It is really shocking to see the misrepresentation of the intent of the memo. I normally stay out of discussion about those topics, it's too dangerous - but that development is just unacceptable.

This is something I feel that he genuinely wanted to discuss and was open to changing his opinion given that his assumptions/research was challenged. This unfortunately didn't happen.

In other words: don't dish it out if you can't take it.

> Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

It is also not an extremist position to take, it's the scientific consensus. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw for an example stating the same thing with almost the same words. And that's not coming from someone unqualified.

Because... no. Nobody's demonstrated that. What people have demonstrated are small average differences in performance on certain kinds of test tasks, and then Google dude and you decide that's "scientific consensus" for whatever conclusions you'd like to draw from it.

I did not say that, did I? The scientific consensus is that there are biological differences that have an influence on job fit and job choices. But we are talking statistics here, there are always people from the other sex that are a good fit for a specific work.

Did you watch the video I linked? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw . Really, watch it.

Also, the Google memo explicitly did not say that women should not be coders. If you think that, this is the warped media representation of the memo you are talking about, not its actual content.

Sure. The author just wrote it as a purely informative note about biology and genetics, and intended it to have absolutely no relationship to hiring or evaluation in any way, shape or form.

Hint: people don't write up this kind of thing if they think it shouldn't affect hiring and evaluation.

It is also terrible style to be so bad at math as to claim or imply that the tiny observed differences on skills tests would produce the gigantic skew in gender ratio we observe. But hey, just piling up more evidence that he was unqualified for the job anyway, and should be replaced by someone with icky girlskills like, you know, actually being able to research something and think critically about it.

I found that aspect troubling too. This isn't a subject I know much about, so I was hoping for more balanced debate from both sides. Instead what we got was internet lynching and grandstanding.

While you may be legally required to give him the benefit of the doubt -- any person who works with him that gives him that same benefit is probably naïve.

As for the cherry picking; remember that he is trying to make a point here, namely that biological differences might play a role over aggregated statistical differences, and that this might be one of the reasons we don't see the 50/50 split, and that ignoring this might be counter productive for everyone. Is the biological studies he have presented cherry picked? I'm sure you have seen the Quillette article [1], and the scientists quoted there does not seem to think so.

[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-....

And while biology may account for some of the gap, it almost seems obvious that it doesn't account for all of it. And this is just looking at gains women have made economically in the past 30 years.

I don't think most reasonable people at google think there are no bio diffs, but rather that we are still far enough from the point where we have exhausted other causes. Simply pointing out thst bio diffs exist, while effectively trying to use that to shut down other approaches of giving equal opportunity is purely a political and not science based position. Unless he has some much stronger science results he has not yet shared.

The research linked in the the document are based on The Big Five Personality Traits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

These traits are measured with self-report surveys. I.e. personality quizzes. Not to malign the field of psychology, but this isn't the gold standard of science, IMHO.

Having read Mr. Damore's document, I can find very little in it of substance. It deals with politics and gender in only the very broadest of terms. It does not delve deeply into the scientific issues at hand, instead sprinkling his platitudes with wikipedia links to give them weight.

That being said, I completely agree that the US's nasty brand of liberalism is in a sad state. Our response to this manifesto should have been a cold critique of its many flaws, not the blind hysteria we've apparently opted for instead.

  These traits are measured with self-report surveys. I.e.
  personality quizzes. Not to malign the field of psychology,
  but this isn't the gold standard of science, IMHO.

In any event, let's not forget that sexism isn't merely something that men foist upon women; it's a culture that can be internalized and perpetuated by women, too. Which means that it's easily possible (and almost certainly likely to some extent) that wealthier, more egalitarian societies exhibit more exaggerated gender roles precisely _because_ women, in being able to self-segregate more broadly, are thus empowered to perpetuate culturally defined gender preferences into far reaching corners of society.

There was a great article recently about a woman who intentionally wore flowery dresses to the office as an expression of her femininity, in purposeful contravention of what she saw as a culture which forced women to unnecessarily and unfairly adopt more masculine expressions. I think it's fair to say that we'll always have a notion of femininity, and that most women would want it that way. Men may have forced dresses upon women at some point, but in our modern culture, at least for the time being, a dress is one marker of a certain kind of femininity that many women feel is empowering. For the past couple of decades, many feminists in particular have been at the forefront of re-introducing these sorts of social signals. This has been partly driven by the way that many men have responded to diversification--by spitefully demanding that all gender markers be erased (usually in favor of the default masculine model), after years of enforcing those gender distinctions to secure their dominance.

You can see how this interplay can become extremely complex. What happens when certain jobs are considered by many women to be too masculine, while at the same time a preference for overt femininity is on the rise (in a mostly positive way) among women? We can still easily trace the phenomenon to its origins in cut-and-dry sex discrimination within an oppressive, male-dominated society. Yet at the same time it's been co-opted--intentionally and unintentionally--by many women and become intrinsic to their sense of autonomy and self-expression. On the one hand that arguably makes those women complicit in sex discrimination; on the other hand trying to directly change those preferences can be (nay, is intrinsically) just as discriminatory.

Now try to untangle that from whatever innate predispositions we have. It's intractable.

The unspeakable truth here is that we have no good way of knowing the precise _extent_ to which hiring practices or work environments are quantitively and qualitatively sexist in the sense of being hostile to women. Some aspects of discrimination are effectively unmeasurable and perhaps even unknowable because there's no simple delineation between classes of perpetrators and victims. I don't think many people doubt that sexism exists, notwithstanding some rabid anti-feminist groups. The issue is 1) defining the problem and 2) finding solutions. But we'll never be able to satisfactorily define #1, and therefore #2 will always rest on some amount of speculation.

What the author of the Google memo fails to realize--and what many smart leaders understand is unspeakable--is that affirmative action programs are, on some level, _intentionally_ designed to cope with complicity of the discriminated group. When push comes to shove, I think most thoughtful people agree that there's a strong element of self-selection driven by incredibly complex social dynamics. At some level there's a calculated judgment that says the way to address self-segregation is to _engineer_ a situation where there are more women in a role than there might otherwise be given some perfectly meritocratic environment.

That judgment is almost certainly wrong. But there is no right answer. Discrimination, in all is forms, is a legacy that will never be extinguished; at least not anytime soon. It will reverberate for countless generations, tainting all our choices. And in as much as there's an innate tendency to discriminate, there'll never be a right answer.

IMO, whether you agree or disagree with affirmative action, there has to be a tolerance for solutions which might overshoot the mark relative to some platonic ideal, especially if you're a member of a privileged group. It's not feasible to address sexism without accepting that some men are going to be discriminated against. Likewise for racism. It forces a contradiction that America has been wrestling with since its founding. There's no having our cake and eating it, too. It's difficult to discuss these things in a completely open and honest manner because there's literally no way to resolve the conflict between American notions of egalitarianism and meritocracy. To do so forces you to recognize that both concepts are deeply flawed, and not many people are prepared to do that.

I agree the author should not have their arguments misrepresented. But this applies in both directions.

If not, then they are just intelligently dressed up assumptions.

Can you support this beyond being your own judgemental assumption? Assuming everyone that disagrees with you is acting in bad faith isn't reasonable.

CNN.com's headline article yesterday was something about him having said "women are biologically unfit for technology jobs" which is a malicious and willful misreading meant to give basis for the moral panic around the memo.