>Mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action?
He never said that. Could you cite the portion where he literally says women are less capable?
He never said that. Could you cite the portion where he literally says women are less capable?
* Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.
* Discrimination to reach equal representation is [...] bad for business.
Which I read as, "woman aren't as good, that's why they don't already work here, if we hire more of them, they'll not be able to do the job as well as men so the business will suffer"
Is that an unreasonable reading?
And can we note that I replied to someone saying "he didn't say that", suggested a place where he did and got replies from different people saying "yes he did say that, and he's correct" and replies saying "no, you're misreading what he said as it's explained in more detail later".
So it appears at the very least (and I feel I'm being generous here), that his words can be misread by people on both sides of the issue, which might be worth bearing in mind for those trying to paint his detractors as a hysterical mob who haven't even read the memo.
In the section you quoted, he doesn't say that hiring more women is bad for business, he said that doing so via discriminatory hiring practices, and if you hadn't ellipsized that line, there would have been an explanation for why right there. The full bullet point reads "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business." So he says that unequal representation is partially explained by gender differences in interests, and then that trying to eliminate the differences, specifically via the method of discriminatory hiring, is bad for business because it's unfair and divisive.
To be clear, the reason I'm interpreting the "differences" he refers to as differences in interest as opposed to competence is because of the content in the "Personality differences" section of the memo, which is the only place he addresses specific gender differences. In that section he says that women are less interested on average in tasks which focus mainly on systemizing, and are less interested in high-stress jobs, as well as that they are less likely to advocate for their own promotions.
I replied to someone saying "he didn't say that", suggested a place where he did
No, you replied to someone saying "he didn't say that" and suggested a place where he said something ambiguous — the tl;dr, which is necessarily ambiguous.
So it appears at the very least (and I feel I'm being generous here), that his words can be misread by people on both sides of the issue
Who do you think is misinterpreting what? I've pointed out what I think you're misinterpreting and offered an alternative interpretation. You don't get to simply assert that other people are misinterpreting the memo, you've got to offer some evidence of that.
In the memo he literally asks for changes to make Google more welcoming for conservatives. He even claims this will be good for business. How do you square this with your contention that any kind of discrimination, even for positive purposes, will lead to negative outcomes due to it being unfair and divisive.
Does it make sense for him to be claiming both these things? I'm not sure that he is even saying that (though it seems tone deaf at the least to present both ideas in the same document).
Also, I'm really not sure that saying women score higher on neuroticism and therefore can't handle stressful jobs as well, or are introverts and so have trouble leading is purely about interest. I'm not sure where this defence about "only talking about interests" comes from, I don't get that from the document. It's certainly not explicitly spelled out.
I'm coming to the conclusion that people aren't just misinterpreting but have actually invented a totally fictitious memo that they find easier to defend than the real one.
Now, imagine a situation: 100 persons (80 men, 20 women - ratio observed by actual HR) are looking for a job in Google, which has 10 open positions for them. Google wants to hire the best possible candidate - and hires 8 men and 2 women; both genders are choosed from top 10% of candidates of a same gender (Assuming their skill does not correlate with their gender). That hiring policy does not reduces observed gender gap between candidates at all. So let's introduce positive discrimination (so called affirmative action), and say, that Google wants to hire 5 men and 5 women (1:1 ratio, but even 7:3 will suffice to show worsening effect, albeit in weaker proportions). Now men are choosed from top 6.25%, and women - just from top 25%. The is no gender gap anymore, but now there is a considerable skill gap - top 6.25% men are having considerable advantage over 25% women. More to that: men are not happy because they think they have struggled much more for the same position than women; women are not happy because they think they were hired not for their skills, but for their gender. Also,both men and women being paid based on their performance alone will result if considerable wage gap.
The original memo stated the same, albeit in less transparent form: personal skills cannot be measured with 100% accuracy, so there is always a chance to hire underperforming person (false-positive) or not to hire well performing person (false-negative). Positive discrimination radically reduces false-negatives, which inevitabely magnifies number of false-positives (see Type I and Type II errors in statistics and Neyman-Pearson criterion). Author proposed not to fight on-enter gender gap with discrimination, which would result in negative effect for company's performance, but to make company's environment to be a more attractive (which may reduce on-enter gender gap, reduce number or women leaving industry permanently and won't compromise performance)
The issue is in the act of finding them. This is where statistics and discrimination comes into play. Lets say that ratio of women vs men that are interested in working at google (and capable of being hired) is 20% to 80%. Then if your goal is to reach gender parity, you must do one of three things: (1) test significantly more women vs men to find those 20% at a higher rate (which involves active discrimination against men), (2) lower the standards specifically for women so that the pass rate for women is higher, or (3) active intervention along gender lines to increase the percentage of women that are interested and capable of passing a google screening. It should be obvious that 1&2 leads to worse outcomes for Google. (3) doesn't directly lead to worse outcomes, but it could be seen as divisive to discriminate against men in these outreach programs, which could indirectly lead to worse outcomes for Google. Now, one could argue that these gender-based outreach programs are just to counter cultural sexism that have kept women from being more interested in engineering jobs at Google. But if the stats in the memo are accurate, at least some portion of the disparity is not due to external factors but individual choices based on inherent (dis)interest. If this is true then such outreach will largely be unsuccessful for the cost in money and resentment.
Would you agree that women are naturally physically weaker than men, and this makes for a convincing argument why you would expect more men doing physically demanding jobs? Is this a controversial statement to make?
A difference in traits does not even have to produce a difference in ability to produce a difference in representation. Some of the traits Damore listed allegedly lead women to value a better work/life balance, to focus more on family, etc, which naturally means they would have a lower representation in highly competitive, career-based environments. None of the traits Damore listed seem to discuss "engineering ability", but they do affect all the other skills you need to thrive in the environment.
(This is assuming that the science Damore laid out is sound, which I can't really vouch for, as I am a layman in those fields. However, most of the arguments against Damore seem to be focused on his logical conclusions, rather than the factual basis behind them - e.g. KirinDave seemed to focus on how unfair Damore's conclusions were, rather than how wrong his quoted research was).
There is a big difference between agreeing that some differences might exist and arguing that any token gestures for the women who DO qualify under the identical standard are unfair.
That's where this argument breaks down even if we pretend that it's not based on a leaning tower of broscience observations and dated dualist notions of "intellect".
Providing opportunities for minorities in the workplace substantially improves the lot of folks in those categories.
If we could point to the current diversity numbers and say, "Women who do qualify are rarer in the population than men, but tend to equal outcomes once we select for this population? Your argument would make more sense.
But wages are imbalanced, harassment is more prevalent, and turnover is higher. So I'm not as inclined to shrug and walk away just yet.
> In this memo's case, perhaps you're mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action
Getting mad at the memo seems like an unreasonable reaction to me, especially for the stated reason. Now you've moved to:
> There is a big difference between agreeing that some differences might exist and arguing that any token gestures for the women who DO qualify under the identical standard are unfair.
This seems wholly agreeable. I don't know what Google's policies are and I don't think Damore really managed to explain them well, to describe the negative effects of them, and to adequately argument why his propositions were better. I don't see why this is a fireable offense, but I can also support the argument that once the outrage broke out, Google's decision was logical and reasonable. But notice we've moved away from being outraged at his assertions, to just finding his conclusions questionable. Is this worth getting mad over? We are in the motte, in agreement that you should not just take what he said as gospel, throw your hands up and say "well let's dismantle all of Google's efforts", that's the essence of discussion! You can present a reasonable counter-argument to what he said, and I can certainly find many points to agree on it!
What I'm worried about though, is that once we stop talking, you will charge down to the bailey, and decry Damore as a sexist who should never have opened his mouth, because he caused people to get mad. That the science he quoted is "broscience observations" and thus he is stupid(and dangerous!) to even believe it. That somehow him making an argument precluded others from challenging him, from finding his argument unpersuasive, or presenting a counter-argument that may sway him, or others who feel like him. The discussion is already poisoned by this tactic. I believe that's what the author in this thread was trying to get at.
You're wrong. I've met him in passing, he didn't strike me as worth considering, then or now. I deliberately avoided prior conversations precisely because of how clear it was that he was going to be fired for this. He had to know it would happen. There's only one outcome that COULD have come of writing that memo.
Is he a sexist? I think he holds some sexist notions. This is an unsurprising outcome if you believe that historically society has been quite sexist. Is he a card-carrying MRA of the school of Roosh? I do not think so.
> That the science he quoted is "broscience observations"
This is a misunderstanding I can clear up. I don't really have a problem with observations of behavior based on gender. I'm sure observable differences exist and I suspect mechanisms for these differences are at play in my personal experience of gender.
What's "broscience observation" is attempting to use these studies to suggest (as he absolutely did) that the current crop of googlers has a problem and this problem is caused by the proposed proclivities as a way to shape the experiences of women at Google. Almost by definition, women at Google are precisely the people who wouldn't fall into this category and therefore are mostly asking for simple consideration for their unique needs in the services provided. James's complaint is that any special treatment is "discriminatory" towards him, but that's a somewhat absurd claim that when reduced to its elements actually somewhat deflates his own points.
I'm not sure what "practices" he's specifically talking about, but he alludes to leadership and mentorship programs that are primarily focused on specific groups. Giving him access to those would probably be about as valuable to him as putting a sanitary napkin dispenser in his cubicle, but he seems to take great offense at the idea that of the many leadership and mentorship opportunities afforded to him, one a small handful are not targeted specifically at him.
Biological essentialialism is a very difficult subject to discuss because it's so easy to become prescriptive with it and such prescriptions often greatly damage even modest outliers in the population. And for what? I'm fairly certain google saves money in the long run by attempting to improve employee retention and increase the supply of technical talent they can hire.
Being left-leaning, I've been doing a lot of looking into some of the ideas floating around amongst the right-leaning crowd since the election. Based upon that, I would say that yes, that is an unreasonable reading.
My understanding (subject to being completely off-base, of course) is that the argument is about biological differences related to interests and aspirations, not intelligence and capabilities. In other words, the early developmental stages cause differences in the brain among men and women that affect, in very general terms, what both may end up aspiring to in terms of career choices and hobbies/interests.
Women (again, speaking generally) could easily do any knowledge-based job performed by men, but you're going to have problems finding the numbers that you need if you want to hit a solid 50/50 distribution in certain types of fields. I think this is why certain fields have had very little trouble reaching either parity or female dominance after the women's equality movement started, while other fields struggle to this day. For example, I've read that SV has no problem with the distribution amongst the non-tech fields and that they slightly favor women, but in terms of engineering and tech, the distribution still lags by quite a bit. This would imply that SV is doing everything in its power to hire and promote women, and that there is something else going on that is the cause of what we're seeing. However, it could also imply that tech and engineering are all filled with men that are actively hostile to women to such a degree that women, even women extremely interested in such fields, simply avoid them. I suspect that, like all things in life, it's a mix of both.
If you look at the published #s right now, they're... very striking. It makes the hypothesis that it's just the preference of women and people of various minorities quite an aggressive hypothesis, in a bayesian sense.
As for the second, which published numbers are you referring to ?
I think that'd be a fantastic outcome. Then we really could think about "the pipeline problem."
The first bullet point exemplified: Let's say there's a job that requires trait openness / empathy to a certain degree (e.g. early education). Now, some given statistics show that e.g. 40% of the female population and 20% of the male population have this manifestation of the trait to the required degree. Would you still expect a 50/50 male/female representation in the field? The author makes the argument that, if the statistics he found are correct, he wouldn't expect a 50/50 split.
The second bullet point just says that discrimination for the sole sake of said equal representation is bad for business, because given the above it would have to be necessarily unmeritocratic. I would contest this point in a sense that individual merit is not the sole factor at which to look, because it is only a single factor in group success, where the availability of diverse ways of thinking and social compatibility also play major roles.
That is, he's saying explicitly that women find leadership roles more difficult. Generally if somebody finds something more difficult they're not as good at it as people who find it easier. As a result I'm not sure how this could be taken any other way than stating that men are better managers simply because they're men.
Remember?
What positive connotation could be drawn from it?
> What positive connotation could be drawn from it?
I'm not claiming that women are better at pair programming, but that is a positive connotation that can be drawn.
IMHO that is the wrong question. Connotations aren't something anyone can argue for or against - one can have bad connotations for all sorts of words. Actual example: my ex hated the word "negotiate" in any personal discussion as she saw negotiations as something where you tried to screw the other person over (she was a lawyer). This was to the point where she refused to negotiate anything - including where we would have dinner. How can anyone live without negotiating? Hence, ex :)
I think a better question than one about connotations would be:
If we accept that women have a preference for people over things, what would encourage women to want to do a "things" job? The memo's answer: more peer programming i.e. adding a people element to a things/systems job. That is internally consistent, I think, with the evidence presented on average female preference.
Honestly, I find all this inferior/superior talk really troubling. Different != inferior, or superior, it is just DIFFERENT. Is a hammer a better tool than a saw? Depends what I want to do... I find it even more troubling that people against labelling others superior/inferior see everything that way. Personally, I think vive la difference!
If you accept the premise that there's such a thing as a male-dominated work culture with stereotypically male values, then attitudes and actions that match those values are considered better ("normative") by default.
Anyone who has different requirements or interests will always be considered an outsider who will to have allowances made for them while receiving special treatment.
This would also be true of hypothetical female-dominated cultures with stereotypical female values where men would be considered the inferior outsiders who need special treatment. (Do such cultures exist? At work - sometimes, but not often. Outside of work - perhaps.)
The topic is an unholy mess because there are so many implications and assumptions on both sides, and so much outright ranting and bullying too, that useful debate is practically impossible.
My view is that corporate culture isn't stereotypically "male" so much as stereotypically totalitarian. More women won't change that. It might rein in some of the more obvious abuses, while running the risk of replacing them with some new ones.
But real economic and political freedom could only come from equal opportunity at a scale that most (tacitly neoliberal) feminists seem uninterested in.
Is it?
For the average person working at a big company it is much more important to have a good fun team than a productive team.
After all a fun happy team benefits me on a day to day level whereas if company profit jumps 20% I'm unlikely to see any benefit.
The exceptions are a few tech giants who hand out lots of stock.
Yes. In the memo, at least.
You've just said that if you accept male-dominated work culture exists, males are considered better by default.
Ergo either males are considered better by default or such a culture doesn't exist. You deny the latter, so clearly you are claiming the former.
You just made that claim, not the guy who was fired.
My interpretation of this point should not be taken as an endorsement of it or the document as a whole
I was hoping not to discuss the document as a whole myself. I largely avoided the last pseudoscientific cesspool of a thread.
Author: Pair programming may be one possible way to bring more social women into programming by appealing to their interest in people vs. things
He wrote one thing, your read another. Who's the one with a problem here exactly? The author or the reader?
First, the section is "Non-discrimnatory ways to reduce the gender gap".
You cannot reduce the "gap" by aiming at the women who are already at Google. This should be obvious. They are already there. To make a dent in the gap, you need to attract more women who currently do not choose to work in tech or not at Google. So nothing he writes is about his colleagues at Google, or by extension women who are already in or interested in tech. It is about potentially attracting those who are not currently interested in that career.
Second, this is about subtle differences in the distribution of preferences in populations with huge overlaps. So when you have an individual in front of you, you simply cannot tell whether they will exhibit this trait more or less by inference from the population statistic. And you certainly can't say "all X have more of this property than all Y". He even has a nice graph for this.
Third, it's not about ability, but about preference. "Women on average show a higher interest in people..." How do you get from "preference" to "ability"?
Fourth, you are assuming a symmetry where "higher X" implies "lower Y that's complementary to X". This would probably be true for interests (if I a am more interested in working alone, I am probably less interested in working in groups). But it does not translate to abilities.
In fact, one of the documented areas where gender differences in ability do show up is exactly a case of this lack of symmetry: you've probably heard that tend to score higher on the math SATs and women higher on the verbals. This is apparently not the whole story: men with high math scores do tend to not also have high verbal scores (and therefore prefer STEM). However, for women the two are correlated, not anti-correlated: those with high math scores tend to also have high verbal scores, so they have more options. And people with more options tend to prefer non-STEM options, regardless of gender.
Fifth, I thought pair programming was a Good Thing™?
That is far from obvious. Everything else being equal, you would increase the proportion of women if you reduced their turnover.
Well, maybe not "obvious", but "clear that it can't be any other way once you think about it".
If that were the case then he would not lead his essay implying that the current hiring policies were hurting Google. He seems to imply standards have somehow been damaged, but right now that's not what Google does.
> Third, it's not about ability, but about preference.
There are so many potential sources of preference, from negative experience to personal ability. It seems very suspect to point to gender stereotypes that a large number of women have been arguing against for decades are in fact the root cause here.
> you've probably heard that tend to score higher on the math SATs and women higher on the verbals. This is apparently not the whole story: men with high math scores do tend to not also have high verbal scores (and therefore prefer STEM). However, for women the two are correlated, not anti-correlated: those with high math scores tend to also have high verbal scores, so they have more options
Sources, please.
> Fifth, I thought pair programming was a Good Thing™?
That depends. If I told you the only way you're going to be competitive and not drag down the standard of my organization is by pairing up with another person, should you take that as a compliment?
And he made it clear that he didn't think they were producing "false positives", so every woman hired was qualified.
> There are so many potential sources of preference
Yes. Biology is one.
> gender stereotypes
http://www.spsp.org/blog/stereotype-accuracy-response
[Stereotype Accuracy Is One Of The Largest And Most Replicable Effects In All Of Social Psychology]
> [verbal/math scores correlate for women] Sources
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
> the only way you're going to be competitive
> and not drag down the standard of my organization
> is by pairing up with another person
Huh??? Where did you get that from? Pleaaze.
This is factualy not what was said in the memo.
https://diversitymemo.com/#reduce-gender-gap
> Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
> We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration.
That was literally the only mention of pair programming the the entire memo and it was as a suggestion to make positions more appealing to women who were more interested in people and more social. Not once does he equate pair programming as some remedial for your perceived statement of lower quality ability. The guy was trying to suggest ways to attract more women and you flip it around to demonize him. Do you not see that you are large part of the problem? Instead of trying to engage and explain to him why his points are perhaps wrong or misguided, you instead twist his words to simply eviscerate him instead.
Even if you admit that all genders, races, any way you want to segment the population, do not have the same distribution, that doesn't mean anything to a person as an individual.
For instance I think it's fair to say that black people are better at athleticism/running than white people (a disproportionate number olympic champions are black), i.e. the tail of the distribution is fatter for black people than white people. It doesn't mean anything to a random individual in that group. I am white, I shouldn't feel offended that another category of the population has a different distribution than my category. And it doesn't mean that no white people can become an olympic athlete either. Just that there will be a natural race imbalance among athletes. And it doesn't mean that a random black man will be better than a random white man at athletism.
So I don't agree with the way you read this memo: In this memo's case, perhaps you're mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action. The memo doesn't say that an individual woman will be less capable. What it claims instead is that women have a different distribution for certain skills than men, which you might agree with or not. But it's a very different point.
Your conclusion does not follow from the premise. It's not hard to come up with a distribution that is identical for the top x% but differs for the general population. Or one where the difference in top x% is in the opposite direction of the general population (e.g. two normal distributions where mu1 < mu2, and sigma1 > sigma2).
Well, again, the Google memo started by arguing Google's technical standard was being hurt so James doesn't seem to believe his colleagues all got the same interviews he did.
I'd be more inclicned to this sort of argument for racial and gender diveristy if Google & others didn't have such abysmly skewed distributions towards white men. Go look at Google's diveristy report and then do some Bayes Rule hacking with it.
Google's diversity rates are worse than the graduate rates for most schools I've checked. I have not found a composite data source to compare a larger average to.
Is it fair though? Is it supported by metrics of muscle strength and length etc? And does it take into account the differences between blacks (Africans?), west vs south vs central (pygmies!).
Also, there's the possibility that whites of equivalent athleticism find better options for their life than being a professional sportsmen, the bottom 80% [1] of whom end their career at 30 with little to show for it but lifelong injuries.
[1] made up statistic.
And I think that's probably what the OP meant by "better at running". The vast majority of people can run to some extent, so the assumption is that someone is "better" at it usually means "faster". And the obvious place to look for evidence of that would be in sporting competitions, rather than trying to look up metrics that you have described. Obviously its a simplification, but if you don't do that then life would be far to complicated and detailed to navigate.
Do people have no sense of history here? The internet lets you look up all sorts of things, like how the racial composition of US track and field has changed over the 20th century, or how Paavo Nurmi (a poor guy from an underdeveloped country) dominated distance running in the 1920s, challenged only by another couple poor guys from underdeveloped Scandinavian countries. It was clear from publicly viewable sporting events in the 1920s that Scandinavians are really the best at running; east Africans really didn't figure into the competition.
There might be a bias towards track and field programs and careers in poor/small countries, thanks to cheap infrastructure and sustainability with very few athletes, and expensive sports that are practically reserved for relatively privileged people, e.g. swimming and horse riding, but confusing an athlete's race and their available opportunities is silly.
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/08/14/kenyans-sweep-...
It's interesting how introducing certain attributes into a conversation can disable parts of the human brain, I wonder if a study has ever been done on this.
In Google's case, women fare poorly in botrh (with rankings expressed in the axis of pay or leadership positions). That's a significant difference.
Threads such as this are chock full of examples of people who are normally very logical and scientific, but once the subject turns to one of the above, suddenly everything's different, nothing can be determined, observed, or measured, the entire world is completely random with no patterns whatsoever, etc.
I wonder if all cultures are like this or only us in the west.
Fair. I just wanted to add that it's not terribly applicable to the specifics of the memo and article. People are upset about systemic total representation and undervaluation rather than a lack of singular genius.
But I agree that there are people who find any conversation about statistics as it regards this subject as a form of heresy.
It's applicable in that (in my opinion) the majority of the people aren't - rather they are interested in a fantasy version of the situation that exists only in their imagination. This is why even on forums like HN where people are far more logical than the average person, there is no shortage of bickering over obvious misinterpretations, moving of goalposts, etc. For example, how many of the outraged people here are angry about things that literally aren't even in the article, and even when this is pointed out to them, still they aren't able to wake up and realize how their brain is playing tricks on them.
The older I get, and the longer I see the very same arguments over and over again over decades, the more I am coming around to the idea that a massive portion of the human population possibly can't even see reality. Maybe I am one of them!
All we can do is dedicate ourselves to following the evidence where we can and avoiding judgement when possible.
That seems fairly judgemental to me.
Edit: To clarify, you are making a value judgement of a person based on some unspecified happening when you met then in passing. That seems to indicate you didn't give much chance in the way to understand that person or the reasoning behind their thoughts.
This is the pair programming text in full:
> Below I'll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I
> outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women's
> representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in
> many of these areas, but I think it's still instructive to list them
>> Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
>>> We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming
>>> and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how
>>> people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive
>>> ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get
>>> female students into coding might be doing this)
My understanding is: if we increase pair programming to make it more of a team activity, more women will enjoy programming, and more women will become programmers.
We don't have to agree with the suggestion. But you've just shown us that our interpretations are wildly different. So, why?
Edit: formatting
We might argue James says women are asking for good mentorship opportunities herr. So why do women benefit from this specifically (and that's okay) but other mentorship program are considered unfair in this rubric?
You say "we need pair programming" when reliability is difficult to gaurantee. Not because you're feeling lonely. It seems an awful lot like he's suggesting that women are especially in need of experienced minders.
This may be wrong(I don't have any evidence to back it up, and neither did Damore), but it is wholly different from the sinister undertones you are seeing.
(In fact, taking your "mentorship" interpretation, it is entirely possible that the women would be the one doing the mentoring, if their skill at engineering was hampered by a disinterest towards purely thing-oriented pursuits).
I'm sorry, what?
> A way more good faith interpretation would be the very simple equation of "working with just computer - more thing oriented, working with computer + partner - more people oriented".
Except that women entering the field now have no such expectations but he is still complaining about special treatment.
Pair programming is not a "social" outlet. It's collaborative, but "social?" That's quite a stretch of the word from where I think James used it.
You specifically said that the suggestion of Pair Programming, was due to James thinking that women are "less capable of individual action".
But you also said "It's a technique to improve product reliability and give more practical mentorship opportunities." Which is also my understanding. I know at least one shop where everybody pair programs. It has nothing to do with programmers being inferior. I also agree that paring is more sociable since every day I will have to greet my team mate, talk about stuff, have a coffee, then get to work.
I'm just trying to understand how "Pair Programming" changes meaning so much just because some dude wrote a manifesto. We can't even have a discussion if our understanding of the same document is so wildly different.