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.
I've known of at least one child care/early education facility that employee fairly equal numbers. It's interesting how some kids (male and female) just respond better to men.
Yeah, I am a good mom and all, but the kids do interact somewhat differently to my husband. I support diversity. It's good to be diverse jsut in general, life is more interesting that way, and it really bugs me how in such a critical period of a person's life, their exposure is so so so not diverse.
I really enjoyed the well reasoned discussion. I think a lot more constructive dialog is happening now that people have calmed down. Of all the sentiments expressed in the article, I mainly disagree with the comment that Damore did the company harm. He posted his thoughts on an internal discussion board and someone else leaked this internal document to the press. The leaker did harm to Google not Damore. In fact, I t…
Anyone making arguments for/against firing him for the memo need to be reminded that we don't know why he was fired. It's just as likely he was fired for lying about having a PhD from Harvard. Edit: I stand corrected, he was just enrolled in a PhD program.
He didn't lie about having a PhD from Harvard.
LinkedIn doesn't allow one to differentiate between being enrolled in a PhD program, or having completed a PhD program
The common practice when enrolled in a PhD program is to list using a future completion date, making clear that you have not yet completed the program.
Google knew he was enrolled in this program when they hired him.
Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even…
It's not the quality, it's the intent. He went for an adversarial debate, not a discussion. The memo reads as him knowingly and intentionally starting a fight. My assumption, from reading the memo, was that he was expressing an opinion he knew to be controversial, knew would upset people, but wanted to make a point of proving he was right anyway in the face of those upset people. It reads a lot like the vaguely provo…
Why is a debate worse than a discussion? We strive for debate on all other topics? If you actually want to challenge assumptions you must debate and evaluate the merits of someone else's argument. A discussion would just be you think x and I think y. A debate puts warrants behind the claims in those beliefs.
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…
Sex, sexual orientation, and gender are different things. By gender spectrum she means that most people's behavior is somewhere along a continuum between completely masculine and completely feminine and that virtually nobody is at one extreme or the other.
I think the point she's making is that while men and women have different interests as groups, there are plenty of women who are interested in what are perceived as masculine things (in this case probably computer programming) and vice versa.
This would be good. I've seen 0 criticism of it that falls into this category so far. For the most part, it's essentially just been "I don't like the conclusion so I'm going to call you a sexist and make a straw man of your argument while ignoring the details."
Dr. Sadedin's Quora answer is pretty good: https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...
SlateStarCodex and HeteroDox are way better and more impartial.
Honest question: Will this thread be quickly flagged by HN moderators or taken off the front page like many others on the topic (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967819 for more info)? Or are there "exceptions"?
This mostly supports a highly biased reading of the memo so it will definitely stay on the front page for hours. There have been at least 3 other considerably more interesting follow ups written by women ("these are not my people" essay, the one by the physicist, and the one yesterday from the google recruiter that was "sick" of it) and all three got flagged to hell and disappeared. Anybody compaining got the stock "you are just another idealogue" admonisminet from moderators.
All i got from the memo, besides the echo chamber part, which google, and others managed to prove almost immediately, was that the author thinks there are biological differences between men and women, which lead to women being less interested in the field, thus being under-represented, and that google's sexist practices won't change that, only make people resent the diversity hires. Was i reading the wrong memo? Beca…
As a woman I can say "women are less inclined to be engineers" is only a skip and hop away from "women are not suited to be engineers.
I would say don't even bother with the biological argument because as a woman you likely know all too well how it's mainly used. Anyway, its not really the business of a company to argue such abstract matters.
It's one thing to be teased about these things but it's another to have people in authority making an opinion on such abstract things. No matter how tame it was. Woman know they are capable of doing anything so they don't really want anything less than that entering the discussion.
It really doesn't matter if the memo had any truth to it or not. At the end of the day, that really is immaterial to the result. What happened because of the memo is it managed to piss off virtually every woman in the company. You don't piss off 20,000 of your coworkers in a completely avoidable manner and keep your job.
I agree with what you said, but what if the reason they were pissed off was because of external manipulation and manufactured outrage over something the author neither said nor implied?
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.
I think it is a lot of crazy moms that fan the flame, just from my observation. Adn the crazy moms are fanned by the media of creepy dudes. Do you know how frequently on my mommy group will be some dude's photo show up "this guy was taking picture of my kid!!!" ....... all the other moms are like. OMG OMG OMG!! Call the police.. Then there are always a few moms go like, FOR WHAT??!! for being a dude and taking some pictures at a public place.. You know there hasn't been a child missing in this neighborhood since 1995.... Then all the other moms yell at the reasonable mom..etc etc. There is a mix, I don't think it's limited to leftist or conservative moms. If anything, I found the really really rich moms (not conservative per se, but lean that way more) to be a bit more crazy in terms of thinking the world is dangerous and if their kid scrap their knee they need to go to the ER..
Tell me you have a paper on that. At least there would be a scientific basis for mandating Unconscious Bias retraining.
I don't, but I was pointing out the annoyance of such a statement. You could probably scrounge up such a paper on google scholar. For example, black lives matter 's point was simply that some specific white people were biogted, and yet all lives matter is a thing. Which is an example of the inverse (generalizing specific complaints, vs. in this case, specifying general complaints).