It's pretty amazing to watch the news responses to his article, because so many respond to what they wanted to see in his article rather than what he wrote.
What he wrote: "Men and women have different interests."
What everyone pretends he said: "Men and women have different abilities."
His points about stress tolerance and anxiety are clearly ability-related. He didn't say women are less interested in stressful work, he said they are biologically inclined to be less capable of handling stress.
Which might be true, I have no idea, but it's not true that he only talked about interests.
Edit: When I say "might be true", I mean it academically might be true, but it clearly has no practical application to job performance. If women can perform equally well at a job as stressful as surgery, they obviously will not have a problem helping Google sell more ads in one of the most comfortable offices in the world.
It's a great read and the sort of lead-out at the end yields some more useful insight:
> Prior art aside, I would like to leave off on a high note. I mentioned earlier that men are doing a lot better on the platform than women, but here’s the startling thing. Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely. So while the attrition numbers aren’t great, I’m massively encouraged by the fact that at least in these findings, it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix.
To me this is more useful than "women are less interested in tech on average," or "there's a hiring bias in favor of men over women."
It's also not just about self confidence and "dusting yourself off", but about being immersed in the field and understanding how the process works. If you're a CS major, and all your friends are CS majors, you've heard everything there is to know about the interview process, you know it's normal to bomb one or two, it takes some practice, maybe you borrow someone's copy of Cracking the Coding Interview to get better, etc.
But if you come from outside that culture, and you don't have many friends in the industry, you might bomb one algorithms and data structures interview and think "wow I guess I'm not cut out for this". The only reason I didn't think that after my first interview was because I knew so many people who had been through it before me.
It might be easier to frame the problem as "how can we reach people outside our circle" rather than "how can we reach more women", even if it amounts to the same thing.
I'd argue that stress tolerance affects both ability and interest. If you're averse to stressful environments, then you're going to be less interested in working in such an environment.
Of course, even people who tend to avoid stressful environments are still capable of high performance in such environments. That doesn't make such environments any more attractive.
For reference, the stressfulness of certain tech environments has been cited (or at least I think it has; I'm on my phone on my lunch break, so pardon my lack of URLs) as one of the factors behind the underrepresentation of women in technical fields. Even things like long and unpredictable work hours can (I would guess) have a chilling effect on working moms (and dads, but there's arguably less social/cultural pressure there, at least here in the US) wanting to actually spend time with their families.
He referenced a paper that noted differences in levels of neuroticism, but he did not defend his point that this affects software engineering performance. Some people will say it's common sense, but I would say it's common sense that this is irrelevant to software engineering (if not every job in the world), so common sense obviously varies a lot and should not be relied on in discussions like this.
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
Right, and I get that your counterpoint is against the person above you. However, that doesn't change the context of Damore's argument, which is saying that interests may differ due to differences in cognitive ability and that the difference may help to explain the gender gap.
And a lot people are ignoring the context, instead pulling straw men out of the text to fight, rather than arguing the substance of the memo itself, context included.
I've had the pet theory that we ought to give teenagers and young adults uncomfortable jobs to do so they develop some empathy for other sorts of human beings and learn something.
For instance yesterday I was cleaning a house, the urine had crystallized in two toilet bowls to about an inch thick and I removed it with acid and a knife. The other rooms only admitted visible light to about half their size because thick cobwebs black from tobacco smoke draped everywhere. Everywhere, bottles of vokda and whiskey.
I thought to myself: if a schoolchild worked this one day, they'd potentially learn some things. Like how some people can turn into shut-ins and how that's a bad thing. How smoking and drinking can help a person develop a mental sickness to this extent. Fairly sure they'd never forget it. Also: hey! Practical skills too.
Ignoring the larger picture at hand, I was reading articles about bathrooms in busy venues of NYC (theaters, mostly), how woefully inadequate they are in terms of capacity and cleanliness.
The comments on the articles were nothing but an amalgamation of what seemed to be screams of teenage children that there is some great misogynist conspiracy that keeps women lined up outside of bathrooms, several shouting contests about whose behavior is nastier in the bathroom, male or female, etc.
I pondered then, about how many of the commenters have ever worked on a plumbing issue, even in their own house, had to unclog a toilet, or build one from scratch. Or had to clean a public bathroom as part of their job (not that I had)
The reason I'm writing all this is to agree with your point - it's a marvel of civilization that we've achieved the world wide web, and that we can address progressive issues and tackle the causes of inequality and minority disadvantages. But we shouldn't forget how we got here: before the internet there was plumbing, and washing machines, and ovens, and vacuum cleaners, physical things that did more to liberate us (in my view) than most comments on the internet could ever hope to.
There is virtue in getting down to the basics of it, so to speak. Sometimes it's humbling, and perhaps being a bit more humble is the difference between constructive dialogue and a shouting match where every party is hurling insults at strawmen of their own construction.
There's little doubt in my mind that the politics of Silicon Valley are nearly entirely a distraction from technology, which, as should be obvious, is the only thing that will matter in 20 years time.
Ironically I think the reason for the politics is that there isn't enough to go around, people get more political, more conscious of class, race and sex when they sense opportunities becoming fewer and the stakes higher.
The most interesting thing out of Silicon Valley in the last five years has been the evolution of Elon Musk's companies - very physical, real world stuff aided and abetted by software. What is he always banging on about? "First Principals".
There exists this enormous pile of problems the working class have and few developers in Silicon Valley are working on anything related to them.
>I thought to myself: if a schoolchild worked this one day, they'd potentially learn some things. Like how some people can turn into shut-ins and how that's a bad thing. How smoking and drinking can help a person develop a mental sickness to this extent. Fairly sure they'd never forget it. Also: hey! Practical skills too.
That's something you learn pretty early in "first world" countries where military service is obligatory. Cleaning toilets for 100 people, picking up cigarette butts, obeying orders despite what you think about them and dealing with people from all walks of life is a valuable lesson. Doesn't help with smoking though :(
There's something to be said for that. It's always interesting how a natural disaster can bring a community together, often for the first time. Maybe it'd be nice if these sorts of things would be done in a more structured manner.
I was thinking something like this the other day. Home and office cleaners are typically 30-55 yo (in my experience), but work like that would be character-building for teenagers learning domestic skills, persistence, etc. So many wouldn't have the resilience, but it wouldn't be wasted trying to acquire some.
In respond to the person who deleted their message: Yes, it would be nice if Silicon Valley was weirder, my sense is that as it strives for professionalism it's ironically losing that quality even as it references diversity.
It must be like how Banks always talk of 'innovation' while they do no such thing.
What he wrote: "Men and women have different interests."
What everyone pretends he said: "Men and women have different abilities."