ON AVERAGE in Norway (one of the top 5 most equal countries), females prefer more people-oriented fields such as medicine and males will favor more systems-oriented fields such as engineering. Again, this is ON AVERAGE. There are major overlaps in many fields (e.g. arts and research sciences) - and in some fields there is virtually none (e.g. nursing vs sanitation). This is not controversial amongst scientists who do their best to suspend ideological or wishful thinking.
The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google
471–480 of 660 posts
Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
That blog post doesn't go into biological reasons — read through it and for each bit of evidence, ask whether the relationship described could be explained by social expectations in early childhood. Talking about career preferences in high school students is much later than what people are talking about – socialization starts before they can talk! I'm married to a neuroscientist and have spent a lot of time talking w…
When you actually read the blog post, you'll see that it does quote research finding sex differences 1) as early as within 2 days after birth and 2) similar in baby monkeys' toy preferences as in human children. I'll let you decide (Occam's razor is helpful) whether that is more likely the product of biology or "social expectations in early childhood" (within 2 days? in monkeys?).
The person you're responding to went out of their way to acknowledge that there are indeed differences, so they are not in disagreement with this point.
Rather, The argument is that it's difficult to make a clear connection between these low-level 'nature' difference and the much higher-level issues we're discussing. That seems like a decent argument considering 1) how much of our world is socially-constructed, and 2) how often the argument ' is inferior at ' has been used to maintain the status-quo by the status-quo, and more importantly how often it has been proven wrong.
To be clear, personally I'm in the 'genetic differences matter more than we think, in general' camp, to an extent that I don't always feel comfortable talking about it in public. And I do think there's something of a bias in the social sciences towards blaming nurture over nature.
However, first of all I'm not sure if, in practice, this bias is a bad thing for society. But even if it is, arguing that male babies act different from female babies and that somehow this explains many of or societal issues strikes me as extremely spurious and downright disingenuous when such an argument is used against people who already openly acknowledge that there is clearly a genetic element to the whole story.
Furthermore, while things might be different in SV, in my neck of the woods I'm pretty firmly in the SJW- or feminist 'circles' and I rarely meet anyone who truly believes that there are no genetic differences. It strikes me as odd that so many arguments primarily argue against the view that it's '100% nurture/cultural', when as far as I can tell very few people actually defend this point of view. It reeks of strawmanning.
(not that these people don't exist, I'm just saying they're a vocal, extreme minority in my day to day experience)
Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a female engineer I don't resonate with the proposed changes for woman working with other people etc. I'm a very independent worker and that's partly why I've thrived in this field. In short, I don't think companies should make any adjustments based on gender. Just ignore it - that part I agree with - let people self select what and where they want to work themselves. And I also don't agree with quotas though I se…
I also thought the pair programming example was odd, as I've never noticed different propensities for pairing based on gender. As far as I can tell, it is equally disliked. :)
Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google
#474"Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently." As an experiment, I'd like to see if HN upvotes or downvotes this statement from the memo. I'm willing to put my karma score on the line to find out what HNers believe (this will help me decide if HN is a community worth investing…
You might be getting downvoted by people who don't like this kind of experiment. Or your use of scare quotes or something. I'm not sure you can draw a lot of conclusions from the score on your post. But, yes, most of the HN community lives in a bubble. If we're honest, we all do, but people who take pride on their education and intelligence are especially challenged when finding that kind of humility.
Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article is objecting to special pleading in a different direction. In other words, there's another train of thought: 1) Sexism exists 2) ??? 3) Differences in representation are explainable by sexism I think the original article was making a more nuanced argument allowing for an interconnected set of factors explaining the gender imbalance.
For differences in representation to be explainable by something other than sexism --- which has been rampant in other fields, in particular medicine and law, in the past and then enduringly corrected --- you'd need to establish either that CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science, virtually all of which see better (usually: much better) gender parity than CS does. In other words: you'll ne…
As I've pointed out before, that shortcut doesn't work.
If we just look at the higher level computer science your jobs, then again we will see that in the most comparable field, mathematics, women underparticiate something like 30-70.
If we ignore all that and pretend working with computers is uniquely bad for women judged against comparable careers, can we start calling out the enablers yet?
Well, bad news, there's another hurdle to jump, which is that female participation in computing is inversely related to a country's ranking on gender equality tables. I've yet to see that stubborn fact integrated successfully into the argument. It is mostly just ignored.
And that's off the top of my head. There are probably more. It's a complicated question to answer. So you must demonstrate at least familiarity with the obvious hurdles before questioning the moral worth of the people who disagree with you.
Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
read "myths of gender" or "delusions of gender" on this subject, which thoroughly debunk this essentialist nonsense about "biological" gender difference. anyone in any sociology or anthropology department will tell you how incredibly obviously false the biological essentialist position of gender is. it's literally only white men in tech or right-wing white male biologists writing outside their field of expertise who…
Nah. > In her preface to the first edition, Halpern wrote: “At the time, it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts and mistakes in the research, and bias and prejudice. ... After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles … I changed m…
Thank god we have science to confirm that to us!
Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who says we need 50% women in tech? Has Google released a statement on this? While I have seen some inflammatory articles on the subject I don't know that many woman care if there are 50% woman in tech. I can tell you as a female engineer, I just hope that women know it's open to them and feel comfortable joining the field. I don't care about convincing uninterested people. Instead here are some of the issues Google…
Not Google, but there are tech companies out there that set hiring quotas significantly higher than what the CS schools are producing [~20% female for the past 10 years]. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-... > Well, not quotas. You can’t say quotas. At least not in the United States. In some European countries, like Norway, real, actual quotas—for example, a rule saying that 40 percent of a…
Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
For differences in representation to be explainable by something other than sexism --- which has been rampant in other fields, in particular medicine and law, in the past and then enduringly corrected --- you'd need to establish either that CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science, virtually all of which see better (usually: much better) gender parity than CS does. In other words: you'll ne…
> CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science, Well the obvious difference is that CS is not a science at all. It's really more akin to engineering, which AFAIK has a similar gender imbalance.
Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google
#479Google (and other tech employers) wants to discriminate in favor of hiring more female engineers, because teams with a little bit higher ratio of female engineers work better overall, even if individual female engineers are not the best individual contributors on their teams. However, openly stating that Google wants to discriminate in favor of females - is illegal. So Google uses double-speak and encourages hiring m…
Where discrimination clearly exists, Google could quite reasonably want to compensate for it. No, not by lowering the bar or setting quotas. Legality aside, we should all know by now that hiring less able candidates isn't good for anyone - often least of all for the candidate who is being set up to fail. Other approaches include casting a wider net, training interviewers to avoid unconscious bias that could lead to false negatives, increasing retention by providing support and additional training (e.g. in negotiating techniques at performance-review time).
None of these lead to anyone less qualified overtaking anyone who is more so. They drive people like the "echo chamber" author nuts only because those people refuse to acknowledge that the problem exists (or matters) in the first place. Because they can't conclusively pin either the problem or solution down to one place in our social code, they decide it's a feature rather than a bug. It's the very same tendency that makes them - and anyone who enables or defends them - crappy engineers. I'll bet "echo chamber" guy was on the way out already, for reasons unrelated to political beliefs. It's not "brave" to manufacture an excuse for getting canned that doesn't require acknowledgement of one's own insufficiency.
Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google
#480This guy claims that women are more neurotic and talkative than men; and that they prefer thinking about aesthetics; and that women are more "cooperative." The subtext is that this is the reason we shouldn't support women becoming software engineers. Uggghhh.