Comment by axlprose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by axlprose | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> The obvious example of an offensive claim is that women are more prone to be neurotic.

As a personality researcher, I feel obligated to chime in and clarify that the memo wasn't stating that women are "neurotic", neither in the colloquial nor clinical sense, but that they are on average higher in the trait of Neuroticism in the Big 5 personality dimensions[0], which is a very specific and well defined term, and the scientific literature actually does support that statement when it is presented using those academic definitions. There's nothing opinionated about this, just as much as saying that men on average test higher in the trait of 'Conscientiousness' according to the same model; they're just population statistics based on the most reliable personality measure we have in the field of psychology today. It is a plain misunderstanding of the academic term to suggest that the memo says women are "neurotic" in any other way.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

He uses this result to claim they are less able (on average) to deal with stress and that's why men have better paying jobs though.

I believe autistic people also score higher on that neurotic scale, so it's ironic someone who self-identifies as being on the spectrum would highlight that result and, given the general stereotypes, for it to be held up as a difference from other software professionals

Well he does cite "the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist". If that's true, the female employees at Google themselves contributed to a meaningful statistic behind the claim.

He goes onto mention that men take on dangerous high stress jobs in far greater numbers than women, such as coal mining and fire fighting. If men account for 93% of work related deaths, it says a lot about their drive for that sort of work.

No need to take offence. It's just data.

Quoting from the memo itself, "Women, on average, have more: [...] Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)".

I don't believe there is any other context to it. It is not at all clear to me that the author is not referring to neuroticism in the colloquial or clinical sense. If he did want to use such a potentially emotionally-loaded term in that sense he should have made it clear how he was using it.

He referenced a paper about it. That provided enough context for me to deduce that he was talking about the clinical sense.

I looked up the memo (assuming I have the found the original version; I checked several and they all claim to be the unedited version) and it links to a general Wikipedia article about the term.

Iirc the memo linked to sources on these specific terms.

Links which gizmodo conveniently removed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com