I agree that the document blurs the line between preference/aptitude and is not totally clear which is one of the reasons overall it is a mess.
Nonetheless, many of the statements in "Personality differences", "Men's higher drive for status", and "Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap", especially the stuff about women being more prone to anxiety, liking part-time work, caring more about people than things, etc. speak strongly to aptitude for engineering, given the context of the document.
EDIT: Also, I reject the implication that the claim "women have less of a preference for engineering" is not in and of itself a harmful stereotype.
1. The memo uses the word "preference" without ever establishing whether it's talking about free choice or choice after discouragement, and so is flagrantly begging the question.
2. It's simply false that the memo makes no connection between supposed preference and aptitude, as it builds to a section about the "harms of diversity" that includes a direct claim that women in Google's workforce are less capable than men.
> It's simply false that the memo makes no connection between supposed preference and aptitude, as it builds to a section about the "harms of diversity" that includes a direct claim that women in Google's workforce are less capable than men.
I have been confused why you and others have been repeating this, but after re-reading the section "The Harm of Google’s biases", I think I see your point now.
Damore does not say that all women who work at Google are unqualified, but he does imply that there are fewer women who are qualified, and that by trying to mine that population too heavily, Google is hiring women who are, on average, less qualified than the men are, on average. Do I have that right?
Damore is smart enough not to come out and say directly that he believes all women to be less qualified; instead, he just strings together a series of assertions that leaves reasonable people with only one conclusion, which is that the women at Google are beneficiaries of a lowered bar that results in the women at Google being on average less qualified than the men.
I have very little patience with arguments rooted in "but that's not exactly what he said", because I have been on message boards for approximately the entire literate span of my 40 years on this planet, and the technique of couching inflammatory assertions in half-hearted hedges and deliberately ambiguous abstractions is the oldest trick in the book.
He allocated a whole subhed to his point, and the whole document builds to it. The subhed is: "the harm of Google's biases". The biases he's referring to are towards women and against men. The harm he refers to is "a lowered bar". His point is plain.
(I'm confident people aren't going to like this comment, but it is what I honestly believe, after what I believe to be pretty significant consideration, and no part of this thread is made better by me pretending otherwise.)
Oh, so you know what he is actually thinking even though he doesn't say it and says things that are contrary to it. I see.
This, too, helps me understand the outrage. Thank you for being honest.
(I do hope the 'thank you' above can be read by people in a calm, snark-less voice. It is genuine. I appreciate Ptacek being forthright. I learned from it. It really does make the thread better and furthers the conversation in a productive way.)
> For what it's worth: your thanks might be intellectually honest, but your summary of my argument is not.
I am very open to being corrected.
When you said, "Damore is smart enough not to come out and say directly that he believes all women to be less qualified", I took it to mean that you think Damore actually believes that all women are unqualified and arguing about populations is a just a smokescreen for what he is really thinking. This is helpful to understand because it means that you don't think the memo is actually about population-level differences and so exploring that argument is a waste of time.
But if you didn't actually mean that, I misunderstood and apologize.
> The memo uses the word "preference" without ever establishing whether it's talking about free choice or choice after discouragement, and so is flagrantly begging the question.
Of course it's talking about free choice. Introducing "discouragement" in the equation is itself begging the question : it's an extra hypothesis which is unnecessary in presence of a simpler, more fundamental explanation (like this one https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/ ). Occam's Razor 101.
> includes a direct claim that women in Google's workforce are less capable than men.
For the n million-th time : the memo said nothing about aptitude for engineering, just preference.