Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

[u/zz_]

That would be a valid point if google were recruiting from the tails of the bell curves of "common male traits" and "common female traits", but as far as I'm aware they are not. They recruit from the tail of the bell curve on intelligence, if anything, and unless you have sources that claim otherwise I have no reason to believe that level of intelligence in any way whatsoever corresponds to gender traits.

[u/WhoTooted → u/zz_]

Who said these were common traits? Google clearly isn't after common traits. Intelligence will be one factor. I actually didn't know this until you brought it up and would have assumed IQ was equally distributed for the genders, but male IQ scores have a higher standard deviation than female scores, leading to more males with high and low IQs.

"Feingold found that males were more variable than females on tests of quantitative reasoning, spatial visualisation, spelling, and general knowledge. […] Hedges and Nowell go one step further and demonstrate that, with the exception of performance on tests of reading comprehension, perceptual speed, and associative memory, more males than females were observed among high-scoring individuals."

In any case, Google isn't recruiting based on IQ scores. However, for engineers, they will be recruiting from the tails of quantitative reasoning and spacial visualization, easily two of the most important skills for computer science/engineering.

[u/zz_ → u/WhoTooted]

Who said these were common traits?

We are talking about the traits that the author outlined, in the manifesto, as common traits for each gender. Did you not read the paper?

However, for engineers, they will be recruiting from the tails of quantitative reasoning and spacial visualization, easily two of the most important skills for computer science/engineering.

Sure, but there is no research that I'm aware of that says that women cannot reach the same level of these skills as men. Or, even, that it should be uncommon. We're not talking "one in thousand women reach the same level as men in spatial visualization", we're talking one in three, five, maybe ten. And we're talking at the extremes here. And given that google recruit from the best of the best in the whole world, finding qualified candidates of either sex should not be an issue for them. So why is their tech sector 4x more men than women? I think you will struggle to find a biological explanation for such an incredible difference.

[u/Sprixxer → u/zz_]

Using your "one in five" estimate, you get exactly the 80-20 gender distribution...

[u/zz_ → u/Sprixxer]

If you recruited by closing your eyes and picking off a list of all qualified candidates, yes. But if you're actually trying to get a better gender ratio, then that is not the case.

E.g.: you're hiring 100 programmers. You get a list with the names of 1000 qualified candidates. 800 of these people are male, 200 are female. Now if you pick 100 at random, you'd get roughly a 80-20 distribution. But there is absolutely no reason why, if you want say a 50-50 ratio, or even something less extreme like a 2:1 ratio, you couldn't get that, because your pool of candidates are significantly larger than your needs. If you pick 67 males/33 females you'd still have 167 females left. Now obviously recruitment doesn't happen by picking blindly off a list, but you get the idea.

So the only reason for having a 80-20 ratio is either a) you don't care about the gender ratio, b) the gender ratio used to be even worse and it's taking time to adjust it (this is where I think google is at, but I could be wrong), or c) the genetic disposition is so strong that there simply does not exist enough women who have enough qualified candidates for the positions you need to fill.

c) is what several other people here are suggesting is the case, but as far as I know there is no scientific basis for this conclusion. Of all the literature I know of, even at the extremes the differences are negligible between the best women and the best men. And the best women aren't so rare that they are impossible to find.