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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

#471

Post by jrs95 »

camgunz wrote: post #405
jrs95 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'm not sure I agree. I don't think we read the same memo. Additionally, while this isn't entirely rational, it's hard to take anything seriously that gets started with trying to tie it to a "covert alt-right agenda". Someone who starts off with a variant of the "you're a Nazi" argument does not come across as someone without significant ideological biases.

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

#472

Post by jshevek »

jdoliner wrote: post #356
pj_mukh wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He specifically mentions in an interview that minority interviewees get assigned to a second interviewer if one interviewer doesn't like them in the first round. He saw this as a 'second chance' when the committee might just be controlling for interviewer biases. Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion.

> Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion. Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind. I'd ask a few questions about this interview practice though. 1) Is this the entirety of Google's diversity practices in hiring? I'd be surprised if it is. So even if this isn't lowering the bar…

Thank you for this. This is one of the most important comments on this page:

" Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind."

Or, at the very least, present speculation as speculation. It does "show" anything definitive.

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

#473

Post by ovao »

Diederich wrote: post #50
ovao wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He stated on Tucker Carlson that he has based his argument on what he referred to as scientific consensus. I'm not making any endorsement of the comment or of the science, since it isn't my field, but just relaying what he said.

> I'm not making any endorsement of the comment or of the science, since it isn't my field, but just relaying what he said. Perhaps this is an off-topic question, if you don't mind responding: why did you feel the need to emphasize this, after your initial sentence: > He stated on .... Thanks!

Sure! It's solely based on my experience with commenters, who sometimes view statements like that as endorsements or as indicators that personal beliefs align with those who are being quoted or described.

So it's sort of a disclaimer.

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

#474

Post by rllin »

DuskStar wrote: post #447
interlocutor wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are H1Bs from India, China and other Asian countries, and Romania and other eastern-European countries. If you subt…

IIRC, some people say the opposite - that as standards of living and gender equality improve, lower proportions of women go into Engineering - which is why Iran, Zimbabwe, Thailand etc have >40% female representation in coding classes while Sweden, New Zealand, Canada etc are <30%.

^This is exactly what I was referring to with

> It keeps leading me back to the idea that increased volition allows gender differences to propagate.

And I'm looking hard for data just in Silicon Valley, which the SO link does help with a little. I think looking at East Asians should be enlightening too.

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

#475

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tiles wrote: post #99
alpsgolden wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have? Isn't this an argument against any form of different hiring practices based on race/gender? Even if distributions of abilities are equal in nature, if a college has a lower bar based on gender, then abilities won't be…

Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still.

> Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still.

That has a very pernicious effect across the industry though. Think about what that policy does to other companies.

The other companies won't have as many high quality women because Google scouted and hired them already, but will have just as many low and medium quality women who aren't good enough for Google, and more high quality men who were displaced from Google. Which skews the gender ratio even more and creates the impression that women at those companies are lower quality than the men there or else they would have been hired away by Google -- because it causes that impression to be the truth.

And you can't fix it by having all companies adopt that policy, because it would still transfer high quality women from lower tier companies to higher tier companies, causing problems for all the women who don't get to work for the companies in the highest tier. Even the high quality women who are still in second tier companies.

The lower tier companies are where almost everybody actually works -- small and medium companies employ more people than huge companies because there are so many more of them.

Google is being quite selfish with a policy like that.

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

#476

Post by 9j9j9j9ju »

kristianc wrote: post #384
9j9j9j9ju wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Even if you accept that there are average genetic differences, they are far outweighed by socio-cultural factors. Reducing people to their genes is lazy psuedo-science If you are a man I dare you to use that argument to get yourself appointment at gynaecologist's :)

Well done for proving I can't get pregnant. What else you got? Edit: But while we're at it, there are male gynaecologists too, largely because while they're studying, they develop an affinity for gynaecology.

That wasn't the point. I think that Americans in particular are too obsessed with their "American dream", their belief that "you can be whoever you want if you work hard enough" that they cannot even accept basic facts from their own biology.

There's a reason why all sports, including non-physical ones, like chess, have separate competition for women - and when there is mixed competition women get places below 100th. Try to explain that with "socio-cultural factors" or other gender pseudo-science.

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

#477

Post by turtleofdeath »

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…

For what it's worth, he did run the document by others at Google and -- based on what I've read -- they were the ones who spread the document, not he. That's not to say he didn't intend to do it at some point, but that it was through his efforts to get said feedback that the fire started.

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

#478

Post by MollyR »

Artistry121 wrote: post #424
michaelchisari wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be completely lost on a lot of HN people that Damore's memo was not very scientific at all for the subject matter he was tackling. It was written in a certain intellectual language that often provides a veneer of authority for those who agree with his conclusions and lack the domain knowledge to understand the nuances of why he's wrong. But a lot of these "bio-truth" type of arguments do the same thing. G…

>>All it would have taken was for him to run the essay past a couple of people with solid domain expertise, and they would have pointed out the dozens and dozens of problems with his assertions, reasoning and perspective. I don't think this squares with truth. There is at least one PH.D psychologist who mentioned the memo was generally correct.

Yep, many agree with him.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-m...

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/08/10/the-google-memo-what...

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

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

#479

Post by sevilo »

I really enjoyed this interview, finally, some voices of reasons and not blind yelling at men for being sexist pigs just from reading some biased media's twisted headlines.

All these times around this memo, how many people actually cared to ask for female engineer's thoughts on this? All I see is women who don't work in engineering positions or men trying to interpret this memo from their perspective. How many actually cared what are the thoughts and impact on the main subject being discussed in the original article?

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

#480

Post by rllin »

humanrebar wrote: post #435
interlocutor wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are H1Bs from India, China and other Asian countries, and Romania and other eastern-European countries. If you subt…

I think the discrepancy between American women and immigrant women is interesting. I'm not sure we can conclude from the given evidence that the difference is reduced impediments. It could be that that the increased economic opportunity (or potential immigration benefits) makes up for other things.

I agree the increased economic opportunity could very well be the primary factor, but why is this not enough of a factor for white American women? Or are there other factors in raising a child in an economically stable society lead to more "do what you want, my child, regardless of your gender"?
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