TheDrake,
I've read many of the critiques of Damore - they usually ignore evidence or mistate the literature.
Okay, LR, I can back off on that end and admit that I overstated it at best, although there's plenty of indication of bias that has nothing to do with preference and competence.
Most companies that are 'socially conscious' don't really have that issue. They tend to have the issue that in pursuit of their socially conscious goals - they will hire under-qualified individuals to try and achieving hiring balance. Then they have the issue that they must either must abandon merit based promotions; or see their under-qualified hires have slower career advancement.
If you have say, 100 female applicants, and 1000 male applicants, and both are normally distributed as far as talent, then you can only hire 10 women for every 100 men. If you try and 'balance' the hires by hiring more women, then you will bring down the average competence of the woman hires; and increase the average competence of the male hires. So if you hire top 11% that is 100 men, and 10 women. Lets say that you instead of 10/110 = 9% women, you want 27% women 30/110. Then you will be hiring 80 men, and 30 women. Of those 30 women 22 will be less competent than ALL of your male hires. Where as previously half of your female hires were more competent than half of your male hires. So in the first case, we could have expected 10 men promoted for each women promoted. We can now expect all of the men to be promoted before 22 of the women are promoted in a merit based promotion system.
A big part of the imbalance is because google and other companies hire internationally. Women generally aren't willing to move away so that they are isolated from their family, but men are - which means that the vast majority of international hires will be male. Similarly the countries with excellent programming education and large populations (China, India, Russian and former soviet bloc countries) have essentially no Hispanic or African population. So this skews the number of Hispanic and African (American) employee numbers.
Your article sets up a major strawman,
We can say flatly that there is no evidence that women’s biology makes them incapable of performing at the highest levels in any STEM fields.
Damore never suggested that was the case.
Many reputable scientific authorities have weighed in on this question, including a major paper in the journal Science debunking the idea that the brains of males and females are so different that they should be educated in single-sex classrooms.
Something which Damore never suggested.
They set up straw man after straw man. Damore's writing only dealt with very specific and well established gender differences. As I said above - in general men and women have very similar brains. But there are known and significant differences which happen to be those that are consistent with his hypothesis.
Much of the data that Damore provides in his memo is suspect, outdated or has other problems.
He didn't really provide much data, he generally mentioned findings in passing. None of which are 'suspect, outdated or has other problems'.
They make wild assertions with no apparent basis,
He implies that stress and anxiety are personality traits inherent in females, but more likely they are due to the pressures and discrimination women face on the job that men do not. [...] But what if you don’t make the catch? “Women have a hard time taking on those assignments because you can dive and fail to catch. If a man fails, his buddies dust him off and say, ‘It's not your fault; try again next time.’ A woman fails and is never seen again.”
As support they quote the "Athena Factor" report authors - but mysteriously leave out the finding of the report that supports Damore - "The “diving catch” culture of SET companies disadvantages women, who tend to be risk averse (35% have difficulty with risk). ". So the reason the 'woman fails and is never seen again' - is because women are risk adverse as a personality trait relative to men.
Many of Damore’s controversial conclusions rest heavily on one recent study and much older, now-discredited research, ignoring reams of data that tell a very different story.
What BS, see the cohen effect sizes above, and see my link that explores the rest of article. Everything he said science wise was well founded. THis is an utter hatch job.
And yes, this is also a popular recap and not original studies - I don't have the time to put in the proper legwork.
It wasn't a recap, it was a complete hatchet job. They mischaracterized his paper, did massive amounts of strawmen, and cherry picked research, and even cherry picked form their own sources.
He still doesn't establish that those traits are positive or negative traits for those jobs.
He was pointing out not as positive/negative traits for the job - but why there would be skew in applicants due to carreer attractiveness vs other opportunities (such as medicine).
Of course, Google's hiring is also a factor in this. They put a premium on solving puzzles and being clever in isolation
It depends entirely on the position they are hiring for. When hiring for programmers - they seek people who have adequate mastery of core data structures and algorithms. It is an essential component of the job.
and spend relatively little time evaluating social and communication skills - or they might not have hired Damore in the first place.
There aren't really any complex social and communication skills needed for the job they are doing - and the screening they do is adequate. There was nothing wrong with Damore's communication skills. He was asked for feedback, and he gave well reasoned and supported arguments - exactly what you want from an engineer. You don't want engineers who give you what you want to hear regardless of where the evidence points.
He might well have gotten traction on some of his ideas if he approached it less belligerently and built support before condemning the people he worked for.
He wasn't belligerent, and he absolutely didn't condemn any of the people he worked for or with.
Even people in leadership positions have a hard time effecting cultural change. To expect to do this as a third year engineer at a Fortune 500 with a fiery memo is astonishingly naive and arrogant. It was perfectly appropriate to excise him and replace him with some other Harvard Grad that does well with thought experiments and algorithmic regurgitation.
That isn't what he did. His memo wasn't "firey". It was sent to address that directed to as a request for feedback.
