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Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

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Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#391

Post by jorgemf »

ATsch wrote: post #331

I think it's interesting how the Edith stated Damore had said women were worse at their job, while one of the other women explicitly said he didn't, and the other only mentioned interest in programming. This is similar to the divide I've seen in the media. I have not read the memo in it's entirety, but since the impression I got from reading a few news stories was that Damore had only made his controversial statement…

> I also wonder why Edith felt the need to mention gender not being binary in a discussion partly about whether biological sex influences choice of job, considering the fact that as far as I know biological sex is indeed binary, you either have at least one Y chromosome or you don't.

I think she refers that gender is not binary as you can be straight male, straight female, gay male, gay female, bisexual, asexual, etc.

I am not completely sure but I think there can be mutations where you have 2 chromosomes X and 1 Y. So XXY [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#392

Post by jdoliner »

wan23 wrote: post #292
jdoliner wrote: post #149

> He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups. Such misrepresentation is harmful to those of us at Google who have to overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills. This to me is the most…

Though if you read the memo carefully, Damore doesn't actually make the claim that Google lowers the bar for women in the sense that they hire women who are less capable. His complaint is that Google lowers the bar in the sense of reducing the number of "false negative" rejections of diversity candidates by paying more attention to those applications. He was calling for an end to this practice not because it was allo…

The devil's in the details on this stuff, and unfortunately we don't have the details so it's hard to say exactly how much devil there is in them.

How do they lower the false negative rate? A sibling comment mentioned Google's practice of giving diversity candidates a second interview if they fail the first. This would mean if you have a false negative rate of `n` your false negative rate would become `n^2` (which is lower because n is hopefully much less than 1). However, this also increases your false positive rate from `p` to `1 - (1 - p)^2`. So in effect, this is lowering the bar as it's giving certain groups a better chance of being hired when they're not qualified than others. I would be very interested to hear about a hiring practice that lowers false negative rate without affecting false positive rate. I can't think of one right now but it seems like it should be possible.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#393

Post by Method-X »

Blackthorn wrote: post #177
rpiguy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thoughts of one twenty-something engineer posted to an internal message board (for these kinds of discussions I might add) does not create a hostile workplace or harm Google in any way. Basically, in any other context we expect people who have vastly differing views to be able to put them aside and work together. The only exception to this rule seems to be around leftist issues, where if you disagree you are out…

> The thoughts of one twenty-something engineer posted to an internal message board (for these kinds of discussions I might add) does not create a hostile workplace or harm Google in any way. Considering how all sixteen of my female teammates were pissed off about it, I'm going to go ahead and say you are demonstrably wrong.

Some people take offence to the fact humans are related to apes and that the earth is more than 6000 years old. Doesn't mean we should tip toe around their ridiculous sensitivities.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#395

Post by astrocat »

> Edith: I disagree completely and utterly that the (yes, real) average differences between men and women map to being better or worse at certain jobs. Interest in certain jobs, certainly.

This is, I think, the key. We can all recognize that there are REAL, average differences in interests between men and women, DEFINITELY driven by society/culture, and maybe by biology/genetics... BUT, this has absolutely no correlation with performance. If fewer women are, on average, interested in software engineering, this absolutely does NOT mean that women software engineers are, on average, worse at their jobs.

The error so many "Team-Damore" men make is that they zealously stand behind the argument that "Better-performing men are being overlooked in favor of worse-performing women/minorities." And yet there is absolutely no way to possibly back up that claim: can anyone clearly demonstrate over the course of a statistically significant number of hirings that most of the women candidates who were hired were A)chosen from a candidate pool that included at least one equivalently-or-more talented man; and B) that those men who were not picked would have been both better performing as individuals and better employees for the team/company as a whole? No. Nobody has shown this because it is, essentially, impossible to demonstrate. Citing studies of character traits or interests of men and women "on average" does absolutely nothing to support claims A and B. And so all these men end up doing is simply implying: "well, I BELIEVE that all these real women coworkers of mine are worse than the hypothetical male candidate that wasn't hired... on average." Which is clearly an insult to your existing coworkers and toxic to your work environment.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#396

Post by semi-extrinsic »

CydeWeys wrote: post #328
notreallythough wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This interview is literally a criticism that says very little about his style of writing. When they talk about "how" he approached this subject, it has to do with overall tone and the medium of delivery, not the nuances of his writing style. > If he had spoken with some of them individually and spent some time trying to better understand their views on the issues, I suspect he would have done a better job choosing wo…

I have some people at work whose opinions I value highly that I occasionally run ideas and documents by before disseminating things to a wider group. It's very helpful, and has sometimes caught potential damaging misinterpretations before they were spread too widely, allowing me to reword things. I definitely agree that if he'd simply had a few women he knew and trusted at work read it before he disseminated it widel…

> If he didn't know any women at work that he trusted with this then that itself is a huge problem.

Given the fact that he was fired over this, i.e. Google thinks it's very bad, and assuming he had a hunch this was so, is it reasonable to believe he should be able to trust a female coworker with this memo not to file a complaint?

Put more generally: is it reasonable that one should expect one's coworkers to keep silent about a fireable offense?

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#397

Post by zygga »

belorn wrote: post #242

A common criticism by each four of the female engineers is how the memo effected them in their job and how they had to prove themselves afterward. This strongly reminds me of about a case a year ago when a kindergarten teacher was tried and charged for rape against several children. After a lot of media attention, many male teachers all over the nation reported to constantly having prove to parents and fellow female…

>both the left, the feminist movement, and the right fanned the flame against male teachers

I find it hard to believe that this would be generally true. Source?

Edit: obviously you're always going to have some twats doing things like that, but that's true for everything. I'm looking for evidence that it's more than average here.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#398

Post by Blackthorn »

Method-X wrote: post #393
Blackthorn wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thoughts of one twenty-something engineer posted to an internal message board (for these kinds of discussions I might add) does not create a hostile workplace or harm Google in any way. Considering how all sixteen of my female teammates were pissed off about it, I'm going to go ahead and say you are demonstrably wrong.

Some people take offence to the fact humans are related to apes and that the earth is more than 6000 years old. Doesn't mean we should tip toe around their ridiculous sensitivities.

Does your workplace have a very large group of young Earth creationists? Does it go out of its way to recruit them? If so, have you posted a ten page memo that says that the hiring bar has been lowered by that effort?

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#399

Post by l_t »

canoebuilder wrote: post #323
Blackthorn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). This was addressed in the article. This burden has fallen on w…

to have to defend themselves at work this time, is ridiculous. Let's just agree on two things then. _Every woman at google has every right to be there. & _The number of women at google relative to the number of men is not the result of mostly imperceptible, malicious actions by men, but rather due the fact that the personal interests between the sexes varies substantially on average, and this results in skewed sex ra…

Can't agree on number 2, because it's a false dichotomy. The gender imbalance cannot be simplified to being because of any one specific cause (like a difference in personal interests). There is a whole cluster of causes, including:

1. Malicious actions by men. This undoubtedly happens, let's not pretend otherwise. However, it might not be very common.

2. Non-malicious but annoying behavior from men directed towards women. This could include unwanted flirtation, accidental condescension, inappropriate jokes, etc.

3. A male-oriented culture. Even if the guys don't act in an annoying way, being in a significant minority is usually less appealing than being in a situation where you have a more even gender split.

4. Boys and girls are nurtured in different ways, which can drive them towards having different interests as adults.

5. Biological differences between men and women. Personally, I think this is one of the least important factors, and it's also the only one that we can't change.

Whether or not (5) is an issue, (1-4) can and should be addressed, so that women who are naturally inclined to CS are not nudged away from the industry by their life experiences.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#400

Post by poohblahoyamo »

belorn wrote: post #242

A common criticism by each four of the female engineers is how the memo effected them in their job and how they had to prove themselves afterward. This strongly reminds me of about a case a year ago when a kindergarten teacher was tried and charged for rape against several children. After a lot of media attention, many male teachers all over the nation reported to constantly having prove to parents and fellow female…

I desperately want make male childcare workers for my children. I honestly could careless about women in tech. Installing a more even view of gender on our kids will prob do a lot more good for women in tech in the long term than any amount of screaming now.
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