming a symmetry where "higher X" implies "lower Y that's complementary to X". This would probably be true for interests (if I a am more interested in working alone, I am probably less interested in working in groups). But it does not translate to abilities. In fact, one of the documented areas where gender differences in ability do show up is exactly a case of this lack of symmetry: you've probably heard that tend to score higher on the math SATs and women higher on the verbals. This is apparently not the whole story: men with high math scores do tend to not also have high verbal scores (and therefore prefer STEM). However, for women the two are correlated, not anti-correlated: those with high math scores tend to also have high verbal scores, so they have more options. And people with more options tend to prefer non-STEM options, regardless of gender. Fifth, I thought pair programming was a Good Thing™?
- kgwgk 9y ago> You cannot reduce the "gap" by aiming at the women who are already at Google. This should be obvious. That is far from obvious. Everything else being equal, you would increase the proportion of women if you reduced their turnover.
- mpweiher 9y agoCan we agree that it is obvious as long as we're not talking about retention/turnover? Well, maybe not "obvious", but "clear that it can't be any other way once you think about it".
- cm2187 9y agoWhether we agree with the memo or not, there was a very good point that guy made and that we should keep in mind, it's the paragraph with the two overlapping distributions. Even if you admit that all genders, races, any way you want to segment the population, do not have the same distribution, that doesn't mean anything to a person as an individual. For instance I think it's fair to say that black people are better at athleticism/running than white people (a disproportionate number olympic champions are black), i.e. the tail of the distribution is fatter for black people than white people. It doesn't mean anything to a random individual in that group. I am white, I shouldn't feel offended that another category of the population has a different distribution than my category. And it doesn't mean that no white people can become an olympic athlete either. Just that there will be a natural race imbalance among athletes. And it doesn't mean that a random black man will be better than a random white man at athletism. So I don't agree with the way you read this memo: In this memo's case, perhaps you're mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action. The memo doesn't say that an individual woman will be less capable. What it claims instead is that women have a different distribution for certain skills than men, which you might agree with or not. But it's a very different point.
- gibberfish 9y agoThat argument applies to the general population maybe, but that doesn't mean it also applies to the population of Google employees. Everyone there passed their hiring standards, so everyone has proved their individual merit already.
- cm2187 9y agoThe population of Google technical employees is I think the equivalent to the population of Olympic athletes in my example. If the general population has a different distribution (again whether you agree or not with that assumption), then there should be a natural imbalance among the cream of the top that made it to Google. And as you said, those who made it are all "Olympic athletes" (in theory, they should have been recruited based on individual merit) so these distributions do not mean that a female google employee would be more or less capable than a male, but it will result in less female google employees than male employees.
- 2muchcoffeeman 9y agoAt this point I would like to see an itemised list of James Damore's points on gender and women's interpretations of them. This is the pair programming text in full: > Below I'll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I > outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women's > representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in > many of these areas, but I think it's still instructive to list them >> Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things >>> We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming >>> and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how >>> people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive >>> ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get >>> female students into coding might be doing this) My understanding is: if we increase pair programming to make it more of a team activity, more women will enjoy programming, and more women will become programmers. We don't have to agree with the suggestion. But you've just shown us that our interpretations are wildly different. So, why? Edit: formatting
- KirinDave 9y agoPair Programming is not a technique to improve social contact in software. It's a technique to improve product reliability and give more practical mentorship opportunities. We might argue James says women are asking for good mentorship opportunities herr. So why do women benefit from this specifically (and that's okay) but other mentorship program are considered unfair in this rubric? You say "we need pair programming" when reliability is difficult to gaurantee. Not because you're feeling lonely. It seems an awful lot like he's suggesting that women are especially in need of experienced minders.
- Sacho 9y agoThat's a wholly uncharitable reading of what he's saying. A way more good faith interpretation would be the very simple equation of "working with just computer - more thing oriented, working with computer + partner - more people oriented". This may be wrong(I don't have any evidence to back it up, and neither did Damore), but it is wholly different from the sinister undertones you are seeing. (In fact, taking your "mentorship" interpretation, it is entirely possible that the women would be the one doing the mentoring, if their skill at engineering was hampered by a disinterest towards purely thing-oriented pursuits).
- averagewall 9y agoSchoolteachers are trained to provide just this type of variety for just this type of reason. For example, they're supposed to have competitive classes because boys are generally more motivated by competition than cooperation. It's uncontroversially seen as a good and wholesome thing for teachers to do it. Why is it demon spawn for programmers?
- eeks 9y agoSo now sociability is a negative trait? I for one would be delighted to find an efficient way to make coding more social. Many a reason why software design is so hard is exactly because most programmers are autistic nerds that tend to produce opinionated, hard to maintain code. Pair programming with someone that tends to think more in breadth than in depth sounds like one way of improving that situation.
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoDo the last two bullet points of his tl;dr count?: * Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. * Discrimination to reach equal representation is [...] bad for business. Which I read as, "woman aren't as good, that's why they don't already work here, if we hire more of them, they'll not be able to do the job as well as men so the business will suffer" Is that an unreasonable reading?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- adrusi 9y agoIt's an unreasonable reading. If you read past the tl;dr you see that none of the differences in traits he talks about are about ability, just interest, so interpreting it as "women aren't as good" is wrong.
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoCan you explain why hiring women who are just as good as, if not better than, men at the job, but who would prefer (on average) to work elsewhere, perhaps somewhere with more women employees, would make the business do worse? And can we note that I replied to someone saying "he didn't say that", suggested a place where he did and got replies from different people saying "yes he did say that, and he's correct" and replies saying "no, you're misreading what he said as it's explained in more detail later". So it appears at the very least (and I feel I'm being generous here), that his words can be misread by people on both sides of the issue, which might be worth bearing in mind for those trying to paint his detractors as a hysterical mob who haven't even read the memo.
- adrusi 9y agoCan you explain why hiring women who are just as good as, if not better than, men at the job, but who would prefer (on average) to work elsewhere, perhaps somewhere with more women employees, would make the business do worse? In the section you quoted, he doesn't say that hiring more women is bad for business, he said that doing so via discriminatory hiring practices, and if you hadn't ellipsized that line, there would have been an explanation for why right there. The full bullet point reads "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business." So he says that unequal representation is partially explained by gender differences in interests, and then that trying to eliminate the differences, specifically via the method of discriminatory hiring, is bad for business because it's unfair and divisive. To be clear, the reason I'm interpreting the "differences" he refers to as differences in interest as opposed to competence is because of the content in the "Personality differences" section of the memo, which is the only place he addresses specific gender differences. In that section he says that women are less interested on average in tasks which focus mainly on systemizing, and are less interested in high-stress jobs, as well as that they are less likely to advocate for their own promotions. I replied to someone saying "he didn't say that", suggested a place where he did No, you replied to someone saying "he didn't say that" and suggested a place where he said something ambiguous — the tl;dr, which is necessarily ambiguous. So it appears at the very least (and I feel I'm being generous here), that his words can be misread by people on both sides of the issue Who do you think is misinterpreting what? I've pointed out what I think you're misinterpreting and offered an alternative interpretation. You don't get to simply assert that other people are misinterpreting the memo, you've got to offer some evidence of that.
- bengillies 9y ago> This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. That is, he's saying explicitly that women find leadership roles more difficult. Generally if somebody finds something more difficult they're not as good at it as people who find it easier. As a result I'm not sure how this could be taken any other way than stating that men are better managers simply because they're men.