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

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

#641

Post by riyadparvez »

computerex wrote: post #301
zzalpha wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just gonna copy another comment I made elsewhere: The problem is that the gender differences cited cannot, in aggregate, explain the 70/30 bias toward men in the industry. There's a real similarity to the global warming debate, here. There are many factors that affect global mean temperature. For example, over the very long term, the sun will get brighter. But that can only account for an astonishingly tiny fract…

> But no serious psychologist or sociologist would claim that those differences can account for the dramatic real world bias in the industry. It simply doesn't follow. What's your evidence for this? Debrah Soh, the author supposedly has a PhD in sexual neuroscience so one would think she is qualified to make comments about this. And although I can't confirm this myself, the article does say that societies with greate…

> And although I can't confirm this myself, the article does say that societies with greater gender equity also have greater gender gaps due to the differences in what each gender values.

I can only provide my own anecdote. I come from third-world country, where women's right is a laughable word. Women are mostly controlled by the males in the family. Even with almost no women's rights, women presence in my undergrad STEM school was around 20%. OTOH, when I came to Canada for my grad school, I've never seen any class where presence of women in STEM classes was more than 10%. Even then, most of them women are immigrants from China or South Asia.

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

#642

Post by zimpenfish »

peoplewindow wrote: post #638
zimpenfish wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are no higher authorities on gender science than actual biologists who study the topic full time Only one (Dr Soh) has supported him that I've seen thus far - she seems to have only got her PhD this year and she studies sexual paraphilia via fMRI (which doesn't have a great reputation.) Not exactly "full time gender science study". By way of contrast, there's PZ Myers - PhD in Biology in 1985, been teaching s…

There were four others too. They published their views on a website (Quillette) that was immediately DDoSd off the internet - presumably by the sort of extremists who now control Google and who did not want anyone to see the evidence that Damore might have a point. Damore is not an idiot. The people who are attacking him in these ways are though: it's pure anti-intellectualism. And by the way, counting experts is not…

Dr Soh was one of the Quillette authors.

> Damore has 5 who point out that he isn't making the science up

Only 4 - one of them is duplicated.

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

#643

Post by rwcarlsen »

manicdee wrote: post #535
rwcarlsen wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his thesis is we shouldn't fix discrimination by actually perpetrating the same thing - just against a different group.

If a see-saw is tipped to one side, you need to apply more weight to the other to balance it out. Nobody is suggesting that you can continue applying weight to the other end forever and still maintain balance, but you can't maintain balance unless you have some to start with. Even achieving a 30/70 split in a male-dominated industry will help defuse some of the rampant masculinity which passes as social interaction (…

I'm not arguing we shouldn't try to get things more balanced. Maybe a better analogy is one side of the see-saw is winning because bullys (gender discrimination) are shoving people off one side. So to fix the problem, we decide to start shoving people off of the other side too. So now it is in balance, but everybody is shoving each other and generally being jerks.

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

#644

Post by mistermann »

dang wrote: post #591
mistermann wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I shall try to adopt a turn-the-other-cheek approach going forward. I am somewhat curious why you've singled me out though, considering the specifics of the conversations I'm involved in.

Thanks—that's just the approach we're hoping for. If you're thinking it might be because we secretly disagree with you, I assure you that (sadly for us) everyone always thinks this. It's an artifact of randomness: we see a mostly-random sample of the comments here, since there are far too many for us to read. HN's moderation principles are consistent, but because of this quantity it's impossible to apply them across…

That seems reasonable. These topics do always tend to degrade to chaos, human nature sometimes overpowers intention.

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

#645

Post by nodamage »

rwcarlsen wrote: post #398
zzalpha wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He acknowledges that in practice the gender differences are real, but small. Then uses the existence of those small differences to justify fundamentally changing their hiring policies. The latter does not follow from the former. Again, as with the global warming debate, it makes a lot more sense to tackle the larger influencers first, before addressing these smaller factors.

I think his thesis is we shouldn't fix discrimination by actually perpetrating the same thing - just against a different group.

If you have two equally qualified candidates but 90% of the time the male candidate is hired over the female candidate, and then you change your hiring practices to reduce that ratio to 50%, are you now discriminating against the male candidate? What if you literally reduce it to a coinflip?

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

#646

Post by dapreja »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #20

Not much new here. This article is essentially just re-affirming all the scientific statements that were already made in the original memo, backed by links to scientific studies. Only difference being that the author of this article has a PhD in sexual neuroscience (so people might have a harder time accusing her of not knowing what she's talking about) and is female (so some people might have a harder time of accusi…

This horse is going to get beaten to death like the MNIST dataset with AI tutorials.

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

#647

Post by rwcarlsen »

nodamage wrote: post #645
rwcarlsen wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his thesis is we shouldn't fix discrimination by actually perpetrating the same thing - just against a different group.

If you have two equally qualified candidates but 90% of the time the male candidate is hired over the female candidate, and then you change your hiring practices to reduce that ratio to 50%, are you now discriminating against the male candidate? What if you literally reduce it to a coinflip?

That seems like a bit of a straw-man. The problem is that "equally qualified" is poorly defined. We all have biases (conscious and unconscious) - and we should be working to keep them in check and reduce bad discrimination (i.e. not based on "good" things like merit). I don't think anybody is arguing that they wouldn't want 50/50 hiring results given the repeated game of hiring between two hypothetically equally qualified candidates of each gender. But there are many unknowns. The author is saying that there are differences between the distributions of characteristics between genders (even if small). Some are biologically driven, some cultural. Since we don't know where any particular individual fits in their gender's distribution (also knowing the distributions overlap a ton), we shouldn't wholesale give them different treatment based on their membership in that group. Given representative candidates from each group we should expect hiring to be proportional to the difference in means of the distribution(s) of relevant characteristics (to the job) between the groups (genders) of the applicants.

Consider a business where 90% of applicants are female and 10% male. If the business chooses to hire 50/50, they are probably getting some sub-par males assuming the distribution of qualifications between male and female for the two sets of applicants are similar (which we don't have much reason to believe they differ much). In this case the females might be annoyed with the "special" treatment given to male hires that perform worse. And male hires might wonder if they got the job because they were well qualified or maybe just because they were male. In my opinion, this kind of "reverse" discrimination perpetuates bitterness and discriminatory thinking on all sides. I don't think of myself as a strongly religious person, but I think Christ had something when he was teaching that an "eye for an eye" was the old way, but the better way to live is to treat others how you want to be treated.

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

#648

Post by notacoward »

likelynew wrote: post #615
notacoward wrote: post #303

As with many defenses of the Damore memo (and more than a few attacks against it as well), this completely misses the point. Let's say for the sake of argument that there are differences in ability and/or preference between men and women. Let's even say that the magnitude of those differences is sufficient to explain a 4:1 ratio between male and female engineers at Google (which is clearly not true). My response is s…

> magnitude of those differences is sufficient to explain a 4:1 ratio between male and female engineers at Google (which is clearly not true) I had obtained numbers for number of pull requests in github and participation in competitive coding contests some time back. Gender ratios are close to 10:1 on both of the places. It's relevant because there is neither any barrier nor lowering the bar due to gender in these.

There's no lowering of the bar in the sense of denying hires/promotions, but I think it's fair to say that there are still significant disincentives to female participation. Also, I know this is heresy, but GitHub is not necessarily representative of software engineering in general. It emphasizes pure code development over ops or design, it emphasizes a very particular style of open source, it's skewed toward certain project types and sizes, etc. How many of those "male" commits were women hiding their gender, or senior males acting as the upstream conduit for an entire mixed team working against a repo elsewhere? Competitive coding contests probably skew even more heavily male, for reasons that I should hope are obvious.

It's a data point, and I thank you for that, but it's not exactly a complete refutation of contrary findings by others. It's also kind of beside the point in exactly the same way as the OP.

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

#649

Post by surge »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #65
Ajedi32 wrote: post #20

Not much new here. This article is essentially just re-affirming all the scientific statements that were already made in the original memo, backed by links to scientific studies. Only difference being that the author of this article has a PhD in sexual neuroscience (so people might have a harder time accusing her of not knowing what she's talking about) and is female (so some people might have a harder time of accusi…

I personally never called it out for sexism. I called it out for regressive-thinking as a solution based on plain fact. I can only be brief right now, but it's starting to get to me how so many people in an innovative sphere seem to have such a hard time with this. To me, it seems like it shouldn't be a second thought. If the main argument is that women do not [by nature of our scientific understanding] have minds tu…

I'm just more of the opinion if Norway tried it and failed with the full weight of their government behind it from the educational level down, one of the most gender equal places on the planet, why does Google think it'll work?

http://vimeo.com/19707588

Their conclusion was ultimately that the more equality and freedom of choice you have for genders, the more uneven the split between genders in careers as preferences tend to skew by gender. You can't force 50% of women to like or want to be engineers. So the more they tried to give women a choice, have equal pay, etc, the greater the imbalance became. It certainly means many women can enter STEM positions when they want to and are just as good as their male counterparts, but the opposite was true as well, as they weren't just complaining about lack of women in STEM, but lack of men in fields like healthcare and teaching. The cognitive dissonance is that "equality" means everything has to be 50/50, and attempts to do so is naive and wasted effort.

That said treat people individually. If a coworker sucks at their job, stop thinking about it in relation to their gender, their are plenty of men in tech who just cruise or who are barely adequate or worse. Don't make it about their biology. But at the same time realize you can't force diversity either, it has to happen organically, all you can do is maybe let there be a little bit of fertilizer to help the process, and setting quotas or special programs just for certain people is not a formula for equality or natural increase in diversity or interest from typically under represented groups.

That said, its obvious Google is just as much trying to protect a legal position, these programs are in response to law suits or protection from law suits to say "we're doing something about this", even if they don't produce results. Just like the terrible sexual harassment videos and anti fraud videos you have to watch at work, that are more to check a box when legal issues arise then actually fix the problem (because in the end a company can only control a person's behavior or choices so much).

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

#650

Post by daughart »

Jabanga wrote: post #539
daughart wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those statements, even if true, say absolutely nothing about the relative abilities of men and women to write software.

They could very plausibly explain the differences in the number of men who write software relative to women. The only explanation is absolutely not "systemic discrimination against women". I know it's trendy to defend feminist talking points, but it ultimately leads to what we see now with the Google firing: a public conversation where facts take a secondary role to ideology/dogma.

Why could it plausibly explain the differences? Seems like a huge leap to me. Basically there is some evidence that men and women are different, on average, to some extent, at the neuropsychological level. There is no evidence linking sex-related neurological traits to being good at or enjoying writing software.

On the other hand, there is evidence that cultural biases specifically discourage women from entering, and push women out of, STEM careers.

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