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by judofyr 2236 days ago
> He is using "neurotic" in the psychological and clinical sense. I believe he specifies as much in his actual paper.

Eh. He's using the psychological/clinical definition, but then draws conclusions on no scientific basis.

This is what he said in the memo:

> [Women, on average, have more] 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.

And this is a quote from the person who actually did the meta-analysis which Damore cites (emphasis is mine):

> These sex differences in neuroticism are not very large, with biological sex perhaps accounting for only 10 percent of the variance.

> It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

1 comments

Regardless of the correctness of his overall argument, he wasn't saying "women are neurotic" in the colloquial sense, which was a common condemnation against him.

Also, and fact check me on this, does accounting for 10% of variance (aka 0.1 * sig^2) mean accounting for sqrt(0.1) * sig, aka 32% of the standard deviation?