Item — HN Reader

So, honest question. Suppose you work at a hospital, and 70% of the nurses are women. And you're coming under fire, and a lawsuit is pending, because this indicates discrimination.

Now suppose a coworker writes a piece saying roughly "Way fewer men apply for these positions. I suspect men are less interested in being nurses, so we have fewer male nurses, but we can't lower the bar just to make it 50-50. I think it's even possible that men just biologically enjoy nursing less on average, so trying to be 50-50 isn't a reasonable goal"

A) Should this coworker be fired for expressing this idea?

B) Is this argument a skip and hop away from "men are not suited to be nurses" ?

C) Does whether or not there actually are biological factors have any bearing on questions A/B ?

1 comments

Sure, honest answer. First off, saying 70% nurses are women does not indicate discrimination. Plenty of the jobs I've applied for as a woman are small startups with over 70% men but I've never thought that this was due to discrimination. We're talking here about a policy that Google engages in voluntarily.

So we know that according to the memo that Google seeks to reduce the number of "false negative" rejections of diversity candidates by paying more attention to those applications. This could be to help counteract discrimination that occurs during the process. This ends up with about 20% qualified women in these positions.

There is nothing here to indicate that the bar is being lowered (the interview process is just as grueling) or that 50-50 is the aim. But if men were being discriminated at when trying to get these nurses jobs, I'd have no problem whatsoever with the respective companies trying to reduce the number of false negatives during the hiring process. Or even just trying to hire more men to create an environment of more diversity among nurses. Those men who are hired there are still there because they want the job and are qualified to do it.

The problem with the biological argument is that historically it hasn't been used to say that "women are not inclined to do x,y,z" but rather "women are not suited to do it". So if there was a historical parallel with nursing and men and people in the past did not think they were capable of doing this job - I'd say people should be more sensitive about what they say in the work environment in our modern day.

A - Generally no, but if the memo was broadcast to the whole company and touched on this points due to the reasons expressed above - I think its ok for the company to take action in the way it deems appropriate.

B - Could be, if that was the prevailing belief system. Realistically though, its not a true parallel because I don't think many people believe that men are not capable of being nurses.

C - Not sure what this means. Whether they are biological factors or social ones should not be something thats asserted by a company. That's going into way too grey territory imo.

>> First off, saying 70% nurses are women does not indicate discrimination.

Totally agree.

As for 70%, that's a completely contrived number in this case. Think of it as 90% or whatever line-in-the-sand we need.

So Damore was concerned the bar was being lowered, and was concerned the goal was 50-50 ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" - links to document I don't have access to) ("Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."), which is where I came up with those elements.

>>> Or even just trying to hire more men to create an environment of more diversity among nurses.

I think we agree that it's probably okay to hire extra minority candidates, even for diversity sake. Not sure I'd do it, but I don't have too strong an opinion.

>>> A - Generally no, but if the memo was broadcast to the whole company and touched on this points due to the reasons expressed above - I think its ok for the company to take action in the way it deems appropriate.

This is where we go out of sync. It's my understanding that "broadcast" is a mischaracterization, as the memo wasn't sent to anybody, but posted on a public forum for open discussion. I also understand that google actively discussed such policies as diversity efforts, so I suspect he wasn't the only public memo.

And I also support the notion of at-will-employment in the abstract. That said, in practice when I think I see somebody saying X and getting fired because it's easy to misread X as Y, it scares me.

Regarding B, I guess my point is maybe those two propositions are close in your head ('women on average might not like engineering as much for biological reasons' VS 'women can't be engineers'), but they're miles apart in mine. And it's a scary world to me if you can be fired for saying something that isn't sexist, but seems like it leads to a slippery slope of sexism.

Addendum to my sibling comment, since HN won't let me edit it:

So the parent's concern does seem justified. It seems conceivable that Damore didn't have any beliefs that most would consider sexist, and didn't have any ill intentions, but was still fired. Hence the throwaway -- it feels like us men have to be extremely cautious when discussing gender.

But again, I recognize that discussing P risks promoting Q, which is the harmful stereotype, so perhaps it's for the best that we don't discuss the topic more freely.

You both make really good points, and I think you're both right.

Let P = "women are less inclined to be engineers" and Q = "women are not suited to be engineers".

For the sake of argument, let's assume the best in Damore. Assume he believes P but not Q, and that he was earnestly criticizing some company practices with the aim of improving them, not seeking attention or controversy. (I realize that many doubt this, but no one can definitively prove his intentions one way or another, so I don't think there's much point in debating it.)

Given those assumptions, can we all agree on the following?

- P is true, though it may be a socialized thing rather than an innate thing.

- Q is false, based on lots of anecdotal evidence.

- P does not imply Q.

- But Q, if it were true, would imply P. That is, hypothetically, not being skilled at engineering would give women a reason to avoid the profession.

- Consequently, to someone who hasn't entirely ruled out Q yet (either due to bias or lack of experience), P(Q|P) > P(Q).

(If the logic isn't clear, consider the analogy of P = "it's cloudy" and Q = "it's raining". It's currently cloudy but not raining. If someone hasn't been outdoors and I mention that it's cloudy, the probability of rain given their limited information increases.)

- So reinforcing P risks reinforcing Q, even if it isn't intentional. Since beliefs in Q can be very harmful to women, we should tread carefully when discussing P.

- Damore believes P.

- Damore's stance on Q is less clear. His essay had a blurb ("the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ") which seems to imply Q, or some variation thereof.

- If we give Damore the benefit of the doubt, we could interpret his stance on Q as follows. Men and women have various biological differences, and surely some of them have some effect on engineering ability. It's just unreasonable to assume that the aggregate difference in zero. It might be totally negligible though. It might also be in favor of women rather than men. Perhaps women are better at juggling multiple tasks, or their social skills make them more effective engineers within an organization.

- Although no one can say with certainty what Damore's intentions were, here's my take. He didn't realistically expect his essay to change Google's practices, but figured it would start an interesting debate. He knew it was a sensitive subject, but didn't expect a reaction of such magnitude, since his essay was mainly establishing P, and the facts are on his side there. He generally avoided the subject of Q, but he could have done a better job. Since his argument only depends on PνQ, he should have explicitly declared Q false (or at least irrelevant) and focused entirely on P.

- Morally speaking, it seems wrong fire employees based on uncertain interpretations of their intent. So he shouldn't have been fired for his stance on Q, because it wasn't clear what that stance was exactly. And he shouldn't have been fired for intentionally stirring controversy, because it's not clear if that was his intent.

- Even if Damore had the best of intentions, it's still possible to justify his firing based on negligence about the effect of his essay. I don't think he was grossly negligent though, since he sent his essay to a mailing list where controversial discussions are common.