This veers way off topic, guarantees a flamewar, and is nothing that HN hasn't gone over dozens of times by now. Please don't wreak this kind of damage here.
"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we
don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership." He lays the groundwork for that argument there, and then his rhetoric which builds upon this throughout the memo basically argues that, possibly, men are better biologically suited than women for high status/stress/leadership roles, or roles involving "things", as he says men are more into "things", and women more into "people".
He argues that biology is, in part, a cause for different preferences and choices between men and women. At no point did he claim any superiority of ability.
"X is worse at Y" is not at all the same thing as "X, on average, will choose to do Y at a smaller rate."
Also, I find the notion that people who choose to not work in tech or work smaller hours are somehow inferior quite demeaning. My brother wasn't very interested in tech, so he went into a different field. Am I (who did go into tech) a superior person to my brother due to our choice of work? Similarly, would I be a lesser person if I worked 30-35 hours instead of my usual 40-45?
So let's take that "biological difference in choices" as premise A, and then take premise B to be the company professing a policy to want a more even split.
The result of that might be an action C, where you lower the standards required to hire people who are in one group to get the numbers more even - otherwise A will cause there to be not enough people of your usually quality for the numbers you want in B.
And that was what he alleged: that the women hired didn't have as high a bar to pass.
And that's where, if you're a woman in the same job as him, you take offense, because the implications of his argument are inescapable: a lot of those women are inferior.
So if you're a Google higher-up who doesn't believe that their diversity/outreach programs are a lowered standards (say, you think they're a different approach to compensate for preparation differences in readiness for certain interviews), then you pretty much have to get rid of the guy who insists on shouting from the rooftops that a bunch of his coworkers aren't as good as he is.
Damore sealed his own fate because he either (a) didn't think through this all, sabotaging his own credibility in the process, or (b) evil-genius arranged it to give himself a platform for a lawsuit and a bunch of conservative media fawning.
This second premise, that Google hires under qualified candidates of they're diverse, is also incorrect. He claimed that Google made the false negative rate higher for non-diverse candidates. Here's the relevant quote:
> "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.
In other words the bar was only lowered in the sense that diverse candidates didn't need to be as lucky as non diverse ones, with nothing to do with skill or ability. Many media outlets omitted the italicized part, so this misconception is common.
Also you're omitting the most plausible explanation in your last paragraph: the negative and often exaggerated media coverage on the memo. Remember the memo was circulated for a month without repression. This indicates that it was the media coverage, not the memo itself, that caused Damore's firing.
Ah, good point, I do remember that false negative bit. That was actually the first thing that jumped out at me, because it seems incredibly implausible and ridiculous!
Here's why I think he's full of shit on that one. Reducing the false negative rate without lowering the bar is an unambiguous positive. He's asking me to believe that Google invented a better interviewing process that will save them tons of time and money in recruiting, and chose not to use it widely.
I simply can't believe it. Not with the salaries they and their competitors are paying. If they had a magic bullet to get more just-as-qualified candidates through the pipeline, they'd use it everywhere.
And in a world that loves to write articles about interviewing / click on those articles as much as this one, I think we'd have heard about it by now.
(Yes, the media coverage contributed to everyone else thinking he was judging them, but so did the text itself. But, in turn, you (and he) are missing the most likely explanation for why Google says they want a diverse workforce: not to discriminate against men, but to look good in the media without intention of actually making major changes to follow through, as their actual recruiting policies appear to be stuck in the same place they've been for years, based on the recruiters I've talked to there. Lotta algorithm questions, lots of years-of-experience and existing-knowledge-of-language-details crap. All stuff that's gonna favor a certain typical profile at the screening stage. PR BS is PR BS, in other words.)
It's not implausible and ridiculous. In fact, in my experience it's one of the most common methods of increasing diversity. Here's a run-down of what my company does (my past workplaces have had similar policies):
* Applications of diverse candidates are accepted from non-traditional backgrounds. In this context, "non-tradition" means majoring in a non-tech field or attended a coding boot camp of some sorts (this applies for non-experienced candidates. For experienced candidates it doesn't matter what their educational background is).
* For diverse candidates, they get two tries at passing the phone screen.
* That said, all candidates go through the same on-site interview loop. The on-site is where the actual evaluation of skills and decision making process is made. This process is not made with any bearing on the candidate's diversity status.
This is a clear example of lowering the false negative rate without lowering the quality of accepted diverse candidates. The false negative rate is lowered by having a more lenient selecting in the first stages. However it's worth noting that these only determine if the candidate move on to the stage where the actual evaluation of skill occurs. The phone screens and resume reviews aren't reliable enough signals for us to make decisions so we only use them to determine the set of candidates that move on the to last stage. Some would point out that this increases the number of false positives for diversity candidates, but that's simply by increasing the total number of diverse candidates. It does not affect the false positive rate. And
The reason why we don't do this for all candidates is because of cost. There's a substantial cost to having full time engineers doing interviews. We already spend ~6 hours a week doing interviews and writing feedback. We couldn't deal with the increased load if we used the first and second points on all candidates. Second, we also want to have larger share of diverse employees in tech positions. Even if people think it's just for better public perception, that's still a tangible and significant benefit.
For what it's worth I think it's perfectly fine way of improving the chances of diverse candidates getting offers. That said, saying that this system is discriminating by decreasing the false negative rate for diverse candidates is an unambiguously true statement and I would object to any of my co-workers being fired for sayings as such.
I don't agree with your interpretation of the memo, however, you definitely touch on a challenging point -- what was actually being said?
I don't entirely agree with this article I found either, it actually skews more to your point of view, however it was quite interesting.
The author's description of the challenge the Damor memo touched upon:
"What we are dealing with here is the problem of how we might offer possible explanations for what is going on, while at the same time keeping in mind the impact those explanations might have on the people and phenomena we are trying to explain. It is important to understand this problem, so I will explain it here. Technically, this is called “the problem of the double hermeneutic”. A hermeneutic refers to a method or system of interpretation. In psychology and the social sciences, hermeneutics refers to the ways people develop systems of meaning and justification that allow them to make sense out of the world."
That makes sense you would find that notion demeaning. I do as well. As I said to someone else, if you took offense (which wasn't intended) from my comment, I'm sure you can understand why many people would take offense from Damor's memo :).
> That makes sense you would find that notion demeaning. I do as well. As I said to someone else, if you took offense (which wasn't intended) from my comment, I'm sure you can understand why many people would take offense from Damor's memo :).
No, in fact this it's just the opposite. Claiming that "women are less likely to choose to work in tech" is a harmful statement is implying that those who do not work in tech are lesser. This is what I am pointing out. Those that do take offense to Damore's memo are inherently implying that people who choose not to work in tech are lesser. Otherwise it would not be an insult to say that group is less likely to choose to work in tech.
I read his memo, the Wired article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, the Quora article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, and the recent Gizmodo article about the lawsuit. I glanced at your twitter link; once I saw it was about his lawsuit I shifted gears to the root of the issue.
I thought Damore's comment in footnote 9, when discussing compensation in the workplace, that "Considering women spend more money than men" was particularly insightful ;) /s
"The problem is, the science in Damore’s memo is still very much in play, and his analysis of its implications is at best politically naive and at worst dangerous"
"But despite the legal gymnastics of Damore’s attorneys, getting fired for his memo wasn’t discrimination, and it certainly wasn’t censorship. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the time of the memo’s circulation, it violated the company’s policies, perpetuating sexist ideologies. Damore disclosed to his non-male colleagues that he believes that they are predisposed to being worse at their jobs than males. Former Google engineer Yonatan Zunger sums it up nicely in this line from his blog post responding to Damore’s memo: “You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.” In a workplace, you can’t say whatever you’d like without consequences—violating a company’s code of conduct is grounds for firing."
"TL;DR: Yes, men and women are biologically different — which doesn’t mean what the author thinks it does. The article perniciously misrepresents the nature and significance of known sex differences to advance what appears to be a covert alt-right agenda."
(FYI, I agree with your views but I think that shifting this thread to the merits of the Damore memo is off-topic and unproductive - it's months old, and everyone who knows about it has made up their minds about it already. I think there's room for productive conversation about the blog post this comment thread is supposed to be about, and I think re-litigating the Damore memo is just going to push this thread in the flameward direction, as 'dang puts it.)
