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][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]

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"  :lol: since my spacial reasoning scored off the charts.  :roll:  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.

[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.

[/quote]

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.[/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