Some of his claims are supported by the linked documents, some are not. Again, there are so many, any conclusion of "100% are supported" or "100% are not" is going to be false.
Can you name one claim that is relevant to diversity at Google that is supported by any of the linked documents?
I do agree (and admit as much in that comment!) that there are claims that he correctly cites, e.g. "Women score higher for 'neuroticism' as defined by psychology." My contention is that none of those claims are relevant to any plausible thesis of the document.
(I think that saying "there exist irrelevant claims that are supported by science" is completely pedantic. If I write an nonsense essay about garbage collection vs. refcounting and correctly cite a scientific paper on the acidity of apple juice, I think it's perfectly justifiable to say that none of my claims are supported, since it's not an essay about apple juice.)
> sex differences in personality traits can be detected in early childhood [..] and remain fairly constant across adulthood [..] The effects of these sex differences lead to predictable differences in men’s and women’s leisure behaviors, occupational preferences, and health-related outcomes [emphasis mine]
Overall I think it's possible for reasonable people to disagree on whether group differences in neuroticism and agreeability or an affinity to people vs. things etc. etc. are or are not not relevant to the thesis. I respect your point of view that they do not. I'm just saying a reasonable argument can be made for the other side too.
(To be clear, he also makes several bad arguments, I'm not defending him. I'm just saying that some of his claims are supported by science.)
He's making the same counterclaim that I am - that while there are biological differences and they almost certainly affect interest, there's basically no rationale to conclude that they're the cause of the specific situation Google is attempting to change with the specific initiatives he's denouncing (and calling illegal), and there's also no rationale to entirely discount cultural factors, including both gender roles and sexism, as causes of the situation.
By your reasoning brighteyes has just proven that you have reached conclusions not justified by the paper, so will you resign from your job, given that you think such incompetence on the part of Dalmore is inexcusable and makes him incapable to do his job?
If this were an internal company forum where I were making serious policy proposals that I expected the company to take seriously -- that is, if this were something I were doing as part of my job, and I were paying as much attention to detail as I should for every part of my job -- and if I had a senior title, then yes, definitely, I would offer my resignation or at least request a demotion. I would be letting my coworkers down if I continued to insist on a senior title and senior levels of respect. But I am being much less rigorous here than I would be for work. I don't try to be deliberately wrong on HN, but my standards for accuracy and professionalism (and copyediting, there are incomplete sentences in too many of my comments) are less exacting than they are for my employed work.
(And if I have done such a thing, which I don't believe I have. I'm really not sure why you say I've reached conclusions not justified by the paper?)
During his interview with Jordan Peterson, Damore explained that he was looking for criticism/push back against his claims, which was why he posted it to a Skeptics forum within Google.
He didn't actually present it directly to management, nor did he publish it publicly. Many people improve their work by asking for feedback, so you seem to demand the impossible: for him to create something great, but without allowing him to refine his work in a way that many people need to create something great.
BTW. I am not aware that Damore had a senior job title and even if he had, his job didn't involve writing rigorous papers. So I'm not sure how you can say that this document proves that he was bad at his job. In his interview he said that his last performance review put him in the top few percent of performers at Google. So if we assume that he is not lying, you seem have drawn wild conclusions based on weak evidence, that far stronger evidence actually contradicts.
> BTW. I am not aware that Damore had a senior job title and even if he had, his job didn't involve writing rigorous papers.
What else is a design document or review, a non-LGTM code review, or an outage postmortem beyond a rigorous paper? The skills are exactly the same: you have to take external research and internal data about your business practices, and explain why the observed facts were as observed, what the company should do about it, and why your proposed approach is correct.
This is a significant part of every job I've had, and Google tried to hire me earlier this year at only L4 and not L5. (The fact that Damore was L5 is well-attested by both pro-Damore and anti-Damore sources.)
When I'm not sure about something, I'll generally ask a question like "Hey, why are we using Debian instead of Fedora" or "Hey, why are we structuring on-call like this, the SRE book says we should structure it like that," and look for an explanation. I won't write a document saying "This is why Fedora is better than Debian and why all the attempts to use Debian are based in a fundamental misunderstanding of reality" and then ask for criticism.
> In his interview he said that his last performance review put him in the top few percent of performers at Google.
Who were his reviewers? Did they deserve their jobs either? Given what I know of Google's hiring practices, I would be entirely unsurprised if there are many pockets in the company consisting of incompetent people propping each other up.
This is a well-known phenomenon in large companies. Quoting Guy Kawasaki recalling something he learned from Steve Jobs:
Steve believed that A players hire A players—that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly—my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It’s clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve called “the bozo explosion” to happen in your organization.
Occupational preferences are not the subject of the document, though. The subject is occupational qualification. The specific things he criticizes Google for doing are actions taken once minority candidates have already applied for a job, that is, once they have already expressed interest in the occupation they're applying for: they're about reducing unconscious bias in hiring, reducing the false negative rate in Google's notoriously noisy interview process, ensuring that internal groups meet standards of representation, etc.
I just reread the document to confirm I read it right the first time. The subtle implication, and I'd argue one of the most harmful effects of the document, is the claim that biases (whether from nature or nurture) in interest also translate to biases in ability. There's a huge difference between saying "More men than women are interested in the job but we've got to hire the most qualified people regardless of either gender or interest" (and he almost gets there in his discussion of men seeking high-status jobs!), which I don't think I could really complain about, and "More men than women are interested in the job so our efforts to hire women are 'effectively lowering the bar' and probably illegal."
If you are at the point where you have 10 resumes on your desk from 10 qualified women, and 10 resumes on your desk from 10 qualified men, and you put together a team of 9 men and one woman, no matter how true it is that women as a whole are less interested in the job, it's not relevant.
(Incidentally, that's a quote from the portion of the abstract where they're mentioning existing research instead of their own, and it cites three sources, the first of which is a book by a lawyer that appears to be targeted at the general non-fiction market. I'm rather surprised that this is a permissible citation in a scientific paper, and I'm wondering if my standards are wrong or this isn't a super reputable journal.)
> Occupational preferences are not the subject of the document, though. The subject is occupational qualification.
No, he talks about both:
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
and
> These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.
(emphasis mine in both cases). And that linked document does support that claim of his.
(Again, I'm not defending all his claims; just that one.)
Sure, I agree that he consciously talks about both preference and ability. Why is he talking about preference? Does that have to do with his thesis?
I think it's because he wants to write sentences like that one about "preferences and abilities" in an attempt to pretend that arguments about preferences translate to arguments about abilities.
That is, I would have agreed with a claim that he has two distinct theses (preferences and abilities), except that the actual purpose of the essay is indisputably about abilities, and there's no reason to also add a thesis about preferences other than to muddy the discussion about abilities. A similar essay about preferences alone wouldn't have drawn nearly as much attention because it wouldn't be suggesting that the women already at Google shouldn't be there and it wouldn't be relevant to the Google D&I programs he mentions.
> Why is he talking about preference? Does that have to do with his thesis?
If preferences partially explain why psychology is dominated by women and why computer science is dominated by men, then preferences can partially explain part of why psychologists tend to be women and tech employees tend to be men.
And that's a big part of the memo: why is there a gender gap, what causes it, etc. So it's not surprising that one issue he focuses on is preferences. And he's not alone in doing so, that preferences are important in the tech gender gap discussion is something agreed upon by both sides:
* A lot of important diversity work done by progressives focuses on increasing interest in tech among young girls: girls' preferences matter.
* And on the other side, conservatives tend to say that preferences explain most of the tech gender gap and not discrimination.
Preferences are important. I'm not disputing that. And there are definitely gender correlations in preferences (I agree with at least three of his points here, namely that women seek better work-life balance, that men seek high-status position, and that there's more work to be done in dismantling the patriarchy's oppression of men who don't conform to gender roles).
I am disputing that preferences are relevant to the business purpose of this memo, which was to claim that what Google does with applicants once they have applied is both unlikely to work and illegal.
I am also disputing, more directly, that he or anyone has shown that preferences are relevant to the gender gap for engineering roles at Google; I'd think that there exist both more qualified men and more qualified who are interested in working at Google than Google has positions for, and the difficulty is in identifying these people. This is supported by how the specific diversity initiatives that the author calls out are all about properly evaluating applicants, and none are about encouraging people to apply or have an interest in the field. (And anecdotally, as someone who received a job offer from Google in May and spent three months going through team selection and ended up accepting another offer, both my own experience and the stories of others I've talked to both inside and outside Google is that headcount is sparse.)
These two claims I'm making (that preferences are irrelevant, and that the memo does not argue that preferences are relevant) are definitely falsifiable, so I'm interested in evidence to the contrary.
Note that this is a different point from the gender gap in tech as a whole. I'd definitely believe that preferences are much more relevant there, especially if we count things like wanting better work/life balance (or wanting better maternity leave, etc.) as preferences.
The memo does care about the gender gap in tech as a whole, while you are focusing more on Google's specific policies regarding applicants.
Clearly both are important topics, and they have some obvious connections - for example, the gender gap as a whole often motivates specific corporate policies, that's one reason he brings it up - but they can also be debated separately.
So I think it's fair to say the memo does make some valid points, but it looks like you think it's wrong on other points that it makes in other areas (which could well be true).
