The Google memo isn’t sexist or anti-diversity, it’s science (opens in new tab)

I personally never called it out for sexism. I called it out for regressive-thinking as a solution based on plain fact.

I can only be brief right now, but it's starting to get to me how so many people in an innovative sphere seem to have such a hard time with this. To me, it seems like it shouldn't be a second thought.

If the main argument is that women do not [by nature of our scientific understanding] have minds tuned to engineering prowess to the extent that men do for whatever cause, then just how does that itself prescribe that we should stop pushing for an expansion there?

Humans never evolved to fly, yet we do it all the time. By the same logic, if we weren't evolved to do it, we should probably just put our planes away because it's bad for us. Same with communicating long distances and sharing knowledge on a planet-wide scale. <sarcasm> I mean, they've caused problems themselves after all. I think we should put all these silly, limit-pushing ideas and practices aside and just go back to smashing rocks together. The ground has rocks. We all have two hands. It can work for us.</sarcasm>

TL;DR Why is a fact being accepted as sound basis for a totally disparate theory on why we should stop trying to exceed our limits? This guys post wasn't science. He used science to reason out a way to revert to a state of community where he stands to gain more. There was another theory like that, I can recall. I think it started with an 'e'.

edit: Wanted to add, a PhD of neurosexuality is probably one of the last people I would consult on philosophy, humanism or any kind of larger social issue. It's not exactly her scope. It does help to have an expert on the subject chime in on the science, though. It will help at least dispose of that less useful side of the discussion.

> Not much new here. This article is essentially just re-affirming all the scientific statements that were already made in the original memo, backed by links to scientific studies.

It's not the biological claims, it's the conclusions he draws from it.

Here's the thing. Let's stipulate that all the biological (and esp. neuroscience-related) claims are 100% true. What follows?

Let's look at nursing. Clearly, it should be a male-dominated profession, right? The work-life balance (all the night shifts) is horrible and the stress is high (lives in the balance and all that). This is a profession that women should not want, right?

Same for accounting. Few professions are less about people and more about things. No room for "gregariousness". Again, a man's job.

In contrast, management positions (at least mid-level leadership positions) should be a great fit for women. All about interacting with people and that "gregariousness".

Obviously, this is not how the real world works. My point is that we're dealing with wishy-washy criteria here that you can use to argue whichever way your personal biases lie. They are inherently unfalsifiable and hence, unscientific. It's like the story about the blind men and the elephant [1], drawing bold macrosociological conclusions from fairly raw biological and psychological data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

I'm just gonna copy another comment I made elsewhere:

The problem is that the gender differences cited cannot, in aggregate, explain the 70/30 bias toward men in the industry.

There's a real similarity to the global warming debate, here. There are many factors that affect global mean temperature. For example, over the very long term, the sun will get brighter. But that can only account for an astonishingly tiny fraction of the warming observed on the planet.

Someone who wishes to debate honestly would admit that, while there are many factors that affect global mean temperature, the rise on CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is significant, and has a demonstrable effect on temperature, making it by far the strongest influencer.

Someone who wishes to debate dishonestly will use these other explanations as a method to muddy the debate and try and turn attention toward lesser factors that cannot explain the whole effect.

Now, if you look at this current "debate", yes, there are undoubtedly biological gender differences that can explain some male/female bias in engineering (among many other disciplines).

But no serious psychologist or sociologist would claim that those differences can account for the dramatic real world bias in the industry. It simply doesn't follow.

So to claim those gender differences lie at the root of bias in the industry is a distraction. At best it's a gross misunderstanding of the science and statistics. At worst, it's a deliberately dishonest attempt to muddy the waters and confuse the debate. Personally, my bet is it's more the former than the latter.

Women used to be more prevalent in STEM fields. In the 80's there were actually more female programmers than males. Something changed in the mid 80's and the culprit might have been gender stereotypes in advertising. If the reason for less women in STEM is biological, they would never have outpaced males at any timepoint.

The problem with scientific studies is that they're great at describing a population, but generally have very little predictive power at the individual level.

For example, one of the studies that showed boys were better than girls at math showed that if you chose a random boy and a random girl, there was a 55% chance that the boy was better at math. Not very much different from flipping a coin at an individual level, but quite significant in a population.

> backed by links

> PhD in sexual neuroscience

> female

There's a LOT that's new here, relative to Damore's memo.

What astonishes me is that Google's VP of Diversity knows so little about the underlying science of her vocation that she confused statements of clinical fact (with the science even referenced in footnotes!) with personal attacks on women.

The issue with the original article was two-fold:

1. It used strawman arguments. Notably that the world is looking for a 50/50 split in gender ratios. Most reasonable people believe that even in ideal equilibrium state that this is not the expected outcome (although I'm sure there exist some people that push for 50/50 or greater). But that the current ratio is not the ideal equilibrium state. The author of the paper seems to point out that 50/50 isn't likely the expected ratio -- and then jumps to trying to dismantle affirmative action.

2. He selectively uses research and data from research. For example the impact of stereotypes and individuating. But the research shows that while individuating is effective when it shows clear discrepancy, it isn't effective when there is any ambiguity. That is Maryam Mirzakhani will likely make someone who thinks women aren't good at math think, "But yes, she's actually quite good." But when it comes to more nuanced decisions and decision with a lot less data (which is more commonplace in the workplace), individuating isn't so effective. Determining who should be promoted to lead or VP from a group of pretty strong candidates, will often have the stereotype bias still play a role (and in fairness, depending on exactly the role -- it can benefit females too). This is meant to be an example of research where in the memo one part of the story is told, but not the other. Based on my limited investigation, I don't trust him being impartial in presenting these facts. In much the same way that climate change deniers often point to facts too -- its what they don't point to that is worrisome.

Lastly, there is a difference between speaking truth and how you speak truth. This seems obvious to most people outside of engineering. Putting "Catherine has big boobs and I'd have sex with her, if she consented" as part of your sig may be completely factually she true. In fact, it may be obvious to everyone who reads it, but there is a time and a place. If I were a female, I'd have a hard time reporting to Mr. Damore. If I didn't get a promotion, I don't think it would be out of line, to consider what he wrote in the memo. If Mr. Damore ignores my suggestion in a design review, I'd have to again strongly consider if he did so because of my gender. If he rejects all of his women interview candidates -- is that a problem or not? The context of what he wrote, even if done in good faith, creates a more difficult working relationship.

My hope is that if Mr. Damore wrote that in good faith, he will take this feedback and make things better for everyone, male and female. He certainly won't have trouble getting job offers (if he wrote it in good faith or not -- there are enough people in tech who don't like women in the industry) -- and if his end goal was to create the environment for the discussion, then he's done that too.

>Only difference being that the author of this article has a PhD in sexual neuroscience

Original evil evil author had a PhD/MS in Biology from Harvard

This horse is going to get beaten to death like the MNIST dataset with AI tutorials.

For the record, the "facts" cited in her post are indeed questionable. A decent sociological analysis has been making the rounds, including https://ifstudies.org/blog/five-facts-about-women-and-men-in... and https://ifstudies.org/blog/what-the-google-engineers-manifes... among others, including a presenter at Google https://twitter.com/histoftech/status/894418661741649920

Even a brief analysis of sociology would reveal a deeply seated counter argument to much of the "fact" present in the screed and the OP link.

> The assumption here is that employment in STEM industries fundamentally and solely involves "mechanically interesting things".

It's not. Read the original memo.

He especially mentioned that women gravitate to the more social jobs in STEM environments, but Google's diversity programs were trying to force them into the "code monkey" jobs instead, to spread them more evenly.

> Strong technology is important for success, but so is leadership, market fit, team dynamics, understanding the customer, etc. The hardest question in tech companies is not "how" to build, but "what" to build. This is essentially a people-oriented problem, since customers are people.

Absolutely. So why waste your people-oriented employees on jobs that aren't people-oriented?

What's the proportion of people who work their way up to management from code-monkey, versus being hired directly into a management role?

If it's highly skewed towards "promoted from code-monkey", then there's a big barrier to entry if you're the kind of person who loves managing and dislikes code-monkeying.

> So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

From my experience, women in technology have a higher chance of reaching manager level than men. I worked with plenty of female managers, and their people and communication skills were the reason that got them in those positions. Women with families, women working 4/5th.

So yes, I do think they can rise up with those skills, from a European perspective.

> So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

In competitive environments men are more willing to fight than women, so they are more likely to get the jobs because women are more likely to give up. And I think we should try to change this because as you said "people skills" have a lot of value in management. We need both skills and try to represent both in management roles.

> WEIRD how none of these guys ever argue that because our ladybrains are better at communication and teamwork we should be paid more

There are profession typical for women like nursing that they have less salary than tech jobs. The reason is economical, tech companies produce more money. But I strongly thing the nursing job is as important as a tech job and we should try to remove the gap between professions. But with a capitalism system you cannot do this easily.

Note: I am one of the persons who agree with the biology differences between male and female.

I don't he denied that though did he. He specifically said women would prefer those roles.

I would imagine it is the Peter Principal to blame for lack of woman management. Even tech companies cannot seem to grasp the idea that management is its own separate skill set and simply promoting your best developers isn't going to guarantee you quality management.

> this tweet puts it succinctly:

When people have a scientific theory and that theory can be shown to not be good at predicting the world, it is still science. The point is to find a better theory, one which predictions better match observational data.

So what other theories are there? One that the memo mention in that controversial list is that men are pushed (incentivized) to seek higher earning. So lets put out a few predictions here. At average, jobs with higher risk and higher earnings should have more male applicants seeking them. Promotions that results in pay increase should be demanded by men more even if that risk their current job position. When there is a choice between benefits or increase pay, me should be statistically biased towards increased pay.

Is that theory better or worse? depend on the observational data that can either confirm or dispel the predictions. Personally I am more convinced by the second theory than the first, but that is purely based on the data. Make a better theory and provide convincing data and I would instantly change my mind. At that point the second theory should be abandoned with the same speed that I abandoned the first one.

I upvoted this comment since I think you made a good, salient point, but I also think that you elided the important baseline point that programming is simply more "mechanical" than work done in HR/Sales or by managers.

My impression is that most managers in the tech industry already have a good amount of experience in "mechanical" (development, etc) roles, and to even get there you need an education or experience in relevant skills (correct me if I'm wrong). I don't know about whether the proportion of women vs men with managerial roles in tech is fair, but if what the author of this article is saying is true, the required educational or professional pedigree just to get into the tech industry is probably one of the biggest causes of men vastly outnumbering women in tech already.

I didn't read a specific causality claim like that.

I think there was a purposeful gap in the logic since the causality is too convoluted to be definitive about.

1. "Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our _interests_ and _behaviour_... our _interests_ are influenced strongly by biology, as opposed to being learned or socially constructed."

2. It might be reasonable to wonder if a biological mechanism is at play here.

3. ??? some combination of things, including innate gender characteristics, but not limited to sexism ???

4. Women are significantly less likely to work in technology.

_ Accenting mine, not in the article.

> So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

The article does mention something about stress resistance, which would be an explanation. Of course, the best managers are able to avoid stress altogether by being effective managers.

There's also something I read elsewhere that men are / can be more competitive; both would explain why there's more men at the top, alongside blatant sexism / gender discrimination.

But that is not related to "shortage of women in tech/STEM". More women in management wouldn't change that.

Maybe it is just difficult to put managers without experience in the trenches in front of people? That is, managers who have no tech skills as such?

> So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

Higher levels of programming may be composed of more work with people (coordinating a team, extracting requirements from clients, etc.), but the lower levels, and the education leading up to there, is tech focused. And it's from there that managers are sourced.

> Google themselves have found through their own research that the best managers are defined by their people skills, not their technical skills. So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?

That's a great point. So maybe Google should have said, 'This memo makes sense for programmers but not for managers'. Instead they said, 'You're fired!'

Also interesting is that it's one of the things social justice activists constantly criticize others for. I can't count how many times I've heard the following: "when we say men are privileged, we don't mean any and all men are privileged to the same extent." Or "when we say white people are racist, we're not talking about every single individual white person."

And it makes sense. Yet when it comes time for someone to say "the statistical average for career interests in females tends to lean away from technology", all observable nuance is thrown to the wind.

> It's not personal by definition.

In my own experience, when one tries to talk with a woman in an impersonal way about something that is personal to her, she will tend to find that very offensive. Infuriating even, because one is ignoring her emotions, treating them as if they don't matter. And to her, her emotions really matter.

From talking to others and based on what I've read, things tend to trend this way. In fact, there was a woman neuroscientist who gave a talk at Google[1] on the differences between the male and female brains and in that she gave an example of this kind of thing. She says that when she comes home and is frustrated about a problem she has been having, her husband wants to go straight to an objective solution to her problem. It drives her nuts. She just wants to hear that he understands how she feels. Before he tries to provide a solution, he is supposed to say, "Honey, I understand how you feel."

I think Damore made this mistake. He has a footnote about the need to be objective instead of emotional about these kinds of things. And so he wrote a very objective, detached memo. I suspect that was a significant part of the problem. It's a male approach to a hot issue. He instead needed to write in a way that was very emotional about how great women are and all the unique gifts they bring to the table and how he wanted to empower them to be free to be themselves at Google and create an environment that was welcoming to all that is special about women. It could have had almost all the same content but lead with positive emotions. Had he done that, he might not have faced such a backlash from furious women.

Men, too, need to know that you care about them before they care whether or not your facts are factual or relevant. But most men do not find an impersonal approach offensive per se, the way that many women do.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu_uGr1ZOn4

    > She's explicit that statistical observations can't be used to judge particular individuals. 

That's perfectly fine but there's a lot more to it than the statistics, even if they're valid. Moreover statistics doesn't necessarily suggest a clear conclusion and course of action for organizations and decision makers.

That didn't stop the author of the original manifesto, however, from proceeding to make a bunch of bogus smug prescriptions for what google needs to do like "de-emphasize empathy" etc. These were way above his pay grade and I find it hard to believe that diversity has harmed this person.

The fact is, Google is doing just fine. They're not in a downward spiral because of diversity initiatives. They're thriving. At a minimum one could argue that Google's diversity programs aren't hurting the performance of the company.

The author of the manifesto clearly violated Google's Code of Conduct and got fired for it.

Do you really find that interesting though? Isn't that incredibly obvious?

My biggest problem with all this is how the author gave absolutely no thought to how his female coworkers would be affected by this. These are REAL women who have to interact with him every day. They are not just statistics who are on average less likely to be good engineers than he is. They are supposed to be on the same team. I can't see how any of his women coworkers wouldn't think of him differently after this.

This was not a paper released on the internet with no ties to his coworkers. By sharing it at work and tying it in with google he made it personal. The women reading it have no choice but to make it about them, because it is about them! They are the ones who interacted with programs that he is against. Everything he talks about is stuff they actually experience. And throughout the entire thing he shows that he does not care at all about these women.

The manifesto didn't stop at citing statistics.

Where he goes wrong is that he conflates statistical significance with clinical significance. Yes, his sources show that there are differences between men and women. However, the measured difference is so minute, there is little to no practical distinction.

Maybe i'm offended because, as a white man, it leaves me open to all kinds of statistics about how white men are overwhelmingly likely to be serial killers, compared to other groups. And it would follow that we could do a better of catching serial killers by assuming white men are unable to control their murderous impulses, and adjusting how our laws work so white men are diverted from jobs involving human contact. That way we don't lower the bar for the safety of our lawful citizens.

Human brains simply aren't very good at thinking statistically. You can say something totally factual and benign, like, "Most nurses are women" and someone will immediately chime in, "My uncle is a nurse!" It happens every time. It's practically a law.

We're good at noticing patterns and exceptions to those patterns, but, for whatever reason, we're just not good at distinguishing statements about populations from statements about individuals. For most people, breaking this intuition takes a lot of education and training.

So, yeah, you shouldn't really be surprised when some random person on Twitter fails to grasp the argument. It's disappointing, but it shouldn't be surprising.

I attribute this to lack of citizen sophistication. If you expect a public discourse to have clarity or nuance on statistical terms, then it probably means paying for statistics training for every citizen, even if it's just a little statistics unit as part of a larger civics course.

Because people do not understand statistics. A great example of this is the Gambler's fallacy [1].

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

Well if your beliefs is that the statistics are incorrect, I guess these kind of people would be offended by people who are simply stating the facts.

You're confusing the way things are versus the way things should be. Evolutionary biology explains the way things are. Diversity measures combats that with the goal of getting us to the way things should be. There are a host of reasons why things are the way they are now. The memo tries to offload some of that to biological explanations and cites studies. Then he makes a leap of faith and recommends the should based on that. The studies only explain why things are the way they are, not whether that is a good or a bad thing.

Specifically, he says at the top of the memo "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business." I'm not aware of any studies that backs this up.

I am always surprised when well educated people misunderstand or misrepresent opposing arguments, or reuse data points that seem to support their side as some sort of argument-winning trump card.

> claiming that sex is not something inborn

Literally no serious[1] person studying gender makes that claim. The reason it's hard to understand is because the actual argument has always ben that both nature and nurture play important roles. As for why "culture" applies, remember that while sex involves genetics (and hormones, etc), gender is performative. Performance happens in a setting, thus acting masculine hap[ens in a culture/setting that defines what "masculine" means.

> Clearly man and woman are different physically

Obviously true in general, but there are surprises in the details.

> and mentally

That is technically true, but presupposing that is bad science. Historically a lot of stupid crap was invented to justify the two predefined[2] categories. More importantly, anybody claiming there is a difference needs to explain the specifics of which traits they are talking about, because for most attributes the bell curves overlap significantly.

> Lysenkoism

If you want to be paranoid, you will find ways to interpret your experience as being persecuted. Instead, I suggest actually listening to the actual arguments being made.

[1] I'm sure you can find examples of almost any claim in forum comments.

[2] Science should create categories from the observations. If you're starting with the two categories [M, F] and then trying to prove or disprove that, you're doing it wrong. These concepts are more complicated than a simple Boolean flag.

Was literally reading about this last night in "The Gene, An Intimate History": https://www.amazon.com/Gene-Intimate-History-Siddhartha-Mukh...

Couldn't help but think of this troubling incident while reading about it.

I think they acknowledge that our society differs from that of our evolutionary ancestors, and that this context matters in determining social policy, and does not amount to "ignoring evolution".

> Sexism is taking a random male and a random female, and claiming that despite all the facts presented to you, the male is taller than the female. It doesn't matter that in a specific case a female is taller than a male.

Upvoted for this. Great definition of sexism.

> Well I'd argue that isn't great accuracy as 50% is what you'd expect from chance.... In fact, I might expect a similar accuracy from a machine-learning technique to predict sex based on your height. ...With height, I don't think anyone thinks it's anything other than genetic....

If the method is probably as good at predicting sex as one based on height, which everyone agrees is genetic, then why isn't that great accuracy?

> our four-year old son suddenly lost interest in 'Frozen'

As a counterpoint, if society was as clear that "My little pony" was also not for boys, Bronies might not exist..

There is a tremendous environmental component to height. Women in South Korea have gained 8 inches in height, on average, in the past century. They are now taller on average than Korean men a century ago, despite no genetic differences.

Because it doesn't align with their worldview, and the wrong kind of thought must be quashed.

This article is trash. Who is claiming that there are no gender differences across the population? Who is she arguing against exactly?

Maybe the author should have actually read the manifesto more carefully, because it is primarily an argument about Google's hiring practices and how to build the best workforce for a company, a topic which the scientific studies she cites do not address in the slightest.

Data entry has always been a strongly female occupation. Even sixty years later, data entry workers were 92% female: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1987-08-02/news/870226065...

It seems concerning that the de-emphasis of data entry in programming in the 1970s and 1980s may have caused the loss of entry-level opportunities for women and help lead to our field's gender imbalance.

>I don't know if the engineer wrote something awful or not

Perhaps you should read it then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14969705

>this article is just a justification for the difference as if nothing can be done. And that is not true.

No, the memo did actually give suggestions for getting more women into programming (e.g. pair programming).

What does mechanically typing into calculators have to do with anything? Clerical work was not the precursor to modern STEM jobs.

Well, first of all, such an unbiased test does not and probably cannot exist. People have to write the test, and despite their best efforts, they will likely still be biased. And how do you determine what 'unbiased' is in the first place? Such a test would likely give us the status quo or close to it because most hiring managers are acting in good faith already (at least, I chose to believe that people don't mean to perpetuate sexism/racism etc, they just aren't necessarily trying NOT to do it.)

> What would you say if the results were essentially the same as the status quo?

OK, I'll bite. I'd say that's both surprising and interesting. Then I'd ask why the status quo is even relevant. "Best qualified" at the time of taking the test might not mean "most productive a year hence" when a candidate's circumstances might have kept them from reaching their full potential. Indeed, circumstances might have kept them from making it as far as the test at all. When there are statistically valid predictors of these things likely having happened, why couldn't - or shouldn't - Google take advantage of that knowledge? Also, no individual test can account for the common phenomenon of diverse teams outperforming monoculture teams. Hiring the best individuals is not the same as building the best teams.

Thus, even if such a "unicorn test" could exist, and even from the most hard-hearted "Google shouldn't consider social justice" perspective, the test would only be one input for selecting candidates. There would still be sound business focused reasons for overriding its results some of the time.

There's already a number of companies that do blind reviews of resumes, or applicants that intentionally hide or change their names - not sure if it makes a big difference, also because there's just less female applicants in general.

Actually, how many female software developers can't get a job nowadays?

Here's the full interview[1] - the above comment linked a shortened version.

For reference, this is Dr. Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto professor who was fired a few months ago for his stance on using gender pronouns. He's a strong proponent of free speech, which he touches on in this discussion.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU

This is an interesting video to listen to, but as you said, the interviewer is most definitely leaning a certain direction.

That being said, I am not informed enough on the topic of gender differences to actually weigh in on who is right or wrong in this situation.

> I have always felt very ambivalent about affirmative action.

Part of the problem is that "affirmative action" takes many forms. Some people assume that it means quotas and lowered standards, but those approaches have been deprecated (and sometimes outlawed) for a long time. Outreach, anti-bias education, and support programs are generally preferred precisely because they don't lead to the same untoward outcomes that tokenism does. Sure, some people still get left out. I was "discriminated against" in that way once, but I thrived despite that and have learned to appreciate how that policy was just overall even though it was unjust to me.

There is no perfect affirmative-action policy, including lack of any explicit policy. The best we can do is ensure that the burden of any policy is as small as possible, and distributed as fairly as possible.

50/50 will imply to force people to join even when they don't want to. It works for politics because the number of politics is significative small compared to the total population. But the work force is really a big number and close the to total population.

In more gender equality countries like Norway the ratios are the worse ones for things like tech. Before a huge measure like this one you should understand by gender equality countries trend to have less diversity than less gender equality countries. This is very counter intuitive and needs an explanation (for some is biology) -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVaTc15plVs

This is anecdotal. But a testament on how difficult this problem is.

I have two nieces and 1 nephew, all of which I've tried to encourage into programming. I have tried to get my nieces interested in programming with great difficulty but my nephew has taken to it almost instantly and effortlessly.

I suspect I am framing the activity wrong.

We do see people-focused fields like psychology dominated by women. Perhaps law is somewhere in the middle.

The memo didn't say biology was "larger than any/all combined societal/'nurture' effects". In the memo there is a section with this title:

> Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech

Note "possible". No one knows the exact combination of causes of the gap, it likely has many factors. The memo is saying there may be non-bias factors too, and that Google is blind to those, so it's pointing those out. That's not the same as saying non-bias factors are larger than everything else.

> magnitude of those differences is sufficient to explain a 4:1 ratio between male and female engineers at Google (which is clearly not true)

I had obtained numbers for number of pull requests in github and participation in competitive coding contests some time back. Gender ratios are close to 10:1 on both of the places. It's relevant because there is neither any barrier nor lowering the bar due to gender in these.

To clarify: your point is that the question of whether or not he's right is irrelevant; he shouldn't have said what he said, because what he said is abhorrent and/or dangerous?

In my experience, most people who act like that lack the intelligence to make valid points in an argument or there are no good arguments that support their point of view.

I think a lot of this has to do with parenting. When crying always gets you everything, you don't learn to work hard or have a debate to get what you want. There's a whole generation of full-grown babies.

It's amazing how much personal experience affects how we interpret messages. I read the original document and, while I thought it was stupid that he was suggesting roles based on gender or genetics, I did think he brought up important issues on the culture of suppressing view points and having segregated groups, classes, and programs. I know that those are the issues I focused on because of who I am. I also think that having discussions is crucial in understanding other viewpoints. I really think we need to have more discussions and listen to everyone's perspectives, both minority and majority groups. That is how different groups will come to understand each other and work together to solve social problems. There is so much prescriptive advice, toxicity, and dismissal of viewpoints on all sides.

You follow different people than I do. I saw people engage with the arguments. Google's official responses explained how diversity was essential to their company.

Some people may have reacted that way. I think you're very intentionally trying mischaracterize people rolling their eyes the same way they always do as some sort of ignorant knee-jerk reaction.

I read the memo entirely. It was half-baked, ideologically, but also creepy. I've heard what it had to say a million times before and it's still stupid.

Private companies are not free speech zones. Not firing this person would have been a Title VII violation and opened them to lawsuits.

Googlers got a very clear message: comply or you are out. The diversity crowd grabbed power and asserted it.

I don't see anything good coming out of this.

This is correct. There is a lot being made about Google trying to enforce ideological purity, and not enough being made about why Google feels obligated to have this company culture in the first place.

I speculate (without much evidence) that Google's intention is to manage PR and deflect attention away from their actual lack of diversity. http://time.com/4391031/google-diversity-statistics-2016

>women are inherently less capable of being good engineers

The article doesn't say that at all. It just says that on average women have certain traits that mean they are less likely on average to want to go into an engineering job.

>Men are inherently less suited for child care, so we shouldn't put in effort to help them be as good at child care as women

But men are inherently less likely to want to go into child care, for obvious reasons. However nobody is saying that they shouldn't be allowed to do so.

I think the main problem with the memo is this line:

"Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race"

I don't see any problem with those programmes myself, and I think he would have gotten more empathy and less hostility if he hadn't advocated removing those programmes to help women.

>women are inherently less capable of being good engineers

The memo never argued that, no one defending it argues that. I urge you to read the original document.

> perhaps we should be more sympathetic to the viewpoints of Nazis? How about white supremacists?

Practically no one is saying that. We should cast out the tiny minority of Nazis.

What people are saying is that the views in the memo are not of a tiny minority. They are accepted by a significant part of society, by reasonable people. They are considered factual or at least debatable by many scientists. And many of the core principles are accepted by conservatives, i.e., a large wing of US politics.

What will happen to society if we aren't willing to listen across the political aisle? And if we aren't willing to listen to reasonable scientific debate?

> This memo does not call for more diversity.

It literally does call for more, including of gender and racial minorities:

> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more

You can disagree with its practical suggestions - I do, I think many of them are harmful - but it's unfair to say it's not calling for more diversity.

> To invoke Goodwin's Law, perhaps we should be more sympathetic to the viewpoints of Nazis? How about white supremacists?

There's a movie on Netflix at the moment, a German movie called "Er Ist Wieder Da" ("look who's back") about Hitler returning in modern-day Germany. It's part movie, part documentary - the actor playing Hitler travels around the country and talks to people about politics and the like, and finds there's a lot of people agreeing with some of the standpoints.

The nazis crossed a huge number of lines and had some batshit people at the helm, but I'm sure you could find some points that a lot of people would agree with even in these days. Same with white supremacists, some of which have toned down their racism and become more politically correct.

>To invoke Goodwin's Law, perhaps we should be more sympathetic to the viewpoints of Nazis? How about white supremacists?

Honestly, I would argue yes (with a big asterisk on your word choice of sympathetic). You need to engage with people and discuss their views in order to change them. Most people when attacked will double down on their views. If you can engage with those people, present evidence, and change their opinions then you are doing something meaningful to remove a piece of hate from the world.

The people-things orientation has an extremely large effect size for social science. The Su et al. meta-analysis from 2009 found an effect size of 0.86 with N > 500,000 participants. Lippa (N > 200,000) found an effect size of 1.40.

http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

If you don't believe the research is solid, please post some convincing counter studies.

I'm sure for every article like this one there are solid arguments coming to the opposite conclusion: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/differences-between-men-women...

I don't think many people have a problem with any of the science or the statistics. That's not the problem with the 'manifesto'.

The author of the 'manifesto' seems to think that no one else reads these studies. I can assure you that everyone who is working on these issues has already read and understood the studies. The people in charge of these programs agree with them. He presented absolutely nothing of value. There is not a single new idea in what he wrote.

All the manifesto showed was that he thinks he you can just apply studies to your coworkers. He took a bunch of women he works with and turned them into statistics, into a problem that he alone can solve. It's incredible ignorant and arrogant.

The science, or understanding of statistics is not the problem, it is his approach to solving it that is the problem.

Why would anybody censor the viewpoint of a woman scientist in this particular debate? How much cognitive dissonance is too much?

Thanks for the piece. Sadly never came across it.

Consider the Medium piece she cites:

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

Point #1: "I’m not going to spend any length of time on (1); if anyone wishes to provide details as to how nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect,¹ and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it. But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else."

In other words: "I have no relevant expertise, but I just know it's wrong."

We would never tolerate that from "the opposing side." I can point you to other articles that do the same.

This is the rallying point for a lot of people, and it's the wrong place to take a stand. It's worth pointing out.

Thank you for this great response. I think you've covered why the 'manifesto' cannot be supported on a scientific basis very well. There's another issue with the manifesto that I don't think is talked about as much. And that's the human element.

All the cited science in the manifesto is irrelevant in my opinion. As an engineer you work with other people. You probably spend 40 or 50 hours a week with them. They may or may not become your friends, but they will have a huge impact on your life, and you on theirs. Many of these people will be women. They are REAL people that you interact with everyday. What he did when he decided to share this manifesto at work is show that he thinks of these women as statistics, and that on average they are not as capable as he is. He has turned the women he works with everyday into a technical problem that he can solve with his intellect. That is incredibly insulting! He's shown an incredible lack of empathy and understanding towards the women he works with. He's turned them into numbers. He's shown he does not care about them as individuals. This is absolutely unforgivable.

If he had simply released this as a research project or something on the internet then it wouldn't be a problem. But he didn't do that. He didn't make a distinction between the general population and the women he works with. He shared it at work.

Well said, it's a massive leap to go from biological gender differences to differences in aptitude for engineering.

The gross oversimplified claims from the document that attempt to make this leap are textbook stereotypes.

One of the bizarre things about this controversy is that even if you grant all of the memo's assumptions (something that I won't do except hypothetically), it still wouldn't follow that _Google's_ policy was bad for Google. Google is a big company but it only employs a small fraction of software developers. They could very well decide that it's good for them to have more women represented regardless of whatever the "global" distribution is.

This is what I don't understand in all these HN threads. How can some kind of vaguely related science paper(s), albeit perhaps accurate per se, make people so absolutely sure that there's some kind of _causal & scientific_ cause to the issue at hand - as it requires a really long jump. I assume it's just confirmation bias wreaking havoc. Thanks for a good summary too.

>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.

There is research finding that the more advanced a country is in terms of gender equality (by generally accepted metrics), the more pronounced the occupational gender gap actually is in most fields.

One proposed explanation is that women in advanced economies are freer of constraints and higher up in the Maslow pyramid of needs, and can afford to go into jobs they actually like, rather that whatever they feel is their duty/more lucrative/otherwise rewarding. Kind of like yuppies (of either gender) dream of exiting the corporate world to set up an organic food shop. That would certainly explain the very different STEM gender gaps in the US/Sweden vs India/China, for example.

I don't have the reference handy, but if someone can provide it, please do !

Scott Alexander posits a theory which addresses why programming has a high gender disparity but law, medicine, biology and (undergrad) mathematics don't: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger....

Doesn't address why the number of women in programming has fallen since the 80's though...

Just to respond to a few specific points:

>Despite that unjustified leap, the document goes on to suggest strongly that women working at Google are less qualified than men

Can you elaborate on this? Just because FEWER women may be qualified to work at Google doesn't mean that the ones that are are any less qualified than the men. The fact that fewer women are tall doesn't mean that tall women aren't tall for example.

>I could argue "water is composed of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule, so women are bad at software development", and my argument would just be a difference of degree worse than hers.

I fail to see how the science discussed in the memo is as irrelevant as you make it out to be. Is it really that far fetched that psychological makeup (as expressed in big-5 characteristics) and interests play a role in what people choose to pursue and what they like to do? Because software engineering is different than other occupations (such as law and medicine), it makes sense to think about what might attract one to one profession over another. Many intelligent women I know chose careers such as medicine over cs. And why not? It pays better and doesn't involve staring at a computer all day (something that not everybody enjoys). The same could be said for law and finance (investment banking, private equity).

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

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/truth-women-stem-ca...

If you scroll down to the two bar charts in the link above, you'll notice that while the % of bachelor degrees earned by women in CS has gone down, the % of PHD degrees earned has actually gone up (looks to be about 40% higher compared to 1991)! I think you would agree that earning a phd in CS is much more difficult than a BS, and I think this actually shows that women are being given more opportunity to excel academically in the subject.

As for bachelor degrees in CS, it seems like it has converged more to the % awarded in engineering. Speaking more on the differences between CS (i.e Bachelors level CS that leads to SWE jobs) and Math, I would say there is a qualitative difference between the two, and certainly one can have personal preferences. Software engineering is much more about creating systems that work and solve real-world problems. It also involves a lot of programming. Pure math (and theoretical CS) is more about investigating an abstract world and looking into interesting patterns and connections. It actually has a lot of similarities with philosophy in this regard. Some of the female math/science majors I knew actually didn't really like programming and ended up being highly successful in other fields even if they went into industry (medicine/finance/business).

>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.

In fact, people have done cross-cultural studies. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23179757_Sex_Differ...

"Regression analyses explored the power of sex, gender equality, and their interaction to predict men's and women's 106 national trait means for each of the four traits. Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality."

From my personal experience (which I agree is less convincing than the numerous empirical studies that have been done on the topic), I'll say that many women in asian countries are pushed into studying cs/programming even if they don't like it, because those fields often provide a straightforward path to making a decent income.

By firing him they took ownership.

It's a memo, not a scientific study. Goal is to point out issues for discussion.

You are confused about what sexism is. Sexism is a prejudice based on lack of evidence and reasoning. Saying that women are inferior to men is a sexist remark.

Saying that on average, women prefer working in people oriented roles whereas men prefer working in mechanical/technical roles is not sexist, because this is a fact supported by real evidence.

The author's point about societies with the most gender equity having bigger gender gaps really drives this point home. In societies where there is gender equity, people aren't compelled to behave a certain way and instead gravitate towards the roles they really want to take.

Real, verifiable, reproducible truths are not sexist or racist. They are truths. The fact that the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalenjin_people#Sport dominate sprinting is supported by empirical evidence and also science.

So to be clear, racism and sexism are terms used to describe prejudices, lies and falsehoods about a gender or race. These terms shouldn't be used to describe real, empirically shown gender or race differences.

We as humans are all equal in worth, but that doesn't mean we are all the same.

You are reading things that are not written there, take a breath and read it without bias. It talks about predisposition and how when you look into a collective you observe differences.

Science by definition can't be sexist. In science there is no place for prejudices, beliefs and biases - only facts. It's human attitudes interpreting these facts that can be sexist, racist and so on. Second, the author didn't argue there are differences between genders or sexes that make one unsuitable for a given task. That's one of the most gross and unfair misrepresentations of the memo.

Sexism relates to prejudices, discrimination. It's a negative word.

And no one argued that an entire gender is unqualified for a task. Where do you come up with all this stuff?!?

Your analogy to race is wrong.

There is no research (to the best of my knowledge) claiming that there are biological differences between the same sex of different races.

But there is enough research about biological differences between sexes (and some differences are obvious, such as different hormones, etc) to at least warrant a debate.

"Sexist" is one of a handful of words that have become absolutely sacred in the US, at the expense of scientific discovery (or common sense, or both).

Reality isn't sexism.

> Why can't the memo be both sexist and science? Arguing that there are differences between genders that make one gender unsuitable for a task can be as scientific as you want, it's still sexist.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/

Definition by motives vs. definition by belief.

> 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.

I submitted this article an hour and a half before this duplicate submission, and it got flagged to oblivion. Telling. But I'm glad to see it's back now.

IIRC, flagging has a lower karma threshold than downvoting.

Things like these don't belong to a corporate forum like HN

I flagged it. How many times do we need to have the same repetitive discussion? This topic is crowding out other quality submissions.

People do: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/men-dont-w...

There is money in tech so women have an interest in playing victim to gain advantages. There are also a few males who hope to gain status for themselves and securing their own position by taking the women's side (while keeping other men down).

Men who play (or are) victims on the other hand are generally ridiculed or ignored, so there is no advantage in doing so.

Behind ideas there is usually self interest.

Scores lower on goodwill points. Diversity is often used as a marketing tool.

Mind you, that industry needs a lot more men - nurses move people around, people are heavy, and nobody's denying that generally, men can lift more weight than women. That's a much more obvious biological distinction than in the more brainy areas like STEM.

Greed, people want a piece of this boom.

How about female coal miners? Female construction workers? This isn't about fairness it is all about browbeating people from a perceived moral high ground so that wages can be lowered for all (more supply of programmers = lower cost). The "useful fools" here likely have the best intentions but are being used by people without good intent.

Or social work, education, etc.

A: money

Because programming pays higher. That's the response you eventually get from the feminist folks. I do believe this gender gap thing is good intentions, but there's just an enormous huge colossal amount of ignorance in the general effort itself and its perpetrators. The emotion-drivenness of the online audiences is not helping either.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14968871 and marked it off-topic.

Welcome to the internet. Where we make generalizations about large swaths of people.

This could keep up until the end of time. I'm an incredibly liberal person in most regards but I find suppressing unwanted speech to be disgusting at a base level.

I think it's unfair to make that generalization; further, it contributes to the false dichotomy that exists through "left/right" politic.

I think you mean "Welcome to modern politics". Suppressing free speech you don't agree with is a time-tested tradition of most mainstream political thought. However, it's most disappointing to see from people you otherwise agree with.

Quite a dangerous falsehood to parrot. I am strongly critical of many of the more conservative values espoused by the practitioners of major religions in the US; their view on these matters do NOT agree with my own.

I will, however, fight for their right to express these views and practice their religion in my country (up until the point it infringes on another's rights).

I flagged this comment because it's a low-quality political attack made in bad faith which can only serve to start a political flamewar.

does the right differ? Is it non-democratic, against free speech, or happily accepts contrarian views?

I doubt being close minded is specific to any political group.

Left/right is a spectrum. No need to further segregate groups with comments like this even if it is in a half-joking manner.

Please don't troll on Hacker News. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14968843 and marked it off-topic.

Your definition is demonstrably unusual. Remember, something is true "by definition" if it's not true for any other reason.

Let me know when your definition makes it into a dictionary.

Independent of the other things wrong with your argument, I find it curious that you think that designers are among those who benefit from empathy. Given knowledge of aesthetics, psychology and the general identity of the target audience, empathy should be all-but-unnecessary for a designer.

(Edited for clarity; namely, the italicized clause is new.)

No. Try actually reading the memo and learn a bit about statistics and bell curves.

My company has an anonymous internal forum and I don't even like asking simple HR questions on there! I once complained about my disuse of my dependent care FSA going unnoticed. That's as far as I'm willing to go.

A touchy subject like this from someone with a technical background to a large group of people... I guess Google has a lot of employees and it was bound to happen eventually but seriously, how do you hit send on something like this without some twinge of anxiety?

> bad engineers for ALL

He didn't say that all (or even most) women were bad engineers.

I just CTRL+F the entire memo for "better". It was only used in two sentences:

> Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts. > We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done).

So where again does it say the he is better than someone else? These type of statements is what's causing the huge divide, because people put words into other people's mouth as and when they like just to support their own argument or agenda at the expense of everyone else.

Show me a quote where he actually says what you claim he says.