Do you believe that men and women have the same biology? If so, then should we stop segregating sports competitions by gender? What would you think about having a man fight a woman in a UFC octagon? If you're going to say that physical abilities are not analogous to mental/psychological inclinations, then my next question would be is neuroscience just a pseudoscience? Because the consensus in neuroscience is that "form follows function" and male and female brains are definitely different anatomically speaking (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969295/). Also I mean NO offense to anyone. I am genuinely looking for a cogent argument from the people who disagreed with Damore's memo.
Yes, women are anatomically different. Yes, that creates a difference in performance in sports. No, you cannot infer that women are in any way inferior in any cognitive capacity as a result. Look at this chart. Did women suddenly start performing worse in computer science in the 80s? Or did CS suddenly become an economically desirable field of study? Which do you think is more plausible? https://m.imgur.com/pkZPrOI
Let's say cs became more economically desirable and that's why men chose to get into cs more. James damore already mentioned that men seek status more than women. Also, what is your explanation for why women were only 15% of cs majors in 1970s, before the tech boom?
Status seeking doesn't explain the wild disparity: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_doctorlawyer.png I don't have a precise explanation. I just know that these differences are clearly due to social rather than biological factors, and muddling them together as Damore and you do makes for a hostile environment.
If you don’t believe the memo, watch this https://youtu.be/JUxY_5-N81Q
Ben Shapiro has entered the chat
Damore's "memo" was pseudoscience based more on stereotype than on research. Even if you think there are differences it's unlikely they are the stereotypical things he put in the memo. He would quote some research and then extrapolate it ridiculously in stereotypical ways. One example (there are very many examples but I only need one to illustrate the problem): He quoted a study that showed women had marginally lower performance on a rote task when they were subject to physical discomfort. The study called this discomfort "stress", though they made no claim it represents anything other than physical discomfort. Damore then extrapolated in two ridiculous ways: 1. He assumed he could use this as proof women don't handle any kind of stress well And 2. He assumed he could equate this rote task to technology work None of that is logical or scientific, that's just him randomly listing an article that used the word "stress" and then spewing a garbage stereotype. That type pseudoscience extrapolation and stereotype exists in almost all he wrote. In almost every case the study he listed had no valid relationship to the conclusion he tried to draw. He was justly and properly fired for being a hateful bigot.
From what people on blind have reported, James Damore was a shit tier SWE himself, so I wouldn’t pay much attention to what he has to say about other people’s skills.
Stale meem. Redpillers are too 2017. Pass
OP’s making a straw-argument. People were upset not by “the science” but by this guy arguing tired sexist tropes about his co-workers with a thin veneer of appealing to “science”. (I’m sure at some point in the 1800s some social-Darwinist said, “Social-Darwinism is pseudoscience? my word, you don’t think evolution is science!”) People use to make similar arguments that black folks naturally wanted to be nannies and servants or porters because more complex tasks were biologically beyond their interest or reach. Funny that in Damore’s intro he includes ethnicity... but then never makes the case like he attempts for gender. Maybe pulling some studies about biological differences by ethnicity and then arguing that black people like to work low-paid jobs was a little too obviously social-Darwinist for him to attempt?
Nah if you'd look at foreign engineers you'd see a much more even gender distribution. Women are just as capable as men in the field, provided they're not raised in the west it seems. This goes both ways by the way. It would be just as wrong to say that men are somehow less capable than women as nurses or teachers.
Yup! Teaching used to be considered a male profession while women were seen as natural technical workers — because it was seen like a typing pool or secretarial work. Using biological determinism to explain 20 year old trends in human-made conditions of jobs... is just an attempt to explain away and excuse the status-quo.
How much of the crowd here claiming women and men are different in body but not in mind claimed until recently that there are no biological differences to begin with. In other words, different hormon levels, different physical attributes don't manifest into mental differences?! And mental differences don't lead in any way to different life choices? 🤣🤣
Zero. Women are probably better at tech than men just like they turned out to be better at law and better at medicine after a century of being told those weren't feminine jobs.
^^ It's not about who is better at it, but who goes for it. It doesn't even have to be the right choice long term: most high paying jobs are high paying for a reason ...
Men and women have different biology and different brain structure. They also have different hormonal balance which affects mood and disposition. Anyone who disagrees with that simple reality is kidding themselves. Where the memo is dead wrong is where he's trying to justify which gender makes a better software engineer because we don't fucking know. Not only that, we don't even have a real canonical set of metrics that define a software engineer. What we have is a set of business metrics we care to see and both genders have shown equal level of capability against those loosely defined arbitrary business metrics. Furthermore the memo questions the value of trainings specialized for one gender. That is also wrong because historically and presently the opportunities are not equal for both genders due to biases still present so if we want equal outcomes for both genders then we need to reverse some of the damage done to one of them in the space of availability of opportunities.
Thank you for your answer, and thank you for not lobbing insults at me. Could you kindly elaborate on what obstacles are still present for women trying to get into tech in 2019? Or what obstacles a 21 year old college grad might have faced in the last 21 years that would have dissuaded her from pursuing a career in tech?
The reason women are not into software engineering is also the different brain structure..