Tech's Big Gender Diversity Push, One Year In
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
> I ask Mason about this—would she do it? Would she consider a job with a bunch of white dudes? "No," she laughs, because the answer is obvious. "Maybe they’re screwed and it’s a problem they created. But if it were a great work environment, they’d be able to attract a diverse workforce."
I can't help but ask (and I hope this is a reasonable question), why are companies pushing so hard to attract these women?
I am not white, but I have zero problems working in an environment with 100% white dudes, 100% Asian women, or 100% any other group, so long as I am treated with a decent amount of respect. If a person is attracting funding for her initiatives (e.g. From the article – "Other companies, like Intel, have commendably devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to diversity programs"), but wouldn't even consider working at places just because they have a certain ethnic or gender mix regardless of their actual behavior, it is not at all clear to me that said initiative should be widely promoted or endorsed.
At the very least, I'd hope reasonable people could agree that in a universe where this scientific hypothesis isn't true, or turns out not to be true, this situation looks very different from the way the article (which seems to assume it is true) presents it. Certainly, Occam's razor being a thing, any falsification of this hypothesis would be a very parsimonious explanation for the statistical disparities being observed.
The scientific findings are muddy at best, with some studies [1] showing that development factors are the leading cause of interest, and others [2] showing some correlation for twins raised apart. And while yes, there are some small differences in things like spatial reasoning between genders [3], you would be hard pressed to show how this translates into some legitimate reason for women not wanting to write code. It's far, far more likely that social pressures account for most of the disparity in STEM careers. You don't even have to look farther than the kids toys aisle at Walmart - girls are marketed barbies, while boys are marketed RC cars.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/05/14/18263340... [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=YqanMBTJbxwC&lpg=PA300&ots... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#...
If you tell me that the Sears Tower and the Empire State Building are the same height (a hypothesis), you should show up with evidence that they are the same height, or some other a priori reason to believe that your hypothesis is more likely to be true than untrue (for instance, if both buildings were the product of the same prefab factory).
[1] is a rat study. How it relates to any hypothesis about XY versus XX humans is beyond me.
If XX and XY humans have different interests/aptitudes, that's a very parsimonious explanation for the toy aisle at Walmart, right?
But if your hypothesis is true, we need to search for other explanations. For instance, Walmart and other toy stores might be controlled by a conspiracy of conservative Christians who believe in different gender roles, and are willing to sacrifice profits (from boys buying Barbies, girls buying cars, etc) to support their goal of an unequal society. Is this the hypothesis you're proposing? It also needs to apply to Target, etc, all of which have the same boy/girl aisles.
I'm trying to figure out how you would even begin to do an objective study of what you're looking for since by the time kids present meaningful interests, they're already irrevocably influenced by society and their parents' expectations.
And no, that's not a parsimonious explanation at all, it's one of many that fits a particular narrative. Equally plausible is that toys today are a relic of thousands of years of traditional gender role pressures that have no place in today's knowledge economy. You can trace "dolls are for girls" back to hunter-gatherer times where it made sense for boys to be given knives and bows, and girls to be given baskets and dolls. The problem is those roles are deeply ingrained in today's society even though they don't make much sense anymore since today women are more likely to build robots than men are to hunt their own food.
[1] Is a genetics study, the very thing you're asking for evidence of. That's how you would test a hypothesis that genetics is key to occupational interest -- look at two animals with identical genetics and see if they show the same interests regardless of environmental factors. If they don't, then the entire XX vs. XY distinction is a moot point. i.e. if two people with literally the same DNA don't show the same interests (as is the case for many identical twins), that's rather strong evidence that genetics doesn't mean much for occupational choice at all. And if you're discounting the study merely because it uses rats, you're going to have to throw out an awful lot of research from the last 100 years on just about everything related to biology.
> I'm trying to figure out how you would even begin to do an objective study of what you're looking for since by the time kids present meaningful interests, they're already irrevocably influenced by society and their parents' expectations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
What you're saying is that your hypothesis (the absence of human sexual dimorphism in brain neuroanatomy) can't be proved false by any practical experiment. Nor can the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Imagine you lived in a world (perhaps the world of 100 years ago) in which everyone believed in human sexual dimorphism in neuroanatomy. (BTW, here's the top link I get when I google that: http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/6/490.short). Lacking MRI scans, these uneducated people give as evidence the fact that girls prefer dolls and boys prefer tin soldiers.
Your job is to convince them otherwise. You say: my theory is that it's possible that girls prefer dolls and boys prefer tin soldiers because of thousands of years of cultural conditioning, etc. You've offered an alternative hypothesis to explain facts that both of you observe.
You haven't even begun to explain why your hypothesis should be believed over the existing null hypothesis. Your listeners ask: what evidence makes your hypothesis more plausible than mine? That genetically identical rats can be trained to do different things? What does this tell me about human sexual dimorphism?
But actually, it's not as bleak as you think. Society today has enough parents and scientists who believe in the absence of sexual dimorphism above the neck, that this experiment has not gone unperformed. One example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money#Sex_reassignment_of...