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From his memo: > I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the dist

by ebbv 9y ago

From his memo: > I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. He said exactly that, right there. Why do conservatives always appear to defend this guy and try to pretend the memo wasn't full of repugnant crap.

x3n0ph3n3 9y ago
I think the "preferences" part carries more weight. More men want to be engineers than women.
- ebbv 9y ago
  We're not debating what you think, we're debating what he said, and he included abilities in there. He said what they claim he said, but people always appear to try to claim he didn't.
- itaris 9y ago
  > preferences and abilities
- threeseed 9y ago
  And if all Damore said was that he would still be at Google.
  - lurr 9y ago
    I don't know why you are being downvoted. I think if he had made a better written argument that focused more clearly on the idea that part of the gender gap is due to a lack of interest by women, that he probably still would be employed.
- wellboy 9y ago
  Men also select more career oriented roles with higher pay, of which CS careers are one of the main ones.
794CD01 9y ago
Because their repugnancy/crappiness meters are calibrated in such a way that by their standards, it really wasn't.
bagrow 9y ago
Even the TL;DR on page 2 says it: > 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
moduspol 9y ago
Nowhere in that quote is it stated that women are biologically less capable of engineering.
- ebbv 9y ago
  ability (noun) 1. possession of the means or skill to do something. 2. talent, skill, or proficiency in a particular area.
  - Veen 9y ago
    The argument goes like this: traits are distributed with different frequencies throughout populations (plenty of evidence this is true), those traits may lead to differences of interest and focus in specific areas, and that leads to differences in the frequencies at which we can expect to find members of those populations represented at the top of some fields. None of this says anything about the abilities of any individual women. There are many excellent female engineers. Nor does it say that these excellent women engineers don't face discrimination because of their gender. All it says is that you'd expect fewer women to be represented in the population of the most competent engineers (in the same way you find fewer men in veterinary fields, for example).
- kossae 9y ago
  Seriously. That particular section is describing an average inherent distribution of career preferences/abilities due, in PART, to biological causes. However social (mainly), economic, and tons of other factors can come into play here. Given there is a section in the memo with similar verbiage as the article's quote, I would give some slack to the author if the sentiment remained from the original. However the author's quote changes the meaning of what Damore said quite a bit.
vanattab 9y ago
What part of that quote is repugnant?
marcoperaza 9y ago
Why is suggesting the distribution of certain qualities in men and women are different “repugnant crap”? There is ample evidence that men and women have behavioral differences. This exists across all mammals. I don’t know whether that makes the average man or average woman[1] better at any particular task, but it’s not an absurd hypothesis. Surely it’s worth reasoned consideration, not moral outrage at the very thought. [1] And averages are of course irrelevant when dealing with individuals, who should each be judged according to their own merit, not according to generalizations of the groups they belong to.
- menacingly 9y ago
  When you're secretly so fearful it's true that you've got to use increasingly outrageous words to attack the idea
  - ebbv 9y ago
    Really? You're implying I'm scared that it's true women aren't as good at engineering as men because of biology? I'm a dude. That makes zero sense. I label it repugnant crap because it is. It's not based on scientific evidence or experience or anything except for pure misogyny.
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  Because he didn't just say that. You can't just pick and choose the part of the sentence you want to respond to. You have to accept the entire thing as a complete thought. e.g. It would be like me suggesting you wrote: "men and women are different 'repugnant crap'". It's accurate, but misrepresentative of what you meant. One is honest, and the other is dishonest.
  - jasonlotito 9y ago
    The comment I was replying to seems to have been edited from what it originally said, apparently taking into account what I posted.
thenayr 9y ago
Hacker news is every bit as full of misogynistic assholes as reddit/4chan, they all worship Paul Graham who basically has the same world view as Damore.
- ng12 9y ago
  I don't know, I'm pretty liberal and I find political discussions on HN to be overbearing at times.
  - fzeroracer 9y ago
    There are definitely some issues still on HN; I've had to argue with people here that think gay people don't deserve the right to get married and I've noticed people instantly downvoted into oblivion for mentioning that they're trans.
    - collyw 9y ago
      My guess is that it depends on whether you look on marriage as a religious custom or a legal custom. I can understand people not agreeing with it in the religious sense (as their special book says so). Personally I say give everyone the same rights (i.e single people) and a large part of the problem would go away.
falcor84 9y ago
I don't think anyone would dispute that statistically women differ from men in some abilities (e.g. ability to lift weights, and also some more mental capabilities such as 3d rotation), but it's a far fetch from this to "biologically less capable of engineering", which Damore did not say
nashashmi 9y ago
A = distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women B = biological causes ... A differs in part due to B ... ... reason why we don't see equal rep in tech/leadership. Then he goes on to say maybe if we take A into consideration when designing tech and leadership roles, can we solve this dilemma. He does not mention performance, just preference.
- wellboy 9y ago
  Excellent summary.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
take4 9y ago
Actual quote: > the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes From the article: > women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering Do you not see the difference?
- ebbv 9y ago
  Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism. It's always the same kind of crap from bigots. "Women MIGHT be less capable of engineering." "Black people MIGHT be more prone to crime." "Gay people MIGHT be more likely to be pedophiles." and it's always based in bigotry, not in science or evidence.
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    > Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism. The second sentence wasn't written by Damore, so why attribute to him what he didn't write?
    - ebbv 9y ago
      I didn’t, man. Work on your reading comprehension skills. They are spelling out the bigotry he’s trying to be coy with.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Neurology and psychology studies have shown differences in the way men and women think. For example, when navigating, men tend to use dead reckoning, while women tend to prefer landmarks. Similar differences may exist with respect to the modes of thinking useful for engineering. With that in mind, consider that our current modal computer architecture and programming paradigms were designed and implemented by men. There may be some intrinsic bias towards man-thought embedded in the entire toolchain. As a thought experiment, imagine a computing system designed from the ground up by women, with no input whatsoever from existing systems or concepts. A group of females are placed in a time stasis bubble with no outside communication, and emerge from it only after they develop a computing ecosystem of equal capabilities to the existing one. With this in mind, now give all new students in the pipeline the option to try out both, then choose between the new system and the old for the entire remainder of their career. In this experiment, try to determine whether, after 20 years, the overall balance between sexes is equal, and whether the balance within each system is biased to one sex or the other. If Babbage and Lovelace had further developed their computational mills, Lady Ada's influence over early programming might have snowballed, such that software development would have been sex-biased towards women from the start. As it is, the ecosystem currently sex-biased towards men was created mostly by men, simply as a matter of feedback. In order to make the existing ecosystem less intrinsically biased in the future, it needs to be shaped by a less-unbalanced group now. So the natural biological differences are irrelevant. A fair system would have caused those differences to cancel out or complement each other through equal participation. To make the unfair system more fair, you have to force it, against its natural flow toward unfairness.
rwcarlsen 9y ago
That is not even close to what he said. Regarding abilities - he didn't say anything about any gender having greater or lesser abilities - he said "different" abilities. He didn't say that biological differences explain the gender representation - he said it may explain the gender representation - which means it also may not. He said that there are differences in the distributions of preferences and abilities of women vs men - this is true - he made no claim of the primary driver of the distribution differences either.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  He says "it might", then he proceeds to state very assertively that any actions taken to figure out whether that's the case or not are "discrimination" against white men. What do you propose is a sane course of action, considering there's a clear wide gap between "biological differences might affect behavior" and "Google is discriminating by reaching out to women"?
- lutorm 9y ago
  he said "different" abilities Are you seriously saying that the meaning I should take away from that quote is that women don't work in tech because of their superior ability? And the quote we're arguing about, "women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering", also says "may". So it seems you're arguing a strawman.
  - rndmwlk 9y ago
    It's been a while since I've read his original memo, but wasn't one of his arguments that women excel in more team based environments, and he suggested more pair based programming as one potential solution? So an overly simplified argument might be women don't work in tech because they both prefer, and are superior in, different working environments. What you should take away from his quote is nothing. Especially the paraphrased portion of the quote that ignores preferences. Read his memo in it's entirety and judge it in it's entirety.
- goialoq 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal
piyh 9y ago
>preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes I don't think this part is inherently wrong, and could be proven or disproven with well designed studies.
- andrewprock 9y ago
  If you can't prove something one way or another, it seems like a poor foundation upon which to build your HR policy, as Damore suggests.
RandyRanderson 9y ago
Looking only at the section you sight, that's not what he says. In fact those sentences have so many degrees of freedom they hardly say anything.
fahadkhan 9y ago
I don't much like what Damore appears to say but in fairness that sentence does not say "less capable". That he uses "in part" and "may explain" means that it doesn't say much at all while appearing to say something, to me at least.
- novia 9y ago
  It appears to me that in part this may be explained by him attempting to cover his ass.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    It appears to me that in part this may be explained by him attempting to cover his ass. So it's your projection of what you assume he really thinks. What evidence are you basing this on?
endorphone 9y ago
I'm not a conservative (far from it), but I think it's a ridiculous misrepresentation. He spoke to the distribution of preferences and abilities. Turning this into an absolutist simplification should offend anyone with a brain. The science seems to state that nature rolls the dice more with males than with females. We know, for instance, that there are far more very low IQ males than females, and this is understood as fact. This doesn't mean that you or I are therefore low IQ, despite the distribution increase. And the stats seem to say that nature also varies on the side of high IQ more with males. That says nothing to whether a given male or female are either low or high, and only applies at scale. Scale that is meaningless when assessing a given candidate, but is certainly pertinent when talking about representation across an entire industry or large organization.
- ebbv 9y ago
  Really? You think I’m gonna fall for this b.s.? You just tried to cloak the claim that there’s more highly intelligent men in a bunch of nonsense. You’re only proving my point.
  - vorotato 9y ago
    Also someone doesn't have to be a conservative to be sexist so... In fact many conservatives I know aren't sexist.
  - wellboy 9y ago
    There are more highly intelligent men than women, because for men, the distribution is higher, look it up.
    - ebbv 9y ago
      When you get a result like that you should question the measuring tool. IQ tests are horseshit.
      - wellboy 9y ago
        It's a very well researched issue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intellige... There are more dumber men and more smarter men than women.
IncRnd 9y ago
This is the very next sentence from his memo: > Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
shats 9y ago
> He said exactly that, right there. Why do conservatives always appear to defend this guy and try to pretend the memo wasn't full of repugnant crap. Perhaps because what he actually said was that statistically women tend to have lower expression of the traits that engineering positions favor and lower interest in those positions. And because of this the representation of women in tech is lower than their representation in the general population. Nowhere did he say "all women are worse than all men at engineering jobs". In fact he repeatedly explained that there are tons of exceptions to the statistical rule.
BonesJustice 9y ago
I read this as suggesting that the engineering field is currently structured in a way that skews towards the preferences and natural strengths of men rather than women. He's not saying that women are less capable engineers in principle. That would be an absurd argument given that women dominated the field only a few decades ago. Rather, he's arguing that we've reshaped the field and the culture such that it's inherently hostile to women, which is exactly the same argument I hear all the time. He just didn't express it very well. As I recall, his entire point is that we should be reshaping the field to make it more appealing to women so that they are drawn to it naturally, as opposed to the current strategy of giving women preferential treatment in the hiring process, only to have them leave because we haven't addressed the underlying problems that are driving them away. That's hardly a radical idea. There are benefits to his approach: I, for one, think the field would benefit greatly if we focused more on, for example, the importance of empathy. Thinking about others ought to be a fundamental pillar of software engineering, as it naturally leads to better UX, APIs, and services. And when we think about the people who will be maintaining our code, we're inclined to write better code that is easier to grok.
rdtsc 9y ago
> He said exactly that, right there. You even highlight the word _exactly_ but that is not what he said. That quote says they don't have equal representation and there maybe biological differences to blame. The main reason for confusion seems to be the quote assumes women might not be as attracted by tech work as men are. That assumption changes the meaning because in your interpretation "Women want to be in tech as much as men and D'Amore is saying they just don't have the genes for it" vs "Women want to be in tech less than men to start with and besides bigotry, hate and marginalization, cultural biases, there could be a biological explanation for it". I know we all think tech is awesome, we are getting paid to do what we love, etc. But it turns out many people, and maybe women more than men, don't find sitting in a cubicle all day inverting binary trees appealing. I don't think biology is the main driver here [+] but D'Amore does. He might be wrong, but I don't see why it had to become this controversial topic and lead to firing and lawsuits. They could have just said "here is why science doesn't support your view, thanks for starting the discussion, but you're wrong" and leave it at that. [+] I don't support his view, I'd personally blame culture for women not even wanting to be in tech. Having lived in Eastern Europe where there is less "stigma" against girls liking math and computer science. It's not a cause, or a talking point at least, it's just a profession like accountant or doctor.
- Khaine 9y ago
  Quillette asked a bunch of people who are in the fields quoted by darmore and they mostly agreed that the science quoted was accurate[1]. There is evidence to show that as economic equality increases, gender diversity skews more. That is, in poorer countries like India and Eastern Europe, women are more likely to work in tech to gain economic advantages. In countries where women are well off, they are more likely to pursue roles that are seen as feminine.[2], [3] [1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/ http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-... [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153857 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... [3] https://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_funny_thing_happened_on_the_way_to_gender_equality_in_norway/15213 https://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_funny_thing_happ...

by ebbv 9y ago

x3n0ph3n3 9y ago

I think the "preferences" part carries more weight. More men want to be engineers than women.

ebbv 9y ago
We're not debating what you think, we're debating what he said, and he included abilities in there. He said what they claim he said, but people always appear to try to claim he didn't.
itaris 9y ago
> preferences and abilities
threeseed 9y ago
And if all Damore said was that he would still be at Google.
- lurr 9y ago
  I don't know why you are being downvoted. I think if he had made a better written argument that focused more clearly on the idea that part of the gender gap is due to a lack of interest by women, that he probably still would be employed.
wellboy 9y ago
Men also select more career oriented roles with higher pay, of which CS careers are one of the main ones.

794CD01 9y ago

Because their repugnancy/crappiness meters are calibrated in such a way that by their standards, it really wasn't.

bagrow 9y ago

Even the TL;DR on page 2 says it: > 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

moduspol 9y ago

Nowhere in that quote is it stated that women are biologically less capable of engineering.

ebbv 9y ago
ability (noun) 1. possession of the means or skill to do something. 2. talent, skill, or proficiency in a particular area.
- Veen 9y ago
  The argument goes like this: traits are distributed with different frequencies throughout populations (plenty of evidence this is true), those traits may lead to differences of interest and focus in specific areas, and that leads to differences in the frequencies at which we can expect to find members of those populations represented at the top of some fields. None of this says anything about the abilities of any individual women. There are many excellent female engineers. Nor does it say that these excellent women engineers don't face discrimination because of their gender. All it says is that you'd expect fewer women to be represented in the population of the most competent engineers (in the same way you find fewer men in veterinary fields, for example).
kossae 9y ago
Seriously. That particular section is describing an average inherent distribution of career preferences/abilities due, in PART, to biological causes. However social (mainly), economic, and tons of other factors can come into play here. Given there is a section in the memo with similar verbiage as the article's quote, I would give some slack to the author if the sentiment remained from the original. However the author's quote changes the meaning of what Damore said quite a bit.

vanattab 9y ago

What part of that quote is repugnant?

marcoperaza 9y ago

Why is suggesting the distribution of certain qualities in men and women are different “repugnant crap”? There is ample evidence that men and women have behavioral differences. This exists across all mammals. I don’t know whether that makes the average man or average woman[1] better at any particular task, but it’s not an absurd hypothesis. Surely it’s worth reasoned consideration, not moral outrage at the very thought. [1] And averages are of course irrelevant when dealing with individuals, who should each be judged according to their own merit, not according to generalizations of the groups they belong to.

menacingly 9y ago
When you're secretly so fearful it's true that you've got to use increasingly outrageous words to attack the idea
- ebbv 9y ago
  Really? You're implying I'm scared that it's true women aren't as good at engineering as men because of biology? I'm a dude. That makes zero sense. I label it repugnant crap because it is. It's not based on scientific evidence or experience or anything except for pure misogyny.
jasonlotito 9y ago
Because he didn't just say that. You can't just pick and choose the part of the sentence you want to respond to. You have to accept the entire thing as a complete thought. e.g. It would be like me suggesting you wrote: "men and women are different 'repugnant crap'". It's accurate, but misrepresentative of what you meant. One is honest, and the other is dishonest.
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  The comment I was replying to seems to have been edited from what it originally said, apparently taking into account what I posted.

thenayr 9y ago

Hacker news is every bit as full of misogynistic assholes as reddit/4chan, they all worship Paul Graham who basically has the same world view as Damore.

ng12 9y ago
I don't know, I'm pretty liberal and I find political discussions on HN to be overbearing at times.
- fzeroracer 9y ago
  There are definitely some issues still on HN; I've had to argue with people here that think gay people don't deserve the right to get married and I've noticed people instantly downvoted into oblivion for mentioning that they're trans.
  - collyw 9y ago
    My guess is that it depends on whether you look on marriage as a religious custom or a legal custom. I can understand people not agreeing with it in the religious sense (as their special book says so). Personally I say give everyone the same rights (i.e single people) and a large part of the problem would go away.

falcor84 9y ago

I don't think anyone would dispute that statistically women differ from men in some abilities (e.g. ability to lift weights, and also some more mental capabilities such as 3d rotation), but it's a far fetch from this to "biologically less capable of engineering", which Damore did not say

nashashmi 9y ago

A = distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women B = biological causes ... A differs in part due to B ... ... reason why we don't see equal rep in tech/leadership. Then he goes on to say maybe if we take A into consideration when designing tech and leadership roles, can we solve this dilemma. He does not mention performance, just preference.

wellboy 9y ago
Excellent summary.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

take4 9y ago

Actual quote: > the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes From the article: > women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering Do you not see the difference?

ebbv 9y ago
Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism. It's always the same kind of crap from bigots. "Women MIGHT be less capable of engineering." "Black people MIGHT be more prone to crime." "Gay people MIGHT be more likely to be pedophiles." and it's always based in bigotry, not in science or evidence.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  > Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism. The second sentence wasn't written by Damore, so why attribute to him what he didn't write?
  - ebbv 9y ago
    I didn’t, man. Work on your reading comprehension skills. They are spelling out the bigotry he’s trying to be coy with.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Neurology and psychology studies have shown differences in the way men and women think. For example, when navigating, men tend to use dead reckoning, while women tend to prefer landmarks. Similar differences may exist with respect to the modes of thinking useful for engineering. With that in mind, consider that our current modal computer architecture and programming paradigms were designed and implemented by men. There may be some intrinsic bias towards man-thought embedded in the entire toolchain. As a thought experiment, imagine a computing system designed from the ground up by women, with no input whatsoever from existing systems or concepts. A group of females are placed in a time stasis bubble with no outside communication, and emerge from it only after they develop a computing ecosystem of equal capabilities to the existing one. With this in mind, now give all new students in the pipeline the option to try out both, then choose between the new system and the old for the entire remainder of their career. In this experiment, try to determine whether, after 20 years, the overall balance between sexes is equal, and whether the balance within each system is biased to one sex or the other. If Babbage and Lovelace had further developed their computational mills, Lady Ada's influence over early programming might have snowballed, such that software development would have been sex-biased towards women from the start. As it is, the ecosystem currently sex-biased towards men was created mostly by men, simply as a matter of feedback. In order to make the existing ecosystem less intrinsically biased in the future, it needs to be shaped by a less-unbalanced group now. So the natural biological differences are irrelevant. A fair system would have caused those differences to cancel out or complement each other through equal participation. To make the unfair system more fair, you have to force it, against its natural flow toward unfairness.

rwcarlsen 9y ago

That is not even close to what he said. Regarding abilities - he didn't say anything about any gender having greater or lesser abilities - he said "different" abilities. He didn't say that biological differences explain the gender representation - he said it may explain the gender representation - which means it also may not. He said that there are differences in the distributions of preferences and abilities of women vs men - this is true - he made no claim of the primary driver of the distribution differences either.

dguaraglia 9y ago
He says "it might", then he proceeds to state very assertively that any actions taken to figure out whether that's the case or not are "discrimination" against white men. What do you propose is a sane course of action, considering there's a clear wide gap between "biological differences might affect behavior" and "Google is discriminating by reaching out to women"?
lutorm 9y ago
he said "different" abilities Are you seriously saying that the meaning I should take away from that quote is that women don't work in tech because of their superior ability? And the quote we're arguing about, "women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering", also says "may". So it seems you're arguing a strawman.
- rndmwlk 9y ago
  It's been a while since I've read his original memo, but wasn't one of his arguments that women excel in more team based environments, and he suggested more pair based programming as one potential solution? So an overly simplified argument might be women don't work in tech because they both prefer, and are superior in, different working environments. What you should take away from his quote is nothing. Especially the paraphrased portion of the quote that ignores preferences. Read his memo in it's entirety and judge it in it's entirety.
goialoq 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal

piyh 9y ago

>preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes I don't think this part is inherently wrong, and could be proven or disproven with well designed studies.

andrewprock 9y ago
If you can't prove something one way or another, it seems like a poor foundation upon which to build your HR policy, as Damore suggests.

RandyRanderson 9y ago

Looking only at the section you sight, that's not what he says. In fact those sentences have so many degrees of freedom they hardly say anything.

fahadkhan 9y ago

I don't much like what Damore appears to say but in fairness that sentence does not say "less capable". That he uses "in part" and "may explain" means that it doesn't say much at all while appearing to say something, to me at least.

novia 9y ago
It appears to me that in part this may be explained by him attempting to cover his ass.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  It appears to me that in part this may be explained by him attempting to cover his ass. So it's your projection of what you assume he really thinks. What evidence are you basing this on?

endorphone 9y ago

I'm not a conservative (far from it), but I think it's a ridiculous misrepresentation. He spoke to the distribution of preferences and abilities. Turning this into an absolutist simplification should offend anyone with a brain. The science seems to state that nature rolls the dice more with males than with females. We know, for instance, that there are far more very low IQ males than females, and this is understood as fact. This doesn't mean that you or I are therefore low IQ, despite the distribution increase. And the stats seem to say that nature also varies on the side of high IQ more with males. That says nothing to whether a given male or female are either low or high, and only applies at scale. Scale that is meaningless when assessing a given candidate, but is certainly pertinent when talking about representation across an entire industry or large organization.

ebbv 9y ago
Really? You think I’m gonna fall for this b.s.? You just tried to cloak the claim that there’s more highly intelligent men in a bunch of nonsense. You’re only proving my point.
- vorotato 9y ago
  Also someone doesn't have to be a conservative to be sexist so... In fact many conservatives I know aren't sexist.
- wellboy 9y ago
  There are more highly intelligent men than women, because for men, the distribution is higher, look it up.
  - ebbv 9y ago
    When you get a result like that you should question the measuring tool. IQ tests are horseshit.
    - wellboy 9y ago
      It's a very well researched issue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intellige... There are more dumber men and more smarter men than women.

IncRnd 9y ago

This is the very next sentence from his memo: > Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

shats 9y ago

> He said exactly that, right there. Why do conservatives always appear to defend this guy and try to pretend the memo wasn't full of repugnant crap. Perhaps because what he actually said was that statistically women tend to have lower expression of the traits that engineering positions favor and lower interest in those positions. And because of this the representation of women in tech is lower than their representation in the general population. Nowhere did he say "all women are worse than all men at engineering jobs". In fact he repeatedly explained that there are tons of exceptions to the statistical rule.

BonesJustice 9y ago

I read this as suggesting that the engineering field is currently structured in a way that skews towards the preferences and natural strengths of men rather than women. He's not saying that women are less capable engineers in principle. That would be an absurd argument given that women dominated the field only a few decades ago. Rather, he's arguing that we've reshaped the field and the culture such that it's inherently hostile to women, which is exactly the same argument I hear all the time. He just didn't express it very well. As I recall, his entire point is that we should be reshaping the field to make it more appealing to women so that they are drawn to it naturally, as opposed to the current strategy of giving women preferential treatment in the hiring process, only to have them leave because we haven't addressed the underlying problems that are driving them away. That's hardly a radical idea. There are benefits to his approach: I, for one, think the field would benefit greatly if we focused more on, for example, the importance of empathy. Thinking about others ought to be a fundamental pillar of software engineering, as it naturally leads to better UX, APIs, and services. And when we think about the people who will be maintaining our code, we're inclined to write better code that is easier to grok.

rdtsc 9y ago

> He said exactly that, right there. You even highlight the word _exactly_ but that is not what he said. That quote says they don't have equal representation and there maybe biological differences to blame. The main reason for confusion seems to be the quote assumes women might not be as attracted by tech work as men are. That assumption changes the meaning because in your interpretation "Women want to be in tech as much as men and D'Amore is saying they just don't have the genes for it" vs "Women want to be in tech less than men to start with and besides bigotry, hate and marginalization, cultural biases, there could be a biological explanation for it". I know we all think tech is awesome, we are getting paid to do what we love, etc. But it turns out many people, and maybe women more than men, don't find sitting in a cubicle all day inverting binary trees appealing. I don't think biology is the main driver here [+] but D'Amore does. He might be wrong, but I don't see why it had to become this controversial topic and lead to firing and lawsuits. They could have just said "here is why science doesn't support your view, thanks for starting the discussion, but you're wrong" and leave it at that. [+] I don't support his view, I'd personally blame culture for women not even wanting to be in tech. Having lived in Eastern Europe where there is less "stigma" against girls liking math and computer science. It's not a cause, or a talking point at least, it's just a profession like accountant or doctor.

Khaine 9y ago
Quillette asked a bunch of people who are in the fields quoted by darmore and they mostly agreed that the science quoted was accurate[1]. There is evidence to show that as economic equality increases, gender diversity skews more. That is, in poorer countries like India and Eastern Europe, women are more likely to work in tech to gain economic advantages. In countries where women are well off, they are more likely to pursue roles that are seen as feminine.[2], [3] [1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/ http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-... [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153857 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... [3] https://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_funny_thing_happened_on_the_way_to_gender_equality_in_norway/15213 https://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_funny_thing_happ...