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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

To bring up an issue relevant to Google and tech, this was my main criticism James Damore, and why I thought Google had grounds to fire him. The First Amendment gives him the right to write an incel-inspired manifesto if he wants to, but the misuse of "average" for political purposes makes him look like an idiot and discredits other work he might do. In his manifesto he argued that the average male is better suited to computer programming than the average female. How is that in any way relevant at Google, which only hires people 4 or 5 or 6 standard deviations away from the norm? Average isn't relevant. Bringing up the average in situations where the average is not relevant is a common mistake, but it is also a very stupid mistake.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/8/8/16106728/google-fire...

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> How is that in any way relevant at Google

Because certain people constantly use the fact that there isn't 50/50 gender representation in engineering roles as a way to imply the profession is particularly sexist. It was absolutely relevant to the conversation at hand around "women in stem".

> 4 or 5 or 6 standard deviations away from the norm

Assuming normal distribution:

Single tail 4s.d. is like 1 in 30k. There are about 300M people in the US. Doing the division, that's 10k people.

Google employs way more software engineers than that.

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Google does hire at the tail (just not as extreme as you claim). And when you select for the tail, slight difference in average translates to a huge gender imbalance.

Take height for example, we have quite some overlap between men and women. But when we select for people over 6', it's gonna be overwhelmingly men.

Even without the standard deviations I think averages are an often abused tool. If you take any statement following the lines of "group X is better at task then group Y on average", while it might help you win in the long term in a betting scenario it doesn't actually provide any information on whether any individual from group X is better at the task then any individual from group Y

> Google, which only hires people 4 or 5 or 6 standard deviations away from the norm?

Puh-lease

>In his manifesto he argued that the average male is better suited to computer programming than the average female.

That's not what I remember it saying. Are you sure you're remembering it right?

> Women, on average, have more:

> Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).

> These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.

https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...

Not to split hairs, but that's a claim that the average degree of preference is higher among men, not that the average degree of being suited for it is higher among men.

Fair. I do consider it hairsplitting, but I suppose nuance is very important to these discussions.

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