It wasn't the strongest possible argument for his case IMO. There are other better studies and statistics I would have referenced. But it was good enough and the points were solid,. That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios.
> That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios.
This assumption always bothers me. What do you think defines behavior? Is it purely culture, or purely biology? How do you rule out culture when you don't have a culture that promotes equality?
It seems perfectly plausible to me that it's biological. E.g. identical twins have similar personality measures. But it does it matter? Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech. Or the effectiveness of Google's diversity programs that Damore was arguing against.
> Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech.
This sentence contradicts itself. If it is cultural, then it'd be most likely based on sexist stereotypes that we force on our kids from an early age (mind you, when I say sexist I don't mean in the "actively nasty towards a gender" way, but in the "you define people by their gender even before you know them" way.)
If that's the case, then that sexist behavior permeates the culture, which means tech companies are not going to be devoid of it. Which would make the disparity based on sexism in tech (and everywhere else.)
I think people get overly defensive about being called "sexist" because they perceive it as an attack on them. It is not. The moment you realize that, it's so much easier to get out of the "them vs. us" mentality and actually take constructive criticism better.
You've done a bait and switch on me. I'm talking about personality types. Maybe you can argue that women are less likely to be e.g. introverts, because of culture. But that has nothing to do with the tech industry and they can't change that.
And that was basically Damore's argument. You have personality types like INTP being vastly overrepresented among programmers, yet 4 times less common among women. You have the same percentage of young girls interested in computer science at a young age as work in the tech industry. You have studies trying to raise kids as neutrally as possible and still finding boys prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. It's definitely not culture.
> ... that has nothing to do with the tech industry and they can't change that...
So what you are saying is that:
a) We don't know if this is a cultural issue or not
b) So the tech industry shouldn't do anything about it
Huh?
> You have studies trying to raise kids as neutrally as possible and still finding boys prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. It's definitely not culture.
There's definite proof to the contrary: certain cultures (like Soviet Russia, for example) had a much bigger female representation in STEM fields than others [1]. Heck, even Mexico today has a higher representation of females in CS degrees than the US [2]
How do you explain that if "it's definitely not culture"???
I'm saying the disparity is due to personality difference. Which, even if cultural, can't be changed by the tech industry. I find it very implausible that the differences are cultural at any level. And many possible cultural explanations have been ruled out.
Poor and communist countries have less gender disparities because people have less choice over their careers. E.g. poor parents shove their kids into STEM because it's see it as a way out of poverty. In rich countries people have the freedom to pursue their actual interests. And so statistical differences in interests start to matter.
> And many possible cultural explanations have been ruled out.
You say this, but quote absolutely no science to back it up. Maybe this is just an intuitive perception that you have, rather than a fact? I actually quoted two articles that prove the contrary, and you have no retort for them, but rather just glance over them as if they didn't exist.
> Poor and communist countries have less gender disparities because people have less choice over their careers. E.g. poor parents shove their kids into STEM because it's see it as a way out of poverty. In rich countries people have the freedom to pursue their actual interests.
So you are going against your previous statement and saying here that culture plays a major role? Unless you use the word 'culture' in a very narrow definition that only includes things such as food, drinks and folk dances.
Communist countries, especially Russia, made a big deal about erasing gender inequality (they saw gender roles as another form of oppression.) That's the main reason why Russia had such a high participation of women in STEM, it wasn't because "parents would force them because they were poor."
I'm all for having a conversation about this, but are you willing to take new evidence and process it, rather than keep pushing your intuitive notion?
>You say this, but quote absolutely no science to back it up.
Yes I do, and I've been over some of it with you in this thread.
>I actually quoted two articles that prove the contrary, and you have no retort for them, but rather just glance over them as if they didn't exist.
What, the poor countries have different gender ratios claim? I addressed that.
>So you are going against your previous statement and saying here that culture plays a major role?
In poor countries, yes. How is Russia doing today after a ton of economic growth? I had trouble finding statistics, the only stat I could find is this:
>In 2016 Russia had the highest percentage of patents filed by women, at about 16%.
Which is about the ratio of women in STEM in the West.
> Yes I do, and I've been over some of it with you in this thread.
I looked for all your comments with your name in my history. Not a single one of them links to anything.
> What, the poor countries have different gender ratios claim? I addressed that.
You haven't addressed it, though. You claim it's based on economic growth, yet cite no evidence. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary: the UK has a bigger (and more advanced) economy than India, and a bigger participation of women in STEM. The same goes for Norway vs. US. In fact, Latin America has a much higher participation when compared with, say, Asia for comparable economic growth.
Even if we take the US in isolation, your claim doesn't hold up: we have grown at a relatively steady pace for the past few decades and more women participate on STEM fields today that they did in the 80s and 90s. If "economic growth" was the one driving factor, you'd see the exact opposite.
Again, are you sure you are putting enough effort into validating your statements? Here are two sets of statistics you might want to consider [1][2]
> How is Russia doing today after a ton of economic growth?
Russia has gone through a huge amount of "Westernization" since the Berlin Wall came down, so trying to make the case that economic growth or cultural shift are 100% to account for the changes is a fool's errand.
> In 2016 Russia had the highest percentage of patents filed by women, at about 16%
What makes you think that patent filings of all things represents industry participation? You have to be careful, you could easily conclude there are no males younger than 24 in a given industry if you used patents filed as your only data source. I think the links I posted above, in particular [2] are a better reference.
Your hypothesis doesn't explain the data any better than mine. Would you really predict the Arab states, with their incredibly progressive views on feminism, to have higher percentage of female researchers? It really isn't weird to you that Russia, in just 20 years, went back to the same levels of everyone else after all the "progress" they made? Cultures don't change that quickly.
The statistics are nearly useless anyway because of how differently they are measured. Women are much more represented in "soft sciences" like biology. But in math etc, the percentage has been pretty consistent. Math majors show a huge increase in women. But when you dig into it, it turns out that they are going into it to become math teachers. And the actual percentage of female Math researchers is the lowest of all of STEM. And pretty consistent through time. And our culture has changed a hell of a lot.
>gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are
‘very large’ (d= 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-oriented than men.
Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender-egalitarian societies than in gender-
inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolution-
ary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear
to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.
d=1.18 is one of the largest effect sizes I've seen in a social science. It means something like 93% of men are more "thing oriented" than the average woman.
> Your hypothesis doesn't explain the data any better than mine.
My "hypothesis" is that without trying to eliminate the cultural factors, we'll never be able to actually measure how strongly the alleged biological factors affect behavior. So no, my hypothesis doesn't explain anything, because it doesn't try to.
> And our culture has changed a hell of a lot.
Our academic scientific culture is barely 200 years old. Female participation in academic culture is way younger than that, with most of the earlier examples (like Marie Curie) being known as "weirdos" in their time because they didn't behave like "normal women". Our current cultural system is thousands of years old, yet you expect that the last 100 years of science to have fixed all disparities accrued over millennia. Doesn't sound very realistic.
> Why is it so implausible to you that it's biology?
Why is it implausible to you that it is culture, when there are reams of data showing that different cultures perform differently? You are cherrypicking data that supports your thesis and completely ignoring everything else. Why?
Notice that even the paper you link is hedging when making the claim: "In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences." But you, somehow, are 100% sure. Weird. Makes me think you have an agenda first, and look for evidence to back it up second, just like Damore did.
Before I go any further, just answer this one question. Is there literally any conceivable evidence that could convince you that you are wrong? That there are biological differences between men and women?
This is a basic scientific question. It has nothing to do with politics. You accuse me of "having an agenda" just because I disagree with you. You accuse damore of being "alt right" and defend his firing, just because he believes a relatively uncontroversial scientific claim. You accuse me of "cherrypicking data" when I've done nothing of the sort. Yet apparently cherrypicking a few random countries with different stats to support your bizarre culture theory is fine. But as I've shown your model doesn't make any sense of the data either, which apparently isn't a problem for you.
What even is your theory? Yeah, it's "culture", sure. But what predictions does that make? How can it be disproved?
If I show, for example, that there's the same percentage of female computer science graduates as female tech workers, does that disprove it? Does your theory predict that? "But the sexism is happening before the industry then." Ok.
So what about the same percentage of female high schoolers interested in computer science as female computer science majors. Does your theory predict that? "The sexism is happening before then."
Well we can go back to middle school. Hell let's go back to early childhood, and we find boys and girls show strong preferences for different kinds of toys. That seems pretty damning for your theory to me.
But that's far from the only evidence. Does your model predict neurological differences between male and female brains? That doesn't make any sense if all differences must be explained by culture.
>Female participation in academic culture is way younger than that, with most of the earlier examples (like Marie Curie) being known as "weirdos" in their time because they didn't behave like "normal women"
Exactly! 160 years ago women were excluded from many areas. There were no women doctors, few women at universities, no women lawyers, etc.
Now, in 2017, we've reversed all that. There are more women getting university educations than men! They make up 51% of law students, 50% of medical students, 75% of psychology majors, etc, etc. And yet in engineering they make up 20%. And it's been that way, consistently, for decades. And shows no signs of changing even as culture continues to change.
Think about this. It makes no sense to your theory. Why should culture change so quickly for every other area but engineering.
(And also why the double standard of caring so much about gender ratios in engineering, and not any other area like psychology or university in general?)
> Is there literally any conceivable evidence that could convince you that you are wrong?
Oh, for sure, if it was proven beyond reasonable doubt culture is not a factor in decision making.
> That there are biological differences between men and women?
This is not what I am arguing. There's a huge difference between "there are differences between men and women" and "they comprehensibly explain the current gender ratio in the Tech industry".
> That seems pretty damning for your theory to me.
Not really, because for the fifth time: my "theory" (call it: my anti-theory) is we don't know the extent of how potential gender differences might affect career selection, as long as we have a culture that has embedded strong gender identities even before the first career decision is made. Even if you think girls should play with toy ovens while boys play with toy guns, you can just discount the effect such boxing will have long term.
----
For the rest of your post, let me draw an analogy:
Let's say that we are working out of the same office. At some point you are trying to load a website (say, Hacker News) and it doesn't load. You ask me if I know what might be going on:
Me: "Yeah, the WiFi has been terrible today, we called the management company to come and fix it".
You after trying to ping google.com, and getting about 50% packet loss: "I know what it is, it's the database they use to store the articles, it's broken and that's why Hacker News won't load".
Me: "Wait, but the internet is really bad"
You: "Yeah, but there's some connectivity, so it must be the database"
Me: "Have you tried pinging the host?"
You: "No, but I pinged google.com"
Me: "Have you tried loading google.com?"
You: "No, because I know it's the database"
Me: "But... how? Nobody else can't connect to anything because the internet sucks. Even if the internet worked perfectly, there's a bunch of other stuff besides the database that could be broken."
You: "Is there any piece of evidence that will convince you it's the database? Why are you so against it being the database? I know it's the database!"
That's pretty much the conversation we've been having over the last few days. If a coworker of yours did that, you'd think twice before asking for their next time you have to debug something, wouldn't you?
Weird analogy. But from my point of view you are the guy screaming about the database. Replace "database" with "culture". You can't even consider the possibility it's not the database. No amount of tests or other possible explanations seem to have any effect on you.
You latch on to one tiny scrap of evidence that might point to a database issue. Say, the Russian site had a slightly better packet loss. And they have a different server over there, or something.
Then you make it political. And start ranting about how I'm a "database heretic" that should be fired for daring to question the database theory.
