Brief thoughts on the “Google memo”

I agree that a 50/50 split in men and female software engineers seems like a desirable thing. If it existed today I would not consider it surprising, and I would consider it to be a great thing. That said: is this also true for bricklayers and construction workers, who are basically 100% male? What about nurses or child care givers, who are predominantly female?

How do you decide which jobs that have gender skew warrant specific attention towards a balanced gender ratio? All of them? The ones that don't involve physical labor? In sports we accept men on average have higher physical strength and endurance than women, hence league separation, so perhaps gender skew is expected here and uncontroversial for the same reasons? What about the jobs that are particularly high paying or high status? Should it be the case that everyone should get an equal share of the pie of value for these desirable fields, but less desirable fields do not matter because of their high supply? Perhaps its just the jobs that just don't seem to make any sense as to why gender would skew them that are the ones we should worry about?

I think answering this question concretely and consistently is a pre-requisite to having a constructive debate about this subject. There is nothing to me particularly special or interesting about software engineering in particular that makes it stand out among other fields that are heavily gender skewed that do not seem to cause nearly as much debate, other than that it seems counter-intuitive that there should be any such imbalance, given the nature of the work. Perhaps that is enough, a "gut check" if a field should be gender dominated. If the "gut check" says "that doesn't make sense", we should strive for equality.

But here we are, back at a facet of the original memo's thesis: when those gut checks pass they are probably based upon internalized models we have for gender preferences. If you are being uncharitable, stereotypes. If you are being nice, statistically significant correlations of preferences tied to gender, backed by evidence.

Going roughly by what I assume to be the GP's logic then, there should be a minefield surrounding discussions of having the government provide public services at all, since, naturally, that will lead to Soviet-style communism and the deaths of tens of millions.

I'd also be wary of ascribing to large-scale political sentiment (not even shared by all) the kind of purpose and wisdom involved in engineering decisions.

As you quoted "Without inside knowledge it's hard to distinguish stupidity from good engineering" - in this case, there is no inside knowledge.

Do you have any studies or statistics to back you up or is this just what you believe? Also, how does it account for males that come from a poor/under-privileged backgrounds that also requires them to have more motivation, determination, work and ability to win over others and get where they are?

> The fastest-growing companies at 200%+ growth, are 75% more likely to have a female founder.

Revenue growth is meaningless without any sort of revenue numbers to compare it against - compare growing revenues from $5,000/year to $15,000/year (200% growth) with growing from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000 (100% growth).

As a corollary to your point though, how many women founders are there in unicorns?

Unfortunately not that many: http://swaay.com/todays-unicorn-companies-where-are-the-wome...

Would such companies be more or less successful with female founders, I don't know, but I suspect gender doesn't really play much of a role, in much the same way I suspect that gender of founders doesn't play much of a role in revenue growth.

> This is probably wrong,

So you think that there is difference in ability based on gender?