Whether we agree with the memo or not, there was a very good point that guy made and that we should keep in mind, it's the paragraph with the two overlapping distributions.
Even if you admit that all genders, races, any way you want to segment the population, do not have the same distribution, that doesn't mean anything to a person as an individual.
For instance I think it's fair to say that black people are better at athleticism/running than white people (a disproportionate number olympic champions are black), i.e. the tail of the distribution is fatter for black people than white people. It doesn't mean anything to a random individual in that group. I am white, I shouldn't feel offended that another category of the population has a different distribution than my category. And it doesn't mean that no white people can become an olympic athlete either. Just that there will be a natural race imbalance among athletes. And it doesn't mean that a random black man will be better than a random white man at athletism.
So I don't agree with the way you read this memo: In this memo's case, perhaps you're mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action. The memo doesn't say that an individual woman will be less capable. What it claims instead is that women have a different distribution for certain skills than men, which you might agree with or not. But it's a very different point.
This ignores the fact that countries like Jamaica recruit their best athletes into track and field, whereas Australia or China would push those kids into something else. A more accurate statement would be black countries have better track and field coaching infrastructure considering Usain Bolt routinely washed out of race finals until he was picked up by pro coaching staff. It's the same reason Canada usually wins the winter Olympics in Hockey, it's not because Canadians are genetically better at skating and handling sticks, it's because of the coaching, infrastructure to get kids into the national program, funding priorities, ect. Same reason why Germany wins the world cup, it's a financial priority for that country to ensure they do so they can build a national infrastructure of success, they don't have genetically superior athletics for Soccer.
It's interesting how introducing certain attributes into a conversation can disable parts of the human brain, I wonder if a study has ever been done on this.
An important difference is that in the olympics, a fair and objective qualification system exists. Kenyans are disproportionate in the RANKINGS but not the POPULATION.
In Google's case, women fare poorly in botrh (with rankings expressed in the axis of pay or leadership positions). That's a significant difference.
My point was moreso about how prevalent the phenomenon of ignoring obvious objective reality is when certain topics are involved, the key ones off the top of my head being: race, gender, sexuality.
Threads such as this are chock full of examples of people who are normally very logical and scientific, but once the subject turns to one of the above, suddenly everything's different, nothing can be determined, observed, or measured, the entire world is completely random with no patterns whatsoever, etc.
I wonder if all cultures are like this or only us in the west.
> My point was moreso about how prevalent the phenomenon of ignoring obvious objective reality is when certain topics are involved, the key ones off the top of my head being: race, gender, sexuality.
Fair. I just wanted to add that it's not terribly applicable to the specifics of the memo and article. People are upset about systemic total representation and undervaluation rather than a lack of singular genius.
But I agree that there are people who find any conversation about statistics as it regards this subject as a form of heresy.
> I just wanted to add that it's not terribly applicable to the specifics of the memo and article. People are upset about systemic total representation and undervaluation rather than a lack of singular genius.
It's applicable in that (in my opinion) the majority of the people aren't - rather they are interested in a fantasy version of the situation that exists only in their imagination. This is why even on forums like HN where people are far more logical than the average person, there is no shortage of bickering over obvious misinterpretations, moving of goalposts, etc. For example, how many of the outraged people here are angry about things that literally aren't even in the article, and even when this is pointed out to them, still they aren't able to wake up and realize how their brain is playing tricks on them.
The older I get, and the longer I see the very same arguments over and over again over decades, the more I am coming around to the idea that a massive portion of the human population possibly can't even see reality. Maybe I am one of them!
> The older I get, and the longer I see the very same arguments over and over again over decades, the more I am coming around to the idea that a massive portion of the human population possibly can't even see reality. Maybe I am one of them!
All we can do is dedicate ourselves to following the evidence where we can and avoiding judgement when possible.
> I've met him in passing, he didn't strike me as worth considering, then or now.
That seems fairly judgemental to me.
Edit: To clarify, you are making a value judgement of a person based on some unspecified happening when you met then in passing. That seems to indicate you didn't give much chance in the way to understand that person or the reasoning behind their thoughts.
If Jamaica does better than USA in track and field they must be doing something right, but what do you mean by generalizing to "black countries"?
There might be a bias towards track and field programs and careers in poor/small countries, thanks to cheap infrastructure and sustainability with very few athletes, and expensive sports that are practically reserved for relatively privileged people, e.g. swimming and horse riding, but confusing an athlete's race and their available opportunities is silly.
> fair to say that black people are better at athleticism/running
Is it fair though? Is it supported by metrics of muscle strength and length etc? And does it take into account the differences between blacks (Africans?), west vs south vs central (pygmies!).
Also, there's the possibility that whites of equivalent athleticism find better options for their life than being a professional sportsmen, the bottom 80% [1] of whom end their career at 30 with little to show for it but lifelong injuries.
It seems to be supported by the results at the Olympics and many other sporting events that can be viewed publicly.
And I think that's probably what the OP meant by "better at running". The vast majority of people can run to some extent, so the assumption is that someone is "better" at it usually means "faster". And the obvious place to look for evidence of that would be in sporting competitions, rather than trying to look up metrics that you have described. Obviously its a simplification, but if you don't do that then life would be far to complicated and detailed to navigate.
Right, it "seems to be supported." There's a lot of just-so storytelling going on here. Take a look at American football in 1940. No black players! Hm. Black people must be bad at football, perhaps more suited to being airmen (pilots). Seems to have held up perfectly over the last 77 years, eh?
Do people have no sense of history here? The internet lets you look up all sorts of things, like how the racial composition of US track and field has changed over the 20th century, or how Paavo Nurmi (a poor guy from an underdeveloped country) dominated distance running in the 1920s, challenged only by another couple poor guys from underdeveloped Scandinavian countries. It was clear from publicly viewable sporting events in the 1920s that Scandinavians are really the best at running; east Africans really didn't figure into the competition.
That argument applies to the general population maybe, but that doesn't mean it also applies to the population of Google employees. Everyone there passed their hiring standards, so everyone has proved their individual merit already.
The population of Google technical employees is I think the equivalent to the population of Olympic athletes in my example. If the general population has a different distribution (again whether you agree or not with that assumption), then there should be a natural imbalance among the cream of the top that made it to Google. And as you said, those who made it are all "Olympic athletes" (in theory, they should have been recruited based on individual merit) so these distributions do not mean that a female google employee would be more or less capable than a male, but it will result in less female google employees than male employees.
> If the general population has a different distribution (again whether you agree or not with that assumption), then there should be a natural imbalance among the cream of the top that made it to Google.
Your conclusion does not follow from the premise. It's not hard to come up with a distribution that is identical for the top x% but differs for the general population. Or one where the difference in top x% is in the opposite direction of the general population (e.g. two normal distributions where mu1 < mu2, and sigma1 > sigma2).
> but it will result in less female google employees than male employees.
Well, again, the Google memo started by arguing Google's technical standard was being hurt so James doesn't seem to believe his colleagues all got the same interviews he did.
I'd be more inclicned to this sort of argument for racial and gender diveristy if Google & others didn't have such abysmly skewed distributions towards white men. Go look at Google's diveristy report and then do some Bayes Rule hacking with it.
Incorrect question: you want the graduate rates. Not the staff rates.
Google's diversity rates are worse than the graduate rates for most schools I've checked. I have not found a composite data source to compare a larger average to.
First, the section is "Non-discrimnatory ways to reduce the gender gap".
You cannot reduce the "gap" by aiming at the women who are already at Google. This should be obvious. They are already there. To make a dent in the gap, you need to attract more women who currently do not choose to work in tech or not at Google. So nothing he writes is about his colleagues at Google, or by extension women who are already in or interested in tech. It is about potentially attracting those who are not currently interested in that career.
Second, this is about subtle differences in the distribution of preferences in populations with huge overlaps. So when you have an individual in front of you, you simply cannot tell whether they will exhibit this trait more or less by inference from the population statistic. And you certainly can't say "all X have more of this property than all Y". He even has a nice graph for this.
Third, it's not about ability, but about preference. "Women on average show a higher interest in people..." How do you get from "preference" to "ability"?
Fourth, you are assuming a symmetry where "higher X" implies "lower Y that's complementary to X". This would probably be true for interests (if I a am more interested in working alone, I am probably less interested in working in groups). But it does not translate to abilities.
In fact, one of the documented areas where gender differences in ability do show up is exactly a case of this lack of symmetry: you've probably heard that tend to score higher on the math SATs and women higher on the verbals. This is apparently not the whole story: men with high math scores do tend to not also have high verbal scores (and therefore prefer STEM). However, for women the two are correlated, not anti-correlated: those with high math scores tend to also have high verbal scores, so they have more options. And people with more options tend to prefer non-STEM options, regardless of gender.
Fifth, I thought pair programming was a Good Thing™?
Only if you reduce their turnover to be below turnover for men. Which at first thought seems to be worse than discriminating only during the hiring phase.
Sure, if you explicitly exclude any way that the "gap" could be reduced by aiming at the women who are already at Google it is clear that you can not reduce the "gap" by aiming at the women who are already at Google.
> You cannot reduce the "gap" by aiming at the women who are already at Google. This should be obvious. They are already there. To make a dent in the gap, you need to attract more women who currently do not choose to work in tech or not at Google. So nothing he writes is about his colleagues at Google, or by extension women who are already in or interested in tech. It is about potentially attracting those who are not currently interested in that career.
If that were the case then he would not lead his essay implying that the current hiring policies were hurting Google. He seems to imply standards have somehow been damaged, but right now that's not what Google does.
> Third, it's not about ability, but about preference.
There are so many potential sources of preference, from negative experience to personal ability. It seems very suspect to point to gender stereotypes that a large number of women have been arguing against for decades are in fact the root cause here.
> you've probably heard that tend to score higher on the math SATs and women higher on the verbals. This is apparently not the whole story: men with high math scores do tend to not also have high verbal scores (and therefore prefer STEM). However, for women the two are correlated, not anti-correlated: those with high math scores tend to also have high verbal scores, so they have more options
Sources, please.
> Fifth, I thought pair programming was a Good Thing™?
That depends. If I told you the only way you're going to be competitive and not drag down the standard of my organization is by pairing up with another person, should you take that as a compliment?
> That depends. If I told you the only way you're going to be competitive and not drag down the standard of my organization is by pairing up with another person, should you take that as a compliment?
> Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
> We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration.
That was literally the only mention of pair programming the the entire memo and it was as a suggestion to make positions more appealing to women who were more interested in people and more social. Not once does he equate pair programming as some remedial for your perceived statement of lower quality ability. The guy was trying to suggest ways to attract more women and you flip it around to demonize him. Do you not see that you are large part of the problem? Instead of trying to engage and explain to him why his points are perhaps wrong or misguided, you instead twist his words to simply eviscerate him instead.
Please excuse the delay. I'll get to breaking your links down shortly. You're asking me to source papers during my commute hour and on mobile it's difficult to grab and source the resources I'll cite.
At this point I would like to see an itemised list of James Damore's points on gender and women's interpretations of them.
This is the pair programming text in full:
> Below I'll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I
> outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women's
> representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in
> many of these areas, but I think it's still instructive to list them
>> Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
>>> We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming
>>> and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how
>>> people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive
>>> ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get
>>> female students into coding might be doing this)
My understanding is: if we increase pair programming to make it more of a team activity, more women will enjoy programming, and more women will become programmers.
We don't have to agree with the suggestion. But you've just shown us that our interpretations are wildly different. So, why?
Pair Programming is not a technique to improve social contact in software. It's a technique to improve product reliability and give more practical mentorship opportunities.
We might argue James says women are asking for good mentorship opportunities herr. So why do women benefit from this specifically (and that's okay) but other mentorship program are considered unfair in this rubric?
You say "we need pair programming" when reliability is difficult to gaurantee. Not because you're feeling lonely. It seems an awful lot like he's suggesting that women are especially in need of experienced minders.
That's a wholly uncharitable reading of what he's saying. A way more good faith interpretation would be the very simple equation of "working with just computer - more thing oriented, working with computer + partner - more people oriented".
This may be wrong(I don't have any evidence to back it up, and neither did Damore), but it is wholly different from the sinister undertones you are seeing.
(In fact, taking your "mentorship" interpretation, it is entirely possible that the women would be the one doing the mentoring, if their skill at engineering was hampered by a disinterest towards purely thing-oriented pursuits).
> That's a wholly uncharitable reading of what he's saying.
I'm sorry, what?
> A way more good faith interpretation would be the very simple equation of "working with just computer - more thing oriented, working with computer + partner - more people oriented".
Except that women entering the field now have no such expectations but he is still complaining about special treatment.
If you impose social contact, people are going to practice social contact and improve at social contact. It might not be what some relatively antisocial people want, but it seems like an important improvement for the whole team.
Like I said, I am not seeking agreement on the merit of his idea.
You specifically said that the suggestion of Pair Programming, was due to James thinking that women are "less capable of individual action".
But you also said "It's a technique to improve product reliability and give more practical mentorship opportunities." Which is also my understanding. I know at least one shop where everybody pair programs. It has nothing to do with programmers being inferior. I also agree that paring is more sociable since every day I will have to greet my team mate, talk about stuff, have a coffee, then get to work.
I'm just trying to understand how "Pair Programming" changes meaning so much just because some dude wrote a manifesto. We can't even have a discussion if our understanding of the same document is so wildly different.
Schoolteachers are trained to provide just this type of variety for just this type of reason. For example, they're supposed to have competitive classes because boys are generally more motivated by competition than cooperation. It's uncontroversially seen as a good and wholesome thing for teachers to do it. Why is it demon spawn for programmers?
So now sociability is a negative trait? I for one would be delighted to find an efficient way to make coding more social. Many a reason why software design is so hard is exactly because most programmers are autistic nerds that tend to produce opinionated, hard to maintain code. Pair programming with someone that tends to think more in breadth than in depth sounds like one way of improving that situation.
> What positive connotation could be drawn from it?
IMHO that is the wrong question. Connotations aren't something anyone can argue for or against - one can have bad connotations for all sorts of words. Actual example: my ex hated the word "negotiate" in any personal discussion as she saw negotiations as something where you tried to screw the other person over (she was a lawyer). This was to the point where she refused to negotiate anything - including where we would have dinner. How can anyone live without negotiating? Hence, ex :)
I think a better question than one about connotations would be:
If we accept that women have a preference for people over things, what would encourage women to want to do a "things" job? The memo's answer: more peer programming i.e. adding a people element to a things/systems job. That is internally consistent, I think, with the evidence presented on average female preference.
Honestly, I find all this inferior/superior talk really troubling. Different != inferior, or superior, it is just DIFFERENT. Is a hammer a better tool than a saw? Depends what I want to do... I find it even more troubling that people against labelling others superior/inferior see everything that way. Personally, I think vive la difference!
The "different = inferior argument" is strongly implied.
If you accept the premise that there's such a thing as a male-dominated work culture with stereotypically male values, then attitudes and actions that match those values are considered better ("normative") by default.
Anyone who has different requirements or interests will always be considered an outsider who will to have allowances made for them while receiving special treatment.
This would also be true of hypothetical female-dominated cultures with stereotypical female values where men would be considered the inferior outsiders who need special treatment. (Do such cultures exist? At work - sometimes, but not often. Outside of work - perhaps.)
The topic is an unholy mess because there are so many implications and assumptions on both sides, and so much outright ranting and bullying too, that useful debate is practically impossible.
My view is that corporate culture isn't stereotypically "male" so much as stereotypically totalitarian. More women won't change that. It might rein in some of the more obvious abuses, while running the risk of replacing them with some new ones.
But real economic and political freedom could only come from equal opportunity at a scale that most (tacitly neoliberal) feminists seem uninterested in.
Implication means not explicit. Thus it's up to your interpretation. The context also can affect the implications, including the author's actions after the publication (his interviews on YouTube).
I wouldn't expect you to. Inference of tone and context is often quite subjective. I won't bother arguing it beyond pointing out that there can be reasonable differences if opinion.
> If you accept the premise that there's such a thing as a male-dominated work culture with stereotypically male values, then attitudes and actions that match those values are considered better ("normative") by default.
You've just said that if you accept male-dominated work culture exists, males are considered better by default.
Ergo either males are considered better by default or such a culture doesn't exist. You deny the latter, so clearly you are claiming the former.
You just made that claim, not the guy who was fired.
Remember?