Reply to Google male engineeer saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "Google male engineeer saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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?  [/quote]

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.  [/quote]

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.

[/quote]

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. 
[/quote]

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 [u]more [/u]dumb men than dumb women. There are [u]more [/u]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.

[/quote]

But none of what you said boils down to how women would actually function as engineers in the workplace, if discrimination were removed.  Women are not discriminated against based on the fact that some studies show relatively small differences in IQ distributions.  They're discriminated against because of much broader stereotypes that women are neurotic, don't want to work hard, and are bad at math.  And also, there's no evidence that for the run-of-the-mill coder, recruiting based purely on IQ is legitimate.  If IQ-based recruiting resulted in a significant disparity in gender or race, then the employer would have to show that having the highest IQ possible is a bona fide employment requirement.  They are not going to be able to show that, because there are just so many other qualities and characteristics that determine workplace success.  While it's certainly true that coders probably need a certain level of IQ, there's not going to be evidence that IQ is the only relevant criteria.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics