I think his failure was just naivete. He thought Google wanted legitimate feedback or would support intellectual honesty over popularity. That was wrong.

That's not the only issue. Taking away the political content entirely, storing up all your greivances and airing them in a single document intended to attack the entire purpose of other teams was a stupid thing to do. I've seen people do the same thing with technical issues and it's just totally counter-productive.

That's not fair summary of the document at all. In fact Damore was aligned with the purpose of the diversity groups and trying to reason how what is known about different preferences and personalities between men and women could be used to help improve diversity at Google.

For example, Damore's memo has a section where he reasons that one reason women may not be promoted as often is because Google is organized to recognize and reward individual accomplishments rather than participation in groups. Damore theorizes based on cited research that women may be more inclined to contribute in group based settings rather than all alone, and so perhaps aligning promotion to recognize group contributions too would help diversity.

> Damore was aligned with the purpose of the diversity groups

I'm curious your source on this information.

Yup. Like waterfall and agile; it works better to go one-smallest-chunk at a time.

I mean, the authors of some of the studies Damore cited came out and said that he was misrepresenting them and that they disagreed with the conclusion he drew from them.

I think the most that can be said is that is that it is uncertain the degree of influence these (well supported) sex differences in general temperament and preferences have on the specific jobs of software engineering and tech leadership.

However, just because the science is not settled on the subject does not mean one cannot put forth a reasonable hypothesis.

And for the record, the idea that these sex differences have no influence on inclinations towards these specific jobs is also a hypothesis.

Damore may be wrong about the nature of that influence, but I think most people would be surprised if the "no influence" hypothesis was true.

I really wish there was a short way to ask for links without sounding confrontational but maybe this preamble will suffice for this message. Do you have any links about these refutations? Thanks.

This article cites two of them and goes into some of the places where Damore made unjustified leaps in logic.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

Here is another that is more detailed but doesn't talk mention individual scientist opinions

https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-r...

Note that your second link says that Damore's claims were basically correct, modulo a few quibbles. Which is almost beside the point. The whole issue demonstrated a failure at every level of society and corporate leadership.

I read through the first article.

>Damore’s assertion that men and women think different is actually pretty uncontroversial, and he cites a paper to back it up, from a team led by David Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and director of the International Sexuality Description Project. The 2008 article, “Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Difference in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures,” does indeed seem to show that women rate higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness

Good. Wired article agrees women rate higher on neroticism.

> The first-order criticism here is easy: Damore oversells the difference cited in the paper. As Schmitt tells WIRED via email, “These sex differences in neuroticism are not very large, with biological sex perhaps accounting for only 10 percent of the variance.” The other 90 percent, in other words, are the result of individual variation, environment, and upbringing.

In Damore's memo, on the subject of trait differences between men and women Damore writes:

"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."

This is written right under an illustration of two overlapping bell curves with one curve shifted slightly to the right as an example of the overlap he is talking about. It's hard for me to take anyone as honest interlocutor if they are interpreting this as "overselling the difference" as the Wired author does.

On the subject of whether the differences are biological or cultural, Damore cites the fact that trait differences are consistent across cultures and that they are linked to prenatal hormones and heredity, among other points. Perhaps the extent to which trait differences are cultural or genetic is more debatable, but it is beside the point of Damore's essay. Whether trait differences are biological or cultural, Google still acts within a context that they exist . Damore's argument does not hinge on the differences being genetic.

Wired writes:

>Women as a group score higher on neuroticism in Schmitt’s meta-analysis, sure, but he doesn’t buy that you can predict the population-level effects of that difference. “It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),” writes Schmitt. So, yes, that’s the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore.

The researcher is saying that it is unclear to him if neuroticism would play a role in Google employment. That is not exactly disagreement, more the researcher saying he doesn't know. Damore is actually in a better position to judge than the researcher as Damore is not only aware of the research, but also employment practices at Google.

Furthermore, the researcher isn't calling this an unjustified leap in logic or disputing Damore's evidence or interpretation of the facts, just the conclusion. That's perfectly fair, but it isn't fair to take a point like "It isn't clear to me if neuroticism affects Google employment" and act like that is a rejection of the Damore memo. The conclusion isn't clear to one researcher.

Wired:

>In general, he notes, women prefer to work with people and men prefer to work with things—the implication being that Google is a more thing-oriented workplace, so it just makes sense that fewer women would want to work there. Again, the central assertion here is fairly uncontroversial. “On average—and I emphasize that, on average—men are more interested in thing-oriented occupations and fields, and that difference is actually quite large,” says Richard Lippa, a psychologist at Cal State Fullerton and another of the researchers who Damore cites.

Again, the researcher and the Wired author admit Damore has the right science and shrug at the question of whether the science can be applied to Google. As before, the researcher is not rejecting the conclusion and is not claiming Damore misrepresents the facts. The researcher is saying that they do not know if the conclusion can be reached.

Damore lists "pre-natal testosterone" as a biological cause of sex trait differences and then links those differences to different career preferences. Wired writes:

"Still, most hormone researchers agree that these differences are real. But that they’re directly linked to prenatal testosterone? Not so much. And to differences in career choice? “There’s 100 percent no consensus on that,” says Justin Carré, a psychologist at Nipissing University in Ontario. “The human literature on early androgen exposure is really very messy.”"

Again, there is conflicting literature and evidence and the point is debated, but what the "actual researcher" says is not "Damore made an unjustified leap in logic" but rather, "There's 100 percent no consensus on that".

That's it as far as scientists responding to Damore goes - or perhaps I missed something more substantive?

Psychology is barely science in the first place, so I don't see why Damore's interpretation is any less valid than an author's.

If you can't reproduce the results consistently, it's not science. Results in psychology are very frequently not reproducible.

The real error Damore made is buying into the idea that studies in psychology can really tell us useful info at all.

Thank you, that's an awesome tidbit