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Though if you read the memo carefully, Damore doesn't actually make the claim that Google lowers the bar for women in the sense that they hire women who are les

by wan23 9y ago

Though if you read the memo carefully, Damore doesn't actually make the claim that Google lowers the bar for women in the sense that they hire women who are less capable. His complaint is that Google lowers the bar in the sense of reducing the number of "false negative" rejections of diversity candidates by paying more attention to those applications. He was calling for an end to this practice not because it was allowing unqualified people to be hired, but simply because he feels that the special treatment is unfair.

jdoliner 9y ago
The devil's in the details on this stuff, and unfortunately we don't have the details so it's hard to say exactly how much devil there is in them. How do they lower the false negative rate? A sibling comment mentioned Google's practice of giving diversity candidates a second interview if they fail the first. This would mean if you have a false negative rate of `n` your false negative rate would become `n^2` (which is lower because n is hopefully much less than 1). However, this also increases your false positive rate from `p` to `1 - (1 - p)^2`. So in effect, this is lowering the bar as it's giving certain groups a better chance of being hired when they're not qualified than others. I would be very interested to hear about a hiring practice that lowers false negative rate without affecting false positive rate. I can't think of one right now but it seems like it should be possible.
- wan23 9y ago
  That's not really moving the bar though - false positives are undesired errors. Also, at Google hiring decisions are made by committees using feedback collected from the interviewers. Presumably they don't discard the first interviews, but instead consider all of them.
- bduerst 9y ago
  There's a demonstrable, statistical bias against hiring minorities that creates a higher false negative rate for them: https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-candidate-pool-theres-statistically-no-chance-shell-be-hired https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-can... Having an extra interview would seem a logical way of preventing the loss of qualified candidates, wouldn't it?
ehsankia 9y ago
The way I understood his overall point was that in a perfect world were there is not socio-economical bias and a large enough sample size, we would still not have 50/50 split in every single field. Now, even with that being true, that doesn't mean that whatever percentage we have right now is equilibrium either, but from my understanding, he was trying to say that we should be careful pushing too much towards 50% split.

by wan23 9y ago

jdoliner 9y ago

The devil's in the details on this stuff, and unfortunately we don't have the details so it's hard to say exactly how much devil there is in them. How do they lower the false negative rate? A sibling comment mentioned Google's practice of giving diversity candidates a second interview if they fail the first. This would mean if you have a false negative rate of `n` your false negative rate would become `n^2` (which is lower because n is hopefully much less than 1). However, this also increases your false positive rate from `p` to `1 - (1 - p)^2`. So in effect, this is lowering the bar as it's giving certain groups a better chance of being hired when they're not qualified than others. I would be very interested to hear about a hiring practice that lowers false negative rate without affecting false positive rate. I can't think of one right now but it seems like it should be possible.

wan23 9y ago
That's not really moving the bar though - false positives are undesired errors. Also, at Google hiring decisions are made by committees using feedback collected from the interviewers. Presumably they don't discard the first interviews, but instead consider all of them.
bduerst 9y ago
There's a demonstrable, statistical bias against hiring minorities that creates a higher false negative rate for them: https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-candidate-pool-theres-statistically-no-chance-shell-be-hired https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-can... Having an extra interview would seem a logical way of preventing the loss of qualified candidates, wouldn't it?

ehsankia 9y ago

The way I understood his overall point was that in a perfect world were there is not socio-economical bias and a large enough sample size, we would still not have 50/50 split in every single field. Now, even with that being true, that doesn't mean that whatever percentage we have right now is equilibrium either, but from my understanding, he was trying to say that we should be careful pushing too much towards 50% split.