" It's because he's just another brogrammer...."

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...

> 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.

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.

There is a difference between women are on average less capable (or what your interpretation seems to imply - women programmers are worse than men) and what is written which are there may be less qualified female candidates due to biological differences.

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.

> proposing that women are on average less biologically capable of programming is exactly what he's saying.

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."

> the consensus is that biological sex differences are not that big of an effect, certainly not enough to explain the gender disparity in tech.

Whether sex differences explain the gender disparity in tech isn't even the kind of question that cog dev folks ask.

You're completely ignoring the "preferences" part of that statement though. It's unfortunate that he threw the "abilities" bit in there as well, but when reading in the context of the rest of the memo, I think it's fair to say he Damore believes the distributions differ due to "preference factors", much more than he believes its due to "ability factors".

And a very strong case can be made that women make different life choices which result in generally different outcomes in those areas.

The best response to this that I've read, at least in my opinion, was SSC's "Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences"[0]. The key point is that differences between the genders do exist, though they tend to be differences in interest rather than capability. And even small differences in interest can cascade through the selection effects of our educational systems.

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

> It's because he's just another brogrammer

ugh.

>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.

[citation needed]