This is all a good breakdown of some of the ways you and I disagree, and I’m not being snarky when I say I appreciate you indulging my stupidly long posts.
But I don’t think we’re going to get much further, and some of the points we disagree on will also affect how interchangeable we think race and gender (or age or whatever) are in Damore’s manifesto.
I think that’s another good reason to not start saying one is the same as the other, but I’ve said that all the ways I know how and I appreciate you at least reading along.
If you need someone who can lift something heavy, he’s saying you look for people who can lift heavy weights. You don’t look specifically for a young person.
I think just about everyone is talking past someone at this point, myself included, but I think we’re all on the same page with what you’ve said so far. What’s contested is okay, so now we’ve hired a workforce of people who can lift heavy weights. No one who could do the job was turned away in our hypothetical situation. But now we have a disproportionately young workforce. Is that okay?
I’m sorry I misinterpreted what you are saying. I think that this sort of slipping between what statistics might say about a population versus an individual, and what statistical differences are acceptable versus unacceptable ends up clouding a lot of discussions.
Is anyone, even including the original google memo author, suggesting that attributes like sex should be used to judge fitness for employment situations? I agree that shouldn’t be the case, regardless of whatever the science says about statistical distributions. If someone can do the job, they can do the job.
However, another discussion is to what extend is the imbalance in the tech industry evidence of bias in the selection process? To say that, a priori, science could have no possible role in this determination doesn’t make sense to me. If, for instance, science says that statistically there are no psychological differences between men and women, then it puts more weight on pure bias as an explanation. It seems very likely that bias plays a role on many levels, but I wouldn’t want to throw science out the window if we ever want to understand this stuff.
No worries, this is a touchy subject so I probably should have been clearer. Mea Culpa.
I still don’t think that involving “science”, and all the crap that tries to hide under that umbrella in discussions of this topic, is actually really necessary at all. Simple statistics will do the trick. What percentage of applicants belong to age-group/sex/race/other-protected-class? How about what percentage of hires? How about the percentage of people in the industry overall? The numbers can expose a problem in that area and open the door to good discussion.
I think it’s quite possible that there are psychological differences between men and women, that there is no significant bias in Google hiring, but nevertheless Google should hire more women.
In fact, I strongly suspect that this is precisely Google’s position.
I think from what else I’ve read, the imbalance in the tech industry starts far before someone gets a google interview. Most of the discussion seems to be about whether google should accept that imbalance or push against it.
That’s fine with me. There are a lot of good reasons Google might want to do that.
Yeah, they’re presumably at-odds with the abysmal graduation rate for women in CS, which probably stems from the abysmal application rate for women going into CS programs, which probably grows from the abysmal interest-in/passion-for science ratings for girls in high school (which probably doesn’t have much to do with the relatively high interest levels those same girls report 4-5 years earlier in middle school but rather something that’s happening between, but it’s pretty hard to nail down).
I don’t think it’s the case that “science doesn’t matter.”
The issue is that “science” does not say the things that are suggested. It does not say that women are more neurotic than men, any more than it says black people have smaller brains than whites. That’s not a legitimate scientific fact.
The problem in the manifesto, was that it presented such illegitimate statements as though they were supported by a scientific consensus, and they simply are not.
In the context of hiring decisions for individuals, the “science” is a complete side show. And, as you point out, a lot of what people bring up as “science” is dubious.
I’m not denying that researchers can’t or shouldn’t study this stuff, or that legitimate science exists around this stuff, just saying it’s inapplicable to any discussions about how society should allow individuals to be considered for fitness for specific tasks or roles.
Well sure, that’s what I basically said. You can totally study all kinds of things… but there’s a difference between conducting research, and achieving a broad scientific consensus.
Well said. In the early 80’s women accounted for approx 35-40% of CS grads. In 2013 it was 18%. When the stats swing that hard and that fast, I daresay that any supposed inherent biological differences between men and women probably aren’t the root cause.
Don’t forget, studies also show that IQ goes up as you get older as well. Then there is the question of crystal intelligence and fluid intelligence.
Really, it’s all in flux.
Which just reinforces the idea that these decisions in the real world need to be done on an individual basis, but it’s still fine to have goals and to question company culture that might work against stated goals.
He said something counter to a major business objective of a large corporation he worked for.
He said something that is highly controversial, causing negative press/boycotts for said corporation.
Nothing else really matters. No matter where you work and what the details of it are, you’re gone if you do this*.
Don’t talk about anything remotely politics related or controversial at work
If you must do either of the previous, make sure it is among people you’re close with and don’t make it too controversial
If you ever sense any sort of kick back, even among friends, even if you think it is very light/non controversial, immediately stop.
He thought he was super smart and wanted to prove it in his little essay, but i guess he didn’t think about this. Think of it as a growing experience.
I also don’t think this has anything to do with being Liberal. Any large corporation, many of which support Republicans for obvious reasons, would have done the same thing.
*: Unless you’re the president of the United States of America!
However, in your example, while in some abstract sense having more west coast students would increase diversity perhaps the focus of geographic location is a poor goal and less worthy than other goals. After all, the main goal for both Google and your Boston college is diversity. Increasing the recruiting of West Coast student is just a tactic in achieving the larger objective of a more diverse student body. Perhaps recruiting more East Coast students from rural towns instead of would be a better way of achieving geographic diversity, or maybe expanding the student’s athletic department from more than just Ice Hockey and Crew by recruiting say lacrosse player and e-sports athletes would also achieve diversity.
Finally, it’s important for the Boston college to accept reality. College social life revolves around supporting the NE Patriots in the fall, cheering on the nationally ranked college hockey team in the winter and ice fishing, and in the spring supporting Patriots Day and the Boston Marathon. All this plus, a ban Mexican food in the cafeteria will make recruiting west coast students prohibitively hard and expensive.
I think Daemore argued that there other ways of achieving diversity (e.g. making it easier for conservative to work at Google), and also questioned if the tactic of supporting numerous programs specifically designed to recruit woman was the right one for achieving the objectives of more diversity. I see nothing wrong with him questioning a companies tactics.
The DNA of Google is a tech company, probably the purest tech company of all. They develop projects just because the tech is cool.
Take a look at some results from this ACM survey of men and women in IT. Generally, there weren’t differences between men and woman in IT they were equally happy with their jobs, woman valued the safety of IT, and they felt they got supported by their supervisor more. The biggest difference was that men were a lot more likely to “Love technology/computers” than women.
I think Megan McCardle summed up perfectly in her column
Which has nothing to do with why I left. This will make me sound a bit dim, but at the time, it never occurred to me that being a female in this bro ecosystem might impinge my ultimate career prospects. Nor did I miss having women in the room. I liked working with the bros just fine. And the sexual harassment, [From clients, not collegues] while annoying, was just that: annoying. I cannot recall that it ever affected my work, nor that I lost any sleep over it.
No, the reason I left is that I came into work one Monday morning and joined the guys at our work table, and one of them said: “What did you do this weekend?”
I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance. I had attended a concert that Saturday night. I answered the question with an account of both. The guys stared blankly. Then silence. Then one of them said: “I built a fiber-channel network in my basement,” and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail.
At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people. I liked the work. But I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free. Which meant that I was never going to be as good at that job as the guys around me
A few year ago I had dinner with a friend who is 2nd or 3rd grade teacher and bunch of her fellow teachers. I’ve toyed with becoming a teacher in my retirement, and very much enjoyed the various times where I’ve taught things in my life from a TA in college, to teaching people about personal finance recently. I think I’d be decent at teaching, but listening to those teacher talk about their work, I realize I’ll never have the passion to teach young children.
So it doesn’t surprise me at all that only 20% of K-8 teacher are male any more than only 20% of programmers are female. From a societal viewpoint, I worry far more about the impact of not men have on teaching than not enough woman in tech.
