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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

#381

Post by mantas »

mempko wrote: post #231
rpiguy wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blanket statement that Google leans left is empirically true. You also seem to have misread his comments about violence, as he claims the left tends to be more compassionate. Did you read the memo?

An advertising company cannot lean left by construction.

Today's left has went a far way from socialism and whatnot. It's funny how today's far right cares about "common man" and labour rights more than far left which is busy with identity politics.

For example, in Europe more and more labour is voting for right wing parties. While left is becoming more and more rich/educated urbanite.

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

#382

Post by jxramos »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #11

> he wasn’t sure whether he was correct and simply wanted to start a discussion (as he subsequently stated in a YouTube interview) Anyone got a link?

I watched some youtube interviews of him, one on Bloomberg where he seemed pretty nervous and not as articulate or as relaxed as on this longer interview https://youtu.be/SEDuVF7kiPU with some Canadian professor who apparently has a bad rap of his own. Still an interesting discussion with some odd 3rd party alternate Googler in the background who speaks up every now and then but who has an obscure role in the context of the overall discussion. I was pretty curious too who this fella was that stirred up the hornet's nest.

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

#383

Post by pishpash »

mpweiher wrote: post #327
mcfunk wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on the nose. And in fact, the proportion of women in computer science was tracking with other sciences until the mid-eighties, when it started to dive, while women's representation in other sciences continued to climb. One of the more glaringly inconsistent observations with Damore's claims. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Except that CS isn't a science, it's engineering. And it tracked down to the level of other engineering fields. http://news.janegoodall.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/perce... So the mystery is not why it went down, it was why it was higher initially.

You explained it yourself. It was initially a science, and in the 80's it became engineering and now, a get-rich scheme. Each era attracts a different set of people.

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

#384

Post by kristianc »

9j9j9j9ju wrote: post #367
kristianc wrote: post #102

> 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. And we know – and many of us have experienced – that interest levels are also heavily influenced by social and cultural factors. This is the key point. Even if you accept that there are average genetic differences, they are far outweighed…

>> 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.

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

#385

Post by aidenn0 »

Does anyone know if there is anywhere with discussions with women who aren't engineers? I'm thinking find a dozen random women who were 95th percentile or higher on the SATs 6 years ago and ask them 1) Why they chose their field and 2) Why they didn't go into computer science.

At least at the college I went to, the ratio of women graduating in CS was slightly higher than the ratio of women enrolled in my freshman CS class (proportionally, slightly more men switched majors or dropped out than women).

Places like Google hiring more female engineers is good, and even helps with the pipeline problem, since role-models are one way of encouraging disadvantaged groups to pursue particular careers. However, it would be nice to know if there are interventions we could make directly earlier in the pipeline.

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

#386

Post by arcticfox »

jake-low wrote: post #191
nicolashahn wrote: post #124

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). Plenty of far more aggressive articles and essays have been writ…

This is addressed in TFA. > [W]hen I go to work, I go to work, and not to a debate club. Some people at Google reacted by saying “well if he’s so wrong, then why not refute him,” but that requires spending a significant amount of time building an argument against the claims in his document. On the other hand, if I remain silent, that silence could be mistaken for agreement. I should not be forced into that kind of de…

It seems like you're holding a significant double standard here, which is exactly why Damore feels his views are systemically quashed.

For example, that line of reasoning would go: Damore saw practices he feels are discriminatory based on the available evidence. His silence could be mistaken for agreement. He should not be forced into that kind of debate at work.

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

#387

Post by dandare »

dguaraglia wrote: post #302
dandare wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Google was and is a debate club - there is extensive information about Google's multiple discussion boards and lively cluture of dialectics. Why do you object/punish a single discussion that you happen to disagree with?

There's a slight difference between technical flamewars, pointed debates about expanding the amount of bathrooms available per building and Damore's post. If you can't see the difference, honestly I can't help you.

Lol, I can not argue with this :D

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

#389

Post by cyanexttuesday »

kansface wrote: post #96

A related post from SSC on the subject: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... TLDR: Personal interests can plausibly explain the entire gender imbalance.

That blew my mind too. I wish that article could be pinned to the top of hackernews forever.

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

#390

Post by waqf »

pj_mukh wrote: post #230
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…

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.

It's trading off the false positive vs. false negative rate in the hiring signal. The question is what your assumptions are about the sources of error in that signal.

If you assume that the variance consists exclusively of false negatives due to discrimination, then the extra interviewers will work as Google claims and no bars will be lowered.

If you assume that the variance consists of randomly distributed error that's the same for all interviewees, then the second interviewer is just some statistical sleight-of-hand that's, on average, equivalent to lowering the bar.

Of course it's possible that the truth is in between.

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