It's well known that men generally are stagnating economically, while women are catching up. In many metro areas, single women out earn single men.
And so I came across this paper[0], which had some interesting research about that. And what struck me was this: there's an explicit assumption that men have worse socio-emotional skills than women, and that can be used to explain the gap.
By itself, I don't take any issue with it. It's true. But if you turned it around and explained the CS gap starting from the assumption that men are disproportionately represented among the upper levels of spatial and mathematical abstraction skills, there'd be an uproar. Petitions would be signed, scalps would be taken. I say that as someone who thinks much of those differences can be explained by childhood socialization.
And you're not even allowed to talk about it. I'm hesitant to post this comment, for fear someone might hunt me down and dox me to my employer. (Even now, I ponder if I should be making a throwaway account.)
In real life, I had been willing to have conversations about this because I find it an interesting and nuanced topic. But now both sides have taken to treating anyone who doesn't take a stance of complete agreement with their respective ideologies as the Enemy.
It's creating a class of people who know just to shut up and withdraw from any discussion about the topic, because there's clearly no good that can come from it, either socially or professionally. Even academics. And I genuinely don't get why anyone would want that.
This account began as a throwaway. I used to comment with my real name, in the days before the war broke out. In the days when pg used to comment here regularly. The days when, if someone disagreed with you, they'd tell you so, or why you're wrong, or maybe that you're a dumb-dumb. Now, if you don't follow approved talking points in your social media communiqués, you're in real danger of being pilloried, and - as these things go - you're more likely to be attacked by fellow members of the party. I've identified as left-leaning my entire life, but I've never for a moment feared this sort of personal sabotage from a right-leaning person. This is a pursuit of ideological purity at any cost.
As a German I can (mostly) speak my mind about men vs women, the only minefield there is IMO (remotely) Nazi-related stuff, e.g., try to criticize Israel foreign policy or mass immigration.
That may have been true in some circles and at some times, but in early (especially pre-Web) Internet days when it was primarily academic along with some early tech companies, true names were definitely the norm.
For BBSs and the like, it varied. For hacker sites and the like anonymity/pseudonymity was certainly common but for more mainstream discussion boards, lots of people used their real names. We even had IRL get togethers.
I’ve mentioned it repeatedly on HN and have never so much as gotten a rise out of anyone. (I should also point out that the SAT folks publish a detailed report on SAT gender differences each year and nobody blinks an eye.) The problem is that it doesn’t explain the disparity in STEM—it cuts against it.
Men outrepresent women about 2:1 among perfect SAT Math scores. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this represents a real difference in mathematical ability. Even if programming ability were 100% correlated with mathematical ability, you’d expect a much higher ratio than you see in practice. That is strong evidence that women are kept out of STEM for other reasons. Beyond that (1) the pool of programmers isn’t just people with perfect SAT scores—the representation gap rapidly disappears as you go from top 0.5% to top 5%; (2) professions leverage other competencies too. The same 2:1 difference shows up in the top percentile of the LSAT and MCAT, but those fields are more gender balanced because women applicants tend to have better college GPAs.
Anecdotally: I went to a competitive admissions STEM high school, where admissions is gender blind and based heavily on an SAT-like test. The ratio was about 60:40 boys, about what you’d expect from the required testing percentiles. CS was required for all students so it is gender balanced. But APCS was overwhelmingly boys, not because it was full of the best math minds, but I suspect because we’d play DOOM if we got our assignments done early.
I stay well away from it too. In fact I fear simply writing this comment.
On Twitter, I've taken to unfollowing people who repeatedly retweet threads that have turned into piling-on contests built on a shaky foundation - the uncritical joining of a mob to throw stones at the perceived oppressor is especially worrying when a closer examination shows nuances that don't justify mob justice even in an emotional sense.
Also, Google even agrees with him: https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/958138574171287552
"Did I read this right? Susan Wojicicki said that women find “geeky male industries” (as opposed to “social industries”) “not very interesting” and Sundar cites research on gender differences."
He didn't say anything outright false, only that men and women are different and have different interests, so forcing 50/50 wont be a good outcome
I agree with OP that this difference in interests is probably socialized. Men and women are very obviously socialized differently, not to mention at many places (tech companies especially), the social atmosphere is one that favors men (boys) with keggers and nerf guns.
Damore's memo isn't very convincing from that perspective, because if the difference can be explain by 20 years of socialization, it can also be changed, and Damore's argument seemed to be based upon some inherent difference between the sexes and his solutions predicated on that assumption. Then again, not really sure exactly what he was arguing because it was meandering.
It's been argued to death at this point, but it genuinely surprises me that people find his poorly sourced memo (or whatever you want to call it) as the centerpiece for this topic. With that as the starting point, no wonder the discussion is garbage. The people who support viewpoints like Damore's should aim higher because it is not helping their case.
To give a more complete answer, here's a section from his memo:
De-emphasize empathy.
I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.
There are multiple claims there. He does refer to a blog post, but reading that, do you have any clue what that blog post may be about or how it applies to his argument?
As for his writing ability, it may not be at the level of Mark Twain, but it seems quite eloquent to me...
This article explains in great detail how that is not the case in any significance and there are even examples where men and women have been socialized oppositely and still end up choosing typical gender interests.
> argument seemed to be based upon some inherent difference between the sexes
Yes, men and women are different.
Was it really rife with fallacies? Lee Jussim (professor of social psychology at Rutgers University) wrote:
> The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right.
Geoffrey Miller (evolutionary psychology professor at University of New Mexico) wrote:
> For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate.
Debra W Soh (PhD in sexual neuroscience):
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
It doesn't seem reasonable to characterize this memo as rife with fallacies or unsupported generalizations when multiple scientists are willing to go on the record saying the memo's science is generally correct. I have not seen similar in-depth rebuttals from other scientists claiming it's wrong. (If anyone knows of one I'd be glad to read it. I have seen brief quotes from scientists in articles written by reporters, but nothing with depth or analysis.)
EDIT: I wish I understood why I've been downvoted so that I could improve my comments in the future. Would anyone be willing to explain the downvote?
That's why it is bad. Just because you've got sources doesn't mean you are saying anything useful and I'd argue the discussion proves that. He's got sources, which is somehow supposed to mean he's correct. He's blessed his argument with associations with academia, but doesn't really make compelling arguments.
This article explains in great detail how that is not the case in any significance and there are even examples where men and women have been socialized oppositely and still end up choosing typical gender interests.
> some inherent difference between the sexes
Yes, men and women are different.
It doesn't do it at all convincingly. If sexes have been socialized differently for tens of thousands of years (and they have), and one of the sexes has been intentionally limited by the other for long durations of this time (they have), then how do you say what is biological and what is sociological? He never bothers with this.
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at. http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
More from her about Damore's memo and scientific research in this space:
> Despite how it's been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate. Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behaviour.
> As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone – higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men.
> We see evidence for this in girls with a genetic condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who are exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone in the womb. When they are born, these girls prefer male-typical, wheeled toys, such as trucks, even if their parents offer more positive feedback when they play with female-typical toys, such as dolls. Similarly, men who are interested in female-typical activities were likely exposed to lower levels of testosterone.
> As well, new research from the field of genetics shows that testosterone alters the programming of neural stem cells, leading to sex differences in the brain even before it's finished developing in utero. This further suggests that our interests are influenced strongly by biology, as opposed to being learned or socially constructed.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manife...
EDIT: I wish I understood why I've been downvoted so that I could improve my comments in the future. Is the problem that it's too verbose? OK, I've tried to shorten it and replaced the links to three studies with a link to Deborah's article above.
No society has lasted tens of thousands of years and many were in complete isolation which already says something about how the same roles formed again and again. Also we see the same thing in animals.
Damore got what he wanted, he wanted to be a martyr, probably because that was all he was ever going to be good for. He’s the truest of snowflakes, stop giving idiots this platform and maybe they’ll go away.
That doesn't follow for reasons explained in the article. Choice of whether to go into sciences over humanities isn't correlated with just science ability in school, it is correlated with relative ability between science and reading. The 2:1 ratio tells you precisely nothing about expected ratios of entrance into science programs until you compare it with the performance ratio on the English portion (assuming here, I don't know anything about SATs) of the SATs.
From what I remember he did not. Someone at Google publicized a document written by Damore on a Google forum.
In culture war topics, the only real citations that can count are people above reproach, or people who are unknown but experts in their fields, which is a fine needle to thread. Also raw data, but few of us here would be qualified to understand the raw data.
Banging on about a controversial subject that can cause upset and disruption in a work environment. Does that sound very professional, or something that a smart person would do? And do you really want that kind of person in your team?
For example, for many years Law was 95% male. You could say that it was a masculine profession because it’s all about conflict while women prefer peacemaking. But today 50% of new large firm attorneys are women. Law isn’t any softer or gentler now—in fact it’s probably less civil. Same for teaching. We explain teaching being dominated by women on the basis that teaching is about nurturing. But in India, the vast majority of teachers are men.
You could easily say that programming is feminine. It’s not at all physical, all about cooperating and communicating with other people, it’s about managing expectations, etc.
Also, the truck analogy has been debunked. It’s explained by the fact that girls have a higher affinity for faces than boys. Which makes sense: infants don’t have any association between trucks and masculine professions like construction work. They can’t. Any gender difference observable at a very young age has to be unrelated to the associations adults have between trucks and masculinity.
Maybe I am on the autistic spectrum, or ots teh fact I studied science but i thought that Damore's memo was fairly well written. First time I went through it he made a couple of points where I though to myself "that sounds controversial", but then in every case he had backed it up with some study validating it to some extent.
It was certainly a lot better written than the majority of the media's reporting on it.
I was mostly poking my head in to answer the question of why you're being down voted, IMO. I'm on the opposite side of your understanding of this research based on a cursory glance (nothing says 'unbiased' like including the phrase 'feminist campaigners' in the conclusion of a scientific publication).
This week's Weeds podcast has some interesting alternative theories based on the results from various Scandinavian countries where they legislated some gender equality stuff and it neither worked out as well as people on the left would like, nor as much of a disaster as people on the right predicted.
Reply to a reply, so I'm out, back to what I'm actually good at, building stuff for other humans to use.
As a leftist, yes. I understand to be on the left means to strive for equality of power among people, economic and social. To be on the right means, at best, not to care about power inequalities between people.
I cringe every time when other people think that feminists and SJWs (I would prefer to call them by different terms but I don't know any) are leftist. They are only in a certain very narrow sense, which makes them often to be on the right, paradoxically. They often do not care about oppressed white males. But if you do not care about some oppressed group, then you don't stand for equality.
Feminism became to be included in the left, because in the past, all women were oppressed. It's no longer the case, and some feminists do not actually care about equality of other groups.
Some biologist put it nicely in a discussion: The left (as a broad political movement) might suffer from a predatory problem - being joined by someone who is oppressed, but doesn't actually want equality, only power. But that's the nature of the game.
And this conflict is nothing new, either. Noam Chomsky, a giant of the left, has been affected by it in the 70s, when he defended free speech of a Holocaust denier.
I would characterize programming as very far on the “Things” side of the axis that is “People vs Things”.
See: Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/47af/4a7e87267aba681fb69715...
The fundamental task of programming – sitting in front of a computer, reasoning about the machine and the system, and writing code and debugging systems for hours on end — is about as “thing”-oriented as I can conceive of. One needs to do a great deal of this to get a CS degree.
Another dimension to consider is Systematizing versus Empathizing (citations omitted). Programming seems to be far on the systematizing side.
As a thought experiment, what jobs might be further on the side of “things“ and “systematizing” than programming?
(I don’t know of any studies that characterize the programming in these dimensions. I’m providing my intuition.)
I’m not super familiar with the practice of law, but I would guess that it’s actually fairly close to the middle of both of those spectrums. The law itself is systematic but practicing it involves working with people at every level (client, counterparty, judge, regulator). It’s possible to write and deliver code, or root-cause and fix a bug report, without interacting with another soul.
Reply to reply, so I'm out.
I see the memo personally as more young-and-naive and I'm not one who thinks naivety is something that should get you fired, per se (though, much of his whines at the end were directed directly at Google being explicitly anti-conservative; rightly or wrongly, employees who noisily complain in public about their employer do often get dismissed). But he certainly wade into some touchy waters armed more with opinionated commentary sources versus hard science. There is a century's worth of troubling eugenics-oriented history on that "IQ and biological differences" quote that should inform one that this is not a remark to toss off lightly, and merely semi-support that with a link to a conservative think-tank link (that itself IMHO was pretty naive).
Chop the last bunch of the manifesto and it would be more interesting, but as it stands, the memo was not just "men and women are different" and how that applies to STEM careers. In the end, it was also a whine about how Google is Capital-L Left and "alienating conservatives" too.
BTW: the original comment was based on his job. Google didn’t hire him to make comments like that, they hired him to code. That’s all I meant, don’t shit where you eat, if you’re hired to code do that job and focus on that. I don’t know what this generations problem is with not being able to keep it together in a professional workplace, but the problem is this generation, not the rules.
He didn't insult anyone, although some amount of his coworkers did feel insulted.
The difference between these two things is significant.
I’m for all of those things but there is zero doubt society has moved left fast.
He then reworked the doc a bit to be less overtly offensive (the published version is one of these later ones), still got shot down in a friendly way by the sympathetic part of the Google population for bullshit reasoning. Eventually it got wider circulation - not sure by whom, but he certainly didn't object to that.
At some point, when managers and friendly inclined folks tell you to shut up at work, you do. If you decide to pursue the topic further, don't whine when people disassociate themselves from you - not for the content of your speech, but for your conduct and the disruption that comes with it.
He did post the memo to an employee-led internal forum on diversity... Clearly the problem was he posted the wrong opinion.
You might do well enough for a PhD in maths and in sociology and still decide try to become carpenter because you love working with wood more than sitting in an office, no matter if you're arguing math or social contexts.
For a woman that might be the hardest career of all these, too (2% of carpenters are women).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality
Put differently: We are going down a dark road when someone simply being offended by pretty mainstream views mean those views are the problem.
> why we have any reason to believe that programming is a “masculine” profession
By exclusion: we have checked everything else we could think of and found no other logical explanation for the disparity of sexes in STEM. That doesn't mean women's preference is the true underlying reason, but then, we don't have a better explanation, or even any other explanation consistent with facts. Still, AFAIK, Damore never claimed it was THE reason, he just raised it as a possible and the likeliest explanation - given no other explanation seems to work.
> But in India, the vast majority of teachers are men.
I don't think India is a valid example here, because there is still a lot of inequality in that society. Let's talk about countries on the higher end of the equality spectrum, like Finland or Sweden.
> Also, the truck analogy has been debunked
[Source missing]
> The fundamental task of programming – sitting in front of a computer, reasoning about the machine and the system, and writing code and debugging systems for hours on end — is about as “thing”-oriented as I can conceive of. One needs to do a great deal of this to get a CS degree.
From the GP:
>You could easily say that programming is feminine. It’s not at all physical, all about cooperating and communicating with other people, it’s about managing expectations, etc.
Here's the real disconnect, and it's all about the environment that is cultivated wherever you happen to be. These are really two wildly different professions that happen to be lumped under one title. On the one hand you have the concrete, generative work where you are creating a thing out of the void. And on the other, you have the political infighting and jockeying to be allowed to do that generative work, and all of the overhead involved in such operations. These are wildly disconnected activities, and it should be no surprise that people gravitate towards one extreme or the other, with very few rare unicorns that can do both at a high level.
The practice of law at a business firm (where 50% of associates are women) occasionally involves people, but for the most part is thing oriented. I do less coordinating with team members and the client than when I was an engineer, because everything is on the record. You don’t have long meetings with the client to get their use cases, etc. When you do interact with people it’s systematized and highly artificial. Youre not trying to connect with the judge as a person. You’re breaking down an often highly abstract issue into constituent parts to help the judge understand it. And the things you’re dealing with are typically more abstract. The subject matter isn’t a website with pictures or human users. The subject matter is a lien, or a credit default swap, or a regulation embodying an economic theory. You talk about these abstractions as if they were things.
Definitely factions of society have, though I wouldn't say society as whole just yet. Those factions have thought-leaders who are unusually viscous and aggressive (e.g. heaping abuse on those who disagree with them, calling them "garbabe-people" etc.). I'd wait for things to settle down before making the final call.
In the end the people with an actual opinion and interesting things to say don't talk, and the idiots throwing bullshit around scream louder and louder.
If you're a technically-minded woman, who's more interested in her career than being a wet-nurse, you've got problems no matter where you're living.
Making these claims simply adds hurdles for an already disadvantaged group. When claims like this get made it acts as subconscious, or even conscious, justification for the biases of some of the readers/listeners. I.e. simply making the claim adds to the problem.
I agree that this isn't fair, but worrying about that is selfish. It is perfectly acceptable to attempt to formulate solutions based on these beliefs, but vocalizing the the beliefs rather than the solutions in public is harmful.
Regardless, arguments that present this logic feel like a desperate attempt to shunt responsibility to someone else. Women used to be well represented in computer science. This is no longer true, and I suspect that the blame for that lies all over the spectrum.
I might be boiling down your comment down to that one line, but it such a common line that I feel the need to point out some data. Here in Sweden about 12.5% of the population, men and women, work in a profession where the gender segregation is not higher than 150% dominance for a single gender.
The other 87.5% of the population all work in a profession which is seen as extremely gender segregated. We could describe it as if the wast majority of the population is keeping people who don't gender identify similar to their own out of the work market for which they themselves work in. Evidence that men are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that women work in, evidence that women are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that men work in. In a nation which pride itself on equality, we could claim that there is evidence that the wast majority of everyone here is actively being sexist in their professional life.
When looking at numbers to explain whats going on in society, I feel that the discussion often lack perspective. A ratio of 60:40 is actually within that small minority of 12.5% that is recognized as gender equal, and yet many feel that it too is unacceptable high level of gender segregation.
Yeah, you don't really have free speech if you can't even criticize a domestic policy like immigration.
They convinced you that it is Nazi to oppose the government's stance. Soon you will be Nazi for preferring bacon in your sandwiches or having preferences in dating.
I tend to attribute this type of thing to what I call the "identity politics" wing of the left. In a Parliamentary system they probably would be in a different party than you.
The effect of this is to reframe the debate from the actual issue at hand, into a debate about how we discuss it. The way we discuss it does matter, but the level of attention that gets around here feels like bikeshedding.
But my point is that's not the kind of discussion you could have on social media (or, god forbid, ill-advised internally published manifestos) and a not get significant blowback. If I see several friends sharing an article that describes a study effectively showing women are better than men at using Microsoft Word and using that as proof of deep sexism in tech, I'm posed with two choices: I can accurately point out that doesn't make sense as an argument and get people really mad at me for ruining a feel-good social moment, or I can do nothing and roll my eyes internally. Most reasonable people will do the latter, and I don't see how that's a good thing.
Beyond that, I’m not inclined to believe that Sweden really is more gender equal. It seems based on little more than assumption.
Is that not "silencing" (your word) because you think we are irrational and everyone can discuss reasonable points of view without reprisal? Or is it not silencing because we choose to remove ourselves from the conversation?
Your account also looks like it's tending to use HN primarily for ideology and politics. We don't allow that, because it's destructive of the intellectual curiosity that HN is supposed to be for. I've posted about this a lot, if anyone wants to understand how we apply that rule: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
This is about bullies and assholes. Bullies and assholes come in every race and creed. The thing about male/female chauvinists is that they're actually the same! A male chauvinist, born as a female, would still be a chauvinist. They have everything in common. They're the same asshole bully. They are the enemy.
We need to make a stand against assholes whether they identify with us or not, and stop letting the actions of assholes who identify with us cause us to sit by and tolerate further discrimination and bullying. My 'us' and 'them' is whether you discriminate against people.
Freedom from discrimination is a human right. You don't fix discrimination with discrimination - you only perpetuate it. I'm tired of the assholes running everything.
We do have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...
Lets say I have a preference for MMs over Skittles - a 2:1 preference. How often will I eat each? Probably in that ratio over a lifetime, because I'll eat snacks lots of times.
Now lets say I have a 60:40 preference for Driving a car as a career over being a shop assistant. What is the chance that the I will be a driver? Given I can only choose one, in a less than ideal world, it will be influenced by lots of things beyond my personal preference, opportunity most of all. But in an ideal world, the chance I am a driver starts to approach 100%, because why would I choose the 40% option, when I have a better one?
Free societies enable lots of choice, and tiny differences, 60:40 or even 55:45, will start to skew towards 100:0 over time. This is likely to play out right to the bottom, where people with fewer options are still likely to choose based on preference, hence garbage collectors and manual labourers vs shop assistants / PAs.
The consequence of tiny differences in preference and the small instances per person are likely to lead to some radical results.