The universe does not hear the word NO.

So, instead of saying something positive, such as "Build Great Things", they chose a phrase that would make them the company that the CIA wanted them to be.  "Don't Be Evil."  Which, the universe, and your sub conscious turns into 
## Do Be Evil.

In which they are.  Getting people killed and imprisoned in China, just so they can have market share?  Filtering out specific people from the search results.  
They are being evil.

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I do not assume about quotas and hiring, I speak from experience of quotas and hiring.

Or how frustrating it is to work on code where she named all the variables after her cats.

It is not that women can't, its that hiring standards are lowered to make quota.  

A typical story from an engineering company.  100s of resumes from men, 3 from women.  And two of them are completely not qualified for the position.

And, so, this "toxic environment" that women get to complain about, men are actually experiencing.  Do not talk to women, do not compliment women, have a pocket recorder going whenever work has you dealing with a woman.  And further, because of those lowered standards for hiring, men are the ones left to pick up the slack.

You're welcome! Glad you made that clearer. I think people grab ahold of openings like "biological differences" and try to extrapolate "can write my name in the snow with pee" to "better spatial thinking".

Respectfully, after reading the first half of each debater (I confess, it's long enough that I don't plan to finish it.), I think you're dismissing Spelke undeservedly, and I'm not sure why. The results of at least the portion of the debate I read, would incline me to retain my notions of where gender differences are relevant and where they aren't. And the example of testosterone that you give as if it's the only factor determining  both prison populations and fortune 500 CEOs seems overly simplistic. Non-white people are also over represented in the prison population, are you going to claim that's not because of social pressures? I don't reject the idea that testosterone is correlated with risk-taking, but the conclusions you draw are leaps, not steps.
I doubt we'll agree until or unless one of us actually makes the issue the core of our scientific investigations. Otherwise, it seems like there's plenty of scientists on both sides of the controversy for either of us to cite. As both the debaters mentioned, it is a very political topic, so divorcing politics from the science isn't something I'd believe whomever I'm discussing it with capable of, and I confess, I don't think it's possible for me either.

I will furthermore point out that the site itself mentions "Both presented scientific evidence with the realization and understanding that there was nothing obvious about how the data was to be interpreted."

So... even they don't think it's obvious.

More to your point, though, both debaters agree there are biological sex differences. The significance of those is what's debatable, and that's where I think you and I differ.

Hey Sean! Glad you found this post as I was curious of your thoughts on it.

I finally listened to all of that Pinker/Spelke debate today. I'm curious what you think about the counter arguments made by Elizabeth Spelke such as parents who perceive male and female babies differently given tasks they objectively accomplish the same? Or, when dealing with the averages (not the exceptional CEO examples), women are perceived as less hard working or productive if, again, objectively it's not the case.

We're like fish in water trying to run experiments on how much the water impacts us. There's no clear way to fully determine the influence of nurture but we _can_ demonstrate how it's unequal in ways which don't match objective reality, i.e. the way we treat people is actually causing harm, and we can do something about it as a species.

The real issues being discussed here aren't "Are men and women different biologically?" Both Pinker and Spelke (and anyone else, really) says "Yes, of course!" What matters here is the context and if those differences impact why women have not been treated equally as men for so long. Do those differences have much of anything to do with the discussion at hand dealing with sexism in technology and if so, how do we know it's related to nature and not nurture without committing a naturalistic fallacy?

If we _know_ nurture plays a significant role and we _know_ we can actually do something about that by education, shaming, social pressures, rewards, punishments, etc, etc... then we at least have a path towards a better future where women are free to do whatever they want and they will (ideally) be judged by their abilities, not their sex/gender. If we're stuck on debating the impact of physical differences such as hormones and chemicals, how can we tease apart the role of epigenetics and gene expression? How can we know how much of the physical differences we're pointing to are a result of neural plasticity after a lifetime of lived experiences within a culture that may be misogynistic?

At the same time, we should be cautious starting with physical differences and then extrapolating from them causality when, in controlled settings dealing with priming and such, we can directly show causality. Historically related to both race and sex, we've seen how starting with the argument that physical differences play a role has led to some really, really awful conclusions. Not only did they turn out to be scientifically unsound, but they caused direct harm by further changing or reinforcing the perceptions which may be much more influential in causing discrimination.

I really like Pinker and I liked his book The Blank Slate. Just as he describes himself as a feminist, I've seen you describe yourself in similar ways, wanting to empower women to be and do anything they want and most importantly to thrive within their strengths without trying to conform to a self-image put on them by society which may not fit biological reality. That's a wonderful message which I do think should be spread. Unfortunately, I think it gets hijacked a bit by some who currently profit from a disproportionate amount of power and influence over society and don't want to see the status quo change. They want to continue controlling and defining how women are perceived in order to maintain power, even if that means granting women a new sense of self-discovery and identity which is, again, still controlled in many ways by the same classic white, male stereotype power role.

Given the waters we swim in, to say men are better than women at getting CEO jobs may have very little to do with biology and more to do with those who are already in charge and get to set the rules. What if cooperation is more advantageous than competition? Would it then make sense to have more women with lower testosterone in charge of making decisions (if we follow that testosterone argument)? The point here is we haven't yet talked about what we prefer in society, the philosophy of what "good" looks like, before we've jumped to explaining the way things are using things which can remove responsibility from harmful actors.

Most people who are passionate about this discussion are more interested in figuring out what we can do to align things along how they'd like them to be (i.e. women, minorities, etc being treated based on their ability, not their gender/racial identity).

If the answer is, "Well, we're just born that way and that's how it is" there'd be no discussion to have. Since we can provable show how much our own perception changes things, it makes sense to focus on the things we can change and go from there.

Exactly! Many don't want to work in these fields! Even when it comes to programming. I am not trying to stereotype, but as the "Misogynist Manifesto" made clear, women are more interested in front-end people work. Which seems to be supported by statistics about Women who own businesses. Those businesses tend to be Retail and Service, heavily focused on... drum roll...

people! "Gender is a social construct" but biology is scientifically based. And biology is why the male individuals do not develop ovaries, and females do not grow testes. And biology also affects the mind. 

this article came out before PC BS really hit the fan, trigger warnings
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/201402/brain-differences-between-genders

(someone should tell the old man who wrote this article that Gender is a socially imposed prison put over the entity's free expression.)

Lots of implied argument strings go into both of our comments, so I'll back up.

I'm presuming you read the initial manifesto.  The one that Yonatan Zunger was responding to.

Maybe I read a different manifesto than everyone else.  Because the one I read bore little resemblance to what Yonatan Zunger and everyone else calling it a "screed" seemed to have read.  I didn't read one that said, at any point, that women were not built to be coders or engineers.  The manifesto itself was not really addressing that.

Rather, the manifesto was responding to the culture of Google, the culture that was going out of its way to prove that anyone can be anything, and using large amounts of political correctness, implied and overt pressure, and reverse discrimination to prove it.

The events at Google are, in a microcosm, a mirror of the cultural war going on in this country.  On the one hand, you have people who believe that people should be left alone to be who they are, and who are completely comfortable with the historical reality that women and men tend to drift into roles that are different but complementary -- none is better than any other, but men and women tend to approach things differently.  And then, you have that same idea but taken way too far, in which women are told that because historically they occupied a certain role that they are incapable of handling any other role.

On the other side, you have the group that says that anyone can be anything IF THEY ARE GOOD AT IT, and that gender shouldn't automatically define our possibilities.  And then you have that same idea but also taken way too far, that anything less than equal representation in all things represents discrimination, and that force and reverse discrimination must be used to counteract this initial discrimination.  

The point of the manifesto was not that women don't belong in certain roles.  At no point did the writer say this.  In fact, the writer went out of his/her way to repeatedly reiterate that they were talking about tendencies and generalizations.  Their point was instead that the cultures, the societies of men and women, are different, and that while some of these differences are indeed due to societal pressure, some of it also comes from innate differences.  And that Google, in its left leaning drive to prove that everyone can do anything and being willing to use force to make it turn out that way, may actually be hurting the very system they are trying to help.  That google, in its push to correct past problems, has actually over corrected and veered way too far in the other direction.

Which is, of course, in a microcosm the whole argument for and against cultural marxism.

Classical marxism believed that history consisted of conflict between the value producing working class and a fraudulent owner class that rode them like rented mules, and that transition to a much more egalitarian, peaceful, and productive society could be had once this conflict was decided in favor of the working class, and that the force of the state had to be used initially to overcome longstanding unhealthy bias in society towards the owner class, but that this force could and would melt away once everyone was equal.

History did not work out this way.

So the marxist idea moved on from focus on the means of production to society in general, and rebooted itself around the idea that the course and form society takes represents conflict between repressive cultural groups and marginalized groups that they ride like rented mules, and that transition to a much more peaceful, egalitarian, productive society can be had once these repressive groups are put in their place, and that the force of the state is necessary to overcome longstanding bias that society has against these marginalized groups, but that once everyone is equal, then force and the state can just melt away.

So, the whole manifesto and response to it are basically the conflict between those who are for and those who are against the idea of cultural marxism, being played out before our eyes.

There are those who see a future ahead in which the traditional family is shed, parenting becomes much more amorphous and serially monogamous, and society organized through the political system essentially takes over the role of village.  We all submit to become part of a larger collective, which makes us more free because society takes over the role of responsibility from us.

And there are those who see this attempt as an impending disaster because without the operative feedback loops of personal responsibility, systems such as this inevitably over utilize resources and collapse, and that families, whether you define those as "nuclear" in the sense of mom/dad/kids or nuclear in the sense of related individuals that take responsibility for themselves and are comfortable existing as a unit independently from society at large, are how we are built to live.

I agree that all of the problems you mentioned are problems, but to me those are also part and parcel of the bigger discussion about whether society is best left alone or best when controlled.

For me, I'm a balance of nature and leave it alone guy.