Google male engineeer saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers

[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.

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.

Look at the graph. Throw out all data points below 110 and all above 130. Figure out the % for women vs men in that selection. Now compare that to the number of women in STEM. Do you see a difference? Yes. You do, the difference is called unconscious bias... if IQ were a predictor of success (but it is not).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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

Just because you keep saying that, doesn't make it true. There absolutely are programs to recruit men into education and nursing, to name just a few fields.

Because, as many people have been saying, a diverse organization is a more successful organization.

[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.

this is not true at all. women who are as good as men are not seen as 'less than'. to the contrary, they are worshipped, promoted, praised all the time etc. it's just that.. there are not that many such women. the main reason is that women are not interested in these fields, so though smartest men might be in tech, smartest women are not tech. they do other stuff.

my experience with women in technical fields is that they are usually above average but really not that capable people who say they "love math" and "loooove science" but are really much more into saying they love it than in doing it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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

Just because you keep saying that, doesn't make it true. There absolutely are programs to recruit men into education and nursing, to name just a few fields.

Because, as many people have been saying, a diverse organization is a more successful organization.

okay.. please show evidence.

also, how many women were fired for saying "men are not as interested in nursing as are women"?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

Look at the graph. Throw out all data points below 110 and all above 130. Figure out the % for women vs men in that selection. Now compare that to the number of women in STEM. Do you see a difference? Yes. You do, the difference is called unconscious bias... if IQ were a predictor of success (but it is not).

not the difference is called - other factors, of which interest is the strongest one.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

every time you post you sound dumber and dumber. i will be waiting for your reply with apprehension.

[Anonymous]

I wipe my ass with 100 dollar bills and crud like you

Thanks for developing the algorithms to make me rich though.....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:


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.

Look at the graph. Throw out all data points below 110 and all above 130. Figure out the % for women vs men in that selection. Now compare that to the number of women in STEM. Do you see a difference? Yes. You do, the difference is called unconscious bias... if IQ were a predictor of success (but it is not).

Surely you're joking about it not being a predictor for success. Spend 5 min , if you have journal access, let alone Lexis-Nexis, and you will find more studies than you have time to read on the subject. Life outcomes at the 3rd plus standard deviation do start to get wierd though when it comes to IQ.

A better predictor is going to be an IQ cutoff for 125 or so for STEM, based solely off average IQ scores for different majors (average IQ for philosophy/economics majors is also quite high I might add). The further you go up that scale, the more the higher IQ scores skew towards a male biased ratio. For example at IQs of 130-150 the male to female ratio is already 2.5:1, this is well in the realm of the IQ for most STEM students/practitioners at elite institutions.

As I said in another post, in 3rd world countries, women tend to choose STEM fields at higher rates, despite their environments being more patriarchal. It is only in wealthy countries that when women have the luxury of choosing a major, rather than economic necessity, that they tend to choose other fields of study. This is quite the oddity isn't that, that in more equal societies, women choose fields that are less "prestigious" or high paying, and thus I would like to hear your thoughts on that in light of "unconscious bias".

[Anonymous]

Google employee James Damore said "I Have A Right To Express My Concerns"

:popcorn:

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Google employee James Damore said "I Have A Right To Express My Concerns"

:popcorn:

And doesn't he sound like a whiny little bitch as he does it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

Look at the graph. Throw out all data points below 110 and all above 130. Figure out the % for women vs men in that selection. Now compare that to the number of women in STEM. Do you see a difference? Yes. You do, the difference is called unconscious bias... if IQ were a predictor of success (but it is not).

not the difference is called - other factors, of which interest is the strongest one.

The PP asked for an explanation of the data shown that did not take into consideration longitudinal data or other facts, like EQ, drive, etc.

I already explained the "other factors" above but he asked a specific question about his link.

I assumed the PP needed a ELI5 explanation and that is what I provided.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Google employee James Damore said "I Have A Right To Express My Concerns"

:popcorn:

And doesn't he sound like a whiny little bitch as he does it.

Funny ... you quoted the manifesto... so cleaver.

[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.

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.

this is not true at all. women who are as good as men are not seen as 'less than'. to the contrary, they are worshipped, promoted, praised all the time etc. it's just that.. there are not that many such women. the main reason is that women are not interested in these fields, so though smartest men might be in tech, smartest women are not tech. they do other stuff.

my experience with women in technical fields is that they are usually above average but really not that capable people who say they "love math" and "loooove science" but are really much more into saying they love it than in doing it.

yes please extrapolate your limited interactions with women in tech to all women in tech.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
A better predictor is going to be an IQ cutoff for 125 or so for STEM, based solely off average IQ scores for different majors (average IQ for philosophy/economics majors is also quite high I might add). The further you go up that scale, the more the higher IQ scores skew towards a male biased ratio. For example at IQs of 130-150 the male to female ratio is already 2.5:1, this is well in the realm of the IQ for most STEM students/practitioners at elite institutions.

As I said in another post, in 3rd world countries, women tend to choose STEM fields at higher rates, despite their environments being more patriarchal. It is only in wealthy countries that when women have the luxury of choosing a major, rather than economic necessity, that they tend to choose other fields of study. This is quite the oddity isn't that, that in more equal societies, women choose fields that are less "prestigious" or high paying, and thus I would like to hear your thoughts on that in light of "unconscious bias".

So much in education has been changed recently to better suit women, including a renewed focus on coursework, because women don’t perform well in exams. That’s one reason why more women are going to university and more are graduating. But no amount of gerrymandering with educational styles is going to close the gap at the top of the IQ scale: all it does is unfairly disadvantage men further down.

We know gender equality efforts in STEM are foolish, because in a free society women (and men) choose the subjects they are most interested in. The high IQ outliers among women will continue to enter STEM, as they always have. Forcing those who are not elite to compete with those who are is not empowering. It’s just cruel. And lowering the bar to accommodate mediocre talent is just as bad.

It doesn’t matter if women “test poorly” or if IQ doesn’t measure a totality of intelligence or if the test is somehow biased toward men. Because it’s IQ skills that are required to solve the hardest puzzles in mathematics and physics, not verbal communication or any of the other, equally important kinds of intelligence. The work that drives society and technology forward looks a lot like an IQ test, and men simply do better at them.

[Anonymous]

Still waiting for thread that the fired Google Engineer discussed of it's Left leaning cultural?