The Google memo isn’t sexist or anti-diversity, it’s science
This defense of the &quot;manifesto&quot; is flawed just like the others. It picks out a small subset of the claims made in the document, discards the context and all the other claims, and then harangues us for having a problem with &quot;science&quot;. I could argue &quot;water is composed of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule, so women are bad at software development&quot;, and my argument would just be a difference of degree worse than hers.<p>We can talk straightforwardly about what makes the document problematic: whatever the validity of the &quot;scientific&quot; claims it makes about gender differences, there is no support (and likely no validity) to the connections it then makes to software development work. Despite that unjustified leap, the document goes on to suggest strongly that women working at Google are less qualified than men. There is no science Debrah Soh can cite to back up that assertion, however much she might want to.<p>Anyone can wrap an incendiary statement up in a pile of banal sentiment and ambiguous appeals to social science. When challenged, refocus the debate on the truisms and the footnotes and pretend you didn&#x27;t write the nasty stuff you hid in the middle. And, as we can see, plenty of very smart people will fall for the trick.<p>Gender equity has been improving in the United States for several generations. As that has occurred, female participation in STEM fields (and in the professions, like medicine and law) has expanded dramatically. Many science fields are now approaching parity. Most have more than twice as much participation as computer science. That includes the field of mathematics, which is closely related to computer science and is certainly more intellectually challenging than &quot;computer science&quot; as practiced in the industry.<p>Among all STEM fields, computer science is distinguished for <i>losing</i> the participation of women over the last 10 years.<p>Unless the women of 1950 are somehow biologically different from those of 2017, the author&#x27;s theory will somehow have to address the fact that her argument would have predicted the fields or law, medicine, biochem, mathematics, astronomy, statistics, accounting, and actuary would all be bereft of women over the 20th century --- obviously, the opposite occurred, despite the sexual revolution that was immediately to come.<p>The author of this article discusses a correlation between increasing gender equity and decreased STEM participation that does not appear in the evidence. There&#x27;s a reason she does that: if you don&#x27;t stipulate that correlation, the argument against gender bias in computer science has to confront another damning fact, which is that gender disparity in the field isn&#x27;t global. Unless women in Asia are somehow biologically different than those of the US, her argument needs some way to address the fact that women make up the majority of STEM majors in many of those cultures.<p>Reading this article and then this thread, I find that there&#x27;s really only two aspects of it that HN finds persuasive: the headline&#x27;s appeal to &quot;science&quot;, and the footnote observing that the author is a female scientist. That&#x27;s not enough. Everything in between those things is wildly off.<p>In discussions about gender parity in CS, the word &quot;preference&quot; is a coded appeal to the Just World Hypothesis. There is a yawning chasm between neuroscience findings about &quot;agreeableness&quot; and &quot;stress tolerance&quot; and suitability for any particular kind of white-collar symbol-manipulation work. Ms. Soh must intuitively understand that, but mentions it not once in her piece, instead pretending that observations about the kinds of toys children play with allow us to reflect participation statistics directly into real preferences about work. Shenanigans.