| 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. |