The memo was a rambling incoherent mess.

The problem: You cannot invoke science to tell somebody: I'm better than you. Period. That causes wars.

Only if not dating someone is discrimination in some useful sense (it's not).

https://www.amazon.com/Golem-Should-About-Science-Classics/d...; online link: http://cstpr.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/collins_the_gol...

Being just one sample, mine, it is completely statistically irrelevant. But it's the only thing i personally can go on. I want good candidates, if you can find me more good women candidates, that would be great.

We can talk straightforwardly about what makes the document problematic: whatever the validity of the "scientific" claims it makes about gender differences, there is no support (and likely no validity) to the connections it then makes to software development work. Despite that unjustified leap, the document goes on to suggest strongly that women working at Google are less qualified than men. There is no science Debrah Soh can cite to back up that assertion, however much she might want to.

Anyone can wrap an incendiary statement up in a pile of banal sentiment and ambiguous appeals to social science. When challenged, refocus the debate on the truisms and the footnotes and pretend you didn't write the nasty stuff you hid in the middle. And, as we can see, plenty of very smart people will fall for the trick.

Gender equity has been improving in the United States for several generations. As that has occurred, female participation in STEM fields (and in the professions, like medicine and law) has expanded dramatically. Many science fields are now approaching parity. Most have more than twice as much participation as computer science. That includes the field of mathematics, which is closely related to computer science and is certainly more intellectually challenging than "computer science" as practiced in the industry.

Among all STEM fields, computer science is distinguished for losing the participation of women over the last 10 years.

Unless the women of 1950 are somehow biologically different from those of 2017, the author's theory will somehow have to address the fact that her argument would have predicted the fields or law, medicine, biochem, mathematics, astronomy, statistics, accounting, and actuary would all be bereft of women over the 20th century --- obviously, the opposite occurred, despite the sexual revolution that was immediately to come.

The author of this article discusses a correlation between increasing gender equity and decreased STEM participation that does not appear in the evidence. There's a reason she does that: if you don't stipulate that correlation, the argument against gender bias in computer science has to confront another damning fact, which is that gender disparity in the field isn't global. Unless women in Asia are somehow biologically different than those of the US, her argument needs some way to address the fact that women make up the majority of STEM majors in many of those cultures.

Reading this article and then this thread, I find that there's really only two aspects of it that HN finds persuasive: the headline's appeal to "science", and the footnote observing that the author is a female scientist. That's not enough. Everything in between those things is wildly off.

In discussions about gender parity in CS, the word "preference" is a coded appeal to the Just World Hypothesis. There is a yawning chasm between neuroscience findings about "agreeableness" and "stress tolerance" and suitability for any particular kind of white-collar symbol-manipulation work. Ms. Soh must intuitively understand that, but mentions it not once in her piece, instead pretending that observations about the kinds of toys children play with allow us to reflect participation statistics directly into real preferences about work. Shenanigans.

If I state here that it is scientifically expected to see more foos than bars on HN, and then get banned because of it, that wouldn't become HN's manifesto, either.

I fear that, a few years from now, people will say it represented Google's official standpoints (which it doesn't) or those of a significant portion of its employees (which may or may not be the case, from what I know)

"Google employee's manifesto" or "James Damore's manifesto" are better names.

Speculation not from a social scientist as their job but a worker within Google apart from being grossly misplaced begins to sound eerily similar to the ravings of self obsessed supremacists cherry picking science. This is what hostility looks like.

And women then should be rightfully wary of all these fragile men who will watch them like hawks looking for any excuse to confirm their bias.

Google should send a memo explicitly stating anyone who thinks women or any group lower the bar should leave. This is not a place for bigots. It's a place for mature educated well adjusted adults to work together.

Anyone who supported that letter should in good conscience leave the organization which is 'lowering the bar', a definition no random individual not suffering from extreme hubris is 'qualified' to set and the prerogative of the organization and experts qualified for it.

If you are obsessed with diversity lowering the bar you can become a 'measuring the bar expert' and invest the time required educating yourself to become an expert before presuming to speak with authority you do not possess about a scientific field that does not trade in certainties.

How much is nature vs. nurture? (many of the behaviours the manifesto attributed to genetics are actually purely environmental)

Should that even matter? Shouldn't hiring processes be purely meritocratic?

The fact that the author of the memo argued for affirmative action for hiring more conservatives shows that he doesn't have anything against discrimination, as long as he profits. If he wanted a science-backed solution, he'd have supported motions to remove the topic of gender, race, political affiliation entirely from the hiring process. (Anonymous job applications can help with that).

Many of the sources were also quite misleading, or links to blogs instead of papers. The memo wouldn't pass peer review at any journal, and can, frankly said, not be called science.

As we also just had a big discussion about this topic on HN, this article is misleading and from an outlet that previously has published hit pieces on diversity policies[1], I flagged it - this discussion belongs into the recent megathread, not as its own onto the frontpage again.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/will-trump-make-amer...

The fact that they stated this very desire proves that they believe that women are different than men, and that women might theoretically approach a problem or solution differently than a man.

But if someone writes a manifesto which points out that, "Hey, maybe men and women are different, with different traits and mindsets (when considered across the whole average)", suddenly that person is sexist.

Google wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to pretend there are no tangible difference between the way males and females work and think, but they also want a diverse culture that can benefit from the different ways how males and females work and think.

The women in tech that I've asked felt somewhere between offended and furious and, more importantly, would not feel comfortable working with someone who wrote such a memo and distributed it to his colleagues.

It's no different from doing the same but replacing gender with race - it's racist no matter how carefully and scientifically you worded it.

It's almost as if the person writing this article believes that if the manifesto is factually/scientifically correct then it must somehow not be sexist. As if sexism consisted of lies? I don't get it.

1. Thou shalt not think

2. If thou thought, thou shalt not speak

3. If thou spoke, thou shalt not write

4. If thou wrote, thou shalt not sign

5. If thou signed, thou shalt not act surprised.

The article mixes up genetics with what people end up doing in life.

Can someone please tell me, why?

"In fact, research has shown that cultures with greater gender equity have larger sex differences when it comes to job preferences, because in these societies, people are free to choose their occupations based on what they enjoy."

Jim Flynn's study has unequivocally proven that raising the standards of modern introduction and access to equal education, living standards, and nutrition show increases in overall propensity for cognitive achievement. Though, if you talk to an anthropologist the nature of the term "intelligence" and "cognitive ability" is used in the mixed usage term but says nothing of the nature of intelligence.

Nevertheless, the entire debate is whether we are actually in an egalitarian society to begin with. The nature of even measuring cognitive ability with the g-factor is that it is derived from relative populations. Gender differences might indeed be more amplified in these type of societies but the debate is whether we are already there and to what degree sectors of our large country have access to that.

I would argue, as others have, that the distribution of equal treatment, based on the evidence of exodus from the field of technology speaks far larger volumes about the industry as a whole than it does about biological differences.

Indeed, let's even take into account those biological differences that are being discussed here. Just because one has the propensity to behave a certain way in front a social group of men, and different when a female is around (this too has scientific backing), you could argue that the change in behavior over time would be a product of how distributed those groups are (in thought and in numbers). Food for thought.

It's also interesting to note that creative endeavors tend to lead to high correlations of neuroticism as well. If there are biological differences that show that women are, on average, tend to be more neurotic than men, it doesn't really say much about the nature of interaction or the way we behave with one another. Furthermore, to even attempt to use this as reasoning that women may not last within male-dominated environments is insulting in itself. What it really actually proves is that the inequality in both the diversity thought and in numbers only reinforces the problem. The logic is rot with flaws, (I'm paraphrasing several sections with lines of reasoning; i.e. de-emphasizing empathy) "due to the nature of the tendency for behaving a certain way, we should not make attempts at empathizing with one another because of the heightened sensitivity." Not only is this flawed logic, it's not scientific in the least bit. I would've fired him on that alone.

Indeed, you can also conclude from similar studies that creative endeavors have the tendency to being higher activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661315...) Due to the nature of mulling over problems, the tendency is that this often is indicitive of a higher threat sensitivity (real or otherwise); hence the neurotism. This doesn't say anything about the gender differences therein, but rather the brain itself when it comes to problem solving in general.

Of course, the greater problem here is about the nature of social interaction. We can take into account how men tend to behave around other men, or in the presence of women, or women around other women, or in mixed groups; we can take into account innate differences (however pronounced or not); we can even take into account the debate over the access to a population which is educated enough to enter the field of study. Even taking into account the meta-analysis study on things-people, it is a bit presumptuous to think that parity is not obtainable or necessary in STEM.

The nature of STEM revolves around the problems that are being solved. One would hope that those problems are about solving them for PEOPLE. One would hope that software engineers employ creativity and artistic nuances when architecting and collaborating with others. The base of that study only speaks about the anthropologic nature of how people behave within those fields. One can speak of the people-oriented nature of mechanics, engineering, and just about all fields of study. I find it a bit simplistic to categorize STEM as a whole as purely mechanics; it's reductionist and frankly insulting.

The key to changing minds is understanding the other side. Not shutting them out of the conversation.

I think computer scientists tend to apply the same skills and techniques to social issues that they do to compiler theory and algorithm design. And that's how you end up with these 'manifestos'. I don't think that many people are offended by the science. They are offended that he has turned women in tech into a technical problem that he can solve with his logical reasoning.

It appears that he thinks he's the only one who's read the studies. It's arrogant. Everyone interested in the issue has already read those studies. They also have enough interpersonal skills to know that you can't just apply studies to your coworkers.

http://fortune.com/2017/08/08/google-memo-legal/

> It picks out a small subset of the claims made in the document, discards the context and all the other claims, and then harangues us for having a problem with "science".

I'm claiming that the reason she does this is because it is the number one point cited by many of the detractors, and it prevents us from getting into the more interesting and relevant questions.

> something being true doesn't make it not racist (or sexist). The falsehood/lying isn't a necessary condition.

Of course it is! Seriously listen to yourself! If I say "The average 20 year old healthy person will be able to climb this mountain faster than the average 80 year old healthy person" then it is a fact based on science and DOES NOT make me a ageist, or does it? Now apply the same logic to the previous topic and listen to yourself again.

Imagine I'm creating a basketball team and I reason that height is an advantage for players and men tend to be taller than women, so I will not aim to have 50% women on the team. By your definition I'm being sexist, but my attitude doesn't deserve the opprobrium that that label implies.

It's not a debate to be won. Some people just keep insisting it is with this cloying, sweaty desperation. It's embarrassing, and it's awful that these Silicon Valley ghouls have so much power that we have to consider them at all.

I read the article, it didn't have any real science and made a bunch of insane, half-baked assumptions. The guy is a dumbass and deserved to be fired.

Suppose that height is an advantage in basketball and we thereby discover that asian men are underrepresented in the NBA. Are you claiming that is racist and something we have to do something to change?

It's a well established fact that conservatives are, at a minimum, just as guilty of hostility to ideas they don't like as liberals.

Consider Megyn Kelly, a celebrated conservative journalist whose career was completely destroyed simply because she asked Trump some tough questions.

Consider Tomi Lahren who was a cherished conservative icon until she came out in support of abortion based on her conservative principles of individual freedom... following that expression of free speech she was squeezed out of her job and destroyed in the conservative press.

Consider Gretchen Carlson who was humiliated and dragged through the mud in conservative circles after she spoke out about her own experiences with sexual harassment in the workplace.

Consider John McCain who is regularly blasted as a RINO because he occasionally takes an action that is not in complete lockstep with the party line.

Consider Glenn Beck who was on the receiving end of boycotts and death threats because early on, he spoke out against Trump in favor of the eminently conservative Ted Cruz!

Consider Ted Cruz himself who was literally booed off stage during the RNC because he dared to instruct the audience to "vote with your conscience" instead of blindly praising Trump.

The list goes on and on, so I have to reject your assertion that "suppressing free speech is 90% leftist" as utter ignorance.

Edit: Also who could forget the brouhaha around the Dixie Chicks after they said something bad about George W. Bush [2]. That incident foreshadowed the kind of tactics that are common on the left now.

[1] http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks:_Shut_Up_and_Sing

Nonetheless, many of the statements in "Personality differences", "Men's higher drive for status", and "Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap", especially the stuff about women being more prone to anxiety, liking part-time work, caring more about people than things, etc. speak strongly to aptitude for engineering, given the context of the document.

EDIT: Also, I reject the implication that the claim "women have less of a preference for engineering" is not in and of itself a harmful stereotype.

1. The memo uses the word "preference" without ever establishing whether it's talking about free choice or choice after discouragement, and so is flagrantly begging the question.

2. It's simply false that the memo makes no connection between supposed preference and aptitude, as it builds to a section about the "harms of diversity" that includes a direct claim that women in Google's workforce are less capable than men.

(I believe we already told you this elsewhere, but) you've been posting such ideological flamebait to HN that your comments amount to trolling whether you mean them to or not. This isn't a question of how right or wrong you are—plenty of your fellow community members are arguing the same positions as you without violating the spirit of this site. If you'd like to participate in thoughtful discussion, you're welcome to keep commenting here. Kindly fix this?

Admittedly these trainwreck threads have been pretty thin on thoughtful discussion, but even so, several of your posts stand out as poisonous.

And that's why no one makes that argument I hope!

Not to my knowledge. Are you talking about when he (perhaps jokingly) said:

> So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them. I will pay for the legal fees.

This, too, helps me understand the outrage. Thank you for being honest.

(I do hope the 'thank you' above can be read by people in a calm, snark-less voice. It is genuine. I appreciate Ptacek being forthright. I learned from it. It really does make the thread better and furthers the conversation in a productive way.)

You can make the same argument about IT. My point is not that what I'm saying is true, but that (like the macrosociological claims in the paper) it sounds plausible, yet is unfalsifiable and hence, unscientific.

> You are forgetting one huge thing. Lots of women doing something make it automatically attractive to women just because it'll be common in their circles.

I am not forgetting anything. My argument was in essence a reductio ad absurdum. If you want to advance a social argument why women are over- or underrepresented in certain professions and why Damore is therefore wrong, that would be an entirely separate argument. You're welcome to make it on your own, but I don't think the memo is worth that much of a time investment myself.

Because most of the reactions were emotional, not rational. If we were rational beings it wouldn't matter, but we're not and never have been.

In reality most of these levels have only clerical work to do. Sometimes things like writing down on a register that you issued somebody a Screw gauge. So basically book keeping, secretarial work, data entry etc etc.

But yeah, on the ground every gets to be called a 'Scientist'.

...sending rockets to the moon...

It's entirely possible that as he said, he wanted to spark some reasoned debate and he's just made a few mistakes (and got particularly unlucky with Gizmodo cutting his charted caveats) but it's equally possible that he knew exactly what reaction he was likely to provoke and aimed for just beyond the line of what would be considered acceptable.

(I have no insight into what he thinks or how he's been treated, but if I wanted an open discussion on the merits and shortcomings of Google's diversity policies, I'd probably start by suggesting that quotas are nearly always bad and male/female inequalities in STEM start long before people apply to Google, not with an essay insisting that men are more suited to software roles because biology and that Google's promotion of the view that attitudes contribute towards gender imbalances is left wing bias that threatens my psychological safety.)

Also, it sounds like he _actually_ was more asking for feedback from a specific group within Google that in-turn decided to circulate it within the company as a whole.

The most troubling thing is the claim that James makes about the 'super secret, unrecorded meeting' that he attended within Google that prompted this paper in the first place. If that meeting really did take place, that is a sign of systemic racism/sexism within Google at some of the highest levels. If. I have no idea who to believe in this situation. An investigation into the company may be called-for.

Nobody is forced to choose Nursing over Tech, so if they are unhappy with the salary, why do people choose Nursing? Presumably more people choose Nursing than Tech, so the salary is lower as per supply and demand (and of course demand is dependent on other factors as well - but if fewer people went into Nursing, prices surely would go up).

Nobody is entitled to any kind of job they want. Jobs exist because people need jobs done, and they are willing to pay for them being done.

Tech has historically not been awful to women. The social networks are full of the reports on how early programmers were all women. Even today tech is not awful to women. They get a red carpet rolled out for them.

But yeah I don't think it's a scientific claim, of course it depends on how you define "science". If you consider politically-motivated sociology to be science, then yeah I guess you could count privilege as a scientific concept...

https://papers.tinbergen.nl/11074.pdf

A more readable summary is here:

http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/impact-gender-diversity-performan...

The authors did indeed find a balance point, at about 50:50 (a far cry from the 81:19 among engineers at Google). OTOH, this was for a very different kind of task than programming. Another starting point is here:

http://www.chabris.com/Woolley2010a.pdf

It's particularly interesting that many summaries of this work will use vague terms like "composition of the group" to avoid mentioning anything in the findings about number of women in the group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

One of the major giveaways that the Diversity VP at Google is incompetent came when she criticized the author for attacking women simply because he used the terms "conscientiousness" and "agreeability" and "neuroticism". You are not doing much better by insinuating that science can only be correct when it supports your ideological position.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sexual-personalities/20...

The article points out that for most of the biases cited in the memo, the differences are on the order of a few percentage points, which cannot account for the real-world outcomes we see. To quote:

Still, I think it's important to keep in mind that most psychological sex differences are only small to moderate in size, and rather than grouping men and women into dichotomous groups, I think sex and sex differences are best thought of scientifically as multidimensional dials, anyway (see here).

To be honest, I'm not sure how Ms. Soh can seriously argue the merits of the memo, here. Yes, technically the memo is not itself inaccurate, in that there are gender biases that result in practical population-level effects. But how one can seriously use those facts to conclude that the 70/30 population split in the valley is a product of those differences, I really don't know, unless confirmation bias is at play. It just doesn't make any sense.

Heck, just looking historically it doesn't follow... it's not like the biases we see are inevitable. Our industry used to have a different composition. And other STEM fields have seen gender disparities even out. So neither facts nor history support the conclusion.

> Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated[1] by men.

Using this source [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883140

But the published article makes no claim about any causation between STEM preference and actual employment in a field. We can only speculate on causation.

I know in my job as a programmer there is certainly a great deal of "Social" interaction. Agile programming certainly benefits from "Conventional" thinking that women prefer. A graphic designer on my team is highly "Artistic" and we pull him into design decisions for engineering choices all the time.

So why did Debrah Soh neglect to provide supporting citations for the claim that societies with greater gender equity have greater gender career gaps, given that it's the one most central to supporting the Anti-Diversity Manifesto?

Is Debrah going to dispute the claim that Engineers — having to deal with people — need "soft" skills? Is she going to claim that all STEM work is necessarily playing with wheeled toys?

How does Debrah explain that "Gender equality closes the math gap[1]"?

"For science literacy, while the USA showed the largest gender difference across all OECD nations, d = .14, gender differences across OECD nations were non-significant, and a small female advantage was found in non-OECD nations, d=-.09."[2]

It's one thing to be "good at mathematics", quite another to be "a good engineer."

Nobody who participates in quota systems or diversity hiring believes that what they are doing is sustainable in the long term. The point of attempting to hire more people from under-represented portions of the populace is to counter-balance institutionalised sexism.

Debrah Soh does raise one important point: sexism doesn't come from knowledge of a subject, but what we do with that knowledge.

1: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/gender-equality-closes-m... 2: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

I can only provide my own anecdote. I come from third-world country, where women's right is a laughable word. Women are mostly controlled by the males in the family. Even with almost no women's rights, women presence in my undergrad STEM school was around 20%. OTOH, when I came to Canada for my grad school, I've never seen any class where presence of women in STEM classes was more than 10%. Even then, most of them women are immigrants from China or South Asia.

That's "sexual" in the sense of "sexology", not "gender", though. She studies sexual paraphilia ("why people are into what they’re into sexually"), not gender differences as they pertain to society.

It is remarkable how the need for debate is disproportionately forwarded from the side with power.

I don't really understand the forum he submitted to. It sounds like a huge public internal mailing list. That sounds like the wrong forum to me. This probably could've gone to the new VP of diversity directly.

Maybe I'm overly paranoid but I pretty much never write anything about race, religion, gender, disabilities, age, etc... at work. And if I ever felt I needed to I'd do so very carefully, probably with the assistance of HR.

It's easy for the dominant majority in power to see this as holding back the one aspect in their life where they feel as if they are limited in what they can do/say. But these limits and implied apprehensions exist for good reason, IMO.

Then uses the existence of those small differences to justify fundamentally changing their hiring policies.

The latter does not follow from the former.

Again, as with the global warming debate, it makes a lot more sense to tackle the larger influencers first, before addressing these smaller factors.

To add, I started out as an English major. While I did well in most things I applied myself to, I spent the largest part of my youth studying humanities, the human condition, social mores (first hand, from the 'dirt' to the most pious), and art. I'm now back working in amongst the tech world, and studying science again, and that's how you have me here, contributing.

I'd also like to add that my grandmother was an early systems analyst and programmer (FORTRAN, COBOL) and had to work so hard to even be recognized that she wore it as a badge of honour the rest of her life. I didn't understand at the time she told me. I do now.

My mother on the other hand, left her career to look after my siblings and I to the chagrin of her feminista detractors who thought it was a move of weakness. She rallied against that her whole life, and I supported her then, too.

This wavering from one extreme to the other is really harmful, emotionally, on a large scale. However, sometimes we have to dig a little deep to make sure our colleagues, friends, and others get to see a little light. Somebody who's never had to struggle will never understand that fully.

The immediate and harsh backlash for proposing that science is not a good sole means for rationalizing how to work through social issues is pretty striking to me. Anyway, I never claimed to -- and certainly don't -- know what's best, but I know a slippery slope when I see one.

The lack of intellect and integrity displayed by the attacks on the fired Google employee is really disturbing.

I think they are saying that descriptive scientific observations have limited utility as prescriptive devices if we are to make progress because descriptions are based on how things have been rather than how things could be (or even could have been).

Especially in soft sciences, the /cause/ of what is described can be hard to reliably tease out. To assume the same cause is an unchangeable aspect of the human condition and that cause, even if true, will only ever lead to one end-state is often a mistake.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/08/daily-...

While there was a definite gap for the population as a whole, when you zoomed into the same job at the same company, the pay gap disappears.

No idea if that applies to women in tech but it was new info to me. Does anyone have a source for a pay gap in tech?

Oh, am I not allowed to form an opinion on what should be? Please correct me if I am wrong but perhaps your opinion is no one should have an opinion on what should be and let things be status quo? Keep in mind the whole discussion is around what should be the goal of diversity measures.

I get the feeling your position is exactly what Google referred to as toxic. Imagine a woman hired in a diversity program hears your position. Do you think she will feel welcomed and understood?

If you found out that the barista at your favourite coffee shop was racist, would that change whether they make good coffee? Is the value of the coffee inextricably linked to their views? If someone has a disgusting view in one aspect of their life, their other views appear to be tainted even if they are entirely orthogonal.

This often involves being deceptive, which would explain both of your points. For many people, status is everything and it doesn't matter how they get there. Selling yourself is often more important than having the actual skills required for a position.

And let's face it: Not everyone at Google needs to be a rocket scientist. We've also seen how shallow Google's hiring practices are.* Ticking check boxes is more important than correct answers, which perfectly fits with everything we're currently seeing.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272

I would be open to going directly to HR to discuss it. I, for example, have done this to discuss team vs individual compensation at my job. While not the hot topic that this was, HR was super responsive.

In general, I think before you try to present on a public work forum one side of an argument about some biological subclass and their on average work ability/habits -- I'd think twice. Even with the absolute best intentions you can really isolate and offend people. And when this subclass is already a minority and less powerful, the effect can be compounded (at the end of the day, even the affirmative action programs are designed and implemented largely by white men).

I agree that someone willing to condescend to women will be more likely to condescend to a junior employee or a teenager (i.e. they've already shown the propensity for prejudice), but I don't agree that they are probably condescending to everyone (I'd argue that kind of person is very rare).

It's not that there are legions of very sexist and evil people who are not prejudiced in any other way, it's that there's an unfortunately large spectrum of mostly well-meaning people who might harbor conscious or unconscious beliefs about women specifically. They might also harbor similar beliefs about minorities, or have a life experience that justifies their beliefs in their eyes, but nevertheless it's a big enough cross-section of society and a strong enough phenomenon that it's been noticed. That there is some subset of SJWs who think that they can take advantage of this isn't an extreme claim, but that it's a stronger phenomenon is a pretty extreme claim to me.

I keep hearing "well the scientists say so!", but it's simply not enough. For instance, I am enamoured with the work of physicists and their unique ability to explain the beauty of the "clockwork of the universe", so to speak. Outside of my personal sphere, I wouldn't consult a PhD Physics for advice on breaking up a fight between friends, necessarily.

Also, I didn't attack anyone here so please leave the ad hominem jabs at home.

edit: typo

I think it's good to do humanities studies but naive to latch on to one or two. Humanities is a messy field from a scientific perspective. But nevertheless there is plenty of signal there.

The issue I have is starting with something like 50/50 and then trying to optimize for that. This is invariably what happens. This leads to all kinds of weird, bizzare practices like being discriminatory in hiring based on (largely) immutable attributes like race and gender. The concept of gender itself is so in flux these days that it seems premature to start with 50/50.

This above approach I think is known as equality of outcome. I am not a big fan of that.

I personally think a better system is based on equality of opportunity where the optimization function should be trying to improve people's starting points. This is much harder but much better for the long term health of the society (in my opinion ).

In equality of opportunity, the hiring will be blind to gender. But work will be done to encourage more girls to participate in the sciences from an early age. Liberals wont be able to pat themselves on their backs immediately as they won't be fulfilling quotas quickly to show faux diversity. Corporations won't be able to bandage bad PR events quickly (like Google's gender paygap thing ) but this is in my opinion alot healthier over time.

Now, over time, I would expect the ratio to improve, but then settle at whatever is natural without any top down pressure to fulfill prescribed quotas. It might be the case that the mean of the distribution of women is closer to things like raising families or educating kids as teachers (the most important job in the world in my opinion ) instead of toiling away in front of a screen for crap money to make more money for a big corporation (compared to men).

In the first case (equality of outcome) we take two different distributions, men and women, and push them into a 50 50 split. In the second case (equality of opportunity), we try to move the means closer bottom up. I prefer the second approach. Slower, harder but much better for the long term health of society.

If you start with the potentially incorrect assumption that your hiring practices are biased in favor of one group over another then doesn't it make more sense to address this bias directly rather than enforcing quotas? Having your hiring process audited and getting rid of any bad weeds seems like a good start. I've seen firsthand manager who have said outright "we can't hire him, we need to hire a woman this time" after interviewing what seemed to be a good candidate.

Again, I read the article, many others read the article and wrote detailed responses. It's not my job to point these out. Someone making a stupid argument does not obligate anyone to engage or correct them. A massive popular backlash against a shitty idea isn't "trying to shut it down".

If I submitted an internal memo advocating pedophilia or something everyone would rightfully dismiss me. No one would be obligated to engage with my dumb ass, and you're all acting like that would be some kind of tragedy or moral failing on the part of everyone around me, rather than me for writing a stupid memo in the first place.

You should just say "I think women are inferior" rather than trying to dictate how people approach an incident adjacent to your agenda, just like white nationalists should just come out rather than being coy and hiding behind "free speech" issues.

Also, I'm not sure what you're getting at with the distinction between perspective and opinion. Regardless of whether you think Damore presented opinion or perspective, it surely wasn't random.

To reiterate my previous point: considering how things played out, it's obvious that the subclass that you called 'less powerful' is actually quite powerful.

He wasn't silenced in any way. His message reached way more people than he probably ever imagined.

We've yet to hear details of what this really mean, and if this CoC is applied fairly. It sounds like the violation i a) based on a particular interpretation of the memo, or b) based on the subjective offense of other employees. This sounds like the "cultural fit" loophole of the left.

> That's different than being fired for an idea

Is it? Have all the ideas you want, just don't express them, even in forums than are specifically for that purpose? Why isn't the leaker being punished?

> If I started onto my company's social intranet

There are plenty liberal/left essays floating about the google intranets, this is not you average employer.

> he created a hostile atmosphere

Did he? The leaker, and those who misrepresented the content of the memo seem to be implicit in that.

> This resulted in bad press

So does any whistle-blower. But again - He did not leak the memo.

The major concerns being how some perceive their prowess -- and who's preference is really deciding the solutions.

Aside: I've been around enough people in the general field to have heard enough thoughts about women in tech... and they're too often ill-reasoned and ill-positioned (relating to prowess and potential)... but that's more circumstantial, I admit.

Consider a business where 90% of applicants are female and 10% male. If the business chooses to hire 50/50, they are probably getting some sub-par males assuming the distribution of qualifications between male and female for the two sets of applicants are similar (which we don't have much reason to believe they differ much). In this case the females might be annoyed with the "special" treatment given to male hires that perform worse. And male hires might wonder if they got the job because they were well qualified or maybe just because they were male. In my opinion, this kind of "reverse" discrimination perpetuates bitterness and discriminatory thinking on all sides. I don't think of myself as a strongly religious person, but I think Christ had something when he was teaching that an "eye for an eye" was the old way, but the better way to live is to treat others how you want to be treated.

I'd be interested to read a few if you could provide some links. This assumes they exist of course, from the reading I've done on the topic I haven't seen any substantial rebuttal linked anywhere, but I've heard more than one person complain that the only rebuttal they've seen is "sexist!".

I have no particular horse in the race so if you do have content to back up your assertion I'd love to read it.

Can you link to one?

I didn't say they were suppressed. I said "try and suppress". Big difference. Also, what you say is equating "suppress" with "silence". They're not the same thing. I have read literally hundreds of comments, across HN and other forums, where people have made comments designed to suppress views they don't like (I've already given examples of the kinds of things I'm talking about, so won't repeat them here). Lots have literally said that people should not be allowed or should be punished for daring to even talk about such topics.

> Also that he doesn't understand the need for diversity in modern companies

If you've been reading these threads on HN, you'd know that many people would dispute that. Lots of people have argued that the memo is pro-diversity.

Which conclusions were inappropriate, specifically? The memo I read made several suggestions that would only help women in tech. If that's "inappropriate", then it proves his broader point: our biggest diversity problem is really the lack of diversity of thought.

If any of the conclusions are wrong, then no amount of shouting or complaining should be necessary; just refute the basis of those conclusions using facts rather than feelings.

"Inappropriate conclusions" resembles "thought crimes" applied to a corporate/social context.

I'm fine if people think his conclusions are "incorrect", "garbage", "shoddy", "poorly argued", "unsubstantiated", and a whole host of other adjectives. These are all responses that can be part of a discussion, even a healthy one in the right context.

But "inappropriate" is a lot more puritanical. It implies the thoughts are unwelcome and should be shunned (or worse). It implies that the appropriate response isn't reason-based but power-based. Some power is social (shunning, blacklists, twitter shaming) and some is corporate (HR training, formal reprimands, notes in files, demotions, firings).

It frames everything through a lens of identity power struggles. Therefore, whether an argument is scientific and factual is secondary to what identity group the person making it belongs to, and what their group stands to gain from it.

This ideological lens is anti-science, anti-cooperation, extremely racist/sexist and ultimately focused on only one objective: reducing the power of the group perceived as being at the top of the social dominance hierarchy.

If you select all persons from groups A and B that pass a certain threshold, then you will have a smaller number of A than B. Let's say the split is 40% A and 60% B.

We then analyze the population at our company and find we have 7% A and 93% B. Does this mean the company has a bias towards B, and needs to take special action to search for more A candidates to bring the ratio closer to 40/60?

It's not a question of "diversity", just an optimal hiring algorithm - the company is not utilizing a pool of hireable people in a time of scarcity, and its in their best interest to source more from that pool.

Of course the math gets more complicated when the supply of A is drastically different than the supply of B.

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has the most relevant writing on this.

One might disagree with his language, but this post is remarkably insightful to begin such a dive:

http://fucktheory.tumblr.com/post/57633497486/in-which-steve...

The memo, and your argument, is all about summing the parts instead of measuring the whole.

In fact, he goes farther. He says this "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business." Where is the science to back that up?

He is of course entitled to feel and think whatever he wants, but maybe a little old-fashioned advice would help here: measure twice, cut once. He clearly didn't think through the effects of posting a stern essay to a company-wide board on a subject that is really quite touchy in the midst of one of the more socially-turbulent periods in the past 20 years.

If he wants to prove it's that desperate, he probably should have worked harder on his essay or social skills, and found a better way to introduce discussion.

And we haven't even confronted his perceptions yet. I have to wonder who exactly feels afraid and intimidated by the conditions. Him, and who else? Instead of resigning to anxiety that he might be confronted for such a strongly-pointed diatribe, maybe he should have considered that his understanding of the situation might be skewed?

I can't speak for anybody else, but his facts didn't support his conclusions for me. His timing was even worse. If it's a discussion he wanted, then maybe he should have researched tact first.

Who's the 5th? We've got the 4 from the Quillette article and ...?

> Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths. - This defends putting women into less-desirable jobs because desirable ones are not really that desirable? This argument is self-defeating.

> I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women. For each of these changes, we need principles reasons for why it helps Google; - Discrimination is justified if it helps the bottom line.

> We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google. - You're not allowed to believe that discrimination will hurt the bottom line. Even if senior management tells you so.

> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate - The alternative is to increase the false positive rate for those candidates.

> Having representative viewpoints is important for those designing and testing our products, but the benefits are less clear for those more removed from UX. - Having representation is leadership is not important.

> Prioritize intention. - This is also illegal. Google is a government contractor and will be required to implement affirmative action policies if its employees are too different from the general population. That's because they're taking money from all taxpayers and redistributing it to or away from certain groups. Intention here is irrelevant.

> Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and 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).

Women are one of the groups you can hire. Salaries would only increase if you force the companies to have a higher number of women that they are really are (supply/demand).

> I think tech positions already need "female" skills (however sexist that may sound) but we just ignore it in favor of programming abilities as if we all work in silos.

Exactly this. What I am saying is that the solution might be to put those skills in written for those job positions and taking them into account in the hiring process. I think we are not doing it now. Also creating programs to teach everybody that other skills are also valuable for the job, and not because we don't have them we should under valuate who have them. I think something like this was the goal of the person who wrote the doc, but unlikely us, they fired him before open a discussion like we are doing now. In the first comments it seemed that we were having different opinions and look now, it wasn't really the case.

Sorry for the "female skills" sentence. I only wanted to explain it in an easy way. Those skills I refer like empathizing or social skills are more frequent in women but they are in men too.

EDIT: to make clear my position about the salaries: same position = same salary (no discussion here, if you want different salaries justify that person should be in a different position with more/less salary)

I'm not sure, especially for a company like Google, I would assume they get plenty of great candidates of either gender such that hiring from either pool would not require reducing their hiring standards.

> I don't think the argument ever was that unqualified candidates got a job. Rather, the reality is that if several candidates are qualified, and one of them happens to be a woman, she must be the one who gets the job offer, if a company wants to aim for a smaller gender gap.

> Is this fair?

If under the status quo male candidates are hired the majority of the time over otherwise qualified female candidates, then the status quo is already unfair towards the female candidates. Working to correct the imbalance may be perceived as "unfair" to the group whose advantage is lost, but that doesn't necessarily mean it actually is.

> What personally irks me, however, is that someone was fired for asking the question. That was decidedly unfair.

Unfortunately his memo went much further than that. I mean, is someone who concludes that Google's hiring programs are "veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google" really interested in honest debate? Much of his writing comes across as a highly politicized rant that detracts from the actual topic.

Even more generally, transcription factors, and the way they cascade.

Have a quick look at new pursuits such as:

http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/magazine/features/empathy...

https://phys.org/news/2015-11-empathy-faculty.html

I could discuss this at length because it's a subject that really interests me, and I'm severely biased because I started out in the humanities with my main pursuit being an understanding of the human condition. I've brought those learnings with me into my current software engineering career and it's serving me well.

Simple being able to place yourself in the shoes of an end user, rather than dictating to them what they necessarily have to learn (and even better, when you know they should learn something with improved understanding of how to implement such a feature) saves everybody a lot of time and frustration. Your estimates will improve in accuracy as well. You'll see less scope-creep.

It's especially important in critical-systems work.

Plus I consider it a bit of a boon to someones character if they care about what they're putting into the world. Most people do. Hint: it won't inhibit your technical understanding.

Would you agree that, if the gender disparity in an industry is caused by factors outside of the "natural ratio", then correcting those factors does not necessarily imply perpetuating discrimination? Or put another way, if you are holding a race where person A starts at the 0-yard line and person B starts at the 25-yard line, and you make them start from the same place, you are not actually favoring person A and discriminating against person B, but merely equalizing the playing field?

I know it's trendy to defend feminist talking points, but it ultimately leads to what we see now with the Google firing: a public conversation where facts take a secondary role to ideology/dogma.

Damore is not an idiot. The people who are attacking him in these ways are though: it's pure anti-intellectualism.

And by the way, counting experts is not a valid way to decide things, it's just a heuristic.

Damore has 5 who point out that he isn't making the science up, but what actually matters is that there are hundreds of studies and papers that support his basic position. Dr Soh points that out. It's not just her opinion vs other people's opinions. It's the opinion of thousands of scientists who have published research that shows all sorts of preference differences between gender.

Also another argument from him was that 50/50 is impossible to achieve and if you do you are being unfair and lowering the bar for one of the classes.

The real ratio in unknown, but some people here commented that you can get some approximation taking into account the graduates, the statistics about the applications etc. But for sure the ratio is not going to be 50/50 and positive discrimination is still discrimination.

So, as you said, if you don't know the real ratio why do you have positive discrimination policies? You might be doing it wrong. I think this is the discussion he wanted to bring, review the diversity programs because they can harm the company creating an artificial proportion far from the reality. Given that some other actions could be made like adding more "female skills" to the positions for example. Instead of starting a discussion of this issues based on his biological theory most people pointed at him as a sexits and other stuff. And Google shut him up firing him. So now noone will raise any concern because you can be fired.

To sum up: the big issue is that they are not having the conversation we are having here now, regardless of who is right or wrong.

Damore's piece can be read as supporting one of two policies, depending on how you interpret it:

1. Adopt alternative approaches to increasing the number of women at Google.

or

2. Leave things alone and don't try to interfere with the outcome of the standard hiring process.

I think he argued more for (1), in which case his "ideology" would if anything be rather close to Google's standard ideology and it's only a debate about means rather than ends.

But if you read it as (2), e.g. because he says he doesn't support socially engineering tech to get a particular outcome, that's still not an ideology. Doing nothing is not an ideology, it's an absence of ideology.

So I find myself disagreeing with you on this basic point. It's Google and Damore's opponents who are pushing an ideology here. Not him.

The truth you are missing about the world is contained right within that statement. I recommend printing it out and hanging it on your wall as a reminder, and let your mind chew on it for a few months. Resist the urge to draw conclusions, just mull it over, you might be surprised.

Where is the empirical evidence that these initiatives had led to good results at Google?

And assuming we can measure both the good and bad side effects of such initiatives, does the good outweigh the bad?

The biggest piece of empirical evidence that these initiatives have led to bad results at Google is everything that has happened in the aftermath of the memo being published and found considerable support both in and outside the company.

Had the initiatives been universally good and whose goodness is easy to defend empirically, I would likely have no or at most very few bad results to present to you in response to your question.

... as the memo just proved ...

Management could have put him in charge of gathering and analyzing data to prove or disprove his memo.

They fired him instead => they don't care about data => the memo was right, management is biased

The author suggests that when these average statistics propagate into life decisions and employment preferences, you end up with an equilibrium with less females in these roles.

You write 'This can be used again to claim women don't belong in those roles' but the author did not use this to claim such a thing! 'I know several women' precisely coincides with what the author wrote. Again, he pointed out multiple times throughout that he was not generalizing but was merely looking at average trends.

In the aggregate, this is objectively true based on my observations, and you can see this exact same sentiment passionately expressed by feminists.

> ...there are some roles they might not be able to perform.

This part is your mind playing tricks on you. You have certain beliefs, and you are trying to find anything to confirm them.

You have misunderstood what the author was saying, I would suggest because you are not trying to understand it, but rather are trying to find examples to substantiate your worldview.

> Strip away his science and his words

....leaving us....your imagination?

That's absurd. You're not even interpreting his comments at face value. You're attributing a subtext to them that only exists in your imagination.

>Strip away his science and his words, he's a misogynistic techbro

What an absolutely hateful and sexist comment. It amounts to: "strip away his message and judge him by what identity group he belongs to"

if he was a white-supremacist who wrote a scientifically-backed manifesto about biological differences with his black coworkers, would you still be blaming the people who are 'shunning' him?

But we don't have to engage in such hypotheticals. Let's consider the premise that Damore's memo is simply a call to debate based on science and facts. In my opinion, such a non-biased, open-minded essay would not include this kind of assertion:

> We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and a whiner [10]. Nearly every difference between men and women is interpreted as a form of women’s oppression. As with many things in life, gender differences are often a case of “grass being greener on the other side”; unfortunately, taxpayer and Google money is being spent to water only one side of the lawn.

Only someone ignorant of basic facts and history would make this sweeping claim. And only someone ruled by his emotions would be unable to take a step back and do a Google search to see if anti-discrimination law has been used on behalf of men. Given that kind of massive error, or inability to recognize one own's ignorance, I don't think we should continue assuming that Damore's premises are factual or coherent in their arrangement. Which is why I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt in saying that it'd be better if he could have actual empirical evidence on the harm of Google's diversity programs. Just because his memo contains facts doesn't mean that it's truthful, if those facts are used loosely to further the author's emotional appeals.

edit: Fixed the formatting to show that [10], in the original memo, refers to a footnote and contains a hyperlink.

The footnote:

[10] “The traditionalist system of gender does not deal well with the idea of men needing support. Men are expected to be strong, to not complain, and to deal with problems on their own. Men’s problems are more often seen as personal failings rather than victimhood, due to our gendered idea of agency. This discourages men from bringing attention to their issues (whether individual or group-wide issues), for fear of being seen as whiners, complainers, or weak.”

The URL of the hyperlink (the text of which is "misogynist and a whiner"): https://becauseits2015.wordpress.com/2016/08/06/a-non-femini...

(Pretty sure "becauseits2015.wordpress.com" would not pass as a useful source on Wikipedia, but YMMV.)

So, what exactly am I supposed to draw from this? You're insistent I am wrong, but you're offering no explanation as to why I am wrong. I don't disagree that women are more sociable than men. I disagree this means certain roles within the company cannot support that trait.

Further down: "Women value work life balance" "Men are status achievers" "Because of that, men will appropriately be in leadership and technology roles, also women suffer anxiety more." Side note, convenient he leaves out that women are statistically able to deal with stress better than men. His conclusion is that rather than creating programs that encourage women to enter leadership positions, leave that to the men and give women access to part time roles.

If you want to say I am wrong, so be it, disagreement is fine, but you have yet to counter anything I have said with an opposing understanding, just ad hominen attacks and criticism.