ooky wrote:This memo was why I actually logged in today. Not ready to discuss the memo itself yet as I'm only about 1/2way through the original (as opposed to reading thinkpieces about it and the fallout). But I will say that I don't find the memo as earth shatteringly terrible as a lot of other people have. If the old threads were still around, you could find numerous, numerous posts where I went into lavish detail on biologically-based vs. socially based differences in male and female brains, and how this related to simple inter-individual variation (as in, ALL of our brains are biologically and culturally different from everyone else's.) But that doesn't exist anymore, so you'll have to take my word for it if you don't remember.
What I, and I guess the "SJW position" I will no doubt be shortly accused of having
doesn't agree with is the idea that there is a strictly biological, and therefore deterministic basis for
very broad ideas, such as "women prefer to work less and are less smart, and more neurotic. But this makes them more cooperative!" That level of conclusion for cause and effect is not at all backed up by modern science. We are not even sure if basic emotions like fear - I kid you not - are more hardwired or learned. The newest evidence suggests something as universal and basic-seeming as
fear is actually mainly a learned reaction/behavior/emotion, so there's definitely not proof for a much more complicated conclusion that women are "more neurotic" than men and this is biologically deterministic. Instead it's more like, on average, women's brains have more cortisol (stress hormone) and more changes related to cortisol. That can be
measured. But even with a simple biological difference like this, there are lots of men with more cortisol than lots of women. And again, that's a physical thing that can be measured. Trying to measure behavior with anything approaching accuracy and precision is 10,000 times more difficult and therefor the conclusions drawn from that type of data needs to be even more carefully considered.
Anyway, from the "four scientists respond" I very much agree with this one:
But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm. Moreover, men are more emotional than women in certain ways, too. Sex differences in emotion depend on the type of emotion, how it is measured, where it is expressed, when it is expressed, and lots of other contextual factors....
...most psychological sex differences are only small to moderate in size, and rather than grouping men and women into dichotomous groups, I think sex and sex differences are best thought of scientifically as multidimensional dials, anyway (see here.)
Now, treating people as dichotomous sexes is exactly what many affirmative action policies do. As this is not my area of expertise, I can only offer my non-expert opinion on this issue, which is this: There have been (and likely will continue to be) many socio-structural barriers to women working in technological jobs. These include culturally-embedded gender stereotypes, biased socialization practices, in some cultures explicit employment discrimination, and a certain degree of masculinization of technological workplaces. Within this sea of gender bias, should Google use various practices (affirmative action is not just one thing) to especially encourage capable women of joining (and enjoying) the Google workplace? I vote yes. At the same time, should we be able to openly discuss and be informed by some of the real psychological sex differences that might account for variation in men’s and women’s workplace performance? In the right context, I vote yes to that, too.
and I get to see that wall of gibb- I mean text quoted like twenty more times by starry eyed admirers.
