The Google memo isn’t sexist or anti-diversity, it’s science

> Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths. - This defends putting women into less-desirable jobs because desirable ones are not really that desirable? This argument is self-defeating.

> I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women. For each of these changes, we need principles reasons for why it helps Google; - Discrimination is justified if it helps the bottom line.

> We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google. - You're not allowed to believe that discrimination will hurt the bottom line. Even if senior management tells you so.

> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate - The alternative is to increase the false positive rate for those candidates.

> Having representative viewpoints is important for those designing and testing our products, but the benefits are less clear for those more removed from UX. - Having representation is leadership is not important.

> Prioritize intention. - This is also illegal. Google is a government contractor and will be required to implement affirmative action policies if its employees are too different from the general population. That's because they're taking money from all taxpayers and redistributing it to or away from certain groups. Intention here is irrelevant.

I'd be interested to read a few if you could provide some links. This assumes they exist of course, from the reading I've done on the topic I haven't seen any substantial rebuttal linked anywhere, but I've heard more than one person complain that the only rebuttal they've seen is "sexist!".

I have no particular horse in the race so if you do have content to back up your assertion I'd love to read it.

> Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated[1] by men.

Using this source [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883140

But the published article makes no claim about any causation between STEM preference and actual employment in a field. We can only speculate on causation.

I know in my job as a programmer there is certainly a great deal of "Social" interaction. Agile programming certainly benefits from "Conventional" thinking that women prefer. A graphic designer on my team is highly "Artistic" and we pull him into design decisions for engineering choices all the time.

>Despite that unjustified leap, the document goes on to suggest strongly that women working at Google are less qualified than men

Can you elaborate on this? Just because FEWER women may be qualified to work at Google doesn't mean that the ones that are are any less qualified than the men. The fact that fewer women are tall doesn't mean that tall women aren't tall for example.

>I could argue "water is composed of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule, so women are bad at software development", and my argument would just be a difference of degree worse than hers.

I fail to see how the science discussed in the memo is as irrelevant as you make it out to be. Is it really that far fetched that psychological makeup (as expressed in big-5 characteristics) and interests play a role in what people choose to pursue and what they like to do? Because software engineering is different than other occupations (such as law and medicine), it makes sense to think about what might attract one to one profession over another. Many intelligent women I know chose careers such as medicine over cs. And why not? It pays better and doesn't involve staring at a computer all day (something that not everybody enjoys). The same could be said for law and finance (investment banking, private equity).

>Among all STEM fields, computer science is distinguished for losing the participation of women over the last 10 years.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/truth-women-stem-ca...

If you scroll down to the two bar charts in the link above, you'll notice that while the % of bachelor degrees earned by women in CS has gone down, the % of PHD degrees earned has actually gone up (looks to be about 40% higher compared to 1991)! I think you would agree that earning a phd in CS is much more difficult than a BS, and I think this actually shows that women are being given more opportunity to excel academically in the subject.

As for bachelor degrees in CS, it seems like it has converged more to the % awarded in engineering. Speaking more on the differences between CS (i.e Bachelors level CS that leads to SWE jobs) and Math, I would say there is a qualitative difference between the two, and certainly one can have personal preferences. Software engineering is much more about creating systems that work and solve real-world problems. It also involves a lot of programming. Pure math (and theoretical CS) is more about investigating an abstract world and looking into interesting patterns and connections. It actually has a lot of similarities with philosophy in this regard. Some of the female math/science majors I knew actually didn't really like programming and ended up being highly successful in other fields even if they went into industry (medicine/finance/business).

>There's a reason she does that: if you don't stipulate that correlation, the argument against gender bias in computer science has to confront another damning fact, which is that gender disparity in the field isn't global. Unless women in Asia are somehow biologically different than those of the US, her argument needs some way to address the fact that women make up the majority of STEM majors in many of those cultures.

In fact, people have done cross-cultural studies. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23179757_Sex_Differ...

"Regression analyses explored the power of sex, gender equality, and their interaction to predict men's and women's 106 national trait means for each of the four traits. Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality."

From my personal experience (which I agree is less convincing than the numerous empirical studies that have been done on the topic), I'll say that many women in asian countries are pushed into studying cs/programming even if they don't like it, because those fields often provide a straightforward path to making a decent income.