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Comment by heterogenic | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily.

You're assuming that the factors which drive women out of engineering do so independent of ability.

I would hypothesize that this is false, that the most interested and passionate women are least likely to be nudged out. Google should be comparing its ratio to that of their potential pool, which is presumably skewed high. If that's true, they should be expecting to get closer to 50%. (Not exactly 50, but better than the holistic ratio at least.).

Also, they can look at their specific source pools to get a less hypothetical target. Berkeley is ~50/50, for example. (http://www.wired.com/2014/02/berkeley-women/). But retroactively

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> I would hypothesize that this is false

Citation required.

And if women are less interested overall in CS and/or have less ability on non-verbal tasks overall then you would expect that the RHS tail of the distribution of women would be lower than the RHS tail of the distribution of men. This is just basic statistics.

The same applies with African Americans. Blacks in the US have far lower IQs than whites - this is not in dispute though there is a certain amount of dispute about the reason, with some people attributing it to environment. As such the normal distribution will ensure that a much lower percentage of blacks will be at the high end of the scale (135IQ+) where google gets their recruits.

So the fact that google is close to the averages suggests they are already making a lot of effort to bring in women (and non-asian) minorities. Asians are highly over-represented at google versus their fraction of the population.

Citation required.

I see a lot of people make claims like this, or even stronger ones such as claiming it has little/nothing to do with environment. Charts like this bear that out somewhat with the poorest Asian and white students scoring higher on the SATs than well to do blacks: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1a52vkpjans/UmjAc5fGxtI/AAAAAAAAA6...

Generally, people I see who bring this up are usually using it as a thin veneer over racist beliefs. When asked what end discussing minority IQ serves, they usually suggest defunding inner-city (read: black) schools or similar measures.

I can't get on board with that. I think the US certainly fails at providing equality of opportunity to many groups, and there is still widespread discrimination against women and minorities. We can certainly do better and we should view people individually rather than treating them in a prejudiced way based on group membership.

I also have a hard time getting on board with a "blank slate" view of humanity. I'd love for someone to prove me wrong so I could fire back at "race realist" reddit commenters, but it seems plausible to me that different groups, especially men and women, are biologically predisposed to certain traits, on average.

I know in my career that requires both a certain amount of aggressiveness and quantitative aptitude that my colleagues have overwhelmingly been Asian or white men. I've worked with women and "under-represented minorities" who've made me feel like a chump trading, and I certainly don't harbor prejudices about them, but they're difficult to find.

As such the normal distribution will ensure that a much lower percentage of blacks will be at the high end of the scale (135IQ+) where google gets their recruits.

There's little evidence that IQ and programming ability are correlated.

There is some evidence[1] that Mathematical ability and success at programming are correlated (30%). [1] shows that gender and programming success are correlated, but others show no correlation at all.

[1] shows an 8% correlation between spatial ability and success at programming are correlated, while [2] showed "only a small correlation".

[2] shows that people who are successful at program articulate tasks differently to those who are not.

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.110...

[2] http://eprints.usq.edu.au/2259/1/CRPITV52Simon2.pdf

> There's little evidence that IQ and programming ability are correlated.

Yes, but while programming ability is no doubt a priority for Google in programming positions, its not unlikely that general intelligence is something they desire in a broad array of positions (including programming positions.)

So, its not entirely implausible that, to the extent that there are group differences in IQ distribution, those play some role in explaining Google's diversity results (of course, IQ is not purely innate and does appear to be influenced by a number of environmental factors, though those are even farther upstream from hiring than the kind of things that Google is focussing on with regard to educational opportunities in computing for women and minorities. But there is no reason Google couldn't work to improve those, too.

You make the mistake of assuming an equal playing field where there clearly isn't one.

> > I would hypothesize that this is false.

> Citation required.

You may want to Google the meaning of "hypothesis"...

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