[komali2]

Ah, the Damore argument. Besides the fact that his psuedo science has been summarily handled[0], to consider his argument you then have to equally consider the possibility of sexism in academia pressuring women to not study these subjects and societal pressure their whole lives pressuring them to not persue these career paths.

There's also the idea that lack of women scientist "heroes" can be limiting (lack of role models). Basically the idea that if you stack the cards against a population, you're gonna see population-wide effects.

Given these data points, a biased hiring AI contributes to the problem. Therefore, it should be fixed, along with the above points.

[0]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-40865261

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/james-dam...

[21]

> There's also the idea that lack of women scientist "heroes" can be limiting (lack of role models)

This one is a bit weird, computer guys were always "nerds" and "geeks" to stay away from.

[crooked-v]

...starting in the 80s, which is also when the percentage of women going into computer fields started dropping like a rock.

[SolaceQuantum]

The rhetorical context here is that human children look for other human adults that they could potentially grow into in order to aim their own dreams and hopes for their adulthood. If a young human boy sees an adult human man pursuing computers, the young human boy learns that being interested in computers is a socially viable construct and this will affect how he pursues his interests in the future. In consequence, if a young human girl does not see any adult human women in computers, she may not understand that that option is available to her and this will affect how she pursues her interests. Although there is some fuzziness in determining this (some children grow up to be trailblazers, others pursue passions regardless of examples).

[komali2]

Wouldn't being an outcast make you even more attracted to heroes of your "outcast class?" Because, presumably, the hero had to overcome so much more for society to recognize them.

Depending on the era, we had Einstein, Turing, feinman. Kids my age had Gates (literally the richest man on the planet for my entire formative years), Jobs, Bill Nye. Little further along are the myth busters crew, musk...

We have plenty of heroes to pick from :)

[mcguire]

That kinda stopped being the case when geeks and nerds started making 6-figure incomes.

[nv-vn]

Where was it disproven? The article says that the research was controversial, not that it's false.

[komali2]

True or false isn't necessarily something I think you could say in debates about human genetics, yet.

For now I say it was "handled" in that not only did he fail to demonstrate that female disinterest in engineering, compared to male, is due to inherent psychological differences, and I quoted a couple people far more qualified than me that reached the same conclusion (their statements are in the article. The Wikipedia page is another good summary)

[stevenwoo]

Notably, Damore makes pretty much the same arguments against using race in hiring as he does gender, but failed to provide any proof for his arguments, he only really gave what he interpreted as evidence for his gender beliefs. There's little to disprove except for Damore's interpretation of results as being proof for his argument.

When right wing trolls attacked a female CS lecturer, she wrote a long response here: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/8/11/16130452/google-m...

[kopo]

Population wide effects MLK dreamed about too. Reality is a different story. I think the whole end goal is misguided and is going to lead to a whole lot of frustration and disappointment and divisiveness.

Helping individuals to overcome biology is much simpler than doing it at population scale.

[kipchak]

Referencing D. Schmitts article referenced in the BBC article, he's quoted as saying

>"that using someone's sex to work out what you think their personality will be like is "like surgically operating with an axe"."

Being phrased by the article as a dismissal of Damore, along with G. Rippon's statements However in the article Schmitt is quoted from, he writes that

>"Culturally universal sex differences in personal values and certain cognitive abilities are a bit larger in size (see here), and sex differences in occupational interests are quite large. It seems likely these culturally universal and biologically-linked sex differences play some role in the gendered hiring patterns of Google employees. For instance, in 2013, 18% of bachelor's degrees in computing were earned by women, and about 20% of Google technological jobs are currently held by women."

He goes on to write that Pyschological sex differences might lead to less than 50% of technology employees being women.

This seems to disagree with Professor Rippon's opinion that

>"but even if you accepted the idea that there are some biological differences, all researchers would assert that they're so tiny that there's no way that they can explain the kind of gender gap that's apparent at Google."

I think there's reason to consider both the societal reasons women might be pressured and excluded from STEM-ey fields, as well as potential inherent differences in interest, and that they can both coexist as considerations, and agree that a biased AI is unhelpful, and many women lack a fair shot of success, however disagree that there is nothing useful in Damore's perspective.

Additionally if such inherent differences are distributed on a bell curve, it would make sense that at cases further along the trail that small differences in populations and their medians are more pronounced.

[SolaceQuantum]

The jump here in the data being displayed is that it is making a correlation between sex differences and bachelor's degree demographics. Very little in that rhetoric actually has logical sense such that we know that we are missing(usually) at least close to two decades of cultural and social conditioning before the bachelors degree. That's plenty of time to systematically condition women against specific fields.

[kipchak]

One way to try and get around that issue may be to compare cultures with high Gender Equality Index scores or some similar metric versus those with lower scores but otherwise similar. Presumably the closer to parity those years before university are the more some other difference, if any, would be suggested.

[whycombinater]

"has been summarily handled"

Where does it state the number of applicants, male vs female?

[commandlinefan]

Well... why is it, then, that underrepresentation of women must suggest sexism, but the (orders of magnitude higher) overrepresentation of asians - specifically from India - doesn't suggest bias?

[komali2]

From a recruiter standpoint, that answer is easy - there are literally orders of magnitude more Indians applying.

So the bias against women due to decades of societal conditioning leads to less than 50/50 representation because less are applying, which companies are trying to patch by leveling the playing field, making their internal population breakdown identical to the external one.

Seeing shitloads of Indians is a passive effect of that internal/external thing - there are around 1.2 billion Indians...