https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
One of the major giveaways that the Diversity VP at Google is incompetent came when she criticized the author for attacking women simply because he used the terms "conscientiousness" and "agreeability" and "neuroticism". You are not doing much better by insinuating that science can only be correct when it supports your ideological position.
The lack of intellect and integrity displayed by the attacks on the fired Google employee is really disturbing.
Can you back up this claim with a citation from the document? If not, can you explain your thought (feeling) process?
> Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths. - This defends putting women into less-desirable jobs because desirable ones are not really that desirable? This argument is self-defeating.
> I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women. For each of these changes, we need principles reasons for why it helps Google; - Discrimination is justified if it helps the bottom line.
> We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google. - You're not allowed to believe that discrimination will hurt the bottom line. Even if senior management tells you so.
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate - The alternative is to increase the false positive rate for those candidates.
> Having representative viewpoints is important for those designing and testing our products, but the benefits are less clear for those more removed from UX. - Having representation is leadership is not important.
> Prioritize intention. - This is also illegal. Google is a government contractor and will be required to implement affirmative action policies if its employees are too different from the general population. That's because they're taking money from all taxpayers and redistributing it to or away from certain groups. Intention here is irrelevant.
> Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).
Serious question: does your mind think they actually do? This might be a good illustration of why people differ so much on the same objective facts, the human brain automatically adds additional context (that isn't necessarily physically present) into perceptions.
Can you give me some indication that you understand what I'm talking about? You don't have to agree, just a sign that you know what I'm saying. I'm wondering if your brain maybe censors certain sorts of ideas, such that you effectively don't even "see" them.
The truth you are missing about the world is contained right within that statement. I recommend printing it out and hanging it on your wall as a reminder, and let your mind chew on it for a few months. Resist the urge to draw conclusions, just mull it over, you might be surprised.
Strip away his science and his words, he's a misogynistic techbro (I'm reminded of ESR) who wants to pretend technology is some sort of meritocracy and that a woman doesn't play well in that situation. Almost every one of his claims has a hanging but attached to it.
The author suggests that when these average statistics propagate into life decisions and employment preferences, you end up with an equilibrium with less females in these roles.
You write 'This can be used again to claim women don't belong in those roles' but the author did not use this to claim such a thing! 'I know several women' precisely coincides with what the author wrote. Again, he pointed out multiple times throughout that he was not generalizing but was merely looking at average trends.
In the aggregate, this is objectively true based on my observations, and you can see this exact same sentiment passionately expressed by feminists.
> ...there are some roles they might not be able to perform.
This part is your mind playing tricks on you. You have certain beliefs, and you are trying to find anything to confirm them.
You have misunderstood what the author was saying, I would suggest because you are not trying to understand it, but rather are trying to find examples to substantiate your worldview.
> Strip away his science and his words
....leaving us....your imagination?
>Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be
The line immediately before states that women tend to be more people-oriented than object-oriented. The line between these 2 states is crystal clear: women are more people oriented than men, and there are limits to how people oriented certain roles and the company can be, therefore, women will not have the same opportunities as men. If you want to take his words at face value, go ahead, but his entire essay is for Google to stop programs aimed at gender inclusion.
> If you want to take his words at face value, go ahead
Very interesting, to me.
> his entire essay is for Google to stop programs aimed at gender inclusion.
Is anyone disputing that? This conversation is beyond confusing.
That's absurd. You're not even interpreting his comments at face value. You're attributing a subtext to them that only exists in your imagination.
>Strip away his science and his words, he's a misogynistic techbro
What an absolutely hateful and sexist comment. It amounts to: "strip away his message and judge him by what identity group he belongs to"
Really? The first bullet point is "women are more people oriented". The second bullet point is that there are limits to how people oriented specific roles or even Google as a whole can be. If you want to take his words at face value, go ahead, but the belief that there are some roles than women cannot do due to their differences is consistent with the rest of his essay.
The only way I can think of how one could come to this conclusion is a lack of either:
- knowledge of what a statistical average is
- capacity for basic logical thought
You are mixing up your imagination with reality.
So, what exactly am I supposed to draw from this? You're insistent I am wrong, but you're offering no explanation as to why I am wrong. I don't disagree that women are more sociable than men. I disagree this means certain roles within the company cannot support that trait.
Further down: "Women value work life balance" "Men are status achievers" "Because of that, men will appropriately be in leadership and technology roles, also women suffer anxiety more." Side note, convenient he leaves out that women are statistically able to deal with stress better than men. His conclusion is that rather than creating programs that encourage women to enter leadership positions, leave that to the men and give women access to part time roles.
If you want to say I am wrong, so be it, disagreement is fine, but you have yet to counter anything I have said with an opposing understanding, just ad hominen attacks and criticism.
The explanation was in my previous comment.
I will give you another hint: you are misinterpreting the meaning of "women" in your excerpted quotes.
> If you want to say I am wrong, so be it, disagreement is fine, but you have yet to counter anything I have said with an opposing understanding, just ad hominen attacks and criticism.
I don't think there's a way to reply that will satisfy you, there is a crucial part of objective perception that you are lacking.
It does no such thing, because:
(1) STEM fields, especially applied rather than theoretical ones, involve people as much as things
(2) While in some STEM fields gender disparities are apparent from fairly early in career progression, that's not true of all STEM fields; in some (many of them around biosciences) women are overrepresented in education and entry-level work, but still lag men in pay and advancement (problematically for the “it's about men wanting to deal with things and women wanting to deal with people” explanation of STEM gender disparities, this leaves women dealing more with things while the men move to higher levels where they deal with people.)
This doesn't negate my point.
You're correct that I oversimplified: some STEM fields are indeed less 'biologically geared' to men. But the principle remains: biologically established differences in interest can very plausibly explain the differences seen in gender representation in some STEM fields. It is the assertion of this fact that has invited unfounded accusations of sexism.
>women are overrepresented in education and entry-level work, but still lag men in pay and advancement
That alone says nothing about the presence or absence of systemic discrimination.
And, you'll note, I never claimed it did: I cited it as a fact about the gender imbalance in STEM which is not explainable by the facile “men like dealing with things while women like dealing with people” explanation which you described upthread as being, on its own, a refutation of the idea that gender imbalances in STEM are in any part due to systemic discrimination (which could only be true if it explained all aspects of STEM gender imbalance and left no room for systemic discrimination.)
Were it offered merely as a factor which explained some subset of the gender imbalances in STEM, that would be more reasonable.
Yes that is a more accurate construction. For the sake of expedience I wasn't this precise, and left it to the reader to sauce out this more precise meaning, which given the format, I think was entirely reasonable.
Then you're choosing to not be constructive. Sexism and racism are not constructive, and they are hurtful to innocent people.
I know it's trendy to defend feminist talking points, but it ultimately leads to what we see now with the Google firing: a public conversation where facts take a secondary role to ideology/dogma.
On the other hand, there is evidence that cultural biases specifically discourage women from entering, and push women out of, STEM careers.