> Curious, why do you believe in that? Have you evaluated the evidence and come to that conclusion, or is it a priori for you?
Curious why you question his belief?
All of the half-way reputable studies I've ever heard of have either concluded that there is no difference in male/female intelligence or that there are small differences in certain silos, with men scoring slightly higher on average in visuospatial while women score slightly higher on average in verbal.
Even if you accept the latter as fact (which there is no clear cut evidence-based reason for doing so, if you look at the studies in aggregate) it says basically nothing about suitability to "our profession" as both of those skills are important.
Given the choice between someone with higher than average overall IQ and outstanding visuospatial skills and someone with higher than average overall IQ and outstanding verbal skills, I'd generally prefer the latter as a colleague.
The memo did not claim that women were less intelligent. It claimed that women _prefer_ to work in fields other than tech. This is a statement of women's choices, not their ability. It also claimed higher variance, but not overall differences. In other words that there are more men on both sides of the extreme.
>This is a statement of women's choices, not their ability.
Wrong. The memo is poorly worded, but it does make the leap from just preferences to abilities in this sentence, despite not having evidence for the latter:
>>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.
The quote talks about abilities, which you said the memo did not say anything about. Damore was positing that both women's preferences and abilities is why you see less women in tech and leadership positions.
> ...also claimed higher variance, but not overall differences. In other words that there are more men on both sides of the extreme.
This is in reference to what the memo says about abilities. The memo does claim higher or lower overall averages, too, but those are in terms of preferences.
Let me lay this out point by point if I phrased this poorly before:
* The memo claims that women and men have different averages in preferences.
* That men and women have different distributions of abilities.
* The memo does not claim that there are different average of abilities.
Point #3 is what the parent comment claimed, among other things, and that is wrong.
>This is a statement of women's choices, not their ability.
Edit: Rather than reply, you now edited your comment to split hairs on distribution vs averages. That doesn't change the facts about Damore's argument about biological ability to be in tech is unfounded.
Hacker news wasn't letting me reply, so I put the classification in an edit. It didn't change the content of what I wrote, just added a clearer (I hope) phrasing.
I have not once mentioned biology in this comment chain. I made my original comment to dispel the myth that Damore claimed that women have, on average, less intelligence than men.
Whether you agree or disagree with the other claims made about biology is orthogonal to this statement.
The difference between distribution vs. averages is important. See the image linked to below. Damore is arguing the top half of the image. Many people mistakenly believe he is arguing the bottom half. Perhaps you believe the top half is unfounded too, but it's an important distinction.
Right. And what many have said is that there is not enough evidence in his to support the top half on his claim of biological abilities. Preferences, sure, but that can also be attributed to social constructs which he specifically tries to rule out.
It's splitting hairs to make it about distribution when there isn't sufficient evidence to support a distribution in the first place.
Here is an article from Heterdox academy that attempted to do a metanalysis of studies to determine if Damore was correct in saying there are certain traits that men display a wider distribution on. They conclude he was.
I have not personally looked at any of this data, nor vouch for it or Damore's or their conclusion. It could be wrong, either because the current best science is wrong or because the summary is unfair or inaccurate. My only point is that it appears to be a statement with some scientific support, not something that can easily be dismissed as false.
Abilities follow from preferences at the level being discussed (potential hiring pool at Google).
I am not good at being a nurse because I chose to become a software developer. I chose to become a software developer because I prefer working with computers over people. My preference in adolescence resulted in my being more capable as a software developer for a company like Google.
That this one statement keeps getting taken out of context and misinterpreted shows how flimsy the claims against the memo are.
>That this one statement keeps getting taken out of context and misinterpreted
Wrong again. When you look at the full context, Damore specifically says that it's not socially constructed like you're describing. Damore isn't arguing that women lack the ability for tech or leadership because they prefer to be nurses, his argument stems from biological differences:
>> On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:
>> ● They’re universal across human cultures
>> ● They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
>> ● Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify
and act like males
>> ● The underlying traits are highly heritable
>> ● They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective
>> Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” 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.
Note that there are differences in certain abilities (most famously mental rotation) that are known to be affected by sex (male and female babies already perform differently). Now mental rotation isn't exactly relevant to software engineering, but there are other biological traits such as autism spectrum disorders that are anecdotally beneficial for software development. It wouldn't surprise me if there were a correlation between sex and programming ability.
However, the number of skills required for software development is quite large and any correlation is likely to be very small. Additionally, there is no a priori reason to assume that the average woman isn't better suited to it than the average man, since there are lots of other effects that could drown out an underlying difference in ability.
So Damore is technically correct, but that doesn't really matter in the end because he doesn't show that effect sizes are large enough to support his conclusions against the policies he opposes (whose evidence is also pretty weak).
I'm not sure we share the same definition of "technically correct", when the evidence doesn't support Damore's claim that biological causes are why there are less women in software engineering and leadership. It's true that there are observable differences in spatial reasoning and reaction time across the sexes, but as you say, those are hardly requisites for being a good programmer.
The full context is that he's writing this memo in the first place to propose alternatives to a hiring policy. That is: the relevant group is the hiring pool for Google. By the time men and women reach the point where Google's hiring policy is relevant toward their outcomes, the distribution of their abilities is already quite different. That's not even really questionable: It's why there are so many fewer women in the hiring pool.
It's selective interpretation to read this outside the context of the hiring policy.
Except what you said about social constructs in your comment isn't argued in the memo, hence you're now projecting about "selective interpretation."
Nobody is saying this isn't in context to hiring policies - that's your straw man. Damore was arguing that women were not in engineering and leadership positions because of preferences and biological abilities (in support of his memo's argument about hiring policies). The latter of which there is no evidence to support.
> Nobody is saying this isn't in context to hiring policies - that's your straw man.
You're evaluating the statement that way. That's not a straw man--it's removal of original context.
> Damore was arguing that women were not in engineering and leadership positions because of preferences and biological abilities (in support of his memo's argument about hiring policies).
Yet another example of the suspiciously common inability of opponents to comprehend the statement.
The statement makes no mention of biological abilities, only distribution of abilities in general (and preferences), caused possibly in part by biological factors.
And once again: The relevant group is the hiring pool for leadership / tech at Google, which undoubtedly has an unequal distribution of qualified men and women as a result of differing distributions of the abilities of men and women at that stage of their careers.
Here's Damore's statement again, with the context from the purpose of the document added by me:
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women (by the time they can be affected by Google's hiring policies) 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.
Tah-dah! When it's not stripped of context, the meaning is more clear. I still don't suspect misinterpretations will stop, though.
No evidence? The number of women who leave their career to become full-time childcare givers far out number men, even among women in high level career tracks.
You are arguing against your own claims. Damore claimed that women are not underrepresented at Google hiring, after considering the explanatory factors. You explained why the affirmative action diversity hiring policy is unnecessary.
Ow. I agree with you, but can you please not preface your comments with "wrong", "false", "no" etc? You're going on to argue (pretty convincingly) that the parent is wrong anyway, what's the point of cranking up the disagreement volume a notch, like that?
Good point. It's hard to get through confirmation bias, even when the person accuses you of being intellectually dishonest, but I agree the tone is a bit much.
Please identify where the memo claims they women have lower average ability than men. As a hint:
> 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.
This statement references distributions, not averages. E.g men may be more prevalent at the top of the scale but also at the bottom. This is entirely in line with what I wrote about the memo referring to variance.
> Please identify where the memo claims they women have lower average ability than men
The claims about their average tolerance for high-status jobs is a direct statement about average ability for certain job roles. You can perhaps argue that it accurately reflects the psychological research (which is a different discussion), but it absolutely is directly a statement about ability.
He also specifically says women generally have “a harder time...leading”, which is a direct statement of reduced average ability in all roles involving leadership.
He claims that women on average choose to work less stressful jobs. The exact terms he used are, "higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance". Perhaps others think "tolerance" is closer to "ability" than "preference", but that's not how I view it. For example, I have a pretty low tolerance for cold climates. I can tolerate them when I need to like when hiking on Alaskan glaciers, visiting relatives in cold places. On average I'm a pretty outdoorsy person so I think have have a good ability to hike in the cold, as I'm confident in my ability to layer clothing and whatnot. But usually I choose not to because that is my preference. Regardless, Damore even says that there are ways to mitigate this. He suggests that Google should,
> Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.
For your second paragraph, here is the full quote.
> This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for
raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences
and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a
women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men
without support.
This is in the context of how women prefer to channel extraversion. Again, preferences make it harder for them to end up in leadership roles. And yet again, Damore offers a way to mitigate this and achieve greater numbers of women in leadership roles:
> Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there's more we can do.
For both of your points, these aren't claims about ability but preferences from my reading. Even if you disagree with this interpretation, Damore still claims that these differences shouldn't exclude women from tech and advancing in tech careers and lists out ways to limit the impact these factors currently have.
Damore NEVER said that women had lower IQ than men. That wasn't the point of his manifesto, it was saying that the reason why you can't get 50/50 representation the way that Google wants to, because the nature of software development as it's done today makes it less attractive, on average, to women. He even suggested ways to change how software development jobs are done to make it more attractive to women in general.
It is still unclear though, why a belief in lower or higher aptitude of a particular group (as a whole) for a some specific type of activity should lead to any kind of discrimination. I realize, it often does, but attempt to silence the research and potentially, the truth, for some political reason does not sound good.
It's not silencing research, but silencing talking about research is a chilling effect. This research isn't off-topic pornography, it was research specifically on the topic of who works in the office.
But it wasn’t research. It was a sloppy regurgitation of some cherrypicked sources which made some sweeping claims, and oh by the way management was wrong and should let him tell them how to do it.
Consider the alternative: say his goal had actually been to learn what most scientists believe or to see how it applied to Google. That would be things like a representative literature survey, lots of questions about how you could measure effects, what the implications those effects would have, etc. Rather than just assuming current staffing was the optimal outcome, you’d ask how you’d even measure such a thing, etc.
Remember, before he joined Google he has experience working in a real research lab. There’s no way he doesn’t know what scientific discussion looks like – it just wasn’t as important as trying to portray his personal political beliefs as objective truth.
You’re mixing two separate questions. One is whether your boss has the freedom to hire and fire as they see fit, where the answer is yes except for certain protected classes. Their money, their rules…
If he’d sent out a memo saying any management initiative was wrong and they were stupid he could be fired for it in the state of California. He just wouldn’t have been able to turn it into cash from right wing causes.
The second question is whether this is science being squashed as his more emotional supporters frequently claim. I don’t think there’s any reason to conclude that since this was a really lousy attempt at scientific analysis remiscent of the creationists who try to sound science-y but are ideologically prevented from actually practicing science.
Management decisions don't come with references to scientific papers, or any claim that they are backed by science. Damore's memo, on the other hand, did exactly that.
My views are in part informed by this essay. It mostly deals with issues of interest, rather than ability, but the cumulative effect of interest divergence culminates in aptitude divergence.
That being said, i'm open to hearing contrary evidence. To the extent that i've read about it, there are non-trivial difference and they are large enough to at least partially explain some of the discrepancy in jobs like software engineering.
This is a perennial debate on HN. Since you asked specifically for me to expand on my own beliefs, my request to you would be to use the search bar at the bottom of the page and find one of the zillion threads I've stated at length my beliefs about this topic on. Wow, that was a bad sentence. Either way though: I'd rather keep on the topic of labor law here.
Curious why you question his belief?
All of the half-way reputable studies I've ever heard of have either concluded that there is no difference in male/female intelligence or that there are small differences in certain silos, with men scoring slightly higher on average in visuospatial while women score slightly higher on average in verbal.
Even if you accept the latter as fact (which there is no clear cut evidence-based reason for doing so, if you look at the studies in aggregate) it says basically nothing about suitability to "our profession" as both of those skills are important.
Given the choice between someone with higher than average overall IQ and outstanding visuospatial skills and someone with higher than average overall IQ and outstanding verbal skills, I'd generally prefer the latter as a colleague.