I was outraged. Not because he stated men and women are not identical, but by his fundamental dishonesty.
In a honest discussion, I would agree that if the world was fair, there probably would be more men than women in tech jobs - because from culture, men are just more interested in those jobs. So of course, in such a world, it would be normal and fair if more men than women are hired. And any "diversity" order might actually do harm in such a world.
And then, he makes his far-reaching demands based on this idealised scenario.
The point is, it's obvious we don't live in such a fair world, but one where women are kept from succeeding by sexism. By not hiring them, or not promoting them, or not treating them fairly otherwise, not because they as individuals have flaws, but just because they are women. In this situation, noticing this and attempting to neutralise it is actually beneficial.
But Damore just made his demands ignoring this obvious evidence, and since there's no way he never heard about women and also men reporting about this sexism, he is basing his demands on his assumption they are liars, or blind. And that's why I'm outraged, and why I think it was fair that he was fired.
The flaws in his reasoning are so great that they completely invalidate his conclusions. Other examples would be: "Let's use nukes to accelerate a manned expedition to Mars. They'd get there really fast." or "Politicians just promise the moon from the sky, and may be unprepared. Let's have a king instead, he'd get prepared for his job during all of his life."
And so on. Demanding small points speaking for one's idea must be considered while the much larger flaws should be ignored is unreasonable to begin with.
Hi Sabine, I am a frequent but mostly lurking reader, this is probably my first comment.
Thanks for this thoughtful and balanced post.
To me, what's really outrageous here is that a person (perhaps one with a family to feed) has been fired for expressing an opinion in a calm and measured way.
The issue is not whether Damore is right or wrong. I guess he must be half right and half wrong, like it's usually the case. The issue is that thought policing and violent (yes, violent) repression of (calm and measured) dissent is definitely wrong. W R O N G.
Honestly, I don't think he was fired because of the content of his memo. He was fired because he made it way too public. There might be some true in some of his points, but there's also a lot of racism, sexism and nasty things in general. Once that's public, the company have two options: keep him as an employee and send a potential message of approval for that type of ideology; or fire the employee to prove zero tolerance for sexism/racism/xenophobia in all shapes and form.
And this is exactly why HR departments ask you to go to them with these kind of issues. He put the company in an impossible situation and he got the only possible outcome. If he had handled this through the appropriate channels, I'm sure he'd still be a Google employee.
TL;DR: He wasn't fired because of the content of his memo, he was fired because he was an idiot when he decided to send it to everyone.
By the way, in science and technology, conservatism is a minority ideology (he says so himself in his letter). How would he feel if we start saying that conservative people aren't apt for science and technology? That if he doesn't feel welcome he should find a different profession? It's ironic he complains about it even though, in a way, he understands the struggle.
I especially got the argument for affirmative action. I think that a too homogeneous culture can become a dangerous (self-selecting) goldfish bowl very quickly.
There are many tragic (and heroic) stories of great woman scientists of the past, but once the shackles are off, I think a sort of self-balancing may lead to the appropriate ratios being found.
Thank you for your balanced opinion about this complex problem. I basically agree with everything, and I'm not sure I would have been able to formulate it as clearly as you did.
I think Sundar Pichai explained the firing perfectly:
Quote:
This has been a very difficult time. I wanted to provide an update on the memo that was circulated over this past week.
First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”
The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent. So to be clear again, many points raised in the memo—such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all—are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics—we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions.
The past few days have been very difficult for many at the company, and we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree—while doing so in line with our Code of Conduct. I’d encourage each of you to make an effort over the coming days to reach out to those who might have different perspectives from your own. I will be doing the same.
I have been on work related travel in Africa and Europe the past couple of weeks and had just started my family vacation here this week. I have decided to return tomorrow as clearly there’s a lot more to discuss as a group—including how we create a more inclusive environment for all.
Dear Dr B "I used to think this backlash has to be avoided at all costs, hence was firmly against affirmative action. But during my years in Sweden, I saw that it does work – at least for women – and also why: It makes their presence unremarkable."
I think this is the source of much of the opposition to affirmative action: It works. Which means that those who used to get into college or the good jobs easily will now face competition. So they complain.
A large corporation is not, repeat NOT, a university or other academic setting. This is a business setting and the culture and goals are very different.
The diversity programs at a large corporation are not meant to bring men and women or blacks and whites employees into numerical proportions with the surrounding population. It is meant to enable the corporation to attract and retain from the widest pool of talent that is available.
Among other things the corporation wants these employees to be productive - and so has to give them good working conditions. Google has done an extraordinary amount of research on what makes teams productive. Look up what they found, it is educative.
Another anecdote - and this is in this time, not years ago. Our leadership of a very large technological firm told us that just doing the following made a big difference. When there is a position - internal or external hire, or a slot for a promotion - Human Resources picks five candidates and sends to the hiring manager. Without any instructions to the hiring manager, Human Resources was told that if there is a qualified woman, include her as one of the five. This all unbeknownst to the manager who is going to actually make the hiring decision. Think about why this would make a difference.
Further, if Damore had a clue of understanding, he would know how to bring his legitimate concerns up without creating a hostile workplace for the women employees of Google.
And if Google is like other corporations, each employee undergoes 10-20 hours each year being educated on the conduct expected within the corporation, ethics and how to deal with various situations, what is unacceptable behavior, and so on. I don't think Damore has any excuse that he did not know how he should behave.
Google and Sundar Pichai did absolutely the right thing. And if you don't like it, you can sell your Google stock, if you have any.
Maybe here's a simple way to understand what happened at Google. Bee, you've face criticism from say, Tim Maudlin; and you've faced criticism from Lubos Motl. I think you clearly understand the difference. Damore crossed the line from being Maudlin-like to being Motl-like. That is not tolerable.
@Giulio Prisco: It wasn't thought policing. Damore didn't just make an unpopular statement about evolution, or global warming, or even whether Trump was the greatest president of all time. He asserted in no unclear terms that female employees had an unfair advantage at Google and that anyone who thinks otherwise has to be ideologically blinded.
If Damore believed in the bell curve he used that there is a significant overlap in populations he would have come to the conclusion that women were about as trustworthy as men, and he'd have paid attention to their experiences. He chose not to do that, he only used that bell curve to assert men were superior to women in tech jobs - the old "I'm not a sexist but..." excuse.
There was no attempt at an open discussion - if he wanted one, he could have just asked female employees about their experiences about the hiring or promotion process and how it might be made fairer. He probably would have found someone like Sabine who would point out where his reasoning is good and where it's faulty. And if he took such an approach, it wouldn't be seen as accusing all female Google employees - which is the reason he was fired.
I cannot read most of the papers re: gender differences you linked to, but as far as I remember, most differences between men and women come in at less than one sigma, is that true for those also?
Also, you say that affirmative action leads to “every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job”. That is true, but the coorporate (and other) biases that lead to hiring of white cis christian (and whatever else you want) men do the same thing, only not that obvious, by recognizing fewer skills on everyone who does not resemble the predominant group of people already present. Thus, the biaes tend to not create meritocracies, but to mirrortocracies.
I understand that Google is a company and not a university. I also understand that given the publicity it would have created an uproar had they not quickly gotten rid of the guy. I still think it's a mistake though.
The reason is that I think his opinions are quite widely spread and Google is, company or not, a nerd's place. The uproar you'd have heard would have come from a small but loud group of people. And that, I think, is a very general problem which we have seen abundantly on social media in the last years. We give disproportional relevance to opinions a lot of people don't share because of manufactured outrage and because too many of us remain silent. Google could have, but didn't, make a case that it's possible to calmly discuss the matter. They didn't.
Frankly, it makes me very pessimistic about what's to come.
The common standard for statistical significance in sociology and psychology is a p-value of .05 which is something like 2 sigma I think. But, yeah, this isn't particle physics.
"I just can’t seem to appropriately suffer in my male-dominated environment" You are competent and creative. Suffer back the toadies. "a woman in a leading position in politics or industry is now commonplace" Indira Gandhi, Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton were profound disasters claiming deserved dispensation. Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher were despised by social intent.
The natural ratio of males to females in tasks of creative, intensive, and extended endeavor is that ratio in felony imprisonment. Men are sweating, swearing, lusting, hairy, ugly, violent, and driven when accomplishing things (admittedly on the bell curve’s other side).
"he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own. And what example does that set?" Social intent triumphant!
Yonatan Zunger makes a good point that I agree with. Because of James Damore's ignorance, he created quite the predicament in his workplace. He was fired, not because of his attempt at a discussion, but because in his ignorance he insulted and belittled his co-workers.
As Yonatan says, how could any of his superiors ever expect him to be able to work with women or minorities now?
As usual, you are wise and reasonable in a world that is frequently hysterical. I really appreciate your writing, especially on scientific topics, but also, as now, when you venture into more general questions of society.
"The bigger mistake in Damore’s memo is one I see frequently: Assuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from differences among demographic groups. "
Damore never says that. His focus is on differing preferences as an explanation for the dominance of men in software development.
Bee, I'm not talking about significance, but variance. AFAIR, the differences between means are significant, but the spread of basically everything is larger than the difference.
Hi Sabine. It's important to distinguish between effect size and statistical significance here. You're measuring differences between broad distributions, so while you may measure a *statistically significant* difference in (say) the mean of the male vs female distributions, this might only correspond to a small absolute difference in the means. Many of these studies coming out with "statistically significant" differences between genders do indeed have tiny effect sizes (e.g. see this recent Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are-there-so-few-women-in-tech-the-truth-behind-the-google-memo) that can't possibly explain the huge differences in workplace demographics. Plus, psychologists and sociologists are going through a big replication crisis right now that will possibly invalidate a big chunk of even the "significant" findings.
So, I'm in complete agreement that differences between populations are a poor explanation for the gender imbalance in tech and science. The root causes are probably sexism, social conditioning etc, all of which is well known. These appeals to population differences are spurious, and only serve to disrupt attempts to fix the situation -- this Google memo reminded me a lot of the sort of pseudo-scientific treatises that climate change deniers use to disrupt efforts to address that problem too. Quite right to pour scorn on them.
Written outside the company on his own time would have made it different, a free expression of a view (if perhaps wrong) made available for discussion.
"I’m not remotely surprised, however, that Damore naturally assumes the differences between typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled."
Does he actually say or mean such a thing? Maybe i missed it?
On sigmas, I read somewhere recently (maybe here) that something like 50% of published 3-sigma results turn out to be wrong. I think because we don't know what we don't know and therefore don't factor it into the sigma calculation (and because of biases).
I will come down somewhere in the middle of the firing debate. I think he should have been suspended or otherwise punished for violating the Conduct Code in a very public way, but not fired for a first offence (assuming this was a first offence). Here again, I don't know everything that transpired, e.g., maybe he was asked to apologize and refused.
When I started working as an engineer, female engineers were as rare as hen's teeth. When I left GE, they were about 20-30% of my department. A couple were great engineers (by my standards); all of them seemed to work hard, which is more than I can say of all the male engineers. Also there were a few male engineers who were good technically but very hard to work with. That seemed to be more of a male than female trait, in my anecdotal experience.
I'm curious - how do you think Google could have calmly discussed this matter? In a less entrenched situation I would have seen the possibility that Google could have made their female employees welcome by Google openly stating it stands by them, while Damore would express sincere regret on causing them stress with his assertion they were not suited for tech jobs.
But given Damore's entrenched claims of male superiority, would anyone believe he sincerely regretted hurting the female employees?
Goolag confirmed that gender quotas means empowering incompetent feminists allowing them to fire brave men who dare to agree with biology, rather than with gender ideology. If having women at work means this Thought Police and a sub-critical number of children, I don't think it's good for society.
"The bigger mistake in Damore’s memo is... [a]ssuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from differences among demographic groups."
Damore never made any such claim. In fact, he quite explicitly says that we must judge each individual on their own merits, and not based on what larger aggregate they belong to. Furthermore, his focus is on exactly the point you agree with -- that men and women *tend* to have different preferences, and these lead to different career choices.
Damore got fired because his views aren't compatible with Google's policy on "diversity".
If a man is employed as a strip-o-gram for female clients, and then writes a Facebook page complaining about homophobia, lack of BDSM diversity in the company, then he's likely to get fired. He's questioned the agenda of the company, threatening its existence and agenda.
People need to get their heads around the fact that ever society needs a set of rules to maintain its existence, and those that don't conform will need to leave, despite their cries of "free speech", "free expression".
You write: "If you want to spend your life with things and ideas rather than people, then go into engineering or physics, but not into software-development."
I've been in software development in one form or another for 37 years, and the idea that SW dev is people-centric rather than thing-centric is ludicrous. Just because one is analyzing people-data doesn't make the work people-centric -- the fascination is in the algorithms, mathematics, systems architecture, etc. For example, I worked for a marketing research firm for six years implementing Bayesian models of consumer behavior, not because I was interested in marketing research for its own sake, but because the job gave me an abundance of interesting mathematical modeling, statistical inference, optimization, and algorithm design problems to solve.
Sabine. Nice. I would like to see James rehired. Your post is exactly the response I wanted to see to his pamphlet, which is, how do intelligent women in the work place deal with all those issues, and define the milieu. I was greatly tickled by your " The bigger mistake in Damore’s memo is one I see frequently: Assumifg that job skills and performance can be deduced from differences among demographic groups. This just isn’t so. I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary." I would say gender dominance, always evolving, starting to tilt towards parity, is the main obstacle. I think Google would actually benefit by rehiring Mr. Damore, and use this event to thoroughly explore the territory, which is badly in need of AIRING.
Leaving aside the politics and the disruption of business, it was a badly written document. It cherry-picked evidence and used awful leaps of logic to pretend to be a carefully reasoned argument.
I agree with ambi valent, the argument where fundamentally dishonnest. In particular, arguing that talent distribution follows a bell curve is extremly stupid: it is multidimensionnal and has been showed to follow a power law anyway. In short talents are rare and can come from anywhere. However, he has a point. The divide between left and right ideas seems to be aggravated currently, with the election of Pres. Trump by a minority of Deep states. Firing him made him a martyr, while listenning to his BS would have disarmed it ( at least for left and moderate).
In an attempt to give a clue to those who still don't understand the Google firing of Damore:
It would be perfectly OK for Damore to say that all employees should get the opportunity to be mentored. It would have been perfectly OK for Damore to demand it. It would have been perfectly OK for him to have organized a public demonstration at the public entrance to the Google headquarters.
It is not OK for Damore to say that the employees in Google who currently get mentors are biologically disadvantaged and that is why the mentorship program is in place, and why it is misguided, and so on. Your colleagues who have been through the hiring process and who have worked in the corporation and have had satisfactory performance are your equals.
And if you can't/don't get this, then I can't explain it any further.
Dear Sabine, thanks for this article. The problem most times is that the pendulum swings too far either way. Its easy to be happy when a one's side is ascendant and to justify its actions forgetting that when the other side becomes ascendant, the same justifications would be used to act. Sundar's letter sounds a tad hypocritical saying google supports diversity yet sacks someone who writes an INTERNAL memo concerning such. I know education doesnt always work but i fear that the left's resort to labelling of dissidents with any of the -isms or -phobics would only cause more arm than good. what happened to good old reasoning (though i would concede that doesnt always work) especially considering the author of the memo backed up his essays with science. PS: Has anyone refuted the science of the memo???
Claiming that the difference in mean between two distributions is about 1 standard deviation (of either distribution) says nothing about the significance of the claim, which could be 2,3,5 sigma. The later involves the width of the confidence interval, which could be made smaller than width of the difference in means by having more data / better precision. In other words, one could claim that the difference in two bell curves is 1 standard deviation at 5 sigma or arbitrary confidence.
I don't no anything about the confidence in psychology studies, but I would bet some subtle differences between sexes are known with great confidence.
Did anyone, and I even question Damore himself, actually PAY CASH MONEY DOLLAR BILLS to read the FULL TEXT of the research articles? Or did everyone just read and misinterpret the abstract? Let's just ignore the embarassing Wikipedia article citations.
As someone who majored in sociology, I was "forced" to read many research papers, and often times abstracts are easy to misread. They are literally TL;DRs so that people doing research can get a glimpse of whether the literature being reviewed is relevant to them. The full text often contains extra data or conclusions that isn't mentioned in the abstract.
Bjørn's point is right on the money. While it is certain that there is a statistical difference, it is very small. Funny enough, one of the charts from the beginning of James Damore's memo shows exactly this conundrum (https://diversitymemo.com/). In short, the differences have minute practical effects. There is also some uncertainty as to how real these differences are, since they are sometimes not universal across cultures (https://phys.org/news/2011-08-disputes-notion-men-spatial-women.html), can be eradicated with education (http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/men-are-better-at-maps-until-women-take-this-course), and can be accounted for by social stereotypes, and overcome by mentally pretending to be the group unaffected by the stereotype (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608008000216, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11199-008-9448-9, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797616667459).
A very good (and mildly entertaining) video on this matter is THUNK's 109th episode, Statistical vs. Clinical Significance (https://youtu.be/MEr-gEWXJxM).
P.S. I didn't see James Damore advocating that women managers should get paid more and should dominate management: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women-better-leaders-men-study-a7658781.html
When you say that you believe that women would dominate in science and politics, you directly contradict the gender gap the authors of this particular study, which you link in this post, find. At least, according to the abstract. I'm not pointing this out to be snide or clever. It's just that you're arguing for the rationality of your (and to some extent Damore's) position in the authority of the studies you're citing. Reading the article on Science Alert that you later linked, it occurs to me that you've downplayed the significance of disagreements on this issue. Specifically the article quotes the scientists involved in one of the studies Damore cited as saying, "They are differences of degree, with large overlaps between men and women." The article also points out that in many of these studies, the data collected was self-reported, which makes its usefulness a little dubious.
My position is that this is an ethical issue. After all, less than a hundred years ago, eugenics was a scientifically acceptable hypothesis. How you interpret the data is an indicator of your moral compass. Given more decisive science about the very real harms discrimination inflicts on people, I think its hard to stomach people citing less decisive science about how psychological gender differences explain gaps in participation and interest. How could we even begin to disentangle the interaction between these psychological harms and inherent aptitudes? Perhaps we can, but none of the studies you cited seem to have done so, and I would be surprised if any exist. In light of that, I just don't think there is a debate to be had about whether this gap is natural or cultural. The only reason that question still seems reasonable is because it defends a long-standing social truth.
It simply comes across as retaliation for committing a thoughtcrime, for daring to express an unapproved opinion where others would hear it. The quality or correctness of the man's actual position won't matter: Drawing such a heavy-handed, censoring reaction will act as its own form of validation. Co-workers who agree with him will now simply keep their heads down and let their resentments fester. Resentments that will likely grow with time.
The right way to handle this would've been to open the floor to a genuine, free debate over Google's various policies. Allow everybody to give their 2 cents without fear of reprisal, including the "racists", "sexists", and all other 'bad' people. Allow the 'offensive' opinions, because every ideological orthodoxy finds dissenting opinions offensive. After awhile this initial essay would've become one drop in much larger sea, and any policy consensus that emerged would've been far more robust than a phony one imposed from on high & upheld by fear. But that's now no longer on the table, if it ever was.
And no, Pichai (the supervisor?)'s statement won't help. It actually makes things worse, because management comes across as bald-faced liars. Claiming that they will "not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions" right after FIRING a guy for doing precisely that. The obvious inference the employees will draw is: "Yeah, I'm sure free to express my reservations about company 'diversity' programs and left-wing politics all right. Free to immediately be labeled a hate-filled bigot whose opinions therefore don't matter, and then fired because my opinions were 'offensive'". That's not a recipe for long-term harmony or genuinely happy employees.
I'll take up your challenge to explain why men should dominate the higher ranks in science and politics.
See https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10670 for quantitative data indicating that variation in ability is higher among men than women. As a result when you select for extremes of ability, men are overrepresented, no matter which extreme you are looking for. The higher ranks of science and politics should have a high concentration of extremely capable people, which means that men should dominate even if women are on average better at those roles.
I don't understand how you get from the results of that study to the claim that women should be underrepresented in industry and politics. Could you elaborate?
The argument you mention means that it's statistically more likely to find men who are highly skilled in some specialized task. This is not what brings you forward in the higher ranks. I think putting men with these skills in such positions is a big mistake, though you see this all over science. I would agree that this means you'd be more likely to find men among students and postdocs, but less likely to find at higher levels. In reality, though, the situation is exactly the other way round.
Frankly I think that a lot of the problems we see in theoretical physics - overspecialization, people competing to solve problems that aren't problems, an overproduction of entirely irrelevant models - are typically "male" problems. (On the average, on the average.)
As I said earlier, you can plot your means and sigmas all you like, it's another thing entirely to conclude from that who will and won't succeed in science. Men, for example, like to overestimate the relevance of a high IQ. I have known and met a lot of people with high IQ (self-declared but have no reason to doubt) and many of them are bad scientists (indeed not in science to begin with). They lack other qualities that are more important.
First, you can find most of these articles online without having to pay. Second, I did indeed read a whole pile of those, though not yesterday. I got quite interested in this after reading Pinker's book some years ago and looked into the matter for a bit. I won't pretend I actually understood everything that's in the paper (not being from the field, much of the references to other studies eludes me).
I actually think the details of these studies aren't so relevant here. The only relevant point is that it's exceedingly unlikely all of these studies are wrong and there are really no (statistically significant) differences between men and women.
thanks for you thoughtful article, and for urging thinking instead of yelling!
A couple of issues:
1. Predominance of people-centric work at Google?
Are you sure about this? Google is very much "backend-centric" and "algorithm-centric", with humans taken out of the equation as much as possible and computer systems talking to other computer systems. Or in Google's case data-centers talking to other data-centers. In fact, Google is notorious for automating and for its products not being very human-friendly, even for paying customers.
2. Assumption that females are less skilled
Where did you get that from? I don't see it in the memo at all. First, he talks mostly about preferences, not skills, and second is very adamant about the large overlaps and the statistical, population-based nature of the differences. Both of which mean you could never make such a sweeping statement about any of the characteristics mentioned, and certainly not "skill".
Third, and somewhat more subtly, since it is about skews in representation at Google, this means he is never talking about his female colleagues being "less" of anything. There was much outrage about him "denigrating" his colleagues, but that is simply not possible with the argument he is making.
3. Biases
He also says that biases exist and should be eliminated. Your text doesn't say but seems to imply he didn't.
4. 50-50 challenge: accepted :)
First, I agree that if it were purely a matter of suitability for the job, we would probably have many more women in politics and leadership positions, possibly a majority.
However, you are again missing the point that it's not just about skills/ability. It's also (for politics maybe primarily) about motivation. Looking at leadership in the world, I think it should be uncontroversial that we're not governed by the people who were selected based on their skill for governing (i.e. creating the best conditions for their country and its population, rather than just triaging interests in order to remain in power).
In fact, there are many who say that the skills and temperaments required for governing vs. gaining and maintaining the power to do so are so disjoint that actually wanting the job should disqualify one from every getting it.
The other point is that the question is phrased wrong. It shouldn't be "why are there so few women in these jobs", but rather "why are there men who want them". Because these jobs suck if you want to have a life worth living. My dad was a high-ranking executive in the auto industry. He went to work at 7:30, came home at 19:30, had dinner with us, watched the Tagesschau and retreated to his den to work until around 1 in the morning.
Most people of either gender are too smart to want that, but a few men are sufficiently driven that they are willing to sacrifice basically their life for their career. Jordan Peterson put it more eloquently, giving the example of why law firms have such a hard time to retain their brilliant and highly qualified/competent women:
And preference also appears to be the main factor in the STEM disparities. It turns out that there is an actual difference in ability between men and women, in that women who have high math skills also tend to have high verbal skills, whereas men who have high math skills often lack correspondingly high verbal skills. And it turns out that people who have both skill-sets tend to favor non-STEM jobs, regardless of gender. So it's not that women don't go into STEM because they don't have the skills, it's that men go into STEM more because they lack other skills. Again: statistically.
Now everyone at Google (and everyone in large tech companies, and everyone in academy) knows that they can be fired for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line.
Of course they'll shut up for fear of losing their job and the means to support their family.
But they won't change their position. If anything, their position will be radicalized. For example, from classical liberal to alt-right.
Yes, they'll stop expressing their opinion in public. But they'll express their opinion, with a vengeance, in the only place where one can do so in secrecy without fear of witch-hunting mobs: the voting booth.
FWIW, my experience in large firms would suggest that the main reason the guy was fired was not his screed per se, bur rather because he stepped out of bounds. His opinion on corporate policy was not sought or wanted. Nonetheless, he criticized the Google leadership and created a huge PR headache (with associated expense). This annoyed and embarrassed his bosses. When one annoys and embarrasses ones boss, in the private sector, termination ensues. This is not unique to Google.
When it comes to ones employer, discretion is the better part of valour. At least while still collecting a pay cheque.
When you have increased variation in multiple independent dimensions, you should not expect to simply find people who are extreme in a single dimension, but you should also expect to find other people who combine multiple dimensions well simultaneously. So on straight ability you should expect to find your greatest extremes among men. Even when the ability that matters is some sort of combination of other abilities.
That said, the argument that I am making only applies to the true extremes. Averages matter a lot more when it comes to the hordes of work-a-day professionals who are needed to make society tick.
Furthermore the model is just a model. People are not simply multi-variate Gaussian distributions in some number of dimensions. As you have noted, male-dominated organizations have a tendency to become dick size measuring contests. And this does not make for good organizations.
And finally, I would like to point out an interesting extreme data point. The first person to win 2 Nobel prizes, and to date the only person to win in two different areas of science, was a woman. Madame Curie. So no matter the odds, it is possible for a woman to come out on top. :-)
Yes, maybe you are right. The data are so insufficient that I don't even find it particularly interesting to argue over it. Maybe the long tails will turn out to impact the ratios in the end.
If fluency in science and technology didn't equal status then nobody would care.
(Have you ever noticed how status-obsessed everybody is?)
I for one think that men are better at sciencey stuff than women. I also think that the ability to do sciency stuff is not an entirely good thing. Sciencey stuff takes a certain kind of culturally-accepted mental disease. Voila, dominance struggle diffused!
I think his issues was that fact that by pointing out the differences in physiology, and stating it as a weakness shows he doesn't actually understand the full software picture at Google. Those differences are a strength, not a weakness. Google make software for people, so employing based on skillsets that understand people is not only good for business, it's good for software in general. I'm pro-dominantly a systems programmer, and I've identified that my strengths in say, human-centered software design are left wanting, I'm not good at every area of writing software so I need people around me that are good at the things I'm not good at. I'm glad I have people in my company who excel in this area. Empathy for the user are critical to making anything work for real people. The fact he didn't understand that these type of skills are necessary to building software people love tells me he doesn't get how Google write software. You can't boil and imperfect world down to a set of math. I think I just pity the fact he doesn't value the skills women bring to software, skills I can definitely say I don't possess. Embrace the differences, otherwise you'll just end up with a workforce that's all the same. I also don't agree with "removing emotion" from the workplace, we're human that's an impossible thing to do, also passion is definitely an emotion if you don't have that when you turn up for work, what the hell are you doing turning up for work. But I think it was written by someone from an naive stand point, and can understand someone deep in thought trying to over analyse the problem, so do I disagree with him, on the most part yes. Do I think he should be chastised in public for making a mistake, or trying to start a conversation, no. Things like "he'll never work at another company in Silicon Valley" is a pretty extreme stance to take for voicing an opinion. Knee jerk reactions, rather than thoughtful discussion has no place in the industry otherwise we all become oppressors.
Disagreeing with Damore’s arguments is perfectly ok. Not liking the style of his memo is perfectly ok. Calling Damore young and clueless is useless ad hominem. Chances are he is smarter than you and me and the memo is actually well sourced. Calling him a WHITE MAN is an essentialism that reveals the author's bias.
This is a blog, not a scientific article. I've offered my own opinion. If you don't think that's ok, too bad.
I mentioned he's a young, white, man because I think it matters. If the author of the memo had turned out to be a 50 year old black woman, do you think the reaction would have been the same?
I have read the memo and I agree with the memo in far more points than I disagree. It is a shame, that we cannot discuss this issues in a civilized manner anymore. I hope someone will hire this man with better salary than he got at Google. Shame on Google for fascist reaction.
If Damore had simply argued that less women _choose_ a tech career, and that one therefore shouldn't attempt a 1:1 ratio, just fairness in hiring, nobody would have had any problem.
Instead, the arguments he uses say that women are _less qualified for_ a tech career - and that was not a call for fairness but a claim of superiority. If he wanted to do the first, why did he do the second?
You make the claim a few times that if a big chunk of a business values something, it's important. I think Google faced a situation where a lot of people felt that his firing was pretty important. I think that it was the right move for google to have fired him, rather than risk losing others for deciding to keep him around. It's hard to say how much damage they mitigated by firing him, but it's hard for me to imagine that it was not the right decision for the business.
I saw a number of my friends get stressed out by this whole thing. Maybe less severe responses would have been warranted if this particular case had not been the root of a huge stress event at the company, but that's what this became. Stuff like this is going to spark scandal and amplified stress to the extent that these issues are ones that have few effective mechanisms of dissent.
BS persists, stress builds, things like this serve as rare common ground through which that stress can be expressed, and it blows up.
I understood that you were drawing from these data that the gender differences present argued that women should dominate scientific fields (I didn't mean to include politics in that context) But the data about aptitude for mathematics/science skew in favor of men: "Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests". I was making the point that your position, if based on these data, contradicted them. I'll quote one of the studies again: "Although most biologic scientists accept that sexual selection has led to sex differences in physical traits such as height, musculature, and fat distributions, many social scientists are skeptical about the role of sexual selection in generating psychological gender differences." All of which is in service of saying, contrary to your claim early in your blog, it is controversial in the social sciences to say that there are determinative psychological differences between men and women. The burden of proof is rightly on those who want to argue for those differences. Lacking that strong proof, I think arguing in favor of these differences is morally indefensible. I, too, don't know if firing Damore was the correct response, but there ought to be no doubt that he was wrong.
Hi. Psychologist here. Yes, we can see differences in the average personality of men and women. The personality traits that are mentioned are based on the five factor model, the only current valid model of personality. It's data-driven, but from people's perception of personality, so the model, which itself is already influenced by culture and experience of the world, it's not a hard "people just work like this" fact, it's how the majority of people perceive themselves and other people. Additionally, it leaves out huge parts of individual differences in people, it's the best that we currently got, but it's not very good.
So then we administer this test then to the population, and what a huge surprise, we find differences on how men and women are perceived.
Where this difference comes from is quite important however. Because if we keep insisting on this difference between men and women, we will keep shaping women and men to be different from one another, through culture, poorly understood psychology, religion etc.
If we stopped that, and allowed women to be more analytical, aggressive, strong minded and if we give them the freedom to make important decisions for themselves we would be better off. If we allowed men to show emotions, be softer, create an environment where men can take care more of their children and have a better work-life balance we would be better off.
Both genders need to gain more freedom and be less stereotyped by nonsense arguments founded in an insufficient understanding of psychology.
Arun, Blackhead, it is your kind of hateful, intolerant, extremism that is generating a backlash in support of Damore. At one time society had rules against interracial couples in public. It probably made them feel "unsafe." Thank goodness your logic was not applied there. People openly and aggressively questioned those rules. All rules are subject to question and simply saying they make you feel unsafe is no excuse. Damore did his best to make a sound argument, backed by science. But like the church, declaring that the Earth is flat and burning those that dare even provide small evidence to the contrary, you would prefer to just to be rid of a dissenter. Out with the heretic! It is astounding to me that so many smart people can be so primitive.
I am a father and shame on me for not paying attention to these issues until I was married with children.
I want my daughter to have the opportunity to pursue whatever path she ultimately chooses. I am not wedded to any particular remedy because that misses the forest for the trees.
I think you misunderstood that statement. It was a way to say that I don't think the data is conclusive. Hence, tongue-in-cheek, try to prove me wrong when say the ratio should be this number and not that number.
I never said anything about the role of sexual selection in generating psychological gender differences. On the contrary, I stated explicitly that the nature/nurture debate is unresolved (and probably will remain for a long time).
Management is politicians with support staff, college entry IQ 110. The California Academic Performance Index 700,000 student Los Angeles Unified School District is ~85 IQ, 2/3 immediate exclusion. Product resides in ore not dross.
Technical warriors are idiot savants, autists, or hard science PhD entry level 130 IQ, 2% incidence. Technical populations favor Ashkenazic Jewish and Chinese, culled East Indians (Indian Institutes of Technology); demonstrated technical ability plus obsession.
Male versus female IQ distribution is flatter and broader. Qualifying women average ~35% not 50% incidence at the far right. Wage inequality is discrimination. The Manhattan Project was successful not "equitable."
There's a lot of claims in these comments about what is in the memo, or what it claims. Can the respective authors provide links/quotes etc to the parts they are referring too?
@Ambi Valent:
"fundamental dishonesty"
"he makes his far-reaching demands based on this idealised scenario"
"Damore just made his demands ignoring this obvious evidence ... he is basing his demands on his assumption they are liars, or blind"
"The flaws in his reasoning are so great that they completely invalidate his conclusions."
"Demanding ... larger flaws should be ignored"
"He asserted ... that anyone who thinks otherwise has to be ideologically blinded."
"There was no attempt at an open discussion"
"his assertion they were not suited for tech jobs."
"Damore's entrenched claims of male superiority"
"the arguments he uses say that women are _less qualified for_ a tech career"
@Outer M.:
"How would he feel if we start saying that conservative people aren't apt for science and technology?"
@Arun:
"if Damore had a clue of understanding, he would know how to bring his legitimate concerns up without creating a hostile workplace for the women employees of Google."
"[claim: *He* is responsible for "creating a hostile workplace"]"
"I am of the opinion that the Google CEO made the case that it is possible to calmly discuss the matter."
"Damore .. spit in [the water]."
"Damore [said employees] are biologically disadvantaged"
@G:
"it was a badly written document. It cherry-picked evidence and used awful leaps of logic to pretend to be a carefully reasoned argument."
Again your logical reasoning not being corrupted by passion or self interest demonstrates why I have such high regard for you as a physicist and your blog. You discuss facts as they are and not how we’d like them to be. Genetic differences among sex’s and races are a fact that result in a general difference in traits for the groups they are attributable too, yet individuals don’t necessarily have the traits of a group and may not even fit neatly in a specific group category. I am a father of two daughters whose desire is to see them not be prejudged in pursuit of their goals. Yet I still know and have raised them to understand that equality is about not being pre-judged, equal opportunity, and being treated equally when demonstrating equal ability. Knowing we are NOT equal, it is unrealistic to expect or demand equal distribution in careers or pay.
As usual human behavior causes the idealistic to rationalize, distort, and ignore facts to fit their passion and unrealistic expectations are what result.
How the Internet got the ‘Google memo’ wrong https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/08/10/how-internet-got-google-memo-wrong/US4NlaIvQ00UdsyofYbMyM/story.html
I think "cherry picking of evidence" and wild extrapolations of small differences does fit the memo
From the article: "Back to the tech world: There is ample evidence of sexual harassment, unwelcoming workplace environments, and in some cases quantitatively measurable discrimination in scientific and technical fields. Why focus on biological differences, many of them quite small, rather than other factors that could explain certain discrepancies? That’s why some researchers, particularly those with a feminist bent, think it’s beside the point that the differences Damore mentioned are borne out by studies."
@Ambi Valent, Damore DID argue that fewer women choose a tech career, and therefore we shouldn't attempt a 1:1 ratio. He DID NOT argue that women are less qualified for a tech career. Here are some quotes:
"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 distributions"
"I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism)."
The media have lied to you about what Damore said. I suggest you read his document for yourself: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf
Most useful content: "For me, the most relevant contribution to equal opportunity is affordable higher education and health insurance, as well as governmentally paid maternity and parental leave. Without that, socially disadvantaged groups remain underrepresented, and companies continue to fear for revenue when hiring women in their fertile age. That, in all fairness, is an American problem not even Google can solve.
But one also doesn’t solve a problem by yelling “harassment” each time someone asks to discuss whether a diversity effort is indeed effective."
@chris2048:you ask that question as if you have not even read the main article article let alone the comment thread. There are plenty of answers (read: citations) sprinkled throughout.
My mistress started as a programmer and worked her way fairly high up in the corporate food chain. She says the situation was rather simple. Damore was fired for making a problem for the boss. If Silicon Valley, and Google in particular, were not under fire for its "bro" culture, Damore would probably have been warned that his public writing on company time was against company policy and probably forced to take some kind of course in understanding the issue and corporate policies. It isn't easy for a woman to win a sexual discrimination suit, even in California, but having idiots - and I'll use that term in its original sense of one being oblivious to others - like Damore spouting off makes it a just a bit easier. Google, and a host of other Silicon Valley companies, however, are being challenged for their attitudes and actions towards female employees and job candidates, so this kind of public exposition became a problem for upper management at Google.
As far as my mistress is concerned, having an employee create such a public problem would kill not just his career, but hers and likely her boss's career as well. I was never that high up the food chain, so I have to rely on her judgement of the situation. As others have pointed out, using Google terminology, when your job title has a number in it, odds are you can pretend to be a machine person, but when your job title is all words, odds are you are a people person. The pay is better too.
Silicon Valley does have a problem in its attitudes towards and its treatment of women. I have a niece in venture capital, and she has, as they put it, seen plenty. Despite the mystique of engineers not being people oriented, the whole point of engineering is to do stuff for people. Google search does not exist to sell advertising targeted at robots searching the internet. Google ads are targeted at people. Apple, Dell, Samsung and all the rest sell computers to be used by people. Even the supplier of the most esoteric component only has a job because that component is incorporated into something that is either sold to people or performs a service valuable to people.
"Damore was fired, basically, for making a well-meant, if amateurish, attempt at institutional design, based on woefully incomplete information he picked from published research studies."
That's part of the reason he was fired. But as he tells it, he wrote the memo, and some people associated with the diversity program read it but didn't comment. (The memo is pretty broad, so a short response would have to ignore a lot of the content, and I imagine that nobody who read it thought that it was sufficiently well thought out to be worth spending a lot of time on.) So he posted it on a skeptics discussion group. I assume the group was a non-work-related discussion board devoted to the application of the scientific method to things like paranormal abilities. It was posting to that forum that ultimately led to him being fired.
In other words, at Google or pretty much anywhere in the corporate world, having heterodox ideas about diversity is risky if you don't have a clear understanding of where and when the company will tolerate discussion of those ideas.
3:19 AM, August 11, 2017
[Image]
Chairs. [Image: Verco]
That leaked internal memo from James Damore at Google? The one that says one shouldn’t expect employees in all professions to reflect the demographics of the whole population? Well, that was a pretty dumb thing to write. But not because it’s wrong. Dumb is that Damore thought he could have a reasoned discussion about this. In the USA, out of all places.
Damore’s strikes me as a pamphlet produced by a well-meaning, but also utterly clueless, young white man. He didn’t deserve to get fired for this. He deserved maybe a slap on the too-quickly typing fingers. But in his world, asking for discussion is apparently enough to get fired.
I don’t normally write about the underrepresentation of women in science. Reason is I don’t feel fit to represent the underrepresented. I just can’t seem to appropriately suffer in my male-dominated environment. To the extent that one can trust online personality tests, I’m an awkwardly untypical female. It’s probably unsurprising I ended up in theoretical physics.
There is also a more sinister reason I keep my mouth shut. It’s that I’m afraid of losing what little support I have among the women in science when I fall into their back.
I’ve lived in the USA for three years and for three more years in Canada. On several occasions during these years, I’ve been told that my views about women in science are “hardcore,” “controversial,” or “provocative.” Why? Because I stated the obvious: Women are different from men. On that account, I’m totally with Damore. A male-female ratio close to one is not what we should expect in all professions – and not what we should aim at either.
But the longer I keep my mouth shut, the more I think my silence is a mistake. Because it means leaving the discussion – and with it, power – to those who shout the loudest. Like CNBC. Which wants you to be “shocked” by Damore’s memo in a rather transparent attempt to produce outrage and draw clicks. Are you outraged yet?
Increasingly, media-storms like this make me worry about the impression scientists give to the coming generation. Give to kids like Damore. I’m afraid they think we’re all idiots because the saner of us don’t speak up. And when the kids think they’re oh-so-smart, they’ll produce pamphlets to reinvent the wheel.
I’m neither a sociologist nor psychologist, but my understanding of the literature is that these are uncontroversial findings. And not new either. Women are different from men, both by nature and by nuture, though it remains controversial just what is nurture and what is nature. But the cause is besides the point for the question of occupation: Women are different in ways that plausibly affect their choice of profession.
No, the problem with Damore’s argument isn’t the starting point, the problem is the conclusions that he jumps to.
To begin with, even I know most of Google’s work is people-centric. It’s either serving people directly, or analyzing people-data, or imagining the people-future. If you want to spend your life with things and ideas rather than people, then go into engineering or physics, but not into software-development.
That coding actually requires “female” skills was spelled out clearly by Yonatan Zunger, a former Google employee. But since I care more about physics than software-development, let me leave this aside.
The bigger mistake in Damore’s memo is one I see frequently: Assuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from differences among demographic groups. This just isn’t so. I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary.
I’m not remotely surprised, however, that Damore naturally assumes the differences between typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled. That’s the bias he thinks he doesn’t have. And, yeah, I’m likewise biased in favor of women. Guess that makes us even then.
The biggest problem with Damore’s memo however is that he doesn’t understand what makes a company successful. If a significant fraction of employees think that diversity is important, then it is important. No further justification is needed for this.
Yes, you can argue that increasing diversity may not improve productivity. The data situation on this is murky, to say the least. There’s some story about female CEOs in Sweden that supposedly shows something – but I want to see better statistics before I buy that. And in any case, the USA isn’t Sweden. More importantly, productivity hinges on employees’ well-being. If a diverse workplace is something they value, then that’s something to strive for, period.
What Damore seems to have aimed at, however, was merely to discuss the best way to deal with the current lack of diversity. Biases and unequal opportunities are real. (If you doubt that, you are a problem and should do some reading.) This means that the current representation of women, underprivileged and disabled people, and other minorities, is smaller than it would be in that ideal world which we don’t live in. So what to do about it?
One way to deal with the situation is to wait until the world catches up. Educate people about bias, work to remove obstacles to education, change societal gender images. This works – but it works very slowly.
Worse, one of the biggest obstacles that minorities face is a chicken-and-egg problem that time alone doesn’t cure. People avoid professions in which there are few people like them. This is a hurdle which affirmative action can remove, fast and efficiently.
But there’s a price to pay for preferably recruiting the presently underrepresented. Which is that people supported by diversity efforts face a new prejudice: They weren’t hired because they’re skilled. They were hired because of some diversity policy!
I used to think this backlash has to be avoided at all costs, hence was firmly against affirmative action. But during my years in Sweden, I saw that it does work – at least for women – and also why: It makes their presence unremarkable.
In most of the European North, a woman in a leading position in politics or industry is now commonplace. It’s nothing to stare at and nothing to talk about. And once it’s commonplace, people stop paying attention to a candidate’s gender, which in return reduces bias.
I don’t know, though, if this would also work in science which requires an entirely different skill-set. And social science is messy – it’s hard to tell how much of the success in Northern Europe is due to national culture. Hence, my attitude towards affirmative action remains conflicted.
And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data. Is diversity important enough for you to temporarily tolerate an increased risk of not hiring the most qualified person? That’s the trade-off nobody seems willing to spell out.
I also have to spell out that I am writing this as a European who now works in Europe again. For me, the most relevant contribution to equal opportunity is affordable higher education and health insurance, as well as governmentally paid maternity and parental leave. Without that, socially disadvantaged groups remain underrepresented, and companies continue to fear for revenue when hiring women in their fertile age. That, in all fairness, is an American problem not even Google can solve.
But one also doesn’t solve a problem by yelling “harassment” each time someone asks to discuss whether a diversity effort is indeed effective. I know from my own experience, and a poll conducted at Google confirms, that Damore’s skepticism about current practices is widespread.
It’s something we should discuss. It’s something Google should discuss. Because, for better or worse, this case has attracted much attention. Google’s handling of the situation will set an example for others.
Damore was fired, basically, for making a well-meant, if amateurish, attempt at institutional design, based on woefully incomplete information he picked from published research studies. But however imperfect his attempt, he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own. And what example does that set?
posted by Sabine Hossenfelder at 5:32 AM on Aug 9, 2017
"Outraged about the Google diversity memo? I want you to think about it."
75 Comments -
Well meaning is questionable.
5:53 AM, August 09, 2017
I was outraged. Not because he stated men and women are not identical, but by his fundamental dishonesty.
In a honest discussion, I would agree that if the world was fair, there probably would be more men than women in tech jobs - because from culture, men are just more interested in those jobs. So of course, in such a world, it would be normal and fair if more men than women are hired. And any "diversity" order might actually do harm in such a world.
And then, he makes his far-reaching demands based on this idealised scenario.
The point is, it's obvious we don't live in such a fair world, but one where women are kept from succeeding by sexism. By not hiring them, or not promoting them, or not treating them fairly otherwise, not because they as individuals have flaws, but just because they are women. In this situation, noticing this and attempting to neutralise it is actually beneficial.
But Damore just made his demands ignoring this obvious evidence, and since there's no way he never heard about women and also men reporting about this sexism, he is basing his demands on his assumption they are liars, or blind. And that's why I'm outraged, and why I think it was fair that he was fired.
The flaws in his reasoning are so great that they completely invalidate his conclusions. Other examples would be: "Let's use nukes to accelerate a manned expedition to Mars. They'd get there really fast." or "Politicians just promise the moon from the sky, and may be unprepared. Let's have a king instead, he'd get prepared for his job during all of his life."
And so on. Demanding small points speaking for one's idea must be considered while the much larger flaws should be ignored is unreasonable to begin with.
6:12 AM, August 09, 2017
Hi Sabine, I am a frequent but mostly lurking reader, this is probably my first comment.
Thanks for this thoughtful and balanced post.
To me, what's really outrageous here is that a person (perhaps one with a family to feed) has been fired for expressing an opinion in a calm and measured way.
The issue is not whether Damore is right or wrong. I guess he must be half right and half wrong, like it's usually the case. The issue is that thought policing and violent (yes, violent) repression of (calm and measured) dissent is definitely wrong. W R O N G.
6:14 AM, August 09, 2017
Thank you for a non polarised look at the problem.
6:19 AM, August 09, 2017
Honestly, I don't think he was fired because of the content of his memo. He was fired because he made it way too public. There might be some true in some of his points, but there's also a lot of racism, sexism and nasty things in general. Once that's public, the company have two options: keep him as an employee and send a potential message of approval for that type of ideology; or fire the employee to prove zero tolerance for sexism/racism/xenophobia in all shapes and form.
And this is exactly why HR departments ask you to go to them with these kind of issues. He put the company in an impossible situation and he got the only possible outcome. If he had handled this through the appropriate channels, I'm sure he'd still be a Google employee.
TL;DR: He wasn't fired because of the content of his memo, he was fired because he was an idiot when he decided to send it to everyone.
By the way, in science and technology, conservatism is a minority ideology (he says so himself in his letter). How would he feel if we start saying that conservative people aren't apt for science and technology? That if he doesn't feel welcome he should find a different profession? It's ironic he complains about it even though, in a way, he understands the struggle.
6:40 AM, August 09, 2017
Great points here. A lot to think about!
I especially got the argument for affirmative action. I think that a too homogeneous culture can become a dangerous (self-selecting) goldfish bowl very quickly.
There are many tragic (and heroic) stories of great woman scientists of the past, but once the shackles are off, I think a sort of self-balancing may lead to the appropriate ratios being found.
6:48 AM, August 09, 2017
Thank you for your balanced opinion about this complex problem. I basically agree with everything, and I'm not sure I would have been able to formulate it as clearly as you did.
6:48 AM, August 09, 2017
I think Sundar Pichai explained the firing perfectly:
Quote:
This has been a very difficult time. I wanted to provide an update on the memo that was circulated over this past week.
First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”
The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent. So to be clear again, many points raised in the memo—such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all—are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics—we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions.
The past few days have been very difficult for many at the company, and we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree—while doing so in line with our Code of Conduct. I’d encourage each of you to make an effort over the coming days to reach out to those who might have different perspectives from your own. I will be doing the same.
I have been on work related travel in Africa and Europe the past couple of weeks and had just started my family vacation here this week. I have decided to return tomorrow as clearly there’s a lot more to discuss as a group—including how we create a more inclusive environment for all.
End quote.
6:58 AM, August 09, 2017
Dear Dr B
"I used to think this backlash has to be avoided at all costs, hence was firmly against affirmative action. But during my years in Sweden, I saw that it does work – at least for women – and also why: It makes their presence unremarkable."
I think this is the source of much of the opposition to affirmative action: It works. Which means that those who used to get into college or the good jobs easily will now face competition. So they complain.
7:12 AM, August 09, 2017
Dear Bee,
A large corporation is not, repeat NOT, a university or other academic setting. This is a business setting and the culture and goals are very different.
The diversity programs at a large corporation are not meant to bring men and women or blacks and whites employees into numerical proportions with the surrounding population. It is meant to enable the corporation to attract and retain from the widest pool of talent that is available.
Among other things the corporation wants these employees to be productive - and so has to give them good working conditions. Google has done an extraordinary amount of research on what makes teams productive. Look up what they found, it is educative.
Another anecdote - and this is in this time, not years ago. Our leadership of a very large technological firm told us that just doing the following made a big difference. When there is a position - internal or external hire, or a slot for a promotion - Human Resources picks five candidates and sends to the hiring manager. Without any instructions to the hiring manager, Human Resources was told that if there is a qualified woman, include her as one of the five. This all unbeknownst to the manager who is going to actually make the hiring decision. Think about why this would make a difference.
Further, if Damore had a clue of understanding, he would know how to bring his legitimate concerns up without creating a hostile workplace for the women employees of Google.
And if Google is like other corporations, each employee undergoes 10-20 hours each year being educated on the conduct expected within the corporation, ethics and how to deal with various situations, what is unacceptable behavior, and so on. I don't think Damore has any excuse that he did not know how he should behave.
Google and Sundar Pichai did absolutely the right thing. And if you don't like it, you can sell your Google stock, if you have any.
Best wishes,
-Arun
7:14 AM, August 09, 2017
Maybe here's a simple way to understand what happened at Google.
Bee, you've face criticism from say, Tim Maudlin; and you've faced criticism from Lubos Motl. I think you clearly understand the difference. Damore crossed the line from being Maudlin-like to being Motl-like. That is not tolerable.
7:49 AM, August 09, 2017
@Giulio Prisco:
It wasn't thought policing. Damore didn't just make an unpopular statement about evolution, or global warming, or even whether Trump was the greatest president of all time. He asserted in no unclear terms that female employees had an unfair advantage at Google and that anyone who thinks otherwise has to be ideologically blinded.
If Damore believed in the bell curve he used that there is a significant overlap in populations he would have come to the conclusion that women were about as trustworthy as men, and he'd have paid attention to their experiences. He chose not to do that, he only used that bell curve to assert men were superior to women in tech jobs - the old "I'm not a sexist but..." excuse.
There was no attempt at an open discussion - if he wanted one, he could have just asked female employees about their experiences about the hiring or promotion process and how it might be made fairer. He probably would have found someone like Sabine who would point out where his reasoning is good and where it's faulty. And if he took such an approach, it wouldn't be seen as accusing all female Google employees - which is the reason he was fired.
7:50 AM, August 09, 2017
Hi Bee,
I cannot read most of the papers re: gender differences you linked to, but as far as I remember, most differences between men and women come in at less than one sigma, is that true for those also?
Also, you say that affirmative action leads to “every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job”. That is true, but the coorporate (and other) biases that lead to hiring of white cis christian (and whatever else you want) men do the same thing, only not that obvious, by recognizing fewer skills on everyone who does not resemble the predominant group of people already present. Thus, the biaes tend to not create meritocracies, but to mirrortocracies.
9:42 AM, August 09, 2017
Arun,
I understand that Google is a company and not a university. I also understand that given the publicity it would have created an uproar had they not quickly gotten rid of the guy. I still think it's a mistake though.
The reason is that I think his opinions are quite widely spread and Google is, company or not, a nerd's place. The uproar you'd have heard would have come from a small but loud group of people. And that, I think, is a very general problem which we have seen abundantly on social media in the last years. We give disproportional relevance to opinions a lot of people don't share because of manufactured outrage and because too many of us remain silent. Google could have, but didn't, make a case that it's possible to calmly discuss the matter. They didn't.
Frankly, it makes me very pessimistic about what's to come.
I don't own stocks. Best,
B.
9:56 AM, August 09, 2017
Bjorn,
The common standard for statistical significance in sociology and psychology is a p-value of .05 which is something like 2 sigma I think. But, yeah, this isn't particle physics.
10:07 AM, August 09, 2017
"I just can’t seem to appropriately suffer in my male-dominated environment" You are competent and creative. Suffer back the toadies.
"a woman in a leading position in politics or industry is now commonplace" Indira Gandhi, Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton were profound disasters claiming deserved dispensation. Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher were despised by social intent.
The natural ratio of males to females in tasks of creative, intensive, and extended endeavor is that ratio in felony imprisonment. Men are sweating, swearing, lusting, hairy, ugly, violent, and driven when accomplishing things (admittedly on the bell curve’s other side).
"he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own. And what example does that set?" Social intent triumphant!
10:18 AM, August 09, 2017
Yonatan Zunger makes a good point that I agree with. Because of James Damore's ignorance, he created quite the predicament in his workplace. He was fired, not because of his attempt at a discussion, but because in his ignorance he insulted and belittled his co-workers.
As Yonatan says, how could any of his superiors ever expect him to be able to work with women or minorities now?
10:20 AM, August 09, 2017
Bee,
As usual, you are wise and reasonable in a world that is frequently hysterical. I really appreciate your writing, especially on scientific topics, but also, as now, when you venture into more general questions of society.
10:42 AM, August 09, 2017
"The bigger mistake in Damore’s memo is one I see frequently: Assuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from differences among demographic groups. "
Damore never says that. His focus is on differing preferences as an explanation for the dominance of men in software development.
10:48 AM, August 09, 2017
Bee, I'm not talking about significance, but variance. AFAIR, the differences between means are significant, but the spread of basically everything is larger than the difference.
11:14 AM, August 09, 2017
Hi Sabine. It's important to distinguish between effect size and statistical significance here. You're measuring differences between broad distributions, so while you may measure a *statistically significant* difference in (say) the mean of the male vs female distributions, this might only correspond to a small absolute difference in the means. Many of these studies coming out with "statistically significant" differences between genders do indeed have tiny effect sizes (e.g. see this recent Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are-there-so-few-women-in-tech-the-truth-behind-the-google-memo) that can't possibly explain the huge differences in workplace demographics. Plus, psychologists and sociologists are going through a big replication crisis right now that will possibly invalidate a big chunk of even the "significant" findings.
So, I'm in complete agreement that differences between populations are a poor explanation for the gender imbalance in tech and science. The root causes are probably sexism, social conditioning etc, all of which is well known. These appeals to population differences are spurious, and only serve to disrupt attempts to fix the situation -- this Google memo reminded me a lot of the sort of pseudo-scientific treatises that climate change deniers use to disrupt efforts to address that problem too. Quite right to pour scorn on them.
11:24 AM, August 09, 2017
Written outside the company on his own time would have made it different, a free expression of a view (if perhaps wrong) made available for discussion.
12:04 PM, August 09, 2017
"I’m not remotely surprised, however, that Damore naturally assumes the differences between typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled."
Does he actually say or mean such a thing? Maybe i missed it?
12:15 PM, August 09, 2017
On sigmas, I read somewhere recently (maybe here) that something like 50% of published 3-sigma results turn out to be wrong. I think because we don't know what we don't know and therefore don't factor it into the sigma calculation (and because of biases).
I will come down somewhere in the middle of the firing debate. I think he should have been suspended or otherwise punished for violating the Conduct Code in a very public way, but not fired for a first offence (assuming this was a first offence). Here again, I don't know everything that transpired, e.g., maybe he was asked to apologize and refused.
When I started working as an engineer, female engineers were as rare as hen's teeth. When I left GE, they were about 20-30% of my department. A couple were great engineers (by my standards); all of them seemed to work hard, which is more than I can say of all the male engineers. Also there were a few male engineers who were good technically but very hard to work with. That seemed to be more of a male than female trait, in my anecdotal experience.
12:28 PM, August 09, 2017
Sabine,
I'm curious - how do you think Google could have calmly discussed this matter? In a less entrenched situation I would have seen the possibility that Google could have made their female employees welcome by Google openly stating it stands by them, while Damore would express sincere regret on causing them stress with his assertion they were not suited for tech jobs.
But given Damore's entrenched claims of male superiority, would anyone believe he sincerely regretted hurting the female employees?
12:53 PM, August 09, 2017
bee:
an excellent blog entry. surprising only because it was written by a woman (hey, that's supposed to be a joke LOL).
richard
1:16 PM, August 09, 2017
Goolag confirmed that gender quotas means empowering incompetent feminists allowing them to fire brave men who dare to agree with biology, rather than with gender ideology. If having women at work means this Thought Police and a sub-critical number of children, I don't think it's good for society.
1:53 PM, August 09, 2017
"The bigger mistake in Damore’s memo is... [a]ssuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from differences among demographic groups."
Damore never made any such claim. In fact, he quite explicitly says that we must judge each individual on their own merits, and not based on what larger aggregate they belong to. Furthermore, his focus is on exactly the point you agree with -- that men and women *tend* to have different preferences, and these lead to different career choices.
2:31 PM, August 09, 2017
Damore got fired because his views aren't compatible with Google's policy on "diversity".
If a man is employed as a strip-o-gram for female clients, and then writes a Facebook page complaining about homophobia, lack of BDSM diversity in the company, then he's likely to get fired. He's questioned the agenda of the company, threatening its existence and agenda.
People need to get their heads around the fact that ever society needs a set of rules to maintain its existence, and those that don't conform will need to leave, despite their cries of "free speech", "free expression".
2:32 PM, August 09, 2017
You write: "If you want to spend your life with things and ideas rather than people, then go into engineering or physics, but not into software-development."
I've been in software development in one form or another for 37 years, and the idea that SW dev is people-centric rather than thing-centric is ludicrous. Just because one is analyzing people-data doesn't make the work people-centric -- the fascination is in the algorithms, mathematics, systems architecture, etc. For example, I worked for a marketing research firm for six years implementing Bayesian models of consumer behavior, not because I was interested in marketing research for its own sake, but because the job gave me an abundance of interesting mathematical modeling, statistical inference, optimization, and algorithm design problems to solve.
2:39 PM, August 09, 2017
Sabine.
Nice.
I would like to see James rehired. Your post is exactly the response I wanted to see to his pamphlet, which is, how do intelligent women in the work place deal with all those issues, and define the milieu.
I was greatly tickled by your
" The bigger mistake in Damore’s memo is one I see frequently: Assumifg that job skills and performance can be deduced from differences among demographic groups. This just isn’t so. I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary."
I would say gender dominance, always evolving, starting to tilt towards parity, is the main obstacle.
I think Google would actually benefit by rehiring Mr. Damore, and use this event to thoroughly explore the territory, which is badly in need of AIRING.
4:05 PM, August 09, 2017
Leaving aside the politics and the disruption of business, it was a badly written document. It cherry-picked evidence and used awful leaps of logic to pretend to be a carefully reasoned argument.
4:48 PM, August 09, 2017
I am of the opinion that the Google CEO made the case that it is possible to calmly discuss the matter.
But Damore can't ask people to drink the water that he first spit in.
7:06 PM, August 09, 2017
I agree with ambi valent, the argument where fundamentally dishonnest.
In particular, arguing that talent distribution follows a bell curve is extremly stupid: it is multidimensionnal and has been showed to follow a power law anyway. In short talents are rare and can come from anywhere.
However, he has a point. The divide between left and right ideas seems to be aggravated currently, with the election of Pres. Trump by a minority of Deep states. Firing him made him a martyr, while listenning to his BS would have disarmed it ( at least for left and moderate).
7:31 PM, August 09, 2017
In an attempt to give a clue to those who still don't understand the Google firing of Damore:
It would be perfectly OK for Damore to say that all employees should get the opportunity to be mentored. It would have been perfectly OK for Damore to demand it. It would have been perfectly OK for him to have organized a public demonstration at the public entrance to the Google headquarters.
It is not OK for Damore to say that the employees in Google who currently get mentors are biologically disadvantaged and that is why the mentorship program is in place, and why it is misguided, and so on. Your colleagues who have been through the hiring process and who have worked in the corporation and have had satisfactory performance are your equals.
And if you can't/don't get this, then I can't explain it any further.
7:34 PM, August 09, 2017
Dear Sabine, thanks for this article. The problem most times is that the pendulum swings too far either way. Its easy to be happy when a one's side is ascendant and to justify its actions forgetting that when the other side becomes ascendant, the same justifications would be used to act.
Sundar's letter sounds a tad hypocritical saying google supports diversity yet sacks someone who writes an INTERNAL memo concerning such. I know education doesnt always work but i fear that the left's resort to labelling of dissidents with any of the -isms or -phobics would only cause more arm than good. what happened to good old reasoning (though i would concede that doesnt always work) especially considering the author of the memo backed up his essays with science.
PS: Has anyone refuted the science of the memo???
7:55 PM, August 09, 2017
Bjorn and Sabine,
Claiming that the difference in mean between two distributions is about 1 standard deviation (of either distribution) says nothing about the significance of the claim, which could be 2,3,5 sigma. The later involves the width of the confidence interval, which could be made smaller than width of the difference in means by having more data / better precision. In other words, one could claim that the difference in two bell curves is 1 standard deviation at 5 sigma or arbitrary confidence.
I don't no anything about the confidence in psychology studies, but I would bet some subtle differences between sexes are known with great confidence.
8:21 PM, August 09, 2017
Did anyone, and I even question Damore himself, actually PAY CASH MONEY DOLLAR BILLS to read the FULL TEXT of the research articles? Or did everyone just read and misinterpret the abstract? Let's just ignore the embarassing Wikipedia article citations.
As someone who majored in sociology, I was "forced" to read many research papers, and often times abstracts are easy to misread. They are literally TL;DRs so that people doing research can get a glimpse of whether the literature being reviewed is relevant to them. The full text often contains extra data or conclusions that isn't mentioned in the abstract.
9:40 PM, August 09, 2017
Sabine,
Bjørn's point is right on the money. While it is certain that there is a statistical difference, it is very small. Funny enough, one of the charts from the beginning of James Damore's memo shows exactly this conundrum (https://diversitymemo.com/). In short, the differences have minute practical effects. There is also some uncertainty as to how real these differences are, since they are sometimes not universal across cultures (https://phys.org/news/2011-08-disputes-notion-men-spatial-women.html), can be eradicated with education (http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/men-are-better-at-maps-until-women-take-this-course), and can be accounted for by social stereotypes, and overcome by mentally pretending to be the group unaffected by the stereotype (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608008000216, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11199-008-9448-9, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797616667459).
A very good (and mildly entertaining) video on this matter is THUNK's 109th episode, Statistical vs. Clinical Significance (https://youtu.be/MEr-gEWXJxM).
P.S. I didn't see James Damore advocating that women managers should get paid more and should dominate management: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women-better-leaders-men-study-a7658781.html
9:49 PM, August 09, 2017
Hi Bee,
When you say that you believe that women would dominate in science and politics, you directly contradict the gender gap the authors of this particular study, which you link in this post, find. At least, according to the abstract. I'm not pointing this out to be snide or clever. It's just that you're arguing for the rationality of your (and to some extent Damore's) position in the authority of the studies you're citing. Reading the article on Science Alert that you later linked, it occurs to me that you've downplayed the significance of disagreements on this issue. Specifically the article quotes the scientists involved in one of the studies Damore cited as saying, "They are differences of degree, with large overlaps between men and women." The article also points out that in many of these studies, the data collected was self-reported, which makes its usefulness a little dubious.
My position is that this is an ethical issue. After all, less than a hundred years ago, eugenics was a scientifically acceptable hypothesis. How you interpret the data is an indicator of your moral compass. Given more decisive science about the very real harms discrimination inflicts on people, I think its hard to stomach people citing less decisive science about how psychological gender differences explain gaps in participation and interest. How could we even begin to disentangle the interaction between these psychological harms and inherent aptitudes? Perhaps we can, but none of the studies you cited seem to have done so, and I would be surprised if any exist. In light of that, I just don't think there is a debate to be had about whether this gap is natural or cultural. The only reason that question still seems reasonable is because it defends a long-standing social truth.
In respectful but complete disagreement,
Sharat
10:16 PM, August 09, 2017
Firing him is only going to make things worse.
It simply comes across as retaliation for committing a thoughtcrime, for daring to express an unapproved opinion where others would hear it. The quality or correctness of the man's actual position won't matter: Drawing such a heavy-handed, censoring reaction will act as its own form of validation. Co-workers who agree with him will now simply keep their heads down and let their resentments fester. Resentments that will likely grow with time.
The right way to handle this would've been to open the floor to a genuine, free debate over Google's various policies. Allow everybody to give their 2 cents without fear of reprisal, including the "racists", "sexists", and all other 'bad' people. Allow the 'offensive' opinions, because every ideological orthodoxy finds dissenting opinions offensive. After awhile this initial essay would've become one drop in much larger sea, and any policy consensus that emerged would've been far more robust than a phony one imposed from on high & upheld by fear. But that's now no longer on the table, if it ever was.
And no, Pichai (the supervisor?)'s statement won't help. It actually makes things worse, because management comes across as bald-faced liars. Claiming that they will "not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions" right after FIRING a guy for doing precisely that. The obvious inference the employees will draw is: "Yeah, I'm sure free to express my reservations about company 'diversity' programs and left-wing politics all right. Free to immediately be labeled a hate-filled bigot whose opinions therefore don't matter, and then fired because my opinions were 'offensive'". That's not a recipe for long-term harmony or genuinely happy employees.
11:11 PM, August 09, 2017
I'll take up your challenge to explain why men should dominate the higher ranks in science and politics.
See https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10670 for quantitative data indicating that variation in ability is higher among men than women. As a result when you select for extremes of ability, men are overrepresented, no matter which extreme you are looking for. The higher ranks of science and politics should have a high concentration of extremely capable people, which means that men should dominate even if women are on average better at those roles.
12:41 AM, August 10, 2017
Sharat,
I don't understand how you get from the results of that study to the claim that women should be underrepresented in industry and politics. Could you elaborate?
12:59 AM, August 10, 2017
btilly,
The argument you mention means that it's statistically more likely to find men who are highly skilled in some specialized task. This is not what brings you forward in the higher ranks. I think putting men with these skills in such positions is a big mistake, though you see this all over science. I would agree that this means you'd be more likely to find men among students and postdocs, but less likely to find at higher levels. In reality, though, the situation is exactly the other way round.
Frankly I think that a lot of the problems we see in theoretical physics - overspecialization, people competing to solve problems that aren't problems, an overproduction of entirely irrelevant models - are typically "male" problems. (On the average, on the average.)
As I said earlier, you can plot your means and sigmas all you like, it's another thing entirely to conclude from that who will and won't succeed in science. Men, for example, like to overestimate the relevance of a high IQ. I have known and met a lot of people with high IQ (self-declared but have no reason to doubt) and many of them are bad scientists (indeed not in science to begin with). They lack other qualities that are more important.
1:10 AM, August 10, 2017
Alex,
First, you can find most of these articles online without having to pay. Second, I did indeed read a whole pile of those, though not yesterday. I got quite interested in this after reading Pinker's book some years ago and looked into the matter for a bit. I won't pretend I actually understood everything that's in the paper (not being from the field, much of the references to other studies eludes me).
I actually think the details of these studies aren't so relevant here. The only relevant point is that it's exceedingly unlikely all of these studies are wrong and there are really no (statistically significant) differences between men and women.
1:15 AM, August 10, 2017
Hi Sabine,
thanks for you thoughtful article, and for urging thinking instead of yelling!
A couple of issues:
1. Predominance of people-centric work at Google?
Are you sure about this? Google is very much "backend-centric" and "algorithm-centric", with humans taken out of the equation as much as possible and computer systems talking to other computer systems. Or in Google's case data-centers talking to other data-centers. In fact, Google is notorious for automating and for its products not being very human-friendly, even for paying customers.
2. Assumption that females are less skilled
Where did you get that from? I don't see it in the memo at all. First, he talks mostly about preferences, not skills, and second is very adamant about the large overlaps and the statistical, population-based nature of the differences. Both of which mean you could never make such a sweeping statement about any of the characteristics mentioned, and certainly not "skill".
Third, and somewhat more subtly, since it is about skews in representation at Google, this means he is never talking about his female colleagues being "less" of anything. There was much outrage about him "denigrating" his colleagues, but that is simply not possible with the argument he is making.
3. Biases
He also says that biases exist and should be eliminated. Your text doesn't say but seems to imply he didn't.
4. 50-50 challenge: accepted :)
First, I agree that if it were purely a matter of suitability for the job, we would probably have many more women in politics and leadership positions, possibly a majority.
However, you are again missing the point that it's not just about skills/ability. It's also (for politics maybe primarily) about motivation. Looking at leadership in the world, I think it should be uncontroversial that we're not governed by the people who were selected based on their skill for governing (i.e. creating the best conditions for their country and its population, rather than just triaging interests in order to remain in power).
In fact, there are many who say that the skills and temperaments required for governing vs. gaining and maintaining the power to do so are so disjoint that actually wanting the job should disqualify one from every getting it.
The other point is that the question is phrased wrong. It shouldn't be "why are there so few women in these jobs", but rather "why are there men who want them". Because these jobs suck if you want to have a life worth living. My dad was a high-ranking executive in the auto industry. He went to work at 7:30, came home at 19:30, had dinner with us, watched the Tagesschau and retreated to his den to work until around 1 in the morning.
Most people of either gender are too smart to want that, but a few men are sufficiently driven that they are willing to sacrifice basically their life for their career. Jordan Peterson put it more eloquently, giving the example of why law firms have such a hard time to retain their brilliant and highly qualified/competent women:
Women in High Paying Jobs -- Jordan Peterson
And preference also appears to be the main factor in the STEM disparities. It turns out that there is an actual difference in ability between men and women, in that women who have high math skills also tend to have high verbal skills, whereas men who have high math skills often lack correspondingly high verbal skills. And it turns out that people who have both skill-sets tend to favor non-STEM jobs, regardless of gender. So it's not that women don't go into STEM because they don't have the skills, it's that men go into STEM more because they lack other skills. Again: statistically.
1:27 AM, August 10, 2017
The results of this incident are easy to predict.
Now everyone at Google (and everyone in large tech companies, and everyone in academy) knows that they can be fired for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line.
Of course they'll shut up for fear of losing their job and the means to support their family.
But they won't change their position. If anything, their position will be radicalized. For example, from classical liberal to alt-right.
Yes, they'll stop expressing their opinion in public. But they'll express their opinion, with a vengeance, in the only place where one can do so in secrecy without fear of witch-hunting mobs: the voting booth.
Yes, that explains Trump.
1:28 AM, August 10, 2017
FWIW, my experience in large firms would suggest that the main reason the guy was fired was not his screed per se, bur rather because he stepped out of bounds. His opinion on corporate policy was not sought or wanted. Nonetheless, he criticized the Google leadership and created a huge PR headache (with associated expense). This annoyed and embarrassed his bosses. When one annoys and embarrasses ones boss, in the private sector, termination ensues. This is not unique to Google.
When it comes to ones employer, discretion is the better part of valour. At least while still collecting a pay cheque.
1:29 AM, August 10, 2017
@Sabine,
When you have increased variation in multiple independent dimensions, you should not expect to simply find people who are extreme in a single dimension, but you should also expect to find other people who combine multiple dimensions well simultaneously. So on straight ability you should expect to find your greatest extremes among men. Even when the ability that matters is some sort of combination of other abilities.
That said, the argument that I am making only applies to the true extremes. Averages matter a lot more when it comes to the hordes of work-a-day professionals who are needed to make society tick.
Furthermore the model is just a model. People are not simply multi-variate Gaussian distributions in some number of dimensions. As you have noted, male-dominated organizations have a tendency to become dick size measuring contests. And this does not make for good organizations.
And finally, I would like to point out an interesting extreme data point. The first person to win 2 Nobel prizes, and to date the only person to win in two different areas of science, was a woman. Madame Curie. So no matter the odds, it is possible for a woman to come out on top. :-)
1:57 AM, August 10, 2017
btilly,
Yes, maybe you are right. The data are so insufficient that I don't even find it particularly interesting to argue over it. Maybe the long tails will turn out to impact the ratios in the end.
2:14 AM, August 10, 2017
If fluency in science and technology didn't equal status then nobody would care.
(Have you ever noticed how status-obsessed everybody is?)
I for one think that men are better at sciencey stuff than women. I also think that the ability to do sciency stuff is not an entirely good thing. Sciencey stuff takes a certain kind of culturally-accepted mental disease. Voila, dominance struggle diffused!
2:22 AM, August 10, 2017
I think his issues was that fact that by pointing out the differences in physiology, and stating it as a weakness shows he doesn't actually understand the full software picture at Google. Those differences are a strength, not a weakness. Google make software for people, so employing based on skillsets that understand people is not only good for business, it's good for software in general. I'm pro-dominantly a systems programmer, and I've identified that my strengths in say, human-centered software design are left wanting, I'm not good at every area of writing software so I need people around me that are good at the things I'm not good at. I'm glad I have people in my company who excel in this area. Empathy for the user are critical to making anything work for real people. The fact he didn't understand that these type of skills are necessary to building software people love tells me he doesn't get how Google write software. You can't boil and imperfect world down to a set of math. I think I just pity the fact he doesn't value the skills women bring to software, skills I can definitely say I don't possess. Embrace the differences, otherwise you'll just end up with a workforce that's all the same. I also don't agree with "removing emotion" from the workplace, we're human that's an impossible thing to do, also passion is definitely an emotion if you don't have that when you turn up for work, what the hell are you doing turning up for work. But I think it was written by someone from an naive stand point, and can understand someone deep in thought trying to over analyse the problem, so do I disagree with him, on the most part yes. Do I think he should be chastised in public for making a mistake, or trying to start a conversation, no. Things like "he'll never work at another company in Silicon Valley" is a pretty extreme stance to take for voicing an opinion. Knee jerk reactions, rather than thoughtful discussion has no place in the industry otherwise we all become oppressors.
4:13 AM, August 10, 2017
Disagreeing with Damore’s arguments is perfectly ok.
Not liking the style of his memo is perfectly ok.
Calling Damore young and clueless is useless ad hominem. Chances are he is smarter than you and me and the memo is actually well sourced.
Calling him a WHITE MAN is an essentialism that reveals the author's bias.
4:39 AM, August 10, 2017
Daniel,
This is a blog, not a scientific article. I've offered my own opinion. If you don't think that's ok, too bad.
I mentioned he's a young, white, man because I think it matters. If the author of the memo had turned out to be a 50 year old black woman, do you think the reaction would have been the same?
6:27 AM, August 10, 2017
I have read the memo and I agree with the memo in far more points than I disagree. It is a shame, that we cannot discuss this issues in a civilized manner anymore. I hope someone will hire this man with better salary than he got at Google. Shame on Google for fascist reaction.
7:12 AM, August 10, 2017
If Damore had simply argued that less women _choose_ a tech career, and that one therefore shouldn't attempt a 1:1 ratio, just fairness in hiring, nobody would have had any problem.
Instead, the arguments he uses say that women are _less qualified for_ a tech career - and that was not a call for fairness but a claim of superiority. If he wanted to do the first, why did he do the second?
7:22 AM, August 10, 2017
You make the claim a few times that if a big chunk of a business values something, it's important. I think Google faced a situation where a lot of people felt that his firing was pretty important. I think that it was the right move for google to have fired him, rather than risk losing others for deciding to keep him around. It's hard to say how much damage they mitigated by firing him, but it's hard for me to imagine that it was not the right decision for the business.
I saw a number of my friends get stressed out by this whole thing. Maybe less severe responses would have been warranted if this particular case had not been the root of a huge stress event at the company, but that's what this became. Stuff like this is going to spark scandal and amplified stress to the extent that these issues are ones that have few effective mechanisms of dissent.
BS persists, stress builds, things like this serve as rare common ground through which that stress can be expressed, and it blows up.
7:29 AM, August 10, 2017
Hi Bee,
I understood that you were drawing from these data that the gender differences present argued that women should dominate scientific fields (I didn't mean to include politics in that context) But the data about aptitude for mathematics/science skew in favor of men: "Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests". I was making the point that your position, if based on these data, contradicted them. I'll quote one of the studies again: "Although most biologic scientists accept that sexual selection has led to sex differences in physical traits such as height, musculature, and fat distributions, many social scientists are skeptical about the role of sexual selection in generating psychological gender differences." All of which is in service of saying, contrary to your claim early in your blog, it is controversial in the social sciences to say that there are determinative psychological differences between men and women. The burden of proof is rightly on those who want to argue for those differences. Lacking that strong proof, I think arguing in favor of these differences is morally indefensible. I, too, don't know if firing Damore was the correct response, but there ought to be no doubt that he was wrong.
8:51 AM, August 10, 2017
Hi. Psychologist here.
Yes, we can see differences in the average personality of men and women. The personality traits that are mentioned are based on the five factor model, the only current valid model of personality. It's data-driven, but from people's perception of personality, so the model, which itself is already influenced by culture and experience of the world, it's not a hard "people just work like this" fact, it's how the majority of people perceive themselves and other people.
Additionally, it leaves out huge parts of individual differences in people, it's the best that we currently got, but it's not very good.
So then we administer this test then to the population, and what a huge surprise, we find differences on how men and women are perceived.
Where this difference comes from is quite important however. Because if we keep insisting on this difference between men and women, we will keep shaping women and men to be different from one another, through culture, poorly understood psychology, religion etc.
If we stopped that, and allowed women to be more analytical, aggressive, strong minded and if we give them the freedom to make important decisions for themselves we would be better off.
If we allowed men to show emotions, be softer, create an environment where men can take care more of their children and have a better work-life balance we would be better off.
Both genders need to gain more freedom and be less stereotyped by nonsense arguments founded in an insufficient understanding of psychology.
9:28 AM, August 10, 2017
Arun, Blackhead, it is your kind of hateful, intolerant, extremism that is generating a backlash in support of Damore. At one time society had rules against interracial couples in public. It probably made them feel "unsafe." Thank goodness your logic was not applied there. People openly and aggressively questioned those rules. All rules are subject to question and simply saying they make you feel unsafe is no excuse. Damore did his best to make a sound argument, backed by science. But like the church, declaring that the Earth is flat and burning those that dare even provide small evidence to the contrary, you would prefer to just to be rid of a dissenter. Out with the heretic! It is astounding to me that so many smart people can be so primitive.
10:08 AM, August 10, 2017
I am a father and shame on me for not paying attention to these issues until I was married with children.
I want my daughter to have the opportunity to pursue whatever path she ultimately chooses. I am not wedded to any particular remedy because that misses the forest for the trees.
10:18 AM, August 10, 2017
Sharat,
I think you misunderstood that statement. It was a way to say that I don't think the data is conclusive. Hence, tongue-in-cheek, try to prove me wrong when say the ratio should be this number and not that number.
I never said anything about the role of sexual selection in generating psychological gender differences. On the contrary, I stated explicitly that the nature/nurture debate is unresolved (and probably will remain for a long time).
10:31 AM, August 10, 2017
Management is politicians with support staff, college entry IQ 110. The California Academic Performance Index 700,000 student Los Angeles Unified School District is ~85 IQ, 2/3 immediate exclusion. Product resides in ore not dross.
Technical warriors are idiot savants, autists, or hard science PhD entry level 130 IQ, 2% incidence. Technical populations favor Ashkenazic Jewish and Chinese, culled East Indians (Indian Institutes of Technology); demonstrated technical ability plus obsession.
Male versus female IQ distribution is flatter and broader. Qualifying women average ~35% not 50% incidence at the far right. Wage inequality is discrimination. The Manhattan Project was successful not "equitable."
10:52 AM, August 10, 2017
There's a lot of claims in these comments about what is in the memo, or what it claims. Can the respective authors provide links/quotes etc to the parts they are referring too?
@Ambi Valent:
"fundamental dishonesty"
"he makes his far-reaching demands based on this idealised scenario"
"Damore just made his demands ignoring this obvious evidence ... he is basing his demands on his assumption they are liars, or blind"
"The flaws in his reasoning are so great that they completely invalidate his conclusions."
"Demanding ... larger flaws should be ignored"
"He asserted ... that anyone who thinks otherwise has to be ideologically blinded."
"There was no attempt at an open discussion"
"his assertion they were not suited for tech jobs."
"Damore's entrenched claims of male superiority"
"the arguments he uses say that women are _less qualified for_ a tech career"
@Outer M.:
"How would he feel if we start saying that conservative people aren't apt for science and technology?"
@Arun:
"if Damore had a clue of understanding, he would know how to bring his legitimate concerns up without creating a hostile workplace for the women employees of Google."
"[claim: *He* is responsible for "creating a hostile workplace"]"
"I am of the opinion that the Google CEO made the case that it is possible to calmly discuss the matter."
"Damore .. spit in [the water]."
"Damore [said employees] are biologically disadvantaged"
@G:
"it was a badly written document. It cherry-picked evidence and used awful leaps of logic to pretend to be a carefully reasoned argument."
@Sharat:
"he was wrong."
12:08 PM, August 10, 2017
@Exodus
"But like the church, declaring that the Earth is flat and burning those that dare even provide small evidence to the contrary,"
What church declared the earth to be flat? The old Greek already knew the earth was round.
Maybe you are confusing the argument about the center of the universe with an American myth about Columbus?
1:13 PM, August 10, 2017
Again your logical reasoning not being corrupted by passion or self interest demonstrates why I have such high regard for you as a physicist and your blog. You discuss facts as they are and not how we’d like them to be. Genetic differences among sex’s and races are a fact that result in a general difference in traits for the groups they are attributable too, yet individuals don’t necessarily have the traits of a group and may not even fit neatly in a specific group category. I am a father of two daughters whose desire is to see them not be prejudged in pursuit of their goals. Yet I still know and have raised them to understand that equality is about not being pre-judged, equal opportunity, and being treated equally when demonstrating equal ability. Knowing we are NOT equal, it is unrealistic to expect or demand equal distribution in careers or pay.
As usual human behavior causes the idealistic to rationalize, distort, and ignore facts to fit their passion and unrealistic expectations are what result.
2:35 PM, August 10, 2017
Here is a point by point discussion:
How the Internet got the ‘Google memo’ wrong
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/08/10/how-internet-got-google-memo-wrong/US4NlaIvQ00UdsyofYbMyM/story.html
I think "cherry picking of evidence" and wild extrapolations of small differences does fit the memo
From the article:
"Back to the tech world: There is ample evidence of sexual harassment, unwelcoming workplace environments, and in some cases quantitatively measurable discrimination in scientific and technical fields. Why focus on biological differences, many of them quite small, rather than other factors that could explain certain discrepancies? That’s why some researchers, particularly those with a feminist bent, think it’s beside the point that the differences Damore mentioned are borne out by studies."
2:44 PM, August 10, 2017
@Ambi Valent, Damore DID argue that fewer women choose a tech career, and therefore we shouldn't attempt a 1:1 ratio. He DID NOT argue that women are less qualified for a tech career. Here are some quotes:
"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 distributions"
"I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism)."
The media have lied to you about what Damore said. I suggest you read his document for yourself: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf
2:46 PM, August 10, 2017
Most useful content:
"For me, the most relevant contribution to equal opportunity is affordable higher education and health insurance, as well as governmentally paid maternity and parental leave. Without that, socially disadvantaged groups remain underrepresented, and companies continue to fear for revenue when hiring women in their fertile age. That, in all fairness, is an American problem not even Google can solve.
But one also doesn’t solve a problem by yelling “harassment” each time someone asks to discuss whether a diversity effort is indeed effective."
Wise words indeed.
2:51 PM, August 10, 2017
The available science does not support his conclusions, and his arguments are based on sexist assumptions.
https://medium.com/@adljksbvkj/heres-your-point-by-point-refutation-of-the-google-memo-b7201d0cca04
5:29 PM, August 10, 2017
Peter Singer weights in: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/google-wrong-article-1.3399750
5:46 PM, August 10, 2017
@chris2048:you ask that question as if you have not even read the main article article let alone the comment thread. There are plenty of answers (read: citations) sprinkled throughout.
7:36 PM, August 10, 2017
My mistress started as a programmer and worked her way fairly high up in the corporate food chain. She says the situation was rather simple. Damore was fired for making a problem for the boss. If Silicon Valley, and Google in particular, were not under fire for its "bro" culture, Damore would probably have been warned that his public writing on company time was against company policy and probably forced to take some kind of course in understanding the issue and corporate policies. It isn't easy for a woman to win a sexual discrimination suit, even in California, but having idiots - and I'll use that term in its original sense of one being oblivious to others - like Damore spouting off makes it a just a bit easier. Google, and a host of other Silicon Valley companies, however, are being challenged for their attitudes and actions towards female employees and job candidates, so this kind of public exposition became a problem for upper management at Google.
As far as my mistress is concerned, having an employee create such a public problem would kill not just his career, but hers and likely her boss's career as well. I was never that high up the food chain, so I have to rely on her judgement of the situation. As others have pointed out, using Google terminology, when your job title has a number in it, odds are you can pretend to be a machine person, but when your job title is all words, odds are you are a people person. The pay is better too.
Silicon Valley does have a problem in its attitudes towards and its treatment of women. I have a niece in venture capital, and she has, as they put it, seen plenty. Despite the mystique of engineers not being people oriented, the whole point of engineering is to do stuff for people. Google search does not exist to sell advertising targeted at robots searching the internet. Google ads are targeted at people. Apple, Dell, Samsung and all the rest sell computers to be used by people. Even the supplier of the most esoteric component only has a job because that component is incorporated into something that is either sold to people or performs a service valuable to people.
8:22 PM, August 10, 2017
I think you're way to generous in making excuses for this guy....
10:14 PM, August 10, 2017
"Damore was fired, basically, for making a well-meant, if amateurish, attempt at institutional design, based on woefully incomplete information he picked from published research studies."
That's part of the reason he was fired. But as he tells it, he wrote the memo, and some people associated with the diversity program read it but didn't comment. (The memo is pretty broad, so a short response would have to ignore a lot of the content, and I imagine that nobody who read it thought that it was sufficiently well thought out to be worth spending a lot of time on.) So he posted it on a skeptics discussion group. I assume the group was a non-work-related discussion board devoted to the application of the scientific method to things like paranormal abilities. It was posting to that forum that ultimately led to him being fired.
In other words, at Google or pretty much anywhere in the corporate world, having heterodox ideas about diversity is risky if you don't have a clear understanding of where and when the company will tolerate discussion of those ideas.
3:19 AM, August 11, 2017