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There is a difference between women are on average less capable (or what your interpretation seems to imply - women programmers are worse than men) and what is
by verroq 9y ago
There is a difference between women are on average less capable (or what your interpretation seems to imply - women programmers are worse than men) and what is written which are there may be less qualified female candidates due to biological differences.
The latter is an obvious statement however people seems keen to deliberately misinterpret it to fuel their rightous outrage.
I’ll use high jump as an example. Suppose I only hire high jumpers who can leap over X meters. I find that I naturally hire less women because women on average can’t jump as high as men. The women who can are obviously as qualified as men. Now I make the statement that due to biological differences this may explain the hiring disparity, rather than discrimination.
- lukev 9y agoTwo things: 1. Saying that women are "on average" worse programmers is exactly why people are upset with him. He doesn't need to be some kind of insane absolutist in order for what he said to be very problematic. 2. Even if there are statistically significant sex differences with regard to programming ability and inclination, there are also historical and sociological factors that are working against women in tech. Damore's memo was explicitly a negative reaction against some of the programs designed to counteract these systemic issues. As such, even if he were 100% right about the sexual dimorphism (which he isn't, see my other post in this thread), using that as an argument against trying to solve the sociological problems is not only logically unsound, but exhibits bad faith and bad motivations.
- verroq 9y ago1. Except he never even said women on average are worse. Secondly people being upset is not an argument against the truthiness of statement, no matter how problematic. 2. “How dare he question the effectiveness of affirmative action” is also not an argument.
- lukev 9y ago> Except he never even said women on average are worse. That is literally the whole point of his memo, that women have a different (i.e, worse, in this context) statistical distribution of ability and inclination to the tech field. > “How dare he question the effectiveness of affirmative action” is also not an argument. Sure it is. His argument is structured as follows: 1. Negative effect Q is caused by both A and B. 2. We can't do anything about A. 3. Therefore we shouldn't do anything about B. That's just bad reasoning.
- dguaraglia 9y agoThe problem with this argument is that while high-jumping is an obvious function of physical traits that may be more prevalent in males, it's not that easy to draw a straight correlation - let alone complete causation - for career selection. Damore's manifesto purports to present evidence that there "maybe" are inherent differences between genders ("may" and "might" are also sprinkled all over the place for good measure.) He even acknowledges that this is far from a complete picture. But then he goes on to conclude that: 1) That must explain the existing gender distribution in engineering 2) Google trying to explore doing outreach to increase diversity must necessarily imply discrimination of the unfairly oppressed white heterosexual male So trying to dismiss all criticism by splitting hairs over whether he meant that the average, the median, or all women are uninterested in engineering completely misses the point that either way the conclusions are unwarranted. The whole thing smacks of persecution complex first, finding "evidence" later.