<Quote> with the recognition that gender and sex aren’t binary. </Quote>

Is there a biological basis for this? I do not want "Gender Studies" references. I want real BIOLOGICAL, you know code mother nature put in you.

The best explanation you will get is from a medical doctor. They will explain to you how there are multiple sexes. Gender is not biological so there is no biological explanation.

For people who are downvoting me and are either too lazy to talk to a doctor or use Google: Fine, here are some links. Please educate yourselves about simple biology you should have learned in school.

https://www.quora.com/Scientifically-how-many-sexes-genders-...

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/12/opinion/how-many-sexes-are...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction

Gender is not biological so there is no biological explanation.

There is considerable evidence of gender identity different from biological sex lining up with biological features in several areas more typical of the other sex, so it seems that gender identity is tied to biology.

Which, if you think about it, it has to be: humans are biological machines, everything about them is biology, on one level or another. All of psychology is, ultimately, biology.

Seems a tad reductionist; by that same token, all of psychology is also physics.

Would you please not break the HN guidelines by (a) arguing snarkily and superciliously or (b) going on about downvotes? Trainwrecks though these recent threads have been, we're still trying for a higher standard of discussion on HN, and comments like this one make take us all in the wrong direction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wonder about this as well. Specifically, how does one define "gender" as distinct from "opinion", without being recursive (as in "a man is someone who feels like a man")?

This is the worst damaging consequence of this whole charade.

The words themselves no longer have any meaning.

- "Man" is to no longer define any category except for people who self identify as men.

- And at the same time, it is sexist to say that girls prefer dolls.

Regardless of the correctness of either statement, to say both in the same breath is simply contradictory.

Here are some definitions:

Man: Adult human male

Woman: Adult human female

OK, define "male".

Is it chromosomal, such that XY makes you male? Wrong. People with total androgen insensitivity are XY but look and act and feel female, because the androgens they produce never took effect. Their bodies and minds feminized, so they're female in every respect except their karyotype.

There's a ton of other conditions which make the definition of sex complex. Read this essay, which lists a lot more of them: http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Essays/marriage.html

Your simple definition is only simple because you punted the complex part, and no amount of screaming about how words don't have meanings anymore is going to change the level of complexity surrounding this subject.

You are too ignorant to know what you don't know, so you think you're a goddamned expert.

Thanks for your reply. I rarely get a chance to learn from someone who feels so passionately about these issues.

These range of conditions are interesting, we are truly a varied species.

Let us do a thought experiment.

We have 10 humans and 10 monkeys. Now, let’s say 5 humans want to be called monkeys. Now, if I say the word “monkey”, what comes to mind? If the 10 monkey-monkeys AND the 5 human-monkeys does, then that means I no longer have a word to describe what I originally thought was a monkey! The word itself has been destroyed by making it stretch beyond the category which it originally described. Words by their very nature are to form categories, to differentiate is their power, and why we find them useful.

Now, we can both agree that the range of conditions you listed are rather rare, and this is the crux of the matter. If we use the word man to stretch beyond the more stereotypical definition, what does it even mean to be a man anymore? What does it mean to be masculine? That is, what do the WORDS mean?

The word man is, as words work, defined by the average man. The fact that it allows us to speak of a large category of people is what gives it its utility. That is why you can say things like “their bodies and minds [are] feminized”, you must have the words to express such a thought! If you proceeded down the self-identification path, how would you make that sentence? That is why we have words like “Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome”, which describes another idea.

First of all, let me say that I am in no way opposed to men dressing in women’s clothes, or men being effeminate, or women having sex with women, or any other non-conservative human expressions; they are what lend colour to humanity, and we would be much poorer without it, and without letting humans be fully expressed.

Now, what about the rarer cases, what do we do here?

But how should such a person describe oneself?

Just because a man cannot have the confidence to be effeminate and own that identity, does not mean that he needs to redefine the word woman to accommodate himself. I think the problem here is that people want to fit into categories that are traditionally recognised by society. Instead people should just appreciate that everybody is unique, and that they should be comfortable owning their own unique identities. They should not have to derive their own identities from the words that other people call them, worse off by forcing other people to use specific words, in a meaning that they want other people to use them in, because then everything is reduced to just noise.

What do you think?

We have 10 humans and 10 monkeys. Now, let’s say 5 humans want to be called monkeys.

Bad analogy. Really bad analogy. The boundaries between species can be fluid, but they're nowhere near as fluid as the definitions of 'male' versus 'female' in either sex or gender.

My whole point is that even if you restrict everything to verifiable biological observation, with no reference to psychology, there are still myriad corner cases which cannot be classified in a simple dichotomy. Therefore, insisting the division is simple is obtuse.

The division is not simple, there's no way to make it simple, and bringing in this analogy with monkeys versus humans as your proxies for the sexes is misunderstanding the subject. There is no overlap between humanity and any species of "monkey" as the term is commonly understood, although I have known a biologist who would insist that "monkey" was synonymous with "ape" and therefore all humans are monkeys. That's not the common understanding of the term "monkey", certainly.

There is overlap between "male" and "female" regardless of what you define them to be, assuming you define them in any useful fashion. There is no boundary anywhere in this subject which is impermeable. That's why gender studies is an entire field of study, like astrophysics or English literature.

In short, you could write entire textbooks on one aspect of being "male" or "female" and still be incomplete even in terms of that aspect. So you'll forgive me if I'm not prepared to define either term in this forum, or bothered by how people describe themselves.

Linguistic precision is nice where you can get it, and we can't get it here. Not if we're being entirely honest.

Gender is a semantic concept. Biology (and sex) is not.

So no, there isn't a biological basis for this, because gender isn't biological.

It's not as simple as that. The word 'gender' has a history of being used for biology - think of every form you've ever filled out. The OED [1] says:

Either of the two sexes (male and female)

before following up with:

especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones.

And also notes:

The sense denoting biological sex has also been used since the 14th century, but this did not become common until the mid 20th century. Although the words gender and sex are often used interchangeably, they have slightly different connotations; sex tends to refer to biological differences, while gender more often refers to cultural and social differences and sometimes encompasses a broader range of identities than the binary of male and female

If it's unclear, I'm not saying either is correct. Many people don't like saying 'sex' as its also a verb for copulation hence use 'gender' as a polite alternative. The idea of gender as an entity separate from biology is from Dr John Money, who has his own sad and controversial history [2], though his ideas have gained more popularity recently.

[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/gender

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money

Language is a living thing. The meanings of words change over time, and that's normally a helpful thing, which lets us express culturally relevant concepts.

In this case, it's pretty useful to have words which distinguish between biology and culture.

Totally. It's just confusing when people were already using 'gender' to distinguish XX/XY from copulation (since 'sex' means both).

The Hijra have existed for millenia and now have legal status: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/apr/16/india-third-...

There are several cultures that have arisen independently and have had more than two genders. Many of them are still extant today, despite the best effort of colonialists.

So that's gender down.

Intersex individuals exist. Intersex conditions range from physiological to karyotypes with variant sex chromosomes.

Transgender individuals are very varied but there are indications that it is partially heritable with genetics and the prenatal environment hypothesized to explain some of that.

And that's biology.

I could write a 100 page essay about how loaded your question was, the implicit assumptions in the way it was written, the way that "BIOLOGICAL" is implied to be a way to ignore social conditions, and the contempt for ""Gender Studies"". But I won't, it's very tiring and there will be 10 other people like you tomorrow.

Are the numbers of intersex individuals large enough to actually matter? And how many of them are fertile?

It was a question about categories. Are there two categories of gender / sex? The answer is no. These people exist. They have entire lives which are as meaningful as any other. Why wouldn't they matter?

When it comes to policymaking, any prudent work requires the analysis of how many people would be impacted. It's not enough to just say "well there's like 100 people in a population of 300M we should change everything just for them".

The OP asked what evidence exists that gender and sex are non-binary. It's in reference to the words someone said in the article, not hypothetical policymaking.

Intersex traits cover a fairly broad range of things, and there's a reasonable argument that up to 1.7% of people are intersex. Visibly atypical genitals are fairly rare (1 in 1500 births or so), on the other hand, but don't cover the entire range of intersex traits.

What sort of things typically fall into that range other than atypical genitals?

Complicated, but simplest explanation is from wikipedia:

In biological terms, sex may be determined by a number of factors present at birth, including:

the number and type of sex chromosomes; the type of gonads—ovaries or testicles; the sex hormones; the internal reproductive anatomy (such as the uterus in females); and the external genitalia.

People whose characteristics are not either all typically male or all typically female at birth are intersex.

Sure, but what are the rates for things like that? And in the case of different chromosomes, what are the variations that still result in a fertile and "normal" human being?

My concern is that people are attempting to use the existence of intersex folks (at widely varying claimed incidence rates) to make faulty arguments about what is and is not normal physiology.

Is there a biological basis for this? I do not want "Gender Studies" references. I want real BIOLOGICAL, you know code mother nature put in you.

Sex is basically binary in mammals (do you have the gene that triggers producing sperm versus the gene that triggers you producing eggs), the only exception being incredibly rare intersex disorders. Read more here: http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/why-sex-is-binary-but-gende...

Based on sex, people have different traits, physical and mental. Some of these traits are close to binary between the sexes (having a uterus, etc.). Some traits are a matter of distributions (such as differences in physical strength, or willingness to take risks).

Society then considers certain behaviors and traits more masculine or feminine, and creates norms and roles around these. Some of these norms and roles exist on a spectrum, some are more binary.

Gender for a long time was used either as a synonym for sex, or only this case of describing language (gendered pronouns). In the mid-1900s academics in the social science used it to mean "the social norms and roles society creates based on biological sex." Then more recently some academics have re-defined gender again to mean "ones own innate conception of one's male/female identity." There isn't any scientific proof that such a thing exists or doesn't exist, nor can there be, because we don't have mind reading machines.

Sexual identity has also been redefined recently. So now if you were born with the egg producing equipment, but are taking male sex hormones some people will now define you as of the male sex. Frankly, I find this redefining of words to be pretty Orwellian.

I really enjoyed the well reasoned discussion. I think a lot more constructive dialog is happening now that people have calmed down.

Of all the sentiments expressed in the article, I mainly disagree with the comment that Damore did the company harm.

He posted his thoughts on an internal discussion board and someone else leaked this internal document to the press. The leaker did harm to Google not Damore. In fact, I think the memo had been posted for a week or two before it was leaked. If your argument for firing Damore is that he did the company harm, you should look at the person who took an internal company document and made it public.

There are many people who believe he should have been fired anyway for offending his female coworkers and perhaps making them feel unsafe, but that is a different argument all together with its own merits and faults depending strongly on your stance on what constitutes tolerable speech.

The harm would have been done even if the memo was not leaked, due to the otherwise discussed effects on google employees.

Again, only if you believe a line was crossed, or whether he wrote a well-intentioned memo with the goal of supporting and increasing diversity that had some dubious conclusions based on controversial research.

He is also young and just starting his career. If this had been addressed calmly maybe he could have learned from this situation. Zero tolerance for a young man's folly instead turned him into a sympathetic figure and an alt-right star. It has reinforced the perception that the PC left is oppressive and reactionary. And worse of all he will never learn from his experience because the reaction confirmed his natural bias.

I guess there is no cutting people a break anymore in this era of shouting into the ether, virtue signaling, and political hellfire.

Hopefully hes just ending his career now.

Google shouldn't be soaking up all these ignorant young college boys if they're not mature enough to handle a workplace.

Would you please not poison the discussion like this? Regardless of how correct your underlying points might be, it amounts to arson in a fire zone, and we ban accounts that do it.

Plenty of other users are able to express similar views to yours without violating the site guidelines. Please follow in their footsteps and post only comments that make the forum better, not worse.

Lets assume that we're in an alternative universe where the document was never leaked.

The document still did harm. Just read this quote from the posted article-

When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have? How do I prove myself to people one way or another? The additional mental and emotional burden on me just to do my job is not negligible at all, and it’s also a pretty crappy way to start every day thinking: “Will the team/manager/VC I talk with today realize I’m qualified, or will they be making stereotypical assumptions about my abilities and therefore make it harder for me to do my job?” To me, that absolutely makes for a hostile work environment, and it’s an unequal burden my male coworkers don’t have to deal with every day.

That quote wasn't caused by this going public in the way it did, it was caused by it being posted in the first place. There is real harm done if women who work at a company don't feel they are welcome there.

Are you arguing we should spare factual discourse for the sake of someones subjective feelings?

Not much about that memo was "factual", whatever that means.

Some scientists did agree, even said he wrote an A worthy paper.

Others disagreed.

Even slatestarcodex argued a little for both sides.

Its clear scientific consensus has not been reached, and people need to discuss this openly with out censors.

In this case, it's not about "should factual discourse be allowed or not," that's a false dichotomy. It's whether the author of the memo knowingly took an approach to interpretation of the "facts" he selected that was actively harmful to his co-workers by creating a toxic and hostile work environment.

I believe he did, and the parent you're responding to seems to as well, but they didn't say anything about "spar[ing] factual discourse." You seem to be reading that into their comment.

And I would definitely say there are factual discussions that can be had privately between individuals who already trust each other that are better kept private in order to spare the feelings of non-participants. Other humans have feelings, taking them into consideration is not weakness.

Why don't you go ahead and read this:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2017/08/sloppy-scien...

Simply put, unless you are mindful of someone's "subjective feelings" you will never be able to have a "factual discourse" with them. People are individuals and not statistics. You can quote statistics and average all day long, but if you offend, anger, or harm someone with your words, that person will not listen to you.

Simply put, unless you are mindful of someone's "subjective feelings" you will never be able to have a "factual discourse" with them.

Isn't that a catch 22? How do we know their subjective feelings if we can't discuss contested issues?

No, not really. For this specific example, Damore knew the issue is a divisive one. If he didn't, then he does need to have some basic sensitivity training. From what I remember reading, he did acknowledge the issue was contentious. In that respect, there are ways and techniques to have that conversation. What Damore did was not that way. He should have consulted a resource like Crucial Conversations (https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-...) first.

Sensitivity training would not have helped and is not required here.

He went out of his way to praise women engineers and to emphasize he supports diversity.

There are just certain that intolerant people cannot discuss rationally, like biological gender differences.

The fault lies with the intolerant minds, not Damore's approach.

That's victim blaming. His claims that he supports diversity are nothing more than false virtue-signaling. I have yet to find a person who would say there are no biological gender differences. The problem is assuming those differences are the underlying cause for why women and minorities are under represented in technology. Were you aware the first programmers were females? There are -many- reasons why women and minorities are underrepresented. The biological differences are not a significant one.

Thanks for the link, but I disagree with your interpretation and the analogy here. I interpreted this link as saying "don't speak in absolutes", not "don't hurt someones feeling". More often than not, there's information you find out later, and its very likely that you could be wrong. EG: nobody can run a 4 minute mile.

This memo did not say women were bad engineers.

The situation is more dire than that link suggests.

It isn't just that some people are too emotionally reactive to be directly involved in a reasonable conversation.

We are currently shutting down even the possibility of a conversation among any set of a large group of people, because some people in that group are uncomfortable with it.

They aren't even willing to sit out the conversation that makes them uncomfortable, they are insisting that nobody else be allowed to have the conversation within the larger community.

The quote you mentioned results from the process he criticized, not his criticizing it.

This is only true if the process he criticized is actually real.

What reasoning does Damore have to lie?

This is not the case, strictly speaking. It instead results from people perceiving there to be a lower bar for diversity hires; whether or not it is rational to describe things in that manner based on empirical data or what not is ultimately inconsequential. In that context, it is entirely possible for a poorly formulated memo to cause this type of damage, and likewise entirely possible for this perception to be perpetuated if institutions like Google do not properly back up its practices with compelling arguments to people who might otherwise have doubts.

In that context, it is entirely possible for a poorly formulated memo to cause this type of damage

It's also possible, and more likely, for an overreaction to a memo to cause this kind of damage.

Surely "overreaction" is a matter of perception as well.

My point still stands if you replace overreaction with reaction.

But Damore didn't do anything to make women think they were hired only because of diversity initiatives. It's common knowledge that Google makes an effort to hire more women. That was already the case, and Damore merely brought attention to the negative aspects of it.

There's a huge difference between increasing outreach and lowering the hiring bar. One shields more candidates, the other one increases the chances of hiring someone from the same pool of candidates. The reason why Google (and many other companies) are increasing outreach is because they want to maintain a high-quality of engineers, otherwise they'd just open the floodgate and let everyone in and solve their diversity problem once and for all.

Damore's memo states a lot of things about Google's recruiting practices that are still to be proven truth. Lowering the bar is one of them.

Damore's memo states a lot of things about Google's recruiting practices that are still to be proven truth. Lowering the bar is one of them.

That's true and an excellent point. If he's lying about Google's recruitment practices, either by misunderstanding or by outright false accusation, then large parts of the memo are moot.

On the other hand, I would make the counterpoint that the only reason his honesty has come into question is because of the negative reception his memo has had. Also, what are the odds that Damore misunderstood things? I'd say low.

Additionally, I have yet to see any fellow Googlers publicly calling him a liar, but we shall see.

Replying here because I guess there's a limit.

His reaching out to alt-right media and having a "Goolag" shirt on the very first interview suggests that he was kind of ready for it.

Which alt-right media did he reach out to? I've been paying pretty close attention and I saw him being interviewed by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, but they are not alt-right media. They are both classical conservatives.

As anyone who's worked for Google (I have) will tell you, that's highly discouraged. You don't want to put Google or yourself into a weird legal position for posting publicly about this (for example, Google would have to track you down and make sure to archive all your internal emails moving forward for possible discovery, etc.)

Then all we have to go on are theories and the question: what's to be gained from him lying about this?

Which alt-right media did he reach out to?

His very first interview was with Stefan Molyneaux, a self-described "fighter for men's rights" (yeah, I know.)

what's to be gained from him lying about this?

I don't think he was outright lying, I think he was just uninformed and made a lot of assumptions and drew conclusions (biased by his own political views) out of those assumptions. I do think his inflammatory approach to accusing Google and Googlers of "leftist bias" was a way to get attention.

About what's to be gained? Well... he's been interviewed by the New York Times and he'll probably get a book deal out of it, plus whatever money he might get if he manages to successfully sue Google.

I've been told that his first interview was actually with Jordan Peterson. The Stefan interview with simply the first to be published maybe, or widely seen.

From your quote:

When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?

Your perspective is that this is harmful because the memo caused self doubt, so the memo was the problem.

From Damore's perspective, if there were no quota/diversity hiring programs at that place of employment, the woman in question would have no reason to suspect the latter. The hiring policy was the problem.

Totally different interpretations of cause and effect.

The author of that quote clearly wasn't describing her fears that she had been hired only because of affirmative action, but the claims about her innate inabilities, however slight.

Yes, but this raises the issue of affirmative action causing bias about innate abilities, and that's absolutely true.

If you knew there were a lower bar for people who had red hair, for example, because there's a pay gap and their population ratio isn't represented equally, every time you'd have someone on your team with red hair, you'd wonder if they were there because of the exception made for them or if they got there on pure merit. Thus, affirmative action causes people to question that merit (bias).

Worse, the redhead who got in never knows if they got accepted based on merit or based on some quota, which contributes heavily Impostor syndrome, negative self image and confirmation bias based on that negative self image.

You combine these two things over time and there is absolutely an impact.

Damore's ultimate points were: let's discuss this and, by the way, please don't ignore me just because my opinion is unpopular.

Your perspective is that this is harmful because the memo caused self doubt, so the memo was the problem.

It's not about self-doubt, it's about creating a stereotype by which other people (managers, peers) will prejudge you even before you write the first line of code. This prejudice already exists as is, Damore's memo doesn't do anything to help it. If improving women's opportunities at Google was his objective, he failed miserably at it.

I don't think the memo does that. I've not been convinced by anything I've read trying to indicate that it does. I am convinced that people saying it does seem to read more into it and are upset by perceived implications.

If I felt the memo implied or created that stereotype I'd denounce it as well.

Let me put it in a different way:

It is widely acknowledged that there are social factors that might affect the number of women entering the field. He could've made as valid an argument about the hiring practices affecting diversity, without bringing up the supposed "biological" factor altogether. Not bringing it up would have probably put him in the right side of the Code of Conduct.

At best, it was poor judgement for him to bring it up when it didn't add anything to the conversation. At worst, it betrays a certain level of misogyny. Those of us who tend to assume the worst, might be more inclined to believe the latter, but I wouldn't blame people for believing the former.

I appreciate your response and insight into how people might arrive at a more negative conclusion based on what values they read into the text.

One takeaway I have from this is that discussion about biological differences between sexes is often misused, so should be avoided in discussion related to diversity if you want people to not form an emotional reaction.

The whole thing was a meandering stroll of possible reasons. I absolutely don't see this memo creating a hostile workplace or illiciting the pushback it has garnered simply by what I read in the text. I read a document referencing population level differences between sexes(relevant in the context of attempting to explain differences in preferences that account for the difference in size of the groups) that have no bearing on individual differences between sexes(not even slightly relevant in hiring)

My internal reader probably filled in the benefit of the doubt.

The memo didn't cause self doubt, the memo was intended to inspire others to look for doubt (hence the "lowering the bar").

The memo specifically targeted diversity hires as a lower bar. Imagine if a memo started circulating that asked everyone to question whether or not you were hired for your skill. That's a terrible environment to create.

Lowering the bar for a cohort is going to create different distributions of skill in that cohort, this person wasn't the first and won't be the last to come to this conclusion. I think damaging organizational cohesion is never the right choice but both sides of this argument contribute to that damage.

There is no evidence of lowering the bar. Companies like Google aim to cast a wider net at candidates, the bar stays the same.

On the contrary, there is evidence of bias against women, which logically means that the bar is lower for men by default.

I've met engineers who have expressed a belief that women are often hired if the recruiter found them attractive, and that those women shouldn't have been hired. While those engineers are able to find employment there will always be places where women don't feel welcome, even with diversity programs in place. It is simply the case that some engineers are grossly sexist and will always think a woman has been hired for some other reason beside technical merit if they have an opportunity to. If Damore can't see that then he hasn't enough experience to be talking about hiring.

Google doesn't operate that way, they has strict hiring policies and procedures. Recruiter or anyone else has no way to influence hiring without doing something shady (doing selective interview like what Damore claimed they were doing).

Damore literally said they were "lowering the bar". You can't have it both ways here.

When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?

Isn't this an argument against any form of different hiring practices based on race/gender? Even if distributions of abilities are equal in nature, if a college has a lower bar based on gender, then abilities won't be equal among graduates of that college. Conversely, even if abilities are on average different, if a college has the same bar and same standards based on gender, then you won't have to question if a graduate really deserved to have that credential.

Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still.

In an interview, Damore said part of the "lowered bar" is extra interview rounds for minority candidates. You could call that "more energy", but it also reduces the chances that a given candidate suffers from bad luck.

Luck doesn't reduce skill, it alters opportunity.

Consider a 90% free throw shooter vs. a 50% shooter. To get the job, you have to make 3 shots. But the 90% shooter gets 3 shots and the 60% shooter gets 5 shots. All of a sudden the 60% shooter is more likely to get the job.

It highly depends on the details of the interview process, which I don't know, but just to discount it with that logic is impossible.

This analogy doesn't work at all. 3/3 shots is 100% success rate whereas 3/5 shots is 60% - you're literally describing lowering the bar for the 60% shooter.

Additional rounds of interviews are more like trying to accurately diagnose a condition using multiple different tests because the initial test is known to have poor sensitivity and will produce false negatives. Doing multiple rounds may, of course, increase the chance of false positives (reduce specificity); but the assumption in this case is that when hiring minorities the sensitivity of the interview process is much worse than the specificity.

This argument reminds me of the "waterboarding is not torture" argument, both suffer from slothful induction fallacy.

If waterboarding is not torture then why would you apply it to detainees to confess information they otherwise wouldn't?

Equally, if diverting more energy in to finding minority candidates is not lowering the bar for them then why would you need to divert more energy to find them?

Equally, if diverting more energy in to finding minority candidates is not lowering the bar for them then why would you need to divert more energy to find them? reply

The point is to find the ones that can pass at a higher rate than you normally would. No bar is lowered, and your representation increases.

If you search harder for them, the bar is lowered by virtue of letting them be less outstanding / noticeable.

That doesn't follow if they're passing the same hiring process. It's not hard at all to get a contact for a phone screen with Google: I've been contacted by Google recruiters on linkedin with a barely filled out profile with one or two unremarkable positions listed. If you're counting the initial discovery phase as part of the hiring process, you're mistaken.

If waterboarding is not torture then why would you apply it to detainees to confess information they otherwise wouldn't?

Actually effective techniques like building rapport aren't torture, and they get applied to get information out.

Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still.

That has a very pernicious effect across the industry though. Think about what that policy does to other companies.

The other companies won't have as many high quality women because Google scouted and hired them already, but will have just as many low and medium quality women who aren't good enough for Google, and more high quality men who were displaced from Google. Which skews the gender ratio even more and creates the impression that women at those companies are lower quality than the men there or else they would have been hired away by Google -- because it causes that impression to be the truth.

And you can't fix it by having all companies adopt that policy, because it would still transfer high quality women from lower tier companies to higher tier companies, causing problems for all the women who don't get to work for the companies in the highest tier. Even the high quality women who are still in second tier companies.

The lower tier companies are where almost everybody actually works -- small and medium companies employ more people than huge companies because there are so many more of them.

Google is being quite selfish with a policy like that.

But isn't that true of any hiring practice? Should people start lowering their standards just so other companies can get better candidates too?

It's only true of hiring practices that cause the gender ratio in your company to be different than it is in the industry as a whole.

And then watch out if your company bases its diversity targets on numbers from the rest of the industry. All the good ones may be taken (in order to get to the mythical 50%), but now we want to follow suit (to get to 50%), but what's left? What a mess.

Only if you assume that finding qualified minority candidates is just as easy as finding other qualified candidates. Or that hiring chances are equally distributed.

HBR found there's an innate bias against any minorities in hiring pools [1], and considering that women make up a much lower percentage of potential CS positions, the deck is probably stacked against them. This means that for other companies, they have already passed on hiring the qualified minority candidates. Speculatively, Google could be trying to counteract this by diverting more energy into finding minority candidates.

Also, is it Google's responsibility to make sure other companies have the best candidates, minority or not?

[1] https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-can...

Only if you assume that finding qualified minority candidates is just as easy as finding other qualified candidates. Or that hiring chances are equally distributed.

Nope, it's independent of any of that, because the effect is relative to what other companies do rather than any of those things.

And when you do that experiment in the real world rather than a lab, you get the opposite result anyway:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/07/1...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...

Also, is it Google's responsibility to make sure other companies have the best candidates, minority or not?

It's not about who gets the best candidates -- presumably the men who are displaced are of equal quality and then go to work for the same other companies. The problem is that it creates an unfair black mark against every woman who doesn't get hired at Google despite Google having a special preference for them, and then leaves them in an environment with an even worse gender ratio than it was already.

And these other companies feed into Google. Plenty of women get their first jobs there and go work for Google later. If Google makes it harder for the women there and increases the number who drop out as a result, that's bad for everyone including them.

The problem is that it creates an unfair black mark against every woman who doesn't get hired at Google

Can you elaborate on this more? Or give examples?

...it’s an unequal burden my male coworkers don’t have to deal with every day.

Maybe. There's a lot of diversity within the male gender.

I know I'm an outlier at work due to my politics, my religious beliefs, and other details of my background. I sometimes wonder which of my coworkers have something against me. I know all of them don't (or at least they are professional regardless), but people from my background are absolutely in a minority and are publicly ridiculed on a regular basis, including in HN comments.

I don't care to compare my experience to being a woman engineer, but the feeling described isn't foreign to me.

I know I'm an outlier at work due to my politics, my religious beliefs, and other details of my background.

Right. Now imagine being an outlier due to your biology in a way that's impossible to conceal. I'm an outlier in some ways from my peers as well. But I just don't talk about those beliefs or those parts of my life. You don't have the option to do that if you're female or a visible minority.

Now imagine being an outlier due to your biology in a way that's impossible to conceal.

Who said I was concealing anything?

Critical difference that you fail to understand is that you have a choice as to how you are perceived. You have a choice about whether to blend in where a woman or visible minority would not.

The thoughts of one twenty-something engineer posted to an internal message board (for these kinds of discussions I might add) does not create a hostile workplace or harm Google in any way.

Basically, in any other context we expect people who have vastly differing views to be able to put them aside and work together. The only exception to this rule seems to be around leftist issues, where if you disagree you are out of luck.

You would expect, for example, the Jewish people and the Islamic people at a company to work together.

The idea that toleration for one memo form a nobody employee marks an entire company as unwelcome is insane. This zero tolerance attitude is a recipe for disaster.

The thoughts of one twenty-something engineer posted to an internal message board (for these kinds of discussions I might add) does not create a hostile workplace or harm Google in any way.

Considering how all sixteen of my female teammates were pissed off about it, I'm going to go ahead and say you are demonstrably wrong.

How many of them read the memo, as opposed to misleading characterizations of it ("Women can't do engineering", "misogynist", etc)?

All of them.

You don't get to determine how people receive a message. You >can only take care to send it in a way that would be >received well. If everyone in a large and diverse group > >receives the message poorly, the problem is not with the >group. >If you're worried about an angry mob firing you, start >communicating with care.

This is absolutely false I do get to tell the group how to receive the message. When a group is intolerant the problem is with the group. When people were against interracial marriage and intolerant of other opinions the problem was with the group. When people were against African Americans riding in the front of the bus, the problem was with the intolerant group.

No candy coating, sensitivity training, or messaging was required to tell the angry, intolerant mob that they were wrong, just like they are here.

I am saying that they shouldn't have been so pissed off. The bar shouldn't be so low for defining a hostile workplace. Anyone could then get an intolerant mob together and get someone fired for expressing themselves.

You don't get to determine how people receive a message. You can only take care to send it in a way that would be received well. If everyone in a large and diverse group receives the message poorly, the problem is not with the group.

If you're worried about an angry mob firing you, start communicating with care.

Nope.

Someone taking offense is not demonstration of anything, other than someone taking offense.

The post I was responding to said that it did not create a hostile working environment. I explained how it did do that. Are you trying to claim that causing offense to a large group is not creating a hostile working environment?

It's too fickle a criterion for fairly firing someone. Especially if you consider he likely didn't mean to offend anyone.

If you think he did mean to offend people, the firing makes more sense.

I don't think "he should have known better" is very fair when neck deep in a discussion about diversity. Sometimes diversity looks like someone not knowing cultural rules.

Hostile work environments are created because of impact, not intent. It doesn't really matter what you meant to do if your actions made thousands of women feel diminished in the workplace.

I also don't think Damore's totally naive when it comes to diversity issues. He did a lot of research and evidently even discussed his concerns with HR. I think it's pretty clear he knew what he was getting into.

x% of the population are Trump voters.

They tend to be offended if you criticize Trump.

Therefore, you are not allowed to criticize Trump.

What does this have to do with a hostile working environment?

One person taking offense is not demonstration of anything. Sixteen out of sixteen taking offense comes a lot closer to demonstrating that it was offensive, though.

I mean, 90% is bigger than 90% of the other numbers. Like 40% for instance.

What is truth when you have a gun to your head.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? We're trying for a higher level of discussion here. (Trying and failing, but we can always fail a bit better.)

Some people take offence to the fact humans are related to apes and that the earth is more than 6000 years old. Doesn't mean we should tip toe around their ridiculous sensitivities.

Does your workplace have a very large group of young Earth creationists? Does it go out of its way to recruit them? If so, have you posted a ten page memo that says that the hiring bar has been lowered by that effort?

Ok, what happened to Demore would be like me working at a company of young Earth creationists who had an internal message board for discussing controversial religious subjects and then firing me because I brought up natural selection. Is it wrong for me to bring up natural selection or is it wrong for my hypothetical company to entrap me?

That's...a surprisingly good simile.

Yes, it would be wrong of you to do that. You remember how in the Big Lebowski, Walter asks The Dude "Well, am I wrong?" and The Dude replies "You're not wrong, Walter. You're an asshole."

You don't want to be Walter.

I wouldn't even think about bringing up natural selection to my young Earth creationist coworkers. Not touching that with a 10 foot pole, it would only end badly. There's a reason they say don't talk about politics or religion with your coworkers. Harmony is good for getting work done and I go to work to work.

I'm saying that as some who has actually worked with young Earth creationists before.

You would expect, for example, the Jewish people and the Islamic people at a company to work together.

No one wrote a memo claiming that Google hires too many Jews who don't meet the same quality bar due to diversity efforts.

No one wrote a memo claiming Google needs to have mandatory anti-terrorist training because they've recruited a lot of Muslims lately (putting aside the fact that white christian terrorists are far more likely to be your cause of death in the USA).

Basically, in any other context we expect people who have vastly differing views to be able to put them aside and work together.

Yeah and the way this works is not to bring up potentially offensive or sensitive topics except with coworkers you know really well. When you do bring it up acknowledge other people's viewpoints and ask lots of questions instead of making grand pronouncements.

All workplaces are political. Software development is about working with people and that is inherently a political activity. Took me a very long time to realize that but it is 100% true. The quicker you accept it the further you will go in your career.

The idea that toleration for one memo form a nobody employee marks an entire company as unwelcome is insane. This zero tolerance attitude is a recipe for disaster.

What if his memo was arguing that black people aren't suited to be engineers period?

What if his memo argued that black people should be sent back to Africa and that the USA should be for white people only? What if he said he only believes this should be the law but so long as it isn't the law we must respect that and treat people equally until the law is changed?

Should Google "tolerate" someone being openly racist simply because they haven't called for violence?

Let's make this even more abstract: what if an employee openly states they think the company is evil and they disagree with the entire mission and direction of the company? Do you really think they won't spread cynicism and negativity? Do you really think they can be effective? Is there really no risk to morale?

Even if he were completely correct (he wasn't) by doing such a sorry ham-fisted job he made himself a liability. Even if he only angered or offended 10 other engineers that alone is reason enough to get rid of him. Hiring and training engineers is expensive.

Corporations are not free speech zones. If you become a liability the company will drop you like a hot-potato and don't you ever forget it.

When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?

That is a result of affirmative action, not of the memo. Shooting the messenger, if you will.

Exactly. Affirmative action causes everyone, including the person, to question whether they got there on merit or based on filling some quota. Multiple biases are created.

Affirmative action causes everyone, including the person, to question whether they got there on merit or based on filling some quota.

Affirmative Action does not require having quotas (and, in fact, they are in mlst contexts explicitly illegal, even in venues required to have Affirmative Action policies). So, insofar as it “causes” the that result, it is largely by interaction with false information deliberately spread by its opponents.

Affirmative Action does not require having quotas (and, in fact, they are in mlst contexts explicitly illegal, even in venues required to have Affirmative Action policies).

Fair enough -- quotas aren't the issue, but affirmative action is the issue.

So, insofar as it “causes” the that result, it is largely by interaction with false information deliberately spread by its opponents.

That's a concrete conclusion based on unprovable/shaky reasoning.

And even if that were true and you could prove it, it wouldn't change the fact concerning affirmative action (in this case, lowering hiring standards for certain groups) causing bias for both coworkers and the employee. How do coworkers know an individual got there on their own merit? How does an individual who is on/above par, yet who happens to belong to an affirmative action group, shake the internal/external stigma that they got there based on the lowered bar? These things contribute to bias whether or not we like the overall idea behind affirmative action (which is to level the playing field). Nothing comes for free.

Do you completely reject the prescence of existing biases, conscious or unconscious, that give an advantage to males? I would hope not, since such biases have been clearly shown in blind studies by e.g. swapping names on resumes, etc.

But unless you do, you should agree that the choice is not between some biased "affirmative action" and a perfectly unbiased, meritocratic alternative, because the latter does not exist. The real choice is whether we try, in some least-bad way, to level the playing field or not.

So if I say "the average women is shorter than the average man", am I now liable for being fired for creating a hostile environment for my female coworkers?

That leap of logic - taking a general statement and interpreting it as a personal attack - strikes me as something I'd read in Dilbert. It strikes me as a justification for the outrage people want to feel.

It's an excuse; nothing more.

Quoted argument doesn't make sense. If the hiring standards are the same for women an men then you know that any women at the company is as qualified as any men at least until you get to know more about them, there is just less of them - no reason to prove anything.

If on the other hand any kind of affirmative action is in place then you would be right to assume average women is less qualified than an average man because that's what affirmative action is: lowering the bar for certain groups.

The very presence of affirmative action ("diversity efforts") should be the reason for women at the company to feel unsafe because then the prejudice against them becomes rational.

This should be obvious in my view. The place to take action is in early schooling to get more women interested in tech or give them more opportunities to get involved not in hiring more of them from already smaller job seekers pool.

If what you say is true then in workplaces without affirmative action programs we should not expect to find any workers who thinks the women that work there are less qualified than the men who work there. (Because the "cause", affirmative action, is not in place.)

Do you really think that is the case?

The place to take action is in early schooling to get more women interested in tech or give them more opportunities to get involved not in hiring more of them from already smaller job seekers pool.

Yes, this is what many of Google's diversity programs are intended to do.

Everything you write at a company should be assumed may end up printed on the froom page of the NY Times.

I agree, and I suspect the attitude of cooler heads may act in Damore's favor when all is said and done.

The number of leakers has to be quite the headache for Google's StopLeaks folks. Between people leaking Damore's memo because they were upset by it, and people talking to Breitbart because they were angry he was fired, there's been a LOT of leaks. How Google approaches handling this issue is going to be interesting, there's a lot of hurt feelings on all sides.

It was fascinating to see how many Google managers operate their own "blacklists". That's got to be legally very dodgy.

That's a huge one. I can easily see anyone who operates an internal "blacklist" of other employees as creating a hostile work environment. And from my understanding, those who did posted as such under their real names, so there's no investigation needed to track down who is doing it.

If there's an employee conduct we should all be able to agree is hostile, blacklisting coworkers would be it.

Google will be sued for it. It will be too enticing for lawyers to pass up.

It'll be open season on Google now, and they deserve it if the blacklists and age blacklist is true.

As far as I have been able to put things together as a non-Googler he went to an unrecorded "diversity summit" about a month and 1/2 ago, where, according to his statements in the Jordan Peterson interview, practices where put forward that he considered to be potentially illegal. He then wrote the document in his free time and posted it to a forum dedicated for feedback to the summit (? or more general diversity related). After engagement has been nothing to low he also posted the memo to an internal Google Group called "Skeptics" because he wanted to be proven wrong. Shortly after that the memo was leaked to the public (either without citations or the citations were then removed by the respective media), indicating that someone from this community did so.

I'd appreciate if someone could confirm/deny or add anything to this timeline.

I have no factual information, but I know that when I write papers where I want to invite discussion, I don't make blatant statements based on a subset of the evidence I have and then expect people to dispassionately pick them apart for me.

Rather, I present my honest assessment of the strengths of the various pieces of evidence, pro and con. If I "want to be proven wrong", I certainly wouldn't present a falsely certain argument. That is not arguing in good faith.

And that's how I would argue a scientific question, not an argument about my coworkers ability.

The leaker did harm to Google not Damore

I am 100% certain that the trackiest company in the world is perfectly capable of knowing exactly who leaked it. They have chosen to protect that person, for reasons unknown at this time.

Is there some positive net benefit of Google releasing the details of the person they fired for leaking the internal information? Companies rarely mention details about firing employees for misconduct.

Anyone making arguments for/against firing him for the memo need to be reminded that we don't know why he was fired.

It's just as likely he was fired for lying about having a PhD from Harvard.

Edit: I stand corrected, he was just enrolled in a PhD program.

He didn't lie about having a PhD from Harvard.

LinkedIn doesn't allow one to differentiate between being enrolled in a PhD program, or having completed a PhD program

The common practice when enrolled in a PhD program is to list using a future completion date, making clear that you have not yet completed the program.

Google knew he was enrolled in this program when they hired him.

he wasn’t sure whether he was correct and simply wanted to start a discussion (as he subsequently stated in a YouTube interview)

Anyone got a link?

He stated on Tucker Carlson that he has based his argument on what he referred to as scientific consensus.

I'm not making any endorsement of the comment or of the science, since it isn't my field, but just relaying what he said.

I'm not making any endorsement of the comment or of the science, since it isn't my field, but just relaying what he said.

Perhaps this is an off-topic question, if you don't mind responding: why did you feel the need to emphasize this, after your initial sentence:

He stated on ....

Thanks!

why did you feel the need to emphasize this

Not the author, but: The psychology research literature is mostly garbage.[0] It's surprising to me that through all this, hardly anyone has dug into the supposedly scientific papers behind Damore's claims. Ultimately they come down to a massive leap of faith that job aspirations of psychology-major undergraduates can be generalized to a somehow biologically-driven preference for "people" jobs vs "things" jobs.[1]

[0] https://hardsci.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/everything-is-fucke...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...

Your cited study is certainly not the only one that exists on the topic. See http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger....

It's completely unclear how any of that generalizes to a biologically driven human female preference for "people" vs "things."

Sorry, you would probably need to read through the parent article (from the comment) for the broader context ...in which Scott makes the claim in the form of a rebuttal to another article by Grant, to which Grant replied (who also did not find biologically driven human female preference for "people" vs "things." convincing), and I gave you the link to Scott's reply to that!

Can you please recapitulate Scott's argument, in a few words, and the scientific evidence it's based on?

There are plenty of articles that touch on this. https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/08/10/the-google-memo-what...

What's the most relevant one, in your opinion?

The heterodox article is one of them, but they also link to several others they saw as reasonably backed up by the literature cited. The included counter points as well if they were written by people in that field.

I meant the most relevant one cited by the Heterodox Academy in the blog post you linked.

Not the OP, but more and more it seems that if you are not 100% unequivocally clear, someone will attack you as if you agreed with a polemical point.

I think this is in part due to the "chilling effect". I've been there myself. I have to be super clear that I don't endorse nor necessarily agree with some point lest I find myself being equated with the worst of the worst...regardless if I agree or not with said point.

It's very sad actually.

That's it in a nutshell, yes. And I agree that it's sad, but it's something I only tend to feel compelled to do on very divisive political topics, so it's not too bad, really.

Sure! It's solely based on my experience with commenters, who sometimes view statements like that as endorsements or as indicators that personal beliefs align with those who are being quoted or described.

So it's sort of a disclaimer.

Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even if I practiced for years to try and catch up.

I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.

I think one thing that struck me from the linked article was the point that the memo wasn't structured to invite discussion. It wasn't "let's have a chat", it was "here's an evidence bomb of how you're all wrong".

I think advancing points is fine, but if you're after productive discussion rather than an adversarial debate, you need to proactively invite discussion. And if an adversarial debate was what he was after, that does strike me as inappropriate work communication.

It was a politically charged topic, he would have been crucified either way.

But by phrasing the memo the way he did, he covered himself legally.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear everything was run by a lawyer first.

It was apparently a live-document (like etherpad) and the intention was get feedback directly in-line if I understood correctly. Not an unusual way of doing things for an engineer.

It's usual for an engineer to understand something outside their field of expertise by submitting a draft of what they know to others who aren't domain experts, either?

Wouldn't an actual engineering process have started by submitting a document for feedback from somebody whose field of expertise deals with unequal gender representation in the workplace?

I disagree. He mentioned in an interview[1] that he was looking to be proven wrong which is what led him to share it with the Skeptics group at Google, which is when the document propagated. He had actually wrote the document weeks prior but was unsatisfied with the lack of discussion on his document.

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

That seems an odd approach tbh. Many 'Skeptics' groups (Skeptic / Rationalist YouTube) online at least would agree with his reasoning. It strikes me as odd that he was seeking to take down an ideological echo chamber but published it initially in the echo chamber most likely to agree with him.

His first group he sent it to was a diversity group. I think it reasonable that a skeptic group who, ostensibly, would side with reason would be a next logical step.

That seems an odd approach tbh.

If that's odd, then what is firing just to prove him right?

If that's odd, then what is firing just to prove him right?

Google is a company with shareholders and P/L. It's not a thought experiment, a family, a social commons, or a debating society. It exists to make money.

Google took the decision to fire him based on what was likely to create a conducive atmosphere for its workers.

His memo, however construed, made it likely that he could no longer be able to contribute as effectively to some teams.

Google's responsibility to Damore begins and ends at their mutual alignment of economic interests.

Google took the decision to fire him based on what was likely to create a conducive atmosphere for its workers.

They did the opposite, someone said it's not okay to shame people into silence, and then they did just that.

made it likely that he could no longer be able to contribute as effectively to some teams.

What does "as effectively" mean? What are "some teams"? If someone sweats a lot, and a million other things, the above would also be technically true. Or hey, if a company fired someone over something like this. That will make a lot of bright people, both male and female, think twice before even giving Google a consideration.

Google's responsibility to Damore begins and ends at their mutual alignment of economic interests.

It's not about responsibility to him, but about their responsibility for themselves to not shit the bed like they did.

Then Google's calculus is simply different to yours. For what its worth, I don't think Google's response to this is going to have a significant impact on Google's ability to hire talented people, or that white, heterosexual, cisgendered people are going to feel that their opportunities at Google are likely to be curtailed. Females, I would say, or any other minority within Google, are even less likely to.

Amazon attracts talented staff despite a widespread perception that it's a hellhole to work at (https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/15/9159309/you-probably-dont...). Google, to most people, will continue to represent a dream job.

Scepticism is a methodology, not a political group. I think it just looks that way because the term has been kind of hijacked by anti-regressives.

hijacked by anti-regressives

Would someone please explain what this means, wouldn't an anti-regressive be a progressive? If so, why not state it that way?

Also, I thought the term "skeptic" had been hijacked by conspiracy wackos. When I think of a classic skeptic, I look to James Randi and the like; critical thinkers who expose quackery. But, for the last 15-20 years, conspiracy theorists have taken the term over (e.g. vaccine/climate/GMO skeptics). I fall into the Randi group of skeptics, but I sure as hell don't describe myself using that word, for fear of being lumped in with the second lot.

Real skeptics tend to be progressive, conspiracy skeptics tend to be regressive.

Based on the spelling, I'll assume emsy is a Brit... maybe things are different over there, but Randi was always more popular in England than in the US. I'm missing something.

I'm German. The skeptics I were talking about and presumably the comment I answered on, were the YouTube skeptics. What I meant with anti-regressive was that these skeptics mostly tackle so-called progressives that use racism and sexism for their arguments or policies.

I've never heard the conspiracy theorists called skeptics, so I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.

Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). Plenty of far more aggressive articles and essays have been written from the opposite side that have not been criticized in the same way.

And for the record, I did not get any aggressive tone from his paper. I thought he was as polite as he needed to be and made the necessary caveats. I think many people were just so unprepared to hear any argument from an opposing viewpoint that they read into it what they wanted to.

Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem).

This was addressed in the article. This burden has fallen on women since they were teenagers. To expect them to do it yet again, to have to defend themselves at work this time, is ridiculous.

The burden of responding to something that is (at the very least presented as) evidence? I don't think it's possible to have a discussion if you don't expect and allow pro-affirmative-action stakeholders to respond with their own evidence and reasoning, in turn.

He could have brought up his concerns to hiring authorities in the company, whose job it is to refute diversity myths. Not expect people who have had this burden placed on them for their entire adult life to do it yet again.

He did, a month or more before the fiasco.

And that's exactly where he should have stopped. If he did not like the result, he should have resigned in a much less public manner.

It's not just "pro-affirmative-action stakeholders" that are expected to respond. _As referenced in the article_, it's extending to expecting women to come up with responses just because they are women. You're talking about a situation where one side (the side of the manifesto) has dropped an "evidence bomb", some of which may be valid, some not, and is now complaining "why won't you have a discussion?" They weren't invited to a discussion, they weren't talked _to_, they were talked _at_, and are now being looked to as the defenders of their gender when they just want to do their damn job.

this is textbook tone policing. it's an essay, not a spoken dialogue. you could say this about, say, a published study about climate change projections.

You can throw buzzwords designed to shut down discussion at me all you want, that's irrelevant. He claims his goal was to have a dialogue, the fact is that he chose a very poor way of doing that. Either his goals aren't what he claims or he misunderstood how to accomplish them.

This is exactly it. Women in spaces (virtual, in-person, in their workplaces) are being forced into this conversation to defend ourselves, because this "bomb" was dropped/leaked, outside of all relevant context, and now hype and focusing illusions have made it our job to make evolutionary psych-based arguments against it. I don't know what Damore's intent was, but the effect was to put people who disagreed with him, and especially women who disagreed with him, at an immediate disadvantage, rather than to reach out to them for the sake of a conversation.

So basically its ok to discrimate against Men because Women are 'opressed'. Thats not an acceptable argument imo.

You're begging the question. Also, don't put something in quotes that was not a quote.

I'm not talking about a woman having to prove her technical ability to her male coworkers at work because of their prejudices. I know that that's bullshit and I'm sorry they have to do so.

I'm talking about handling what Damore claimed in an intellectually honest way. You can't dismiss his points just because you're tired of talking about them (or what you think are the same points you've always been talking about, but I think Damore's comments on each gender's preference and pressures for picking careers had something worth discussing). What he said had at least some spark of originality and insight, otherwise it wouldn't have gotten nearly the attention it did. Consider, would we be talking about the memo if it were about how he thought Sundar Pichai was a lizard man?

Those who disagreed with Damore already won the battle. They kicked him out of Google and doubled down on their diversity initiatives/echo chamber. We should be able to talk about his arguments honestly and rationally without falling back on gendered reasons at this point at least.

We should be able to talk about his arguments honestly and rationally without falling back on gendered reasons at this point at least.

We are and lots of people are doing so, but another point made in this post is that the workplace isn't the venue for this.

Exactly. If Damore had focused his comments purely on hiring practices, quotas, discriminatory policies etc he would still be there and almost all would've found his comments constructive.

But he didn't do that. He brought up scientifically baseless, insulting and emotionally immature rationales for an important and sensitive topic. Working around people in a professional environment requires nuance and tact. He showed none of this.

The fact that so many in IT seem to miss this point and defend him explains so much about why many men and women stay away from this field.

These things are talked about at the workplace, however. Just around the water cooler in private rather than out in the open. It is getting super weird and awkward these days where many people claim to adhere to the accepted diversity story in public but obviously don't in private.

I think it's a weird dance we play with polite society and reality. Sometime last year it was pointed out that being called a racist is worse than actually being a racist. After years of political correctness, racist people have "learned the language" but you still see conscious and unconscious racism all the time. Does that fix systemic racism? Is it a step forward or a step backward?

These are just tough problems. How do you make up for a system that is biased against you? At what point are you disadvantaging the incumbent group? They didn't exactly choose to be in the incumbent group as much as the oppressed group chose their's.

It's hard to have an honest conversation because it's easy to police words, but tough to police thoughts and motivations.

Really?

I don't have discussions at work or at the bar wondering if women are inferior.

I really do think women are my intellectual equal.

Shouldn't employers abstain from controversial subjects as well, then? It seems one sided to hold employees to that standard but not the corporations and bosses they work for.

I'm still making up my mind on this one, but for the sake of argument, I'll disagree with you.

The workplace was the venue for this, because 'this' was evidence was that Google(his workplace)'s diversity initiatives and censorship were harming the company. He attempted to go through the proper channels (HR) as discussed in another part of the comment section for this very article.

Completely ignored by HR, and after some watercooler discussion in which he received confirmation that he was not the only one to have such thoughts, he decided to organize his thoughts into a memo, which from his perspective, introduced ideas that could explain the gender employment gap at Google and help make the company better by erasing the notion of being a 'diversity hire' among other things.

What it did not do was claim that his female coworkers were inferior. I feel the need to reiterate that because that seems to be the disinformation that many take home with them and use for their arguments against him. With it, they vilified and ousted him.

Going back and reading it now, it's hard to believe such a seemingly harmless claim (women aren't as well represented in tech because they're not as interested in it) has created such outrage. I blame this mainly on Gizmodo, and those who piggybacked their original article (that blatantly lied about what he wrote and presented his memo which they had quietly edited). Some credit also needs to go to whoever leaked the memo, which Damore probably did not mean to leave the relatively small group of people he originally introduced it to, at least at that point in time.

Really, what he presented and how he presented it were not very controversial. It easily could have been addressed internally by HR, or discussed within the company by its employees without the dishonesty and witch hunting. My point is, what he presented should have been acceptable in the way he did it especially given Google's claims of free speech and the historical precedent of memos like these, but dishonesty and close-mindedness distorted it until it looked like he was calling for repealing women's suffrage.

It isn't a question of whether it's the right place to have it.

A corporation may not be the best place to bring up these topics, if your goal is to avoid getting fired. Otherwise, it is a place full of smart engineers and the guy probably had some fantasy that he can have a constructive conversation in a corporate setting about a policy which Google as a corporation faces external and internal pressure about.

But as far as receptiveness, yes Google was a great venue for this, given who works there. Do you think hacker news is a better venue in that respect?

Even on this very board, that same exact seemingly harmless claim, given and elaborated on in a talk about men and women given by a professor of psychology at FSU, was downvoted and bashed in a TL;DR manner:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844777

It fared better a year ago, but not by much:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8909954

EDIT: curious, why the downvotes?

Going back and reading it now, it's hard to believe such a seemingly harmless claim (women aren't as well represented in tech because they're not as interested in it) has created such outrage

I think the larger problem is that this is an overstatement. Women might not be interested in joining the current tech culture, but that doesn't mean they aren't interested in tech to a larger extent than the current numbers suggest.

Part of the disconnect is that these initiatives are aimed at changing the culture to be more attractive to women, and the people who really like the culture don't see the need.

Certainly the current tech culture is effective and fairly productive, but I certainly don't know that it will be more, equally, or less productive with these culture changes.

People, especially groups used to enjoying privilege, always mistake what “free speech” is. Free Speech is the right to be free from GOVERNMENT suppression of speech, not prevailing attitudes, not private companies and institutions and not public sentiment. Expressing racist, homophobic and sexist ideas in a private company that has employee guidelines that forbade expressing hurtful speech has just consequences.

Privileged people feel they are above repercussion because to admonish them encroaches on their sense of entitlement to privilege.

because 'this' was evidence was that Google(his workplace)'s diversity initiatives and censorship were harming the company.

I am not sure I follow exactly. Is there evidence that Google's diversity efforts hurt the company? I don't find the memo offers any evidence. If evidence, even anecdotal evidence, were provided of that harm and of the ideological intolerance I might find the memo more compelling. As it stands, it seems like a book report.

I don't think it was just the "harmless claim" that was the issue. Many of his points were objectionable if not outright offensive. The obvious example of an offensive claim is that women are more prone to be neurotic. Also, can you really assert that you've checked your biases if you claim that people who agree with you (conservatives) are "pragmatic" while those who disagree (liberals) are "idealistic". I'm sorry, but that is complete and total BS. It's not hard to see that there are pragmatists and ideologues in both the liberal and conservative political movements.

As a white male engineer, I will tell you thing the that most white dudes like me fail to understand about micro-agressions- and the document was chock full of them-is that they are not really significant when they only happen once, in isolation, it is the constant, droning repetition of them that makes them harmful.

Asking someone where they're from isn't offensive when considered in isolation. But if 90% of the white people you meet ask you this immediately, while it comes up only occasionally or late in the conversation when meeting other people, it makes you wonder.

One thing my mixed race friends get asked a lot by white people is "what are you?". At first I found that hard to believe, but I've seen it happen over and over again--random chitchat at the park with a nice lady who stopped to pet my dog; for some reason she has to ask my friend "what are you?" She's too nice to say "not racist, how about you?" or anything harsh in response, but it makes my blood boil.

Imagine being expected to defend and define your presence everywhere you go.

So, yeah, the idea was harmless. The presentation was part of the constant barrage of gatekeeping behavior that women and people of color are sick of dealing with. That's why it's offensive, that's why people are angry.

So, you say "what it did not do was claim his female coworkers are inferior". First off, that's your opinion of the paper, ok? That's not a fact about the document. That's your assessment. You might believe it in so strongly it's basically fact to you.

But here's the deal, a bunch of other really smart people think it did do exactly what you claim it didn't. Now what? Are they wrong, you're right? On what basis?

Besides which, if you write "effectively lowered the bar for 'diversity' candidates", actually yes you just claimed that women at Google are less qualified.

Many voices are loudly explain why this memo is offensive. Shelve your own ideas of what you think this memo is saying, and consider them.

As for the emotions, there's a huge veiled anti-woman slant to arguments that take the paper on it's "logical" face value and dismiss emotions. First off, dismissal of emotions is a classic anti-woman tactic. Secondly, you're a human male, you have as many emotions as anyone else. You can separate emotion and "rational" thought.

I'm still making up my mind on this one, but for the sake of argument, I'll disagree with you.

OK :)

I think some of Damore's complaints were, on the surface, about Google. But they're all rooted in some old and incorrect ideas.

Damore advocates against Google's diversity programs, arguing that diversity programs can't be fully effective because fundamental biological differences between women and men are responsible for the gender gap, not social or cultural disadvantage, and further that these programs are discriminatory against men.

This is an old idea. Women's rights activists have heard this time and time again, whether it was for the right to go to school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_education_in_the_Uni...), the right to have a job (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights#Equal_employm...), or of course, the right to vote. The argument, every single time, is "women and girls aren't really interested in reading/writing/working/politics". But in each case, we discovered that women were discouraged (and often outright punished) in strong, varied, and complex ways from being involved in these things, and when we investigated and removed those impediments suddenly the "interest gap" disappeared.

The "discriminatory against men" argument is essentially a reverse discrimination argument, and I'll leave it to Jamelle Bouie to explain why those are wrong: https://www.thenation.com/article/race-millennials-and-rever....

But the main reason that Damore's argument is outrageous is that the arguments about interest and fundamental biological differences have been used to hold women and people of color back since the inception of the US. Reverse discrimination belittles and dismisses the experiences of women and people of color by falsely equating systemic sexism and racism with isolated incidents, or in this case with gender-conscious diversity programs.

I'd also like to address the free speech issue a little. The US concept of free speech protects citizens from government retaliation. It doesn't mean I have to tolerate speech of all kinds in my home, and it doesn't mean that businesses have to tolerate speech of any kind in the workplace. With that in mind, it's obvious that you can't say whatever you want at work even though e we may disagree on where the line is.

Damore should sue Gizmodo. Big companies like Google and IBM and the military though, they usually have CoC requirements that essentially boil down to don't embarrass them in public.

Women aren't interested in tech because they grow up with social blockers, such as his memo. That's the point everyone seems to miss. Imagine a girl interested in tech when only a handful of her peers understand her interest. Then, she reads such an article and bullshit social studies passed on as evidence and gets socialised that tech really isn't for women.

Until you remove social blockers that prevent women from entering tech, you cannot claim legitimacy of any social survey in regards to that. This letter belongs to a time when a generation of women are equally pushed to enter tech as men. Then we can debate whether it's their lack of interest of not.

it's hard to believe such a seemingly harmless claim (women aren't as well represented in tech because they're not as interested in it) has created such outrage

His claim is much stronger: he claims that women _working at Google as engineers_ are less interested in tech than their male colleagues. This debate is about stopping internal diversity programs within Google, not about women in general in tech.

Going back and reading it now, it's hard to believe such a seemingly harmless claim (women aren't as well represented in tech because they're not as interested in it) has created such outrage.

It is only hard to believe if you are entirely unfamiliar with the history of this discussion.

Let's take a more obvious example: the common racist claim that black people are lazy. It is possible to dress this up in neutral, scientific-sounding language. Someone ignorant of the history of racism in America could be fooled into saying, "Gosh, we should consider that as an explanation for why tech is disproportionately white." (That someone could harbor racial bias, but that need not be true.)

That would correctly generate outrage, because a) one should not be ignorant about the history of these things when jumping into a discussion with such impact on people's lives, and b) there is a long, long history of virulent racists edging their way into the mainstream by dressing up their prejudices just enough to sound reasonable to the ignorant.

Returning to Damore, the fact that a bunch of white men ignorant of the history of gender bias can't spot the patterns does not mean the patterns aren't there. The benefit of the doubt only applies to educated doubt, not the doubt that comes from not knowing what's going on.

That you were surprised by the outrage only means you haven't been paying attention.

You can't dismiss his points just because you're tired of talking about them

You can, and some people have, and that's okay. It's not clear whether you're making the implication here, but commonly it's implied that "if you walk away from the debate therefore you are wrong", which is fallacious. Nobody owes you a debate.

I'm talking about handling what Damore claimed in an intellectually honest way

Then the initial argument needs to start from a place of "intellectual honesty".

Damore presented evidence to support his claim that women are on average less able than men in areas relevant to engineering. He didn't discuss veracity, or contradictory evidence. That's textbook confirmation bias, not intellectual honesty.

Damore then started making HR policy proposals. We use a 50/50 gender ratio as an indicator that a particular field is free from bias. It's one thing to propose that 50/50 is not the natural ratio to end up with, but until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number then proposing HR policy changes put the cart before the horse. This indicates that the policy changes are what James in interested in, not the evidence. More confirmation bias.

Further, Damore's proposals discuss diversity as a whole (race not just gender) without a single word of justification, let alone evidence. That's either more confirmation bias or conscious sleight-of-hand, either way, it's certainly not intellectual honesty.

I don't bear Damore any ill will, he should be forgiven, but this memo was a mistake and showed poor judgement and more than a little bias. These studies may be good science, but stringing them together to confirm a conclusion you'd already set your sights in making is bad science.

Having unconscious bias or otherwise being incorrect doesn't make you intellectually dishonest. Whether or not his claims are true, Damore presented a much more metered and reasonable argument than virtually all of his detractors or even published social pundits.

Having unconscious bias or otherwise being incorrect doesn't make you intellectually dishonest.

If you purport to be a (competent) scientist in the 21st century then personally I expected you to be highly aware of biases such as publication bias & confirmation bias and act accordingly. That speaks either to his discipline/understanding or his honesty, I don't know which.

Whether or not his claims are true, Damore presented a much more metered and reasonable argument than virtually all of his detractors or even published social pundits.

Damore was metered, but understandably triggered a threat response in the people who his memo targeted as being below "the bar".

You may have read a selection of counter-arguments, some of which will be less "metered and reasonable" than his. Unfortunately the emotional tenor of an argument is not the measure of its merit.

Damore then started making HR policy proposals. We use a 50/50 gender ratio as an indicator that a particular field is free from bias. It's one thing to propose that 50/50 is not the natural ratio to end up with, but until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number then proposing HR policy changes put the cart before the horse.

I deeply disagree with this approach. You're essentially saying that unless you can come up with an alternative scientific theory, complete with predictions, it's not possible to criticise an existing theory about the world.

There's many plausible explanations why an absence of a 50:50 gender representation could be caused for reasons other than bias or average ability. That's enough to put a nail in that model of discovering bias. Coming up with a way of predicting what the right ratio is, isn't necessary to discard that metric.

I agree with your statement, but...

I think part of the problem is what the memo says and what it doesn’t say. It’s entirely plausible that the ‘natural’ ratio is not exactly 50:50. But as of last year, among Google tech workers, the ratio was 81:19, and that’s with all the affirmative-actiony programs Damore wanted to back off on; in the past it was higher. It’s quite a bit less plausible that intrinsic differences could explain all or even most of that big a discrepancy, especially combined with the many anecdotes of discrimination we hear about. Now, to be fair, the memo never explicitly claims that it does; indeed, at one point it specifically says “in part”. But the tone of the memo, the relative lack of time spent acknowledging the large role played by cultural factors, makes it sound like Damore thinks the natural ratio is at least pretty close to the current one. And that’s simply wrong.

I deeply disagree with this approach. You're essentially saying that unless you can come up with an alternative scientific theory, complete with predictions, it's not possible to criticise an existing theory about the world.

That's a straw man. You're suggesting I disapprove of criticism, which is not so. I disapprove of demands for policy change when you don't even have a hypothesis for what your target should be.

Unless Damore (or someone else) can reasonably estimate whether their theory around 'biological' differences result in a natural 10/90 ratio or a natural 49.9/51.1 ratio then there isn't really a case to be made to change actual real-world HR policies on that basis.

Being able to reasonably estimate that 'natural' ratio is a massive task. You'd need to account for parenting, education, popular culture, socio-economic group, dozens of biasing factors. I'd expect that model to go well beyond what's possible.

Yes, that may impose a high hurdle on criticism of HR policy via this argument, but that's also the intellectual leap that Damore has claimed to have made from the evidence presented. How exactly he's managed that leap is problematic. He certainly hasn't demonstrated full knowledge of all of the factors involved.

There's many plausible explanations why an absence of a 50:50 gender representation could be caused for reasons other than bias or average ability. That's enough to put a nail in that model of discovering bias. Coming up with a way of predicting what the right ratio is, isn't necessary to discard that metric.

Of course, and it's certain to be a combination of factors, some historical, some current that pushes representation away from 50:50. I don't think anyone is pretending that bias alone is responsible. But there's a mountain of direct evidence that bias is a significant problem. On the other hand the chasm between this biological source evidence and an actual hypothesised effect on representation is vast.

Damore presented evidence to support his claim that women are on average less able than men in areas relevant to engineering.

He didn't. He just claimed that they are on average less interested in those areas. There is no mention at all of ability in the memo, only in the manipulated press pieces.

He did not state that women had a harder time leading than men? That seems like a mention of ability.

Damore presented evidence to support his claim that women are on average less able than men in areas relevant to engineering.

His claim was that women are statistically less likely to be interested in computer science. He said nothing about ability.

It's one thing to propose that 50/50 is not the natural ratio to end up with, but until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number then proposing HR policy changes put the cart before the horse.

He gave lots of numbers. 20% is about the percentage of female computer science graduates. Targeting anything above that would necessarily require discriminating against men.

Damore's proposals discuss diversity as a whole (race not just gender) without a single word of justification

I don't see any mention of race in the memo. When Damore is talking about "diversity" he always is talking about gender diversity.

>He didn't discuss veracity, or contradictory evidence. That's textbook confirmation bias, not intellectual honesty.

This indicates that the policy changes are what James in interested in, not the evidence. More confirmation bias.

it's certainly not intellectual honesty...

stringing them together to confirm a conclusion you'd already set your sights in making is bad science.

I've been asked to edit my comment to make it less argumentative. Could you do the same for yours? Calling someone you disagree with "intellectually dishonest", etc, is not good taste.

It's very easy to learn about biases like confirmation bias, and fall into the trap of only applying that knowledge to other people. "He only disagrees with me because of confirmation bias. He's just intellectually dishonest."

You can't possibly know the thought process behind another person. As far as we know Damore did the research and found these facts convincing and developed his view. Not the other way around. Or at least someone presented these facts to him and then he developed the view he has.

In any case, this is how all debates work. People present evidence for their beliefs and the other side responds with refutations and evidence for theirs. There is nothing wrong or intellectually dishonest about this.

Your comments have been crossing into incivility and flamewar. Would you please make a u-turn and fix that? These threads are divisive enough without careless commenting.

Damore then started making HR policy proposals. We use a 50/50 gender ratio as an indicator that a particular field is free from bias. It's one thing to propose that 50/50 is not the natural ratio to end up with, but until Damore can propose a model that predicts another number then proposing HR policy changes put the cart before the horse.

This seems to assume that the only way to measure or achieve equitable hiring is to measure the representation of identity groups across a given position and make sure it tracks their makeup in the general population. It's not clear to me that there aren't other acceptable methods of trying to make things equitable.

For example, you could check that applicants from different identity groups succeed in being hired at about the same rate. That's a practice that should direct an organization towards equitable results whether the reality is that women are underrepresented because of sexism in hiring or the reality is that women are represented in different proportion because of the endeavors they tend to prefer. And also for a reality that's a mix of both (which I suspect is the way of things).

Also: if the primary accepted standard becomes to match representation in a position with an identity's representation in the population, it seems pretty likely that over time it would become more difficult over time to predict a "natural" ratio.

Or just make the entirely hiring process completely gender and race blind by hiding the name and salient biographical details of the applicant.

This solves two problems: 1) the hiring process is blinded and 2) you can demonstrate to the whole world that it's blinded.

As a side bonus, you get to eliminate other implicit biases that are part of the hiring process, like people preferring people who act like them.