[QUOTE=Arctic-Zone;44954494]Obviously there are differences in brain structure between sexes - that's mostly in areas governing hormones and stuff. Any differences in behavioural wiring can't be major enough that men have a natural affinity for computers and women are innately drawn to other things. Like if we had a blank-slate society and no gender roles or dividing influences imposed by that society, men and women would split up between professions pretty evenly ON AVERAGE, not all the time.[/QUOTE]
You can't say something like that without providing some kind of study, that may be what your intuition says but it's not what the studies show..
[url]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2004.00349.x/abstract;jsessionid=0DA65A1C319271C513CAD6D74FAD653E.f04t03?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false[/url]
It's not something specific as interest in computers, and there are definitely outliers, but it's simply a lie that there are no biological reasons for the differences, in short "we had a blank-slate society and no gender roles or dividing influences imposed by that society, men and women would split up between professions pretty evenly ON AVERAGE" it's false.
This isn't really "Google's" diversity problem, it's society's. Google can't do [I]that[/I] much to change up the work force (the gender department seems easier to fix, though), this is really something on a structural level. Cheaper (or rather, free) college education, more support for poor families with kids in school, and probably a lot of other things are the way to fix this.
These statistics just tell me that White and Asian guys have better résumés.
A company like Google is just going to hire the overqualified every single time, because they're such a prestigious company that they can stand to do that.
Its a shame companies can't have/don't want target markets anymore. If you had a userbase of 60% white people or 70% male most companies would try target them. Instead its now "Oh no! We have a group of people that use our service more than another! How unfair!"
Aren't girls the ones who peer pressure their friends to go into more "girly" fields? So lets all shit on women now because the "white man" with his superpowers of racism/sexism/everything negative is off the table.
Also, I work in a place with 100% white man workforce, sue me.
[QUOTE=Midas22;44954852]Its a shame companies can't have/don't want target markets anymore. If you had a userbase of 60% white people or 70% male most companies would try target them. Instead its now "Oh no! We have a group of people that use our service more than another! How unfair!"[/QUOTE]
Well this thread is about workforce, not target market.
[QUOTE=niel12_5D;44947659]I have no idea what you're saying.
[editline]29th May 2014[/editline]
I'm very aware of how it turned out.
The point of this is Google is like "OK we want our company to reflect the demographics of our society because that's how you foster positive community relations and blah blah HR speak". Now the question is how do we accomplish this and that's a whole 'nother step.
Genders should be split 50/50 because that's about where our society is and if there's something stopping it from being 50/50 then we should try to rectify that, even if you personally think that's impossible.[/QUOTE]
what do you mean by rectify?
I don't understand why anything would ever be perfectly evenly split, I don't think we should force that. people should be able to do whatever they like, and we should encourage stem and science in more girls, but even if we do, we shouldn't force a 50/50 split in genders or race or anything. it's just nonsense.
[QUOTE=MaxOfS2D;44953025]
[url]http://www.tedxparis.com/talks/catherine-vidal-le-cerveau-a-t-il-un-sexe/[/url] (sorry for this source being in French)
This is from a reputed neurobiologist and research leader at the Pasteur institute in Paris.
Her research shows that the brain does not differ among sexes, and that whatever insignificant differences are largely outmatched by deviation within the group.
In other words, the difference within all women and within all men will always be much, much, much more than the difference between men and women. You're making the mistake of interpreting these differences as categorical rather than rather as overlapping distributions.
Never underestimate this thing called "neuroplasticity".
And last, [URL="http://www.wired.com/2013/12/getting-in-a-tangle-over-men-and-womens-brain-wiring/"]Regarding so-called differences in "brain wiring"...[/URL][/QUOTE]
So if there are no differences in the brain between sexes, how do you explains transgender people? And how do you explain this?
[IMG]http://lizdaybyday.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/mtf_brain_scan_differences.png[/IMG]
Why do transgender people feel like they are born in a wrong body? Are you saying they just feel like it? Are you saying that it is by choice?
And how do you explain that babies as young as 1 day old already decide between masculine or feminine toys?
Why do women and men behave differently? Why are men more aggressive, why do they have more testosterone, there have to be differences in the brain that lead to this.
You give me a source which only exists in french, and I never learnt french so I can´t look into it. There are tons of sources in english which back up the claims that there are significant differences between female and male brains.
And to your "Regarding so-called differences in "brain wiring"...", you should really look into the sources there.
[QUOTE]You may have heard there’s a new study that claims to have found that men’s and women’s brains are wired differently. Published in the respected journal PNAS, the researchers based at the University of Pennsylvania used a technique known as diffusion tensor imaging to plot the brain wiring maps of 949 people aged 8 to 22. Ragini Verma and her colleagues said their results showed “fundamentally different connectivity patterns in males and females.”
Specifically, they reported that men’s brains had more connectivity within each brain hemisphere, whereas women’s brains had more connectivity across the two hemispheres. Moreover, they stated or implied, in their paper and in statements to the press, that these findings help explain behavioral differences between the sexes, such as that women are intuitive thinkers and good at multi-tasking whereas men are good at sports and map-reading.
Not surprisingly the world’s media lapped this up. “The connections that mean girls are made for multi-tasking,” said the Daily Mail. “… hardwired difference between male and female brains could explain why men are ‘better at map reading’,” announced The Independent. Your own newspaper probably said something similar.[/QUOTE]
This is the part which backs up my claims.
[QUOTE]Make no mistake, the technical wizardry involved in creating a brain wiring diagram – researchers call it a “connectome” – is awesome. I’m sure Leonardo Da Vinci, who used hot wax to create a cast of the brain’s ventricles (the fluid-filled hollows), would have been mightily impressed. But unfortunately, this wiring study and the subsequent press coverage has got a lot of things in a tangle. First of all, the differences in brain wiring between the sexes were not as noteworthy as the researchers imply. They say they are “fundamental,” but other experts have crunched the numbers and they state that although the differences are statistically significant, they are actually not substantive. And remember, these are average differences with a lot of overlap. It’s possible that my male brain is wired more like an average female brain than yours, even if you’re a woman.[/QUOTE]
Then there is this. The link here leads to [url]http://figshare.com/articles/Illustrative_effect_sizes_for_sex_differences/866802[/url] . "figshare is an online digital repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, images, and videos.[1] It is free to upload content and free to access, in adherence to the principle of open data."
It is by no means a site which can be used as a source when it itself doesnt have any sources like wikipedia does. Everybody could post something there and claim that this stuff is true. If you looked into the comments you would see that this is simply pseudoscience. The author itself even said this [QUOTE]I am grateful that Drs Dodge and Mooperson have taken the time to engage with this. I hope I can be forgiven for only selectively responding here.
Most importantly, I'd like to clarify that I did not and do not consider the original paper to be fraudulent in any way. My argument is that I personally do not believe the effect sizes are consistent with the idea that men's and women's brains are fundamentally "wired" differently[/QUOTE] He personally believes that. BELIEVES. This is supposed to be scientific! You can´t just believe up some facts, you have to use the scientific method.
[QUOTE]A second key thing to bear in mind is that the new paper did not in fact look at behavioural differences between the sexes – things like intuitive thinking and multi-tasking. The researchers are only guessing about how any wiring differences might be related to behavioral differences between the sexes. They have published past research that tested the same sample on various tasks, but as Cordelia Fine points out, the sex differences they found were “trivially small” and they didn’t look at the kind of activities being cited in the media, such as map-reading.[/QUOTE]
The second paragraph has a link to an article by Cordelia Fine, which says that a new study found that sex differences are "trivially small". Lets look at the abstract of said study:
[QUOTE]Objective: Examine age group effects and sex differences by applying a comprehensive computerized battery of identical behavioral measures linked to brain systems in youths that were already genotyped. Such information is needed to incorporate behavioral data as neuropsychological “biomarkers” in large-scale genomic studies. Method: We developed and applied a brief computerized neurocognitive battery that provides measures of performance accuracy and response time for executive-control, episodic memory, complex cognition, social cognition, and sensorimotor speed domains. We tested a population-based sample of 3,500 genotyped youths ages 8–21 years. Results: Substantial improvement with age occurred for both accuracy and speed, but the rates varied by domain. The most pronounced improvement was noted in executive control functions, specifically attention, and in motor speed, with some effect sizes exceeding 1.8 standard deviation units. The least pronounced age group effect was in memory, where only face memory showed a large effect size on improved accuracy. [B]Sex differences had much smaller effect sizes but were evident, with females outperforming males on attention, word and face memory, reasoning speed, and all social cognition tests and males outperforming females in spatial processing and sensorimotor and motor speed.[/B] These sex differences in most domains were seen already at the youngest age groups, and age group × sex interactions indicated divergence at the oldest groups with females becoming faster but less accurate than males. Conclusions: The results indicate that cognitive performance improves substantially in this age span, with large effect sizes that differ by domain. The more pronounced improvement for executive and reasoning domains than for memory suggests that memory capacities have reached their apex before age 8. [B]Performance was sexually modulated and most sex differences were apparent by early adolescence.[/B] (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)[/QUOTE]
If you read the bold sentence, the study doesnt claim that at all.
I don´t have much more time today to read through the other stuff, but I will post an article which claims that male and female braines are really built differently:
[url]http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/male-and-female-brains-really-are-built-differently/281962/[/url]
Scientific theories don´t have to be right, there can be mistakes which lead to results that are simply false. So we have to look at how many researchers come to same conclusion. We have to look at all the information that we can gather. And when I look at all the sources at [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_gender_differences[/url] it screams that there are biological differences.
And now to an example in reallife. Norway is the most gender equal country in the world. So how come that the percentage of women going into male dominated fields is even lower than in other western countries?
[quote]Why do transgender people feel like they are born in a wrong body? Are you saying they just feel like it? Are you saying that it is by choice? [/quote]
because they feel that way, they look in the mirror and their self-image doesn't match the image in the mirror, its not by choice it just happens
[editline]30th May 2014[/editline]
[quote]Why do women and men behave differently? Why are men more aggressive, why do they have more testosterone, there have to be differences in the brain that lead to this. [/quote]
women and men have different types of hormones, they don't necessarily behave differently 99% of the time though, and its not the brain that lead to the differences in testosterone vs estrogen those hormones are produced by the body's glands naturally to regulate many other things besides just reproduction and growth,
on a side note, have you had sex-ed because you seem very un-informed
[QUOTE=Beetle179;44946896]You're absolutely right, companies should hire the most qualified candidates. But that's not the problem, although for some reason people here love to call on that strawman.
No, the problem is in the [I]reason why[/I] men ultimately end up being more qualified than women. It's cultural; at a young age, kids are exposed to such social constructs that discourage them from participating in certain fields, even if that's what they're interested in. So a young girl who loves computers and could potentially end up working in comp-sci ends up not wanting to alienate herself from her peers, so she settles for something she didn't want -- because that's the culturally acceptable/normal thing to do. There's nothing actually [I]preventing[/I] her from sticking with it; the argument isn't that women aren't [I]able[/I] to enter such fields (though some, not myself, may argue that), rather that culturally, they're discouraged from doing so.[/QUOTE]
That's kind of true. Though, they're discouraged from taking anything from the STEM field because it's not flexible in comparison to the subject they're introduced to in their childhood. If you glance at the curriculum between the humanities and the engineering major, the engineering majors are generally more packed/busy.
I really don't buy the argument that women have "evolved" to avoid technology fields, but more importantly I don't like the message that it sends, that women just shouldn't be in these fields.
You can't say "Women can join these fields if they want to", then follow that up with "But they just aren't biologically suited to them".
Edit: I'm involved in computing because I was an inquisitive kid and computers were more interesting to me than books, not because I'm more "genetically suited" to it because I'm a male.
[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;44957077]I really don't buy the argument that women have "evolved" to avoid technology fields, but more importantly I don't like the message that it sends, that women just shouldn't be in these fields.
You can't say "Women can join these fields if they want to", then follow that up with "But they just aren't biologically suited to them".
Edit: I'm involved in computing because I was an inquisitive kid and computers were more interesting to me than books, not because I'm more "genetically suited" to it because I'm a male.[/QUOTE]
You are misunderstanding the topic.
What science tells us is that women can join those fields if they want to, but on average, and given the free choice, they will choose humanities/biology related majors instead of engineering ones.
No one is saying they aren't suited to them, they are just as suited to them as men - this has nothing to do with the ability to do a job.
[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;44957077]I really don't buy the argument that women have "evolved" to avoid technology fields, but more importantly I don't like the message that it sends, that women just shouldn't be in these fields.
You can't say "Women can join these fields if they want to", then follow that up with "But they just aren't biologically suited to them".
Edit: I'm involved in computing because I was an inquisitive kid and computers were more interesting to me than books, not because I'm more "genetically suited" to it because I'm a male.[/QUOTE]
it's ridiculous that you could think someone would have "evolved" to avoid technology fields considering i cant think of a feasible selection pressure
in any case, if you bring in biology (and there is always a little biology somewhere influencing all human behaviour), you gotta know it's a lot more complicated than what you mused
women can sign up for these jobs, but the reasons they don't are rooted in economics, culture, biology, etc
[QUOTE=Rangergxi;44953869]I imagine its because of the fact that African Americans are generally poorer and have less access to technology or less opportunities to take courses on it. We should fix that by working on the poor people problem.
If Google isn't actively discriminating I seriously don't see any problem. Forcing diversity is just stupid.[/QUOTE]
First paragraph of Google's diversity report:
[quote]We’re not where we want to be when it comes to diversity. And it is hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.[/quote]
They [i]want[/i] to fix it.
[editline]31st May 2014[/editline]
If it appears that you're alienating an entire segment of the population, who knows what kind of talent you're missing out on? It's in Google's interest to do something about the lack of diversity.
Show me the demographics of graduates in computer science and technology fields and I guarantee you Google is actually more diverse than should be expected.
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