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If you wrote just the first three paragraphs, I would upvote you. I agree completely. But then:

> Even if there were jobs that women were less qualified for, or had less interest in, we would want lower the difference, with equal representation if possible.

Who are we to tell people what they should do? If people want or don't want to work in some field, they should have the freedom to do so. They shouldn't be forced to work in some field just so that the society could mark the 50:50 checkbox.

Now, you can say, there is "discrimination", and that's why that's somebody preference. But that shouldn't really matter, as long as you fulfill each individual's honest wishes. If I ask you about something, and there is no reason for you to lie to me, then that's your preference and it should be respected if possible. If it's respected, then there is no discrimination, doesn't matter what the group outcome is. Individuals matter, groups are just constructs.

(In fact, the reason why the whole nature vs. nurture debate gets invoked is that somebody has an agenda. You can see the same thing in reverse with gays. Some people want to believe that being gay is cultural, because if it's cultural, then it can be changed, and according to them, should be.)

So this worries me, by going against individual preferences, we are going to make people unhappy, just to satisfy some "higher" goal. There is always a tension like this, in the free market (which I don't believe in), the pay should resolve it, but why to add to it?

Sadly, there are some women out there who are vocal proponents of for example more women programmers (I actually wish for that too, because programming is just cool, but I can't force anybody) and want positive discrimination, but if you ask them personally, if they considered programming as a career, they will tell you that it doesn't interest them for one reason or another. It's incredible hypocrisy.

This isn't about telling anyone what they should do–at least not in any new way.

Everyone is in some way being told what to do by society, in that the needs of the economy are reflected in any number of mechanisms that influence peoples' decisions. I'd even say almost nobody actually gets to "work in the field they want to work in", simply because the demand for "highly paid beer tester" is lower than peoples' interest in the job.

> Everyone is in some way being told what to do by society

I do consider that a problem as it is, no need to add new "societal" goals to that.

The reason why I don't like "societal" goals (like many libertarians, although I am definitely not one) is that it's not clear who is asking. I am big proponent of direct democracy (even in the workplace), where the societal goal(s) are the sum of each individual's preferences, weighted equally. This is a clear mechanism.

However, who actually wants the 50:50 gender parity (or whatever ratio) in particular jobs? Especially understanding that it would lead to lower chance to land a job that you actually enjoy doing?

Of course, I understand that we need coal miners, even though it isn't people's preference, someone has to do it. But there are physics reasons for that, we need it to survive (well, not exactly in the case of mining, it's actually more nasty). Ideally, they should be paid well enough (and in better societies they somewhat are) for the trade off.

I'm not sure the ex-Googler would disagree with you on this, though. There's even a section titled 'Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap' that clearly indicates he at least is not opposed to reducing the gender gap.

I've been wondering about this. Say that we can prove the distribution of Male/Female interest in technology/no interest in technology, and for arguments sake say we can reliably measure that to be 75:25 male to female.

Then we look at the industry as a whole and we discover placement is 90:10, that'd be indicative of a gap, and it'd be equitable to ensure that people who's interests lie in tech are not prevented from perusing it.

Would that be a fair and honest thing to do?

First of all, even having that conversation would be a HUGE leap forward in terms of intellectual honesty.

The easy answer to you question (which I think many would agree with) is yes. However, reality is a bit more complicated. Is the 75/25 split in the total population or Google applicants? Are differences originating from things under Google control or from other parts of society? etcetcetc. This is the conversation that should be had. To see differences and honestly discuss them (including striking down on unfair discrimination), while also discussing what the goal should be and what trade-offs we might want to make to get there.

But all of this is impossible when a significant and loud part of the population answer with calling people "sexist" and firing anyone who tries to broaden and nuance the conversation

I suppose it would be? But I'm not entirely sure I understand how your comment relates to mine though. Could you elaborate?

From how I'm interpreting it, ryan-allen is saying "If there are quantified differences between the sexes, and even with the biological differences taken into consideration we still see a gap, should we do something about it?" which is a fantastic question made more difficult by the fact that it won't ever be quantifiable.

There may be legitimate biological factors affecting career preference, but how do we determine when that stops and cultural suppression begins?

Easily enough. Ethnography is the main source of help there. Check other cultures with different set of biases.

Failing that, attempt to experimentally manufacture a different culture in a small scale experiment.

> Even if there were jobs that women were less qualified for, or had less interest in, we would want lower the difference, with equal representation if possible.

I agree that a 50/50 split in men and female software engineers seems like a desirable thing. If it existed today I would not consider it surprising, and I would consider it to be a great thing. That said: is this also true for bricklayers and construction workers, who are basically 100% male? What about nurses or child care givers, who are predominantly female?

How do you decide which jobs that have gender skew warrant specific attention towards a balanced gender ratio? All of them? The ones that don't involve physical labor? In sports we accept men on average have higher physical strength and endurance than women, hence league separation, so perhaps gender skew is expected here and uncontroversial for the same reasons? What about the jobs that are particularly high paying or high status? Should it be the case that everyone should get an equal share of the pie of value for these desirable fields, but less desirable fields do not matter because of their high supply? Perhaps its just the jobs that just don't seem to make any sense as to why gender would skew them that are the ones we should worry about?

I think answering this question concretely and consistently is a pre-requisite to having a constructive debate about this subject. There is nothing to me particularly special or interesting about software engineering in particular that makes it stand out among other fields that are heavily gender skewed that do not seem to cause nearly as much debate, other than that it seems counter-intuitive that there should be any such imbalance, given the nature of the work. Perhaps that is enough, a "gut check" if a field should be gender dominated. If the "gut check" says "that doesn't make sense", we should strive for equality.

But here we are, back at a facet of the original memo's thesis: when those gut checks pass they are probably based upon internalized models we have for gender preferences. If you are being uncharitable, stereotypes. If you are being nice, statistically significant correlations of preferences tied to gender, backed by evidence.

Unless specific sexual organs are required for a job (eg surrogate mother, wet nurse), there should be no appreciable skew in any industry.

Well there is.

So are you suggesting equal efforts should be expended to equalizing the representation of men in nursing and women in bricklaying, as we do other fields? They are skewed worse than most, so perhaps more effort should be put there?

Are the skews in those fields equally unacceptable or somehow more acceptable? And if they are more acceptable, why? Based upon the public discourse, the commonly accepted answer seems to be they are actually more acceptable, since it's rare to hear about efforts for increasing men in nursing or women in construction work relative to other fields like medicine, law, or STEM.

So the question reduces onto "why are some fields with gender skew more acceptable than others?" and answering that question is basically the key to everything.

I'm simply making an ethical claim. Any` skew sounds unacceptable to me.

If we agree that any` skew is unacceptable, I'd suggest we take advantage of leverage and seek the greatest skew correction per resources allocated. That might well turn out to be in construction workers…

`statistically significant

I guess there is also an inductive problem with not accepting any skew whatsoever. For example, the field of medicine has minimal skew, but if you drill into specialties, there is massive skew. At what level of granularity does skew stop mattering? It has to become noisy at some point, but good luck deciding on a concrete and consistent metric for determining where that is.

> is this also true for bricklayers and construction workers...?

No, it is not–and I tried to make that argument: you want female CEOs and politicians and software engineers not (just) for the sake of each of these CEOs and engineers. You want it because these roles come with power over other people, either directly, because they make the law or they design the software we all use. And also, quite generically, they are well-paid, and money is also power.

There are, obviously, no absolutes in this: I wouldn't for a second doubt that I, as a white male can be adequately represented by a black congresswoman.

But I can easily see that, for example, more women at the CXO level could lead to better company-financed childcare.

I think what's important to mention is that this isn't a zero-sum game where any advances by women create equal and opposite losses for men: when women fail to advance to the level that their skills would usually warrant (not just because they didn't get that top job, but also because they got the impression that they should rather go into nursing than medicine etc.), then we are, as a society, letting these skills go to waste.

To see this mechanism, just consider what would happen if we prohibited everyone born in the summer months to work: would that make it easier for the other 3/4 to find a job? Of course not: their loss of income would result in a loss of demand, and therefore jobs, of equal proportions.

This effect, together with the idea that higher diversity seems to also result in better performance of companies, should more than compensate any first-order losses that better representation may initially bring.

And, specifically to your question about bricklayers etc.: of course nobody complains about not having access to something that they don't want. But women being underrepresented in some of these labor jobs doesn't mean they're getting a better deal than men: the female overrepresentation in nursing alone probably makes up for it, considering how many nurses there are. And I'd even say us men have at some point collectively decided that housework is rather unattractive, and women do the vast majority of that.

By your separation of "direct vs indirect" power it seems hard to know where the line is. Arguably, my barista has more power over me than any software engineer, because my barista can poison me if they so choose. It seems like any argument can be made that if someone is in a field that can influence other human beings they have power, so it seems hard to pin down. (though i agree some roles are clearly power oriented, like executives and political roles.)

> "And I'd even say us men have at some point collectively decided that housework is rather unattractive, and women do the vast majority of that."

This to me is a pretty huge reach (and seems vaguely sexist) but if you accept this then I don't see how you can not just apply what you said here to other fields. Do you think women seek out housework?

> That said: is this also true for bricklayers and construction workers, who are basically 100% male? What about nurses or child care givers, who are predominantly female?

There are projects to fix the gender imbalances in each of those industries.

No doubt, but do they get comparable attention? Are they similarily controversial? I think compared to tech, hell no. Degrees matter and my point is understanding why those different levels of acceptability exist.

> If there's one defining characteristic of humanity, it's our ability to overcome biology (the 'hardware',so to speak), using our unique 'software' of self-awareness and abstract reasoning.

Sure, when there's a compelling benefit to doing so, we totally can.

There are obvious benefits to gender diversity when it comes to political representation. Women are still oppressed when it comes to healthcare in the US. They need representation to be treated fairly.

It's not as obvious that there is a need for equal representation in tech. If the current geek culture works quite well, and women by and large aren't interested in joining that culture, that's not obviously a problem as long as those who do want to join aren't prevented or discouraged from doing so.

Changing that culture so that it's more appealing to women might make it better, might make it worse, or might have no effect on the effectiveness of the tech sector.

It's certainly lowered productivity for now though, with all of us commenting on these frequent stories on HN!

One part is ok. This is not mainly about facts but value systems:

For example we can decide as a society that everybody born with equal rights, and some rights are inalienable, and work out the logical consequences. On this level differences do not matter (this is exactly the content of our value proposition). But this value proposition is not against the knowledge of the differences.

Knowledge may matter:

Factual knowledge of differences can help towards your goals independently of the nature of these goals. If your goals are equal representation - facts help, if it is to suppress people than these facts also help. Facts do not have goals and can be equally useful for morally different goals.

One of the best ways to beat the averages is to use volunteers.

If you need 100 new firefighters and pick people by random, you get absolutely average firefighters. If you just pick people who apply, without any kind of testing, you beat the average with fat margin in the quality of firefighters.

Now if you would have a problem that not enough big people are applying to be firefighters, then you might increase the success rate greatly with publicity campaign with a message: "did you know that bigger people make great firefighters!"

What you probably don't want to do is to send a message that "we now have special training exclusively to people over 185cm tall!"

That sends two messages:

1. If you are short you might read it like this: You are doomed to be kind of "workhorse fireman". You get to do the dirty work, but the exclusive tall people club is permanently closed for you.

2. If you are tall you might read it like this: You are somehow naturally inferior to shorter people and that has to be compensated. But you get to join out of pity.

Now google has been sending the latter message. Now they also send a message, that they don't give too many shits about their employees. If they genuinely care about female employees and think that memo is serious crime against them, google should have fired Damore immediately after the memo started to circulate. If Google doesn't think like that, they should have stood up for their employee Damore.

This whole thing is failure from Google on quite many levels.

Part of the problem is that even traits that are linked to better performance should not be considered qualifications.