> biological differences that make them inferior candidates for technical and leadership positions

I didn't see that in the "manifesto" at all. The assertions that "biological differences exist" and that they contribute to the under-representation of women in tech don't at all imply the conclusion that the under-representation is due to biologically-caused inferiority.

There's good evidence, summarized in this blog post, that on the average across society, equally gifted and capable girls tend to choose non-STEM careers more than their male counterparts simply because of differences in preference, combined with the fact that a wider array of career options is open to them due to their higher verbal skills (this was featured on HN a couple of weeks ago): https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...

Furthermore, it seems that unlike men, women who are capable in math also tend to be capable in both math and verbal skills (whereas on the average, men have less capability in verbal skills), thus giving women more career options. Unlike men (on the average, again), women that do choose STEM careers tend to excel at all levels, including management.

> pseudo scientific trash

See the above article. It references highly cited studies that seem to clearly indicate innate differences in preference (in even 2-day-old infants and primates).

  > Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar, they are about outreach.
  > Nobody is being insulted by this. 

Some people are insulted by this [0]. When I said these programs already do disempower women, I wasn't speaking for all women: I was referring to what I had read. We can't just ignore people's lived experiences when they don't suit our positions.

[0] https://communequation.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/im-not-a-wom...

I think you should reread that article. It is stating that this woman, someone who is already successfully integrated into the "Tech Scene" is not the problem to be solved by outreach. Which is true. That doesn't mean that she would be insulted by outreach to women. It means you shouldn't ask her how to do it.

  > I don’t want your ‘exclusively for women’ support groups
  > I want inclusivity, not exclusivity.
  > You’re victimising me when you do that. You’re indicating that it’s most
  > likely I need special, extra support. Just because I’m female.

And then later on:

  > By creating special awards for women I think you’re belittling the impact
  > and effort a group of humans are having in their field – just because of
  > their gender. 

She is certainly insulted by these so called 'outreach' programs. She is using the word 'victimising' and 'belittling' to describe them. It can't get any clearer than this.

We can't just ignore people's lived experiences when they don't suit our positions.

The ensuing comments thread on HN also had many similar stories.

Did you see the quillette [1] article that was briefly on the front page earlier? Four different experts write briefly their thoughts on the memo. While they don't necessarily agree with the author's judgment of the value of diversity programs, they unanimously agree with his points that the sexes are different and have different personalitie.

So saying that, what part of the memo was pseudo scientific drivel?

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

He doesn't assert the differences are due to inferiority. The vast majority of differences he mentions are differences of taste not differences of ability. There are many studies that show that women are more prevalent in engineering in poor countries than in rich ones. One fairly prevalent hypothesis to explain this data is that economic freedom allows people to pursue what makes them happier, rather than what makes them the most money. I have no idea if this hypothesis is right, but I think it's pretty sad that one can't make a case for it without getting fired.

The part where he implies the massive disparity of representation between men and women in tech (17% percent of technical roles at Google, 15% at Facebook) is due to small and inherent physiological differences, which make women inferior at performing in those roles, rather than hundreds of years of structuring our society and culture to favor men. It is an invalid argument.

> Hundreds of years of structuring society and culture to favor men

Utterly ahistorical nonsense.

Could your great grandmother vote?

Could your great grandfather opt out of war?

Yes?

At various times (in the United States) men have been able to opt out of war by: hiring a replacement to take their place; being a conscientious objector and taking a non-combat role; being born at the right time to not be drafted, and choosing not to volunteer; enlisting in a branch of the service unlikely to see combat; pleading a hardship; finding a doctor to claim you are medically unfit; just walking away (desertion, as long as it was not during combat, has historically be inconsistently punished).

One of the major criticisms of conscription in the US is that, in practice, whether those methods of avoiding conscription were actually available depended on race, class and how wealthy you were. So only some men could actually take advantage of them; the rest were screwed. (This conflation of the experience of a few better-off men with the experiences of men as a whole seems to be quite common in many social justice circles for some reason.)

Of the four older men whose draft stories I know personally, two had exemptions (hardship/agricultural labor), but one went to war anyway, one enlisted as a pilot in the National Guard, and one lucked out by having the draft end before his number came up. None of them were particularly wealthy or influential, although all of them were white.

Where exactly did he argue that?

I get the feeling that this document is what Scott Adams talks about when he writes that two people can sit in the same movie theater, look at the same screen, and watch two different movies play out.

"that make them inferior candidates for technical and leadership positions rather than hundreds of years of disenfranchisement and misogyny"

This is completely false! He absolutely does not say that, he says women to not prefer to compete for those jobs. He might still be wrong but you are grossly misrepresenting his statement in an attempt to demonize his lack of PC orthodoxy.

> Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar, they are about outreach.

At colleges, lowering the bar is in fact how they have often been implemented. This article has some decent numbers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-un...

Lowering the bar is also the easiest way for a mid-level manager to achieve a target percentage. It's probably also the first method that may come to mind for many people.

Also, if you spend 3x the resources to find 3x the number of candidates (is it linear? I dunno), conduct normal interview processes, and then randomly throw out 2/3 of the male candidates that passed, while keeping all the women that passed, that is one way to triple the number of women you hire while having the same bar for men and women. However, the step where you throw out a random 2/3 of the male candidates might strike someone as highly irrational. Why not throw out the bottom 2/3 of male candidates? But then you end up with male candidates that passed a higher bar. You're not lowering your standards for women, but you're raising your standards for men, and then employees might notice and form the impression that the average male employee is better than the average female employee, which would be unfortunate. But it would probably be difficult to convince the people involved that avoiding the "unfortunate" outcome is worth throwing away 2/3 of the very best male candidates.

It might be possible to spend 3x the resources in such a way that all the new candidates you find are women. That would be a way to avoid the above problems. How would this be accomplished? Perhaps you send a recruiter to a university, and have them only talk to the female students. Hmm, that might be a little weird. How about a female-only university? That would be great. Likewise any female-only programming meetup groups. And of course any qualified female engineers that anyone knows—they'll never be wanting for a job.

How well will a company perform that spends significant resources recruiting from female-only groups, compared to one that recruits from groups that simply take the best candidates? How significant a fraction of company resources are normally spent on recruiting? And I did see a study indicating that demographic diversity (measured as age and sex) improved morale. I guess we'll see.

What would really help is if universities published the CS accomplishments of all their female students, but not of their male students. I wonder if they'd be willing to do it.

In any case, my original point was, even if a company does in fact implement its diversity program with one of the methods that does not systematically lead to higher-quality male hires than female hires, I think it is natural for someone to assume until proven otherwise that it is implemented by shifting the bar.

>> You're not lowering your standards for women, but you're raising your standards for men, and then employees might notice and form the impression that the average male employee is better than the average female employee, which would be unfortunate.

No process is ever random. All processes have side effects, that make some kind of memory/feed back loop.

If there are two groups of uniform set of people A and B. And you if make it harder for A to succeed. Set of people in A will have to work way harder, than set B over very long periods of time to win consistently. You will end up making A far more stronger than B. While your intention was to make B at least as good as A over time, you have now achieved the very exact opposite of what you set out of achieve.

This is common in sports, and even competitive exams. Candidates are trained to take on difficult problems than the baseline so that they can get better than the baseline.

At this point the bar for winning is largely to subject to interpretation. Did you raise the bar for A, or did you decrease the bar for B? It depends on what you consider the baseline.

Companies have forgotten how to incentivise employees. If you want people to work for you and not the competition it's not a matter of advertising and getting more eyeballs (especially if you're Google) you have to actually do some stuff that makes the job more compelling. Like paying people more money.

If women are really worth more to the company, for diversity purposes - if not literal diversity of people, at least diversity of opinion and experiences - it would make perfect sense to just actively headhunt women from other companies and simply pay them more than the other people.

Companies never want to actually pay employees more money though.