What makes female engineers different from male engineers again?
Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
881–890 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#882What bothers me most about this article is how all of us, when we feel threatened, tend to close off our empathy for the other side which prevents us from seeing clearly that they too feel threatened. We both come across as selfish and uncaring to the other and are completely oblivious to the fact that we are doing exactly the same thing ourselves.
Marshall Rosenberg used to say that “all objectionable behavior is a tragic expression of an unmet need”. That’s worth thinking about because it points the way towards an actual solution to the problem.
The simple “nonviolent communication” method that he developed was designed to help people to break down the barriers of hostility and connect in a fashion that enables both parties to achieve a mutually satisfying resolution and a closer and more fulfilling relationship. I have found it to work very well in my personal relationships.
As a general rule, when the other person feels that you genuinely care about their needs and are truly committed to helping them to meet them, they are very likely to return the favor. At that point the hostility fades and the seeking of zero sum solutions on both sides gives way to both sides working together to brainstorm a positive sum solution that fully meets everyone's needs. This is really quite a beautiful process and I wish more people used it because I truly believe it could make the world a far better place for all of us.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#883Why not have a real discussion about the environmental differences that influence interests and expectations. American society has very clear gender roles and expectations. Why are girls by age 6 conditioned to think "math is hard". Why are men encouraged to "crush it" or "kill it" and promoted if they do so at work, and yet if a women took a similar approach she would be criticized for being too pushy or bitchy.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#884Earlier 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). Plenty of far more aggressive articles and essays have been writ…
> Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking ... Well from a strategic perspective, that's a losing attitude though. You start in a defensive position in a debate you didn't call. You are stuck in the specific frame the author has decided to limit his own argument. He also restrict the time you have to prepare such a refutal piece as every minute he spend with his argume…
You're under no compulsion to refute the author or to engage them in a debate, except that you've taken issue with their statement of their position and you've chosen to attack it.
Do you feel that viewpoints that you disagree with should not be allowed to be stated publicly and remain unopposed?
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#885Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting is that all Google related news (in the last two weeks) got flagged/hidden ("it's the algorithm", "it's the user", blabla). And now HN had time to post their own opinion piece - this one stays.
That's false and nasty. You've made up so many groundless insinuations against us over so many years that at some point I'm just going to give up and ban you; I don't think it's reasonable to expect patience with false accusations to be infinite. In the meantime, here are three comments that explain how moderators had nothing to do with this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15023538 https://news.ycombinator.com/…
I don't think it's false and nasty. I was thinking the same thing ... quite objectively. There were at least two discussions that I thought were very reasonable, and they got flagged into oblivion very quickly. So I don't know why the YC link gets to be the exception. It feels wrong.
Maybe it is due to the users, but if that is so, it feels wrong enough to give me a pretty big loss of faith in the dynamics of the community.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#886> 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…
> those who believe Google does not lower the bar for women and those who do.
That part aside - why does it matter? If you want to recruit for diversity and there is a smaller selection of one group, you are very likely to have to recruit the weaker candidate from the smaller group.
But why is that a problem? The whole argument behind striving for diversity is that "A diverse team is stronger than a non-diverse one". So the argument must be that regardless of whether you recruit the strongest individual or not, you are building the strongest team.
There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding that a) The strongest team is built by having the strongest individuals, or b) that the strongest candidate has a right to be recruited even though the team is not the strongest if he is.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#887Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's false and nasty. You've made up so many groundless insinuations against us over so many years that at some point I'm just going to give up and ban you; I don't think it's reasonable to expect patience with false accusations to be infinite. In the meantime, here are three comments that explain how moderators had nothing to do with this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15023538 https://news.ycombinator.com/…
I don't think it's false and nasty. I was thinking the same thing ... quite objectively. There were at least two discussions that I thought were very reasonable, and they got flagged into oblivion very quickly. So I don't know why the YC link gets to be the exception. It feels wrong. Maybe it is due to the users, but if that is so, it feels wrong enough to give me a pretty big loss of faith in the dynamics of the com…
It occurs to me, maybe this is another instance of the left engaging in silencing tactics and maybe that is a weakness in the flagging algorithm.
I can't vote "don't flag this". So if there are approximately two sides to a discussion, and one side wants to flag it to silence the discussion, then the discussion is going to get flagged no matter what.
So the side that wants to silence just selectively silences the opinions they don't agree with, and they win.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#888Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> A team of researchers from the UK has shown that the under-representation of women at the top end in chess is almost exactly what would be expected, given the much greater number of men that participate in the game at all. Researchers Merim Bilalic, et al., have published their research on this statistical sampling explanation in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. > In the study, the scientis…
Yes, I dismiss entire field of sociology as pseudo-science. Same as psychology.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#889Honest 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"?
You seem to be mistaken about what's been happening. Moderators haven't been flagging those articles; users have. That's what '[flagged]' means. The different outcome in this case is because of community response. There are still a lot of flags, but there are many more upvotes. That, plus the discussion quality (i.e. not a trainwreck) surprised us quite a bit. I emailed Cadran this morning that she should probably ex…
Thanks for taking the time to clarify.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
#890Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author of that quote clearly wasn't describing her fears that she had been hired only because of affirmative action, but the claims about her innate inabilities, however slight.
Yes, but this raises the issue of affirmative action causing bias about innate abilities, and that's absolutely true. If you knew there were a lower bar for people who had red hair, for example, because there's a pay gap and their population ratio isn't represented equally, every time you'd have someone on your team with red hair, you'd wonder if they were there because of the exception made for them or if they got t…
You can flip this argument on its head. As a man I'm often thinking about why the unequal gender distribution of roles and salary within my company is the way it is. I often wonder how much of my own success is due to opportunities and encouragement that women generally don't receive.