Google male engineeer saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
those old studies are irrelevant. everything that could have been squeezed out of discrimination has been squeezed out. women are now getting significantly more college degrees and even phds.

You are basing this on...? Women are not getting more PhDs in the fields that lead to tech jobs. And there is blatant hostility to women in tech, as evidenced by the recent events at several SV VC firms accused of sexual harassment and also at Uber.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wage gap is a myth (agree)
Diversity for diversities sake is a joke should hire the best (agree)
Women are different than men and are better at certain things (agree)

Anyone not agree with those 3?

I disagree with all 3.

Wage gap is real

Diversity "for diversity sake" is not a joke, we need different viewpoints depending on the job. I am not going to hire a white dude from Vermont who graduated from an Ivy league school to market products to black customers in Chicago, even if his GPA and class rank is higher than the black chick from Chicago who graduated from a Chicago state school.

NO women are not "better at certain things" ... some women are better at certain thing, some women are not, some men are better at certain things, some men are not. I don't think every man would make a better Army soldier than every woman. We need to look at everybody as an individual regardless of their gender.

Outliers don't make the rule. According to certain studies, men on average have one standard deviation higher spatial intelligence quotient than women. This domain is one of the few where clear sex differences in cognition appear (likewise the brain structure associated with this type of intelligence, the parietal lobe, differs between male and female brains). However, in some studies, once time constraints were removed, women did as well as men. It has also been found that spatial ability correlates with verbal ability in women but not in men, suggesting that women may use different strategies for spatial visualization tasks than men do. Spatial intelligence is often a requirement to make it through engineering courses, as one needs to flip the orientation of objects in ones head to visualize designs, and understand a summation of forces at moment in basic engineering classes like engineering statics.

You clearly do not understand averages or outliers or hiring practices.

It does not matter if one study showed that the men in that study had a higher score in spatial intelligence (spacial relations is what is actually measured) you would need to do a longitudinal study and you would have to correct for nurture.

It also does not mean men are better than women it just means more men score higher, but a huge amount of women also score high.

It's not one study, this is one of the few areas there there are non-trivial differences in intelligence between men and women (there are many potential causes for this, but no consensus). This is not controversial. What may be controversial is whether or not spatial intelligence leads to success in STEM, though there are a number of studies that show a strong correlation.

Men and women have approximately average general intelligence (with men tending to be slightly higher) but the distributions are not the same (see link below to a graph). This difference makes a huge difference among outliers when looking at differences in standard deviations. There more dumb men than dumb women. There are more smart men than smart women. A greater number of women's IQs are within one standard deviation of average than for men. In other words, highly intelligent women (among women) are even more of an outlier than highly intelligent men. (among men) due to paucity of numbers. These aren't huge amounts of people like you allege, but a relatively small part of the population. The reason I bring this up is that you have a very limited pool of people to recruit from because relatively few people in our population have the potential to complete the educational requirements for employment in the tech industry (for example someone on the left side of the bell curve can not comprehend differential equations and will never graduate with a BS in engineering). This makes it more difficult to reach parity in certain fields because the talent pool is smaller. This leads to a problem for HR staff when trying to meet diversity goals.

https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-16b03344e557c02d559cc5fac9724be3

I would allege that I understand more about the concepts of averages and outliers than you do, but HR is not my field of expertise. I'm an electrical engineer, I can certainly apply concepts I learned in modeling analysis and uncertainty (basically statistical analysis for engineers) to read a graph.

I am a mathematician with a minor in Economics and Statistic. I was also a programmer. I also work in management and hiring. So yes, I understand the math, the analysis and how you are misinterpreting it. I also understand HR and "diversity goals", we have none where I work and we have a plethora of female programmers.

You should read up on the the law of diminishing returns when it comes to IQ. You may be suffering from that, or from your own admission most the people that suffer from that are men.

You should also read about the research done by Google on hiring programmers from state schools vs. Ivy league schools.

It's good to know I am an "outlier" since my spacial reasoning scored off the charts. But I suspect I just liked to play with puzzles instead of dolls as a child and I played football instead of cheered.

Nurture vs. nature. The study can not correct for that.

Oh, and the education system is a culling system... I don't care if you got a perfect SAT, can you program. I have a ton of drop outs programming because they can learn it from a video or a book, in the comfort of their home and their computer. Take the human interaction of terrible teachers and the calculus/history requirement out of the equation and we would have tons of good programmers, men and women. You don't need a BS in engineering to program. Maybe to architect a system but not to program.

for a mathematician, you sound quite dumb. is that stereotyping?

No. It's called jealousy. Ad Hominem arguments are a sign of defeat, I accept your resignation.

[Anonymous]

women are now getting significantly more college degrees and even phds.

That has nothing to do with being hired or advanced.

Also, women are often geared away from certain degrees. Men are also geared away from certain digress like nursing and teaching.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The double standard left continues to amaze me. Code of Conduct and Free speech are two different things.

Freedom of speech means from government censorship and persecution. It does not mean freedom from the consequences of one's speech. Employees are representatives of the companies they work for, especially when they publicly identify themselves as such. Google has the right to choose who represents them.

Even if Google were a government agency, disruptive, biased speech is not protected against punishment. Government employers are subject to anti-discrimination laws, and government employees do not have a 1st Amendment right to say whatever they want to coworkers.

This! If I write something that is different than the core principals of my company, it may affect my ability to get promoted, but should never be a reason for being fired. This code of conduct has nothing to do with expressing oneself in a blog forum. Google will regret this in the PC world, as it goes both ways.

Do you mean the a-hole misogynists will leave? Pretty sure they won't be missed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
This! If I write something that is different than the core principals of my company, it may affect my ability to get promoted, but should never be a reason for being fired. This code of conduct has nothing to do with expressing oneself in a blog forum. Google will regret this in the PC world, as it goes both ways.

Do you mean the a-hole misogynists will leave? Pretty sure they won't be missed.

It's absolutely hilarious to me the extent to which the whiny, white males are threatening revenge on Google. I think Google is pretty evil, but it's Google. They are going to do just fine with a few less entitled brogrammers. Actually, if the DoJ is right they'll do more than fine, since they can get away with paying the women and URMs who replace them less.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wage gap is a myth (agree)
Diversity for diversities sake is a joke should hire the best (agree)
Women are different than men and are better at certain things (agree)

Anyone not agree with those 3?

I disagree with all 3.

Wage gap is real

Diversity "for diversity sake" is not a joke, we need different viewpoints depending on the job. I am not going to hire a white dude from Vermont who graduated from an Ivy league school to market products to black customers in Chicago, even if his GPA and class rank is higher than the black chick from Chicago who graduated from a Chicago state school.

NO women are not "better at certain things" ... some women are better at certain thing, some women are not, some men are better at certain things, some men are not. I don't think every man would make a better Army soldier than every woman. We need to look at everybody as an individual regardless of their gender.

Outliers don't make the rule. According to certain studies, men on average have one standard deviation higher spatial intelligence quotient than women. This domain is one of the few where clear sex differences in cognition appear (likewise the brain structure associated with this type of intelligence, the parietal lobe, differs between male and female brains). However, in some studies, once time constraints were removed, women did as well as men. It has also been found that spatial ability correlates with verbal ability in women but not in men, suggesting that women may use different strategies for spatial visualization tasks than men do. Spatial intelligence is often a requirement to make it through engineering courses, as one needs to flip the orientation of objects in ones head to visualize designs, and understand a summation of forces at moment in basic engineering classes like engineering statics.

You clearly do not understand averages or outliers or hiring practices.

It does not matter if one study showed that the men in that study had a higher score in spatial intelligence (spacial relations is what is actually measured) you would need to do a longitudinal study and you would have to correct for nurture.

It also does not mean men are better than women it just means more men score higher, but a huge amount of women also score high.

It's not one study, this is one of the few areas there there are non-trivial differences in intelligence between men and women (there are many potential causes for this, but no consensus). This is not controversial. What may be controversial is whether or not spatial intelligence leads to success in STEM, though there are a number of studies that show a strong correlation.

Men and women have approximately average general intelligence (with men tending to be slightly higher) but the distributions are not the same (see link below to a graph). This difference makes a huge difference among outliers when looking at differences in standard deviations. There more dumb men than dumb women. There are more smart men than smart women. A greater number of women's IQs are within one standard deviation of average than for men. In other words, highly intelligent women (among women) are even more of an outlier than highly intelligent men. (among men) due to paucity of numbers. These aren't huge amounts of people like you allege, but a relatively small part of the population. The reason I bring this up is that you have a very limited pool of people to recruit from because relatively few people in our population have the potential to complete the educational requirements for employment in the tech industry (for example someone on the left side of the bell curve can not comprehend differential equations and will never graduate with a BS in engineering). This makes it more difficult to reach parity in certain fields because the talent pool is smaller. This leads to a problem for HR staff when trying to meet diversity goals.

https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-16b03344e557c02d559cc5fac9724be3

I would allege that I understand more about the concepts of averages and outliers than you do, but HR is not my field of expertise. I'm an electrical engineer, I can certainly apply concepts I learned in modeling analysis and uncertainty (basically statistical analysis for engineers) to read a graph.

I am a mathematician with a minor in Economics and Statistic. I was also a programmer. I also work in management and hiring. So yes, I understand the math, the analysis and how you are misinterpreting it. I also understand HR and "diversity goals", we have none where I work and we have a plethora of female programmers.

You should read up on the the law of diminishing returns when it comes to IQ. You may be suffering from that, or from your own admission most the people that suffer from that are men.

You should also read about the research done by Google on hiring programmers from state schools vs. Ivy league schools.

It's good to know I am an "outlier" since my spacial reasoning scored off the charts. But I suspect I just liked to play with puzzles instead of dolls as a child and I played football instead of cheered.

Nurture vs. nature. The study can not correct for that.

Oh, and the education system is a culling system... I don't care if you got a perfect SAT, can you program. I have a ton of drop outs programming because they can learn it from a video or a book, in the comfort of their home and their computer. Take the human interaction of terrible teachers and the calculus/history requirement out of the equation and we would have tons of good programmers, men and women. You don't need a BS in engineering to program. Maybe to architect a system but not to program.

I certainly agree that you do not need a degree to program. Certainly when I was in school most of the "good" programmers did it for fun prior to going to college, and more than a few dropped out during the dotcom era. Google is doing things that are more than just enterprise programming. The more interesting things, which is much of what google is more involved in, are algorithms behind their products in the areas of search, AI and the like.

Oh I agree too when it comes to IQ and diminishing returns, but would appreciate an explanation of how you are looking at the datasets differently than me.

You are looking at one data point and it is a data point that has been proven to not be correlated with competency at work. You have to look at things as a system, how does the system work. What competencies are needed to make the system work and what skills are needed. Those skills and competency are not something that can be measured by 1 data point.

There's a distinction, we've only discussed one data point. I was asking specifically about interpretations of that graph alone with the concept of averages, deviations, and outliers. Since you have a math/statistics background, you should be able to readily explain it.

I would certainly agree that intelligence alone will not dictate how successful one is in the workplace (though in general higher intelligence does correlate with what we generally consider economic success up to around a score of 130). Again, someone with low intelligence (i.e. 70-85), effectively will be a barrier to entry for many intellectual career fields. I would certainly agree that EQ certainly plays a role in team environments, variables in work ethic, social pressures , etc can all play a role in workplace success. Intelligence as general problem solving ability or pattern recognition is certainly a very useful thing. General intelligence distributions are not the same across all demographics though.

As I said before, spatial skills tend to predict who will enter STEM fields, and there seems to be a correlation with respect to spatial skills rather than mathematical ability alone when it comes to success in STEM. Most of what I have talked about is barriers to entry more so than success in the workplace.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the person who titled this post misrepresents the GoogleGuys screed. Here is a portion reproduced below where he discusses what things can be done to help achieve parity without discrimination.

Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech and without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:

Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).

Women on average are more cooperative
Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.

Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.

The male gender role is currently inflexible
Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.

There are many false assumptions here. That's the problem PP. These aren't solutions but rather what men think are the problems with women.

Women don't seek more work-life balance than men? Women don't take more responsibility for child and eldercare? Its not like female MDs don't work fewer hours than men, or are less likely to go into surgical specialties or anything.

Men aren't judged for status? (Of course women don't prefer to marry up than marry down!) Its not like there's been an uptick in assorative mating patterns or anything!
'
Women's gender roles haven't changed? Why of course not, its the same as 100 years ago! Women aren't allowed to work outside of the home! In fact, men have even more flexibility than women in the workplace when it comes to expectations of child and eldercare!

Women are highly independent and are socialized to prefer solo work to group work. Women certainly are less subject to social pressures than men! After all there's no mean girls in the office!

False assumptions?

Here's a false assumption--you can have cooperation OR competition. Or you can have work-life balance OR status. Here's another one--leadership is stressful.

I also enjoy the statement to the effect that competitive people are disadvantaged in education. Made by the Harvard PhD.

His supporters say Google proves his point--you can't talk about certain topics. I would say he's proving Google's point--they need to make an affirmative effort to diversify their workforce. Sending this man to diversity training once or twice a year isn't going to help him overcome the biases he's built up over a lifetime. Daily exposure to a variety of different types of people is what helps people start to think about others as individuals and not "averages," so that over time a person might start to question his assumptions, broaden his perspective, and hopefully start to see commonalities as well as differences.

NOPE the ONLY THING THAT SHOULD MATTER IS HOW WELL YOU DO THE JOB PERIOD. ARE WE GOING TO START HAVING CORPORATE MORALITY TESTS BEFORE HIRING PEOPLE NOW. THIS IS SUCH F BS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
those old studies are irrelevant. everything that could have been squeezed out of discrimination has been squeezed out. women are now getting significantly more college degrees and even phds.

You are basing this on...? Women are not getting more PhDs in the fields that lead to tech jobs. And there is blatant hostility to women in tech, as evidenced by the recent events at several SV VC firms accused of sexual harassment and also at Uber.

so what? they are getting more phds than men in many other fields. nobody is trying to help men excel in those fields.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wage gap is a myth (agree)
Diversity for diversities sake is a joke should hire the best (agree)
Women are different than men and are better at certain things (agree)

Anyone not agree with those 3?

I disagree with all 3.

Wage gap is real

Diversity "for diversity sake" is not a joke, we need different viewpoints depending on the job. I am not going to hire a white dude from Vermont who graduated from an Ivy league school to market products to black customers in Chicago, even if his GPA and class rank is higher than the black chick from Chicago who graduated from a Chicago state school.

NO women are not "better at certain things" ... some women are better at certain thing, some women are not, some men are better at certain things, some men are not. I don't think every man would make a better Army soldier than every woman. We need to look at everybody as an individual regardless of their gender.

Outliers don't make the rule. According to certain studies, men on average have one standard deviation higher spatial intelligence quotient than women. This domain is one of the few where clear sex differences in cognition appear (likewise the brain structure associated with this type of intelligence, the parietal lobe, differs between male and female brains). However, in some studies, once time constraints were removed, women did as well as men. It has also been found that spatial ability correlates with verbal ability in women but not in men, suggesting that women may use different strategies for spatial visualization tasks than men do. Spatial intelligence is often a requirement to make it through engineering courses, as one needs to flip the orientation of objects in ones head to visualize designs, and understand a summation of forces at moment in basic engineering classes like engineering statics.

You clearly do not understand averages or outliers or hiring practices.

It does not matter if one study showed that the men in that study had a higher score in spatial intelligence (spacial relations is what is actually measured) you would need to do a longitudinal study and you would have to correct for nurture.

It also does not mean men are better than women it just means more men score higher, but a huge amount of women also score high.

It's not one study, this is one of the few areas there there are non-trivial differences in intelligence between men and women (there are many potential causes for this, but no consensus). This is not controversial. What may be controversial is whether or not spatial intelligence leads to success in STEM, though there are a number of studies that show a strong correlation.

Men and women have approximately average general intelligence (with men tending to be slightly higher) but the distributions are not the same (see link below to a graph). This difference makes a huge difference among outliers when looking at differences in standard deviations. There more dumb men than dumb women. There are more smart men than smart women. A greater number of women's IQs are within one standard deviation of average than for men. In other words, highly intelligent women (among women) are even more of an outlier than highly intelligent men. (among men) due to paucity of numbers. These aren't huge amounts of people like you allege, but a relatively small part of the population. The reason I bring this up is that you have a very limited pool of people to recruit from because relatively few people in our population have the potential to complete the educational requirements for employment in the tech industry (for example someone on the left side of the bell curve can not comprehend differential equations and will never graduate with a BS in engineering). This makes it more difficult to reach parity in certain fields because the talent pool is smaller. This leads to a problem for HR staff when trying to meet diversity goals.

https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-16b03344e557c02d559cc5fac9724be3

I would allege that I understand more about the concepts of averages and outliers than you do, but HR is not my field of expertise. I'm an electrical engineer, I can certainly apply concepts I learned in modeling analysis and uncertainty (basically statistical analysis for engineers) to read a graph.

I am a mathematician with a minor in Economics and Statistic. I was also a programmer. I also work in management and hiring. So yes, I understand the math, the analysis and how you are misinterpreting it. I also understand HR and "diversity goals", we have none where I work and we have a plethora of female programmers.

You should read up on the the law of diminishing returns when it comes to IQ. You may be suffering from that, or from your own admission most the people that suffer from that are men.

You should also read about the research done by Google on hiring programmers from state schools vs. Ivy league schools.

It's good to know I am an "outlier" since my spacial reasoning scored off the charts. But I suspect I just liked to play with puzzles instead of dolls as a child and I played football instead of cheered.

Nurture vs. nature. The study can not correct for that.

Oh, and the education system is a culling system... I don't care if you got a perfect SAT, can you program. I have a ton of drop outs programming because they can learn it from a video or a book, in the comfort of their home and their computer. Take the human interaction of terrible teachers and the calculus/history requirement out of the equation and we would have tons of good programmers, men and women. You don't need a BS in engineering to program. Maybe to architect a system but not to program.

for a mathematician, you sound quite dumb. is that stereotyping?

No. It's called jealousy. Ad Hominem arguments are a sign of defeat, I accept your resignation.

jealous of what? you can barely string a sentence together. oh, and i have two ivy league degrees (one of them in statistics).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the person who titled this post misrepresents the GoogleGuys screed. Here is a portion reproduced below where he discusses what things can be done to help achieve parity without discrimination.

Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech and without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:

Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).

Women on average are more cooperative
Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.

Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.

The male gender role is currently inflexible
Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.

There are many false assumptions here. That's the problem PP. These aren't solutions but rather what men think are the problems with women.

Women don't seek more work-life balance than men? Women don't take more responsibility for child and eldercare? Its not like female MDs don't work fewer hours than men, or are less likely to go into surgical specialties or anything.

Men aren't judged for status? (Of course women don't prefer to marry up than marry down!) Its not like there's been an uptick in assorative mating patterns or anything!
'
Women's gender roles haven't changed? Why of course not, its the same as 100 years ago! Women aren't allowed to work outside of the home! In fact, men have even more flexibility than women in the workplace when it comes to expectations of child and eldercare!

Women are highly independent and are socialized to prefer solo work to group work. Women certainly are less subject to social pressures than men! After all there's no mean girls in the office!

False assumptions?

Here's a false assumption--you can have cooperation OR competition. Or you can have work-life balance OR status. Here's another one--leadership is stressful.

I also enjoy the statement to the effect that competitive people are disadvantaged in education. Made by the Harvard PhD.

His supporters say Google proves his point--you can't talk about certain topics. I would say he's proving Google's point--they need to make an affirmative effort to diversify their workforce. Sending this man to diversity training once or twice a year isn't going to help him overcome the biases he's built up over a lifetime. Daily exposure to a variety of different types of people is what helps people start to think about others as individuals and not "averages," so that over time a person might start to question his assumptions, broaden his perspective, and hopefully start to see commonalities as well as differences.

NOPE the ONLY THING THAT SHOULD MATTER IS HOW WELL YOU DO THE JOB PERIOD. ARE WE GOING TO START HAVING CORPORATE MORALITY TESTS BEFORE HIRING PEOPLE NOW. THIS IS SUCH F BS

The skills he says women are better are -- like cooperation -- are "the job" at the management level, as well as subject matter expertise. If you say "the job" at the programming level is not geared to women, how will they get the subject matter expertise to add on to their "natural" skills in order to help the company have the best managers? A company is not ONE JOB. A company is lots of things and people need to be able to move around and work with other people. There are almost no jobs that do not require you to ever work with others or to understand others. And you can't move up if you can't work with others. That means there needs to be diversity at all ranks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

women are now getting significantly more college degrees and even phds.

That has nothing to do with being hired or advanced.

Also, women are often geared away from certain degrees. Men are also geared away from certain digress like nursing and teaching.

who is gearing them? women and men like different jobs. i would much rather be a nurse than an engineer. btw, their salaries are comparable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the person who titled this post misrepresents the GoogleGuys screed. Here is a portion reproduced below where he discusses what things can be done to help achieve parity without discrimination.

Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech and without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:

Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).

Women on average are more cooperative
Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.

Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.

The male gender role is currently inflexible
Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.

There are many false assumptions here. That's the problem PP. These aren't solutions but rather what men think are the problems with women.

Women don't seek more work-life balance than men? Women don't take more responsibility for child and eldercare? Its not like female MDs don't work fewer hours than men, or are less likely to go into surgical specialties or anything.

Men aren't judged for status? (Of course women don't prefer to marry up than marry down!) Its not like there's been an uptick in assorative mating patterns or anything!
'
Women's gender roles haven't changed? Why of course not, its the same as 100 years ago! Women aren't allowed to work outside of the home! In fact, men have even more flexibility than women in the workplace when it comes to expectations of child and eldercare!

Women are highly independent and are socialized to prefer solo work to group work. Women certainly are less subject to social pressures than men! After all there's no mean girls in the office!

False assumptions?

Here's a false assumption--you can have cooperation OR competition. Or you can have work-life balance OR status. Here's another one--leadership is stressful.

I also enjoy the statement to the effect that competitive people are disadvantaged in education. Made by the Harvard PhD.

His supporters say Google proves his point--you can't talk about certain topics. I would say he's proving Google's point--they need to make an affirmative effort to diversify their workforce. Sending this man to diversity training once or twice a year isn't going to help him overcome the biases he's built up over a lifetime. Daily exposure to a variety of different types of people is what helps people start to think about others as individuals and not "averages," so that over time a person might start to question his assumptions, broaden his perspective, and hopefully start to see commonalities as well as differences.

NOPE the ONLY THING THAT SHOULD MATTER IS HOW WELL YOU DO THE JOB PERIOD. ARE WE GOING TO START HAVING CORPORATE MORALITY TESTS BEFORE HIRING PEOPLE NOW. THIS IS SUCH F BS

The skills he says women are better are -- like cooperation -- are "the job" at the management level, as well as subject matter expertise. If you say "the job" at the programming level is not geared to women, how will they get the subject matter expertise to add on to their "natural" skills in order to help the company have the best managers? A company is not ONE JOB. A company is lots of things and people need to be able to move around and work with other people. There are almost no jobs that do not require you to ever work with others or to understand others. And you can't move up if you can't work with others. That means there needs to be diversity at all ranks.

i suggest that women enter companies at C level.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the person who titled this post misrepresents the GoogleGuys screed. Here is a portion reproduced below where he discusses what things can be done to help achieve parity without discrimination.

Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech and without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:

Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).

Women on average are more cooperative
Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.

Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.

The male gender role is currently inflexible
Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.

There are many false assumptions here. That's the problem PP. These aren't solutions but rather what men think are the problems with women.

It's called "unconscious bias".. we act on the world based on what we believe not what we see (or hear). "Women on average" means you only act on what you believe to be true, not what is true for your specific employee. You unconsciously discriminate against some women based on your bias on how you see the world.

Orchestras use to have no women in them or as little as <5%, because women "play differently" ... it sounds different when a woman plays. So they started blind auditions in the 70's and 80's and all of a sudden women sound the same.

those old studies are irrelevant. everything that could have been squeezed out of discrimination has been squeezed out. women are now getting significantly more college degrees and even phds.

What good are those degrees if women are still viewed as "less than" or somehow not deserving of the degree because they got it on a less than equal playing field? What good are the degrees if they are forced to work in a hostile work environment? Women are always viewed as less knowledgeable/technical than men, regardless of education or experience.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wage gap is a myth (agree)
Diversity for diversities sake is a joke should hire the best (agree)
Women are different than men and are better at certain things (agree)

Anyone not agree with those 3?

I disagree with all 3.

Wage gap is real

Diversity "for diversity sake" is not a joke, we need different viewpoints depending on the job. I am not going to hire a white dude from Vermont who graduated from an Ivy league school to market products to black customers in Chicago, even if his GPA and class rank is higher than the black chick from Chicago who graduated from a Chicago state school.

NO women are not "better at certain things" ... some women are better at certain thing, some women are not, some men are better at certain things, some men are not. I don't think every man would make a better Army soldier than every woman. We need to look at everybody as an individual regardless of their gender.

Outliers don't make the rule. According to certain studies, men on average have one standard deviation higher spatial intelligence quotient than women. This domain is one of the few where clear sex differences in cognition appear (likewise the brain structure associated with this type of intelligence, the parietal lobe, differs between male and female brains). However, in some studies, once time constraints were removed, women did as well as men. It has also been found that spatial ability correlates with verbal ability in women but not in men, suggesting that women may use different strategies for spatial visualization tasks than men do. Spatial intelligence is often a requirement to make it through engineering courses, as one needs to flip the orientation of objects in ones head to visualize designs, and understand a summation of forces at moment in basic engineering classes like engineering statics.

You clearly do not understand averages or outliers or hiring practices.

It does not matter if one study showed that the men in that study had a higher score in spatial intelligence (spacial relations is what is actually measured) you would need to do a longitudinal study and you would have to correct for nurture.

It also does not mean men are better than women it just means more men score higher, but a huge amount of women also score high.

It's not one study, this is one of the few areas there there are non-trivial differences in intelligence between men and women (there are many potential causes for this, but no consensus). This is not controversial. What may be controversial is whether or not spatial intelligence leads to success in STEM, though there are a number of studies that show a strong correlation.

Men and women have approximately average general intelligence (with men tending to be slightly higher) but the distributions are not the same (see link below to a graph). This difference makes a huge difference among outliers when looking at differences in standard deviations. There more dumb men than dumb women. There are more smart men than smart women. A greater number of women's IQs are within one standard deviation of average than for men. In other words, highly intelligent women (among women) are even more of an outlier than highly intelligent men. (among men) due to paucity of numbers. These aren't huge amounts of people like you allege, but a relatively small part of the population. The reason I bring this up is that you have a very limited pool of people to recruit from because relatively few people in our population have the potential to complete the educational requirements for employment in the tech industry (for example someone on the left side of the bell curve can not comprehend differential equations and will never graduate with a BS in engineering). This makes it more difficult to reach parity in certain fields because the talent pool is smaller. This leads to a problem for HR staff when trying to meet diversity goals.

https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-16b03344e557c02d559cc5fac9724be3

I would allege that I understand more about the concepts of averages and outliers than you do, but HR is not my field of expertise. I'm an electrical engineer, I can certainly apply concepts I learned in modeling analysis and uncertainty (basically statistical analysis for engineers) to read a graph.

I am a mathematician with a minor in Economics and Statistic. I was also a programmer. I also work in management and hiring. So yes, I understand the math, the analysis and how you are misinterpreting it. I also understand HR and "diversity goals", we have none where I work and we have a plethora of female programmers.

You should read up on the the law of diminishing returns when it comes to IQ. You may be suffering from that, or from your own admission most the people that suffer from that are men.

You should also read about the research done by Google on hiring programmers from state schools vs. Ivy league schools.

It's good to know I am an "outlier" since my spacial reasoning scored off the charts. But I suspect I just liked to play with puzzles instead of dolls as a child and I played football instead of cheered.

Nurture vs. nature. The study can not correct for that.

Oh, and the education system is a culling system... I don't care if you got a perfect SAT, can you program. I have a ton of drop outs programming because they can learn it from a video or a book, in the comfort of their home and their computer. Take the human interaction of terrible teachers and the calculus/history requirement out of the equation and we would have tons of good programmers, men and women. You don't need a BS in engineering to program. Maybe to architect a system but not to program.

for a mathematician, you sound quite dumb. is that stereotyping?

No. It's called jealousy. Ad Hominem arguments are a sign of defeat, I accept your resignation.

jealous of what? you can barely string a sentence together. oh, and i have two ivy league degrees (one of them in statistics).

That explains it. I throw away all Ivy league intern applications because they don't understand they still have a lot to learn.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the person who titled this post misrepresents the GoogleGuys screed. Here is a portion reproduced below where he discusses what things can be done to help achieve parity without discrimination.

Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech and without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:

Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).

Women on average are more cooperative
Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.

Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.

The male gender role is currently inflexible
Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.

There are many false assumptions here. That's the problem PP. These aren't solutions but rather what men think are the problems with women.

It's called "unconscious bias".. we act on the world based on what we believe not what we see (or hear). "Women on average" means you only act on what you believe to be true, not what is true for your specific employee. You unconsciously discriminate against some women based on your bias on how you see the world.

Orchestras use to have no women in them or as little as <5%, because women "play differently" ... it sounds different when a woman plays. So they started blind auditions in the 70's and 80's and all of a sudden women sound the same.

those old studies are irrelevant. everything that could have been squeezed out of discrimination has been squeezed out. women are now getting significantly more college degrees and even phds.

What good are those degrees if women are still viewed as "less than" or somehow not deserving of the degree because they got it on a less than equal playing field? What good are the degrees if they are forced to work in a hostile work environment? Women are always viewed as less knowledgeable/technical than men, regardless of education or experience.

Top Engineering/CS programs are still overwhelmingly male so I am going to view Females with suspicion

You fix the issue by getting rid of the diversity program, its a similar issue for African Americans if you want me to not judge you get rid of Affirmative Action. Otherwise, I have ever right to assume you are a diversity/affirmative action hire and not as qualified.