But it kind of is, for these purposes, isn’t it?
I mean, how is it different?
Are you seriously asking how is gender different from skin color?
I think you’re on unstable ground as soon as you start trying to mix the two because in the best case scenario, you’re going to spend all your time clarifying exactly what you meant in your head when you said that “for these purposes”, race and gender are the same.
He means for the purposes of employment discrimination.
He is asking why statistical differences between gender are inherently different to statistical differences between races when thinking about employment policies.
Actually, I suspect that most psychiatrists talk to patients roughly as much as cardiologists and internists do, which means just long enough to check off a list of symptoms and write a prescription. The cardiologist asks about chest pain, the psychiatrist asks about mood, and both are often out of the room within 15 minutes. For the most part, psychiatrists (especially younger ones) are letting clinical psychologists handle the long psychotherapy sessions.
Still, I agree with your general point. My problem is with the structure of the argument more than the details. Like many examples of evolutionary psychology, there is no real effort to test the theory. Take radiology, for instance. It’s claimed that radiology appeals to men more than women because radiologists work with machines. Ok, but radiology technologists - the people who actually operate the MRI and CT scanners and send the images to a doctor - work with those machines even more closely than radiologists do (radiologists are not actually trained to run an MRI scanner, they are trained to interpret its output). Yet radiology technologists are overwhelmingly female.
And there are many other corollaries to the claim that innate differences drive specialization. You would expect the male:female ratios to be relatively fixed over time, but they are not. Psychiatry was once completely dominated by men. You would expect male:female ratios to be relatively fixed in different cultures and health systems, but they are not. Eventually, you are left with the conclusion that if innate differences exist, then they are just one of many factors, and not necessarily the most important factor. In which case, why not focus on the factors we can change?
Yes.
How exactly is it different, if you were to take that manifesto, and replace gender references with references to race?
Because it’s effectively saying that women are inherently worse at these various technical jobs, based entirely on their gender. If I said that black people were inherently worse at those jobs, based on their race, we all agree that would be overtly racist, right?
This statement by this guy is, by definition, sexist.
The suggestion that gender is different from race requires that you specify HOW exactly it is different, within this context.
The suggestion implies that it’s different because… it’s true? That women are just inherently inferior to men when it comes to performing these types of techincal tasks? There’s not really any biological basis for such a statement. One of my best engineers is a woman (who’s actually going on maternity leave in a month).
So I’m asking for the rationale that supports such statements, and makes it less overtly sexist than it would be overtly racist if you replaced the gender references with racial ones.
I may be losing the thread of this particular discussion, but at least part of the debate (overall, not specific to Qt3) is whether this is discrimination. James Damore is trying to give reasons why there would be a statistical difference in employment that could be attributed to something other than discrimination, and he cites studies about gender.
Whether you believe the studies are wrong, or Damore is misinterpreting them, or whatever, that’s what you should be evaluating, not how it would sound if he said these things about race.
If he said these things about race, you’d call him a racist.
Why?
Answer is the same I guess, because gender is something completely different than race and conflating the two in an attempt to portray the guy as a racist/sexist is something I find pretty distateful. Of course he might still be that, but neither from the document nor the interview does he strike me as that.
Timex, where in the memo does it say that women are inherently worse at technical jobs due to gender ? Or where is it implied there (“effectively saying” as you put it) ? Did you read it?
From what I can read there, he lays out some differences between genders, on average. Doesn’t say that one is superior/inferior over the other.
Okay I think I fixed my post, I originally posted it when I was only half finished writing it and so I had a bunch of frantic edits to finalize it
Well for starters it would be silly because the research he cites, correctly or otherwise, is all about gender!
Because it’s effectively saying that women are inherently worse at these various technical jobs, based entirely on their gender. If I said that black people were inherently worse at those jobs, based on their race, we all agree that would be overtly racist, right?
Again, he’s saying these things in context of research that he believes which is about gender. The research could be wrong, his interpretation could be wrong, but when that’s where his claims are based, you have to take them apart on those terms, you can’t just talk about how awful it would sound if it were about race and expect that to be the end of it.
He’s saying women aren’t the same as men—there is individual variance but there are broadly applicable biological differences—and that the ways they are different make them less suitable for/less interested in some jobs than others, and that it cuts both ways: men are also less suitable for/less interested in jobs based on their gender.
He’s not making claims that either is worse or inferior, only that they’re different. And because these claims are specific to gender, it’s going to be most effective to evaluate and debunk (or defend, theoretically) based on those claims.
This statement by this guy is, by definition, sexist.
I think there is room for Damore to be wrong without being sexist, but maybe that’s a distinction that doesn’t matter and just comes down to the sementics of the word.
The suggestion that gender is different from race requires that you specify HOW exactly it is different, within this context.
No, it’s on you to explain how they’re the same. Outside the context of this argument, gender and race are not the same thing. We agree on that, right? If you think that for purposes of this conversation it would be helpful to compare the two, you need to start by narrowing down the context. And you (and Juan, and Soapyfrog) have tried to, explaining that you mean discriminatory practices in hiring, and I’ve tried to explain that Damore isn’t proposing discriminatory practices, he’s trying to offer research-backed evidence that there are non-discriminatory explanations for a gender disparity in the field, and because that’s what his claim is based on, that’s what you need to debunk.
I hope I’ve given an explanation, and sorry about the clusterfuck of posting while I was still trying to put together this response. I’ve probably left some typos or formatting errors in here in my haste to finalize it.
You and Wholly Schmidt are dancing around the point.
Take Damore’s manifesto. Find/replace “women” and “black people”. Find/replace “men” and “white people”. Delete the list of references. Leave everything else, e.g. about “neuroticism” and “status”, exactly the same.
Is the edited document racist or is it not? Would it make a difference if you were given a revised reference list?
He’s trying to link those differences to inferiority in their ability to perform work in that field.
Timex, where in the memo does it say that women are inherently worse at technical jobs due to gender ? Or where is it implied there (“effectively saying” as you put it) ? Did you read it?
There are a number of places where he says this. He suggests that women are more prone to neuroticism, and inherently less capable of dealing with stress. There is no real scientific basis for this claim. You could potentially find studies to support the statement, but you could find studies discounting it as well. Here’s a study as an example:
The reality is, you can find physilogical differences in the neurochemistry between men and women, but there is no evidence that the RESULT of this difference is a lowered ability to deal with stressful situations. Attempts to suggest such manifestations occur is the same kind of pseudo-science that we’ve seen with tons of racists or bigotry in general in the past.
What you’re seeing in this guy’s screed, is the same kind of low key, indirect bigotry that you see from all kinds of psudo-intellectuals promoting bigotry. Essentially, it’s a circular argument that attempts to suggest that a minority group “belongs” in their current socio-economic pidgeonhole, because if they didn’t they wouldn’t be there. And then it attempts to mask this with pseudoscience.
Again, highlighting the similarity between this argument and those made by other bigots serves to shine a light on it for what it is… because the parallels are innumerable. It’s literally the exact same argument made about blacks, or jews, or . There aren’t many black people in the tech industry, because they’re not interested in that kind of work, or are inherently less competent at it. Here are studies showing the genetic and biological differences between them and white people, thus those differences must result in the lack of competence I just stated existed.
He specifically cites that women, on average, are more neurotic and prone to anxiety than men. Those are not positive traits. In fact, I’d argue that if you’re looking for a leadership or management position “neurotic” is going to be somewhere on the bottom of the list of big resume wins.
Then he says this:
Men’s higher drive for status
We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we
see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not
be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.Status is the primary metric that men are judged on, pushing many men into these higher
paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men
into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and
dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of
work-related deaths.
Out of context, you can take this to be a wash, right? Men are driven by their biology to go for dangerous, stressful, and “less satisfying” (in terms of work/life balance) jobs. Sucks for them! But you can’t ignore context. It’s important. I think we can agree that there isn’t a lot of life-endangering jobs being assigned at Google. We can ignore that bit of the statement. What’s left is the assertion that men are literally biologically more suited to lead because they have the drive to ignore their lives outside of work, and they handle stress better than women.
Is he wrong on the science? I frankly don’t know, but it’s impossible to read this as an endorsement of women in the workplace.
I think there are a lot of aspects of this manifesto, and in some ways you could draw parallels to racism, and in other ways it doesn’t work.
A hypothetical argument defending a workforce disparity by comparing it to a similar population disparity could be made and/or debated in a similar way whether it was for a gender or a race disparity.
The specific research Damore brings up (and that other guy cited above, the star-something blog?) is mostly about gender, and I don’t know enough to just discount the entirety of that research. My suspicion is that it’s a combination of research both good and bad, being applied in ways it probably shouldn’t. But that’s all specific enough that it should be dealt with on its own terms, because he’s not citing some theoretical research that’s making any claims about race.
Or to reframe it, if this guy is reaching sexist conclusions what does this debate gain by saying “and what if they were racist?” Isn’t it damning enough to call sexism sexism? Most of the debate I’ve seen is about the nuance of the validity and interpretation of the data being referenced, and that’s where I think it’s especially fruitless to substitute racism for sexism.
It’s also pretty blatantly just a manifestation of a martyrdom complex. The guy is basically saying, “Oh, I’m biologically forced to take on this terrible job (which happens to pay extremely well, and which I enjoy). Such is my lot in life! I’ll take one for the team!”
It’s really just meant to draw attention to the bigotry, because I think that in many ways, we’re less sensitive to sexism than we are to racism at this point. We’re better at recognizing racism for what it is, but sexism is still kind of invisible to many of us.
Absolutely. It’s the same kind of fallacious bullshit people spouted back in the day about whites having to step up and care for their less intelligent, darker-skinned citizens. “Oh! God has tasked us with the heavy burden of leadership! While these coloreds gambol and play in ignorance, we are morally and biologically required to tend to the needs of humanity! Look, their skulls have less space for brains than us white folk. Even science agrees with the holiest of direction! Amen!”
Yes, that’s exactly my point. I think there is no question this guy is sexist. But his defenders would prefer to avoid that issue, and instead ask whether gender differences can be predicted by Science™. There are several problems with that. First, basing bigotry on science has a troubled history, as others have pointed out. But even more fundamentally, it’s irrelevant. Even if you could firmly establish that women are more likely to be X or Y, that has no bearing on how they ought to be treated. The former is a question of facts, the latter is a question of values.
To take a simple example, it is a well-established fact that there is a relationship between age and cognitive ability. But as a society we have decided that this ought not affect employment, and therefore it is illegal to ask someone’s age during a job interview.
I wouldn’t work with this man and I don’t see how a woman could hope to manage him either. This would be a different discussion in a class room or a research setting… but this is s workplace. He sees women as inferior, and he works with women. He clearly doesn’t want to work with more women and assumes the women and the minorities are there because of quotas, not merit. He has no real proof of that. That creates a hostile environment and a person a good number of his colleagues couldn’t hope to receive fair consideration from. Google had to fire him.
Introducing LGBT rights in Syria is colonialism. Or something like that. My head actually began to hurt while trying to parse what this article was saying.