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Comment by interpol_p | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure the women who work with him love that his "viewpoint diversity" considers them to be more neurotic, less able to deal with stress, and less suited to the high demands of a senior Google engineering role than himself!

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Not than himself. Than men.

You understand how Gaussian distributions work, yes?

You and I are not reading the same manifesto. This guy clearly thinks less of the women he works with. There is no way he sees his female co-workers as equal while publishing rubbish like this. And I doubt women engineers at Google would read that and feel very pleased about it.

Yeah I understand Gaussian distributions. I also understand the emotional tone of the original manifesto and the discriminatory thinking behind it disguised in its academic, reasonable, and rational voice.

I think Asians are generally shorter than me. But if a 6'2 Asian is standing next to me, I don't think that particular person is shorter than me.

It's perfectly reasonable for him to say the 50/50 ratio might not be ideal, and maybe biology plays a role, while still believing his colleagues are competent.

The trouble is that, whilst it's easy to determine whether or not the person stood next to you is shorter than you, competence is something far harder to assess. If your opinion is 'women are, on average, less competant', it would seem more likely than not that your default position would assume the woman stood next to you is less competent.

It would also seem that if we actively prohibit this line of enquiry we will never actually learn to accurately measure "competence" or "empathy", let alone enable humans to recognize those traits in others.

Measurement is key to understanding!

About the only "lie" in this debate (in so far as I can tell) is that we are all the same!

Sure - at some very high level of abstraction it may be "true". But as engineers, surely we understand that failure stems from false assumptions?

Not quite - if it's not a random person standing next to me, but someone also working in the area, I'd assume that the filtering has eliminated people less competent (if not, then we'd already be at 50/50 equality). To be concrete, I'd assume that any engineer at Google to be about the same competence as their peers. Though it sounds like if you're "diverse" you might have an easier time of getting in, similar to medical school? (Honest question.)

At any rate, how do we get to the facts? Saying it must be 50% by fiat doesn't seem like a way to truth. So far I see one side proposing there might be biological reasons and the other side being offended anyone could even suggest the possibility.

This does not seem as much of a trouble as having a preferential hiring policy for some classes of people and then having the ability of these people doubted not just at the hiring time but through their entire career.

To wit: I am a foreigner living and working as a software engineer in the USA. My English is far from perfect and a lot of people assume I am dumb just because of my thick accent. I failed few interviews because of this. I have absolutely no problem with that and am happy with my career. My achievements speak for me. I would not be as happy if this had been made a "diversity" issue and people with heavy accent were given advantages in hiring. This would forever invalidate my achievements as a proof of my competence. I would actively oppose any moves to establish such policies and would not approach any company that had them in place.

>This guy clearly thinks less of the women he works with

Can you cite the part of the manifesto which made you reach this conclusion?

>I doubt women at Google would feel pleased about that

Why? I didn't see anything insulting or disrespectful in the article. Perhaps your mind filled in things not said?

For example: I openly admit that I suck at empathy. I am socially awkward, I have hard time relating to other people. I may have EDD.

Not only do I recognize that women are better at it I prefer female managers to male managers because all my female managers innately understood psychological safety. And fostered such culture.

Is it anecdotal? Yes. But it is consistent with the author's observations that we are different. It is consistent with the Big Five personality trait studies in psychology.

So I think shutting down this line of reasoning is effectively an attempt to block attempts at better understanding of what makes us different.

And yet if we actually understand each person's strengths AND weaknesses we will be able to build better organisations!

People have suggested that the manifesto's author is autistic. If this is true, then it is very possible that if you are not familiar with how autistics' think you will not be able to judge his mental state based on the emotional tone of his writing.

So you have a study which refutes this? He's made a claim, you are just making an appeal to emotion! Show that there are no differences between men and women on these scales, or that the whole science behind the idea is sketchy (which I've seen arguments of) but please, pretty please, some evidence.

Oh because he linked to so many studies in his manifesto? He didn't.

Read his footnotes. They basically say "this is true because I know it to be true," and "this is universally accepted" (it isn't). But he gets a pass on that, sure.

You are here trying to persuade me, at least I assume that is the goal, you could just be here trolling I guess. To try to persuade by claiming you are as bad as everyone else seems, unpersuasive?

You seem to think there are two sides: for or against. I have the ability to be against EVERYONE, don't I? Neither side can be convincing, or one side can. As it stands, you are just as unconvincing as the other side, which is hardly a great position!

So, seeing as you have a strong opinion, as evidenced by about 400,000,000,000 posts in this thread, do you have any evidence to support your ideas and refute what you seem to think is a bad piece? Or should I continue to be unpersuaded by both sides?

Fair enough. I'll do some homework.

Here [1] is an article on how cultural gender inequality leads to poorer maths results for women, and fixing that cultural inequality fixes the maths results. This was commonly attributed to differences in biological traits in the past, that was wrong.

Here [2] is another article where spatial abilities relate to societal roles. Another area commonly attributed to biological differences (and which the author of the manifesto still seems to believe).

I've linked to Arstechnica articles because they are good summaries and reference the sources.

Notice that the trend here is that we misattributed something to biological differences and then science showed us that things were more fluid than we initially thought. That attribution to biological differences propagated extremely harmful beliefs that still seem to resonate, though.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/06/why-judy-cant-...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/08/gender-gap-in-spatia...

Alright, I'll bite. But, I've never heard of any research suggesting women have a different cognitive capacity than men. I read some research a number of years ago suggesting cross-culturally women had better language skills than men, but I don't know if this is still considered to be true.

I can't remember reading anything in the manifesto which suggested women are less capable as software engineers. The essay did suggest women were less interested in programming than men (obviously true - see enrolment figures) and that at least some of the effect size is due to biological factors (probably true - see below).

---

None of these links suggest any capacity difference. Only that there is a biologically influenced gender difference in interests.

Here's an essay contextualising and summarising the historical specifics of male and female gender roles in society: http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm

Here's a study of how prenatal androgen effects psychological thing vs people orientation, and how it influences career choice: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/

A summary of studies looking at big 5 personality distributions and other effects. Of note is the long section describing blindspots in current research: "Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where and Why?" http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

Here's a Dutch documentary where they send a camera crew around asking different researchers about gender differences: https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=30m49s The full documentary is great. Their conclusion is that biological factors result in an overlapping but different distribution of personalities between men and women. These differences result in statistically different career preferences.

A talk by researcher Steven Pinker on the subject, where he argues that biological differences result in at least some of the effect size in STEM interests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw&t=1057s This is part of a debate on the subject. (Not linked) Prof Elizabeth Spelke responds, but I found her argument to be much less convincing than Pinker. Watch both, make up your own mind.

> I can't remember reading anything in the manifesto which suggested women are less capable as software engineers.

It does suggest this:

> “I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes,”

Preferences and abilities. If men are in the majority of leadership, senior, and CEO roles, what is the author suggesting about the abilities of women?

He is suggesting that it's a difficult problem in a complex system and that it's likely that we don't understand all the factors at play? And that we need different perspectives in order to engage in the kind of constructive skepticism which ultimately leads to better understanding?

Making assertions, on the other hand... that suggests that we already know the answers; and that further scrutiny is not required.

The arrogance!

Here [1] is an article on how cultural gender inequality leads to poorer maths results for women, and fixing that cultural inequality fixes the maths results.

That is an interesting study which demonstrates the opposite of what you seem to think it does. Here's the PDF: https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/sapienza/htm/sc.... It shows that the as cultural inequality decreases, the relative performance of girls rises in both math where they end up about equal to boys, and reading where they end up even further ahead. Take the sum of the gap values in the first chart; they're all between 40 and 60 except for Iceland which is over 70. (Edit: no, I'm bad at math. Iceland's relative gap is about 50 as well).

So if you point to the more equal math scores as proof that there are no innate differences between boys and girls, you now have to explain why the reading scores become even more unequal with increased gender equality. Is it just that Norway and Sweden are hotbeds of discrimination against boys?

Finally some meat to the discussion. This thread is one of the few to actually dig into the matter. Kudos.

From the Gizmodo article[1], "The text of the post is reproduced in full below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted." The several hyperlinks are probably his sources.

[1] https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/08/exclusive-heres-the-full-...

Random software engineers don't tend to be experts in social psychology and sociology. Maybe the thing to do is to defer to experts in those fields rather than trying to parse through the literature with no experience whatsoever?

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