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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
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".[/quote]

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.[/quote]

For someone who probably thinks he has a high IQ, that's a remarkably circular argument with a lot of glaring presumptions.  IQ tests measure IQ, not job performance.  Google is not looking for the people with the highest IQs.  They're looking for a qualified pool of engineers.  There's no lowering of the bar or forcing the non-elite to compete with the elite.  It's just looking for people who can do the job, rather than being constrained by your prejudices. [/quote]

What presumptions are you referring to? Have not schools changed their classes to be more group based? Are women not free to study what they wish?  Do you not need high math oriented intelligence to comprehend complex mathematics than verbal intelligence?

If you want to graduate with a STEM degree, you have to possess above average intelligence. Above average intelligence heavily skews male. Ergo there are more available males in the talent pool than females with the potential to graduate from such a program. Google is certainly going for the elite of the elite, but does it make sense to allocate more resources to bring women into study STEM if they are more likely to leave it? After all there are only a finite number of seats available in these programs. You could make the same argument with med school as well as increasing female enrollment, and less likelihood to choose surgical professions (be it due to social factors or work balance factors) will lead to a shortage in certain specialties in the coming years.

[/quote]

1) the presumption that hiring the highest IQs available, as opposed to also looking at other factors, is the only consideration in hiring a competent workforce;
2) the presumption that IQ tests are accurate measures of ability, and that the gap is inevitable
3) the presumption that we have a "free society" where people are choosing professions with no reference at all to background social/economic conditions
4) the presumption that all coders are and must be "elite"
5) the presumption that the work of Google engineers is to "solve the hardest puzzles," as opposed to being good engineers 
6) the presumption that success as an engineer in the real world does not require verbal intelligence 
7) the presumption that women leave stem because they are inferior women, not because they are discriminated against
8) the presumption that "the work that drives society forward" is equivalent to an IQ test (probably the dumbest presumption of them all)
[/quote]

I think you're inserting quite a few biases/presumptions of your own there rather than what was explicitly written, but I would be happy to respond after taking care of dinner, later this evening.  Virtually none of what you wrote appears in my text.[/quote]

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