[ejstronge]

His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks[1]. I could find more questionable positions but have attached a copy of the memo below.

Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things. We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).

More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.

Another point he raised was that Google's hiring initiatives 'lower the bar' for their targeted groups.

Google has created several discriminatory practices: [...] Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversity...

[throwaway613834]

> His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks

Could you please point to the exact sentence that says this? Because I did a quick search for "biolog" and I did not find a single passage that proposed what you wrote. What I did ̶s̶a̶y̶ find is sentences like "women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men" which say nothing about women being less capable of performing any software-associated tasks.

[ejstronge]

> Could you please point to the exact sentence that says this? Because I did a quick search for "biolog" and I did not find a single passage that proposed what you wrote. What I did say is sentences like "women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men" which say nothing about women being less capable of performing any software-associated tasks.

From his article:

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because...

[Pyxl101]

> [Damore's] argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks

The line and paragraph that quoted above makes no judgments about the capability of men or women for software tasks or otherwise, as far as I can tell. (Edit: I’ve read the whole memo at least twice)

The statements that men and women differ biologically, and that this impacts occupational preferences, is not scientifically novel or controversial. Writing about Damore's memo in Quilette, Deborah Soh (PhD in sexual neuroscience) said:

> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.

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

Another other article by Koh goes into more detail about the specific scientific research into this topic, and includes links to several original research publications (so you don't need to take her word for it): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manife...

[ejstronge]

As I'll reply to the other commenter, it's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.

[throwaway613834]

> > On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because...

How do you conclude "women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks" from merely that sentence?

[ejstronge]

It's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.

[throwaway613834]

> It's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.

Indeed, I have read the article in its entirely before. And I didn't remember such a passage (my memory isn't great), so I went back and Ctrl-F'd to try to find it and still didn't find it. Then I read on in each instance and saw that, just as I remembered, he was talking about preferences everywhere I found. So, yeah, I've already done everything you're saying, and that's why I think your claim is baseless, but I acknowledge maybe I'm still missing something. So instead of telling me to RTFA, it would behoove you to just spend 5 seconds pasting the full passage you are concluding this from. It isn't any harder to copy-paste the relevant portion of the passage than to comment about why you're refusing to do so when it actually exists. It's only harder when it doesn't exist.

[ejstronge]

> So instead of telling me to RTFA, it would behoove you to just spend 5 seconds pasting the full passage you are concluding this from. It isn't any harder to copy-paste the relevant portion of the passage than to comment about why you're refusing to do so when it actually exists. It's only harder when it doesn't exist.

I'm not sure what you'd like me to do, as I pasted the passages I was referring to in my initial comment. I don't think he's referring to preferences when he says that Google women have higher levels of self-reported anxiety due in part to their innate neuroticism[1].

Fundamentally, my problem with this article is that it makes an enormous leap from psychology studies to innate capabilities to unsuitability for certain types of work. We just don't know enough about each of these areas to make the generalizations that are put forth in the essay.

[1] Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs

[caseysoftware]

> His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks[1].

I see nothing there about "capability" but about preferences and about how much the work & teams can/can't be (re)shaped to match those preferences.

We should strive to create conditions where people can be effective in jobs they enjoy as it makes teams, projects, and companies better overall. How responsibilities are divided, teams are formed, and people interact are all variables that should be tweakable to some degree.

[cm2187]

There was a whole section on his memo about not reducing a distribution to its average. A difference in distribution will result in different averages or percentiles, however this doesn't mean all women are less capable or interested in a field which is the way I heard most of his detractors characterize his memo.