He did not make that claim that
> "He was making an unsubstantiated claim that his coworkers, or at a minimum the sex and/or races they belong to, are inherently deficient at performing the work"
He only claimed that the difference between groups could come from something else than society. To deny that is a much harder argument which could only be proved to exceptional evidence. Basically he's saying 'some' and you say 'never'.
AFAIK the IQ difference between genders is negligible, but the spread of the IQ is much greater in the male group. This also means that there are more men who are above 130 IQ then women which is kind of necessary to be a programmer. This does not mean that a female can't be a genius! If you want to disprove this you can do two things:
1., Prove that the average female IQ is way higher than mens.
2., Prove that there are as much women who are intellectually retarded ( sorry, English is not my first language, I don't know a better word ) than woman.
Some quick research on this suggests that the average college graduate in engineering (which is programmer material, at least programmer material for companies like Google) is around 130. Sources like [0].
Therefore it is not unreasonable to deduce that people who work as programmers in prestige companies are, on the average, from the very right-hand tail ends of the normal distribution curve, and the differences of men and women (on the average, again) are significant enough to cause an over-representation of men among this group.
The same thing that causes an over-representation of men among homeless alcoholics at the left-hand-side end of the normal distribution.
I'm gonna call bullshit on this, a 130 IQ average for engineering majors is silly, and seems more like what engineering majors think of themselves than reality.
I don't know what is the IQ of an average programmer, for my claim it's enough to state that it is over the average of the population. 130 was just a number, it doesn't really matter anyway ( for my claim ).
It absolutely does. If the claim is that men are more striated, it makes a big difference whether the bar is 105 or 145. In fact, it is core to the argument. If it's 105, then the difference won't be statistically significant. If it's 145, you'd practically expect only men.
I was only talking about a possible statistical difference, which might be that significant. A quick search lead to a paper[1] which says the average is ~110, which is not insignificant.
In my perception the 'left' side states that there is no other factor than bias against women ( or I haven't seen any other argument ). The original document here stated that sexism exist but there might be other factors too, and apparently that was a problem.
[1] http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/98-07.pdf
AFAIK the IQ difference between genders is negligible, but the spread of the IQ is much greater in the male group. This also means that there are more men who are above 130 IQ then women which is kind of necessary to be a programmer. This does not mean that a female can't be a genius! If you want to disprove this you can do two things: 1., Prove that the average female IQ is way higher than mens. 2., Prove that there are as much women who are intellectually retarded ( sorry, English is not my first language, I don't know a better word ) than woman.