Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
&gt;  Edith: I disagree completely and utterly that the (yes, real) average differences between men and women map to being better or worse at certain jobs. Interest in certain jobs, certainly.<p>This is, I think, the key.  We can all recognize that there are REAL, <i>average</i> differences in <i>interests</i> between men and women, DEFINITELY driven by society&#x2F;culture, and <i>maybe</i> by biology&#x2F;genetics... BUT, this has absolutely no correlation with performance.  If fewer women are, on average, <i>interested</i> in software engineering, this absolutely does NOT mean that women software engineers are, on average, worse at their jobs.<p>The error so many &quot;Team-Damore&quot; men make is that they zealously stand behind the argument that &quot;Better-performing men are being overlooked in favor of worse-performing women&#x2F;minorities.&quot;  And yet there is absolutely no way to possibly back up that claim: can anyone clearly demonstrate over the course of a statistically significant number of hirings that most of the women candidates who were hired were A)chosen from a candidate pool that included at least one equivalently-or-more talented man; and B) that those men who were not picked would have been both better performing as individuals and better employees for the team&#x2F;company as a whole?  No. Nobody has shown this because it is, essentially, impossible to demonstrate.  Citing studies of character traits or interests of men and women &quot;on average&quot; does absolutely nothing to support claims A and B.  And so all these men end up doing is simply implying: &quot;well, I BELIEVE that all these <i>real</i> women coworkers of mine are worse than the hypothetical male candidate that wasn&#x27;t hired... <i>on average.</i>&quot;  Which is clearly an insult to your existing coworkers and toxic to your work environment.