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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

He posited that women might be less inclined towards programming due to inherent traits, such as being more people-oriented, suggesting that biological and psychological differences between men and women might explain the underrepresentation of women in tech.

So, maybe, not less intelligent, but, maybe, a poorer fit for a software engineer position than a person less "people oriented" and, therefore, that a lot of the women working as software engineers at Google were hired over more fitting men, because they were women.

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This is closer to correct.

Damore said that women tend to choose to work with people rather than things. He said that, therefore, a way to increase women in the workforce is to enhance the peopleness of it, by incorporating more pair programming and collaboration.

He did not say that women were a poor fit for software engineering, nor that they were hired over more fitting men. Those words are from a bogeyman of your own imagination.

> So, maybe, not less intelligent, but, maybe, a poorer fit for a software engineer position than a person less "people oriented" and, therefore, that a lot of the women working as software engineers at Google were hired over more fitting men, because they were women.

Closer, but still wrong. His point is that women are less likely to enter the field of software or engineering. Not that the subset of women who do enter those fields are less capable than men.

Imagine someone demands that we address the inequitable murder convictions with outcome based goals on the gender distribution of murder convictions. If I say that I believe that the disparity in murder convictions stems from the fact that men commit more murder, not bias in police or courts, does that make me a misandrist?

If women make up ~18% of software developers, why would we expect a non discriminatory hiring process to hire more than 18% women in software development roles?

Arguing about the meaning of what Damore wrote, and what he thought/intended, is a huge waste of time. Just about everybody who read it comes to a different interpretation of what he meant to imply. Then folks argue endlessly (on forums like this, memegen, elsewhere) about their different interpretations.

A better writer with more experience could have written a doc that was basically "some aspects of the training in our DEI classes is not scientifically supported, but is being used as a cudgel to change people's behavior" with a few examples.

The problem is you trying to "interpret" what he wrote. Let's stick to what he actually said:

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...

His writing is very clear. He is talking about the Ideological Echo Chamber at Google. He is not railing against women.

I've read the document (before it was widely published- it was posted internally at the time) several times and I don't think I said anything at all that wasn't technically correct.

Have you considered the interpretation process within reading?

>Arguing about the meaning of what Damore wrote, and what he thought/intended, is a huge waste of time. Just about everybody who read it comes to a different interpretation of what he meant to imply.

Studying the literal fundamental nature of reality doesn't seem like a waste of time to me.

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