[Banthum]

Given how absurdly twisted and misrepresented the Damore memo itself has been in the media (calling it anti-diversity when it was pro-diversity, posting it but silently removing links to sources, stating that it says women are bad at engineering when it actually said they're statistically less likely to be interested in engineering, and many many other lies), everything reported in these sources should be taken with a grain of salt.

It's perfectly likely that these stories are just not true, or are at least a highly interpreted version of what happened. Only primary sources are trustworthy; show me the chat logs and emails.

[bduerst]

The Damore memo was anti-diversity, under the stated guise of being pro-diversity. It was a criticism of Google's policies to fight social biases and promote diversity in hiring, using cherry-picked and misrepresented evidence. (e: Yes, I've read it several times for those who question it)

Like most news cycles though, the media from all sides of the spectrum were able to find something in it to get people outraged, drive clicks, gain eyeballs, etc.

[naasking]

> The Damore memo was anti-diversity, under the stated guise of being pro-diversity.

It was anti-pro-diversity policies (at least the existing ones). That doesn't entail it was anti-diversity. For instance, if I prove that diversity policies are completely ineffective and say we should do away with them, that doesn't make me anti-diversity except to people interested in token PR efforts rather than real change.

> It was a criticism of Google's policies to fight social biases and promote diversity in hiring, using cherry-picked and misrepresented evidence.

Not really. Did you actually read the memo?

[bduerst]

Following your hypothetical: But if you didn't prove that diversity policies are ineffective and still say we should do away with them, that does make you anti-diversity, to most rational, logical people.

Before you inevitably get further into semantics and burden of proof, you should read a breakdown of how Damore failed to prove his memo's claims, from the perspective of an Evolutionary Biologist:

https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

[naasking]

Please, Sadedin responded to a strawman, not Damore's actual argument. I could point out every mistake she made in interpretation, but it's frankly not worth my time doing this again. I'll just say that plenty of scientists with equivalent credentials agree that Damore's evidence was sufficient and used more or less correctly, for example [1].

Most of the people who disagree don't even understand the terminology Damore employed, and instead project their own inflammatory interpretations of scientific terms (such as various personality traits from the literature, like "agreeableness").

Finally, I will also note that we can even throw out any arguments about the evidence and quite easily prove mathematically that Google's hiring practices aren't biased and the methods will necessarily be ineffective at attracting more women: women comprise about 19% of Google employees. Women comprise around 20-21% of computer science graduates. Is Google expected to conjure women from the aether so that their female ratio somehow supercedes the ratio of women in the entire pool of possible applicants?

Even if Google were to achieve a better than possible ratio, they'd just be making the ratio at other companies worse. We'd all be hailing Google as some pinnacle of modernity and diversity, and we'd scold the rest of the industry for not following suit. It's complete bullshit theatre.

The only real change can happen in the halls of post-secondary education, or even earlier. Most of these arguments about culture at companies driving women away is smoke and mirrors. The predictions of such theories simply can't explain the data.

Women fought long and hard to get into achieve parity in plenty of other fields that were way more of an old boys' club than programming, like medicine and law. We're to believe that scores of women are so intimidated by nerds with keyboards that they're running away from STEM back in first and second year college? This narrative of the gender gap in STEM is total bull.

> But if you didn't prove that diversity policies are ineffective and still say we should do away with them, that does make you anti-diversity, to most rational, logical people.

Except you're clearly not even open to the possibility that Damore pointed out, that there's some intrinsic factor driving interest in STEM. Not ability, as Sadedin's strawman argued against, but interest. I suggest reading [2] for an overview of the evidence for the "things vs people" theory that can explain gender differences in interest.

[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

[bduerst]

Sadedin quotes Damore directly and addresses his argument directly.

I get that you support and want to make your own personal argument in for Damore's memo, but if you would read the Sadedin's criticism of Damore's memo, rather than dismissing it with an ad hom attack, you would see that the points you and Quillette are raising are addressed.

You can't ask me, "Did you actually read the memo?" and then make excuses to not read an expert's criticism. It smacks of confirmation bias.

[naasking]

> Sadedin quotes Damore directly and addresses his argument, point by point.

No she does not. I read Sadedin's response when this Damore thing blew up. Sadedin's mistakes are so blindingly obvious that I can't even... Here's Sadedin quoting Damore and responding to it:

> Damore: I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

> Sadedin: At what point did we jump from talking about personalities to abilities? It’s a massive leap to conclude that a slight difference in average personality must undermine women’s professional abilities in software engineering.

Except Damore didn't say anything of the sort. Damore literally said nothing about ability in his entire memo except this one off-hand remark that some differences in ability might exist due to biology, and Sadedin spends half her text attempting to debunk something Damore didn't even claim.

Sadedin clearly has an axe to grind, and Damore's memo was a convenient outlet. Sadedin's reply is riddled with exactly this sort of pattern, building up a nice Damore strawman and easily knocking it down.

And now I suggest you read the other expert's opinion that I linked in my previous comment, as he provides an overview of over 4 decades of cross-cultural research on gender differences which actually explains the data we have, rather than some bizarre conspiracy theory of nationwide sexism, oh but not everywhere, just in these specific fields for no reason whatsoever.

I'm not even going to bother responding to any more uninformed comments on this topic. You believe what you like, but if you're interested in evidence-based measures to improve gender disparity in STEM, then inform yourself. If you just want to wage some gender holy war, then I'm not interested in hearing about it.

[zenhack]

> Not really. Did you actually read the memo?

The sentence immediately following your quote:

> (e: Yes, I've read it several times for those who question it)

[naasking]

Notice how that's an edit.

[zenhack]

Fair.

[sloppycee]

> The Damore memo was anti-diversity

How so? I've read it; but maybe my own biases prevent me from seeing an "anti-diversity" theme.

I've have read the mischaracterizations of it online, for example:

> "circulating a memo discussing the biological inferiority of his female colleagues" [1]

Yet, reading it, I see absolutely no claim in the memo that supports that idea.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/08/google...

[jamie_ca]

The quote you're looking for is "I’m simply stating that the distribution of ... abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes."

[Banthum]

Those three dots are doing a lot of work.

[qubex]

Having incurred the high karmic cost of breaking Godwin’s Law anyway, I might as well go ahead and quote Hitler: ”I will bring down democracy by democratic means!”. The ultimate, and most despicable, form of diagonalization I can think of.

[ImSkeptical]

Have you read his memo? It seemed very mild and grounded in reason to me.

Your claim that it was secretly anti-diversity is a bit infuriating as Damore goes to great pains to state he is in favor of diversity, and part of his memo is about how Google can do a better job of attracting women. Watching you, and others, twist this into "secretly he doesn't believe anything he wrote, but actually thinks the exact opposite" and not even bother offering evidence of this, let's be generous and call it an "interpretation", like I said - it's infuriating.

Damore's mistake was believing Google's PR, that it cared about diversity or rational discussion. Google doesn't care about diversity, they care about appearing to care about diversity. Thus, when Damore's memo is internal it can be discussed, but when made public he must be terminated.

Google is demonstrably insufficiently diverse, when an employee offers some thoughts based on modern science, to improve diversity, the press howls and Google terminates him. Google wants people to think it's a good corporation, and they are quite willing to abandon good principles to pursue that. It's a shame you've been fooled by their corporatist double speak and lazy media.

[candiodari]

It attacked diversity policies, which form the reason for power for a great many Google managers, and one of the only ways to climb the corporate ladder at Google that aren't to build a new product (which is the incredibly hard way. Maybe one in 1000 to one in 10000 Googlers does that).

These people see these reactions as only fair. After all, this memo attacked their careers, so they attacked the author of the memo. Doubly so, of course, when it turned out to be well-written, effective, and, crucially, led many people to question the reason for the policies that form the basis of many "careers" (sorry "initiatives" I hear is the current term) at Google. I've heard similar stories of this happening at many companies.

Google is just doing what every other company is doing. Managers are directly rewarded or punished for diversity, but (at the moment) also for effectiveness. So they give out the jobs that don't matter exclusively to women. And of course management is enabling this. The cleaning staff. Security. There are many kinds of women-only internships. HR. Finance. Does this result in equality ? No, of course not, it results in antagonism, resentment as careers are destroyed because the person behind the career is the "wrong" gender, and to a lesser extent color, religion, ... (and, I would like to point out, as can be clearly seen in any SV company: minorities are racist too. There are teams in every company that "just happen" to be young Japanese males. Indian females with a few males among them that are behaving VERY obediently. Pakistani males. And so on. Zero diversity in those teams, and from the stories I hear, not because people don't join those teams)

The real thing diversity wants to achieve (imho), a more reasonable, perhaps even equal proportion in the various departments like engineering, is something that may happen over, well, let's be optimistic and say between half a generation and a generation, 15 to 30 years (from what base I don't know, because it still isn't the case at all that women and men have equal proportions in university CS).

Those are the rules many higher ups live by. You attack me, I attack you. Issue is that a LOT of people in the lower echelons don't know what might attack them. Diversity efforts are at the moment idiotic : it is not possible to recruit 50% women engineers from a pool that is 95% male, so the stated result is impossible to achieve and to get better scores they must cheat. Pointing this out, in a way that becomes popular, is an attack against the careers of higher ups and will result in very high up management demanding your dismissal.