He spoke to the distribution of preferences and abilities. Turning this into an absolutist simplification should offend anyone with a brain.

The science seems to state that nature rolls the dice more with males than with females. We know, for instance, that there are far more very low IQ males than females, and this is understood as fact. This doesn't mean that you or I are therefore low IQ, despite the distribution increase. And the stats seem to say that nature also varies on the side of high IQ more with males.

That says nothing to whether a given male or female are either low or high, and only applies at scale. Scale that is meaningless when assessing a given candidate, but is certainly pertinent when talking about representation across an entire industry or large organization.

There are more dumber men and more smarter men than women.

> the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes

From the article:

> women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering

Do you not see the difference?

It's always the same kind of crap from bigots. "Women MIGHT be less capable of engineering." "Black people MIGHT be more prone to crime." "Gay people MIGHT be more likely to be pedophiles." and it's always based in bigotry, not in science or evidence.

I have a lot of problems with how the issue was raised by Damore and I think his firing was appropriate, but I also agree that his essay has been wildly mischaracterized by the media.

If you want to make a case that someone means something other than what they clearly say (or write) then you should have a convincing argument to justify such a claim. Otherwise you're just projecting your prejudices on the discussion.

How many people with top engineering skills do you think flip patties at McDonalds? Probably not many. Does that mean they're worse at flipping patties? No, it means they want to work elsewhere.

The second sentence wasn't written by Damore, so why attribute to him what he didn't write?

For example, when navigating, men tend to use dead reckoning, while women tend to prefer landmarks.

Similar differences may exist with respect to the modes of thinking useful for engineering. With that in mind, consider that our current modal computer architecture and programming paradigms were designed and implemented by men. There may be some intrinsic bias towards man-thought embedded in the entire toolchain.

As a thought experiment, imagine a computing system designed from the ground up by women, with no input whatsoever from existing systems or concepts. A group of females are placed in a time stasis bubble with no outside communication, and emerge from it only after they develop a computing ecosystem of equal capabilities to the existing one.

With this in mind, now give all new students in the pipeline the option to try out both, then choose between the new system and the old for the entire remainder of their career. In this experiment, try to determine whether, after 20 years, the overall balance between sexes is equal, and whether the balance within each system is biased to one sex or the other.

If Babbage and Lovelace had further developed their computational mills, Lady Ada's influence over early programming might have snowballed, such that software development would have been sex-biased towards women from the start. As it is, the ecosystem currently sex-biased towards men was created mostly by men, simply as a matter of feedback. In order to make the existing ecosystem less intrinsically biased in the future, it needs to be shaped by a less-unbalanced group now.

So the natural biological differences are irrelevant. A fair system would have caused those differences to cancel out or complement each other through equal participation. To make the unfair system more fair, you have to force it, against its natural flow toward unfairness.

1) Professions tend to become more gender biased over time

2) It was equally likely that computing become a female dominated field.

These are novel claims that require justification. If (1) was true, we should expect to see it in other fields. But many industries seem quite stubbornly gender neutral - for example medicine. (Although many specialties are male dominated or female dominated). And if (2) were true we should see the same profession have different gender biases in different cultures. But I don’t think we see that either. My understanding is that generally the direction of gender bias we see in other highly gender biased fields is consistent cross-culturally. (nurse, prison guard, career criminal, construction worker, child care worker, etc).

Your understanding isn't correct, at least for nursing.

Nurses were male until the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing#History give examples of predominately nurses and caregivers in other cultures before that time. http://minoritynurse.com/rethinking-gender-stereotypes-in-nu... says "Before modern day nursing, men were nurses, not women. The earliest recorded nursing school was established in India around 250 B.C. It was exclusively for men; women were not allowed to attend because it was believed that women were not as pure as men."

What happened in the 1800s? Quoting from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1081399.pdf :

> Through the efforts of Florence Nightingale in the mid-nineteenth century, nursing was established as a women's profession (Hus, Chen & Lou, 2010). Nightingale's image of the nurse as subordinate, nurturing, domestic, humble, and self-sacrificing, as well as not too educated, became prevalent in society. The American Nursing Association ostracized men from nursing until 1930, when as a "result of a bylaw amendment, provision was made for male nurses to become members of the American Nurses' Association" (In Review - American Nurses' Association, p. 6). Looking back in nursing history, Florence Nightingale, and the American Nursing Association ostracized men from the nursing profession.'

See also http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2648.1997.... , "History appears to indicate that men have had a place in nursing for as long as records are available, but their contribution has been perceived as negligible, largely because of the dominant influence that the 19th century female nursing movement has had on the occupation's historical ideology."

> The term nosocomial originates from the latin nosocomi, the name given to male care-givers, meaning that men were prominent in Ancient Rome

... If they needed a special word for male care-givers in ancient rome, that implies they assumed care givers were female by default.

I don't see how you can therefore infer that men weren't the majority of nurses back then.

As for the term "nosocomi", it doesn't imply that care givers were female by default. Latin is a gendered language. A different word would have been applied to female caregivers. As an example from Spanish, think "maestro" and "maestra" for male and female teacher, respectively.

If the Latin only used the masculine form, and never the feminine, then it indicates the job was primarily (or perhaps only) done by men.

Consider the word "maid", short for "maiden" meaning "female virgin." We have a special word for female domestic workers but that doesn't imply that domestic workers were male by default.

Similary, in many English speaking parts of the world, a senior or supervisory nurse is a "sister". This title includes males, eg. from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282839878_Clinical_... "… what was nice there was a senior male sister that welcomed us and orientated us, so that really help me a lot to accept the situation …".

A male sister may also be referred to using the gender neutral term "charge nurse".

Again you see that a gendered term for a given job does not imply that job is usually done by the other gender.

Or, we have "mailman", "chairman", "cabin boy" for jobs which were usually done by males, while "charwoman", "lunch lady", and "call girl" indicate females. The existence of a special gendered term doesn't mean the mail was usually delivered by women, or that prostitutes were usually men.

If there is an imbalance in intrinsic inchoate biases, such as if men tended to unconsciously hire 55% men and 45% women, whereas women preferred to hire 50% each, then an initial 50-50 split, but with no other biases in play after someone enters the field, would drift towards an equilibrium at around .5263 men and .4737 women. More men magnify the male bias towards males.

My other assumption was that early movers have a magnified effect on the future of the field. Think about how any arbitrary decisions made by Turing or von Neumann could still be affecting computing today, like the sign convention for the charge on an electron--that could have been +1 instead of -1, and many of the signs in physics equations would be flipped. If a female had been making those decisions, we might be using a different computing paradigm that would better match female thought patterns. Computing as we now know it initially came about through the confluence of war and academia. Mathematicians designed machines to aim artillery pieces and automate military-grade ciphers, and then to automatically break automated ciphers. The development of computing has occurred rapidly and recently, and after air travel and telephony, such that there really is only one global culture for it. The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described.

You would have to look back into history, when culture barriers were stronger, to look for examples of computing devices that may have been used preferentially by men or women.

I agree and acknowledge that. But many other fields are much older than computing, and arose independently in separate countries (medicine, childcare, law, organised crime, nursing, farming, cooking, construction, etc). If your hypothesis were true we should expect strong, consistent gender biases in all those fields. And we would expect that the dominant gender in different fields would vary across different cultures. But we see the opposite of that in the world - the dominant gender in different professions is remarkably consistent between isolated cultures. In the case of child care its even consistent cross-species.

SSC had a much more in-depth analysis than I'll manage in this comment. The onus is on you to explain why we don't see that actually happen in the world, as would be predicted by your theory.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

> The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described.

I understand why this feels true, but in practice it is easier today than it has ever been to make novel user interfaces for programmers and users. There are no gatekeepers between you and your code editor. Please experiment with this; I'd love to see what you come up with.

It would actually be a rather interesting theory to test, and I would hope someone does test the theory. However your claim is not currently known to be true, rather just a promising theory.

As I recall, his entire point is that we should be reshaping the field to make it more appealing to women so that they are drawn to it naturally, as opposed to the current strategy of giving women preferential treatment in the hiring process, only to have them leave because we haven't addressed the underlying problems that are driving them away.

That's hardly a radical idea. There are benefits to his approach: I, for one, think the field would benefit greatly if we focused more on, for example, the importance of empathy. Thinking about others ought to be a fundamental pillar of software engineering, as it naturally leads to better UX, APIs, and services. And when we think about the people who will be maintaining our code, we're inclined to write better code that is easier to grok.

Are you seriously saying that the meaning I should take away from that quote is that women don't work in tech because of their superior ability?

And the quote we're arguing about, "women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering", also says "may". So it seems you're arguing a strawman.

So an overly simplified argument might be women don't work in tech because they both prefer, and are superior in, different working environments.

What you should take away from his quote is nothing. Especially the paraphrased portion of the quote that ignores preferences. Read his memo in it's entirety and judge it in it's entirety.

You even highlight the word _exactly_ but that is not what he said. That quote says they don't have equal representation and there maybe biological differences to blame.

The main reason for confusion seems to be the quote assumes women might not be as attracted by tech work as men are. That assumption changes the meaning because in your interpretation "Women want to be in tech as much as men and D'Amore is saying they just don't have the genes for it" vs "Women want to be in tech less than men to start with and besides bigotry, hate and marginalization, cultural biases, there could be a biological explanation for it".

I know we all think tech is awesome, we are getting paid to do what we love, etc. But it turns out many people, and maybe women more than men, don't find sitting in a cubicle all day inverting binary trees appealing. I don't think biology is the main driver here [+] but D'Amore does. He might be wrong, but I don't see why it had to become this controversial topic and lead to firing and lawsuits. They could have just said "here is why science doesn't support your view, thanks for starting the discussion, but you're wrong" and leave it at that.

[+] I don't support his view, I'd personally blame culture for women not even wanting to be in tech. Having lived in Eastern Europe where there is less "stigma" against girls liking math and computer science. It's not a cause, or a talking point at least, it's just a profession like accountant or doctor.

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

[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

[3] https://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_funny_thing_happ...

B = biological causes

... A differs in part due to B ...

... reason why we don't see equal rep in tech/leadership.

Then he goes on to say maybe if we take A into consideration when designing tech and leadership roles, can we solve this dilemma.

He does not mention performance, just preference.

Perhaps because what he actually said was that statistically women tend to have lower expression of the traits that engineering positions favor and lower interest in those positions. And because of this the representation of women in tech is lower than their representation in the general population.

Nowhere did he say "all women are worse than all men at engineering jobs". In fact he repeatedly explained that there are tons of exceptions to the statistical rule.

So it's your projection of what you assume he really thinks. What evidence are you basing this on?

[1] And averages are of course irrelevant when dealing with individuals, who should each be judged according to their own merit, not according to generalizations of the groups they belong to.

e.g. It would be like me suggesting you wrote: "men and women are different 'repugnant crap'". It's accurate, but misrepresentative of what you meant. One is honest, and the other is dishonest.

> 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

None of this says anything about the abilities of any individual women. There are many excellent female engineers. Nor does it say that these excellent women engineers don't face discrimination because of their gender. All it says is that you'd expect fewer women to be represented in the population of the most competent engineers (in the same way you find fewer men in veterinary fields, for example).

Given there is a section in the memo with similar verbiage as the article's quote, I would give some slack to the author if the sentiment remained from the original. However the author's quote changes the meaning of what Damore said quite a bit.

> 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.

I don't think this part is inherently wrong, and could be proven or disproven with well designed studies.

I think if he had made a better written argument that focused more clearly on the idea that part of the gender gap is due to a lack of interest by women, that he probably still would be employed.

Personally I say give everyone the same rights (i.e single people) and a large part of the problem would go away.