Thank you for sharing the information.

  1. What does “the number of participants is limited” mean, limited to who (certainly, software engineers are in)? Are women allowed to be in this discussion group set by the company? Are the participants allowed to share with other employees outside of the group? If they find something shocking, they will.

Trolling and harassment applies to any number of participants even if it’s just 2 people. Men to men, women to women as well.

But sure, he sounds like an idiot who didn’t realize what he was doing rather than somebody having a malicious intent.

2. It indeed has LOTS of links (even excessively), most of them garbage. I took a liberty to click through and sort them.

2 broken links (1 is probably internal)

1 link to a private Google group (no permission)

1 link to Google Drive (his? no permission)

1 Google search

5 links to Wikipedia (nothing is wrong looking up definitions, but the argument about jobs in garbage collection is pretty weird, no triple pun intended)

7 links to media — The Atlantic, WSJ, The New Yorker, New York Post and some City Journal (the latter one is criticising “science denial”)

6 links to some web sites, whatever they are — “The Righteous Mind”, “Quillette”, “Heterodox Academy”, “Chicago Reader”, “Boston Review”, “Society for Personal and Social Psychology”

1 link to a Wordpress blog

1 link to a site marketing a book

2 links to popular Science — Scientific American blog and Psychology Today

8 papers:

1 paper about media bias (we just can’t forget about the media, can we?)

2 papers about gender differences in personality

1 paper about mate selection (Wow!)

1 paper about testosterone related to prosocial/antisocial status enhancing behaviour in males (is it about him?)

1 paper about work-life balance (from a site of some University in Czech Republic, by a controversial British sociologist, he probably searched real hard. Although, I’m not sure if he fully read it “However, the differences between men and women’s career goals are smaller than sometimes thought.”)

2 papers (“papers”? I’m not sure how to call them) from a self-publishing site

2 graphs with data of unknown origin

The total inventory is 35 links, out of which 3 might be called relevant research, 8.6%.

With all those links, it’s still a pretty lame document for somebody who used to be in Science, although he probably spent a lot of time writing it. It feels that he worked this “research” backwards, googling links supporting preconceived ideas rather than asking questions and looking for answers based on ALL available research (he should’ve become a lawyer if he likes the “backwards” approach. Or write fake news). He’s also very indiscreet with his sources, whatever comes up in Google and supports his point is ok; and, probably, didn’t read all of it himself, just keyword search.

Overall, the choice of examples and links (as I opened all of those links first and then was closing one by one) feels a lot like MRA resentment disguised as a “political diversity discussion”, rather than anything else.

If somebody wants to check if Google is overreaching with its diversity initiative, they would build a model determining what would be a correct gender representation accounting for all possible factors. Say, 10% female engineers per 90% male (Google is overreaching). Or, 40% female engineers per 60% male (Google is underperforming). But this “scientist” doesn’t even seem to understand that data is quantifiable.

    Jane Doe, programmer

    Written by

    Silicon Valley, California