"he has provided no data for this, and neither has the person creating the memo."

ignore that haha

That video was pretty good!

James, the memo's creator, does mainly mean software engineers when he says tech (pg. 3 footnote), and so did I. Also "starting off with the base assumption that tech naturally favors people with more masculine traits than feminine" is a little unfair to him in my opinion as he does explain why he thinks some traits a better suited for tech on pg. 4 under Personality Differences and a few places elsewhere.

Also explain that comment on TrPrado's anecdotes?

@Ticonderoga

under personality differences, he does note some verifiably correct differences between men and women, however his interpretation of the necessary traits needed for software engineers are all on the male side.

he does not support this with evidence, and this is purely his opinion. there is no study he links that connects proficiency in software engineering, with biological differences between men and women: or even social-level differences for that matter. i've read it top to bottom (with hyperlinks and charts)

@Trprado made the point that his father's company included many more women in such positions: and yes this is an anecdote. he's not pretending the anecdote represents a wide-scope of data, but rather that his personal experience leads him to believe that we shouldn't be generalizing (in a potentially harmful manner) about things we simply do not know.


i will agree with you on a few points, google's dismissive nature towards his claims have been TERRIBLE and only work to exacerbate the problem. Gizmodo removing ALL links from the article has also been terrible. also, i do not think James intended to attack women here, and i don't think he has any animosity towards women either.

with all of this having been said, i still think the memo was a bit on the nose, and really hit at his employers for having left wing bias.


so let's look at what he could have done:

1. present a memo saying that they should specifically focus on programs that have higher correlations with women's traits than men's, to promote diversity

2. START by attacking google for having strong biases, and continue to do so throughout, while touching on diversity in-between.

the second one is the one he opted to go with, and it was always going to be more inflammatory. now, there is a lot of truth to what he's saying, but if i'm sending this memo out and *NOT* wanting to get fired (in an at-will state) i'd try to be more cordial and MUCH MUCH MUCH more specific.


another problem is, there are zero points in the memo mentioning the different early life social effects that cause women to be less potentially interested in STEM fields.

if i were to send someone out to find out why there's a gap between the number of men and women working at software engineering at google, and they were come back to me with this memo, i'd be extremely disappointed.

- he does not address all potential causes of the gap
- without any quantifiable data he attributes biological differences to the gap
- he focuses a large amount of his time attack biases BY google, which if anything are running in an opposite course to the overall diversity problem

this could also be made better by simplifying things down as much as possible if he were to phrase it as simply a streamlined meritocracy, so that any potential disparities are no fault of the company and thus are meaningless.

Because Yanik and I also talked about it privately and I'm not sure if all my points were made in the thread:

Women make up a decent portion of the employees at the tech company where my dad works.

ok... i found this interview with him, and now he's claiming that the memo was originally created as a first stepping stone so to go back on google's potentially illegal practices... and that's a whole other matter.

i mean they can still fire him, but he has a legitimate case to sue google if they're discriminating based on sex or ethnicity, favoring some more politically suitable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU

so i think i've read the memo in the wrong lens, it's less about explaining why women and men differ in such large number in software engineering and tech jobs, but it's FOCUS is on why google's practices are bad.

i guess that'd explain why he put relatively less research into his biological:behavior assessment, but it still doesn't excuse laziness

"I am disagreeing to three individuals experiences as being representative of the whole industry; a nation-wide company is not defined by your dad"

I've been in the office. I've met the CEO. My stepmom worked there when she met my dad. My brother used to work there. I've met several people who work for this company. My dad holds a senior position at this company. My dad was just a leading-in point for the conversation. I don't consider myself particularly invested in STEM fields or the tech industry myself (as I said at the outset of the thread), so I tend to forget that what my dad does is part of the tech industry. He and most other employees have the job of teaching clients how the software works. This software wouldn't be sold without the company being primarily socially-oriented, and it wouldn't keep its clients if it weren't primarily socially-oriented. The software wouldn't have developed to its current state if the company weren't socially-oriented.

And ATC's article was written by a former Google employee who held a more senior position than the memo's author, which leads me to presume he has greater understanding of Google and the tech industry than the memo's author.

So it's more of a trend than an anecdote, eh? ;)

just for reference, i'm having the biggest problem connecting software engineering to the biological and behavioral differences of men and women. to some of the people earlier in the thread talking about pseudoscience in regards to behavioral differences between men and women, and other things talked about in the article, here are a series of studies mostly validating what is said in the study in terms of factual statements, reference back to the earlier interview i posted.

it's what he did NOT put in the memo, and claimed as opinion that i am upset with

but here are the studies:


Sex differences in personality:
http://bit.ly/2gJVmEp
http://bit.ly/2vEKTUx

Larger/large and stable sex differences in more gender-neutral countries: (Note: these findings runs precisely and exactly contrary to social constructionist theory: thus, it's been tested, and it's wrong).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...
http://bit.ly/2uoY9c4

(Women's) interest in things vs (men's) interest in things:
http://bit.ly/2wtlbzU
http://bit.ly/2fsq7Ru

The importance of exposure to sex-linked steroids on fetal and then lifetime development:
http://bit.ly/2vP0ZLS

Exposure to prenatal testosterone and interest in things (even when the exposure is among females):
http://bit.ly/2wI28RE

Primarily biological basis of personality sex differences:
http://bit.ly/2vmtSMs
http://bit.ly/2uoPzy0

Status and sex: males and females
http://bit.ly/2uoWkMh
http://bit.ly/2uoIOw8
http://bit.ly/2vNzcL6
To quote de Bruyn et al (first reference on status and sex, above): high status predicts more mating opportunities and, thus, increased reproductive success. “This is true for human adults in many cultures, both ‘modern’ as well as ‘primitive’ (Betzig, 1986). In fact, this theory seems to be confirmed for non-human primates (Cheney, 1983; Cowlishaw and Dunbar, 1991; Dewsbury, 1982; Gray, 1985; Maslow, 1936) and other animals from widely differing ecologies (Ellis, 1995) such as squirrels (Farentinos, 1972), cockerels (Kratzer and Craig, 1980), and cockroaches (Breed, Smith, and Gall, 1980).” Status also increases female reproductive success, via a different pathway: “For females, it is generally argued that dominance is not necessarily a path to more copulations, as it is for males. It appears that important benefits bestowed upon dominant women are access to resources and less harassment from rivals (Campbell, 2002). Thus, dominant females tend to have higher offspring survival rates, at least among simians (Pusey, Williams, and Goodall, 1997); thus, dominance among females also appears to be linked to reproductive success.”

Personality and political belief
http://bit.ly/2hJ1Kjb
http://bit.ly/2fsxIzB
http://bit.ly/2fsILJd
http://bit.ly/2uoPS87
http://bit.ly/2ftDhOq
Conscientiousness associated with conservatism; neuroticism and agreeableness with liberalism: http://bit.ly/2wHNA4r

Occupations by gender:
https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gend...

Problems with the measurement and concept of unconscious bias:
http://bit.ly/2vGzhQP
http://bit.ly/2vQuwEP

(just in case any of you were wondering what sources they were talking about)

@TrPrado

Tristen i think Ticonderoga is talking about women on average having a higher relative SQ to EQ in E-S tests, which translates to less of a prominence in average results of women in more systemizing related fields.

there’s actually an ok point to make there, but there's still no justification for the article taking a broad series of results, and attributing them to such a specific job field

sorry i got that backwards, the systemizing quotient on average for women is lower compared to men

@ sweetypie James Yannick and TrPrado.. How can we be sure that you two are not just Chinese hoaxes ? Like Google.
I thought one of the basic principles of capitalism was that the owners of a business, or the management they appoint on their behalf, have the right to run that business, for better or worse, in any way they see fit, provided they do not act unlawfully.
If this whiny employee didn't like it at Google~hoax, then he should have found somewhere else to work that better suits his peculiar preferences.

Well, yes, but that doesn't mean people can't critique the model.

It just happens this guy's critique was filled with misunderstandings of the tech industry, over-attributions of certain traits to genetics, subverted management, and made female coworkers uncomfortable where they worked. So management thought their one solution was firing the guy.

Though, Google could've expected a bit of an uproar from the people who would take the claims at face value, and even a handful of people who disagree with the solution even if they don't believe the claims. But it's not like anyone's saying they'll boycott Google so it'll probably blow over in a month or two.

also, google is a very left leaning company, so of course you're going to see right wing attacks on them.

in other news, sky is blue

Let me know when Google's stock crashes lmao

interesting nytimes opinion piece, where the guy is actually going after google. frankly, i don't think Pichai should have to resign, but this is an interesting development, and from the NYtimes of all places

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/opinion/sundar-pichai-google-memo-diversity.html

If this post gets +1 I'll post it again but double the number

If this post gets +2 I'll post it again but double the number

If this post gets +4 I'll post it again but double the number

If this post gets +8 I'll post it again but double the number

And they call me a +1 whore. It must be something with the checkered boards...

... now see, that brings up an important vocabulary point. You are only a whore if you get paid for it. When you want +1's for nothing, you should maybe be called a +1 slut. Just saying....

I doubt that. I guarantee you nobody will +1 anything I post.

7. Do not spam the forum

+1 whoring is biological. Those with comedy cubes just do it better than those of us without.

+1 whoring is abwhorent. +1 this if you agree

+1 if you think abwhorent is the worst pun of 2017 so far

"7. Do not spam the forum"

You have to consider it relative to the conversation it supplanted.

@ Bo Sox.. Well that was just such an obvious ploy to get +1s, and I fell for it. Have a +1 from Daffy old MajorMitchell. Same for Zultar. I wonder if Zultar has ever had the Google~hoax "email problem" ..getting questionable emails from Naughty Mods. I'll bet he got a few terrible emails from "he whose name cannot be mentioned at WebDiplomacy"... Aaah..the "good" old days.. I DON'T miss that part of them at all.

If this post gets +16 I'll post it again but double the number