Hacker News Reader

Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

I remember at a previous job, a female engineer talking to other engineers when the Damore story broke. She said "I can't believe he said that women can't be good engineers" and indicated he deserved to be fired. As someone who actually read what he wrote, I just had to bite my tongue. That's not what he said at all, but even making the distinction makes you one of "them" and politicizes the workplace. It's just disappointing that these little whirlwinds of misinformation bullshit get to circle around and everybody just has to nod their heads.

View on HN

> As someone who actually read what he wrote, I just had to bite my tongue. That's not what he said at all,

As someone that also read it, those arent the words he used, but that is very much what he was saying. A facade of misrepresented psuedoscience doesnt change the intent, motivation, or reality.

That's not what he said. He said on average women do not prefer the field, and optimizing to change that observable fact is a fool's errand.

I don't have an opinion on whether he's right or wrong but I don't think he shouldn't be able to make that argument...

And the lady engineers should put out some great work in reply and refute him.

That's not good.

Imagine how you'd feel. Imagine people would generally claim that someone who looks like you is a bad engineer (say, someone with your hair color). And then imagine that people would expect you to constantly disprove that assumption, just because of your hair color.

You'd be on the edge all the time. You'd never feel at home in the field. And whenever you interact with someone who doesn't have past work experience with you, they'd still assume you're a bad engineer.

But don't you think that the fairer the selection (blind to things such as gender, race or politics) the more confidence you'd have that you deserve to be in the position you are? How does a woman engineer should feel, knowing she was given a boost in the selection process by some kind of affirmative action? Isn't that in itself a source of uncertainty?

Have a lot of female programmers told you about the unfair advantages they feel they have in the field?

Not sure what you mean. All the female programmers I've come across had been hired without receiving any boost from an affirmative action program. Had I worked in a company that gave a score boost to candidates belonging to any group X, I could have the legitimate doubt that without the boost some of the people in the group X wouldn't have been hired. It's simply a necessary consequence of the affirmative action.

Originally you were presenting an opposition which is based on a theoretical objection held _by women themselves_, one which you've now confirmed you've never actually seen. If you're going to advocate on people's behalf, limit it to concerns they've actually expressed themselves.

You've now rephrased your objection that you would have a problem because you would assume female programmers were less qualified, which is not what you said in your original comment.

I'm sorry, but I don't follow.

- There is a score threshold you must cross to get a job;

- score is normally representative of competence;

- individuals belonging to group X get a score boost.

It follows that it's possible for someone to cross the minimum threshold thanks to the boost given by their belonging to the favoured group, and not because of their competence alone. It's not a matter of "the point of view of the woman" or "my point of view". It's not a point of view. It's a logical consequence that can be inferred by women, men, everyone, equally.

I can't understand how doing great work isn't a great thing.

As the moderation bears witness, we live in an age where positive is somehow negative.

> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

Damore deliberately chose to cast doubt on whether the women Google hired were as good as the men. Otherwise, it's easier and less controversial to just argue that any form of discrimination is wrong.

"cast doubt". That's a weasel word, because he said nothing of the sort.

At Google casting doubt was a good in the early days. Even in search relevance of the results were the most important factor, even if it meant much less clicks, and the culture that Eric Schmidt created with the founders reflected that.

Nowadays I think it's a better strategy at Google to not discuss if you don't agree with its policies. It's still a great workplace as long as you can discard politics.

> It's still a great workplace as long as you can discard politics.

There are large swathes of people who can't just "discard politics" because they are directly affected by the current political status quo.

Sorry, but if you're talking about Googlers, that's bullshit, they're fine. 200k/yr, 300k/yr+ worth of fine.

It's great to have empathy for people in a less fortunate position, and yes we have a lot of problems in our society, but FAANG software engineers are arguably the least oppressed people on the planet.

Is this a class reductionist argument? Are you saying, for example, a black women at Google doesn't deal with adversity and is no longer effected by politics because they make a large amount of money?

Everyone is affected by "everything". Especially politics. People discussing it means they need to acknowledge how policies affect them and how it affects others, and is it good or bad "in general".

Or is that a too naive view of what Googlers are supposed to be capable of?

Right now a hard working black woman would have much harder time kicking herself out of Google than a white man. Also women are especially encouraged to go for promotion, and as a white man it just made me want to put in the work to go for promotion less there.

What I learned over time is that it's just better to work 8x5 days, don't do overtime/weekends, because it's not worth it anymore. For 8x5 hours of work Google is amazing.

> FAANG software engineers are arguably the least oppressed people on the planet.

Heterosexual cisgender white christian male FAANG software engineers may be. Racism and other bigotry doesn't stop affecting you because of economic class or other social position of advantage orthogonal to the basis of the bigotry.

Similarly, police officers are also a relatively privileged group of people, but 90% of mistaken identity shootings of off-duty police by police between 1982 and 2010 were shootings of black or hispanic officers.

> 90% of mistaken identity shootings of off-duty police by police between 1982 and 2010 were shootings of black or hispanic officers.

That's an interesting statistic. Can I have the source? (This is a genuine question, I'm not trying to cast doubt on what you said.)

I can't find the original report at the moment, but here's a news report on it that includes that particular statistic. I'll try to see if I can dig up the report later and post it if I can.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/nyregion/27shoot.html

That's actually not what "false negative rate" means - what he's trying to say is that you can find more candidates which are just as good, because you're putting more effort into searching for them. But of course it's an easy thing to miss, especially if you're not familiar with that terminology - and with existing tech-hiring practices that accept a higher false-negative rate to begin with. Damore never expected his memo to be spread as widely as it was, and this ongoing confusion is part of how it became such a political hot potato.

It doesnt cast doubt though..

You cant have so much more women than the rest of the industry without that being true. There literally is not enough women coming through engineering schools to allow for that without you a) discriminating against men based on sex, and b) lowering the bar for women.

There is no doubt. It is a mathematical given.

I see what you mean I think but it's really not a mathematical given. If you have two groups where group 1 with size S scores X with variance V==0.4X on average in a given skill (score means competence), and group 2 with size S/2 scores 0.8X with variance V on average; then it's possible to recruit a set of people from group 2 and the same number of people from group 1 so that the average competence level of people hired from group 2 is higher. All you need to do is to pick more carefully (invest more resources, etc.).

So even if we accept that the average female engineer is not as good as the average male, and there are less female engineers than male, and that Google hires more female engineers than other players in the industry (relative to male hires), it is still absolutely possible that the bar is not lower. Maybe they look harder, maybe they pay more to female engineers with a given competence level, maybe there's no difference, etc.

It’s not hard to imagine that Google simply hired an enormous outsized chunk of the top female talent via outreach and just making vastly better offers to industry leading women.

I dont think you understand the hiring pool available to mountain view at all.

The rate of female attendance in comp sci has been in decline since the 70s. At my university it was quite literally 100 to 1.

You cant have a 50-50 hiring pool without some fuckery there.

And for what its worth i absolutely do not accept that the avergage female engineer is not as good as the average male engineer.

If anything, they are anecdotally better equiped.

> All you need to do is to pick more carefully (invest more resources, etc.).

So what amounts to increase their total comp because theyre female and you have a quota to fill?

Thats sexual discrimination is it not?

I really need to say while im passionately pissed off about the way identity politics has infected this industry i am more than welcome to more females joining the industry and more than hapoy to see the broculture fuck right off.

What University has 100 to 1? That's way, way more unbalanced than the typical cs program.

> All you need to do is to pick more carefully (invest more resources, etc.).

This needs fleshing out. One goal is to give equal preference to equally deserving candidates, say candidates with individual score x, regardless of their group membership. It's not clear that you can pick based solely on score x and still achieve that goal, no matter how carefully you pick. If you're picking on x and group membership, you're harming one group of people with score x (assuming a fixed headcount, where advantaging one person means disadvantaging another).

At the time, a Googler explained here how they did it without doing either a or b https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14957764

Their description of what recruiters do seems like discrimination. They said that recruiters would deliberately go out of their way to find diversity candidates, instead of treating everyone equal. That matches up with a leaked email where the recruiters were told to stop processing candidates who weren't diversity hires.

Dropbox gives recruiters a diverse bonus equal to the difference between hiring an entry level IC1 and an IC6 (senior staff engineer) [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22741024

Google and where i work both benefit greatly from having increased diversity. It massively improves business outcomes over the monoculture culture we used to strive for.

My take is that when you optimize for equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity you break something at the opportunity end (its either or, not both.)

Regarding a or b, this is mostly b, lowering the bar. But its also a, sexual discrimination.

If you think its not, please explain how you think it would go down if google was focusing hiring efforts to hire white males because they wanted to match the current male to female ratio seen in engineering schools and currently have too many females in the office.

Because i fail to see how aiming to hire more females than the industry schools can bare simply because there are too many men in the office is anything but sexist.

Maybe one day people can stop looking at immutable physical characteristics like sex and skin color. Until then it's all discrimination by another name.

> He said on average women do not prefer the field, and optimizing to change that observable fact is a fool's errand.

Yes, it still leaves open whether the following is true:

> when women do prefer the field, they tend to be amazing engineers

Hence I'd say there is nothing wrong with the statement.

Not just women but anyone. For any social group,the share of that group may never be at or close to their make up of the population. People come from an insanely diverse set of upbringing and social expectations.

If they think 50% of engineers should be women, I would like to hold them to an even higher standard by requiring that out if that 50% of women,each national origin,ethnicity,political/ideological upbringing and social status (mother,single,divorced,etc...) is also proportionally represented. If this is about making up for historical prejudice then let every women of a wronged group be equally represented. You will soon see the silliness of the pursuit.

It is the cause that needs policing and adjustment (upstream) not the effect.

The original memo is poorly written, poorly reasoned, and thinly veiled:

> Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts

No, the summary is that men and women have different interests (in average across billions) which creates a tendency to choose different professions. This division is even more pronounced in the most egalitarian and free societies.

Lack of interest in a subject does not mean a lack of capability.

If a society tells a woman she's not likely as interested in something, guess what profession she is more likely to choose? Not the one she's being told she won't be happy with.

What an oddly paternalistic point of view.

People do form a lot of their personalities as small children, after all.

It also has a large genetic component at the same time.

Wouldn't that apply to both sexes? Can you really tell someone what their interests are?

"happy with" is not the same as "interested in" however it seems like the last 2 decades have had a lot of focus on letting people follow their passion.

Is there any evidence that would convince you that interests can diverge, independent of society (nurture)? Your argument relies on the assumption (yes, an assumption, not evidence) that society exclusively determines our interests. You do not admit a role for biology. There is little scientific evidence that supports this view.

Is there any evidence (say, the numerous studies on this very topic) that would convince you that the pipeline of many careers has systemic discriminatory effects driving particular genders and races out of those fields?

In fact, quite a bit! I am already convinced. If tribal associations would clarify, then I am more than likely "on your side."

Can you direct me to where I suggested there is no systematic career discrimination towards minorities? If that's how you interpreted my comment, then I apologize for that. There is absolutely substantial structural discrimination; I don't intend to minimize that.

The comment I was replying to did in fact specify as an assumption (the antecedent of the conditional) that "society tells a woman she's not likely as interested in something." This framing excludes the possibility that something else (namely biology) may affect a person's preferences.

I don't think that's a reasonable assumption - again, little scientific evidence supports that view. (Even intuition does not support that view: I don't think most people would argue that men for the most part are "brainwashed" by society to have sexual preferences for women. Likely some of this is biological; in fact, there is a good evolutionary reason for it!)

You mean like that in more gender equal societies, women are less likely to pursue a degree in STEM. Its a well known phenomenon called the gender-paradox[1]

[1] http://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/4753/6/symplectic-version....

I didn't say "society exclusively determines our interests"

my point was pretty simple. If society at large, in ways small and big, encourage women from joining a field, I think it's likely fewer will participate.

This is the argument behind Sheryl Sandberg creating stock photos that demonstrate more inclusion. If all I see are white men with grey hair in photos as doctors, don't you think that might bias women to think that's who doctors are? That's not 100% of what influences an interest, but it's an important one.

https://www.gettyimages.com/collections/leanin

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-11115-001

Current research generally does not find evidence that variations in preferences, psychology, or personality stem from genetic or biological factors. Rather, they’re primarily attributed to culture and socialization.

Actually the abstract points out that this hypothesis is one going against the largely held scientific view of biological factors and gender differences...

A rebuttal a year later in the related section points out omissions from this paper and offers a deeper perspective on the differences

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-11202-013

Seriously, who in society is doing this?

20 years ago there was a lot less of a push for women in tech and you actually did hear lots of people espouse this view, now the programmes and encouragement is everywhere and the social cost of a different view is your job.

What is being argued and and what is happening don't seem to correlate.

I don't think having a few programs or pr campaigns solves systemic bias. I guess to answer your question, ask women who are in tech or considered it if they experience bias.

I have, and I regularly hear depressing and disturbing examples.

Would you hire someone who was really good at something but hated doing it?

How would I know someone hated doing something? How would they be really good at something by investing time and effort if they hated it? Any why would they apply for that position?

But all things being equal, I would rather hire the person who is more motivated and interested in the field than the person who isn't because skills can be learned and motivation produces results.

It's so disappointing to read this. I don't see how his thesis of "everyone needs to be treated by their individual merits because personal variances grossly outweigh any gender bias" can be interpreted as sexist.

He was literally preaching for equality. His point was that affirmative action programs do companies a disservice by making minority/women employees seem like they didn't get there through their own merit, and also punishes companies that don't have sufficient women due to a lack of interest women have in programming - which may or may not be innate.

...and he was fired for that. Crazy.

Focusing on the idea that women are biologically "less interested" (but don't worry, we aren't talking about the good ones you may know, they are just statistical outliers) and trying to twist up scientific "proof" for that does not lead me to trust him or his motives.

Being blind to the widespread dismissive, discriminatory, and derogatory behavior that routinely drives women from the industry does not inspire confidence. Choosing to ignore the quantities of good science on the topic in favor of what he did does not inspire confidence.

Then he chooses to widely declare this and demean large swathes of his coworkers. I'm all for open communication, but that doesnt absolve you of social consequences. When you make a big chunk of your company uncomfortable with you and how you view them....yeah, consequences, yeah, fired.

The only reason this is a surprise is because it happened to some like him and not the groups he was pretending to defend. I assure you most of them would be outraged and frustrated but nearly as surprised had the interaction gone the other way. All you have to do is watch and listen to know that.

Men and women (biologically and socially) have different interests. This is different than capabilities. Countries with the most free choices see the most division between sexes in different professions.

Nobody seems to have a problem when it comes to auto mechanics, medical sciences, teachers, social services, lawyers, etc. Why are different interests such a controversial thing to accept?

1) I'd argue that you arent paying much attention to those other industries. I certainly see issue commonly raised in a few you mention that are in my circles. Things that still make me double-take.

2) tech is just the latest in a series. Comp sci degree enrollment for women DROPPED for recent decades - that's not a biological lack of interest. This has occurred in many professions - when the profession becomes high profile, the women are driven out.

3) you are proving the problem in the original memo. Instead of looking into any of the research on the topic, you are repeating what feels true. You speak with such confidence on the different interests of different genders, without considering how you know what the actual interests might be. (You're assuming what you see must be the result of interests, and use that to prove a difference of interests is the cause. That's a tautology) You assert that "no one seems to have a problem" with imbalances in other professions, when it is trivial to find people definitely have problems.

What other professions? What series? Computer science degrees and jobs are seeing a rise in women, but they're already the majority in biological sciences and other disciplines. Would you claim men are conditioned to not going into those fields?

The research on the topic covers what I state about different countries and societies showing how different interests affect professions. Here are some links:

https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...

https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-gir...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...

https://www.nber.org/papers/w22173

Nah, in the late 50s and until the 90s, there was around 25% on women in computer science in the US, and close to 50% in some countries like France an UK (i think a book was written on why in 2017).

I've talked to Pr. Emeritus Mallard a lot three year ago, who was a biology researcher studying genotype and phenotype in animal/vegetal populations (for context, he got his degree around the time we discovered ADN). From what he remember, there was a lot more than 50% women when he started, at least as "programmers", although they were barely viewed as clever seamstress at the time.

Each time he wanted to do a computer-assisted statistical study in the early days, the programmer was a woman (again, from what he remembers) and he always thought the field was dominated by them, at least for grunts work.

There was a time when it was "systems analysts" who gathered requirements and made decisions and wrote flowcharts, and "programmer" was a glorified data entry position translating a flowchart into assembly/FORTRAN/COBOL on punch cards that the system could run. As computers became more powerful, "programmer/analysts" began writing their own source code in "higher-level" compiled languages (this meant reentrant functions and loops and "if" blocks rather than globals and computed "goto") as the full-time "programmer" job became obsolete with automation.

That's a red herring, and also the 60s - I started my career in the late 70s, 1/3 of my CS class was female, my first job in the US (as a kernel hack) was almost 50% female, still some of the best engineers I've ever worked with, all doing the same job I was.

I don't know what happened, by the time my daughter was doing CS the number of woman was < 10% and she and her compatriots were literally hounded out of the course by the bro-culture - personally I blame gamer culture, there's something terribly dysfunctional with kids these days

> personally I blame gamer culture, there's something terribly dysfunctional with kids these days

Could you elaborate? - interested in hearing more about this.

> kids these days

Computer science predates gaming, particularly online gaming with a social component, by a lot. You're committing the "all things with 4 legs are elephants" fallacy.

Reread their comment - they are pointing out that CS classes had a DROP in women attending them, and that decline does line up with the rise of computer gaming. They weren't saying women have never had an interest as a result of gaming, but rather as gaming rose there is a corresponding decline. Hardly proof, but as the poster above was stating their personal opinion, they aren't wrong (and they aren't alone in that belief - I've seen it many places).

Here's once quote: "Starting when computer technology first emerged during World War II and continuing into the 1960s, women made up most of the computing workforce. By 1970, however, women only accounted for 13.6% of bachelor's in computer science graduates. In 1984 that number rose to 37%, but it has since declined to 18% -- around the same time personal computers started showing up in homes. According to NPR, personal computers were marketed almost exclusively to men and families were more likely to buy computers for boys than girls." ( from https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-... )

Here's a graph of the data: https://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/article/ctw.... ( found via https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/women-computer... )

Those are only talking about successful degrees, there are plenty of more datapoints to look at when you consider entry vs completion, and similar stats from post-graduation careers. This doesn't prove causality, but their statement stands as viable.

And again, in the 1970s the internet - and multiplayer gaming with a social component - effectively did not exist as a widespread hobby.

This is cherrypicking in the most bizarre way: if you can't explain the earlier oscillation, why should I accept the later oscillation? Which also doesn't line up with the type internet gaming which was exploited around the 2010s mark where alt-right groups began aggressively recruiting out of the gaming community via the "gamergate" movement.

In every case you're datapoints don't make any sense - there weren't 12 years olds playing Call Of Duty in 1985 and learning to scream racial and sexual epithets in voice chat. Games with a substantial violent component - the first person shooters - Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992.

Which still doesn't actually explain anything, because it's not remotely clear how "shooting nazis" lines up with excluding women from CS.

> if you can't explain the earlier oscillation, why should I accept the later oscillation

Clearly women in the 1970s had no other obstacles - they couldn't obtain credit(!), much less be on equal footing in so many other ways. The issue is not "but there is an earlier oscillation", it's "if women have been slowly moving in direction of equality, what reversed that?" or "If women were able to 'be interested' back then, how can we claim they aren't now"?

Women started being excluded once computing was considered a "serious" career path and salaries ticked up. Before then serious engineering was mechanical engineering, chemistry, physics.

Sexist (and racial) exclusionary behavior ticks up once a field becomes commoditized and the general populace move on in, because the general populace carry with them the prevailing attitudes of the times.

So women have a biological interest in the technical part of transforming flowcharts into code, but not in the social parts of software development, like gathering requirements?

I think it's more that they were hired on as typists and secretaries, basically the only office professions that women could have at that time.

This is rather demeaning considering it's objectively false and downplaying the huge influence women had on early software development.

If you're going to claim that women were only hired as secretaries for software dev work I hope you have actual data behind your assertion.

I have no idea whether they weren't interested or weren't accepted.

> Countries with the most free choices see the most division between sexes in different professions

I've seen this idea around and I think it's quite problematic. Some countries may have relatively "free choices", but that is just one cultural dimension. A culture is an inconceivably complex phenomenon. A culture also has education strategies, gender roles, specific kinds of toys and games, specific languages and sub-languages, a myriad of sub-cultures that youth will cluster around, cultural specific concepts and ideas and so on.

I'm not ruling out that biological factors play a role, but I see biological factors as just one part of a complex, and, additionally, if you look at history, it's very clear that cultural factors can and will override just about any biological imperative, from the will to live to the will to procreate. This should make it clear that cultural factors need to be systematically ruled out before we can begin to consider that biology is to blame.

Have cultural factors not been ruled out?

Affirmative action policies literally make it easier for one group to get a spot in [insert institution here] than another group. And yet we still see discrepancies. We publicly shame and fire anyone who says "maybe biological differences play a role". And yet we still see discrepancies.

If we haven't ruled out cultural factors in the West at this point, I'm not sure how we can.

By effectively every metric, it is easier for a woman to become an engineer in 2020 than a man. There are many, many programs and initiatives which encourage women to get into STEM from an early age – the same do not really exist for men. Women get into (and graduate from) university at a higher rate. There is more funding available specifically to women that are pursuing STEM And yet still you have more men choosing to be engineers than women.

> Have cultural factors not been ruled out?

How could they be? That is an intractable problem. Cultural factors permeate our existence from birth. You'd literally have to catalogue every single thing influencing an individual's life from birth to the time they enter the workforce.

I have two daughters and I've seen just how powerful subconscious messages from media influence the way they think. My oldest daughter is only four and she is absolutely adamant that girls can _only_ marry boys. That's clearly because the Netflix shows and Disney movies she watches all have a "girl marries boy" narrative. Think about that: my daughter is only four, I've never talked to her about marriage, and she is already firm in her belief that same sex marriage is not OK.

You are talking about funding and affirmative action, but have you considered gendered advertising towards toddlers? Have you considered gendered concepts in TV shows and movies? How about in toys? Do you know how elementary school teachers, not to mention parents, are subtly encouraging and discouraging boys and girls by their words and actions? Children absorb these things and they are solidified into semi-permanent activation pathways in their developing brains.

There are a million factors here that we will never grasp. Affirmative action is useless if people's minds are already fully constructed by the time those programs take effect.

Your four-year-old daughter assuming that the norm is the only way to do something is her jumping to conclusions, not a mark against society. It is ok for children to jump to conclusions. Girls do generally marry boys, as >90% of sexuality is heterosexuality. Children are wrong all the time. This is only a problem if you don't correct her misconceptions. Your child growing up the way you think is right and proper is 100% your responsibility – not Netflix and Disney's. Likewise, if she grows up thinking that girls shouldn't be programmers, that is on you.

> Affirmative action is useless if people's minds are already fully constructed by the time those programs take effect.

This is exactly my (and, funnily enough, Damore's) point. Affirmative action / quotas are a bandaid that does not solve the problem and can actually make it worse by encouraging resentment (from non-affirmed groups) and increasing self-doubt (among affirmed groups). The solution is to treat individuals as individuals and not look at their race, sex, religion, etc. The only way to move forward as a society in the long-term is to truly look past any groups a person belongs to and see them as an individual. Continuing to lump people into groups and make decisions based of those groups has the opposite effect and will only hurt us in the long run.

I just want to point out that I don't think we disagree on these points, but you're misinterpreting my argument.

> Your four-year-old daughter assuming that the norm is the only way to do something is her jumping to conclusions, not a mark against society

I didn't say it was a mark against society, you read that into my argument. If I thought this was wrong or bad, I wouldn't show her that kind of media. I am simply pointing out how _everything_ in a child's environment will influence their thinking, I made no moral judgement on the situation.

> Likewise, if she grows up thinking that girls shouldn't be programmers, that is on you.

I agree, but I think most adults aren't thinking "I'd better make sure my daughter knows she can be a programmer." If they aren't, then their children will be subject to myriad influences. That flows into my last point.

> This is exactly my (and, funnily enough, Damore's) point.

I read Damore's paper and that is not the part I take issue with. He claims the scientific evidence has established that women are _biologically_ less interested in engineering. I don't believe that has been established.

The parent comment referenced a study by Jordan Peterson that shows that in countries with more freedom of choice, women continue to choose people oriented occupations. My point is that freedom of choice _doesn't matter_ unless the entire society is focused on treating children equally. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement either way, just pointing out that the study doesn't take this into account. IIRC Jordan Peterson himself remarked that the results could be the effect of gender roles or culture.

I would like to see source for your statements. I don't know much about Damore. I did glance through the manifesto and found it alright back then but I still don't understand why anyone needed to bring politics into question or write a manifesto.

You vote with your job. If you don't like things, quit. Either the people working at the company are discriminatory and don't care or you are the problematic one. If you think you are right that a big company discriminates openly, then wouldn't you have to admit that most people at your company don't care about discrimination as much as their paycheck or they are discriminatory themselves. If a company can easily replace employees, then the society doesn't value equality. We should fix that foremost.

If we had UBI, wouldn't discrimination of any kind be detrimental given that workers wouldn't be forced to work for low wages and companies which discriminate based on pseudoscience be at a disadvantage because they won't get talent that other companies can. Is there any reason why this wouldn't work? Why are people not pursuing UBI for gender equality?

As for an opposing view point, check this - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... which says fewer women take stem in developed countries than under developed countries. There will always be more differences. We shouldn't do a shut down case for either. It's not yet clear what percentage are affected by it. If it is, mention the source.

> Being blind to the widespread dismissive, discriminatory, and derogatory behavior that routinely drives women from the industry does not inspire confidence.

I'm sceptic to this claim because discriminatory and derogatory behavior in medicine or law are much more widespread. And female students flock to these professions.

If true, this is extraordinarily significant.

It could mean that woman who are driven away from software engineering by discriminatory and derogatory behaviour are somehow exhibiting differences to their law / medicine counterparts.

Is there any research in to this question?

I don't know about any comparative studies, but sexism in medicine (even patients are calling female doctors honey or sweetie) is an ancient problem.

https://www.girlsglobe.org/2019/03/12/time-confront-sexism-m...

I can't imagine sexism or work environment (looong hours and exhausting shifts) are substantially worse in engineering.

What is different is, in my opinion, that medicine/law is perceived as higher status than nerd stuff. There are popular tv series idolizing the glamorous life of New York lawyers and the heroism of doctors/nurses. When are techies depicted favorably and not as social autists? The goth chic in Navy:CIS maybe, but not much else.

I'm not sure shopping exclusively at Hot Topic in your forties is idolizing tech in any way. If they wanted the character to be cool and edgy, they should have updated her look at least occasionally.

> Focusing on the idea that women are biologically "less interested"

This is the absolute crux of the entire paper, and it's very easy to view it with whatever politicising lens you want.

So lets try to flippantly and dispassionately break down how he constructed the statement

1) Women in absolute aggregate seem to not like CompSci.

2) We want more women in CompSci.

3) We should make CompSci more attractive to women.

4) What do Women in aggregate seem to like?

5) Is there room in CompSci fields for things that women like?

6) Yes, lots, it would be absolutely amazing if we could promote the things women in aggregate prefer to do in the field compsci. Those tropes of introverted men sitting in the basement should be subverted.

7) The current method of attracting women is harmful, we should instead change our desired behaviour of engineering to incorporate feminine ideals which could easily be incorporated.

> We want more [singleton] in [x].

> We should make [x] more attractive to [singleton].

Why?

Unless the field is more toxic to [singleton] or there is more productivity due to "diversity" at which point you are admitting that people are different on biological (or social) level and have different interests, views etc.

Diversity is a desirable trait, especially in things that produce products that are designed to be used by the entire planet.

My mother explained diversity to me this way:

"We are each of us, unique but equal. Meaning that while you will grow up and be stronger than me, I will be able to produce children. This doesn't make either of us better, both should be respected as equal. There is value but difference in both." (not verbatim)

If we assume that on average women are more prone to overthinking, then it likely follows that having a women the team designing a product with a man (who, on average are more likely to be dismissive and flippant) then there's a necessary conflict, and the product will be better for everyone if it happens.

We should not be judging a fish by it's ability to climb a tree, we should instead be asking, how do we define the value of swimming and how do we ensure we have great swimmers working with us.

> This doesn't make either of us better, both should be respected as equal.

I think we are agreeing.

That's why I highlighted more attractive to [singleton] when you could be more inclusive by avoiding singletons.

Why shouldn't a field be attractive to everyone - blind, deaf, disabled etc equally?

Imo, focusing on singletons is detrimental because by doing so, you will end up discriminating automatically because there will always be other groups that you won't or don't see.

I think we’re weaker for not including someone because of those traits either.

Why focus on women now?

Because there’s a lot of women in the world and they seem to not like this field.

I don’t really have a good answer, I thought Damores memo was pretty good and I thought it might provoke the powers that be to approach the distribution of underrepresented factions a little better.

For instance, if you want to hire blind people (and you should want to hire a few blind people) then offering accessibly tools to them is a no-brainer.

And if you’re not getting any applicants, maybe you should look at why. Maybe your job board can’t be read by blind people. (To keep the analogy going).

> Because there’s a lot of women in the world and they seem to not like this field.

Source. I have seen few and they do show women working in the field not liking it. The problem with that is it could be those women are outliers given the gender ratio in some CS fields (I will ignore non biological genders), the field could be attractive but don't have good working conditions for women, women don't have much interest etc.

All of those can be true and change your steps to make the field more attractive.

As an example, you can look into construction field which is heavily dominated by men and women in the field feels the same but outside, it's a different story in terms of interest.

How do you make construction work more attractive for women?

I am curious to hear your opinion about below too. What are the problems do you see with this approach? -

> Source.

Well, what I mean is that we're not even close to a gender parity, it would be fine at 35-40% female in my opinion but the industry is closer to 14-25% (depending on country) and to me that indicates a problem.

I think quota's and the extreme bias towards education programs that favour women is problematic though, in my opinion it infantilises Women which I dislike because I really believe women are just as capable as men in this field.

That's why I liked Damores memo, it spoke to the idea that instead of having quotas we should seek to bring in a more human centred approach to asking the question: what do women bring uniquely to the table and how can we ensure that women know that this is desirable and that they're welcome.

Killing the trope that Tech work is isolationist was one example from the memo that would likely cause some traction.

> As an example, you can look into construction field which is heavily dominated by men and women in the field feels the same but outside, it's a different story in terms of interest.

> How do you make construction work more attractive for women?

I think drawing a parallel to construction is a fine one, but I would argue instead for Architecture.

Construction doesn't need a diverse set of views, neither does nursing or mining. But Architecture does because the consumers of architecture is everyone.

And I think that's the crucial difference here: things that are designed for everyone should have a diverse set of eyes on them.

> things that are designed for everyone should have a diverse set of eyes on them.

Teaching, especially pre-school teaching, is going to be tough to make attractive for men.

And for a lot of parents too.

I agree, this needs to be fixed also. But teaching isn't my industry.

One of the teachers I most learned from was male, he actually sparked my interest in computers because he ran an after school computer club for 20 pence.. which for a poor household such as mine was affordable..

Wait until we try insist on parents hiring male au pairs for their daughters. Especially if they are bald, short, and plump.

Then you will see gender bias. :)

What? How is anything you just said relevant?

I think I missed something.

I am not sure if you intentionally ignored it because I said the same - that women in tech is a minority - outlier. The problem with accessing whether the field is unattractive to women is asking women not in the field why they don't like the field which I haven't seen done much. This is the reason why I compared construction.

Secondly, I don't understand why it has to be CS. A product requires more roles than a CS graduate. UX/UI, design, support, marketing, management, documentation, etc.

There can be more women in any of those roles and there seems to be in some.

A team of CS graduate wouldn't pull off a global product even if they are diverse because they are CS graduates.

> I am not sure if you intentionally ignored it because I said the same - that women in tech is a minority - outlier. The problem with accessing whether the field is unattractive to women is asking women not in the field why they don't like the field which I haven't seen done much. This is the reason why I compared construction.

Sorry, I thought we were still discussing the James Damore memo, because he said and backed up the assertion that women seemed to not _want_ to join compsci programs or join the associated industries in aggregate when compared to men.

I think you're assuming that I am the poster child for diversity and inclusion; I am really not. I just make my own decisions I'm definitely on nobodies side and I'm not going to go down the path of defending other industries.

I can just see a value in diversity in teams that work on products we all use, and I think I communicated that effectively enough in previous comments.

No, I didn't assume anything. Sorry if I came off that way.

And I wasn't talking about damore memo.

I like the idea of diversity and support it but it depends on what cost. My country suffers from reservation (quota) and it's wrecked.

Although I wanted to talk more about organisational diversity. Whether organisations as a whole have 50/50 gender ratio at scale. Whether roles are "diverse".

Because that would be more interesting.

Incidentally that's exactly what Damore was saying;

Quotas are terrible no good bad and ugly hacks which will cause a lot of harm and the reasons why are controversial.

I think 50/50 gender parity is a stupid goal too, I think more representation but if it's not 50:50 then it doesn't mean that there is sexism, 60:40 is fine even 70:30 is ok, wether it skews more to women or men, it doesn't matter, the point is that women, men, blind, black- everyone needs to have their voices heard on teams that design global products.

The closer you try to force it to 50:50 the worse and much harder it'll be, bureaucrats will love you though, at what point do you stop breaking down societal boundaries? I'd argue that getting a few voices from each are is a good thing but I don't think exactly defining the distribution of the country is a good goal.

Instead of quotas, we should investigate what would make the industry more appealing to those under-heard voices.

Damore says that women tend to favour flexible working hours, that's great Tech can support that.

Damore says that women tend to favour jobs that have a high emphasis on collaboration, excellent, tech can support that.

This is why I dislike the overwhelming criticism of Damores paper, because it's the quintessential attack on the author for daring to insinuate that women are different, instead we should boulder through the idea that Women == Men, and anything other than that is sexism, but also we want 50:50 gender parity... and why isn't it happening! sexism! therefore men are bad and we should hire women over men using quotas! that will fix it!.

It's egregious, and stupid, and harmful. And a conversation about why and trying to actually improve the situation is more fruitful than shit slinging because the only people to let Damore speak are right-wingers.

If you're left-wing (as I am) you should want him to speak, he's promoting equality and compassion.

Whataboutism is a time-honored tradition to dismiss the concerns of a marginalized group while intending to do absolutely nothing about any other.

Toilets are needed by all people on the entire planet, so by your logic we should have more diverse emoloyees in toilet manufacturing, since toilets are used by so many people. Wouldn't we also be better off if more women were working in the garbage industry? We need women's diversity in the garbage collecting industry because their diversity will help improve garbage collection for the entire planet.

Does it really make a difference if the same feature is implemented by a man versus a woman?

> 1) Women in absolute aggregate seem to not like CompSci.

Based on what? They don't end up there, but we have evidence (based on decreasing enrollment in degrees) that they USED to be "more interested" (If you use that as criteria). Do you think they generationally are just more aware of what it really is now?

How would that happen without ALSO becoming more aware of the absolute vile GamerGate-type shit women have to face, from the smallest "let me assume you don't know anything" to the "let's make rape jokes" to the "Can a woman have confidence she probably won't be groped"?

If you start with the premise that women "seem to not like CompSci", you've already assumed the problem and normalized a lot of factors that don't have to be normalized.

I believe you already have a stance here and you're rather embroiled in the beliefs you already have. So I'm not going to comment to you- but to anyone who reads your comment.

Sorry for that.

> Based on what? They don't end up there, [...]

Well, yes, you can argue the factors here but there is a trend that something is off-putting. Either Gamer-gate (something which is absolutely mired in controversy of its own right) or 'rape jokes' but more likely the tropes of: long working hours with a dead end at the end of it, competitiveness, isolation and the notion that if you're in technology your job is your life.

Frankly to assume you and I know the true reason is rather arrogant, I'm not a sociologist I can only read the corpus of their work and believe that they came to the correct conclusions.

Your comment indicates that there is an aggressive amount of sexism in tech, rape jokes and groping not withstanding, and I'm not going to ask for evidence of that despite my conviction that this is not nearly as endemic as you indicate; instead I'd ask the question: If marketing is also inherently sexist (and definitely more "boys club groping the ladies" than tech) why is there a much stronger representation of Women there?

I think you have internalised a mistruth about the tech industry at large.

>Focusing on the idea that women are biologically "less interested" (but don't worry, we aren't talking about the good ones you may know, they are just statistical outliers) and trying to twist up scientific "proof" for that does not lead me to trust him or his motives.

"Biological sex plays no role in life choices / job preferences" (which is different than: "we should not prevent people from going into X choice/profession because of their biological sex". A priori considering the former as "truth" / "obvious" etc is also a political idea.

Great don't trust him don't like him don't feel comfortable... That doesn't change the fact he posted biological truths did NOT say women can't be good engineers which is what you exactly try to project on him over and over and makes you look silly and wrong. It was in response to him not getting traction via internal channels and only after he talks about his legit concerns in this memo does it finally blow up... Not surprising Google has very loud outspoken minority groups

What about all the people that were made uncomfortable by his firing? Can we fire those responsible for that? This got so silly so fast

Is it sexist to say men are on average stronger than women?

I went to HS with James for a few years and have spoken to him on this topic a few times.

I don’t agree with how he went about pursuing the issue but your assessment does not comport with the views he’s shared with me or our contemporaries who stay in touch with him.

Then he should have done a better job representing himself. At any time he could come out and say exactly what he means and doesn't mean, and apologize for any harm done. Instead, he allied himself with the very people whose views you claim he doesn't hold. At some point, your actions define you.

> but that is very much what he was saying

No it's not. Nowhere in the paper did he say that women can't become good engineers. You're literally defaming his work. Either support your accusation with evidence, or don't comment.

> You're literally defaming his work.

His "work" does a fine job of that on its own.

> those arent the words he used, but that is very much what he was saying

> Nowhere in the paper did he say that

You both are saying the same thing- he did not use those exact words.

The parent comment is saying that despite not saying "Women can't be engineers", the entire purpose of the paper, in the view of that reader, was to insinuate that women can't be engineers. It's not terribly hard to promote an idea without ever saying it explicitly. Perhaps you didn't read the deeper meaning out of the memo.

And demanding those who interpret things differently than you "don't comment" doesn't promote discussion, it ends it. When someone says something you disagree with, don't tell them to shut up, ask them why they see things differently. Debate. Discuss. Grow.

> in the view of that reader, was to insinuate that women can't be engineers

Although his intentions were unclear by his vague approach to the subject, I believe he didn't mean to say women can't be engineers.

Most of the time he gave population-based examples of how women decided not to be engineers. His thesis was to show that forcing women in STEM fields is not a fair practice to both women and men who want to be STEM professionals.

You're right that they both talked about exact words, but you're indexing too highly on it. Just because they used the same words in places doesn't mean they're saying the same thing. Reading again, I don't know why you start with that statement. It really muddies the rest of your comment.

Please take this idea with an open mind. When you arrive a singular purpose to the paper, it may say more about your views than it does about the author's. He didn't have a thesis that stated directly that he meant to "insinuate that women can't be engineers", so you're literally putting words in his mouth.

And the "don't comment" line explicitly said it was in response to statements that are unfounded, NOT statements that disagree.

Putting that all together, you seem to be having an argument with a ghost of your own making.

Parent is essentially playing the 'so what you're saying is...' card.

No, ergothus is stating their interpretation based on disclosed facts, so it's quite unlikely to be considered defamatory (in the US).

> the entire purpose of the paper, in the view of that reader, was to insinuate that women can't be engineers.

Ok, please explain to me how the memo suggests that women can't be engineers.

No, that's your political interpretation of it. You __choose__ to read it that way because then his punishment can be justified.

That's not what he said it's what you project and transform his arguments into. What he said was factual and his concerns were legit and the over reaction was hilarious

>As someone that also read it, those arent the words he used, but that is very much what he was saying.

Ah, the classic "so you mean (something not said, and never meant)"...

There is a huge difference between "women can't be good engineers" and "women are less likely to be good engineers", and he said the latter (while, IIRC, explicitly acknowledging that variance is high enough that it shouldn't influence decisions about individuals).

Edit: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo... page 4 has a diagram at the top explicitly explaining that.

You can’t do that. You have to judge based on what was written, not what you’ve convinced yourself was an ulterior motive and dismissing his actual words as a facade. This behavior is so perplexing.

It is not what he was saying. Why do so many people absolutely insist on misinterpreting it to the point of willful distortion?

You are literally describing critical thinking. To assume no one would lie, mislead, or even just be blind to their own biases is to be part of the problem.

How did I "convince myself of an ulterior motive"? I read what was written, and then I asked questions and did research. Are these studies he cites credible? [No]. Why would he bring these up? What motivations would be involved? How do the people he is talking about feel? Did he consider their feelings? If I were Google, what are my options, and what are the results of those options?

Dog-whistles and micro-aggressions thrive on failure to ask these questions. It empowers the status quo to entrench so long as they avoid the absolute most stark of statements.

I tend to tune out once I see words like micro-aggression and dog-whistle. It has been my experience that people throwing these phrases around are too deeply immersed in their ideological war to assume any good faith at all in who they perceive as their opposition, which tends to a preclude any productive discussion. You’re wrong, by the way.

The dude is talking about probabilities and distributions, while the stats-ignorant public is generalizing to every individual.

It's impossible to have a scientific and open minded debate about the differences between genders. Even theorizing biologic differences exist makes you a sexist. Let alone bringing up this question in public.

Edit: Yes, his memo is totally tone deaf. I thought his wording was very questionable. But the his core argument (regarding differences in biology leading to differences in distributions) is worth debating.

Example: There's a noticeable distributional difference in 100m running times between genders (due to biology). That said any number of men or women are faster runners than me :) Population doesn't mean anything for the individual.

> Even theorizing biologic differences exist makes you a sexist.

Eggs vs sperm -- plumbing aside -- is a fundamental biologic difference. And bringing a pregnancy to term, and delivering without bleeding out, sort of requires a uterus.

But of course, it's gotta stop there.

Edit: If someone wants to explain away such differences, I'd love to see the argument.

People focus on the “plumbing” but the hormones produced by the plumbing are the important things that give us different behavior. I found this article about trans men to be fascinating.

The hormones made me more impatient. I had lots of female friends and one of the qualities they loved about me was that I was a great listener. After being on testosterone, they informed me that my listening skills weren’t what they used to be

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/07/20/feat...

> But of course, it's gotta stop there.

What about higher amount of testosterone making men have more muscles and better sprinters?

There are biological differences that affect performance in various activities. How much in comparison to nurture, and in what activities, seems to be an open question

And it explicitly states that generalizing to individuals is wrong (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo..., page 4).

She's not wrong.

He shared a manifesto about gender differences in the workplace. In it, he calls women neurotic.

Whether people's read on the manifesto is reductive of his overall argument isn't the point.

He showed a serious lack of judgement writing and posting that in his workplace. He should not have played the part of expert gender/psychology expert. A researcher he cites specifically disagrees with his takeaways.

There are productive ways to have these kinds of conversations, he chose to go to the opposite wrong end of that spectrum.

Women have enough BS to deal with in tech, the last thing they need is a tech bro mis-using uncertain psych research to justify telling them they should find more appropriate roles.

Google has always had a very open culture with lots of political discussion and encouraged these kinds of internal debates. This was a memo written specifically for a private internal forum that was focused on that specific discussion. The widely shared version was leaked and edited, but never meant for a public audience.

Saying that men and women tend to have different preferences doesn't make a statement about their capabilities, nor is it really that controversial. The pursuit of a 50/50 ratio is counter-productive to free and open choice. Encouragement and opportunity should be the goal, not a forced ratio outcome.

The research the post cites strongly implies women would be better qualified for other roles. That suggestion was (and is) both inaccurate and inappropriate to send in a workplace.

Less interested/"qualified" compared on average to males by virtue of their interests and biology not their intelligence. Ignoring this is like sticking your fingers in your ears to the argument

How is the statement in a general population inaccurate? I agree it can make people uncomfortable but it looks pretty accurate to me

"How is the statement in a general population inaccurate?"

um, because there is no credible science behind his assumptions. Many of the researchers he cites dispute his conclusions.

I'm not ignoring his argument, I'm saying it's a really bad argument with almost no evidence to support it.

Actually it's pretty basic biology and psychology.

What "conclusions" are disagreed?

Can you really not see how this would apply in real life with personality differences? It seems obvious and intuitive not even mentioning the science, women are more social on average, men more into things that make a whirring noise. What data am I missing?

"...men more into things that make a whirring noise."

You are proving my argument. Nonsense like this has prevented women from feeling like equal participants (and equally capable) in many fields for decades.

How is it nonsense though? You just saying it doesn't make it so sorry... It's a pretty obvious observation made over and over you are going to need to give some data or reasoning why this is wrong, because science and logic both say these are the gender norms in a general population

How does that prove anything for you? You haven't shown anything except that you disagree, that doesn't give us anything except your opinion and definitely won't convince people who know the science also... The personality differences between men and women are not edgy science. I have a degree in psychology and I'm pretty confident you have no legit science (and haven't even give logical reasons) to back your claims but feel free to post something different

You also seem to have a lot of misinformation in this thread. Calling his memo a manifesto... Mixing neurotic with neuroticism... Basic facts you are smearing... You aren't giving people a reason to believe any of what you say so maybe you should think about why you have such an extreme view

What is a productive way to have this discussion? I can't think of any plausible way to have a discussion in this realm without serious risk of being ostracized.

Calling it a "manifesto" is trying to give reader here some bias against it. Like he was some alt-right madman.

He wrote a post. Not a manifesto.

"There are productive ways to have these kinds of conversations"

Well obviously there aren't when posting a comment in an internal company forum gets you fired.

There obviously ARE more productive ways, because most people aren't fired for having discussions at work.

He skipped over classical liberal and very quickly gave interviews to prominent alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneaux.

He also tweeted during the middle of this, "The KKK is horrible and I don't support them in any way, but can we admit that their internal title names are cool, e.g. 'Grand Wizard'?"

So...shrugs

I mean.

He's not wrong.

He sounds like he may be on the autistic spectrum, which if treated as a form of social disability would (or should, IMO) grant him some leeway.

If his intent wasn’t sexist then his failure to perfectly negotiate the complex social way those points have to be expressed isn’t a moral failing on his part.

Edit: I’d rather posters took the time to argue against rather than downvote. My point is just that ‘socially colourblind’ people probably shouldn’t be punished for lacking perceptual and expressive subtlety. It doesn’t mean they can’t be corrected or educated, of-course.

Why shouldn't people get punished for lacking perceptual and expressive subtlety? I doubt you would have a problem with rewarding people for possessing such skills (e.g. well-paid actors, or clever detectives).

> He sounds like he may be on the autistic spectrum, which if treated as a form of social disability would (or should, IMO) grant him some leeway.

This attitude leaves me almost speechless. When someone makes an argument that at least tries to be well reasoned, and people attack him based on misunderstandings and how it makes them feel, maybe the problem is not that he's autistic. Maybe it's those who are offended and refuse to engage in a civilized debate that have some form of disability.

It used to be that dispassionate reason was the highest form of discourse (the only one on which it's possible to reach agreements). What happened to that standard, when the responses boil down to "how does it make you feel"?

> He sounds like he may be on the autistic spectrum

That's because he is: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-dam...

Can't disagree with that.

That's obviously a joke, though. (It's also on Twitter. Everyone acts weird on Twitter.)

That's called a joke.

He interviewed with Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. Also who on the left would interview him? That's the issue with claiming that he only talked to one side.

As he said in his interview with Peterson, he declined interviews with any centrist media. He filed an NLRB complaint before posting, hired Charles Johnson (who is a professional conspiracy dude and claims to know where MH370 is) to run PR and made a bee-line directly for maximum exposure with people like Molyneaux.

That's a very deliberate choice. He's no martyr of rational thought.

"Centrist media" kind of took a dump on him... Why would he run to them?

Is Joe Rogan not a centrist? He is self proclaimed liberal on most topics, right wing is a silly label

What makes you think Joe Rogan is alt right?

Watching his interviews with various people who are more left leaning doesn't give me the impression that he is alt-right.

He didn’t appear on Rogan until a long time after his first interviews.

Rogan was labelled alt-right after he interviewed Gavin McInness and Alex Jones again (a comical interview btw). That may have been cancelled out by him interviewing Bernie Sanders though.

Rogan is aesthetically a bro, that's all this comes down to.

If he were more 'soy' and less 'bro', while having the same mostly-liberal opinions, he'd get an entirely different reaction from the elite cultural left.

I'm a European living and working in Europe. I have no idea what a 'bro' is.

And I'm too American to give you a good analogy :) In England I think they'd say 'chav'?

Think culturally lowbrow vs cultural elite. Rogan came up as a cage fighting commentator. In Europe there would be a lot more techno blasted out of a much smaller car.

A stereotypical bro is someone who says "bro" a lot, like to do chest bumps with their others bros, scream about sports while shotgunning a beer, and talks with his bros about women as sex objects.

Joe Rogan is not alt right, far from it. That was my point, that the interviews were not from one side.

It was a draft. Have the conversation. Address the flaws. Find a common ground, you don't have to be a conservative Manchurian candidate infiltrating the bay area to acknowledge where tech companies are failing on inclusivity goals in ways that stretch the imagination of being out of touch.

Big Tech's contrived and readjusted and out of touch practices have been written about in NY Times, Wapo, even freaking SFGate ad nauseum.

Adding some points that overlap with misogynist communities means address the misogyny in isolation, and also factor in the points.

> He calls women neurotic.

Neurotic, as he uses it, is not the same way it is used in everyday parlance.

Neurotic is part of the Big 5 personality traits, for which there is substantial academic evidence. The traits are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

He is using "neurotic" in the psychological and clinical sense. I believe he specifies as much in his actual paper.

Quite so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...

"A study of gender differences in 55 nations using the Big Five Inventory found that women tended to be somewhat higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The difference in neuroticism was the most prominent and consistent, with significant differences found in 49 of the 55 nations surveyed."

> He is using "neurotic" in the psychological and clinical sense. I believe he specifies as much in his actual paper.

Eh. He's using the psychological/clinical definition, but then draws conclusions on no scientific basis.

This is what he said in the memo:

> [Women, on average, have more] neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance): This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

And this is a quote from the person who actually did the meta-analysis which Damore cites (emphasis is mine):

> These sex differences in neuroticism are not very large, with biological sex perhaps accounting for only 10 percent of the variance.

> It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

Regardless of the correctness of his overall argument, he wasn't saying "women are neurotic" in the colloquial sense, which was a common condemnation against him.

Also, and fact check me on this, does accounting for 10% of variance (aka 0.1 * sig^2) mean accounting for sqrt(0.1) * sig, aka 32% of the standard deviation?

> In it, he calls women neurotic.

No, he says that on average they score higher on "neuroticism", one of the Big Five personality traits. [1] And it is an empirical fact. [2]

If you say "he said women are neurotics" it means you didn't understand neither the language nor the logic of what you were reading, something that should give you pause.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004....

>He showed a serious lack of judgement writing and posting that in his workplace

Probably doesn't help being autistic.

This view to me is just as tone deaf at Damore's piece itself.

Whether or not you agree or disagree, it clearly had an impact of making a very large and significant segment of female employees at Google feel as if they were biologically inferior or otherwise not suited to do their jobs. You can sit here and say "Oh, that's nuts, that's not what he said" - but you're also not hearing the same internalized misogyny and bias that a LOT of female engineers are, day after day, at every company they've ever been at. He should have known it had the potential to have that impact, so I have approximately zero sympathy in that regard; what his true intentions are/were is irrelevant.

I would bet any number that the largest cohort of people who are baffled by the reaction to his memo are white men. I'm sure it's not even close.

I'd say the reporting about Damore had a larger impact than Damore ever did.

Nah, this was likely already making the rounds at Google and causing massive disruption. People don't need media to get them all worked up, although it certainly helps.

> it clearly had an impact of making a very large and significant segment of female employees at Google feel as if they were biologically inferior or otherwise not suited to do their jobs

Blame that on the attention seekers and clickbait journalists. A lot of things quoted out of context cause people to be offended. If you misrepresent citing a study that says that women score higher than men in neuroticism in personality surveys, as “Damore thinks women are neurotic,” of course women will be offended.

How people misread it really shouldn't be the point, if we could establish that it's a misreading (a big if). Like if someone at google wrote about the harms of toxic masculinity, talking about the cultural pressures society puts on men, should it matter that a bunch of men will think it's calling men toxic and be pissed off?

If you care about her having a certain opinion it's good you bite your tongue.

Very few can handle the truth when they feel something different inside. You don't win over people with facts, fact support internal believes or they get ignored, blocked or morphed.

U.S. corporate culture truly has become toxic when one can't even debate anything or exercise freedom of speech.

> That's not what he said at all

Those aren’t the words he used, but it’s exactly what he was saying.

You didn't have to bite your tongue - you could've told her she's wrong.

As the article shows, you can speak up and you can get fired for speaking up.

This is one of the few examples where the phrase "political correctness" could be used correctly. Speaking 'correct' facts is not the 'correct' move to maximize the probability of still having a job tomorrow.

If he wanted to risk being treated as a radioactive dumpster all the rest of his time working at that company - sure, he could. Maybe it wouldn't happen - maybe she would turn out a wonderful individual who would thank him for correcting her and educating her about the truth. Or maybe not. Given the risks of "maybe not" - the smart money is on "bite your tongue".

As it is true for any number of conversations in the workplace? Try telling your boss they're not as smart or talented as they think they are and see how that goes.

I'm not sure how "making broad generalizations about your coworkers based on their gender" differs from all the other stuff most people have to keep quiet about as they go about their work.

> Try telling your boss they're not as smart or talented as they think they are and see how that goes.

Why would I? My boss is very smart and talented :) No, seriously, I'm anonymous here so it's not because my boss would be reading it - I just not enjoy working for idiots and I have the luxury of being able not to do it for long.

But in general yes, telling people they're idiots doesn't usually go well, so don't do that either.

> "making broad generalizations about your coworkers based on their gender"

Oh it has nothing to do with gender. If've seen hyperwoke males as much as I seen females. It's the type you want to bite your tongue around, not gender.

When the whole discussion is about a guy getting fired for saying a thing, it's not safe to defend him if you don't want to risk being fired. It's that simple.

So... this is typical of the way this argument goes. Many HN readers are essentially "fellow travellers" with Damore. And you agree with him, and with that whitepaper thing he wrote.

But here's the thing: every time this comes up, this is framed, as you do, as a failure of "everyone else" (meaning left-leaning general folks, often women themselves) failing to understand the truth of what he wrote. But what you don't do is actually defend what he wrote.

And that's because what he wrote was really kinda vile. Indeed he didn't say "Women can't be good engineers". He said: "Women at Google aren't good engineers", which is quite frankly no less offensive. Now, sure, sure, his point was that this was because Google's diversity policies were incorrectly boosting these candidates. But that doesn't change what he said.

So... I don't see that the "female engineer" you were talking to really had it that wrong. You're focused on what to her was a minor fact, and while you seem to be oblivious as to why she might find the "correct" interpretation offensive too...

... you aren't. Because you know it's not really that defensible either and don't want to be held to account for Damore's opinions yourself. So you content yourself with what the rest of us view as nitpicking.

"Women at Google aren't good engineers"

You quote this, which isn't a quote. Feel free to draw out the passages of his memo where this is explicitly or implicitly stated.

What was actually said is that men and women tend to have different interests on average, and therefore choose different professions when given equal freedom and opportunity. More men choose to be mechanical engineering and more women choose biological sciences.

It's strange for that to be so controversial. Not having an interest in a field does not mean you're not capable. Perhaps that's the nuance that's missing.

This argument doesn't work because there were a significant number of woman devs back in the 70s and 80s. That claim is completely at odds with the history of programming.

And before people make the claim that programming was glorified hole punching as it seems to come up by that point in history we already saw the rise of modern abstractions and higher level development. It's controversial because it's trying to abstract some sort of universal biotruths by vaguely linking data with psuedoscience and correlation.

I don't think "glorified hole punching" is fair at all. It was still an intellectual challenge, just a different one.

I find it hard to believe an explanation that proposes an industry has become more sexist since the 70s.

What people chose to get degrees in a generation or two ago doesn't really help with hiring today. Especially when you mostly hire people in their twenties (not defending that).

The field has changed vastly in the last 50 years. I don't find it shocking that interests and resulting demographics have also changed since then.

I agree entirely with what he wrote. Men and women, innately, have different interests - on a statistical level. ...but individual variances make stereotyping ineffective, therefore everyone needs to be treated as individuals, and thus quotas should be eliminated.

That was literally his conclusion - and it's spot on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com