Try replacing "men and women" with "different skin color" and see if the idea that different groups could have different innate desires still makes sense.
Men and women DO have different biological make ups, and there are detectable and measurable changes in statistical behavioral at large sample sizes. That's ok.
I don't condone hiring, firing, etc based on this information. And I do think diversity hiring is a good thing, as it pays dividends that go further than pure ability. Ideation is more powerful when diverse viewpoints and backgrounds are present, for example.
I think the author of the memo was wrong, but you can't de-construct his argument like this to subsequently claim an obvious moral authority.
the author wasn't suggesting they make better engineers, just that they make different career choices than pursuing engineering
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/
Abstract : "There is considerable interest in understanding women’s underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. Career choices have been shown to be driven in part by interests, and gender differences in those interests have generally been considered to result from socialization. We explored the contribution of sex hormones to career-related interests, in particular studying whether prenatal androgens affect interests through psychological orientation to Things versus People. We examined this question in individuals with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), who have atypical exposure to androgens early in development, and their unaffected siblings (total N = 125 aged 9 to 26 years). Females with CAH had more interest in Things versus People than did unaffected females, and variations among females with CAH reflected variations in their degree of androgen exposure.
Results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with Things versus People."
(emphasis mine)
This is completely in line with the memo. I am so disappointed by Google.
Who is going to determine what WOMEN_INTEREST_FACTOR should be? You? Me? A panel of old white men in the Senate? (just like we do with women's reproductive rights?)
Nobody said anything about discouraging or discriminating the many women who are interested in STEM fields. In fact, if anybody seems slightly obsessed with using discrimination to twist reality's arm into matching some "magical speculated" EQUALITY_RATIO (0.5), it's your side of the debate. And that's the whole premise the memo wanted to question.
I strongly believe and care greatly that any individual interested in a field of work should feel welcome to enter it regardless of gender, race, age or other personal factors unrelated to their ability. I have personally always tried my best to remove any specific hurdles my minority colleagues might encounter, and I will support anything that helps in this respect. But no more than that : make people welcome, but stop short of forcing them in or blaming the system if they don't come. This is where some diversity programs go IMHO too far by trying to fix what ain't broken, if their aim is social justice (the best defence for them is actually a business argument : greater diversity does make for better functioning teams, so it might be worth artificially forcing it)
The dogma that needs to be questioned (not least because the scientific evidence against it is overwhelming) is the idea that the gender imbalance in STEM fields (and in nursing/care/humanities) is more likely the undesirable outcome of sexism, discrimination and hostile environments, rather than the desirable result of free choices made by liberated western women following their hearts. Obviously, if it turns out to be the latter, it follows that the whole fight for parity at all costs (the "magical speculated number" of 0.5) looks like a rather moot and quixotic endeavour. How about just letting people be whatever they want to be ?
Occam's razor is again helpful here : on one side we have a very straightforward biology/hormonal influence-based theory supported by evidence. On the other hand we have something much more complex, bordering on conspiracy theory : "the patriarchy". While I agree that further replicated studies are probably required on both sides, as things stands I'm pretty confident which one is the more likely explanation that scientifically-minded people should reasonably lean towards.
The dogma that needs to be questioned is the idea that, in a society where women were only given the vote in the last 100 years, were still relegated to the kitchen until after WWII and - to this day - are considered second-class citizens who can't determine what to do with their own bodies, we should be talking about them being in a "position of equality."
> How about just letting people be whatever they want to be ?
Is anyone forcing women to become engineers? I wasn't aware of that. Maybe you just have a pre-conception of what women "should do" and seeing them in your field strikes you as "someone must have forced them"?
> on one side we have a very straightforward biology/hormonal influence-based theory supported by evidence. On the other hand we have something much more complex, bordering on conspiracy theory : "the patriarchy"
No. Stop trying to make this some conspiracy theory. The "evidence" you are presenting as to why women behave one way is just a step above phrenology, which was wildly popular in the early 1900s and proven to be completely bogus since. You can't discount societal context when talking about behavior. Why do Norwegian and Swedish women behave differently than American women, if biology should explain everything?
This is not at all to say that, as the person in charge of hiring, you should be concerned about these things. You should set objective standards for what you need in a particular role and hire the individuals that best meet those standards.
That being said, there is ample evidence that most of the disparity in tech in hiring is due to cultural/social factors and focusing on biological aspects is mostly a waste of time. I think a lot of the diversity-increasing efforts in place at companies such as Google are commendable and should be continued.
This is a very, very, very slippery slope you are treading there. Again, going back to my point: who defines where that partiality starts and ends?
> there is ample evidence that most of the disparity in tech in hiring is due to cultural/social factors and focusing on biological aspects is mostly a waste of time.
And this is why bringing back the argument of testosterone is ridiculous. How can we know how many women are going to be interested in the field, when only recently we've realized that "jeez, they might be interested in something else than an oven and what cleaning liquid to use"?
Here's my understanding. If a company posts a job and receives 30 applications from women and 70 applications from men, you need to explain the reason for the disparity. Why is there such a difference? I think it's generally accepted that in this case in the software field, the majority of the disparity is due to cultural/social factors. And there are a lot of programs dedicated to outreach, education, raising interest, etc to counteract these societal factors. And I think these are good!
The point I was replying to was whether or not some of the difference in application rates could be explained because women, as a distribution of individuals, have a lower percentage that are interested in a particular type of job than men, perhaps due to biological factors. I don't think there are any conclusive studies that have shown this to be a significant effect, but for the sake of argument, I don't think it's unreasonable to consider. Of course, if it's not backed up by the evidence, then I won't continue looking at it.
I think one of the many issues with the memo was that it significantly overplayed speculative (and incorrect) biological factors, while ignoring the many social and cultural factors that we know to be the cause of most of the lack of diversity.
I know, no rational person would. But on the other hand, assuming there is one such ratio and that "we shouldn't do anything to fix the current imbalance because the magic ratio explains it" is a terrible idea. That's what the whole manifesto was about really: let's not fix a problem that doesn't exist, because testosterone.
Not sure where the author got the idea that Google is discriminating against men, either. As I said elsewhere: unless he has solid proof that the distribution of resumes Google gets and the number of people hired diverge significantly, and that the divergence is only explained through some form of discrimination, he's talking out of his ass.
By contrast, the differences in racial averages in genetic makeup is often less than the genetic differences between two individuals of the same race.
it is important that we all broach the ugly subject of racial genetics with rational and compassionate minds. firing or punishing (socially and otherwise) people who try to discuss things such as this will lead to much worse outcomes in my opinion.
It turns out that the most genetic variability lies between... black people who live in West Africa.
While we can use 'junk DNA' to classify people somewhat well, that doesn't tell us much about what makes a person a person.
This is not a controversial view - here's a discussion of it for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1893020/
Just wanted to put out the point that race as we understand it does not map cleanly onto distinct phenotypes.