Outraged about the Google diversity memo? - <AUTHOR> http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/08/outraged-about-google-diversity-memo-i.html <comment><USER5> An interesting anecdote regarding gender bias and tech.

In the very early stage of my company, we wanted to outsource some UX work. After an exhausting review of applicants on one of the freelance sites out there, we finally settled on a Pakistani woman who had the best balance of portfolio vs cost.

At the initial Skype call, there was no video. And it turned out to be a guy speaking in a very high voice. We didn't really care and just went along with it (after a call or two he dropped his octave significantly, but everything continued with the original female name). But it was curious that this enterprising individual decided that the best way to stand out from the countless other developers with similar demographics he was competing against was to pretend to be a woman.

I do suspect that the presumed bias that women aren't actually as skilled and got where they are because of gender preference, while an uncomfortable bias for women, does make it so that a woman with equal skill to a male candidate is perceived as a greater rarity/find because "oh wow, this one is legit." (Not saying women are actually less likely to be legit, just saying the perception that is true can work to board in the opposite direction). I'd be extremely curious to see the classic "attach picture to resume/work sample" experiment done for tech with actual hiring managers. I'd be very surprised if the work with the female photo has a lower net score than the male photo across the experimental groups.

<comment><USER6> That experiment was done in STEM academia recently, and showed a 2:1 hiring advantage for women.

[http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract)

It should also be noted that the earlier study, which showed a smaller effect and only if the resumes were calibrated to be (a) mediocre and (b) precisely calibrated to be the same, was done in _Psychology_. Which is, of course, a field dominated by women and maybe not the typical "STEM" that we think about when we talk about the underrepresentation of women in tech.

Those two findings in turn gel with a recent French study that showed bias in grading in favor of the underrepresented gender in a particular field (though the bias was stronger in favor of women than in favor of men).

[http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/46681/...](http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/46681/title/Slight-Female-Bias-in- French-Science-Teacher-Exams/)

And of course there was the recent trial (not an experiment AFAICT) in Australia to reduce gender bias:

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment- tria...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to- improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888)

"The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door."

UPDATE: I was looking for one more thing, and finally found it. Despite the fact that the study showing bias against women is much weaker, it has been cited several times more often than the study showing bias for women (table near the bottom). [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble- rouser/201707/wh...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble- rouser/201707/why-brilliant-girls-tend-favor-non-stem-careers)

<comment><USER7> >That experiment was done in STEM academia recently, and showed a 2:1 hiring advantage for women.

Back when I was still at university I was on a hiring panel for a new prof.

In a first step we ranked all the applicants using qualitative and quantitative metrics (the rankings across qualitative/quantitative and people on the panel was very similar when we compared rankings at the end) and then we handed in a shortlist with the best male applicant and best female applicant. We did this to make the Gleichstellungsbeauftragte (="diversity officer") shut up and thought that since the ability gap was really noticeable it'd be a no contest. How wrong we were. Despite being in the upper part of the bottom half of our ranking, she got the job.

That was the day I found out that I wasn't at a meritocratic institution as I had previously thought and left a few months later. That sort of thing really isn't good for your self confidence.

<comment><USER8> When you say the ranking was quantitative, what sort of quantities did you measure? Did you ever evaluate the quality of your metrics, and how predictive they were for future success?

IIRC, Google did the same thing and concluded their hiring metrics had very little predictive value beyond setting a certain bar. Once you rose to that level, most discriminatory power of the metric evaporated.

If that was the case where you were, then is probably very little predictive value between "top scores" and "median scores".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great perspective. As a Northern European having dealt with American company ownership I don't think the main problem in Google's case was political correctness but rather a general American problem with how free speech is defined in the US. Freedom in America is always about government NOT doing something, while in Europe government is defined as a protector of these freedoms. This shows up clearly with respect to stating an opinion at a US company. There is no protection of free speech on private property in the US. I first encountered this when out company got bought by an American one and they i sisted that religion and politics should not be discussed at work. It surprised them that such a demand was illegal in Norway. Private property does not trumph everything else as it often seems to do in the US.

While americans are free to utter quite inflamatory speech in the public, I find that American culture seems to discourage any sort of controversial topic in polite company.

That applies to conservatives and liberals alike in the US. Discussing religion among conservatives in the US seems taboo. While liberals are not very open to having PC opinions challenged.

<comment><USER10> To be clear, a private company in the US cannot stop you from discussing anything at work but reserves the right to fire you at will, including for discussions it deems unproductive. Discussing politics in polite company in the US is indeed discouraged by culture. I personally think that's a good thing as people on opposite sides of the spectrum often can't agree on a basic set of facts, which makes discussions pointless. Do supporters of far right parties in Scandinavian countries often discuss politics with supporters of left wing parties at dinner ?

<comment><USER11> Sometimes the point of the conversations is reminding each other that we're decent and intelligent humans. Giving up on engaging because you haven't converted people is giving up too soon. Sometimes the changed mind is in how we value political opponents, not whether we agree with them.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but you can't have a political discussion that is productive if there is a fundamental disagreement about the facts

<comment><USER11> Sure you can. Sometimes it's essential so you can agree to disagree properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Const-me IMO the best comment from there:

Giulio Prisco said... The results of this incident are easy to predict.

Now everyone at Google (and everyone in large tech companies, and everyone in academy) knows that they can be fired for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line.

Of course they'll shut up for fear of losing their job and the means to support their family.

But they won't change their position. If anything, their position will be radicalized. For example, from classical liberal to alt-right.

Yes, they'll stop expressing their opinion in public. But they'll express their opinion, with a vengeance, in the only place where one can do so in secrecy without fear of witch-hunting mobs: the voting booth.

Yes, that explains Trump.

<comment><USER12> I made the grave mistake of trying to express that point on Twitter. Twitter seems to be a poor vehicle for nuanced debate at the best of time, but it's a dumpster fire right now full of raging people who don't understand what you've just said.

I was in SV last year for a couple of months during the election, and everyone I met were all paid up members of the church of political correctness up front, but when you spoke to these people in private there were a lot of people who were secretly conservative, but "It's Silicon Valley and you can't be a Republican out here".

I'm reminded of Chomsky's words in his book, The Common Good:

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum"

Where things have gone drastically wrong here are that the spectrum is now so tiny that any debate within that spectrum is now impossible. It becomes almost impossible to depolarize the situation and widen that spectrum, and that's going to lead to everything you more eloquently put above, if not more.

<comment><USER13> _> Twitter seems to be a poor vehicle for nuanced debate at the best of time_

Understatement of the century. How on earth can you expect to have "nuanced debate" with only 140 characters?

<comment><USER14> _> How on earth can you expect to have "nuanced debate" with only 140 characters?_

Oh come now, it seems to work fine for Trump! /s

<comment><USER15> Sad!

<comment><USER15> I was downvoted! Sad!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you > will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value > judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data. Is diversity > important enough for you to temporarily tolerate an increased risk of not > hiring the most qualified person? That's the trade-off nobody seems willing > to spell out.

Perhaps because it's not a necessary trade off of diversity policies per se, only a trade-off of the one specific type of diversity policy with which the author happens to be familiar.

For an historical example that does not feature such a trade-off:

1\. I put up a curtain between the judges and the musician auditioning for the orchestra.

2\. I hire whoever the judges say sounded the best.

3\. The number of women in orchestras grows.

In no case where this diversity policy is used does the policy cause a less skilled player get chosen because that player was female.

<comment><USER17> When the Australian public service experimented with blinding demographic data on resumes, fewer women and minorities were hired:

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment- tria...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to- improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888)

A blind recruiting process only increases diversity if there exists significant bias against diverse candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if Silicon Valley has a bias _in favor_ of diverse candidates, like Australia's public service.

<comment><USER11> You have an excellent point, but your use of the phrase "diverse candidates" misses the concern that the most important diversity is in thought and culture, not just predetermined demographics. A "diverse candidate" in reality may not look like an official "diversity candidate".

<comment><USER18> Another question is what makes you think that all whites think the same and therefore it will narrow the spectrum of ideas?

This assumption is never discussed and always accepted as true.

Why is that? Why are all the whites (or white males) identical in their thinking?

<comment><USER11> It's clearly not true. Hiring a Slavic man would, in abstract, be an increase in diversity in a lot of shops. They're likely Caucasian, though. One response is that it's important to officially value historically disadvantaged groups, but many Slavic groups _are_ historically disadvantaged.

So, in a weird way, diversity initiatives come from a very ethnocentric (American) perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article also has a few problems

> I believe for example if it wasn't for biases and unequal opportunities, > then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. > Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I > challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary.

Claim bearers are burdened with proof. Otherwise I can say 'I claim it is not so and if you believe otherwise you provide evidence to the contrary' and we would be a bunch of children shouting nonsense

> I'm not remotely surprised, however, that Damore naturally assumes the > differences between typically female and male traits mean that men are more > skilled.

He didn't say that

> The biggest problem with Damore's memo however is that he doesn't understand > what makes a company successful. If a significant fraction of employees > think that diversity is important, then it is important. No further > justification is needed for this.

No, what makes a company successful is the positive impact it has on employees, customers, the communities it operates in and shareholders

> Biases and unequal opportunities are real. (If you doubt that, you are a > problem and should do some reading.)

Why assume your readers can only reach conclusions if they are dumb ? Why not point out the specific readings that you have done ?

> And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you > will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value > judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data

Value judgements should also be subject to logical deductions

<comment><USER20> > Claim bearers are burdened with proof.

I think that was her point...

<comment><USER21> But the point of the original "manifesto" was that google makes the claim that uneven distribution of men and women is due to discrimination, and the "manifesto" explains how a 100% fair and non-discriminatory selection process may result in uneven results.

In that case, there's no reason to assume discrimination unless it's proved.

<comment><USER20> > there's no reason to assume discrimination unless it's proved.

Yes there is. Cultural sexism is already widely known to be a massive problem, and active discrimination is only a small part of that. Discrimination is known to exist as well. At the same time there is no known, no proven connection between sex and capacity for engineering, that doesn't even exist as as far as we know.

The number of women in tech is changing over time, faster than evolution, the number of women starting computer science degrees is changing over time, faster than evolution, and many companies employ a larger percentage of women than Google. So, there definitely are reasons to assume cultural sexism and discrimination are involved, and there are _more_ reasons to do so than not.

Burden of proof is on Damore. He has made vague and blanket generalizations about some of the differences between men and women to jump to very specific conclusions that there is no proof of. The burden of proof absolutely rests on him to back up his claims. What he's done so far is spread some FUD, he used sophomoric logic to invent a theory that rationalizes his own desire to discriminate. By claiming that women aren't innately as good- something for which is there _no_ evidence- that frees him up (and anyone who believes the same) to openly not hire women, or to pay them less, for example.

Active discrimination is only one part of the wider issue. Cultural stereotypes, and fear and self-selection by women and men are part of the larger cultural sexism issue too, among other things. There are fewer women studying computer science now than 10 years ago. There are more women studying computer science now than 40 years go. If the primary differences in the capacity for engineering are innate, then how do you explain that? Evolution of human capacity for engineering is not taking place on a yearly basis, so _obviously_ innate biology is not the primary force at play here.

The number of women in the workforce has gone up over the last decade at the same time the number of women in tech has declined, yet all the male-female differences Damore commented on would affect all men and women in business. Remember, he only claimed that women are more open, more agreeable, and more neurotic, and that men are more driven for status. If this explains the gender gap in tech, then it should also explain the same gender gap in business globally, and it fails to do that by miles.

The same arguments that Damore is putting forward were used to discriminate against women in tech have been used in the paste to discriminate against women in the workforce in general, and against women in the military as well. Maybe read a little more history. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_workforce](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_workforce) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military) [http://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in- computer-s...](http://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer- science/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Disagreeing with Damore's arguments is perfectly ok.

Not liking the style of his memo is perfectly ok.

Calling Damore young and clueless is useless ad hominem. Chances are he is smarter than you and me and the memo is actually well sourced.

Calling him a WHITE MAN is an essentialism that reveals the author's bias.

<comment><USER23> I'd happily agree he's a better engineer than me. That doesn't make him smarter, and his engineering acumen certainly doesn't give him any specific ability to do any kind of psychology or neuroscience lit review.

Know how we get up in arms when someone with expertise one field starts going on about some totally unrelated field and makes a lot of leaps of reasoning?

Expertise in one field doesn't make you an expert in everything. Nothing tells me this guy can write authoritatively on this subject matter, or that the memo is well-sourced, just cause he's smarter at writing software than me.

<comment><USER22> Nice strawman you've build there ;). "Expertise in one field doesn't make you an expert in everything", sure! But not being an expert in given filed does not make you clueless. And _that_ was my argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Let me present a walmart associate opinion on the person that was fired.

Tldr - sometimes really smart people do the dumbest things. Where was his common sense?

For the average associate i know the overarching Question would be did he not know he could be fired?

"I would have loved to go to college. I couldn't afford it. Id love to have a job at Google. He probably makes over one hundred thousand dollars. All those years spent in college to get a good job and to then lose it. Didn't he think saying something bad about your employer can get you fired? I cant go on Facebook and write sh#! about walmart and not expect to get fired or at least reprimanded. I just dont understand how people who are supposed to be so smart can be so dumb."

\-- I am fortunate to have straddled upper and lower classes in my life. I learn new things working with adults who have never known a family member who attended college. Managers who never flew in a plane. The ground level view of living where you work to get by. The joy of life (imo, more joy with less wealth)

I have no outrage personally.

<comment><USER25> There is a big difference between going on Facebook to talk shit about your employer and what happened here. The memo writer asked for feedback on his memo and was ignored. He tried again and again to get feedback on his opinion internally until turning to the Google internal 'skeptic' community. The skeptics doesn't quite like what he wrote so they strung him up and made an example of him. He was encouraged to give feedback like this so that the company could react to internal problems and self correct before they became worse. In a collective sense Google is acting like a child by refusing to address this problem and their reaction will alienate employees more than this memo ever could.

On a personal rant, I've contracted for Google doing software architecture on a few projects. They do have practices which mildly disgust me. Stuff like flagging people as 'diverse' and making sure the correct number of diverse people are in attendance.

<comment><USER24> <He was encouraged to give feedback like this so that the company could react to internal problems and self correct before they became worse.

I never got that. Ty. But isnt one of the mechanisms to get feedback making input anonymous? Did they ask for authored input? Really? About diversity?

<comment><USER26> From what I gathered, yes. Unquestionably! In a message board with the name "pc-considered-harmful"

What did they think was going to get posted onto that board, if not this memo?

<comment><USER27> In retrospect, it almost seems like they were fishing for people who have 'unsavory opinions' so they can force them to attend diversity training (even the name is Orwellian) and fire them if it doesn't work out.

<comment><USER24> Do i have this right?

Google: "we want to hear how you think? It's safe."

Googler: "you suck."

Google: "just kidding. It's not safe. Bye bye."

Seems like dirty pool.

Is that what occurred?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I do not agree with a lot of points of that diversity memo but that means that it's a topic that needs to be discussed instead of being censored and the author fired.

Discussion is how people change their opinion. It's by being free to discuss and say what you think that you can exchange ideas with other people you disagree with and maybe change your mind once you understand their view point.

If you close discussion, then those opinions will be more radicalized and will tend to be discussed in echo chambers where people are not afraid of being shamed by their writings.

As Voltaire once said[1] "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it " and I think, forgetting this, is what leads to Trump and to an increase of misogyny.

[1] It's actually apocryphal, he never actually wrote or said that but it does illustrate his philosophy so wouldn't have been out of character for him.

<comment><USER29> > that means that it's a topic that needs to be discussed instead of being > censored and the author fired.

Here is what CEO said on the about it in his response [1]:

"many points raised in the memo—such as the portions criticizing Google's trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all—are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics—we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions."

The author of the original memo wasn't fired because of trying to discuss the topic. He was fired because he violated Google's code of conduct, which expects:

"each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination."

If you intimidate enough employees via a widespread memo, you will get fired. I see no problem with that. The freedom to discuss a topic also comes with responsibilities.

As an example, would anyone expect to keep their job if they published a memo with "Blacks on average are [insert negative here]." at any big company anywhere in the world? Regardless of scientific basis? It's an absurd expectation, unless you work at a company doing scientific research on that specific subject.

[1] [https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/note-employees- ceo-...](https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/note-employees-ceo-sundar- pichai/)

<comment><USER28> The main problem I see with that is that poll that says that a third of the employees didn't disagree with the memo. If there's such a large percentage that agree with it then it's time for discussion. It's not a minority opinion and that memo shows what a lot of people think but will not be afraid to express.

So, instead of having open discussion on the topic which would help changing ideas, those opinions are being suppressed and the people holding them will be further radicalized.

<comment><USER29> In my comment I quoted the CEO saying _many_ parts of the memo _are_ open to discussion. Discussion and debate comes with responsibilities, and one of the responsibilities per the CoC is that you do not intimidate or harass other employees.

Is it unreasonable to say you are not allowed to intimidate or harass other employees?

> be afraid to express.

They should be afraid to express an opinion that violates the code of conduct. The code of conduct values some things over others, and a workplace free of harassment and intimidation is more important to Google than making sure no one is ever afraid of expressing an opinion. It might well be the opinion of some engineer in Google that all blacks should be called niggers. That engineer should rightly be afraid of expressing that opinion no matter how deeply held that opinion is, and no matter how many other employees share that opinion.

> the people holding them will be further radicalized.

Source?

<comment><USER28> Ok, where is the intimidation or harassment? He expressed unpopular opinion and unenlightened points of view but is there harassment?

In another comment, you say it's the mention that women tend to have on average more neuroticism although you seem to acknowledge in that comment that it has basis in research [1]. If, as you say, it's a fact, then how can it be harassment?

You cannot have reasonable discussions, if you dismiss what you consider to be true facts because you consider them to be harassment. There could be factors that could cause a statistical difference between genders due to physiology or due to culture (I disagree with the memo's author in his dismissal of cultural and parenting influences on gender behaviors) and any discussion of diversity would need to take those into account.

Now, the author claims that his memo had notes to supporting evidence but the leaked copies do not have that.

[1] For the record, I haven't found the research on that and I'm rather skeptical of that result.

<comment><USER29> > where is the intimidation or harassment?

Many employees felt intimidated and that they now had to prove in a work setting that they are not "more neurotic on average than men". This is about human relationships. If enough people say they felt intimidated, how can anyone dispute that? Can you prove they didn't feel intimidated? Can I prove they did feel intimidated? No to both questions. It's not in the domain of science or facts. It's in the domain of human relationships and emotions.

> If, as you say, it's a fact,

I said it was a fact? Where? I actually don't care if it's a fact or not. It just doesn't mean a lot to me either way.

> then how can it be harassment?

Easy. There is zero relationship between facts and harassment. I can tell the truth and harass you. I can also lie and harass you.

If I pass your workspace every day and say "You have a smaller penis than the average man and some people here are better at programming than you" does it matter whether both of those are facts? It's still clearly harassment. Unless we have an inside joke.... human relationships are far more complex than science. No wonder so many of us would like to shoehorn everything into black and white scientific facts!

> You cannot have reasonable discussions, if you dismiss what you consider to > be true facts because you consider them to be harassment.

Of course you can. A reasonable discussion around your penis size at work wouldn't include facts about your penis size. The reasonable discussion would be "that's inappropriate and if you don't leave me alone I'll report you to HR for harassment."

You are confusing "facts" with "appropriateness". One is a scientific concept, the other is a social concept. The two have almost nothing to do with each other.

> the author claims that his memo had notes to supporting evidence

It might be interesting, but it doesn't matter in the least in this case. The domain isn't science. Per the Google code of conduct, it expects "each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination."

Do you see anything about science in the code of conduct? Or is it talking about culture and human relationships?

<comment><USER27> > Many employees felt intimidated and that they now had to prove in a work > setting that they are not "more neurotic on average than men".

Since we can't read minds, we don't know how they felt. We only know that they _said_ they felt that way. When you believe it is for a higher cause - <USER2> fighting the patriarchy - lying about your feelings is a minor consideration.

Witness how many of these identity activists lie about being pushed, lie about having their space invaded to accomplish their ends:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRlRAyulN4o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRlRAyulN4o)

Not a single one of them says "Hey, no, lying isn't right." The collective values of that massive group of identity activists has no regard for truth, on this level.

We can't deny that there is cultural overlap between the identity activists in this video, and the identity activists currently working at Google.

<comment><USER29> You're basically saying what I'm saying: harassment isn't something that can be objectively determined. Googlers might be lying about it, they might be telling the truth.

If you don't want to get fired for harassing folks, and you don't have great people skills, you should probably keep your controversial opinions at home. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Really great post, and I had what I thought were some great observations about the article I wanted to share. But then in the article's comments I read this by Outer M.:

"By the way, in science and technology, conservatism is a minority ideology (he says so himself in his letter). How would he feel if we start saying that conservative people aren't apt for science and technology? That if he doesn't feel welcome he should find a different profession? It's ironic he complains about it even though, in a way, he understands the struggle."

After I read that, I went back and re-read the memo, but I swapped all gender references for politics, and vice-versa, and it was _awesome_.

At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and political orientation, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Gender is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean male, we should critically examine these prejudices.

...

Possible non-bias causes of the political gap in tech

...

In highly progressive environments, women are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different genders to be able to express themselves.

Alienating women is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because women tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.

<comment><USER30> Politics, favorite foods, religion, dress sense and other ideas aren't innate.

Gender, age, ethnicity and sexuality are.

Hence swapping gender for politics doesn't work.

Additionally Damore argued for assessing individuals as individuals rather than as tribe members and assuming discrepancy is down to bias - even if you did sub someone's chosen politics for their gender, Damore's proposed fix would still require you to assess the individual.

<comment><USER20> > Politics, favorite foods, religion, dress sense and other ideas aren't > innate. Gender, age, ethnicity and sexuality are. Hence swapping gender for > politics doesn't work.

That is incorrect. The word "gender" is defined as the social and cultural differences between male and female, as opposed to the biological ones.

You also meant to say "sex" and not "sexuality". Sex is the innate biology of males & females. Sexuality refers to things like sexual preferences of partners, sexual feelings, and sexual activity, all of which are not innate.

I wasn't arguing against Damore and I don't care whether he argued for individuals. Except that he obviously didn't just argue for individuals, because he complained about the plight of the conservatives at Google, _and_ suggested that women as a group are innately less capable technologists.

I just find it really funny that he took opposite stances on two minority groups in tech, and with a straight face argued against sensitivity toward one group and argued in favor of more sensitivity for the other. You can swap them, and I did, and what you get is more or less the exact same, equally wrong argument. It's very sad if what it takes is swapping them to see how wrong it is.

<comment><USER31> Your statement that "he complained about the plight of the conservatives at Google, and suggested that women as a group are innately less capable technologists," is not a fair recounting of his arguments. He claims that Google's internal cultural dynamic is hostile towards conservatives, and that Google's hiring policy towards women is inappropriately favorable. There is nothing innately contradictory about these beliefs.

Damore never argues against using groups to make big picture, strategic decision. Quite the opposite. What Damore is arguing is that Google's strategic decisions are rooted in ideology, not research, and the consequences of those decisions are discriminatory at the individual level. Worst of all is that because those decisions are rooted in ideology, they can't be questioned.

Of course, Damore makes several other arguments. Damore suggests that Google's minority retention practices are discriminatory and ineffective, while agreeing that Google's corporate environment is likely a poor fit for women.

Damore does make recommendations on how to show sensitivity towards women in order to boost retention of women and he bases these recommendations of his understanding of current, replicable research in psychology. What's important to note about Damore's recommendations is that while strategically they favor women, on an individual basis they do not. The practices that Damore suggests would be as open to men as they are to women.

<comment><USER20> Maybe you misread or misunderstood Damore's letter.

[Damore] "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."

He did exactly what I said - he complained about the plight of conservatives at Google, and he suggested that women as a group are innately less capable technologists. That's not just fair, it is, without judgement, completely factually accurate.

I didn't claim these two things are contradictory, that's your own straw man. I claim that one of them is wrong, and that if you swap them, one of them is still wrong.

I'm a little surprised how many people are defending him. He's got no expertise in these matters at all. Why are you so sure this is a good argument overall? What makes you confident in his interpretation of modern psychology and social issues?

His letter is specious - it sounds good for a bunch of reasons, and he has many valid points, but it's wrong overall. Programmers _love_ arguments that favor consistency, and they're convinced it's always and forever more fair, but that's very often not true in reality. If society were already fair and if cultural sexism didn't exist, then not being extra sensitive to women might be the right thing to do. But the prevalence of cultural sexism is a fact, it exists just like racism does. We have to actively get rid of it before we can be consistent. Because it's there, suggesting that it's more fair to pay less attention to it is actually rationalizing sexism. What you're arguing for indirectly is to keep our level of sexism at the status quo, rather than fix it _before_ we treat everyone exactly the same. Treating everyone exactly the same right now assumes there's no problem right now, but there is a problem right now.

> Damore never argues against using groups to make big picture, strategic > decision.

Then I think your beef is with @nailer's comment above mine, and you can argue that with him. He said "Additionally Damore argued for assessing individuals as individuals rather than as tribe members and assuming discrepancy is down to bias - even if you did sub someone's chosen politics for their gender, Damore's proposed fix would still require you to assess the individual."

You are contradicting what he said.

<comment><USER31> I didn't say your characterization of Damore's arguments was wrong, I said it was unfair. What I meant by that was that you stripped statements of context and nuance and represented them with negative connotations that are not warranted based on the original context. My understanding of your statement was that you were suggesting that Damore made definitive statements that are muddled and contradictory. If that was an unfair interpretation of your comment, then I apologize.

I consider your statement "he suggested that women as a group are innately less capable technologists" to be unfair because it could be interpreted in multiple ways. The danger of misinterpreting this statement is so great, that the underlying idea can't be expressed in this manner. Damore uses the phrase "these differences MAY explain.."(emphasis mine) to indicate that evidence suggest, but does not prove, his hypothesis. You make Damore sound more definitive than he actually is (or at least how I understand him to be).

The most dangerous word in your statement is "innately". If I remove it from your statement, than it becomes incontrovertibly true. Women as a group are less capable technologist, by simple nature of the fact that there are fewer of them. Why is the big question, and the word "innately" is the attempted explanation.

If "innately" means that "women are generally to stupid to grasp computes, than that's codswhallop. There's no evidence to suggest that the mean IQ of women is any different than the mean IQ of men.

If by "innately" you mean "men are biologically compelled to be assholes to women, and women are biologically compelled to flee this treatment", then that's a scary fucking problem that I hope we can solve in some manner other than the obliteration of the male sex.

If "innately" means that "women generally don't give a shit about computers", then there is evidence to suggest that it might be true, though of course the evidence is far from conclusive .

If "innately" means that "Men are more represented at the extremes at of most distributions, and since being a google engineer is an extreme position, men should be more represented there", then that is another possibility that is suggested, though obviously not proven, from current evidence.

For me, the word "innately" is too fuzzy in its meaning and it makes me uncomfortable to use it in this context.

As for your concerns about his expertise, his interpretations of current research concerning the cognitive differences between men and women are not out of line with current research and the interpretation of that research by well regarded members of the psychology community. Steven Pinker is a name that has come up frequently in the past few days, whose own views overlap Damore's to some degree.

I find your interpretation of my motives to be uncharitable. My intention is not to argue that we should keep the status quo of sexism. I think we all agree that judging the capabilities of an individual based on their biological sex is bullshit. My concern (And it seems Damore shares this concern) is that we're replacing one kind of sexism with a different kind of sexism. That's not progress.

I think you should ask yourself how comfortable you are with the following statement: "There are differences in the distribution of cognitive traits in the populations of males and females based on biological sex." (I use the word cognitive here to mainly refer to emotional differences though of course it can have other meanings. I apologize for using such broad language here but I felt that it was suited to this context)

Note that this statement is one of pure fact. Either there are differences in the populations at large, or there aren't. Of course, it's a fact that will be incredibly difficult to discern, but at some point in the future, we could conceivably answer this question. Are you comfortable with this statement being disproven? Are you comfortable with it being proven? If you answered no to either of those questions, than you have an ideology that will be difficult to update with facts.

Please note that these questions are all rhetorical. I'm not trying to attack you personally and I appreciate the time you've taken to respond to my post. I'm not an asshole, I just write like one.

<comment><USER20> I appreciate your response too, and I'm not impugning your motives, nor judging you. I have no doubt you believe your motives to be good and in the interest of fairness and equality. Many men who are siding with Damore believe that. What I do think is that you're not fully prepared for this discussion and not aware of the history and causes of discrimination and systematic bias. Do you know about the book "The Bell Curve" and the controversy it caused in the 90's? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve) Don't skip the "criticisms" section.

> I think we all agree that judging the capabilities of an individual based on > their biological sex is bullshit.

You're further demonstrating a misreading of Damore's letter. Yes I do agree, judging engineers according to biological sex is bullshit. If you agree with that, then you didn't understand what Damore said. The memo says explicitly "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.

I think you actually don't agree with Damore, and you just don't know it yet.

Talking about how he hedged with a "may" and didn't state it as fact is a huge cop-out. He stated as fact that abilities are different (for which there's no evidence.) What he proposed is that the imbalance in current distribution might be caused by a proportional imbalance of ability (for which there exists mountains of contrary evidence). The entire point behind his statement is to establish that biological sex could be responsible for the distribution imbalance, and it's possible there's no sexism or discrimination against women going on, and thus nothing to fix. This is FUD. It doesn't matter whether he's claiming it's a fact, what he's doing is casting doubt.

The problem with denying that discrimination exists and asserting there are other causes is obvious: it's hypocritical, it's a way of discriminating.

> The most dangerous word in your statement is "innately".

I am using 'innate' as synonymous with biological, meaning hard-wired and unchangeable, a trait that comes with the package. Let me re-phrase, Damore suggested that woman as a group are biologically less capable technologists than men. This is the same sense that other people in this thread used 'innate'. It may help you to lookup the definition, e.g. "adj. Possessed at birth; inborn. adj. Possessed as an essential characteristic; inherent."

> If I remove it [innately] from your statement, than it becomes > incontrovertibly true. Women as a group are less capable technologist, by > simple nature of the fact that there are fewer of them.

I know you don't mean to sound as bad as you do, but that sounds really, really bad. The capability of any individual has nothing to do with how many others there are. In this specific case, it's quite possible that the few women in tech are more capable than the average man. Damore was not suggesting that women are less capable as a group because there are fewer of them, he suggested that it's possible that women can't do tech as well as men _because_ they're women.

> I think you should ask yourself how comfortable you are with the following > statement: "There are differences in the distribution of cognitive traits in > the populations of males and females based on biological sex." (I use the > word cognitive here to mainly refer to emotional differences though of > course it can have other meanings. I apologize for using such broad language > here but I felt that it was suited to this context)

You might also want to look up the word 'cognitive'. It doesn't mean what you think it does, and you just misused it pretty badly. Taken at face value, that statement would suggest to most people that the mean IQ of women is different than the mean IQ of men, which I already know you don't believe.

<comment><USER31> Thanks for your reply. I regret that hacker news is not a great format for engaging in these sorts of long running (and long winded!) discussion, but's it's what we've got and so I'd like to continue if it's alright with you.

I think there are a lot of small disagreements we may have about this issue, but there's a big elephant in the room that I would like to focus on. Namely, my statement that women as a group are less technical capable than men, and your reaction to that statement.

I want to focus here because it's the point where we disagree the most, and I think it offers the best opportunity to highlight the differences in our thinking and, most importantly, to highlight the different ways we each use language.

'I know you don't mean to sound as bad as you do, but that sounds really, really bad.'

First off, I agree with you. This statement could be taken in some very terrible ways which is why I chose to bury it deep in an obscure comment thread, surrounded by lots qualifying statements, while pleading with my audience that my comments be interpreted charitably. I understand that you want to interpret each statement within the context of human history but for the time being, I would ask that we try to engage in a conversation free of that context. From my point of view, we are hypothesizing, not proposing policy (I think one of the flaws of Damore's memo was that he did not cleanly separate hypothesizing from policy proposals, and so he was not able to cleanly discuss what evidence may or may not say). To me, trying to discuss the evidence for trait distribution in human populations while worrying about the sad history of human bigotry is like trying to write a recipe for spaghetti and interjecting a discussion on the weather and soil best required to raise tomatoes. Technically the subjects are related, but I think we can all appreciate how that could make the spaghetti recipe difficult to understand if we don't carefully partition out all the concerns at this stage.

Do you have any objections to the statement that "Men as a group (compared to women as a group) are less capable knitters by simple nature of the fact that there are fewer of them"?

From my personal experience, this statement seems incontrovertibly true. If I needed a group of highly skilled knitters to accomplish a large project, I have no doubt that the vast majority of the people I would end up recruiting would be women. Does this mean that men can't be good knitters? Absolutely not. Stephen West is a male knitter who travels the world drawing (small) audiences wherever he goes. There are knitting groups in Finland and Amsterdam that are mostly male, which love to get together, drink beer, and knit. Nevertheless, I am confident in my original statement that men as a group are less capable knitters. From my perspective, this is ultimately a matter of skill not talent. Skill by it's very definition requires time and practice, and generally people people don't spend time and practice on things they don't have an interest in.

Now let's assume that men as a group are biologically less interested in knitting (obviously I'm pretty deep into the hypothetical here), from the definition of innate we could say that men as a group are innately less interested in knitting. If men as a group are innately less interested in knitting, I would claim that men are less likely to acquire knitting skills. If men as a group are innately less likely to acquire knitting skills that I would comfortable saying that men as a group are innately less capable knitters. 'Capable' mean competent, and if you don't have skills, you're not competent.

With all that in mind, let's look at Damore's statement that "the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership".

One reading of this statement is as you have read it. Ability refers to talent, IQ, mathematical, and technical talent. Thus the reference to biology means that Damore believes women tend to have a lower IQ that that makes them unsuitable to be engineers except in exceptional cases.

However, there is another way to read the statement, and from my conversations with friends, my spouse, and reading of various articles and blogs, it is a very common reading. Let me paraphrase Damore: "The distribution of preferences and _acquired skills_ of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership." Ability means "the means or skill to do something", thus I believe that this paraphrasing is fair.

I would argue that Damore intends the second interpretation of his statement. He never tries to cite evidence that claims women are stupid. All his citations revolve around the possible differences in the perceptions and interests of men and women. He then argues that differences in interests may result in a difference in acquired skills, which results in a large difference in the populations of men and women who are suitable to apply to Google.

P.S. I did want to address the definition of 'Cognitive'. Ripped straight from Google,'Cognitive' means 'the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses'. To me, innate preferences absolutely effect how someone acquires knowledge and how they reason about their experiences. Other definitions refer to perception and intuition, as well as IQ and working memory. I understand 'Cognitive' to be a grab bag word that can refer to any mental trait that effects the way you think. I asked my question to try and understand if you were comfortable with the idea that there are any statistically significant differences between the populations of men and women in how they tend to view, perceive, think about, or respond to their environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers being fired in 2006 showed that there could be no rational discussion of this topic. Sad to see it unchanged in 2017.

Doubly sad because if the anonymous survey linked in the post is true, 1/3 of Googlers agree with the memo. Only 1/3 "strongly disagree", and the people who wanted him fired should be a further fraction of that 1/3.

[https://basicgestalt.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/press-f-for- ja...](https://basicgestalt.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/press-f-for-james-damore- the-only-set-of-balls-left-at-google/)

EDIT: fixed link to alternative site.

<comment><USER33> I wish this Larry Summers martyr mythology would be revisited with scrutiny. Summers was already unpopular with the faculty for his changes to the core curriculum (it was argued that they reduced rigor in some tracks), endowment strategy, and a very strange scandal involving financial wrongdoing in Russia and a massive Harvard payout. He made his comments to a group including top female faculty during a time when they had made specific complaints concerning - among other things - severely family-unfriendly campus policies that disparately impact women. The faculty, many of whom were completely on board with the concept of sex differences in personality, saw his inartful "mama truck, daddy truck" comments as an attempted rebuttal. His comments - in this context - were pure toxoplasma, so of course they are what the media seized upon.

<comment><USER33> For example, one of the specific complaints of the faculty at the time was that the advertised perk of on-site daycare was an extremely small number of places in the basement of a trailer on land not owned by the University (and so possibly subject to return to Cambridge). The environment at the time was tense, and the faculty appear to have opportunistically seized on the brouhaha to weaken a disliked leader. Many female faculty publicly supported the topic of the comments themselves (as I recall, the most vocal were an economist in favor and a very famous biologist against - the biologist appeared to interpret to the comments as a direct comment on the ability of the Harvard faculty)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is an excellent discussion.

I especially love this comment:

> I believe for example if it wasn't for biases and unequal opportunities, > then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. > Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I > challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary.

Because arguably that's where gender differences highlighted in Damore's memo point :)

I'm reminded of Richard Morgan's _Black Man_ aka _13_. He argues that men basically don't play well in groups ;)

<comment><USER35> I'll take up that challenge with [https://www.edge.org/response- detail/10670](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10670) which provides quantitative data indicating that male abilities vary more than female ones, and this fact is sufficient to explain why men should be overrepresented in CEO boardrooms and prisons.

<comment><USER36> Mother nature does seem to roll the dice more when it comes to men. People then look at the outliers to the right and scream sexism while completely ignoring all the outliers to the left. There are many more profoundly stupid men than women. Men are incarcerated at a higher rate. Men kill themselves at 3x the rate of women. Yet this is quietly accepted.

<comment><USER37> Women have a much higher level of attempted suicide, possibly 3x as often as men. [1] I once heard a theory that women don't die from suicide as often because they tend to use less violent means of suicide. For example, if you swallow a bottle of pills you could survive or change your mind a few minutes later and get your stomach pumped, but this rarely applies to shooting yourself in the head.

1\. [https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide- statistics/](https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/)

<comment><USER38> "While males are 4 times more likely than females to die by suicide, females attempt suicide 3 times as often as males."

So a suicide attempt by a man is 12x more likely to succeed than one by a woman.

<comment><USER39> That is sexist! Are you suggesting that women are less skilled than men ??!!??

(/s, obviously. Sorry I have to point it out.)

<comment><USER34> I get /s :) And maybe they're _more_ skilled. In that they get the message across without actually dying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > That leaked internal memo from James Damore at Google? The one that says one > shouldn't expect employees in all professions to reflect the demographics of > the whole population?

I don't see how this is an unreasonable argument to make. There is a dearth of male kindergarten teachers, for instance. This doesn't mean the school is being "sexist". It might just mean that certain genders tend to be attracted to certain types of professions.

<comment><USER41> > I don't see how this is an unreasonable argument to make. There is a dearth > of male kindergarten teachers, for instance. This doesn't mean the school is > being "sexist". It might just mean that certain genders tend to be attracted > to certain types of professions.

If that's all the manifesto said, this wouldn't be a story. I am a minority in tech and I certainly didn't see a lot of people like me in my Computer Science program so naturally there is under-representation in the work force, it happens.

But when you start wading into the, 'Women are biologically less well-suited for this work...' is where you get into problems. No different than arguments that used to be made against black people before de-segregation.

<comment><USER42> Was he making a statement or trying to find an answer?

<comment><USER41> I don't know how much he was trying to find an answer but he does leave a good amount of qualifiers in there like, 'this may be the cause' or 'this could explain'. I could be wrong, but it seems like he was trying to put forth a argument in good faith that was not divisive, yet he got into dodgy territory with how he constructed and executed his argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I like the discussion. I think the point about software being significantly "people centric" is a bit off base and betrays the authors lack of experience in the field. Working with people is certainly part of the job and in some roles maybe a large portion of the work. Being a good communicator is an important part of being a good developer, but it doesn't make you a good developer. Being a talented and experienced programmer is the foundation on which the rest is built.

<comment><USER43> That's a nice theory, but I fail to see any evidence of it. I see lots of people cap out at senior engineer, cause that's how far you can get without having strong technical skills. Staff engineers, tech leads, and managers all get there because they're good communicators, and tbh, in those roles, their engineering skills are secondary.

<comment><USER44> _I see lots of people cap out at senior engineer_

What's wrong with that? The majority of software engineers are senior engineer or below, any skill you only need to make it past that level clearly can't be considered core to the job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "one also doesn't solve a problem by yelling "harassment" each time someone asks to discuss whether a diversity effort is indeed effective."

Google simply didn't, and neither did Google employees. The letter from CEO Sundar Pichai makes this clear:

"many points raised in the memo—such as the portions criticizing Google's trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all—are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics"

I don't understand why there is so much discussion around whether or not what the fired employee said was scientifically true or not.

"Blacks on average are more [insert negative here]"

"Jews on average are more [insert negative here]"

"Men on average are more [insert negative here]"

How would I get away with any of the above statements in widely published memo at any big company, regardless of basis in fact?

It's a PR disaster that costs the company money to manage, and it also violates Google's code of conduct by having made a significant portion of employees feel harassed or intimidated.

Here is an excerpt from the Google employee code of conduct which expects:

"each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination."

The fired employee didn't do that, and that's why he was fired.

I suspect the reason so many people have trouble with the firing, and the responsibility stated in employee CoC is that it puts a lot of power in other people's hands. You can no longer sit behind your screen and insist that it's a scientific fact and therefor you are right. Respecting the CoC requires empathy, people skills, listening, perhaps sometimes even submissiveness - <USER3> things that "technical people on average are bad at."

<comment><USER45> > "I suspect the reason so many people have trouble with the firing, and the > responsibility stated in employee CoC is that it puts a lot of power in > other people's hands."

I disagree. I think people are upset, at least conservatives within Google, because they see this "against the CoC" idea selectively applied. I can tell you first hand that there were a lot of things said by those on the left, especially after the election, about conservatives that many felt violated the CoC, the issue is just that its a minority at Google that are conservative. I mean, after the election at the TGIF, a member of management basically told everyone to stand up and hug the person next to you and "it's going to be alright." If this isn't alienating, lacking in empathy, and downright rude toward the conservative Googlers, I don't know what is...

<comment><USER29> I'm sure it's a little of both of what we said, and other reasons as well.

One has to ask: did the conservative Googlers who felt intimidated or harassed by the hug session report that to HR or management?

If the the CoC is selectively applied then people have to prove it, not just have a hunch about it and moan about it. They need do what every minority group in the past has done: collect stats, show the evidence, and take action.

If this is in fact happening, then I wish them luck, even if I disagree with some of their politics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> People are making way too big a deal of genetic predisposition. Yes, there are genetic predispositions, like how musical talent may run through some families, but what matters way more is how we are brought up, and how we choose to act. If someone is a musical virtuoso, they became that way not because of the talent they were born with, but because of the encouragement of their parents and environment and long hours of practice they chose to put in.

Young minds are impressionable, and if you tell a young person they're probably less capable of something, they probably will be. Even as the stereotypical nerdy white male programmer I can see how people look differently at a young girl who is interested in computers. It is considered odd, if not improper. Boys never have to contend with this bias (although they have similar yet opposite biases in different fields, like child care). Inevitably this societal pressure will cause fewer girls to go into programming, and in turn fewer women to end up at google. That's not a consequence of some genetic predisposition, it is a consequence of being brought up in a world where not everyone is treated equally.

How do you flip that around? You stop thinking in terms of averages and you start thinking in terms of individual opportunity. We treat every child as deserving of the same chances as any other child, and we stop trying to steer them into directions based on their birth. That requires a modal shift in thinking where gender is just not a factor anymore, for any profession or any talent.

The diversity memo's failing is not the statistics it cites, it is that it furthers the notion that diversity is a set of statistics to control for. True diversity is about ignoring statistics and instead giving every single person the same chances, regardless of where they came from. I want my daughter to have the same chance of becoming a programmer as my son, and my son to have the same chance of becoming a kindergarten teacher as my daughter, and for no one to tell them either choice is odd or improper.

<comment><USER47> "The diversity memo's failing is not the statistics it cites, it is that it furthers the notion that diversity is a set of statistics to control for. True diversity is about ignoring statistics and instead giving every single person the same chances, regardless of where they came from."

Your point is the memo failed because it makes exactly your point - <USER4> people should be treated like individuals rather than their group's statistical means.

I'm curious if you've even read it.

<comment><USER46> I didn't read it that way. To me it was strongly making the case for statistical differences between women and men that matter, which is what I disagree with. I guess everyone reads into that memo what they want.

<comment><USER47> I don't understand how you could read it that way. In the memo's suggestions sections he clearly states that people should be treated as individuals. Is there some other way to read that section? Bold is my own.

> I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or > society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, > or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My > larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that > don't fit a certain ideology. I'm also not saying that we should restrict > people to certain gender roles; I'm advocating for quite the opposite: > __treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group > (tribalism) __.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Quite refreshing to hear a European voice in this debate (not suggesting that she represents all Europeans -- but it definitely strikes a chord with me).

She's wrong about one thing though:

 _Damore was fired, basically, for making a well-meant, if amateurish, attempt at institutional design, ... , he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own._

No, he was fired because Google is already neck-deep into being investigated by the DoL for gender pay discrimination [1] and they have a class action lawsuit coming up about the same issue [2]. He was fired for the same reason that they recently _hired_ a chief diversity officer [3].

Believe me, at that point they would do almost anything to avoid those cases turning south (and what that would mean for the corporate public image), and giving voice to someone who has even the slightest doubt about diversity in the workplace is a big fat political No-Go.

James Damore made the mistake of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, that's all.

[1][https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google- pa...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pay- disparities-women-labor-department-lawsuit)

[2][https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/08/google- wo...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/08/google-women- discrimination-class-action-lawsuit)

[3][https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/29/google-hires-intels- former...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/29/google-hires-intels-former-head- of-diversity-as-vp-of-diversity/)

</comment><comment> d--b I am sorry if I come across as a liberal who gets offended, but I completely support the decision of Google to fire him. In fact, I think that Google had no other choice than to fire him, and that's mostly because the engineer shot himself in the foot.

Memos are not meant to express debatable personal arguments, memos are meant to express a company position. By widely spreading a personal view, the author impersonated the company in a way that the company does not endorse. As a culture manager, you just cannot let this kind of things happen.

Regarding the content of the "manifesto", the author should have known better. Even if it was genuinely true that women's biology explains the gender gap in technology, it is not provable - as in, there is simply no way to quantify the effect, if any. And using unprovable causes to justify a societal bias is not acceptable. The problem is that you can use unprovable statements to justify anything.

The debate regarding whether it is good or not to intervene at company level to try and change an industry culture is a perfectly healthy debate. Widely sharing one's view which uses unprovable arguments and that will offense some people is simply a dumb thing to do.

<comment><USER11> > The problem is that you can use unprovable statements to justify anything.

This is _exactly_ why we can't shut down conversations the way Google did. Saying line employees are unqualified but Google executives are qualified to judge truth is very stifling to rational thinking and, yes, diversity that actually means something.

But nobody really believe that Google leadership is the best arbiter of diversity. Otherwise, everyone would be telling those class action discrimination lawsuits to pack up and go home.

So what do you think? Does Google leadership have a monopoly on public thought? Do the employees release all expectations of fair treatment when they sign an employment agreements?

<comment><USER23> Do we want the Google execs to sit there and make line-by-line technical decisions? Would you want the head of HR to tell this guy what kind of sort algorithm he should be using, or get into arguments about Go's lack of generics? Or do we expect them to defer to the smart engineers they hire?

This guy is probably a very smart software writing dude, but why would that make us want to listen to what he has to say on any other subject, whether it's biology, evolutionary psychology, running a business, or hiring practices?

<comment><USER49> Should employees be allowed to raise concerns about practices that appear to waste resources or lower morale? (I'm thinking of things like compulsory diversity / bias training)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I agree that the left and the rights reaction over the memo has been overblown. However I am unsure whether or not you think the Googler's opinion is novel. You state both, "that Damore's skepticism about current practices is widespread" and "imperfect his attempt, he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own". As someone who works in the tech industry let me tell you his beliefs were not novel. Its a commonly held belief in the tech industry. I have heard countless renditions of the same argument with vary degrees of sexism.

I'm not sure whether or not he deserved to get fired. Sundar's response was well written and is worth reading Damore, however childish his written seems, is not young and has worked at Google for four years. He's by no means a junior engineer. At the very least the lack of understand of software development speaks for something.

"And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data. Is diversity important enough for you to temporarily tolerate an increased risk of not hiring the most qualified person? That's the trade-off nobody seems willing to spell out."

This is not how "affirmative action" works. "Affirmative action" states that if you have two "equally" qualified candidates you favor the least represented in your society or company. Thus there should be no added risk.

<comment><USER51> > This is not how "affirmative action" works. "Affirmative action" states that > if you have two "equally" qualified candidates

If you can quantify candidates' capabilities, please start your money printing press.

<comment><USER50> Then then why would affirmative action lead to less capable employees?

<comment><USER51> The OP used the term "qualified" and not "capable". I also find the OP's writing effective as they demonstrate their own conflict and lack of clarity on the topic.

Previously in the thread my response is in protest of the reduction both of the OPs related writing and the topic.

<comment><USER50> I'm sorry I'm not following what you're saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The main problem is that stupidity is mainstream. The guy was fired not because of what he wrote, but because the stupid people criticized google and google can't afford to fight against the stupid people. This is a fight one can't win alone. Google's goal is to make money, not to make people less stupid.

Now regarding the firering, the lesson to learn is not that one should stop saying that the king is naked when it is. One should use anonymizer because the stupid people are still dominating the population.

The focus of making money of capitalizm is nurturing stupidity in the population because it makes business so simpler. (e.g. junk food consuming) Things need to change.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'll repeat this again here: it's very likely he wasn't fired for trying to have a discussion. It is more likely he was fired because he did so by propagating gender stereotypes and doubling-down on those stereotypes (his suggestions for how to improve diversity essentially were just context- specific extensions of these stereotypes), which both almost certainly reduced his credibility as a coworker to the point that he could not be effectively managed or productive when assigned to work with others. The author glides right past the point in her article when she notes his improper application of findings about averages.

It's possible to have a discussion about these issues today. It's not rational to give special preference and excessive leeway to discussion that isn't actually fact based (and is in many ways based on nothing related to facts).

<comment><USER54> > It's possible to have a discussion about these issues today. It's not > rational to give special preference and excessive leeway to discussion that > isn't actually fact based (and is in many ways based on nothing related to > facts).

Well, that's great, because his points on gender differences are actually extensively backed by research. When he's talking about that, he isn't talking about _what should be_ or _what can be_ , he's talking about _what is_.

Even after clarifying to the poor-intended reader about _what is_ , he still states that more diversity is _what should be_. He just doesn't agree with the present method.

<comment><USER55> There's a penalty in society and your career for being an asshole. If you do something to make yourself wildly unpopular at work, even if it's well within the lines technically, you might be out of a job. The issue is that most people at Google don't want to work with this guy. That makes for a distraction, not to mention the obvious legal risk if the engineer ever interacts with a woman or minority at Google again.

You can have all the opinions you want, think women belong in the kitchen, hell, be a raging neo-Nazi, but please don't broadcast that shit at work. If you don't like that Google's promoting diversity, there are ways to make your voice heard like a normal adult. I would be livid if I got a link to a doc like this. Here we're busting our asses, and this guy has the gall, time, and energy to write a lengthy essay version of /r/theredpill and put it on a company server.

<comment><USER54> > There's a penalty in society and your career for being an asshole.

Partially true, Gawker staff thrived on being assholes until they got the Hogan Leg Drop. Are you implying that Damore was an asshole, though? How so?

> That makes for a distraction, not to mention the obvious legal risk if the > engineer ever interacts with a woman or minority at Google again.

What about the legal risk of institutionalized discriminatory hiring and career advancement practices?

> You can have all the opinions you want

Thanks.

> think women belong in the kitchen, hell, be a raging neo-Nazi, but please > don't broadcast that shit at work.

Oh, did he broadcast any of those kinds of ideas or political leanings?

> If you don't like that Google's promoting diversity, there are ways to make > your voice heard like a normal adult.

Like, for example, attempting to discuss a topic?

> I would be livid if I got a link to a doc like this.

[http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti- div...](http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity- screed-1797564320)

> Here we're busting our asses, and this guy has the gall, time, and energy to > write a lengthy essay version of /r/theredpill and put it on a company > server.

Have you even browsed that subreddit? Damore's views are nowhere even near in the same side of the political spectrum

<comment><USER56> [https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles- Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf)

is a better link, because it preserves the links to references, the formatting, and the graphic clarifying distributions vs. averages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> looking at the men:women (8:2) ratio in software science at my university in NL, I can perfectly understand where the inbalance in ratio in the workforce comes from. Maybe we should focus on that first? Trying to get a different ratio at the workforce in all companies will effectively mean you will have less qualified women. Assuming a CS university degree is an important qualification.

<comment><USER53> Yes, it's important to attack the root cause. Might it be that the hyper-male workplace contributes to the perception of technology as a place hostile to women, and by attempting to counter that particular problem (e.g., by having diversity initiatives) it _also_ helps attack the root cause?

I do think "diversity initiatives" are like voting in that it's the least amount of effort to put to the issue. I agree with your comment in this sense: I'd like very much for companies to go much further to address the root issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> This whole episode leaves me a bit perplexed because in tech we keep missing the mark when it comes to diversity.

I work at Microsoft. The back of my ID badge has our mission statement: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

To me, that mission is a blueprint for how I can easily approach issues of diversity and inclusion. It says "everyone". To me it's a simple matter of gaining empathy for a wider set of customers so that I can more effectively create software for them.

As an engineering manager, I need to somehow be able to include the views, perspectives, and experiences of a wheat farmer in rural Kenya. Same goes for the high speed day trader in Iceland (I've been to neither place, so how do I know what they really need).

I want more women in engineering precisely because they're not me. Nothing about them makes them less capable of writing code, and several of their attributes (grossly generalizing) makes them far better collaborators than most men I know.

So, I'm just shaking my head, and continuing to do my bit to improve things in ways that I believe are useful: [http://aka.ms/leapit](http://aka.ms/leapit)

<comment><USER59> I see this mentality pop up time after time: How dare you say there are differences in women's capabilities! Except of course, here are some things women are _better_ at.

Sorry, but no. Either we are equally capable by nature and any differences in outcome are due to upbringing ("nurture"), or there are biological differences which means you have to accept there very well may be things women are less capable of as well as the opposite.

I'm firmly in the first camp and think it's mostly if not only upbringing and cultural biases, but you don't get to shun the notion that women are less capable at some things while at the same time claiming there are many things women are actually more capable of. Don't open that door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> > To begin with, even I know most of Google's work is people-centric. It's > either serving people directly, or analyzing people-data, or imagining the > people-future. If you want to spend your life with things and ideas rather > than people, then go into engineering or physics, but not into software- > development.

That's silly. Every job involves people, at some level, otherwise you wouldn't get paid. By this logic, a lighthouse keeping is a people-centric job, because you maintain a light that other people will look at.

> That coding actually requires "female" skills was spelled out clearly by > Yonatan Zunger, a former Google employee. But since I care more about > physics than software-development, let me leave this aside.

I believe this is the one that points out that managers deal with people, not software (so why not just get MBAs?). I'd counter that _liking_ people doesn't mean you're good with them, there's even research that introverts make better CEOs.

Similarly, being predisposed to like programming (or any other task) doesn't mean you're naturally good at it (though putting in the hours will help a lot).

</comment><comment><USER61> I hate to just turn a blind eye to the issue but, man, I'm glad I work at a place where only getting shit done, done right, and done on time matters. My team is about 60% men 40% women and pretty much evenly distributed across Asian, Russian, White American, and Central American races. No one cares in the least about diversity, only the project(s) matter. I feel very fortunate.

<comment><USER11> Part of the problem with diversity culture is that, depending on the circumstance, Russians and Central Americans, especially fair skinned and Americanized ones, may not count as "diverse". And in most workplaces there is an obvious "Asian" presence (scare quotes because Filipino and Chinese go in the same category), so the Asian men aren't counted as "diverse" either.

Companies can't come out with official taxonomies of diversity, so it's all vague and based on unspoken intuitions about which candidates count as more diverse.

It's not a system someone would design from scratch.

To me, it seems like hiring the first Mormon, albino, or Thai employee would be an obvious win from a diversity perspective, but it's not that simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> As an aside, I noticed that many of the negative or outraged comments about Damore's memo stem from some inability to grasp the difference between the statements:

"Men are more skilled"

and

"More men are skilled"

</comment><comment><USER63> In the last month I have hired 4 people in specialist technical roles. I reviewed 15 CVs. All were from men. No women applied.

There is clearly something filtering women out. There is something deep in the supply chain of labor (by which I mean education) which results in women being siphoned off long before they hit my company's diversity and inclusion policies. I believe these policies are reasonably effective at tackling unconscious bias, but they are unable to affect the underlying talent pool.

My personal theory is that specialisms are risky (good pay if you can find employment, no pay if not), and men are more likely to take risks than women. There is research to support the latter point. Casual googling digs up this for example: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Byrnes2/publicati...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Byrnes2/publication/232541633_Gender_Differences_in_Risk_Taking_A_Meta- Analysis/links/00b49514c47ab0f093000000.pdf)

<comment><USER64> I'm skeptical of blaming education. For example, 69% of developers say they are partially self-taught[0]. I've worked with many talented developers with liberal art degrees. The main takeaway of the memo is that women are filtering themselves out.

[0] [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016)

<comment><USER63> But how many of those self-taught developers managed to do so with the aid of a love of mathematics/detail/technicality that survived an encounter with high school peer pressures?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Oh man, voices of reason sound nice. What happened to reason instead of hollow emotion? I am right, you are wrong, and you shouldn't be listened to, because you are a nazi, and nazis are bad, and you deserve bad things happening to you.

</comment><comment><USER66> As a black male, I guess I just comprehend that I dont have the right to spout off my opinions at work, at least not if I want to keep my job. If I start rocking BLM merch around the office, I might not have a job. Feel free to finish telling me how unfair it is that he can't express his opinions, while we ignore the fact that he likely insulted a great deal of his colleagues while doing so. But they don't matter, right? Whats most important is James getting his opinions across. He is free to write what he wants, and they are free to can him.

<comment><USER67> > If I start rocking BLM merch around the office, I might not have a job.

You are kidding right? At least in the major tech companies of the area, people would be out with pitchforks if a black man was fired for rocking BLM merch around the office.

Heck, Mark Zuckerberg specifically reprimanded his employees for writing stuff like 'All Lives Matter' over BLM posters at Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is a thought provoking response, but I think she's wrong to say the firing was not justified. Simple fact is that if you whip up a shitstorm of this caliber, you will not be long for your role.

But more importantly, if you're going to walk the path of claiming that some of your coworkers are biologically unsuited for their roles, you'd best be sure your research and reasoning are ironclad. There's no "just starting a discussion" on such a topic.

</comment><comment><USER69> I don't have much to add to this discussion, except that this is why I never respond to workplace surveys unless I'm required to, and even then, I say what I think upper management wants to hear.

If I'm unhappy or unsatisfied with something that I'm not in an immediate position to change, I'll get a job elsewhere. I want to control if and when that happens, which means no whining or complaining, even if I'm asked to. It's not worth the risk.

</comment><comment><USER70> "Worse, one of the biggest obstacles that minorities face is a chicken-and-egg problem that time alone doesn't cure. People avoid professions in which there are few people like them. This is a hurdle which affirmative action can remove, fast and efficiently."

I think this assumption is made by most people but unfortunately simply filling slots based on socially constructed identity labels does not seem to be effective in addressing underlying inequalities.

For instance, we have had "race" based affirmative action policies for universities for decades but very limited effect in having those policies translate into balancing income and wealth gaps between socially constructed race groups. In fact those gaps have widened considerably over the past couple decades.

I think that people still fail to understand the extent of sub-conscious prejudice and fail to understand that the programs they are putting in place to try to solve inequalities between socially constructed identity groups are actually reinforcing the underlying causes of those inequalities instead of eliminating them.

</comment><comment><USER71> > Women indeed are, on the average, more neurotic than men. It's not an > insult, it's a common term in psychology. Women are also, on the average, > more interested in people than in things. They do, on the average, value > work-life balance more, react differently to stress, compete by other rules. > And so on.

Here's the problem. These studies model the status quo, not the way things would be if women weren't subjected to different historical and social pressures. I would venture that the profile distribution of women in tech is perhaps different than the population wide distribution. Imagine a world where women weren't told they are naturally good/bad at things, now project that forward 50 years and redo the study.

This is my chief problem with the memo, and the fact that he launches into IQ, the talking point of the prejudiced everywhere.

<comment><USER72> >Imagine a world where women weren't told they are naturally good/bad at things, now project that forward 50 years and redo the study.

I doubt you have read James Damore's memo ( [https://diversitymemo.com/](https://diversitymemo.com/) ) because he addresses your very question explicitly by citing a scientific paper:

[http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf](http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf)

And guess what? Less constraints on gender roles lead to more sexual dimorphism.

Here's another study, resulting in the same conclusion:

[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153857)

>This is my chief problem with the memo, and the fact that he launches into IQ, the talking point of the prejudiced everywhere.

Damore doesn't "launch into IQ" at all. The memo mentions "IQ" only 2 times and touches the subject very fleetingly. It appears to refer to an opinion piece that is more elaborate on it: [https://www.city-journal.org/html/real- war-science-14782.htm...](https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war- science-14782.html) . As it turns out, research on IQ has been defunded in the past for being "racist". You can call Damore "prejudiced", but then you will have a lot of work disproving the body of scientific research cited here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence)

Damore's memo is on solid ground regarding the scientific consensus on gender differences in the statistical distribution of psychological traits. It's an honest and fair attempt at describing biological reality. When reality doesn't turn out to be as you want it to be doesn't mean that the author is "prejudiced".

<comment><USER71> Thanks, I actually did read the memo and did also follow up on the sources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I giggled when this article said "most of Google's work is people centric". It's data. It's an isolated intelligent person at a computer screen. At the center is a server. On one end, a programmer, the other end, a user. People don't enter into it.

<comment><USER74> There is plenty of people-centric work in big organizations. Less charitably, it can be described as "navigating the bureaucracy".

<comment><USER75> Its called HR and its dominated by women

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Just because there is science and studies that indicate that women and men are "X", on average, it does not mean you can immediately dismiss people's grievances with the fact that some people are under-represented in one area or another.

My wife certainly does not fall under what the studies would deem a woman to be on average (nor that of which the author of the blog describes). Therefore, she would most definitely protest any notion that the reason why she is not "X" is due to her biology and scientific studies and take issue with anyone in the workplace trying to frame her current position as "she is in that job role due to her biology."

</comment><comment><USER77> _But however imperfect his attempt, he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own._

Why is this surprising? People get fired in America all the time for thinking on their own. It's also called "disagreeing with the boss".

</comment><comment><USER78> Damore's thesis was really more around difference in personality between populations as the likely cause of differences in the same population's distributions in STEM Fields/Leadership. It's about the aggregate interests of a population and not a comment on ability. The people turning it into the latter need to re-read the memo. The gender gaps in STEM/Leadership are likely a combination of both biological and social factors but moderate centrist viewpoints are boring and don't get you views/clicks.

</comment><comment><USER79> Completely right. I hope this is not banned because it is worth the read.

<comment><USER80> Whichever side you are on this is probably the most important topic discussed in this forum this week.

It is also very interesting to a large number of the audience.

Yet sadly there seems to be a number of people here who think they have a right to overrule everyone who upvote (and no, I'm not talking about the mods but about the flaggers.)

<comment><USER79> I have to say that I flagged one of the other post because I was tired of the topic and there weren't adding anything new. But this one is outstanding.

<comment><USER80> Upvoted. Thanks for your honesty. I think this forum could benefit from a larger meta discussion about flagging.

I believe we could have closed this faster and with less problems if we allowed the debate to happen and only flagged comments -on both sides- that broke hn guidelines.

Instead we now have 50 threads and where people are getting increasingly frustrated.

<comment><USER79> I don't prevent any debating flagging another post saying exactly the same than the last 3 posts (actually I agree with most of the post). You can still comment in the post (I did indeed).

I do think people flagged post because they didn't aline with their opinions, but they are in their right. If this is a community site and people decide to flag something, you should accept it (or leave the community if you don't like it). I also consider those flags under the community guidelines because we already have a couple of post about the topic.

The debate is happening anyway. Don't get frustrated. I am learning a lot.

<comment><USER80> _If this is a community site and people decide to flag something, you should accept it (or leave the community if you don 't like it)._

Here's where I accept the current rules but suggest looking into whether flags are given too much weight compared to upvotes.

<comment><USER79> Probably you are right with the weight of flaggling. Maybe it is worth to contact the admins. But as a person who created an app for a community, this things are very difficult and no matter where do you put the limit some people are not going to like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Casting aspersions on colleagues is not cool. There is no 'science' to do this.

The science of studying gender and racial differences does not lend itself to 'easy conclusions' and generalizations and certainly not practical application or advocacy.

Tomorrow a colleague could write a tome pointing to studies about male aggression and the risk of putting them in collaborative environments or about introverts unsuitability for certain roles and presume to advocate 'other roles' for them. This is beyond the pale.

Cherry picking studies in a way they are not meant to applied in any real world scenario is a dangerous unscientific preoccupation of bigots and supremacists.

The fact that you are making these conclusions not as an expert in the field trying to further knowledge but in a real world application context about your fellow workers in an act of extreme prejudice and hostility and completely compromises this individual and his memo.

The biggest concern of this misguided memo is the level of support for this troubled individual. It appears women in the valley really have something to worry about. There exist all these men and colleagues who harbor deep doubts about their capabilities. This is alas what hostility looks like.

</comment><comment><USER82> It's funny that the outrage actually opens opportunities for white men to feign outrage too and stay in power. That's why you keep seeing so much agitation in this area but not much actual change, because the smart play is to be the white male in a comfy position but distract from that by disguising yourself as a fellow freedom fighter.

</comment><comment><USER6> Certainly much better than a lot of the outrage that's been going on. A couple of nits:

> I know most of Google's work is people-centric.

Hmmm...is that really so? Last I checked a lot of Google's code output and value-generation is backend-y, with very little interaction with humans. Google is also notoriously bad-mediocre at UX, though this has improved lately.

> Assuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from

> differences among demographic groups.

Hmm...he didn't do this, and in fact explicitly states that doing so is not correct.

> Damore naturally assumes the differences between

> typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled.

I also didn't see that in the memo. At all. First, what he talks about is mostly _preferences_ , not _skills_. Second, there is the whole "you can't draw conclusions about individuals from slight variations in populations"-thing. So you can't turn "women have slightly stronger preferences, statistically, for these things" into "men are more skilled". Third, and maybe least intuitively, this is almost entirely about the people who don't (yet) work at Google.

Finally, she brings up Northern Europe. I can relate, because I am also from Germany, and yes, the country finds, for example, having a female Chancellor simply _not remarkable_. So when people vote for or against her, it is largely (can't speak for everyone) because of what they think about her, her party and their policies (or in her specific case, lack thereof _g_ ), not because she is a woman or is not a man.

And I also believe this applies to other jobs as well.

However, what Sabine misses is that this has not had the effect of gender representation in the job market equalizing. Surprisingly, it has had the _opposite_ effect, as has been documented many places. And yes, I want to stress again how utterly unexpected this is.

And so:

> I believe for example if it wasn't for biases and unequal

> opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics

> would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation

> gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any

> evidence to the contrary.

Challenge accepted (although not for politics, that's a different subject)!

If it were obstacles, countries that (as we both agree) have fewer of those obstacles such as Northern Europeans ones would see more women in technical fields. The opposite is the case.

And of course there is the point that the question is not "why aren't there more women in these jobs", but "why are there any men that do them", because they generally suck if you want to have a life. See Jordan Peterson's excellent take on "Women in High Paying Jobs": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q)

<comment><USER83> > Last I checked a lot of Google's code output and value-generation is > backend-y, with very little interaction with humans.

Honest question: When was the last time you checked Google's code output and how it was accomplished? Have you worked at Google for an extended period?

I've worked at Google for many years, on more projects than one can count on 2 hands, and in my experience this commonly held stereotype about working here couldn't be more wrong.

First, there is a ton of code written all over the stack from backend through UI, and most engineers are expected to be able to work on code from the UI through to the backend. This was true from the early days through today. It's been the case on _every_ project I've worked on here: One quarter I work on the data pipeline, next quarter I work on an UI feature, sometimes both simultaneously.

But even if you don't write a line of UI code, any non-trivial system created at Google requires a lot of human interaction for:

\- requirements gathering and design

\- code reviews

\- justifying resource requests

\- coordinating access to services that you depend on

\- suggesting, negotiating, and advocating for improvements to those services

\- etc, etc.

It's very difficult, if not impossible, to leverage Google's environment to succeed without a lot of human interaction.

<comment><USER84> Lots of Google's software is open source. It is easily checked.

Regardless, I worked at Google for many years and agree with him.

Implementing MapReduce, BigTable, MegaStore, even things like G+ or Teams is not a people oriented task. It involves long hours of working with machines, alone, punctuated with code reviews in which your code is systematically criticised by your co-workers but in a predictable and non personal way. There are occasional meetings but most engineers I knew there saw meetings as a necessary evil and got annoyed if they were too frequent.

When I was a SWE the bulk of my work hours were spent working entirely with machines, or with processes that were run by people but were largely mechanical and formalised, like resource requests.

I believe this sudden argument that coding is a highly social activity is motivated reasoning. The motivation being to try and arrive at the politically correct opinions required to survive in the modern Google workplace. If you tried to describe programming as a highly social and people-oriented activity to the average man on the street they would think you were bullshitting them, I have no doubt about that at all.

Teaching is people oriented. Social care is people oriented. Most of your working hours are spent in front of people, talking to them. Programming is the opposite - _most_ of your hours are spent in front of a machine. Talking to others is probably not the bulk of your job. If it is you probably aren't a developer, regardless of what you might think: you might be a tech lead manager at most.

<comment><USER85> This perspective seems like to highly downplay the issues of working on a team at a software company. Independent of the ideological and political battles that this manifesto controversy is but one example of, there have been more and more reports of issues at tech companies about "brilliant assholes" who are able to do the technical work yet create toxic environments for others to work with.

Are you saying all of those projects at Google are owned by individuals who don't spend time interacting with others on the codebase? That doesn't sound like a very sustainable organizational model.

The social aspect of coding may be currently trumped up, but if so, it's only in compensation to how its social aspect has been traditionally underrated. Any type of work at a company involves social interaction, communication, teamwork, etc. Coders aren't solitary medieval monks illuminating manuscripts by their lonesome

<comment><USER84> _> Are you saying all of those projects at Google are owned by individuals who don't spend time interacting with others on the codebase_

No. That's not a reasonable interpretation of anything I said.

All the programs I mentioned are written by groups of people. Despite that if you measure each hour in their day and classify it as "in front of a machine" vs "in front of people" you will find nearly all are in the first category.

Now if you further sub-divide "in front of a machine" and classify time by "time spent in a text editor coding" vs "time spent emailing, filing tickets etc" then most time will still be in the first category, unless something has gone badly wrong at Google since I left.

Interactions with people are, in programming projects like that, a means to an end. Usually the end being some concrete outcome like a machine allocation or a cross-check for bugs. There may sometimes be design or brainstorming sessions, MapReduce being famously designed over many cups of coffee between Jeff Dean and his colleagues like Sanjay Ghemawat. But these conversations are entirely work focused. They aren't about people or relationships. And the time spent drinking coffee whilst figuring out the design is ultimately dwarfed by the long term effort required to build and maintain the software itself.

<comment><USER85> Coding in of itself isn't a highly social activity, but you still need people who are reasonably competent socially to be able to handle a project that requires teamwork. Just because communication and social interaction is a means to an end doesn't mean they can be excessively devalued.

Sure, you can say time spent in front of a machine is the value center, and time spent interacting with others (in interminable meetings, at stand-ups, etc.) are cost centers. But it's generally accepted around here that neglecting cost centers is a strategic miscalculation, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> See, just because STEM is less than 50% women means it's sexist against them... Just like nursing, HR, home care, child care, social services, accounting, and a bunch of other services being less than 50% men is sexist against men! Make them equal! Begin the gender wars!

Don't take my word for it though:

[https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/professions- wo...](https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/professions-women)

</comment><comment><USER87> The most intolerant wins. Society is sinking. "We can answer these points using the minority rule. Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, as we saw, it will eventually destroy our world." [https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the- dict...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship- of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15)

</comment><comment><USER88> It's interesting to see the right wing interest and faith in scientific papers here, I look forward to similar enthusiasm for climate science.

</comment><comment><USER89> Anyone else notice how bloggers and the media emphasize 'white man' or 'white male' to transform it into a perjorative term?

</comment><comment><USER90> I'm trying to understand his motivations, maybe it is just naivety, but that he wanted to talk about something that was bothering him, and didn't understand why he couldn't (or shouldn't) talk about it publicly seems fairly typical of a condition like aspergers, is it possible he simply has something like that?

Either way the witch hunt needs to cease immediately.

<comment><USER91> after watching his hour long interview with jordan peterson, it's almost certain. he was painfully awkward. if not aspergers, he must have zero social iq.

<comment><USER90> That's where I got that impression too. I'm not sure how that changes things, but it does seem to make his firing especially harsh.

<comment><USER91> well he's suing so i guess we'll see if he decides to try to use that as a defense

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> You know something? I have come around on my thinking on this topic.

There is a single central point where everyone on both sides of this debate are getting stuck and that is in the nature of the term "Sexism." What helped me to better understand what people mean when they say "Sexism" is to replace that word with the phrase: "Males Competing For Limited Resources With Females."

Once I made that mental shift I really was able to bridge to a place where I can sort of see what people from the Left are trying to say (but the problem is they are using a meaningless and overwrought phrase to get there and also attempting to jam insane ideas down people's throats using Orwellian tactics along the way while holding onto delusional optimistic views about reality). _ahem_

There are limited jobs at Google, very very high paying jobs which everyone in the entire world wants. There are people living in absolutely desperate circumstances all around America (let alone the entire globe!) who would basically kill for a job at Google. You see people lying in their own filth every day in downtown San Francisco who can't hold a job down and pay rent. The ones who can actually afford rent (barely) are sometimes not all that much better off.

If you think these people are going to be nice to one another once they get inside Google and are competing for the same promotions, you are hilariously wrong.

I have seen myself what men in large corporations are willing to do to one another in a closed environment with few promotions and resources: We are f*cking really mean to one another. We back-stab. We lie. We undermine. I have done it myself, it was fun when I was winning and awful when it was being done to me.

Large corporations spend a tremendous amount of money on PR and marketing to polish their images, but inside they are filled with men acting like rats trapped in a jar with dwindling food pellets: They eat each other sometimes. Maybe 15-35% of the time, but its enough.

Now add in a couple women to this environment: The experiment ends badly for them unless some structures are put into place. Men can and will tend to use whatever techniques they have at their disposal to get rid of or manipulate those around them. This includes being condescending and demeaning to reduce the influence of women.

However, no matter what you do. No matter how much you train your workforce, when you lift the lid you are going to find the following: Men competing with women and other men for few resources and promotions.

The problem is that corporations are built around making employees compete with one another. Thats how promotions work! Thats how money and stock are allocated: You did better than your peers or screwed them over so they failed.

The biggest lie companies like Google and Facebook tell the world is that they are lovely meritocracies ruled by fairness when they aren't. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon all share the same thing in common: People competing using whatever tools they have to get few resources.

All this SJW bullshit is simply an attempt to polish what is fundamentally a smiling bloodsport and always will be, its how corporations work.

</comment><comment><USER93> Outraged about the leaked manager reactions. Will be hard to attract any talent with such middle management.

<comment><USER94> Nah, it's Google. They could require all employees to receive a swift kick to the gonads when they walk into the building every morning, and they would still have absolutely no problem attracting top talent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble- rouser/201707/wh...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble- rouser/201707/why-brilliant-girls-tend-favor-non-stem-careers)

</comment><comment><USER96> There's an irony to the downvotes in this thread. People are outraged that this guy was harassed for expressing his opinion and then downvoting anyone here who expresses an opinion they don't like.

Are people so afraid of having a discussion with opposing views that they shut down any conversation they don't like with downvotes. If you disagree say why and give the person a chance to respond.

</comment><comment><USER97> Mostly shocked that Google got caught discriminating on race/gender grounds.

</comment><comment><USER98> The existing legislative context, e.g: Equal Employment Opportunity, is incompatible with some of the things in this memo, particularly, stating that females do not perform well at certain roles and should not be preferred. That would not be compliant with the EEO law.

</comment><comment><USER99> You can't fix inequality by discriminating; discrimination is part of the problem, not the solution.

It's about time we started considering other, more constructive ways of cleaning up our collective mess.

</comment><comment><USER100> No, not at all.

</comment><comment><USER31> An interesting article, but I was baffled by this line:

'The bigger mistake in Damore's memo is one I see frequently: Assuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from differences among demographic groups.'

From my understanding, Damore does not argue this. Instead, he argues that job skill and performances _in groups_ might be deduced from differences in demographic groups. I don't recall Damore every claiming that differences in a group make an individual less skilled.

I think this confusion arises from a misunderstanding of Damore's argument flow, which goes something like this:

1\. Women as a group tend to be interested in things other than programming, so there are fewer female programmers overall relative to their population.

2\. Because there are fewer female programmers, there are fewer female programmers applying to google.

3\. The distribution of skills in the population of female programmers that apply to google is identical to the distribution of skills to the male programmers that apply to Google. (This is an important assumption that we don't have a lot of data for)

4\. Google wishes to hire women in proportion to their representation in the general population (looots of anecdotal support for this point).

Conclusion: Google hires a larger percentage of their female applicant than their male applicants. Because of point 3, they will end up hiring more low skilled females than males[1].

You'll notice that a lot hinges on point 3. There is some data to suggest that women self select much more when applying to a job than men do, thus it's possible that the distribution of female engineers applying to google is either more high skilled, or the distribution is right shifted, than the distribution of skills among male engineers. If this shift was big enough, google would not require special considerations in order to hire a larger percentage of female, than male applicants. Since Google's discriminatory hiring practices are one of the worst kept secrets in the tech industry, it's unlikely that the skill distribution among female applicants is that skewed, though there is very likely some skew.

Point 1 is interesting because it suggests that the fundamental problem is not Google's fault so it can't be fixed by Google's hiring or retention practices. Even if point 1 is actually "Women as a group are discouraged from being programmers therefore there are fewer female programmers", it still puts the problem squarely outside Google's hiring and retention practices.

[1]The actual error being made here is much more complex. Since hiring is an error prone process, a certain percentage of unsuitable candidates will be hired. Since there are so many more men hired by Google than women, even lacking any positive discrimination in favor of women, there will be far more low skilled men hired than low skilled women. What would actually happen is that the error rate for hiring low skilled candidates would be much higher for women than for men. Absent any other intervention, this could lead to a lower retention rate for female hires as managers realize that their skills are not up to par. Thus Google also introduces a plethora of retention programs designed to raise the skill level of the female engineers.

Note that these low skilled female hires are not low skilled because they are women, but they are low skilled because Google was less stringent while hiring them. This argument is not sufficient to say if a particular female engineered is low skilled, only that if you were to evaluate and group the skills of all the female and male developers, the female skill distribution would have a larger left tail than the male left tail. Thus for a given female engineer, they are more likely to be low skilled, despite the fact that you will almost certainly meet more low skilled male engineers.

</comment><comment><USER101> Okay, slipping into my bomb-squad EOD suit to comment on this topic. But, seriously, the more I read about Damore, the more it seems like this was a cunning plan to get fired and then sue the roller-hockey pants off Sergey Brin and Co.

While much has been made of a Harvard education being no substitute for social intelligence, Damore is no slouch and really does just seem like a disgruntled employee who devised an almost surgical peace-out that would ensure he was compensated for life. This will be one interesting lawsuit.

<comment><USER102> While his plan may be to sue, what grounds do you think he can sue for?

There's no right to free speech in the work place. If he was fired for something he wrote on his private blog, or discussed with coworkers at an off- site bar, that might be different.

If he does sue, Google will have little problem showing that the employee, through his memo, has created a hostile workplace for women at Google.

<comment><USER103> California has very strong employee protection. Yes, even though it is "at will" there are still some very strong protections.

For example, in California it is illegal to fire someone for "political activity", which this memo, debateably, may have been.

It is also illegal in California to fire someone for bringing up workplace concerns (this falls under union/worker organizing laws).

Finally, and most ironically, it is illegal to fire someone for bringing up discrimination concerns, EVEN IF those concerns turn out to be false/not illegal/not discrimination.

This guy, debateably, was bringing up discrimination concerns.

<comment><USER104> Read footnote 6. That to me, is a pretty smoking gun of a comment.

"6 Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I've seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs"

....discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I've seen it done)....

Wonder if he has proof?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> I know people always want to discuss the merits of the memo -- whether he was right, wrong, or somewhere in between -- but I'd like to have a meta- discussion.

I believe the memo is irrelevant not because of its content, but rather because it's embarrassingly reductive. In my opinion, anyone that takes it seriously validates Damore's ultra-reductive approach to social policy -- and this is, I think, unequivocally wrong.

I recently wrote a blog post, _Confusing Math with Morality_ [1], in which I touch on a similar subject matter. The problem with smart non-liberal-science people is that they think they are just that -- smart -- when, in fact, the emotional intelligence of STEM majors is barely average[2][3]. Now this doesn't mean that this _disqualifies_ math-y people from having opinions on social policy, but it certainly means I value their opinions much less. In the market of ideas, theirs are simply not worth a whole lot.

For example, you may _think_ you have an educated opinion on abortion, or euthanasia, or nuclear proliferation. But the reality is that you don't. And I've been called an elitist before, but until you take a few semesters on abortion[4] and read some court opinions, your views are simply not worth much of a damn.

And, as far as Damore is concerned, it's a very similar scenario. He's trying to argue for or against some kind of social policy, but he simply has no idea what he's talking about. I doubt he's even heard of Bakke v. UC Regents, never-mind read Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique. Knowing about these is _very_ important in the context of gender/race/etc. policies. My point is only that strong, sweeping opinions and viewpoints need to be properly contextualized. There are, of course, good arguments on both sides. But Damore makes none of them -- or even if he does, it's merely accidental to his "spray and pray" strategy.

And to be frank, I see this at work (and saw this at school) all the time. I've always tried to be broad in my education (both formal and otherwise) -- my grandmother was in charge of a library and I couldn't live without books. If you talk to a programmer and ask them what's the last book that they read, they'll probably mention something programming-related. If you ask them what news they read, they'll probably say slashdot. I had a co-worker recently question _why_ I read fiction -- after all, we can expense any programming book we set our sights on. And don't think I'm ragging on programming books, I even wrote one! My point is only about the type of person attracted to this type of work -- and perhaps how STEM degrees have failed us. It doesn't seem like we are educating a generation of Isaac Newtons, but rather an army of regurgitating robots.

Damore is intellectually lazy in a sea of intellectual laziness. His views might be wrong or might be right, but his intellectual sloth is unforgivable.

[1] [https://dvt.name/2017/07/10/confusing-math-with- morality/](https://dvt.name/2017/07/10/confusing-math-with-morality/)

[2] [http://www.recsam.edu.my/R&D_Journals/YEAR2008/dec2008vol2/e...](http://www.recsam.edu.my/R&D_Journals/YEAR2008/dec2008vol2/emotional\(132-163\).pdf)

[3] [http://publisher- connector.core.ac.uk/resourcesync/data/else...](http://publisher- connector.core.ac.uk/resourcesync/data/elsevier/pdf/068/aHR0cDovL2FwaS5lbHNldmllci5jb20vY29udGVudC9hcnRpY2xlL3BpaS9zMTg3NzA0MjgxMTAxOTg4NA%3D%3D.pdf)

[4] You could also be self-taught, but that's a slippery slope. Ethics is much harder than Calculus.

<comment><USER106> > The problem with smart non-liberal-science people is that they think they > are just that -- smart -- when, in fact, the emotional intelligence of STEM > majors is barely average[2][3]. Now this doesn't mean that this disqualifies > math-y people from having opinions on social policy, but it certainly means > I value their opinions much less. In the market of ideas, theirs are simply > not worth a whole lot.

Do you realize you just used a population statistics to argue that the population as a whole is worse at certain task than another population, and discount the opinion of individuals in that population?

Also, based on the studies you cited, STEM majors have barely average emotional intelligence, of which one component is empathy (your [2][3]). Is there a reason why STEM major tend to attract people of average empathy? Could the same reason be driving away people with higher than average empathy? Does women have higher empathy on average as a population compare to men?

edit: added line break between quote and comment

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> The problem here is that there actually is a biological disadvantage that women possess in regard to career success. That disadvantage is that on average 100% of children are born from women. Additionally on average 100% men do not bear children. Due to this statistical anomaly even if only a small percent of women; say 10% decide to have children there will be a measurable disadvantage/bias towards the male gender in the workforce for a simple reason. A person carrying a child even on a most optimistic outlook must spend a least a tiny percent of their time dealing with the fact they are pregnant. This includes hormone levels, energy, medical issues and general physiological inconvenience. Furthermore this inconvenience lasts a minimum of 9 months and reasonably even a year. During this time of less than maximum career effort a man will never suffer such setbacks and is theoretically able to devote nearly 100% of his effort to career advancement.

Until we either have artificial wombs or completely change the laws dealing with childbearing to deal with the actual childbearing rather than serve an outdated form of social contract (marriage) there will never be a true resolution.

</comment><comment><USER108> In my opinion, a lot of this rhetoric is being repeated. But the points raised by the original memo require a bit of perhaps subtle mathematics to understand.

This is an attempt at curating a list of relevant math and rationality articles, so that we can at least speak the same language when talking about this.

Start here: I personally view it as the base model of all beliefs that we can hold. It talks about some kinds of things that we can know and how much we should have confidence in what we know.

Bayes theorem: [http://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule_guide](http://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule_guide)

<comment><USER108> Appreciate that this notion exists: Confidence intervals

[https://www.mathsisfun.com/data/confidence- interval.html](https://www.mathsisfun.com/data/confidence-interval.html)

Let's say I give you a biased coin, but don't tell you what the bias is. You make 10 flips and record what you see. What can you tell about the coin and how much confidence can you have in your assertions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> Before talking about gender imbalances in computer science related jobs we should fix the imbalance in the most male centric jobs. We need more women miners, bricklayers and mechanics along with trashwomen and oil rig workers.

<comment><USER110> We also should limit the number of women models, especially the ones on runway and in catalog and start paying all models the same $150/h rate non- supermodels make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> I find it hilarious that this guy was somehow okay with using disparate, unrelated facts to create detached conclusions to make a contrived political point, and when the obvious solution is to fire him because of his toxic, baseless beliefs that disrupt a working environment it's suddenly about free speech? That's delusional.

You out right take an unreasonable course of action, "predict" that there will be negative out comes from it, and cry foul when those negative outcomes come to fruition. What's sickening is how dishonest that is, what's disheartening is that the memo's creator is being defended by a sizable audience in the tech community.

There's a good deal of irony where the memo wanted to remove emotion from the conversation and face the "true" facts, yet the defenders of this guy want to cry about free speech (that isn't being violated) and defend terribly contrived pseudo-scientific points just to be outraged to defend some principle that was never being threatened in the first place.

It seems to be a continuing trend that people aligning to one side of the political spectrum are _surprised_ when the rest of society rebukes them, and they get unimaginably offended at the reality that people actually react to things you do and say, especially when the latter statements are completely baseless.

<comment><USER112> What language is this?

I can barely understand what point you are trying to make; why don't you just come out and say it?

<comment><USER111> The language is English. The point is pretty clear. Why don't you elaborate on what you're confused by?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> Interesting perspective, but:

>I'm not remotely surprised, however, that Damore naturally assumes the differences between typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled.

He never said or implied that. The whole problem is people overreacting about what they read in to it.

</comment><comment><USER114> Come on, try to make an effort. Your comment is full of straw men.

<comment><USER115> This breaks the HN guideline against calling names in arguments. Please don't do that here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14977201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14977201) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> Because that huge California block of Trump supporters really changed the landscape huh?

<comment><USER115> Would you kindly stop posting snarky comments on inflammatory topics? These discussions are flamewarrish enough without that. Pouring fuel on the fire amounts to vandalism no matter how correct your underlying points are.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14976935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14976935) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> Yet another take on the diversity memo that doesn't mention the systemic sexism that the 50/50 target is intended to offset. The closest she gets is saying that having more women in the field will make their presence unremarkable, which will reduce bias. But what about the institutionalized sexism that prevents so many more women from ever getting anywhere near a job at Google in the first place?

<comment><USER34> Huh? How about this point that she makes?

> The point is, it's obvious we don't live in such a fair world, but one where > women are kept from succeeding by sexism. By not hiring them, or not > promoting them, or not treating them fairly otherwise, not because they as > individuals have flaws, but just because they are women. In this situation, > noticing this and attempting to neutralise it is actually beneficial.

Edit: Oops, that's in a comment. Sorry. So the best quote is:

> I believe for example if it wasn't for biases and unequal opportunities, > then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women.

<comment><USER117> No, that's in a comment.

<comment><USER34> Thanks. I was careless in my text search.</comment></comment></comment></comment>