_Here_ is where they misrepresent what he said. He didn't suggest that men and women differ in their suitability for different roles, but rather that men and women _generally_ differ in their suitability for different roles. There will always be deviations from the norm, and given the fact that there are known physical and psychological differences between the sexes[1], I don't see why those differences wouldn't lead to differences in career choice overall. However, there are plenty of women suited to be engineers and plenty of men not.
Edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? If I am misinterpreting something, I would love to know the flaw in it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
I'm honestly not sure how one could in good faith make that case given the current climate. A couple weeks ago, I would have bet on his memo being generally derided but not anathematized.
> "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."
He also mentions this in one of his interviews [1].
This sentence is nonsense, which you can tell from how you had to formulate the conclusion. Not "A therefore B" but "A therefore you can't rule out B."
Yes there are gender differences in psychology. But the link between the specific gender differences the Manifesto author pointed to and the conclusion is non existent. The piece is just a bunch of handwaving. It's the Chewbaca defense of sexist ranting.
Here is a direct quote from the memo:
"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."
This sounds exactly like what the above poster summarized: "women and men are biologically different in their suitability for different roles".
My guess is because you've condensed the central underlying premise into a compact, impossible to misunderstand, obfuscate, or mischaracterize idea, upon which a real discussion can be undertaken. This is counter to the goals of one side of this discussion, in my opinion.
Using this "on average" bullshit when making adverse reccomendations aimed specifically and directly people who are anything but is an especially nasty sleight-of-hand, and sound reason to disregard the writer's claims of good-faith and benovelence.
Of course, it's possible that Damore is just an brainless idiot who is too intellectually mediocre to check his own work for basic logical consistancy, but he lost the benefit of that particular doubt When putting Harvard and MIT on his CV.
At this level, the rules are different. If, like Damore, you're presenting yourself as one of the best and brightest, you better live up to a very high standard when taking public shots at the standards of others. Otherwise, you could get dumped very unceremoniously.
The moment you point out that the same kind of argument was made about black people not long ago, most of the trolls just disappear.
He didn't say that either. In fact, he advocates for more diversity and suggests changes that, at least according to him, should increase diversity without the negatives he's concerned about.
The NYT piece could have just said something like, "...fired for harboring anti-diversity attitudes that are obvious from reading a deceptively worded diatribe," or something like that. At least be honest about what he literally said and what additional context and inferences add to the picture.
This is the "only the literal words should be taken" argument - but words can have contextual meanings above and beyond their literal meanings.
"Urban crime", for example, literally just means "crime in an urban environment" but is often used as a dogwhistle for "crimes committed by POC".
Same with Damore's memo - he may not literally have said the things people are seeing but - if you assume it was written in bad faith (which the pseudoscience and "I'm just asking the questions" would indicate) - the dogwhistles are clear.
By now I'm convinced he wrote the memo in bad faith. The moment he beelined to every alt-right media outlet wearing a "Goolag" t-shirt it was clear this wasn't just an honest mistake. Even an idiot would understand that writing a memo setting up a "left vs. right" argument and then attacking Googlers as "repressors misguided by leftist ideals", while laying out a flawed biological argument for why "women are not well suited for engineering" is not going to go down smoothly.
It's no coincidence that he admittedly kept pushing this around when it got ignored until it eventually "made it to the public." Had he really wanted to have an honest discussion with HR about practices, he could've emailed them directly. Then he sued immediately after getting fired. Very tight timeline for a well-intentioned snafu.
> Why argue that it says things it doesn't?
Where did I do that?
> At least be honest about what he literally said and what additional context and inferences add to the picture.
At least be honest about the actual content of the memo. The additional context and inferences are just fluff to mask the base premise: "women are biologically different, that means they probably don't want to work here, please stop trying reaching out to them, you are discriminating against everyone else."
Here: "while laying out a flawed biological argument for why "women are not well suited for engineering" is not going to go down smoothly"
Do you actually not realize that's what he said? Since we're on HN, I bet you wouldn't make such a sloppy mistake of imprecision if the topic was something other than gender/race/sexuality.
So far I've gotten a lot of people saying "he didn't day that!" but without explaining what he said. Please clarify.
There have been at least two large threads on HN on this topic. You would have me believe everyone is saying "he didn't say that!" but with no explanation of what he he said?
What he said was that in the aggregate, women and men statistically have different interests, behaviors, and performance in different fields. I can't imagine how sheltered of a life you'd have to live to not be exposed to this in real life, or more appropriately, how intellectually dishonest you'd have to be to pretend you've never noticed.
To me, this rise of anti-intellectualism in the west is rather scary.
...which therefore explains the lack of women in tech and leadership. People are taking exception to the latter claim: that the biological differences between men and women justifies the lack of women in the tech industry. The former claim, that men and women are biologically different, is uncontroversial.
> I can't imagine how sheltered of a life you'd have to live to not be exposed to this in real life, or more appropriately, how intellectually dishonest you'd have to be to pretend you've never noticed.
You are conducting a straw man argument against a claim that the other side is has not actually made.
Did you use justifies instead of explains accidentally, or is that actually your understanding?
> The former claim, that men and women are biologically different, is uncontroversial.
Have you been reading the same discussions as I have?
> You are conducting a straw man argument against a claim that the other side is has not actually made.
The irony.
As it is to claim that the reason for so few women in the tech and leadership is due to sexism, no? Oops, I guess not, there I go with my old fashioned misogynistic presumption of innocence. Silly me thinking the onus should be on the person demanding special treatment to prove the need, when of course the onus should be on the person providing that special treatment to prove why it isn't needed. Guilty until proven innocent, it's a brave and confident new world.
Wait, then what was "and then to call for the elimination of programs designed to encourage more women in tech" all about? I'm now in the position of having absolutely no idea what you are fighting for....it's not for programs to increase female representation, I presume it's not against such programs.....so what is it then? I guess we'll never know, which is fairly common in these conversations, because simply asking seems to be too much to ask.
Edit: (Sticking around to dole out some downvotes though I see, that'll teach me!)
Fair enough. That's a valid theory to entertain, and I'm sure there's a growing body of science supporting both sides of the debate. Now, the question is this: if that was the case, how do we determine the extent to which the biological factors affect career selection, when we live in a society that encourages gender stereotypes? If we don't know the extent, how can we jump to conclusions about outreach generating "a discriminatory framework"?
That, at the end of the day, is my main complaint about Damore's memo. It's just a weak attempt at generating outrage.
> To me, this rise of anti-intellectualism in the west is rather scary.
Anti-intellectualism has many faces. The fact that we are discussing this in an open forum, and that we could probably sit on a coffee shop and have a civilized discussion about it is proof that the whole narrative about "liberal values = cultural Marxism" is at least partially bogus. Meanwhile, the same people who complained about stifling free speech at Google are threatening to leak the names of liberal Googlers to alt-right websites. Where's the outrage about that?
There is extensive study on this topic going back several decades, if you're interested in the topic, there's not shortage of material. There's also plentiful anecdotal material where college educated forward thinking mothers very quickly learned the reality of nature vs nature after bearing children of different genders.
> Meanwhile, the same people who complained about stifling free speech at Google are threatening to leak the names of liberal Googlers to alt-right websites. Where's the outrage about that?
I'd have absolutely no problem condemning that whatsoever. Imagining your philosophical "opponents" as some sort of one dimensional monsters isn't doing yourself or your movement any favors.
That would have been a valid claim until the unfortunate incidents in Charlottesville (and Bloomington before that, and Seattle before that...) People threatening to expose liberal Googlers to the same kind of ecochamber that celebrates someone driving a car into a crowd is beyond the pale. Anyone who takes so lightly potentially having blood in their hands is a monster.
This is my last comment regarding this topic.
That person being me presumably. Guilty until proven innocent, a recurring theme lately.
> This is my last comment regarding this topic.
What a loss.
EDIT: Seems I'm not being allowed to reply anymore (gee, where do conspiracy theories about censorship of conservative speech come from eh?), so I guess I'll have to reply here...
> No, I was talking about the Googlers who were threatening to leak names to alt-right websites.
You wanted the people that are threatening to leak names to be outraged at themselves? I think I'm losing track of all the parties involved in this vast criminal conspiracy.
Anyways, besides this entire topic being utterly pointless, if the right to speak freely is granted to only one side, I guess I should take the hint and adapt to our new world by keeping my mouth shut.
No, I was talking about the Googlers who were threatening to leak names to alt-right websites.
I'd love to have my mind changed. Most of my friends are liberal and think this science is bunk, but from what I've read there is a lot of evidence that women are more interested in things than people, and a moderate amount of evidence that at least some of this preference is biological.
To clarify, I'm not saying that there's 0 possibility that there are differences between sexes, just that trying to rationalize the current gender imbalance in engineering as "girls being girls and boys being boys" is a bit disingenuous, considering different countries perform differently. This article has some interesting data to mull over: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/th...
There's no "right answer" right now, and yet there's a lot of people around here defending Damore's memo as if all the premises were completely accurate.
The idea that that women are more into people than men, who are more into things is much more well established. With large cross-cultural studies and meta-analysis showing one the largest effect sizes in social science.
Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where, and Why? http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x
Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/
But the % of women in CS doesn't seem to correlate very highly with my intuition about sexism. For instance I would never think that Mexico or Poland was a far less sexist place than Norway. Nor does it seem to correlate well with female student's math anxiety. Mexico and the U.S. seem to be very similar in terms of the math anxiety gap, but very far apart in term of number of female CS majors.
You could look at the charts and see support for the hypothesis that "there is variability in the % of women in CS therefore the difference is cultural" but you could also look at it and say "look across every cultural in the world women choose CS less often than men".
We also don't know why, it could be gender stereotypes about what field women go into, or it could be emphasis on passion vs income. With countries that place greater emphasis on community and income having larger numbers of women in CS, with countries that place greater emphasis on passion and interests having a lower number of women in CS.
Or they completely stop taking you seriously.
The increasing absurdity of this discussion is astonishing.
You take yourself really seriously, for someone defending the modern equivalent of phrenology.
> "we shouldn't do anything to increase diversity, because women are biologically different and hence they won't be interested."
This is not the argument. You should be ashamed of yourself for behaving like this.
So what is the argument?
If 80% of candidates were left handed, no one would think twice about 80% of hires being left handed. Ditto for female candidates. Ditto again for male candidates for relatively undesireable jobs. But once the topic of discussion is male candidates for highly paid jobs, the logic completely changes.
Pretend this isn't happening as much as you like, it's no skin off my nose.
And yet, that has changed over time, implying that there's definitely a big non-biological component to the ratio.
> If 80% of candidates were left handed
Right, because a biological characteristic that literally doesn't have any effect in professional careers is exactly comparable to a biological characteristic you say does make a difference. Talk about comparing apples with "things I say are an orange, but let's pretend I'm saying are an apple for me to draw this completely irrelevant analogy."
> it's no skin off my nose.
Of course it is not, and that's why you can be so blasé about the whole thing.
Which OP and I are not denying. Such a simple logical error I would almost expect among the civilian population, it's odd when software professionals on HN seem to completely loose their logical faculties when certain topics are discussed.
> Right, because....
See above comment.
I don't think there's any conflating going on when he literally says biological differences in preferences and abilities explains why there aren't more women in tech.
It doesn't help that in the English language the word "disposition" can be used to mean both innate tendency and preference. When I say "I have a nervous disposition" I mean "I have an innate nervous tendency" rather than "I prefer to act nervously", but "disposition" can also mean "the power to do with something as one pleases." The fact that he does pair it with "innate" suggests that this preference is something we are born with however, and something that would indeed impinge on our biological suitability for a role.
He even goes as far as to suggest that "there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles" 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)." It seems clear to me that he is using quite causal language there, and this isn't just a "preference" for people-oriented roles he's talking about.
Also, to be charitable to NYT, the fact that we are having to be this forensic with language over something that was written last week (as opposed to Plato's Republic, written 5000 years ago and which has been through many translations), and still can't agree what the memo is about, probably suggests that any misinterpretation is understandable and probably not borne of malice.
We need to work on promoting common understanding and a common corpus of non-inflammatory definitions (i.e., the "charitable" interpretation of the other side) so that we can get back to the work of friendly political engagement and discussion. We must not be so quick to ostracize, mock, or dismiss those with whom we don't agree. It's usually not too hard to be sympathetic to their position if you strip away the political manipulation promoted by those who stand to benefit from divisiveness.
Not sure where you get "suitability" out of that. And not sure where you get "suitability" out of either "tendency" or "preference". Unless maybe the most adversarial reading possible, and even then...not really.
> "there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles" can be
Yes, and? In order for those who prefer more people-oriented roles to want/prefer/enjoy those roles. Incidentally: both men and women (larger overlaps, remember?)
> this isn't just a "preference" for people-oriented roles he's talking about.
That is exactly what he is talking about here.
> having to be this forensic with language
Not really. What is in the memo is fairly simple and obvious. It's the misrepresentations that twist themselves into interpretative pretzels.
If someone has a prevailing tendency, and it's a prevailing tendency that they are born with (i.e. an innate prevailing tendency), and that tendency impacts their ability to carry out certain roles, then they are innately less suitable for those roles. The second half is you selecting one definition of disposition (the "preference" one), and basing your argument on that.
What I see argued there is the tendency for women to prefer something like early childhood education or psychology over software engineering.
It has nothing to do with suitability at all.
See also: Why Brilliant Girls Prefer non STEM Subjects[1]
The studies it cites show that women who are good at math (SATs, I think) also have good verbal skills, so they simply have more options. And apparently people of either gender who have both options open to them prefer non-STEM.
That is even an ability difference (whether biological or not is irrelevant, though SAT scores appear to have a strong genetic component) that has nothing to do with women being "less suitable" for STEM and yet fewer women in STEM.
So your logic that any type of argument, even if it's just preferences, has to automatically mean that there is a claim (if hidden) women are less suited is quite simply wrong.
Apart from the mistake pointed out elsewhere of taking a statistical argument about populations that tries to explain population differences (and not individual differences) and turning it into exactly the essentialist argument you find objectionable.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
Similarly, a disposition that applies generally to a gender doesn't mean that gender is suitable or unsuitable - suitability is a term for policies that get applied to individuals.
You make an excellent point here. This is very common among James Damore's critics. Thank you for pointing this out.
Dictionaries define "suitable" in terms such as "such as to suit; appropriate; fitting; becoming", which all either carry a moral connotation (appropriate, becoming) or one of capability independent of volition (such as to suit, fitting). Let's not forget that one of the primary underlying moral motivators of the fight against sexism/discrimination against women is freedom (it's not an accident that "emancipation" means "release from captivity"). To turn, in this context, a statement that says that women do not want tech jobs into a statement that women can't do tech jobs (with a connotation of "even if they wanted") is not just a minor cosmetic change - along the axis that matters, it flips the meaning of the memo upside down.
He does say "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."
And "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business."
He basically says the gap isn't 100% caused by sexism, and he thinks gender blind strategies for closing the gender gap should be used instead of non-gender blind strategies.
I disagree, I'm all for programs that encourage more women in tech, even if the program has to be restricted only to women.(I think this also applies to minorities) I just don't think his argument to restrict these programs to only gender blind ones is a thought crime.
P.S. I'm so tired of defending this asshole, but people are aggressively filling his mouth things he did not say.
Of course variance within groups is larger than variance between groups, so making discriminatory policy decisions based on group averages is deeply unfair and offensive. That doesn't mean that setting 50:50 gender representation targets in job roles wouldn't be sub-optimal for what appear to be biological reasons.
A lot of stuff in that memo I thought was very offensive - reasoning about specifics based on group attributes is a logical error in the same class as racism and antisemitism - but it's also not reasonable to say that everyone is equal, and thus the distribution of outcomes should reflect the distribution of the population. Everyone is not equal.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...
The paragraph from NYT does not make any kind of normative "ought" claims at all about what is reasonable, it merely states that he was fired and this is what the memo said.
But what was written was not what the memo said. And Damore has been insistent that it wasn't his intention to say anything of the sort. It's what people have inferred about the memo, and the NYT author could have easily written "and made statements that can be fairly inferred to question female suitability for technical jobs". Or something pithier along those lines (I'm not a contributor to the Times).
> This is a huge misrepresentation of the ideas of the memo.
People encouraging a 'charitable' reading of the memo have argued that the memo says that Google shouldn't aim for 50/50 diversity as a goal (or that increasing gender representation as an end in itself is likely to lead to sub-optimal outcomes), and that women and men are biologically different in their suitability for different roles. I'm really trying quite hard to think where the misrepresentation comes in, or indeed, if it's not about that, what the memo is actually about.