O most exalted robotitude: first of all, my apologies for my silence of late. It has been far too long since I last left any evidence of dropping by the Castle. Real life, you know, has a way of intruding on things…

At any rate, I did want to offer a modest corrective to your take on Mr. Damore’s now-infamous memo. Having spent my adult life in STEM academia and IT, I agree with the vast majority of what you had to say, especially about Mr. Damore’s (apparent) naive idea that his approach was likely to either end well for him or be helpful for Google. However, I would like to point out that he didn’t actually say that “biological differences hinder women from being good developers” – that is, at most, an implicit inference from what he did say. He did, at one point, say that biology affects “preferences and abilities” but all of his examples were pointed toward the (valid, in my experience) differences in preferences between men and women. Had he asked me for advice beforehand, I would have suggested to him (in addition to suggesting that he not take this approach at all) that he remove “and abilities” from that line, since it didn’t affect his subsequent argument at all. The only example he gave subsequently that could be argued to be an ability (or disability) is his reference to neuroticism, which, in the form in which it exists in the scientific literature, could also be characterized as a preference (preferring a low-stress vs. high-stress environment). I would also say that anyone who thinks that being neurotic is an obstruction to being a successful programmer must not have met many programmers. It may, however, be somewhat detrimental to success in software development as currently practiced in large corporate environments.Having taught numerous female mathematics students and raised two daughters currently working in STEM, I just don’t see any differences in native abilities between men and women. I do, however, see significant differences (at the population level, not the individual level) in preferences. This is also consonant with what I know of the scientific literature on the subject. Preferences do, however, affect which skills one is willing to work to acquire, and that seems to begin to play out, certainly by college (and possibly quite a bit earlier), in the overall low representation of women in computer science (and, to a lesser extent, engineering in general). This will inevitably affect the gender makeup of the population from which Google is hiring. I would point out, though, that mathematics undergraduates are currently nearly 50/50 (though most of the female majors are intending secondary math teachers, so that statistic is somewhat misleading), while biology and veterinary science are overwhelmingly female, so it appears not to be STEM as such, but very specific to CS/engineering. In fact, one way in which Google could increase the gender diversity of their applicant pool is to recruit more heavily from the biological sciences (ironically, Mr. Damore himself is trained in biology, so I’m surprised that this seems not to have occurred to him).