From a logical point of view …

On the veldt, all (surviving) programmers were mediocre because the star programmers couldn’t outrun the sabre-toothed tigers.

Welcome back Daniel. If I may speak for my fellow bent timbers, we have missed you.

I see this as a great example of the inherent subjectivity of statistics (and analysis in general) that often gets ignored (“numbers mean it’s real!”). Every analysis starts with a definition of your variables, scope and parameters. The author of the manifesto refuses to take responsibility for making any of these definitions; it’s like constructing a logic proof and refusing to acknowledge that you’ve made any assumptions.

If, after 50 or 100 years of teaching statistics, most mathematically inclinded people don’t get it , is that because
a) statistics is actually a *really* difficult subject
b) statistics teachers suck
c) some combo of A+B

I mean, people who teach stat have had almost 100 years to get their act together; if students are still misusing basic things like p values, that goes to the teachers , not the students

Funny story. Almost all the physicians used to be men. Now half the medical school graduates are women. I guess the job description suddenly changed . . .

Wow! It is telling that, right off the bat, you are at such pains to defend your PC bona fides. But, of course, you would not have been caught dead reading this smut in the toilet but for the need to forestall people from saying “but have you ACTUALLY READ IT?” Rather ironic I think when Google has thrown intellectual diversity under the bus of gender diversity. Who says that intellectual terrorism isn’t alive and well?

I notice that you circumnavigate the mulberry bush of sex differences very gingerly. What I don’t find is any statement of your own view of the role of biology in shaping preferences, say, for math and computer science.

I think candor was called for because what drove James Damore’s professional suicide by memo was a “diversity” session (doubtless one of an unending series) in which he was instructed regarding what he could and couldn’t say. It is a premise of diversity policies that every disparity between men and women in Google’s workforce is due to discrimination/ harassment by men and their “techbro culture.” As Damore put it, “all disparities in representation are due to oppression.”

Now, if you are an earnest young man who favors diversity and inclusion (like Damore), it must be pretty demoralizing to be forced to submit to endless brainwashing or “re-education” sessions in which male employees are the designated bad guys and are forced to denounce themselves for their sexism, what Damore calls Google’s culture of shaming. Damore’s memo was intended to spark a debate over whether in part the “underrepresentation” of women might be due to “differences in distributions of traits between men and women,” rather than oppression by males. (It is hard for a tech company to achieve gender balance in its workforce when less than 18% of computer science graduates are women).

What makes Google’s behavior so contemptible is that, not only did it misrepresent what Damore said, but out of political expedience (I suspect) it has chosen not to challenge the charge that all gender disparities are due to discrimination. To have defended itself would only have invited more media abuse. But, by failing to defend itself, Google has failed to defend the honor of its male employees.

No matter what your views of the relative importance of nature and nurture in causing observed sex differences, the fact remains that the case for diversity is a fraud. It has a logical flaw at its heart. Either women are the same as men, in which case hiring more women won’t increase diversity. Or women are different from men, in which case it is no surprise that they make different career choices.

Diversity is a cloak for progressives’ agenda of imposing gender equality on every “male-dominated” occupation or profession without any regard to what actual men and women want. It would be refreshing if they admitted that truth.

I’m depressed that this shite gets reheated every few years.

There’s a parallel process whereby a field or profession suffers a loss of relative prestige (and earning power) as women and minorities enter it, even though they often have better credentials and experience than the older generation because board licences now demand it. (Similarly, consider the position of nurse practitioners and physician associates as “not quite doctors.”)

The explanation for the gender disparity in tech proposed by the ‘manifesto’ was dimorphic preferences, not ability. ACTUALLY READ IT again perhaps?

imagine for a moment Google did that, and it showed the women they’d hired were on average worse. Would that be taken, as you suggest, as evidence of biased recruitment in favour of women?

Yes that’s what I would say, which is why I did say it. (I’d probably take it as evidence that failure in the outreach process was being foolishly compensated for by introducing biases to the recruitment process). But since that’s not what they have found, I find it hard to give a fuck about this hypothetical possibility. You are clearly much more resilient when it comes to giving such fucks so why not answer me a question of my own – how much human productivity might we have sacrificed over the course of the last 100 years simply because God awful annoying stupid tedious techbros of all sorts would rather go through literally any intellectual gymnastics than imagine that there could ever be such thing as a white dude from the right university who was just plain and simple f****** thick white dude from the right university who was just plain and simple f****** thick?

“…if the Google Manifesto was correct, then you would expect to see that Google was full of mediocre female employees, who had been hired by a process biased in their favour despite being inadequate to the task.”

No, it would only explain “why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership” as Damore states. It’s mainly about preferences not about ability.

To keep the numbers simple, let’s say that the average gender percentages nationwide in university computer science programs (roughly 80:20 m/f) follow through to Google applicants.

A study of GitHub “pull requests” found that code written by women is approved slightly more likely than code written by men, but only if the female author’s profile hides her gender. If she reveals her gender, her code is less likely to be accepted. So it’s plausible that women are, on average, slightly better coders than men. (Note: the difference in acceptance rates, when female authors’ gender was hidden, was very small.)

Google gets roughly 130 applications for each job opening. Again, to keep it simple, let’s say that 130:1 ratio applies across entry-level job openings, including coders. And let’s say that only the top 20% of applicants are good enough to meet Google’s standards.

Given those numbers, for any entry-level coding job Google would typically have 26 qualified applicants: 20 men and 6 women. That’s the 80:20 ratio referenced above, with the ‘extra’ qualified applicant a woman, based on the GitHub study results.

If Google hire a qualified man from that pool of 26, they will turn away 19 qualified men and 6 qualified women. If they hire a qualified woman from that pool, they will turn away 20 qualified men and 5 qualified women. Either way, they will turn away about two-dozen qualified applicants, including both men and women.

If Google decide their code shop should more closely resemble the demographics of their market — roughly 50:50 m/f — they have plenty of qualified women in the pool for a typical coding job.

What’s more, if they have 10 coding job openings and hire the best 5 men and the best 5 women (as best their HR procedures can determine that) then they’ll turn away about 190 qualified men and 55 qualified women.

That works out to a qualified-but-turned-away ratio of 77.75:22.25 m/f, which is still very close to the ratio in the qualified applicant pool (80:20). Indeed you could justify the ‘extra’ 2.25% for women by the small difference found in the GitHub study.

And here’s the key point: not a single qualified male will have been turned away to hire an unqualified female.

Yes, there’s an exception: HR mistakes. No HR hiring process is perfect, and invariably at least some new hires don’t work out. But if the HR assessment of qualification is truly gender-neutral, then the washout rates for men and women should be about equal … as David predicts in his post.

If the washout rate is higher for men, it’s possible (but not proven) that Google’s HR process overestimates men’s qualifications. If the washout rate is higher for women, the converse is true. But so long as the washout rates are about the same, it’s likely their HR are assessing and hiring applicants well …

… and that remains true even if Google hire 50:50 from an 80:20 pool, because they have so many applicants for every position.

As for Google’s (hypothetical) decision that their coding shop should more closely resemble the demographics of their market — because they think that will help produce more products that meet the wants/needs of more of their market — in employment law that’s known as a “legitimate business reason.”

Belle@7

It would be pretty annoying I agree. (Though I’ve never seen that attitude expressed by my colleagues. Not overtly anyway. I work in software, but in the UK)

Tech companies can and should contribute to closing the “inclination gap” by treating their women better – but it’s a variable that’s largely (IMHO) outside their control. You can see the gap well before software companies are involved, e.g. in the rates at which girls and women choose to study computers.

I only make the point because the industry seem to be routinely attacked for having an unequal gender ratio, and individual companies should be able to use the defence of having an unequal ratio of applicants. (This is certainly the case where I work: 90% of applicants I’ve seen in the last 6 months were male).

The best explanation I’ve heard for the gender gap in programming is that it’s not so much about ability as it is about interest. A lot more men get into computer related stuff from an early age, and thus a lot more come out the other end of the pipeline into the job market. So there’s no reason to expect a very different average level of skill between male and female programmers, but there’s also no reason to expect there to be proportionately more female programmers than there are female computer science majors, which are overwhelmingly male.

MrArt’s suggestion might equally well prove that Daniel’s advice was being followed, that they were restricting recruitment of stars to white men and were recruiting women and racial minorities deliberately into support positions.

(I haven’t read the thing, nor any piece about it longer than this one, nor do I plan to. I will say that the idea of the “supercoder” was well known in my youth and I have no desire to see how many otherwise sympathetic people who couldn’t place a semicolon correctly to save their lives simply assume they are all men.)

Most of the academic work that James Damore gestures at[1] is about differences in *personality* and *preferences* as these things are measured in social science, rather than ability.

Damore keeps making references to “ability” as well, which is unfortunate, as his substantive claim is as follows:

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. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

He then blunders into this statement:

I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes

This is a facepalm-moment, because he mentions “abilities” then spends most of the rest of the piece talking about *personality* differences, interest in things vs. people, neuroticism etc. He claims there is a difference in skill traits, which is not what most of the evidence he gestures at actually indicates. So the memo is clearly sexist, and definitely worth a stiff talking-to from HR and an early warning.

But it does bring me back to the OP above. I’m genuinely curious if Dan thinks the entire gender disparity in “tech” or Google is attributable to sexist hiring policies. Dan says:

The male/female ratio at Google is not the outcome of a neutral process; it’s a variable under Google’s control. And when you think of the male/female ratio as an input rather than an output, you can start thinking about recruitment as a quality control process and everything becomes much simpler.

But is it though? That’s the key point in question. If women are on average more interested in people and men are on average more interested in things you might simply expect more men to apply to work on jobs that require dealing with things than women[2]. At this point you’re no longer hiring from a random sample of the population, but from a biased sample. In the US, in 2014, 18% of computer science majors were women. So Dan’s claim that the ratio is wholly under Google’s control is just wrong. Unless you want to start talking about exactly what sort of company Google wants to be, which doesn’t really illuminate matters one way or the other.

Dan states:

if the Google Manifesto was correct, then you would expect to see that Google was full of mediocre female employees, who had been hired by a process biased in their favour despite being inadequate to the task

At no point does James Damore make this claim. His argument is that the observed gender disparity is *mostly* a result of preferences which, on average, differ between men and women. He doesn’t discount sexism entirely, but his point is that relentless pursuit of 50%/50% representation is, as he puts it, divisive. If you pick the top 5% of applicants from category M and category W, and you get 82% of applicants from category M, and only 18% from category W, then it’s unlikely your output will be 50%/50% between M and W.

I’m more of a people-person myself, so I may have made some mistakes in the HTML tags in this comment. I’d be grateful if someone who was better at that sort of thing could correct any errors I’ve made.

[1]: Apparently links were redacted from the version of the memo posted at Gizmodo. I’m sure we all agree that lack of explicit citations might have contributed to the general bad temper and lack of clear understanding of the content of the memo.

[2]: The question of whether Google should focus on “things” or “people” is another question entirely. It’s been weird seeing people attack the memo on the basis that software engineering is as much people work as technical work, which seems to accept the memo’s basic claim that there *are* significant gender differences; and as a result hiring more women is the right thing to do because they’re on average more interested in people.

Of course this was Silicon Valley where everything was just invented, so something else missed is how moth-eaten this particular topic is. Back in the Early Paleolithic (that is, say the 60’s and 70’s) the fraction of women in computer science was high; then to quote from an article in 2000, “The proportions of Computer Science (CS) graduates who are women has been declining in the last fifteen years. ” Historically, most computers (the human kind) were female, and this carried over into the early computer era. Then it became prestigious and the men showed up.

And the article is “Underrepresentation of Girls and Women in Computer Science: Classification of 1990s Research”, with citations back into the 1980’s to papers about possible causes. The writer may have been a great programmer, but he sure didn’t do his homework.

@ orangeman #5:

“If, after 50 or 100 years of teaching statistics, most mathematically inclinded people don’t get it , is that because
a) statistics is actually a *really* difficult subject”

It is. Moreover it relies on probability theory, a mathematical theory whose syntax dates from the decade around 1666, whose standard axiomatization of that syntax dates from the late 1920s, and for which there is, as yet, still no agreed semantics. If people who study the formal representation of uncertainty professionally can’t agree what probability statements mean after 350 years, what hope is there for the rest of us.

In these circumstances, the lack of agreement on the semantics of and choice between alternative approaches to statistical hypothesis testing is, after a mere 100 or so years of disagreement by statisticians, not something we should be especially alarmed about.

The original author tries to explain the lack of women in tech with biological differences, which aren’t just socially constructed because:

• They’re universal across human cultures

…

• The underlying traits are highly heritable

• They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective

So we should swiftly reject the “timeless biological differences” explanation for outcomes that do vary significantly by social environment, or that have varied within a single culture too swiftly to be the outcome of genetic changes, right?

In the USA, women’s share of bachelor’s degrees granted in computer science more than doubled from 1970 to 1980, peaked at 37% in 1984/1985, and then fell back into the high teens by 2010.

The change is lightning-quick compared to human generations. This is like looking at a graph of American polio cases and concluding that selection pressure abruptly produced polio-proof offspring starting in the mid-1950s. It’s mutation and selection as explained by X-Men comics.

Why does India have twice the percentage of women among HackerRank participants as Canada? I don’t know. Here’s what I do know: not because of biological factors that are innate to all women! There’s not much variation in sex ratios among working age adults across these countries. There is a large variation in how male-weighted HackerRank participation is by country.

Under very general assumptions, we can say that if the recruitment process is “fair” with respect to male versus female employees (or any other groups), the defect rate in the groups will be identical.

a: If you worked for google, would you feel comfortable posting under you own name the opinion that some of the women who worked for them were ‘defective’?

b: google’s recruitment process involves a step where minority candidates (only) who fail one interview can request a second. I presume you understand how this policy, which is new, will very likely lead to a higher proportion of ‘defective’ minority candidates, as there are now two chances to get the wrong result. The claim otherwise, in defiance of all logic in favor of making soothing noises, seems to have been what annoyed the sacked guy initially.

So your position here seems to be a criticism of google’s recruitment strategy. For which see a above.

Alex K:

Then the reasoning gets a little opaque, I’m afraid. To check for possible discrimination, we should be looking at the male/female ratio both in the pool of applicants and in the pool of new employees hired from the former. As an example, suppose 990 men and 10 women of equally high quality are applying for 100 jobs

No, let’s not suppose that. Instead, let’s suppose the pool of applicants is a variable which Google has at least some control over. That is, it doesn’t just sit there waiting for people to apply by chance, but advertises all over the place, sponsors people, visits university open days and jobs fairs, sets up community coding classes for kids, you name it. Then if only 1% of applicants are women, we can say that Google really needs to work on those outreach programs, and focus more on getting the number of women applying up.

I submitted a comment many hours ago. It is still “awaiting moderation.” Is there some problem?

I agree with most of the OP, but the problem is that you can’t really read this on the merits as such. You have to read it on the perceived merits of how the alt-right freakout machine will take it. It was made to sound very reasonable, using all of the so-called SJW language and references to science and yet elicit the very reaction that it brought on: termination, thus giving them the martyr that this person seemingly wanted to be.

The key thing that they will take away from this is that you can’t even acknowledge that differences between men and women—constructed or not—exist. Is that what it says? Is that what it means? No, but that’s the text for the alt-right reader. And of course that straw man text makes it absurd on its face to argue with.

You could post forever about how and why the memo is wrong, but you’re wasting your time.

I fully expect that women are treated poorly in programming, largely because women are treated poorly all over the place. I have no idea if it is worse in programming than in say doctoring or lawyering or investment banking–all places where I have heard some nasty anecdotes. It seems perfectly plausible that women may be discriminated against, and legally, any time we see big differences in hiring to population ratios, there is a huge potential for legal liability.

Your discussion has some holes though.

“Under very general assumptions, we can say that if the recruitment process is “fair” with respect to male versus female employees (or any other groups), the defect rate in the groups will be identical. ”

Yes, if there is a nice neutral method for evaluating employees, this would be true. But in actual fact, you know what gets much more legal scrutiny for bias against protected classes than hiring decisions? Firing decisions. If you tried to fire a protected class in proportions larger than the current already hired population you would be begging for a lawsuit without absolutely ironclad evidence that the members of that population were ‘defects’ under your definition. You see it all the time in age discrimination lawsuits–an employer is taking a somewhat risky path if they don’t hire some people 40 and older. But if they disproportionately fire people 40+, you can tell them to start writing the settlement check now. You’re assuming an approximate symmetry in hiring and firing that absolutely does not exist.

Now vaguely looking at the numbers you can see that the hiring ratios are pretty much in line with interest numbers and graduation rates in the field. That would tend to suggest that women are either genuinely less interested in the field, or that they are pushed away from it much earlier than the hiring level. Or very likely both.

” If there were a genuine problem with a biased recruitment process, you would expect to see that the small minority of conservative professors were startlingly good and universally recognised as being so intelligent and productive of the best scholarship that they had got through the discriminatory process.”

Again this presumes that “productive of the best scholarship” was subject to a neutral evaluation, while in many of the less scientific fields the politics of the field certainly could contribute to the citation levels or lack thereof. And shouldn’t this argument be reflexive? If women were really being discriminated against shouldn’t the small minority of female programmers be universally recognised as being the very best programmers in the world?

I tend to think that surviving in a field with heavy discrimination doesn’t always suggest that you’re the best of the people who would have made it had there not been heavy discrimination. Surviving in a field with heavy discrimination requires ancillary skills and talents like stubbornness, hard headed refusal to be pushed down, or in some cases hard headed refusal to notice it.

The argument that women just aren’t interested in a highly compensated field like software development is hilarious.

When you speak of evaluating the hiring process according to the defection rate you’re assuming that the process which weeds out employees is unbiased.

In an environment where you can be summarily fired for even thoughtfully and respectfully questioning the value or method of diversity efforts, that would seem like a strong assumption to make.

I very much enjoyed reading your analysis minus the attack on conservatives at the end.

Your argument is that a functional of two input distributions is unaffected by their locations? Are you sure YOU understand statistics?

MrArt @8: If you want to measure fairness, comparing the averages of the tails of two distributions isn’t very helpful. What counts is the cutoff point, which arguably should be the same in a fair process. After that, let the averages fall where they will.

Or more crudely: if Google recruit the next Turing, they shouldn’t have to recruit a dozen halfwits of the same gender to bring the averages back into line.

@21

The correct place for the semicolon is at the end of each statement in C++.

I think I basically agree with Daniel here.

Semi-seriously, I’m wondering if a better model might be something like the Fermi Paradox, with “why are there so few women working for Google” substituting for “Why haven’t we encountered extraterrestial life yet”, and something a bit like the Drake equation having terms for the various reasons people do not work for Google.

Just an anecdote, but a woman I know who does work for Google says the reason she doesn’t work for Microsoft is the way woman get treated at Microsoft. A proper social science study might take this a research hypothesis and see if the effect is more general than just that person. Hypothesis: (a) “Potential candidates don’t want to work with those sexist dillweeds” (hat tip to Belle here) is a significant term in the analogue of the Drake equation; (b) certain other employers in the same industry have a reputation as noticeably worse offenders.

[Of course, there are plenty of other reasons why you wouldn’t want to work for MS apart from the sexism factor … ]

I am slightly puzzled by the hiring practises of some of these tech companies…

a) The story they tell the immigration authorities when applying for visas (in both the US and EU) is that there are absolutely no qualified applicants for the post with the right to work in the relevant country. Zero qualified applicants. Not even one, of either gender.

Now of course you, or some suspicious minded person from the relevant government’s immigration department, might doubt the truth of this claim.

But, on the other hand, the salaries those companies are willing to pay suggests there may be some truth in it. (i.e. “offer more money to attract more applicants” has definitely been tried, and might well be into diminishing returns by now)

b) On the other hand, the stupid version of stack ranking, as practised by e,g, Microsoft, is not entirely consistent with (a) and is more consistent with an oversupply of candidates.

How not to do stack ranking: You have (say) 1000 applicants. You hire the top ten. You tell the immigration authorities the other 990 were not qualified for the post (so you can hire the ones who needed a visa). Each year, you sort your employees and fire the bottom 10%, even though you know they are actually competent — even really good — at the post they’re in, and are better than any of the 990 you didn’t hire last time. (because this is how dumb stack ranking is done). You then attempt to refill the vacancy you’ve just created … (this bit would work if candidates are in over supply, contra to previous claims about there being no remaining qualified applicants).

To take one point from this. If we knew what the actual distribution was, would it be appropriate to recruit in the ratio that exactly matched that distribution? I can think of two reasons why we would want to err on the side of diversity.

Firstly, if I have a group of workers from one clearly defined social group, it is unlikely I will get applications from talented people outside that group. If I recruit someone from outside that group, then I am more likely to be able to attract talented people from outside the core group in the future as they can see this is a team where they could prosper. That added optionality on future recruitment is worth something, so on a like-for-like basis it is advantageous to recruit outside the group.

Secondly, one consequence of having employees from the same social group is the possibility of them developing a group-think that becomes damaging to the organisation. For a specific example, I know some senior managers in banks who think it is no co-incidence that desks involved in Libor fixing were predominantly white male and all from similar backgrounds, and who think that recruiting a diverse group of traders is a way of increasing the chance of having a proper open culture. Hence recruiting a diverse range of people is more likely to produce an open culture that is less likely to tolerate destructive behaviour.

CJColucci , kaepernick may not be the best quarterback in the league but he is definitely above average and would have a job this year if it were not for his anthem protest. It’s an insult to his achievements to suggest otherwise, and undermines your argument to suggest highly qualified people are not rejected or underpaid on a purely political basis. See also: Marie curie.

DCA @ 29 makes a good point but I was just thinking about this while brushing my teeth, and I think it’s more complicated. In 1980 I was 13, was taught programming by teachers who’d learned it as adults and found it very difficult, and it was considered amazing that any of us could do it well. It was considered normal that out of 150 college bound grads, only 2 were good programmers. Of course only maybe 35 were even exposed to programming at all.

There was a period in there where it was a hobbyist thing, it required money and willingness to appear geeky, or later able to have lots of friends who did it (so the worry about appearance wasn’t there). That seems to be around the time it became a guy thing on the order of metal rock and comics. I wouldn’t be surprised if the “genius” tag hung around them even as it got easier and easier to do it.

My husband says his company gets fewer and fewer resumes from women.

@Faustusnotes:

I mean no offense, but I think you need to give CJColucci’s last sentence a closer reading. I think he covers your objection:

” . . . if Colin Kaepernick were a better quarterback, he’d be playing somewhere; if he were worse, no one would question why he isn’t playing; but he’s just mediocre enough that non-football reasons look like the best explanation.”

Something else occurs to me: how many commenters here are not in academia or journalism and would think it ordinary to publish a long attack on their employer’s management practices, in a venue provided to them by their employer, not even to mention having it picked up by major media?

I’m not defending firing people for being critical of management (whatever the perspective, political or otherwise), but on the other hand, the only two s/w engineers I’ve known essentially fired for cause (one was sacrificed to a scheduled RIF) had become disgruntled to the point where they were spending significant time trying to convince people who worked for them or whom they’d been assigned to interview, and this seems rather similar.

Dipper @ 57

You say that having employees from the same social group my result in group-think that becomes damaging to the organisation., and you cite the LIBOR scandal in which “desks involved in Libor fixing were predominantly white male and all from similar backgrounds.”

That puzzles me because, first, you’d expect foreign exchange desks to be more, not less diverse, than most other bank departments. So, by your logic, a scandal should have happened elsewhere.

Second, was LIBOR a purely a lily-white affair? I take the following from WIKIPEDIA:

“In court documents filed in Singapore, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) trader Tan Chi Min told colleagues that his bank could move global interest rates and that the Libor fixing process in London had become a cartel. Tan in his court affidavit stated that the Royal Bank of Scotland knew of the Libor rates manipulation and that it supported such actions. In instant messages, traders at RBS extensively discussed manipulating Libor rates. In a released transcript of a 21 August 2007 chat, Jezri Mohideen, who was the head of yen products in Singapore, asked to have the Libor fixed in a conversation with other traders:
Mohideen: “What’s the call on the Libor?”
Trader 2: “Where would you like it, Libor that is?”

Damore proves that white boys need a mentoring program to help them in their career.

“female employees in tech are generally very good.”

I don’t know how I can phrase this question without it sounding like I’m challenging this assertion, but I’m just genuinely interested: do you have evidence for this claim?

@60: Damore was canny when you think about it. Although race is mentioned along with gender when he speaks of diversity and its fell influence on the company, he is careful not to cite any of the related pseudo-science. Note he had no such inhibitions when it came to gender.

Had he actually quoted Murray or his fellows or wrote at length about racial differences and the difficulty blacks have with coding or handling stress, he would have been fired within 24 hours. As it is, his memo was allowed to bop around the company until it was made public, or such is my understanding. In other words, it’s still okay to write and talk this drivel about women — as this very thread demonstrates.

@56: I was amused to read Damore’s complaint that Google was not a welcoming environment for conservatives. Guess this special conservative snowflake couldn’t cope and needed his own safe space. (Which I gather several wingnut organizations have offered him.)

@19:

… for any entry-level coding job Google would typically have 26 qualified applicants: 20 men and 6 women. That’s the 80:20 ratio referenced above…

If Google decide their code shop should more closely resemble the demographics of their market — roughly 50:50 m/f — they have plenty of qualified women in the pool for a typical coding job.

Agreed. It will result in anti-male discrimination, but you’re saying Google should be able to get away with it as a legitimate business decision. So be it for the sake of this thought experiment.

@40: If only the OP said clearly, “the failure rate is significantly lower for the women at Google.” Instead, it observes that women in tech are generally very good. But so is pretty much everyone at Google, so the failure rate seems equally, negligibly small for both sexes. If the failure rate is about the same, it doesn’t give us any new information unless we measure it against the incoming quality averages.

72: Done and done. Enjoy the wombats or what have you.

I’ve said it before, though maybe not here: I doubt there is any profession as reliant on group work, and more full of people who think the world will come to an end if their essentially aesthetic preferences aren’t followed by all around them, than programmers, unless it’s actors.

@76: I’ve seen people claiming that the memo was initially sent to an internal mailing list specifically meant to discuss diversity issues. I think it changes things quite a bit if that’s true, but I have not been able to verify that claim.

I was an IT professional for over four decades.

The reason there aren’t more women in IT is cultural.

Young children are told that math and science is hard. When young girls have difficulties they are ‘encouraged’ to do something else. When young boys have the same issues they are told to ‘work harder’.

In my ( admittedly anecdotal ) experience most people regardless of gender, skin color, religion or any other such attribute are only ‘adequate’ programmers. To be a great programmer a person needs to be closer to an extreme end of the Asperger scale.

Most people, thankfully, are not.

As an extreme example of genetically influenced disparities in ability, take tennis. (Sailing would also do). It won’t I trust be controversial to posit that in the population as a whole, tennis-playing potential will be skewed toward men by virtue of being taller and having longer arms and a stronger upper body. The disparity holds in the upper tail of the distribution; the results of the various “battles of the sexes” between high-ranking players organised as stunts are pretty lopsided, and nobody has ever bothered to organise one between reigning champions. Now suppose there is an eccentric, prestigious and tony suburban tennis club that only holds both-gender competitions, and you are a gambler betting on the results. Is there a Bayesian prior in favour of male players here? I doubt it. Far too many other factors enter into the recruitment of the club, such as money, motivation, and peer pressure, and it is these the gambler should concentrate on. It’s too far from a random sample of the general population, or even the upper tail of the tennis-genetic-ability distribution. The same goes for Google. Its recruitment pool is graduates of highly ranked college computer science programmes in California. Stanford’s is 30% women, Harvey Mudd’s 50%. Google’s intake is a much lower percentage.

I worked in computing from 1983 to 1995. Admittedly, all my workplaces were majority-male, but none of them had a sex ratio of 4:1 or above; 5:2 or 5:3 was much more usual. Apparently the industry has got more male-dominated – unlike pretty much every other walk of life – in the last twenty years. But clearly this is just the way things are, and any attempt to fix it would be the rankest political correctness and also doomed to failure.

Someone brought up in this conversation the onerousness of a diversity training. Oh, the horror! When you consider what Google engineers get paid, if they have to suffer through a seminar they find uncomfortable, well, I just can’t get sympathetic to that. A lot of jobs, a lot of poorly paying jobs, have regular conditions that are dangerous, that are demeaning.

Grow up already. Feeling a little uncomfortable for a few minutes or a couple of hours at a highly desirable and extremely well-paying job is small potatoes. Get over it. It’s an entitled attitude to think your workplace should be so suited to you that never feel any stress there.

@89: Those diversity training sessions, like sexual harassment seminars, are more necessary than many realize. As the priest observes in “Brideshead Revisited”: “But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.”

(The foregoing applies to older people, as well.)

RichardM @ 84

Along the same lines about STEM hiring;

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/04/22/396672571/could-it-be-researchers-find-a-hiring-bias-that-favors-women

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888

@Crissie, Daniel

As someone who’s done hiring in software (not for Google) the idea that 20% of candidates are qualified for even a moderately-challenging job is laughable. Try closer to 2%. Of those 130, maybe 60 will be illegible CVs that are heading directly to the bin. Another 60 will be CV writeoffs for other reasons: not enough experience, wrong kind of experience, etc. You might phone screen the remaining ten and bring only 3-5 to interview. That’s approximately my experience. Maybe Google gets better CVs than I do on average but I seriously doubt that; I suspect anyone and their dog applies to every available Google vacancy.

Let’s do the numbers again assuming 2% “qualified” instead of 20%. You get 2 men and 0.6 women. Round that up to 2 qualified men and 1 qualified woman and hire the woman, and suddenly your thought experiment looks rather worse.

Note that I think Google Guy is basically wrong on all points — but I also think this example is way, way out.

I don’t think this whole debate has much to do with statistics either being hard or being poorly taught. Or really, with statistics at all.

Currently 60:

Please everyone actually read this “”manifesto”” to see that it is cribbed poorly in equal parts from the quite thoroughly discredited Charles Murray and rightly never credited pick-up blogs.

I can’t see where even one single sentence in the memo (let alone 50% of it) is “cribbed” from Charles Murray. The word “race” appears 5 times, by my count, twice in headers, but is there mainly (by my reading) because the diversity programs the author is objecting to include both gender and racial diversity. (“IQ” makes an appearance in a footnoted aside).

Meanwhile, although the author never brings up “race” to specifically object to or discuss practices concerning racial diversity, he brings up “woman” over and over and over. The memo is clearly focused on what the author doesn’t like about Google’s efforts to hire a greater proportion of women.

Perhaps this is all a Trojan horse, and what the author really hates is the effort to hire more minorities, but what’s the point of surmising that? Yes, it could be true, but it might not be true. Maybe all of the specific practices that he’s seen or been subject to and didn’t like have involved women and not minorities.

The “evo-psych” stuff about women and their interests and the whole discussion of why women are under-represented in some fields and over-represented in others may be complete twaddle, but it doesn’t seem like the same sort of stuff that Charles Murray does. I think I understand at least some of the objections to Murray’s ideas and interpretation of data, so maybe I am just unfamiliar with how those objections carry over to these other ideas and interpretations of other data.

Currently 89:

Someone brought up in this conversation the onerousness of a diversity training. Oh, the horror! When you consider what Google engineers get paid, if they have to suffer through a seminar they find uncomfortable, well, I just can’t get sympathetic to that. A lot of jobs, a lot of poorly paying jobs, have regular conditions that are dangerous, that are demeaning.

Grow up already. Feeling a little uncomfortable for a few minutes or a couple of hours at a highly desirable and extremely well-paying job is small potatoes. Get over it. It’s an entitled attitude to think your workplace should be so suited to you that never feel any stress there.

This gets at what the Memo is actually about, how Google’s efforts to hire to hire more women are, in the author’s view, counter-productive in that they have created less attractive working conditions for some other workers, and that on balance this is hurting the company. But, criticizing him this way obviously pre-supposes that he’s wrong. What if he’s right?

Much of the response by the Left to this memo seems to implicitly assume that in this case, Google, because they’re trying to hire more women, is getting it right. Well, how does anyone know? Not every bureaucratic outcome in a corporate context is a good one, not even ones with a “progressive” intent, surely. (Also, “slack?”).

I have myself never been subject to any onerous diversity training or practices of any sort. But I do know people, left-wing people in particular, who have expressed strong reservations about various “diversity bureaucracy” practices (in an academic environment mostly).

If a worker in a job that was unnecessarily “dangerous” or “demeaning” made an effort to improve working conditions, I think everyone would agree this is good. If the author of the memo is correct, then it seems the invective above (and also of course his firing) is hard to justify.

Of course the author might be wrong also, Google’s actions in this regards may be working to make the company better. My point is that I don’t see any evidence for this either way[1], and yet everything else is kind of besides the point. In a way harry b’s comment 62 or the discussion of Kaepernick are the most relevant comments, because at least there’s some recognition of the desirability of having evidence.

[1] I guess you could take the idea that the author’s evo-psych arguments about women are bad as evidence that his arguments about Google’s working environment are bad, but is that necessarily so? I also find myself less sympathetic towards the author and his concerns because of his focus on “conservatives” and ideology – if these programs are really a problem, I would think they would be alienating many non-conservatives as well, yet the author never seems to entertain this notion – yet I don’t know that this is really evidence against his view, either.

Well, OK, Maitland, then, not “mainland”.

William Berry @ 99

I hope you mean “Maitland” rather than “asshole.” Regardless, I’ve been called worse. (And I get a kick out of provoking assholes).

But, empirically speaking, where do you get the idea that women are sexually harassed and discriminated against at Google? True, there may have been a few isolated egregious cases, but what workplace is completely free of those? The difference is that the liberal media machine seizes on any misbehavior in Silicon and uses it to smear every male employee. The political motivation is obvious.

I think that Doug K @ 100 backs up my claim that the issue is about being a ” little stressed or uncomfortable on occasion in the workplace” (as you put it) rather than something as serious as being sexually harassed. Doug concludes that “gender disparity in tech is due to rancid fuckwit techbros like Damore, and the hostility they engender towards women and minorities.” (Please disregard the stereotyping).

Really, if the earnest gentle well-intended Damore is the major barrier to women in tech, then my pastiche of Mark Engleson @ 89 is closer to the mark than I imagined. We are back in the make-believe feminist world where a micro-aggression can cause a nervous breakdown. (Damore has described his mandatory diversity training: “You’re not allowed to say that — that’s sexist” ).

Surely, the most anti-feminist meme around is the (contemporary) feminist meme of women as passive and helpless and devoid of any agency. This is why women are underrepresented on Google’s workforce?!

@Ian Maitland:

Well, OK, I took it that the Internet debate had broadened to the general issue of discrimination against women in hiring and promotion in tech, and not just at Google.

Your silly “re-writing” of Engleson’s post includes the priceless “workplace gripes of women at Google and the occasional microaggressions that they experience” and “oafish male pranks” [that make women “uncomfortable”]; smarmy cracks that are so typical of the MRA’s technique of trying to minimize the actual harms experienced by others so that your own whining doesn’t look so contemptible in comparison.

What you are really doing here is just confirming what I have always known about you MRA types (and right-wingers in general): the one thing you are really good at is crying.

From what I’ve seen about you online, you’ve made a good career out of it.

Crooked Timber really needs a better class of troll.

BigHank53 already posted this link but I think it well worth reading so I reposted it here.

I’ve worked as a software engineer for 40 years, and observed both the rise and fall of women’s participation in the field and the development of toxic brogrammer culture. And I’ve worked (and continue to work) at some of the big-name Silicon Valley internet companies and can say that Yonatan’s experience matches mine. I spend about 15% of my time actually writing code (on average — a bit more when I was more junior, a bit less today). The rest is spent in communication with managers, customers, and other programmers. I have noticed some differences between women and men software engineers. Like Yonatan observes, the women seem on average better at the whole mutual support, teamwork, and yes, political aspects of software engineering. Thing is, we don’t interview for those qualities. We interview on “objective” criteria like high-stress coding challenges. Yet my experience is that successful teams are the ones where those other things are most present.

Software engineering isn’t like most other engineering disciplines, and in fact many would refuse to call it engineering at all. There is a lot more informational communication, and a lot less math and detailed specifications than, say, electrical or mechanical engineering (something that may be entirely contrary to what folks outside of the profession might assume). The social aspect is highly important; frequent discussion of design and progress and, yes, empathy in the sense of understanding a coworker’s thinking. And although I cast a skeptical eye toward arguments from biology, the fact is that women are expected by our culture to do better in these domains, and thus often do so. Make of that what you will.

It amuses me, in a sad way, that there has been a lot of effort to engineer the social and communication environment of software development, techniques such as “agile programming” — and yet the brogrammer “hold my beer while I write some spectacular lines of code” ethos still predominates.

One final comment: that screed circulated within Google for weeks before its existence was leaked to the public. The result was a textbook case of a hostile working environment for the women there. Shame on Google for letting it go on so long.

To me, that statement looks like an indefensible lie

Every hard-right activist without exception displays obvious signs of theory-of-mind/empathy impairment.

If James Damore is so furious about being fired, why doesn’t he just go to his trade union?

Oh but wait.

Slightly OT but while we’re on diversity, a significant transgender anecdote. Ever wondered why Silicon Valley’s hardware flagship Intel is being slowly eaten alive by upstart chip design shop ARM of sleepy Cambridge (England)? In recent years. it’s mainly because the business model (“decent and regularly improved low-power processors licensed openly to all comers, including Chinese” has proved superior to “powerful energy guzzling processors made only by us and sold at huge monopoly markups”. But the low-power bit goes back to Sophie Wilson, who as a young man designed the first processor in 1985 for what was then Acorn to meet a BBC specification. Advert for old blog post with the story.

You wonder why the obviously super-talented young Roger Wilson, as she then was, was not headhunted away by Silicon Valley for much more money. My speculation (somebody should ask her) is that it was the working environment. Discrimination, harassment and simple incomprehension must be much, much worse for transgender people than for women who are usually present in numbers for solidarity. If Roger/Sophie had found a safe working environment at Hauser’s little startup, she would have been very reluctant to leave it for the macho culture of Silicon Valley. She eventually did move, but to another Cambridge company. The city is notoriously tolerant of discreet sexual diversity, in a generally more tolerant country. Actions have consequences, as they say.

Sorry, seem to have screwed up the formatting there. My comment was directed at Ian Maitland’s astonishing statement that “The truth is that I am an old-fashioned feminist. I didn’t leave the feminist movement, it left me.”

Every hard-right activist without exception displays obvious signs of theory-of-mind/empathy impairment.

Not this again

Will we know that women’s liberation has finally arrived when it is taboo for male engineers to give female engineers books of poetry by Leonard Cohen?

So, it was the book, not the asking-her-to-dinner-on-a-night-when-his-wife-is-out-of-town?

PatinIowa (12) I agree completely, except, I would still fire him even if he were one of those so-called star programmers.

You don’t need to protect the welfare of a white male over-privileged (Harvard eh?) youth.

Ian Maitland
‘Widespread’ and ‘universal’ are not synonyms; a report that says a problem is widespread in Silicon Valley (or any other place or context that happens to be under discussion) is not fairly interpreted as saying that the problem is universal in Silicon Valley and is not, therefore, a smear of everybody in Silicon Valley.

@Pavel A: What you said @110

I admire your patience. I am getting old. I just can’t do it any more.

But, if you haven’t done it already, I suggest you take a look at Professor Maitland’s history on the Google. You will learn that he has been a “feminist”, by his idiosyncratic definition (well, not really idiosyncratic; it’s actually a fairly standard pose within the MRA crowd) for a long time.

Well, actually, what you will learn is that he is the poster-boy for White Male Privilege in Academia; the guy who cried all the way to the bank by socking it to those nasty women who dared to want to be paid as much as him.

[Moz:] He was fired for making it impossible for anyone to work with him, because he felt the need to make points that are unacceptable (and possibly illegal) to his coworkers.

Could you quote just one?

anon/portly

I think one could agree with your point entirely and also agree with my point entirely. Right? My point is that, just because you or I agree with the purpose of a bureaucratic process in a company or governmental institution, doesn’t mean that bureaucratic process in a specific instance can’t be poorly or unfairly implemented.

What is not clear is how you could possibly think that point is worth making in the specific context of this discussion. It is of course true that sometimes people bungle whatever it is that they are trying to do (whether that is making a workplace more welcoming to female employees or anything else), but this is so generally true and so easily perceived that it is hard to think of any context where it would be a point specifically worth making. It is this that makes it tempting to suppose, in a spirit of interpretive charity, that you had some other point you were trying to make, and if that is not in fact the case it is hard to blame people for misunderstanding you.

‘Is that all you meant?’ the reader naturally wonders. ‘That sometimes people blunder? We all know that. Did you really post a comment just for that? No, there must be something else there.’

Ian @124: generalisations about hardware engineers don’t tell us anything about software developers. Perhaps box-shifting and cable-laying do appeal to under-socialised males; people in those roles can get away with not having people-oriented skill-sets (just about). Software engineers absolutely can’t.

But say, for the sake of argument, that male software engineers are (typically) autistic-spectrum gearheads with no social interests or skills. If that is the case, there’s all the more reason to make an effort to recruit more software engineers who can actually talk to people, who will (ex hypothesi) mostly be women. Also, all the more reason to try and create a hospitable environment for those vitally important members of staff, by socialising the males already on the payroll, or at a minimum schooling them in the basics of social interaction – which, as parents of toddlers know, starts by laying down the law about what they can’t say.

In short, where you – and Damore – see the natural order of things, the rest of us see a problem that needs solving, and that companies like Google are (creditably) making an effort to solve.

Jeff Guinn
It is not immediately obvious how valid or meaningful it is to treat mechanical aptitude as a single trait susceptible of one-dimensional measurement; but supposing it means something, if men on average show more of it than women, one might wonder why that is so. On the face of it, it would appear to me that mechanical aptitude could easily be the sort of thing that is improved by practice; in which case, one might wonder whether men have more of it because they practise it more. But then, why might that be so? There would probably be a combination of reasons; but boys being encouraged to use their mechanical aptitude more than girls is one obvious possibility. Shouldn’t we therefore explore the possibility that if employers of mechanics gave more encouragement to women as employees and potential employees, they would develop greater mechanical aptitude and take up more jobs as mechanics? I can’t see how it makes sense for any kind of employer to discourage (intentionally or inadvertently) a section of the population from developing the abilities the employer needs.

[J-d:] On the face of it, it would appear to me that mechanical aptitude could easily be the sort of thing that is improved by practice; in which case, one might wonder whether men have more of it because they practice it more.

That’s certainly a valid supposition — assume it is true. In that case, as Western societies have become vastly better in terms of equal opportunity (40 years ago, women were actively excluded from my profession to being actively sought after, and that is just one example of many), then the mechanical aptitude difference between men and women
should converge.

It hasn’t budged.

Further, there are easily available indicators out there to suggest what women’s preferences are right now. There is a series on youtube called “Project Binky”. It is about putting a turbo charged Toyota Celica drivetrain in an original Mini. Viewership: something more than 100% male. Same for AvE — he does tool reviews as well as shop tips and tricks.

Women practically never, even now, choose to spend time on that stuff. Guys in their hundreds of thousands (nearly 800,000 for Binky Ep15) do.

And I’ll bet the numbers are pretty much the same for, say, Arduino (popular micro controller) videos.

This means that young women are almost exclusively not choosing to look at these things, which could very well mean that they are not at all inclined to do so. Further, despite growing up in a culture that imposes no explicit limits, they are no more inclined to do so than their mothers.

So while your supposition might be true, there is no available evidence suggesting it is true. Rather, it seems that, as with many other things, their are distinct and ineradicable population-wide differences between men and women.

Which is Damore’s point: across many characteristics, the aggregate differences between men and women are such that at any point on the right side of the male distribution, there will be far fewer women. Within the easily and thoroughly quantified realm of mechanical aptitude, there is no doubt of this, and no indication it is amenable to social determinism.

There is no reason to believe that once artificial constraints are lifted — as in my profession — that female representation will change from its constricted amount to 50-50. It could be anything. In some professions, veterinary medicine, for instance, it has gone from nearly zero to more than 60%. In mine — zero to five percent, hasn’t budged since, and doesn’t look like moving ever.

This is a long-ish read, but looks in detail at the issue.

This American Life — which will never be confused with the right — had a show called Testosterone. Turns out, it makes a difference.

Damore was on solid ground, he used well established data and a coherent logical argument to make the case that Google’s goal for women software engineers will be defeated by the combination of women’s aptitudes and inclinations. Absent grotesque abuse of EEO law, there is no way to get there.

Jeff Guinn@135: There is a series on youtube called “Project Binky”. It is about putting a turbo charged Toyota Celica drivetrain in an original Mini. Viewership: something more than 100% male. Same for AvE — he does tool reviews as well as shop tips and tricks.

I watch most of AvE’s videos, and he’s unashamedly sexist. His latest video is called “BOLTR: BEAVER FEVER RELIEVER” for crying out loud. Sure, he possibly would argue that he does it in a self-consciously postmodern ironic way. But that doesn’t fly, because he does it consistently and there’s no counterpoint. He does it because it’s funny and it gets clicks. Because his audience is male, and comfortable with sexual, sexist humor.

Saying “women aren’t interested in sexist humor aimed at them” is almost tautological.

Ian Maitland

… we can safely rely on market forces …

I deny you the right to treat that statement as axiomatic. If you want to rely on it, you need to indicate why it should be accepted.

So — unless you believe that tech companies are insufficiently motivated by greed — over time their actual sex ratios (or mix of “gendered” skills) will change, with lags, to reflect the evolving challenges they face. To believe otherwise is to believe that we know their business better than they do.

If that logic is applied consistently, it must follow that for you (or James Damore) to criticise policies/programs Google is adopting/implementing (such as diversity training) is to believe that you know their business better than they do. If you think that Google is a better judge of what it should do than anybody else can be, on what basis can you possibly support James Damore’s criticism?

Damore would be the last person to oppose policies to create a hospitable environment for women at Google.

That seems like a large claim to me. I am not inclined to accept it solely on the basis of your assertion.

Under pressure from left-wing media and feminist activists, Google caved in and — to quote Damore — created “a climate of shaming and misrepresentation [that] is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber.”

If it were true that Google had created a ‘climate of misrepresentation’, it would be possible to present examples of misrepresentations. So far you don’t seem to have done so.

The company instituted mandatory “diversity training” whose premise is that “all disparities in representation are due to oppression” and that discrimination is necessary “to reach equal representation.”

You’ve mentioned several times that the training is mandatory, but so far the reports I’ve found don’t support that. I’d like to know where you’re getting that from. I’d also like to know whether the statements ‘all disparities in representation are due to oppression’ and ‘discrimination is necessary to reach equal representation’ are direct quotes from the training, as you appear to be representing them as being.

Diversity programming has nothing to do with creating a welcoming workplace. Rather it is about throwing Google’s male employees under the bus to bolster the company’s legal position in ongoing litigation.

What litigation are you referring to?

It is no coincidence that Damore decided to write the memo after attending a Google diversity session where he heard things he “definitely disagreed with.” “There was a lot of just shaming and ‘no, you can’t say that, that’s sexist’ . . .”

If somebody tells me that something I have said is sexist, and it actually is sexist, then the appropriate response is not for me to complaint about having been shamed. If I actually have been sexist, then I should be ashamed of it.

On the other hand, it’s possible that somebody might tell me that something I have said is sexist when in fact it wasn’t. The appropriate response then depends on more specific facts. For one thing, it’s possible that what I said might have been sexist even though I didn’t intend it to be sexist and didn’t realise it was sexist; so one part of an appropriate response might be to reflect on whether what I said was sexist, despite my first impulse to deny that. Even if what I said was not actually sexist, one part of an appropriate response might be to reflect on what led people to perceive it as being sexist, and whether I can learn anything about how to express myself more clearly in future. I can imagine that there are some circumstances where part of an appropriate response would be to make a public defence of my statement, explaining how it isn’t sexist and how perception of it as sexist is mistaken. What I can’t imagine is any circumstance where it would be an appropriate response to complain publicly about having been shamed. What is it, specifically, that James Damore said, and how was it, specifically, that he was shamed for it?

[Moz:] I watch most of AvE’s videos, and he’s unashamedly sexist.

Fair enough.

But the point still stands. There are untold numbers of videos on youtube dealing with tools, engine rebuilding, woodworking, electronics, programming tutorials, etc. that aren’t the least bit sexist. Near as makes no difference to 100% of the people making and watching them are men.

That counts as powerful evidence that women’s interests do not lie in those activities nearly to the extent men’s do, thereby substantiating Damore’s point.

[Ogden:] Imagine unsupported attributions that smear half the population.

Could you please provide one, using direct quotes, and showing how it was unsupported, and constitutes a smear?

Jeff Guinn
If we have a situation where many occupations used to be heavily gender-segregated, but in the last forty years there have been huge changes in some of those occupations, so that the gender-segregation has been sharply reduced or eliminated, while in other occupations there has been little or no change, how do we explain that situation?

It seems that your preferred explanation is that in some occupations the gender segregation was largely or wholly a consequence of unfair discrimination, while in others it was largely or wholly a consequence of innate differences between men and women, and that over the last forty years unfair gender discrimination in our society has been sharply reduced, with the result that gender-segregation has disappeared, or at least been sharply reduced, in those occupations where it was a consequence of unfair discrimination, but remains in those occupations where it is a consequence of innate differences between men and women.

But I don’t know of any good reason to prefer this explanation to the alternative explanation that what has happened in our society over the last forty years is that some forms of unfair gender discrimination have been sharply reduced (affecting gender segregation in some occupations) while other forms have been little affected (leaving gender segregation largely unaffected in some occupations).

I think there are few if any people who would deny that there are differences between the interests and preferences of men and women; what is heavily disputed is the extent (if any) to which those differences are innate. It’s possible that there are innate differences which will remain no matter what else changes in society; but it’s also possible that there are still huge differences which could be sharply reduced, perhaps to nothing, if society changed.

Notice that you write that young women grow up ‘in a culture that imposes no explicit limits’. Even if this is true, your inclusion of the qualifying word ‘explicit’ represents an acknowledgement that there could be such things as implicit limits. Notice also that you refer to ‘distinct and ineradicable population-wide differences between men and women’. The fact that you conjoin the two qualifying adjectives ‘distinct’ and ‘ineradicable’ represents an acknowledgement that they are not synonymous, that it is possible there are distinct population-wide differences that are not ineradicable.

Jeff Guinn

I can’t help but notice that no one who has leveled accusations at Damore has ever quoted him directly, nor impeached his sources. Not at the NYT, Slate, Gizmodo, nor here.

In my comments in this discussion so far, I have been responding to the contributions of other commenters, not to anything James Damore wrote. But I have now looked at what he wrote, and I notice several dubious points. For example (and I quote directly):

As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits

If we think about an issue in terms of costs and benefits, we are implicitly moralising; what we count as a cost, and what we count as a benefit, is a moral choice.

Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.

That’s not a claim that deserves to be accepted without argument.

We should focus on psychological safety, which has shown positive effects and should (hopefully) not lead to unfair discrimination.

That’s another claim that does not deserve to be accepted without argument. For one thing, it’s not obvious what is meant in this context by ‘psychological safety’.

From the previous comment(er):

I was a lurker here for several years… But I now recall why I generally stay away these days… the haughty petulance of some of the most frequent commenters leaves a bad smell.

Seconded.

Orange @ 138

That is wrong. It is beside the point what upper management or lower management wants.

Recall that I was responding to Phil’s scenario: “But say, for the sake of argument, that male software engineers are (typically) autistic-spectrum gearheads with no social interests or skills. If that is the case, there’s all the more reason to make an effort to recruit more software engineers who can actually talk to people, who will (ex hypothesi) mostly be women. ”

In that environment (i.e., where social skills are needed), it follows that companies that don’t recruit more “software engineers who can actually talk to people” (ex hypothesi mostly women) will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage as compared with companies that do recruit such software engineers. They will lose market share and eventually go out of business. That will leave only companies that have something close to an optimal balance of gearheads (men) and software engineers with social skills (women).

Might individual low-level managers try to sabotage a change in the recruiting mix? Of course it’s conceivable, but then they had better be on the verge of retirement, because they will be putting themselves out of a job.

In that case, we don’t need your leftist-feminist conspiracy theory about pushback from “entrenched cultural forces.” The entrenched cultural forces can fight all they want, but they are history.

@134 appears to be an argument based upon the magical thinking that markets can will cure all ills. I can’t expect an expert on Gender Differences to also have read Economics and understand market failures, or the tendency of high-rent, near-monopoly businesses to control a market (versus being-controlled-by-it).

Nor can I expect the sort of ideologue who was the first to be named a Senior Fellow at the Center of the American Experiment to concede that Google’s firing of Damore is a market response.

Damore, slapped down by The Invisible Hand.

J-D @ 130, 139

I apologize if I appear to have neglected your comments. I had to think hard about them.

You’ll hate me saying this, but I find a lot to agree with in your post. I am not proposing anything like abolishing lawsuits, but I think we need something the English rule where the loser pays, among other overdue reforms. I would also be interested in your take on the Pao case. If you don’t want to share that here, you are welcome to email me. I’ve already been outed on this blog. I teach business at the Univ. of Minnesota. You shouldn’t have too much trouble finding my email address.

Having said that, I believe that the court system has been abused, particularly in the case of gender class actions over alleged pay discrimination at colleges. The problem is less with the court system itself than with college administrations. I don’t want to generalize, but very few of them are willing to let lawsuits brought against their colleges go to trial. They are paralyzed by the prospect of negative publicity and terrorized by fear of being labeled misogynists, and anyway they are PC and even if they are convinced that the particular lawsuit against their college has no merit, who could oppose hiking women’s pay? Consider the pay hikes to be some sort of righting of a historic injustice. So the administrations move quickly to settle the lawsuits, usually giving women generous “equity” pay increases, without any serious regard to the merits of the claim.

Of course, this process feeds on itself. Once the plaintiff’s bar figures out that colleges won’t fight women faculty’s pay equity claims, but will always offer settlements, then no matter how unfounded the claims are, a lawsuit is a one-way bet. They can’t lose. These lawsuits have greatly enriched the plaintiff’s bar. (I am speaking from first-hand experience).

Re your # 139

1. My original comments first: “we can safely rely on market forces …”
2. You: I deny you the right to treat that statement as axiomatic. If you want to rely on it, you need to indicate why it should be accepted].
3. Reply: I spelled out the economic logic. I think the burden is on you to give some indication of why the laws of economics may be suspended in this case.

1. So — unless you believe that tech companies are insufficiently motivated by greed — over time their actual sex ratios (or mix of “gendered” skills) will change, with lags, to reflect the evolving challenges they face. To believe otherwise is to believe that we know their business better than they do.
2. If that logic is applied consistently, it must follow that for you (or James Damore) to criticise policies/programs Google is adopting/implementing (such as diversity training) is to believe that you know their business better than they do. If you think that Google is a better judge of what it should do than anybody else can be, on what basis can you possibly support James Damore’s criticism?
3. My contention is that Google’s policies have been political decisions, not business decisions. Companies should not be placed in the impossible position of having to adopt bad policies in order to placate political and media bullies with their own political agendas.

1. Damore would be the last person to oppose policies to create a hospitable environment for women at Google.
2. That seems like a large claim to me. I am not inclined to accept it solely on the basis of your assertion.
3. As Jeff Guinn says to Moz, if you haven’t read Damore’s memo, “that’s on you then.” Don’t accept my assertion if you want, but (and I address this to almost all of you) please read Damore’s memo. That is where you will find the supporting evidence.1.

1. Under pressure from left-wing media and feminist activists, Google caved in and — to quote Damore — created “a climate of shaming and misrepresentation [that] is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber.”
2. If it were true that Google had created a ‘climate of misrepresentation’, it would be possible to present examples of misrepresentations. So far you don’t seem to have done so.
3. That is not fair. For one thing, that is a quotation from Damore. But, if you want specifics, take the biggest lie of all, one that has girdled the globe billions of times, and appeared in thousands of media outlets (including the NYT, the Economist, the Guardian). It is Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s lie about Damore’s memo: “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.” For the quote see: https://www.recode.net/2017/8/7/16110696/firing-google-ceo-employee-penned-controversial-memo-on-women-has-violated-its-code-of-conduct
That is not what Damore said, and it is not what he meant. But it is what the media reported. But Damore’s detractors seem to fear that if they actually read the memo they will somehow become ideologically contaminated. Read the memo, please. (For one case, see Claire Cain Miller’s column in the NYT. The lie lives on in the archives because she refused to react despite numerous protests).

1. The company instituted mandatory “diversity training” whose premise is that “all disparities in representation are due to oppression” and that discrimination is necessary “to reach equal representation.”
2. You’ve mentioned several times that the training is mandatory, but so far the reports I’ve found don’t support that. I’d like to know where you’re getting that from. I’d also like to know whether the statements ‘all disparities in representation are due to oppression’ and ‘discrimination is necessary to reach equal representation’ are direct quotes from the training, as you appear to be representing them as being.
3. No, the statements are directly from Damore’s memo — the one that ignited this controversy. (As for mandatory, are you suggesting that they can be skipped with no consequences? I will try to verify the claim).

1. Diversity programming has nothing to do with creating a welcoming workplace. Rather it is about throwing Google’s male employees under the bus to bolster the company’s legal position in ongoing litigation.
2. What litigation are you referring to?
3. There are pending sex discrimination lawsuits in the courts. I believe they (or it) were filed recently. The Department of Justice is also in the courts demanding a huge data jump. (You see how the iron triangle of activists, media and government work?).

1. It is no coincidence that Damore decided to write the memo after attending a Google diversity session where he heard things he “definitely disagreed with.” “There was a lot of just shaming and ‘no, you can’t say that, that’s sexist’ . . .”
2. If somebody tells me that something I have said is sexist, and it actually is sexist, then the appropriate response is not for me to complaint about having been shamed. If I actually have been sexist, then I should be ashamed of it.
3. That is a big “if.” I am quoting Damore. He obviously didn’t believe it was sexist. If you have read up on campus speech codes, you will know how perfectly innocuous words have been proscribed.

1. It is no coincidence that Damore decided to write the memo after attending a Google diversity session where he heard things he “definitely disagreed with.” “There was a lot of just shaming and ‘no, you can’t say that, that’s sexist’ . . .” BIS
2. On the other hand, it’s possible that somebody might tell me that something I have said is sexist when in fact it wasn’t. The appropriate response then depends on more specific facts. For one thing, it’s possible that what I said might have been sexist even though I didn’t intend it to be sexist and didn’t realise it was sexist; so one part of an appropriate response might be to reflect on whether what I said was sexist, despite my first impulse to deny that. Even if what I said was not actually sexist, one part of an appropriate response might be to reflect on what led people to perceive it as being sexist, and whether I can learn anything about how to express myself more clearly in future. I can imagine that there are some circumstances where part of an appropriate response would be to make a public defence of my statement, explaining how it isn’t sexist and how perception of it as sexist is mistaken. What I can’t imagine is any circumstance where it would be an appropriate response to complain publicly about having been shamed. What is it, specifically, that James Damore said, and how was it, specifically, that he was shamed for it?
3. Yes, and when will they find time to write code? If you read Damore’s memo, you will see what he said, and you already know the consequences. As for your claim that you “can’t imagine is any circumstance where it would be an appropriate response to complain publicly about having been shamed,” I am horrified. I think you and your conscience need to have a serious conversation. (Can you imagine “any” circumstance where it is appropriate for a woman to complain publicly about having been discriminated against?).

The thing, of coutse, is
+ nobofy realises that they are in error (“I belueve X” and “I believe I am correct to believe X” are the same damned statement, not independent verification of each other)
+ a fortiori, a person’s conceptual errors are believed by that person to be correct
+ which means line-by-line refutation is largely pointless: if a person is acting in good faith, then every thing they write is genuinely believed.

I mean, how’s it supposed to work? What’s the mechanism of correction here, how is having your mistakes pointed out supposed to help you see that they are mistakes?

wierdnoise @ 107

W-“I have noticed some differences between women and men software engineers. Like Yonatan observes, the women seem on average better at the whole mutual support, teamwork, and yes, political aspects of software engineering…. Software engineering isn’t like most other engineering disciplines, and in fact many would refuse to call it engineering at all. There is a lot more informational communication, and a lot less math and detailed specifications than, say, electrical or mechanical engineering (something that may be entirely contrary to what folks outside of the profession might assume). The social aspect is highly important; frequent discussion of design and progress and, yes, empathy in the sense of understanding a coworker’s thinking. And although I cast a skeptical eye toward arguments from biology, the fact is that women are expected by our culture to do better in these domains, and thus often do so. Make of that what you will.”

I- I don’t find anything to quarrel with here. In fact, I am ecstatic that, unlike other critics of Damore, you are not a biology-denier. I’ll settle for a biology-skeptic because that is a major advance over the dogmatic attitude of so many other commenters.

W-It amuses me, in a sad way, that there has been a lot of effort to engineer the social and communication environment of software development, techniques such as “agile programming” — and yet the brogrammer “hold my beer while I write some spectacular lines of code” ethos still predominates.

I-When I saw this, I thought it was a cheap shot, if a fairly harmless one. I still think so. Two things bothered me. First, I thought you were giving aid and comfort to some of the media attack pieces that suggest that tech workplaces are overrun with beer-swilling brogrammers who create a hostile work environment for women. Second, there is the double standard. Is it possible for there to be a predominant ethos without a majority or at least a plurality of the class sharing it? You are characterizing real people here — the “ethos” is not just an abstraction that hovers over Google or is pumped in through the air ducts. What is sauce for the gander should be sauce for the goose. I tried to imagine the furor you would have provoked if you had used an equally derogatory stereotype of women programmers.

W-One final comment: that screed circulated within Google for weeks before its existence was leaked to the public. The result was a textbook case of a hostile working environment for the women there. Shame on Google for letting it go on so long.”

I-I am probably going to repeat myself, but here goes. Of course I think your view is vile. To show why, let me oversimplify. The underlying issue is why women are “underrepresented” (only a lawyer could have coined that barbaric neologism) in Google’s workforce. There are broadly two theories. 1. The underrepresentation is the result of sexism. 2. The underrepresentation is the result of the career choices voluntarily made by women and men (which presumably reflect the different distributions of their interests).

Now, it is possible that the answer lies somewhere between the two theories. That is Damore’s view. He begins his memo by admitting that sexism may play a role. (He was torched because he dared to mention the B word that is anathema to feminist thought police).

Think for a moment about what accepting the first theory means. Again, sexism isn’t just something in the ether of the workplace. There can’t be any sexism without sexists. And that is where Damore and other male employees come in. They are the designated fall guys. (Who else?). If the low number of women at Google is a national scandal, it is THEIR fault. That is exactly the point of diversity sessions — that is where male employees are “re-educated” and brainwashed to purge them of all those nasty male toxins that make them discriminate against women.

It is no accident that that is precisely the stereotype that you will find endlessly propagated in the attack media whose goal it is, as I said in an earlier post, to force gender equality on tech firms regardless of what real men and women want. It is quite usual for the writers to heap scorn on the beer-swilling frat boys who are supposed to populate tech firms (SEE http://theweek.com/articles/476014/brogramming-disturbing-rise-frat-culture-silicon-valley). That may be why your caricature hit a raw nerve. (“Oh, Wierdnoise is one of THEM”).

Let’s imagine Damore’s reaction. He is stung by these unwarranted attacks. They don’t fit anything he has seen at Google. He knows that less than 18% of computer science graduates are women. So how can he be blamed for the small number of women at the company? To make things worse, there are the degrading and humiliating diversity sessions at which it is forbidden to question the premise that the underrepresentation of women at Google is due to the sexism of its male employees.

And you say that his speaking up in his own defense, in defense of his male co-workers, and for the truth is “a textbook case of a hostile working environment for the women there.” That is worse than vile. It is evil. Repent!

It’s so good that people focus on equality issues at Google. As far as I know, at Amazon’s warehouses everybody is treated equally.

Clever argument which misses the larger point that available evidence shows quality of programs does not depend on star programmers but on the quality of the system+team that produces those programs. Producing good teams is the goal, or should be.

Turns out that hiring superstar programmers isn’t the key to producing good teams.
What is? Social intelligence and emotional sensitivity:

“…On the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as `equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’

“Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

So, as usual, the available research shows that emotional rather than intellectual qualities prove far more important to building successful teams and actually getting the job of producing high-quality programs done. Standard, typical, usual and quotidian. All the emphasis on intelligence and superstar programmers is wasted, all the effort to identify the very best people and gather them together proves not only irrelevant but counterproductive.

But of course neuroscientist Antonio Damasio had already summarized the overwhelming evidence that intellectual capacity is much less important in assessing the ability to accomplish difficult tasks than evaluating the person’s emotional qualities. See Damasio’s book Descarte’s Error.

As you’d expect, NASA — which has to produce mission-critical software where failure can mean death — also rejects the “star programmer” delusion:

“There’s a reasonable degree of trust when entering the workforce due to the federal background investigations you’re subjected to. It is also assumed, however, that everyone has something valuable to offer, and we trust the potential of the individual. Show that you’re good and the title becomes almost meaningless. It’s not uncommon for an intern to contribute to high-profile NASA software projects. ”
https://mystudentvoices.com/a-look-into-nasas-coding-philosophy-b747957c7f8a

We now return you to the regularly scheduled rating and ranking of people in organizations, which Campbell’s Law AKA Goodhart’s Law has shown to be destructive, futile, and toxic.