I'm not a conservative (far from it), but I think it's a ridiculous misrepresentation.

He spoke to the distribution of preferences and abilities. Turning this into an absolutist simplification should offend anyone with a brain.

The science seems to state that nature rolls the dice more with males than with females. We know, for instance, that there are far more very low IQ males than females, and this is understood as fact. This doesn't mean that you or I are therefore low IQ, despite the distribution increase. And the stats seem to say that nature also varies on the side of high IQ more with males.

That says nothing to whether a given male or female are either low or high, and only applies at scale. Scale that is meaningless when assessing a given candidate, but is certainly pertinent when talking about representation across an entire industry or large organization.

Actual quote:

> the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes

From the article:

> women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering

Do you not see the difference?

I read this as suggesting that the engineering field is currently structured in a way that skews towards the preferences and natural strengths of men rather than women. He's not saying that women are less capable engineers in principle. That would be an absurd argument given that women dominated the field only a few decades ago. Rather, he's arguing that we've reshaped the field and the culture such that it's inherently hostile to women, which is exactly the same argument I hear all the time. He just didn't express it very well.

As I recall, his entire point is that we should be reshaping the field to make it more appealing to women so that they are drawn to it naturally, as opposed to the current strategy of giving women preferential treatment in the hiring process, only to have them leave because we haven't addressed the underlying problems that are driving them away.

That's hardly a radical idea. There are benefits to his approach: I, for one, think the field would benefit greatly if we focused more on, for example, the importance of empathy. Thinking about others ought to be a fundamental pillar of software engineering, as it naturally leads to better UX, APIs, and services. And when we think about the people who will be maintaining our code, we're inclined to write better code that is easier to grok.

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

> He said exactly that, right there.

You even highlight the word _exactly_ but that is not what he said. That quote says they don't have equal representation and there maybe biological differences to blame.

The main reason for confusion seems to be the quote assumes women might not be as attracted by tech work as men are. That assumption changes the meaning because in your interpretation "Women want to be in tech as much as men and D'Amore is saying they just don't have the genes for it" vs "Women want to be in tech less than men to start with and besides bigotry, hate and marginalization, cultural biases, there could be a biological explanation for it".

I know we all think tech is awesome, we are getting paid to do what we love, etc. But it turns out many people, and maybe women more than men, don't find sitting in a cubicle all day inverting binary trees appealing. I don't think biology is the main driver here [+] but D'Amore does. He might be wrong, but I don't see why it had to become this controversial topic and lead to firing and lawsuits. They could have just said "here is why science doesn't support your view, thanks for starting the discussion, but you're wrong" and leave it at that.

[+] I don't support his view, I'd personally blame culture for women not even wanting to be in tech. Having lived in Eastern Europe where there is less "stigma" against girls liking math and computer science. It's not a cause, or a talking point at least, it's just a profession like accountant or doctor.

A = distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women

B = biological causes

... A differs in part due to B ...

... reason why we don't see equal rep in tech/leadership.

Then he goes on to say maybe if we take A into consideration when designing tech and leadership roles, can we solve this dilemma.

He does not mention performance, just preference.

> He said exactly that, right there. Why do conservatives always appear to defend this guy and try to pretend the memo wasn't full of repugnant crap.

Perhaps because what he actually said was that statistically women tend to have lower expression of the traits that engineering positions favor and lower interest in those positions. And because of this the representation of women in tech is lower than their representation in the general population.

Nowhere did he say "all women are worse than all men at engineering jobs". In fact he repeatedly explained that there are tons of exceptions to the statistical rule.

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

Why is suggesting the distribution of certain qualities in men and women are different “repugnant crap”? There is ample evidence that men and women have behavioral differences. This exists across all mammals. I don’t know whether that makes the average man or average woman[1] better at any particular task, but it’s not an absurd hypothesis. Surely it’s worth reasoned consideration, not moral outrage at the very thought.

[1] And averages are of course irrelevant when dealing with individuals, who should each be judged according to their own merit, not according to generalizations of the groups they belong to.

Even the TL;DR on page 2 says it:

> Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership

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

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

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

This is the very next sentence from his memo:

> Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

What part of that quote is repugnant?

>preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes

I don't think this part is inherently wrong, and could be proven or disproven with well designed studies.

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

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

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