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> you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment People have been fired from Google for suggesting exactly that.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I know. Google deeply disappointed me with that one.
ajross 7y ago
This isn't a fair characterization. Damore's memo (which I assume is what you're talking about) absolutely did not attribute Google's lack of women candidates to a lack of graduates in the pipeline. It went with a straight on (and largely unsourced) "women are biologically different" argument. Wikipedia's page on the controversy is relatively good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch... And even that didn't get him fired per se. He got fired once it went viral and embarrassed his employer.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  You're misreporting the very link you quoted. Indeed, the Wikipedia description is pretty fair. I'll quote the relevant paragraph directly: "James Damore was spurred to write the memo when a Google diversity program he attended solicited feedback.[2] The memo was written on a flight to China.[12][13] Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo states that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that male/female disparities can be partly explained by biological differences.[1][14] Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait).[15] Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.[1][14]" In terms of pipeline argument, the memo can be viewed as arguing that the pipeline is biased at every stage, which is "partly explained by biological differences"[0], and that it's wrong to try and solve this by reverse discrimination at the tail end of the pipe (i.e. throwing perfectly good candidates out to improve the ratio). Instead, the memo proposed means to reduce the bias near the end of the pipe without resorting to discrimination. -- [0] - Note that some of the differences - "stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism" - can be also plausibly explained by social factors (instead of biological), but that's orthogonal to those differences existing and biasing the entire pipeline.
  - ajross 7y ago
    Sorry, how are these two arguments equivalent in your mind: 1. There are few women engineers at Google because there are few candidates in the pipeline. 2. women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism I don't see that at all. The only way you get there is to assume a common causality. But that assumption (that some people are inherently bad at coding) is offensive if made without good science. You can't start with bad pseudoscience and "prove" that Damore was fired because he pointed out the pipeline problem!
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      The argument is: because of 2), less women enter the pipeline that leads to a job that's less social and more about things, relative to other occupations, therefore 1). 2) is presented here as a plausible explanation of 1). The connection is very clear, so the validity of that view depends entirely on the validity of point 2) itself. Damore presented a boatload of links to research supporting that point, and plenty of other people did too. See e.g. SSC's take on it here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge.... Now one big aspect of the whole drama is that 2) is being rejected out of hand as offensive wrongthink. The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist, and instead a narrative of systemic oppression is proposed. Another big issue with the memo is that a lot of people couldn't - and a lot still can't - understand the fundamental concept that you cannot take population-level statistics and use them to pass judgements on individuals. Just because a certain population doesn't like X on average, does not mean that a particular member of that population currently doing X is somehow wrong or unsuitable because of that. Damore didn't make this mistake, but was widely accused of it (and from what I remember from reading the memo two years ago, he repeatedly warned the readers against making this mistake).
      - DoreenMichele 7y ago
        The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist I would posit that men and women have different realities, thus different needs. This shapes interests. It's not wholly unassailable, but needs to be approached differently than goals like "achieve x percentage of women in tech" are typically approached.
- gotoeleven 7y ago
  People should look at the memo with all its links to papers to decide if these claims are "largely unsourced." https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I... There was a version initially floating around that had all the links removed.
  - ajross 7y ago
    There is absolutely no sourcing for research showing women being inherently or unfixably uninterested in computer science. None. He had a bunch of links to studies about bland stuff like personality differences, using them to make arguments the study authors never indended and (where asked) refused to support. Calling that "sourcing" is essentially trying to treat Damore's fundamentally political document as an original piece of social science research.
    - gotoeleven 7y ago
      "women being inherently or unfixably uninterested in computer science" is not the claim. Do you grok the part where he talks about distributions?
    - naasking 7y ago
      > There is absolutely no sourcing for research showing women being inherently or unfixably uninterested in computer science. Damore never made such claims. At the population level, it does indeed seem like women tend to be more interested in people-oriented subjects (nursing, pediatrics, law) and men tend to be more interested in thing-oriented subjects (engineering, compsci, surgery). So even a discipline like medicine which has roughly gender parity, you still see segregation along gender lines, where women are overrepresented in subfields which deal directly with people (pediatrics, obgyn), and men are overrepresented in subfields which treat people as things (surgery). So a theory that delineates things vs. people has good explanatory power for explaining gender disparities [1]. Furthermore, Damore never claimed that such tendencies aren't "fixable". He claimed that the discriminatory policies currently in place are not only completely ineffective at influencing the gender numbers (and so should be ended), but that policies that take this research into account would be more effective. > Calling that "sourcing" is essentially trying to treat Damore's fundamentally political document as an original piece of social science research. If you're actually interested in a proper analysis Damore's claims by actual researchers in this field, I suggest reading [2]. [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018... [2] https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-research-say-about-gender-differences/ https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-r...
baddox 7y ago
I don't know about people getting fired for saying that, but it's probably not a true or reasonable thing to say. Consider that, to the extent that there may be a pipeline problem, one significant cause of it may be the conditions of work in your industry.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

I know. Google deeply disappointed me with that one.

ajross 7y ago

This isn't a fair characterization. Damore's memo (which I assume is what you're talking about) absolutely did not attribute Google's lack of women candidates to a lack of graduates in the pipeline. It went with a straight on (and largely unsourced) "women are biologically different" argument. Wikipedia's page on the controversy is relatively good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch... And even that didn't get him fired per se. He got fired once it went viral and embarrassed his employer.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
You're misreporting the very link you quoted. Indeed, the Wikipedia description is pretty fair. I'll quote the relevant paragraph directly: "James Damore was spurred to write the memo when a Google diversity program he attended solicited feedback.[2] The memo was written on a flight to China.[12][13] Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo states that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that male/female disparities can be partly explained by biological differences.[1][14] Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait).[15] Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.[1][14]" In terms of pipeline argument, the memo can be viewed as arguing that the pipeline is biased at every stage, which is "partly explained by biological differences"[0], and that it's wrong to try and solve this by reverse discrimination at the tail end of the pipe (i.e. throwing perfectly good candidates out to improve the ratio). Instead, the memo proposed means to reduce the bias near the end of the pipe without resorting to discrimination. -- [0] - Note that some of the differences - "stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism" - can be also plausibly explained by social factors (instead of biological), but that's orthogonal to those differences existing and biasing the entire pipeline.
- ajross 7y ago
  Sorry, how are these two arguments equivalent in your mind: 1. There are few women engineers at Google because there are few candidates in the pipeline. 2. women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism I don't see that at all. The only way you get there is to assume a common causality. But that assumption (that some people are inherently bad at coding) is offensive if made without good science. You can't start with bad pseudoscience and "prove" that Damore was fired because he pointed out the pipeline problem!
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    The argument is: because of 2), less women enter the pipeline that leads to a job that's less social and more about things, relative to other occupations, therefore 1). 2) is presented here as a plausible explanation of 1). The connection is very clear, so the validity of that view depends entirely on the validity of point 2) itself. Damore presented a boatload of links to research supporting that point, and plenty of other people did too. See e.g. SSC's take on it here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge.... Now one big aspect of the whole drama is that 2) is being rejected out of hand as offensive wrongthink. The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist, and instead a narrative of systemic oppression is proposed. Another big issue with the memo is that a lot of people couldn't - and a lot still can't - understand the fundamental concept that you cannot take population-level statistics and use them to pass judgements on individuals. Just because a certain population doesn't like X on average, does not mean that a particular member of that population currently doing X is somehow wrong or unsuitable because of that. Damore didn't make this mistake, but was widely accused of it (and from what I remember from reading the memo two years ago, he repeatedly warned the readers against making this mistake).
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist I would posit that men and women have different realities, thus different needs. This shapes interests. It's not wholly unassailable, but needs to be approached differently than goals like "achieve x percentage of women in tech" are typically approached.
gotoeleven 7y ago
People should look at the memo with all its links to papers to decide if these claims are "largely unsourced." https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I... There was a version initially floating around that had all the links removed.
- ajross 7y ago
  There is absolutely no sourcing for research showing women being inherently or unfixably uninterested in computer science. None. He had a bunch of links to studies about bland stuff like personality differences, using them to make arguments the study authors never indended and (where asked) refused to support. Calling that "sourcing" is essentially trying to treat Damore's fundamentally political document as an original piece of social science research.
  - gotoeleven 7y ago
    "women being inherently or unfixably uninterested in computer science" is not the claim. Do you grok the part where he talks about distributions?
  - naasking 7y ago
    > There is absolutely no sourcing for research showing women being inherently or unfixably uninterested in computer science. Damore never made such claims. At the population level, it does indeed seem like women tend to be more interested in people-oriented subjects (nursing, pediatrics, law) and men tend to be more interested in thing-oriented subjects (engineering, compsci, surgery). So even a discipline like medicine which has roughly gender parity, you still see segregation along gender lines, where women are overrepresented in subfields which deal directly with people (pediatrics, obgyn), and men are overrepresented in subfields which treat people as things (surgery). So a theory that delineates things vs. people has good explanatory power for explaining gender disparities [1]. Furthermore, Damore never claimed that such tendencies aren't "fixable". He claimed that the discriminatory policies currently in place are not only completely ineffective at influencing the gender numbers (and so should be ended), but that policies that take this research into account would be more effective. > Calling that "sourcing" is essentially trying to treat Damore's fundamentally political document as an original piece of social science research. If you're actually interested in a proper analysis Damore's claims by actual researchers in this field, I suggest reading [2]. [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018... [2] https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-research-say-about-gender-differences/ https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-r...

baddox 7y ago

I don't know about people getting fired for saying that, but it's probably not a true or reasonable thing to say. Consider that, to the extent that there may be a pipeline problem, one significant cause of it may be the conditions of work in your industry.