The first point should be obviously true, however we live in a time were identity politics on the left tries to shout down any but the hard line reaction to biological determinism. Both extremes are false and saying so should not be controversial.
"There are differences between the sexes." This is a statement about populations not individuals. It is also not a claim of causes only the current state of affairs.
Of all the coworkers I've had in tech, women make up a strong majority of the top 10. Yet of all the women I've known most weren't driven to excel to the same level of most men I've known. Whether you blame culture or biology for that sexism play A role, not the ONLY role in creating the gender discrepancy we see in the fields of STEM and executive management.
>> for that sexism play A role, not the ONLY role in creating the gender discrepancy
Then you say this:
>> Yet of all the women I've known most weren't driven to excel to the same level of most men I've known.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt in that I'm going to assume that it wasn't your intention to make a disturbingly sexist remark in a discussion about sexism.
You can replace women with African-American, and what you wrote sounds an awful lot like the racist drivel that came out of the South for 200 years. If anything, the author of the memo's attempts to argue that there is some biological basis for discrimination only serve to weaken his position. Furthermore, this 'biological differences basis' for discrimination eventually leads us to eugenics if taken to its illogical extreme. And yes, people have taken it that far in the not so recent past.
In the cases where what you wrote is even partially true, that some women (appear on the surface) to be less ambitious and less driven than men, did you ever stop to ask yourself why?
I've worked in tech my entire career, and I've witnessed appalling sexism. I have watched with my own eyes while women suffered humiliations like being told things like "no one invites you to meetings because you can't keep anything secret". Then there are things like code reviews. At work we recently had to institute a 'no abusive code review' policy because a small cadre of the men were using the code review process to hammer several of the few female engineers we've managed to somehow convince to come work for us. Like most places, our workplace policies are required largely due to behavior that was originated by men.
It seems like it's awfully easy to forget that women are half our species! How can anyone in their right mind think that sexism, unconscious or otherwise, is okay? How can anyone think that it's because 'women are less driven to succeed'? How can anyone think this when half their DNA comes from a man and the other half from a woman?
As a gay man (a gender/sexual minority), I can actually relate to how awful it feels to be treated like a second class citizen simply because of something that I do not feel like I can change (my sexual orientation). I'm not sure how much money it has cost me, but at the very least it has cost me the difference in filing single vs. filing jointly for the first 17 years of my marriage. Women pay similar costs when they're paid less over the course of their career, and/or when they're denied promotions for 'being ambitious'.
The attitude that underlies your comment -that you could actually believe that what you wrote is true and somehow justifies unequal treatment- is utterly, totally, and exactly why we need the programs the author of the now infamous memo argues against.
I also appreciate you sharing your story, but I personally find it a bit uncomfortable that these sorts of posts need to be qualified ("As a gay man..."). While I understand you were trying to support the point you were making, this sort of thing feeds into the notion that some opinions occupy a privileged position within our society, which feeds such "screeds" as this. It's almost hypocritical in a way, because I imagine that the anger and "otherness" that oppressed or minority groups feel is not unlike what the author of such a rant is feeling. Basically when it comes to cultural discourse, you're wrong, evil, the enemy, or ignored.
This looks like a throw-away comment but betrays a bit of ignorance about basic biology. Men have anywhere from 2x-10x more testosterone than women (lots of individual variance) [1], which has a huge effect on personality. Just because most of your DNA is inherited 50/50 does not preclude huge differences between the sexes. This is even more obvious when looking at other, non-human species [2].
ON AVERAGE in Norway (one of the top 5 most equal countries), females prefer more people-oriented fields such as medicine and males will favor more systems-oriented fields such as engineering. Again, this is ON AVERAGE. There are major overlaps in many fields (e.g. arts and research sciences) - and in some fields there is virtually none (e.g. nursing vs sanitation). This is not controversial amongst scientists who do their best to suspend ideological or wishful thinking.
If type A did better in an interview than type B, but the company ended up hiring a type B because of the whole diversity thing, is that considered a bad thing? Wouldn't that be considered preferential treatment? Why are there company initiatives or programs for B but not for A.
As someone who is of type B, I feel offended that there are 'initiatives' that help me get jobs at companies. I dont need my hand held or the job given to me just because i'm the only B applicant in a pool of 10 applicants
I was born to well-employed, college-educated parents in a stable marriage, moved to my childhood home specifically for its excellent school district, had plenty of quiet space and encouragement to do homework, funded through a top-5 university, etc. I've capitalized on those advantages and done quite well, but I didn't earn them. I don't mind when some of the competitive power I merely inherited is transferred to someone who inherited none. Probably they worked even harder, they just started lower.
This is the fundamental problem with policies based on group identity rather than individuals.
Is hiring Bs who are exactly like your As, except in superficial characteristics like appearance, really bringing in diverse points of view?
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x
He uses a lot of the same terminology as the paper, references big-5 personality traits etc, as well as the same personality dimensions like people-object axis.
The left vs. right stuff is clearly coming from Jonathan Haidt's Moral foundations theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory
The author of the "manifesto/screed" is drawing pretty clearly from good research, but isn't linking to it or discussing it in context
> Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted
The links that were removed are probably relevant. Some passages in the text even have quotation marks around them where I assume that links to sources were removed.
No, the research exists in some cases, but the content of an internal informal document obviously doesn't require a rigorous (redundant) academic format. If you can't Google, it probably wasn't intended for you anyway. The comment about women ranking higher (in general) for agreeableness is statistically true. However, the reasoning for why is up for debate and has been well considered...
A neuroscience/evolutionary theory in plain english: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewvqEqIXdhU
This is something that's part of "training" at Google?
So yes. Before, programming was hard, and low status. Now it's easy and high status, and men think that women aren't there because it's too hard. No, they were there when it was hard.
That to me sums up the difference. It is now vastly easier to write and run a program. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Programming careers realty do have a red queen race quality to them.
I really couldn't compare it to fields I haven't worked in. But I do think that programming certainly can reach hellacious levels of stress and complexity.
Is this true?
Or is it the old "machine code is harder" idea?
How many people here programmed assembly language in middle school, but would have been stumped (or at least strained to the max in comparison) if made to read say, the Design Patterns book?
The kind of assembly programming you do in middle school is a far cry from the difficulty of designing and maintaining an entire program in assembly.
Something has changed since then and I am unable to perceive or explain what it is.
I thought about this a bit but let's say it was indeed a factor of employment and advancements over some men in roles.
There is signifant research on the benefits of a diverse culture.
Decades of research by organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers show that socially diverse groups (that is, those with a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation) are more innovative than homogeneous groups.
I would argue that it isn't a problem that diverse members are indeed advanced because of ONE of the factors being their contribution to a diverse group. That doesn't negate the necessity that they must also be good at their job.
Furthermore, great engineers are people oriented. Anyone can learn how to write code, but it takes skill to hone in on necessary insights that deal with people, interaction, and the nature of finding solutions that I suspect are meant to help people.
Can you point to the two or three best studies showing this? It seems really hard to study objectively--how do you measure innovativeness? how do you control for all sorts of potentially confounding variable?
What are your opinions about this? Do you think biological differences leads to social differences (not only gender but race, height, etc)? Do our "intelligences" [1] differ based on our gender? [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc...
[2] https://www.elsevier.com/connect/can-brain-biology-explain-w...
- Is the extreme sex disparity in the prison population in the United States a result of a massive system of anti-male oppression or a result of population level sex differences between men and women.
- How do you interpret the experiences of trans people on hormones who experience their personalities change after taking hormones.
I'll admit it is a bit of a cheap shot, those are carefully chosen to cause cognitive dissonance, but that's an effective tool for getting people to clarify their opinions.
If you're a capitalist, if you believe in exploiting the market to the benefit yourself, you would be stupid and shortsighted to not find a way to utilize women and minorities in any way possible to serve your business.
Say you discover that women and Indians are biologically incapable of working more than 3 hours at a stretch without taking a tea break. Use that tidbit of knowledge to maybe place women and Indians closer to the breakroom. Don't brush their individual idiosyncrasies under the carpet. Use them.
And once you start using them to benefit yourself, realize that companies like Google are doing exactly that by promoting policies to bring in and retain women. It's not altruism - it's pure business.
Historically, for millennia women were treated as property of men. This was justified with all sorts sexist jabber. The same is true of race; ou can read all sorts of racist nonsense from the era of slavery. E.g., the Cornerstone Speech, in which the vice-president of the Confederacy said straight out: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."
The important thing to note from this is that people will justify the status quo, whatever it is, in terms of what is "natural". They are not really rational, but rationalizing.
For the last hundred years or so, we've been struggling our way out of that long era of institutionalized sexism and racism. If we don't fuck it up, we might be truly out of it in another hundred years. Until we have ripped up its roots, then questions of biology should be ignored.
Why? One good reason is that historically those arguments have proven incredibly wrong over and over. There's a whole host of things that women supposedly couldn't do that they now do just fine.
Second, we should learn a lesson from the long history of rationalizing the status quo. People who do well by the current system will tend to argue to maintain the system. Whenever we find ourselves arguing like that, we should be very suspicious.
Third our enormous history of discrimination by gender and race entirely confounds attempts to answer questions of what is truly innate. If we want to get any sort of real answer, we need to build a world with no remaining trace of bias. Only then can we start to see the nature that might exist behind culture.
Fourth, and most importantly, it doesn't fucking matter. If men turn out to be naturally, as a group, less good at math than women, does that mean we should stop training men on math? No. We should train men more at math, because math is a valuable skill, humans are very plastic, and nobody should be denied an opportunity just because somebody reduced them to a single bit, and then condemned them to ignorance. It's dumb, it's unkind, it's wasteful.
TL;DR: Let's focus on the well-documented historical distortions of massive gender and race bias, not subtle, possibly imaginary gender and race differences that have been used over and over to justify that bias.
biology comes before history, history can be a consequence of biology
> If men turn out to be naturally, as a group, less good at math than women, does that mean we should stop training men on math? No. We should train men more at math, because math is a valuable skill
This is what scares me of this society. If someone is bad at something lets force him/her to improve at the things he/she is bad at. Instead of focusing on the things a person is good at and try to put them on the next level and make a difference that way, let's focus on the bad things and get a mediocre individual.
I love maths, but are you saying art is not a valuable skill compare with maths? Should the great artist bad at math study math and give up in art?
You might think that not training someone at something that he/she is bad at is stupid, but some people like me think the stupid thing is to no to focus in what make someone special and good at.
And finally, why do you think there is a bias? Couldn't be the reason that there are not more female CS engineers that they choose freely not to be because they just don't like it? The answer is in the video I put before.
"Natural"[2] - if it has any meaningful definition at all - is not an ethical category. Evolution is not normative.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem
[2] For example for a naturalist everything is natural :)
Fundamentally the whole gender equality thing is about whether any given individual feels that they can live their life to its full potential. If those potentials were to differ in the large between men and women then that is fine.
Alternatively what if the problem had a lot more to do with how ingrained the drive for status is in men compared to women? That women are underrepresented because they're more likely to want work-life balance and they're competing with a horde of men willing to be miserable for years to attain status. The problem in that case isn't that there are too few women, but that there are too many men.
http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
One should not discount the additional biased inherent in the discussion, by the way. This is the corporate world and people are talking about selling their time or money. Perhaps one answer to all this is to opt out of the full-time corporate treadmill, start your own business or be self-employed.
Of all things, why focus on race and gender? How about hairstyle? Why not height? Maybe I feel like my weight is not represented fairly!
I'm just poking fun. Those aren't real questions.
The author promotes the only diversity that matters: diversity of thought.
Anything else should at worst a proxy to get some.
You brought up height and weight, but there actually are situations where they matter. For clothes, obviously, but this also comes up when flying, or anywhere that space is a premium.
And yep, it matters even in the Air Force:
"Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions. One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size — say, neck circumference, thigh circumference and wrist circumference — less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear and incontrovertible. There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one."
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
Why does any diversity except thought matter?
After all, that is the argument I have for racist diversity: "different perspectives".
If I can get those perspectives without being a racist, why bother?
Probably height is more relevant for leadership than gender: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1368430212437211
I am sure I could find a study showing that attractive people have a better shot at getting the job. Height is attractive.
Kind of needlessly degrading.
"Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)." (emphasis mine)
So women are bad at programming because of evolution and non-whites/asians are bad at it because they're dumb. According to science. Does dressing this up in pseudo-academic prose make it any less racist?
[1] "Stretch, BOLD, CSSI, Engineering Practicum (to an extent), and several other Google funded internal and external programs are for people with a certain gender or race"
Racist is "I think all Mexicans are dumb, so I won't hire any or even give them an interview. I hate Mexicans."
Racism is not "Groups of humans evolved dramatically different physical characteristics, vulnerability to health conditions, ability to consume foods like lactose, and countless other characteristics. There's some evidence to suggest they may have different distributions of skills required to do this job well. Even if there are no innate differences, there are certainly cultures that prioritize learning the skills we require more than others.
I wouldn't be surprised to see different groups represented at different rates vs. the general population at this job. However, I'm smart enough to realize there are extremely skilled and extremely unskilled members of every group, and I'd gladly interview and hire from any."
I am actually glad that you concede that "cultures" can affect learning, not merely evolution. While most people usually use that term to blame minorities for their disadvantages (i.e. culture means "their" culture), it also means that you implicitly accept that living in a (shared) culture with systematic racism and discrimination over several centuries can perhaps negatively affect skill acquisition as well.
the "heritability" of IQ - the degree to which IQ variations can be explained by genes - varies dramatically by socioeconomic class. Heritability among high-SES (socioeconomic status) kids was 0.72; in other words, genetic factors accounted for 72 percent of the variations in IQ, while shared environment accounted for only 15 percent. For low-SES kids, on the other hand, the relative influence of genes and environment was inverted: Estimated heritability was only 0.10, while shared environment explained 58 percent of IQ variations.[1]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/why-peo...
I read his paper 3 times, and from what I can tell, that claim didn't exist until you made it.
This is why we can't have honest conversations. By all means, disagree with things that he is saying, and engage him on any points that you feel need to be corrected. But don't disagree with things he quite obviously isn't saying. That doesn't get us anywhere.
I literally directly cited the "paper", as you call it. Specifically "evolutionary psychology" and "IQ" explaining the gender and race performance gaps, respectively.
Note: He is also saying that leadership and tech skills are more frequent in men than in women and that the biology could be the reason.
I once heard a scientist (female) in this area that it is stupid to think that the brains of males and females are the same when clearly the evolution make males and females so biological differents that the brain cannot be the only exception when it is the more complex organ in our bodies.
That women and people of color have been historically discriminated against and in many cases still are cannot be denied, especially in my personal experience, women of color. I have seen this both in tech and outside of it.
Is there a biological or chemical component to people excelling in certain fields? I have no idea but people must be judged as individuals not on any conceived notions of gender or race. I am a white guy and there are tons of women and people of color who are brighter than me or better than me at what I do. They should not be denied a role over me because an interviewer does not like their gender or ethnicity. If they are better than me they should get the position, period.
On the other hand, I am white with two white sons. I in no way agree with hiring practices or college admission policies that would put my kids at a disadvantage based on the color of their skin or gender. If my kids want to go to an ivy league school, and they invest the time and effort to to attain entry they should be granted it. I would be furious if they were declined in favor of another student if that student had worse grades and entry test level scores but were chosen based on the color of their skin. I would be very resentful.
If there is an issue with interviewers showing bias, we need to address that, not establish quotas which disadvantage others. A good solution should never involve pulling others down, a good solution lifts everyone. Bad solutions spread resentment.
We need to stop judging others on what they are and focus on who they are. I don't claim to be smart enough or educated enough to know the solution but i do know what it should feel like, it should feel like a good thing to all individuals. All individuals, not parties because we are all unique and should be treated and judged as such.
Edit: Personal story. I was in charge of hiring for a role in a non tech position. I interviewed several people for the position. My favorite was a black woman, she was awesome; smart and driven. I was over ruled by my director in favor of a decidedly less intelligent attractive white woman. His choice was fired after 6 months for poor performance and inappropriate behavior. Racism is absolutely alive and well in hiring. I think the solution needs to be addressed on the hiring manager level though, not by artificial quotas. By the same token that black woman was absolutely discriminated against.
I don't have the answers and all of the above is just the opinion of one person.
The Gizmodo foreward say they have removed several links and a couple of graphs. I think I also recall googlers saying that the manifesto had links to various papers etc.
It raises some valid points, but it kind of feels like an extremely hamfisted interpretation of a recent blog post by Scott Alexander: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-m...
I don't think Google's official response to it is very good either, though.
While the document may have been influenced by that post, and while both authors seem to have a similar "non-feminist left" political position, it has a different focus: Acknowledge people's natural strengths, weaknesses, preferences and accept diversity of political views vs. influence of sexist microagressions on gender representation.
> you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
His screed is instead concerned with distribution across populations (such as Google's).
http://www.businessinsider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-eng...
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
The gender issues from this paper have been pretty well hashed out, but one really interesting thing, he makes the point about being conservative at a tech company. I actually think this is a bit misleading. I know a large number of tech people who would consider themselves libertarian (fiscally conservative), but NOT socially conservative. So, at least from my experience, I have to interpret his comments about conservatives vs. progressives as about social conservative, in which case I would say he does himself a disservice - a lot of the modern American social conservative movement is explicitly about exclusion and is anti-diversity. So, I think it's fair to say, if you're socially conservative and subscribe to the modern platform (believing LGBTQ individuals don't deserve full rights, for instance), it may be expected to feel a bit uncomfortable at a tech company, just like I would probably feel uncomfortable working for a defense contractor.
