TIL: male vs female brain

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manifesto-isnt-sexist-or-anti-diversity-its-science/article35903359/

new research from the field of genetics shows that testosterone alters the programming of neural stem cells, leading to sex differences in the brain even before it’s finished developing in utero.

Also on collective male & female intelligence:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6004/686

In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.

Awesome!

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Why the infamous ex-googler is wrong both on form and substance*

A. On form.

He suggests that hiring additional female sw engineers and executives hurts Google business performance, but offers no empirical evidence to support the thesis. That is, he shows no effort whatsoever to correlate, e.g. the number of female hires with any kind of business performance indicators, either at a unit or corporate level. Putting forward a thesis without relevant evidence to support it is bad form.


B. On substance.

He claims that on average, women exhibit certain psychological traits, which in his opinion make women less suitable for sw engineering and executive jobs. He doesn't show that Google employee population is representative of the population in general. Even a cursory look at Google employee demographics shows that it is significantly different from the US population at large wrt to sex, age, education attainment, ethnicity, race, etc. In short, he doesn't demonstrate that evidence he cites applies to Google and its employment policies.

Overall, it's a dumb paper, although I'm not sure whether he should've been fired for being out of his depth on business and demographics issues. One can argue that firing him was justified because it prevented resignations of multiple qualified Google employees.

*The original paper can be found here. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf