From the memo:
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
Minus a bit of softening language ("in part", "may"), proposing that women are on average less biologically capable of programming is exactly what he's saying.
Also, because I know how HN works, let me pre-empt the inevitable reply to this one: "but what if there ARE sex differences?! shouldn't we be allowed to talk about that!? Freedom of speech!?!"
Scientists who study this stuff (including those cited by Damore) can and do talk about it, and the consensus is that biological sex differences are not that big of an effect, certainly not enough to explain the gender disparity in tech. What effects there may be are absolutely dominated by sociological factors.
Sociological factors that some companies are attempting to counter, which is what Damore didn't like, which is why he issued his complain-y memo to start with.
And THAT is why people are upset with him. Not because he's an amateur biologist with a day job as a programmer who just earnestly wants to have an innocent conversation about sexual dimorphism. It's because he's just another brogrammer whose jimmies got rustled by the thought of women being his peers, and decided to insult (on average) his female colleagues and create a hostile work environment for which he was (quite correctly) fired.
After having read two lengthy pieces about him and his case, I think you are showing a lack of empathy and willingness to put yourself into some other person's shoes. You might disagree with his actions and world view. But you should maybe not be so quick with your labeling. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-dam... http://quillette.com/2018/01/05/empathy-gap-tech-interview-s...
And if we're worried about empathy, why don't we stop and think for a while about the people affected negatively by his memo?
Or do you mean the autism excuse (which is from the Guardian journalist, btw, not Damore himself?) I know lots of people on the autism spectrum who are not sexist, or who at least have the intelligence not to send out a memo to the whole company on a nuanced, controversial social topic
That being said nobody had a negative reaction until vox leaked it. It had been available for months.
I will also note it seemed to be those who have more tweets than minutes they have been alive that got the most upset about this memo.
I was really disappointed in the response by Google engineers. To this day I have yet to see a proper rebuttal that did not go out of it's way to misrepresent the original memo.
That is what makes me sad. That to this day people still quote things that were not in or even eluded to in the paper.
"And if we're worried about empathy, why don't we stop and think for a while about the people affected negatively by his memo?" I do. It's you who falsely assumes one can only do one thing.
That isn't my interpretation at all. His entire point was that Google's current strategy was ignoring the cultural and sociological factors that might be discouraging women from entering the field. Rather than simply giving women preferential treatment during the hiring process, and going out of the way to specifically hire women, he argued that we should be spending more time identifying why women aren't naturally drawn to the field (or why more women later choose to leave the field). Fix that problem first, or the women that get hired will eventually leave, because we haven't done enough to consider why they don't feel welcome.
He never said that women are unfit to be engineers. He argued (clumsily, I admit) that we've created an environment that favors the preferences and strengths of men over those of women. If we want to see more women thrive in tech, start by changing the culture.
I think that most of the outrage over Damore's memo can be chalked up to poor communication on his part. He lays out evidence, but he never explicitly states his argument. It's like he assumed there was a single, obvious conclusion that readers would arrive at. Some of us got the message, but apparently a whole lot more didn't. The outcome is almost perfect in its irony: he cites a greater emphasis on empathy as a way of making the engineering field more hospitable to women, but he fails miserably at using empathy to evaluate how people will interpret his own words.
The latter is an obvious statement however people seems keen to deliberately misinterpret it to fuel their rightous outrage.
I’ll use high jump as an example. Suppose I only hire high jumpers who can leap over X meters. I find that I naturally hire less women because women on average can’t jump as high as men. The women who can are obviously as qualified as men. Now I make the statement that due to biological differences this may explain the hiring disparity, rather than discrimination.
Damore's manifesto purports to present evidence that there "maybe" are inherent differences between genders ("may" and "might" are also sprinkled all over the place for good measure.) He even acknowledges that this is far from a complete picture. But then he goes on to conclude that:
1) That must explain the existing gender distribution in engineering
2) Google trying to explore doing outreach to increase diversity must necessarily imply discrimination of the unfairly oppressed white heterosexual male
So trying to dismiss all criticism by splitting hairs over whether he meant that the average, the median, or all women are uninterested in engineering completely misses the point that either way the conclusions are unwarranted. The whole thing smacks of persecution complex first, finding "evidence" later.
1. Saying that women are "on average" worse programmers is exactly why people are upset with him. He doesn't need to be some kind of insane absolutist in order for what he said to be very problematic.
2. Even if there are statistically significant sex differences with regard to programming ability and inclination, there are also historical and sociological factors that are working against women in tech. Damore's memo was explicitly a negative reaction against some of the programs designed to counteract these systemic issues. As such, even if he were 100% right about the sexual dimorphism (which he isn't, see my other post in this thread), using that as an argument against trying to solve the sociological problems is not only logically unsound, but exhibits bad faith and bad motivations.
2. “How dare he question the effectiveness of affirmative action” is also not an argument.
No, he's saying that they also might be less interested, for biological reasons. I recommend actually reading the memo (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...): "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men."
I recommend you start realizing that people can read something and interpret it in vastly different ways.
Of course then you might have a revelation about this whole thing.
Whether sex differences explain the gender disparity in tech isn't even the kind of question that cog dev folks ask.
> “It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me.)”
For more, check out the citations on this article: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/16/16153740/tech-diversity-p...
Finally, even if the facts were true that women on averaged perform worse in tech, how do you want to use that information? Cancel all the sensitivity programs designed to solve other very real problems in tech? Or are you saying not only that biology "plays a role", but that _nothing else does_ so we should just completely ignore this as an issue?
In other words, "that's not the kind of question we ask."
Also I looked at the citations, neither of the metastudies looks at differences in sensory perception which imho are the most interesting of the sex differences. But even ignoring that, looking at the statistical significance of certain population traits doesn't tell you anything about their clinical significance. E.g. if you look at two groups of 100 people and one group is 100% alive and the other group is 99% alive, there isn't a significant effect size, but there is a big difference to that one person.
Hey, let's keep things civil. Please consider Hanlon's Razor in this case.
How about something like, "I don't think you're correct about the consensus. Citations please?"
And a very strong case can be made that women make different life choices which result in generally different outcomes in those areas.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
There's Grant's response added by Scott to the comments [0], but I don't think that really qualifies as a rebuttal.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
ugh.
[citation needed]
But what seems to be missing (and what I had hoped for) is research showing that "the consensus is that biological sex differences are not that big of an effect, certainly not enough to explain the gender disparity in tech." I feel like the article should be overflowing with references to this if it's a consensus.
It turns out that even this article admits that
> there’s very little scientists know for certain about which behaviors are due to biology, and which are because of society’s expectations of both men and women
The article essentially concludes that men are competitive.
Maybe I missed something in the article. Which citation really spoke to you and confirmed this consensus?
