> The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist
The concept that men and women may have different interests due to biological differences is extremely sexist, yes. For all the sources Damore cited, there's an entire body of academic work (and an entire cultural revolution in the United States spanning upwards of a century) to the contrary on that topic specifically. A large chunk of the feminist movement was and is women and men actively working to prove that biology is not a limiting factor in what women can choose to do with themselves.
Had he kept his comments to a realm of "men and women might have different representation in computer engineering because they have different interests on average," he would have been treading on thin ice with people disinclined to assume good faith but could have probably kept his job. Attempting to hang the causality on biology really did him in (and when his memo became public, it put Google in a situation where they ran serious risk of tolerating a hostile work environment if they kept him).
A large chunk of the feminist movement was and is women and men actively working to prove that biology is not a limiting factor in what women can choose to do with themselves
That's got nothing at all to do with what was being suggested.
Saying women have different "interests" -- or priorities, which is a better word in my opinion -- isn't suggesting they are incapable nor suggesting society should constrain their role. It's suggesting they have agency and make choices which fail to serve some abstract narrative about the theoretical importance of so-called equality of the sort that gets debated and hypothesized about in articles like the one under discussion.
I was a homemaker for a lot of years. Self-proclaimed feminists have a long history of being incredibly ugly to me.
I'm not the only person who has noticed that feminists are basically openly hostile and contemptuous towards homemakers:
I'm sorry that happened to you, because whoever did that to you utterly missed the point. It's about choice, and if you chose to be a homemaker, it's exactly as valid a choice as someone who chooses to pursue a career that leaves no time to raise a family if they don't want to raise a family.
What we should avoid is choices being constrained by assumptions about what you want because of your biology (such as the assumption---clearly illegal to act upon but still acted upon nonetheless---that young women are a higher-risk hire and promotion because they probably want to leave the workforce to raise a family in three years). Assumptions like that constrain women who do want a career because the company is going to invest in the male employees who are assumed to be in it for life.
For various reasons, I've thought very long and hard about what I think of as "human sexual morality." A great deal of our historical cultural norms, such as expectations of monogamy, virginity prior to marriage and shotgun weddings, boil down to the fact that sex is a profound human drive and very often has unintended consequences. This includes both pregnancy and disease.
You talk about women and their lives as if what they want is or should be the driving factor in their lives. I don't think that's accurate at all.
A serious career woman I was close to for many years had serious fertility problems. After many years of intervention, she managed to have one child in her mid to late thirties. She had read enormous research and concluded that infertility was a driving factor in the lives of many career women.
Careers and children are both serious commitments. Studies show that every dollar invested in our small children for things like preschool saves multiple dollars down the line on things like prison.
I enjoyed being home with my sons. They both have special needs and I have a serious congenital defect that wasn't identified until my mid thirties. Getting a diagnosis was extremely empowering and allowed me to be able to more effectively pursue school, work and even a divorce at long last.
But to a large degree being a homemaker was not something I chose. To a large degree, it was a circumstance foisted upon me by circumstance beyond my control.
I'm not a feminist. I see feminists as people who feel women are entitled to a career as if a spiffy title with a big salary is a prize in a Cracker Jax box that unfairly is handed out to men arbitrarily based on the dark heart of society being a sexist pig. This attitude is fundamentally disrespectful of both what it costs men to have a real career and what it takes to adequately raise healthy kids.
Society is not going to solve these problems as long as it continues to chase this insane delusion that children are a casual choice no harder to get or avoid than picking your lunch from a menu.
Our current mental models throw everyone under the bus, men, women and children alike. Many women soak up a lot of the damage to lessen it for their children which is the morally and practically correct choice given the shitty state of the world. But we shouldn't be designing a world like that. It's evil to design a world where that's basically the norm and not some bizarre stastistical outlier.
I wish most self-proclaimed feminists would go die in a fucking fire. They are generally worse than most self-proclaimed Christians who all too often are just assholes giving Christianity a bad name.
I would like to see the birth of a post feminist world where we deal realistically with the thorny issue of human sexual morality, including the fact that sex can lead to pregnancy and this can have huge consequences for the lives of the parents. I hate labels but I tend to think of it as a humanist model, which to me means a model that is humane and cares equally about men, women and children.
The feminist narrative mostly cares about women having serious careers and it mostly cares about empowering a subset of very privileged women to live their lives like very privileged men. The reality is that when you have a very privileged woman who has a serious career and also children, it's usually some less privileged woman raising her children under a title like nanny.
Our current feminist narrative pretends that it wants equality for all. It actually doesn't.
It actually wants equality between a small subset of very privileged upper class women and very privileged upper class men and it expects that so-called equality to come largely at the expense of lower class women working as maids and nannies to make it possible for a few upper class two-career couples to "have it all."
Career paths must be reimagined if we are ever to escape this bullshit. Our current career paths are posited on an implicit assumption that the worker is a heterosexual man with a wife and kids to support and her labor is freeing him up to put all his time and energy into the job while she worries about making sure he eats healthy and arranges to make that possible for him. That pattern served humanity well when most families had multiple children and it improved quality of life for men, women and children.
The world has changed and our mental models are failing to adequately catch up. We aren't going to invent better ones while chasing bullshit delusions based on ridiculous ideals that cannot actually be achieved and are actively undermining the claimed goal of creating a better world.
> You talk about women and their lives as if what they want is or should be the driving factor in their lives. I don't think that's accurate at all.
Is "what they want" the driving factor in men's lives? If so, it's a somewhat fundamental principle of American cultural philosophy that we do all we can to make the option available for women too, if they want it. To do otherwise is to abandon the notion of "created equal."
The American experiment may be founded on flawed reasoning there, but it's going to be a heck of an uphill battle to convince people that's true. A battle I'm not going to fight because I'm on board with the "created equal" notion.
America has a generally worse track record for women's rights than Europe. It boils down to the fact that the American attitude of "we were created equal and I can too achieve just as much as a man if you will just get out of my way!" is a broken mental model.
European women asked for help with carrying the burden entailed in bearing and raising children. They asked for things like maternity leave. America is the only wealthy, developed country on the planet that still lacks a strong national maternity leave policy.
American "rugged individualism" is a delusion. It always has been. It serves the needs of women especially poorly.
Once a woman gets pregnant and has a child, she needs other people to help her raise that child, like it or not. We can't do what some mammals do of hiding the kid up under some bushes while we go get food.
Society as a whole has to make it easier for parents to do right by their kids. America has an atrocious track record in that regard.
And women like me are the ones that get ROFLstomped in the process, often while very much benefiting other people. I spent a month playing nanny for my sister and her child. She got a serious career. I still am failing to pull that off.
Yes. And that elite class can only exist in a system where servitude by the masses is the norm. To call it a search for equality is straight up a lie.
It's a narrative that actively seeks to trade gender-based inequality for class-based inequality. And then that class-based inequality has a strongly gendered bent to it. You don't typically see men working as nannies and maids.
Nobody is saying biology is "limiting" anything. That's the crux. They are choosing something else. Not better and not worse, but something they feel better suits their needs or desires.
CS isn't some magical field that floats on air. In fact, it's mostly a miserable profession with managers who don't understand how it works, cooped up in an office the whole day under artificial white light while sitting on your ass.
I can’t shake the feeling that the women who leave programming because it’s “unwelcoming” don’t realize that it’s just as miserable a profession with managers who don’t understand how it works cooped up in an office the whole day under artificial light for men as it is for women.
Uh, sure, there are common negatives. But from what I can tell, it really does appear that women have to put up with a boatload more shit than men in addition to the negatives they have in common. And a lot of it hits in exactly the areas that make up for the rest of the shit - try having every one of your nonobvious decisions challenged, subtly or overtly, and see how easy it is to work through your problems with managers or whatever.
Actually any psychologist can contradict you easily. If you find arguments like "men are on average taller and heavier than women" to be sexist, you have a wrong sense of what sexism is.
Your examples are not related to software engineering. Please name software engineering related biological differences between men and women, backed by solid scientific studies.
Do we even have a scientifically-backed set of essential biological or cognitive skills related to software engineering?
I would probably start with [1] and [2].
Paper [3] concludes that sex-based differences in risk tolerance tangibly impacted approaches to spatial navigation AND program development.
There's a few others on spatial cognition and mental information processing: [4][5][6]. Paper[5] in particular links spatial cognition to mental modeling, which was identified in [1] as a software engineering skill. And [6] directly connects it to navigating source code.
[1] and [2] are not studies. [2] isn't even peer reviewed.
[3] is behind a paywall. It appeared in the "2006 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance", which is a pretty good indicator that this is not work done by social scientists, i.e., not scientifically backed. I have worked in science, the good papers appear in journals highly relevant for the topic.
[4] and [5] are not about software engineering.
[6] is also behind a paywall, and is based on a study with 24 students.
As I can't access the full-text papers, what is the reported strength of the effect, i.e., if person A is x% better than person B in spatial recognition, how much better is A in software engineering?
The concept that men and women may have different interests due to biological differences is extremely sexist, yes. For all the sources Damore cited, there's an entire body of academic work (and an entire cultural revolution in the United States spanning upwards of a century) to the contrary on that topic specifically. A large chunk of the feminist movement was and is women and men actively working to prove that biology is not a limiting factor in what women can choose to do with themselves.
Had he kept his comments to a realm of "men and women might have different representation in computer engineering because they have different interests on average," he would have been treading on thin ice with people disinclined to assume good faith but could have probably kept his job. Attempting to hang the causality on biology really did him in (and when his memo became public, it put Google in a situation where they ran serious risk of tolerating a hostile work environment if they kept him).