The major elephant in the room here, which the memo doesn't seem to address, is that as late as the 1960's, computer programming was seen as a natural career for young women. Has biology changed that much in the last fifty years?
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
It wasn't just in the sixties - women's participation in computer science was growing until the mid eighties. As a woman who's helped other women learn to code, all I can say is that the interest is certainly still out there.
Anyone have a graph that shows absolute numbers rather than percentage points?
If this is the case, then the gender imbalance has nothing to do with sexism in the tech industry or hiring practices. Google's efforts to hire more women is doomed to failure if there aren't an equal percentage of women coming in the first place.
This is (also) a sexist stereotype, but maybe just maybe women are drawn to detailed work (say, needlepoint knitting, picking berries) while men are drawn to broad, imprecise work (such as selling insurance policies or chasing antelope). Maybe women are better at punching BCD numerical integrators for problems brought down from Feynman and Fermi, while men like coming up with a whole new language that compiles to PHP.
"Women" and "men" meant as generalities and not in the least implying that within-group variation can't be larger than between-groups variation.
If men are drawn to broad, imprecise work, why are more men not marketers (tech or otherwise)? Or, if women are more "creative" as the memo implies, then why wouldn't women be more suited to coming up with a whole new language that compiles to PHP?
And, centrally to it, if tech hiring is broken on so many levels, why does it get it right in terms of gender?
So once some programmer writes the code/flowchart, and gives it you on a paper. Its supposed to converted to punch cards/switches/whatever and then fed to a computer. The difference between the former and latter now is huge. The latter job is now nothing more than being a glorified typewriting kind of work.
I realized this when I was doing some really complicated GUI work on an embedded system. I was programming all the time on paper, I was doing it a lunch table, during transit, thinking during shower etc etc. After working several papers worth of programming, I converted it to C code, a few hundred to may be a thousand+ lines.
The real job of writing C code was largely a ritual that took like a few hours. Working out the algorithm was real programming that spanned a few days.
I could see how early programming went. Plenty of algorithm writing and unit testing through induction on paper.
Edit: I just want to know the history, and I'm not looking for rhetorical weapons.
Another argument which I have seen is that the marketing changed to focus more on men and boys, and so the narrative changed to "personal computers are a thing for boys". Here's an Apple ad from 1985 often used to support that argument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxNjx_VWJ8U
Personally, I find both of these arguments plausible. You don't have to look too hard to find engineers who don't think tech hiring works very well, and yes, that advert does exclusively talk about boys.
I don't think "sexism" caused the current imbalance any more than I think Google's algorithm is "racist" when it shows racially objectionable content.
I think it's a case of a rule being arbitrarily applied and having an unintended and unforeseen consequence over the far future. And if that's the case then its a legitimate and noble endeavour to try to fix "tech hiring" so that it does find the best person for the job irrespective of gender.
The question at hand, I guess, is, have the tasks that one would be expected to perform as a computer programmer changed over the last fifty years?
Or has the hiring process - which even most male programmers are happy to admit is "broken," adjusted to favour men over women?
Two of the things that have been suggested as causes have been hiring tools focusing on puzzle solving / whiteboarding, and job applications focusing on finding "culture fit" and an ideal "programming type"
It's not hard to find male programmers who, even when gender is taken out of the equation entirely both admit that a) whiteboard interviews and culture fit is a thing, and b) is a terrible way of choosing people, so perhaps Occam's razor suggests that this is the cause rather than an inherent biological difference with an obvious counterexample?
You may say -- "aha, but culture fit is a proxy for racism". Fine, then people are racists -- in that very implicit, system-wide way that's immune to sensitivity training and generic pressure in the wider culture. What to do then, shoot the racists?
You can say that while "shared mental context" is important, the research says that diverse teams are higher functioning teams [1] (one of the things myself and the author of the memo would agree on is that groupthink is a bad thing!), and that if culture fit is one of the blockers, find a way of retaining its good aspects while removing its potentially deleterious ones. Some of the world's smartest people work at Google. I'm sure they can have a role in figuring it out.
Then there's fit to organizational purposes. It's doubtful that Google or SpaceX could function as an organization of racists, but maybe that level of homogeneity is best for a tire repair shop in rural areas.
EDIT: it was more of a secretarial type of job. And women would socialize with other women on the job.
The point is that aside from the title, the IT industry then is in no way what we understand by IT industry now.
And, honestly, it is more fulfilling to work/interact with others in a school/hospital/social setting than toil away in a cubicle.
Raising a child or teaching might actually be more exciting than starring at a screen.
This blatant attempt at distorting reality to fit one's self is due to cause more trauma than to alleviate it.
Time will tell. It is just a sign of immaturity.
(Also, uh, I feel like "make sure you typed correctly" is a special case of "detail-oriented," which we just had an article yesterday trying to claim that men are better at because autism is more prevalent in men.)