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but to everyone else, the implication that differences in IQ variance between men and women lead the "top of the curve" to be naturally overpopulated with men is exactly what it sounds like: a claim for the intellectual superiority of men. Sure, there are dumb men; maybe they're even dumber than the dumbest women! But if you're looking for the best, that logic says, you're going to end up mostly with men.

The claim is that there are more extreme outliers for men, both at the top and at the bottom. So there are more very stupid men. This is borne out by the research, and by the prevalence of Darwin Awards winners who are male. I don't think this makes men inherently superior, overall. I think it makes men more prone to specialization at the expense of other areas of attention, like social graces. My "lived experience" would seem to bear this out. Nerdy guys are more obnoxious in certain ways than the general populace, and currently express this in way which would tend to affect the preferences of women.

I work in this field, at a pretty deeply technical level, and when I hear other people in it make arguments premised on the notion that what we do demands the pinnacle of human cognitive ability, I just want to hide under a rock from embarrassment.

We've talked about this before, and I did and would still agree that the Bay Area/Silicon Valley's view of itself is overblown. Taking such a view actually deflates the notion of male superiority instead of inflating it.

Re: the online challenge which your company had online for recruitment purposes -- was it gender neutral in its presentation and availability, and what was the gender distribution of the successful takers? What was the gender distribution of the hired population?

Gender and age diversity improved with work sample testing (but we never had to scale it to a point where we challenged our candidate pipeline, which was drawn pretty conventionally from commercial programmers, so, like everyone else, our candidate pipeline was male-dominated).

We tried to do a company premised on scaling it up, so that we could place enough candidates to service a truly large funnel. I looked forward to seeing what that would do for our parity numbers. But we did that startup wrong, and so I haven't found out how it will work out yet.

so, like everyone else, our candidate pipeline was male-dominated

Doesn't a situation where the candidate pipeline is so skewed call to question the desirability of "equality of outcomes?" It would also make me question ideological doubling-down, and mob psychology behaviors like ridiculing managers who hadn't met quotas yet. Such behaviors in such a context, like that of the Google which James Damore described, strike me as every but as illogical and mean-spirited as the parody motivational sign, "the beating will continue until morale improves."

Google has enacted diversity policies which are directed towards the front end of the pipeline -- like directly recruiting at Howard University -- and those are supposed to be backed up by hard numbers showing results.

"Equality of outcomes" is a political catch phrase, and not one I introduced into the conversation.

Right. "The social compact" is your catch phrase, or at least it used to be.

I do believe in equality of opportunity, and do not believe we have it. You're familiar with what I think of tech management culture. Hiring, in particular, but none of the rest of it is any better. The idea that anyone would feel comfortable making assertions about things our field gets right offends me. As a profession, we're clowns.

As a profession, there is hardly a better one to be in for women. It's one of the highest paid, most flexible and equal opportunity professions there are.

All the biggest tech companies go out of their way to encourage women to the point where they favor women rather than men.

What industry does better when you look at it on a whole?

No one is claiming it's perfect but it's hardly filled with clowns IMO.

Law. Medicine. Accounting.

And yes, our entire profession is clownish. We produce shitty, unreliable software using ad-hoc methods no two teams agree about, our management processes are folkloric, our hiring procedures random. At the very peak of our profession, on teams building the most important and widely used software, we are at best working around those problems.

Neither law nor accounting are better than the tech industry when you put everything together. Medicine might be as good and is already having record level of females.

You're wrong.

Ok, about what?

If you compare working hours, salaries, opportunity, benefits, freedom, vacation, maternity leave etc. I have a hard time seeing law or accounting being better and even with medicine I would claim that tech is still better for women on every step.

Whether your company doesn't live up to this is another question but most other places I have been or worked with in the tech industry are extremely open to both women and minorities.

And yes, our entire profession is clownish. We produce shitty, unreliable software using ad-hoc methods no two teams agree about, our management processes are folkloric, our hiring procedures random.

In other words, it's exactly the kind of milieu which runs off of ideology, and is ripe for ideological hysteria. I mean, what in the heck do we think language flamewars are?

This is the funny thing. It's one thing to use this distribution to explain the gender disparity among Nobel laureates. Employing it to explain the same disparity in Google employees is just laughable. As someone who teaches college math at what one might call an 'elite' institution, I've found no difference between the abilities of students based on gender. If anything, the girls are better because they have to be better to be taken as seriously as an equivalent guy.

Again I would urge you and others to be specific. Where did he claim intellectual superiority of men?

This memo was written inside of Google, yet you seem to judge it as if it was written to the outside world. Why would you do that?

Even if he was misguided (as far as I know he was a top performer), then by what standard do you mean that your interpretation as an outsider is more relevant than the intent of the memo (which was feedback as encouraged by HR)?

Why should I read it in the light that you want me to look at it in (he is arrogant and think he is the pinnacle of human cognitive ability) rather than the one he intended which was to raise his concern with their hiring process?

> But put that aside and just try to engage with the simultaneously naive and arrogant assumption that the people Google hires --- people, we assume, like Damore --- must somehow represent the top of that curve. Because what they do is just so demanding.

This is fallacious reasoning. The claim that the IQ of men has higher variance implies (given a Gaussian distribution) that there is some IQ threshold beyond which there are many more men having an IQ greater than the threshold than there are women. It doesn't imply anything about whether this threshold is above or below the average IQ of Google employees. In fact, if indeed the claim is correct, the threshold may well be not very much higher than the average IQ of the general population.

When the Damore memo came out, people have calculated that to explain the only 20% women working for google, the average IQ of google engineers needs to be 160. That is laughable.

Interesting. Do you have a link to that calculation? Maybe tptacek was impliticly referencing that calculation. I took what he said at face value but maybe real world numbers make my claim moot.

By way of calculation, apparently 30k software engineers work for Google[1] so there are probably around 15k in the USA. There are 600k software engineers in the USA[2]. I estimate that Google employs about 10% of the engineers that could pass an interview with them if they tried, so the Google-level cohort in the USA is about 150k or 25% of all engineers.

The top 25% of engineers is 0.7 standard deviations above the mean of a normal distribution. Assuming equal means, female engineers would have to have a variance in "software engineering quotient"[3] 45% that of the male engineer variance.

So it seems that if men and women have the same mean propensity to be good software engineers (not just IQ, or even IQ at all, but general propensity) but the variance of the female propensity is 45% of that of the male, then that would entirely explain a 20%/80% ratio at Google.

(Caveat: I've calculated the SWEQ level based on male engineers only but since there is such a small proportion of female engineers I don't think this skews the calculation very much.)

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does-Googl...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...

[3] IQ per se is probably not the relevant factor. I don't know if a single number representing "SWE quotient" is even plausible ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997524

Thanks! A variance ratio of 1.15 is nowhere near the 2.2 that my calculation predicts would be necessary! I think yorwba and I have done the same calculation from opposite directions and reached the same conclusion. A huge difference in variance would be needed to explain an 80/20 split at Google level.

Wait, what?

Damore's memo doesn't mention intelligence or IQ at all [1], not even in the abstract or as distributions or as averages.

--

Using the version of the memo cited on the wikipedia page https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversity...

I'm not interested in rereading the version of the memo that was published publicly. I'm working from the direct quotes in the NLRB Advice Memo. I believe that what you read was not what was circulated inside Google, but Damore is not at pains to tell you that.

My understanding is that the version distributed was a draft purposefully leaked, rather than distributed by Damore.

Why should this be representative here? Shouldn't the leaker be punished for the fallout of distributing the draft, if the final version was more nuanced?

It definitely mentions it. Here (section "Why we are blind"):

"[...] the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)"

I don't know how else to read that other than "men are smarter". Is there any other reading?

Yes, of course, there are.

The correct reading is that there is biological difference both between the sexes and inside each of the sexes.

This is a reference to the identity politics you see especially in 2ndwave/3rd wave feminism which claims that almost everything is a social construct.

I don't get it.

He says there are IQ differences between people. Who are these "people" if not men and women? He either means men are smarter or he just randomly went on a tangent.

Let me ask you, when he says there are IQ differences between people, which groups of people do you think he means?

What is it you don't get?

He is referencing the people who claim there is no biological differences and that almost everything is social constructs.

If you want to understand what he is talking about here is an example

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-i...

He's referring to a group that is selected based on their intelligence. In that case, it doesn't really matter what the distribution of the larger population is, because you're only talking about a group that is selected for their favorable attributes.

For someone to say that people who are already in a career, that is, already selected for their ability, are less suited because of their sex is kind of absurd.

No he is referring to the claims by the left who claim that there is little biological difference and mostly social constructional. Read the whole thing and the whole sentence.

He's arguing "the left" would never say group A has a higher average IQ than group B, regardless of the groups.

That tidbit is a paranthetical in a sentence about the psychology of left vs right. His thrust is an illustration of how ideology and science are conflated.

You're taking that way out of context. He's not saying that the left denies IQ differences between the sexes, and it's sloppy to quote half a sentence. If you read that section, he's analyzing the psychology of the left and the right.

The full sentence, which you clipped is: Just as some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans > environment” hierarchy (e.g., evolution and climate change), the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ8 and sex differences).

That is, that the left likes to pretend there are no IQ differences (between any two groups), nor that there are any psychology differences between the sexes [because it undermines their ideology, just as global warming undermines conservative ideology].

Though this may seem ambiguous, it's clear if you consider his footnote. [8]