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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

#701

Post by humanrebar »

mejari wrote: post #569
cookiecaper wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why this means that Damore shouldn't have shared his opinion. We absolutely should not construct a credentialist edifice that says only people certified to have gone through brainwa---err, regent-approved programs--- can comment on a topic. That would prevent discussion on most topics, as virtually all topics of interest are complex and have many years of study behind them. Overall, these comments…

>I don't understand why this means that Damore shouldn't have shared his opinion. "Shouldn't have shared his opinion" and "should have shared his opinion in a different way" are two completely different things, and I don't see many people saying the first.

I think "should have shared his opinion in a different way" is moving the goalposts too far. I think anything that would have placated critics on this point would have neutered Damore's position.

Can someone produce a "diversity culture" critic (for lack of a better term) who provides a good example for Damore? One that is well received across the board?

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

#702

Post by ehsankia »

wan23 wrote: post #292
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…

Though if you read the memo carefully, Damore doesn't actually make the claim that Google lowers the bar for women in the sense that they hire women who are less capable. His complaint is that Google lowers the bar in the sense of reducing the number of "false negative" rejections of diversity candidates by paying more attention to those applications. He was calling for an end to this practice not because it was allo…

The way I understood his overall point was that in a perfect world were there is not socio-economical bias and a large enough sample size, we would still not have 50/50 split in every single field.

Now, even with that being true, that doesn't mean that whatever percentage we have right now is equilibrium either, but from my understanding, he was trying to say that we should be careful pushing too much towards 50% split.

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

#703

Post by kansface »

rllin wrote: post #480
humanrebar wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Yes, exactly this - the ratios are the same in Scandanavia as in the US (and surprisingly much better the third world over).

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

#704

Post by alexandercrohde »

taysic wrote: post #671
alexandercrohde wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, honest question. Suppose you work at a hospital, and 70% of the nurses are women. And you're coming under fire, and a lawsuit is pending, because this indicates discrimination. Now suppose a coworker writes a piece saying roughly "Way fewer men apply for these positions. I suspect men are less interested in being nurses, so we have fewer male nurses, but we can't lower the bar just to make it 50-50. I think it's…

Sure, honest answer. First off, saying 70% nurses are women does not indicate discrimination. Plenty of the jobs I've applied for as a woman are small startups with over 70% men but I've never thought that this was due to discrimination. We're talking here about a policy that Google engages in voluntarily. So we know that according to the memo that Google seeks to reduce the number of "false negative" rejections of d…

>> First off, saying 70% nurses are women does not indicate discrimination.

Totally agree.

As for 70%, that's a completely contrived number in this case. Think of it as 90% or whatever line-in-the-sand we need.

So Damore was concerned the bar was being lowered, and was concerned the goal was 50-50 ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" - links to document I don't have access to) ("Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."), which is where I came up with those elements.

>>> Or even just trying to hire more men to create an environment of more diversity among nurses.

I think we agree that it's probably okay to hire extra minority candidates, even for diversity sake. Not sure I'd do it, but I don't have too strong an opinion.

>>> A - Generally no, but if the memo was broadcast to the whole company and touched on this points due to the reasons expressed above - I think its ok for the company to take action in the way it deems appropriate.

This is where we go out of sync. It's my understanding that "broadcast" is a mischaracterization, as the memo wasn't sent to anybody, but posted on a public forum for open discussion. I also understand that google actively discussed such policies as diversity efforts, so I suspect he wasn't the only public memo.

And I also support the notion of at-will-employment in the abstract. That said, in practice when I think I see somebody saying X and getting fired because it's easy to misread X as Y, it scares me.

Regarding B, I guess my point is maybe those two propositions are close in your head ('women on average might not like engineering as much for biological reasons' VS 'women can't be engineers'), but they're miles apart in mine. And it's a scary world to me if you can be fired for saying something that isn't sexist, but seems like it leads to a slippery slope of sexism.

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

#705

Post by humanrebar »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #696
hedgew wrote: post #21

Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even…

There is some irony there, because a common tactic for derailing complaints of sexism towards women is "maybe you're right but you said it in a way that hurts people's feelings, so we're going to ignore you. Try again next time." I think the challenge is there is disagreement about who is the aggrieved party. Are women aggrieved because the memo made them feel unwelcome, or is Damore the aggrieved party because he wa…

I think Damore is aggrieved because Google leadership had chances to provide more constructive criticism, missed those chances, then resorted to a draconian resolution.

Also, I don't know why aggrievement needs to be exclusive. More than one party can be aggrieved.

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

#706

Post by md224 »

dang wrote: post #645
md224 wrote: post #517

On a side note, I would like to thank the HN mods for allowing this discussion to take place. Previous attempts at discussion were quickly silenced by flagging, and while it's a little weird that a piece on YCombinator just happens to be the sole exception, I'm glad that an exception was made. These kinds of discussions are difficult but necessary, critical to the process of gaining a greater understanding of those w…

Thanks, but we didn't do anything different in this case and are as surprised as anyone that the post went to #1 and (better still!) the discussion remained as civil as it has. I don't want people to think that the ycombinator.com domain affects moderation on an article like this, since our first rule is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved [1]. I emailed Cadran to warn her that the post would probably mee…

Thanks for clarifying and correcting my assumptions. I'm guessing the content of the article in addition to the domain led users to view this as a more productive contribution to the debate. Apologies for assuming that it was HN favoritism on the part of the mods... very interesting that this happened organically.

(While I'm replying to you, one super trivial and completely unrelated feature request... if comment forms are being submitted via JS, could you guys add code to prevent duplicate form submission when the enter key is held down too long? Very low priority and I know you're busy enough, but just figured I would pass along the suggestion. I've had to go back and fix my own accidental dupes a few times.)

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

#707

Post by novembermike »

CydeWeys wrote: post #76
hedgew wrote: post #21

Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even…

I am well aware of my inabilities to tackle this issue properly, so ... I don't write a big document about it and circulate it. Discretion is an issue here too. If you are not capable of addressing an issue in a productive manner, then don't, especially if it's not even related to your job. James was hired as an engineer to work on engineering stuff; he wasn't hired as a sociologist to work on diversity stuff. He mad…

To be fair, from his perspective it appears he was trying to discuss discrimination taking place against him. I'd think long and hard before I told a woman to shut up if they were talking about the same. There's actually a reasonable argument that his document is protected speech and Google violated federal employment law by firing him.

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

#708

Post by alexandros »

hedgew wrote: post #21

Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even…

In fact, the incredible Scott Alexander has also explained the point you raise in "Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor" [1].

[1]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands...

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

#709

Post by Lon7 »

studentrob wrote: post #682
dreta wrote: post #151

All i got from the memo, besides the echo chamber part, which google, and others managed to prove almost immediately, was that the author thinks there are biological differences between men and women, which lead to women being less interested in the field, thus being under-represented, and that google's sexist practices won't change that, only make people resent the diversity hires. Was i reading the wrong memo? Beca…

> the author said women are less suited to being good engineers... Where was that stated? DAMORE: "I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership." EDIT: also https://youtu.be/TN1vEfqHGro?t=30m13s

And I think it's important to point out here that this argument is probably wrong. It is one of the many examples where Damore cites research, but puts his own spin on it. One of the researchers Danmore cited is David P Schmitt. Here [0] David states:

"But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm. Moreover, men are more emotional than women in certain ways, too. Sex differences in emotion depend on the type of emotion, how it is measured, where it is expressed, when it is expressed, and lots of other contextual factors."

A lot of the science that Danmore cites is correct. But he goes beyond what the science says in his memo. He misinterprets it to prove his point. This is my main problem with the memo, and why someone may call it sexist.

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

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

#710

Post by thedays »

Remarkably few comments on the actual linked article. I found most of the comments in the article calm, reasonable, nuanced and reflective. To me, this shows the benefits of conversation and long form text, which we often seem to forget in this age of short attention spans driven by social media.

We need more discussion like this. I for one would appreciate hearing more about how this discussion was facilitated. Is it a transcript of a face to face conversation, or was it done online, and if so, how?

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