Reply to post: Re: Oh how El Reg is fallen

Memo man Damore is back – with lawyers: Now Google sued for 'punishing' white men

ratfox

Re: Oh how El Reg is fallen

It was well argued, moderate and does not contain any of the sentiments indicated in the El Reg article.

I could agree that it does not contain those sentiments, but I have to disagree with well-argued and moderate.

The thesis of the paper is that women make choices that are different from men, because they are on average biologically different from men. The conclusion is that Google should stop their diversity efforts, and not make their employees follow anti-bias training.

The paper does not claim that the biological differences are significant enough to explain all or even most of the difference in results between men and women. The paper does not give any argument that bias does not exist. The paper does not explain why the status quo is optimal and should be left as is. Without these arguments, all that's left of the paper is the conclusion that the author wanted to reach, and a single factoid that generally goes in the right direction.

This is in fact rather similar to what right-wing comments accuse the global warming argument from being: A single explanation (carbon pollution) is given for an effect (temperatures are going up); all other explanations are dismissed, and the conclusion is imposed.

Completely omitted: Diversity means racial diversity as well as gender diversity. It is well-documented that resumes wearing names that sound African-American are rejected more often than those wearing names that sound white. This is not only unfair, it reduces the pool of candidates to hire from, which means it is detrimental to businesses. Which is why businesses want their employees to follow anti-bias training. There is not a single word in the article that contradicts this; yet the article somehow concludes that Google should stop its efforts to raise diversity, and again that includes racial diversity just as much as gender diversity.

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