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Comment by TheAdamAndChe | Hacker News Reader

> ...and that women and men are biologically different in their suitability for different roles.

_Here_ is where they misrepresent what he said. He didn't suggest that men and women differ in their suitability for different roles, but rather that men and women _generally_ differ in their suitability for different roles. There will always be deviations from the norm, and given the fact that there are known physical and psychological differences between the sexes[1], I don't see why those differences wouldn't lead to differences in career choice overall. However, there are plenty of women suited to be engineers and plenty of men not.

Edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? If I am misinterpreting something, I would love to know the flaw in it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology

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My reading of the memo was that Damore's hypothesis was mostly centered around differences in population averages of interest, and not necessarily innate ability. Once you've had several decades of heightened interest in a subject, it's understandable that differences in effective ability would result just from that.

That's my reading as well. He tries to distinguish between "women can't be technologists" and "women can be technologists if they want to, but they don't generally want to".

I'm honestly not sure how one could in good faith make that case given the current climate. A couple weeks ago, I would have bet on his memo being generally derided but not anathematized.

Eh? He mentions abilities in the memo here:

> "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 also mentions this in one of his interviews [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/TN1vEfqHGro?t=30m13s

> There will always be deviations from the norm, and given the fact that there are known physical and psychological differences between the sexes[1], I don't see why those differences wouldn't lead to differences in career choice overall.

This sentence is nonsense, which you can tell from how you had to formulate the conclusion. Not "A therefore B" but "A therefore you can't rule out B."

Yes there are gender differences in psychology. But the link between the specific gender differences the Manifesto author pointed to and the conclusion is non existent. The piece is just a bunch of handwaving. It's the Chewbaca defense of sexist ranting.

How is that misrepresenting what he said? Yes, it is true that there will always be individuals that are deviations from the norm. That is already implied in either scenario.

Here is a direct quote from the memo:

"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."

This sounds exactly like what the above poster summarized: "women and men are biologically different in their suitability for different roles".

> To those downvoting me, can you please explain why?

My guess is because you've condensed the central underlying premise into a compact, impossible to misunderstand, obfuscate, or mischaracterize idea, upon which a real discussion can be undertaken. This is counter to the goals of one side of this discussion, in my opinion.

You're being downvoted because this is a fundamentally dishonest argument. Even if you believe the bit about averages it's clear that the recommendations made by the memo didn't pertain to the average. They pertained to the staff of Google, where the average employee - man or woman - has abilities that vastly exceede those of the population in general.

Using this "on average" bullshit when making adverse reccomendations aimed specifically and directly people who are anything but is an especially nasty sleight-of-hand, and sound reason to disregard the writer's claims of good-faith and benovelence.

Of course, it's possible that Damore is just an brainless idiot who is too intellectually mediocre to check his own work for basic logical consistancy, but he lost the benefit of that particular doubt When putting Harvard and MIT on his CV.

At this level, the rules are different. If, like Damore, you're presenting yourself as one of the best and brightest, you better live up to a very high standard when taking public shots at the standards of others. Otherwise, you could get dumped very unceremoniously.

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