Push for Gender Equality in Tech? Some Men Say It’s Gone Too Far
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's essentially a moral argument: women and minorities deserve equal treatment and opportunity, but due to stereotyping and social inertia (i.e. girls don't grow up seeing many women in technical fields, so they aren't compelled or don't even think to join them), they don't currently get it.
To answer the question:
> Still, if women, men and people of different ethnicities and races all have such fundamentally different backgrounds, why would you expect them all to choose the same fields in the same proportion?
I think we'd like to assume that everyone can essentially do whatever they want, but just choose not to, but we simply can't because we've never had an equal starting position to begin with.
I think a better argument for diversity is that people who are underrepresented in a job deserve the same opportunities as everyone else, not because they bring wise insights not otherwise attainable.
The "but we want to hire on merit" argument is clearly fucking bullshit if you've ever had any involvement in recruitment and seen how flawed it is.
It's much harder for white men to preferentially hire white men if as much of the interview process as possible is blinded.
What is the natural level and how did you find it?
1) every last big company fires people until everyone "believes" this to be true, because not doing so would incite rebellion internally. Are you not a team player ?
It is also what every product manager always goes for, mostly because it allows them to deflect responsibility for the inevitably mediocre (at best) product that comes out of it. Usually, they also succeed in angering "small" subgroups of users while doing this at an absolutely enormous cost in bad PR.
2) it is most definitely not true at all. A vision by a single mind that really works at it (and is thus by necessity someone who is both technical, knows the code AND uses the software AND talks to the users) will blast any consensus product out of the water.
The thing is, small failures by a single person's vision will have an outsize impact on their career. Total failure in a consensus product is not just not punished, it is actually rewarded : Aside from the obvious "you don't need maintenance for a failure" there is the fact that there aren't any users to actually criticize the failure. Therefore the internal feedback for participants is going to be about how they "successfully" organized a large effort by a large group and fought heroically to keep it going. Promote this failure NOW !
The reason promoting diversity (e.g. in tech) is good is because there is a shortage of qualified people. If we have certain populations that could work in the field, but don't, for whatever reason, then we want to find those causes and stop them. And if those causes are historical (e.g. past discrimination), we might even go so far as to take that into account.
E.g. take affirmative action for African Americans (in America). Yes, it's partially there to have equal opportunity. But (perhaps more) importantly, we know that because of past diversity, most African Americans have a harder time in education growing up. This probably shows up as people have e.g. lower scores on tests. But what we should be thinking is: "If they got slightly lower scores, but we know that it was harder for them, then imagine what they could do if we help them out with better education!".
One could argue (and other commenters do so) that we should care more about the moral "everyone should have equal opportunities" argument. I agree, but I much prefer to show why diversity tends to be a win-win, not a "you lose so we can win" situation.
Are you implying that for some reason we don't hire qualified women if there are no men to fill in the roles? Would love to see your sources.
> If we have certain populations that could work in the field
Why not look to see how can we get more white men to work in the field?
> , but don't, for whatever reason, then we want to find those causes and stop them.
What if it's cheaper to just get more men instead?
> Yes, it's partially there to have equal opportunity.
It's not equal opportunity, white people won't get it.
> But (perhaps more) importantly, we know that because of past diversity, most African Americans have a harder time in education growing up.
I've heard it's because of socialism, can you prove that that's not the case?
> This probably shows up as people have e.g. lower scores on tests.
Me having a lower score on a test, doesn't mean that it's because I was historically oppressed.
> imagine what they could do if we help them out with better education!
Imagine if education would be just be better in general for all, I wouldn't leave out the uneducated white men.
> I agree, but I much prefer to show why diversity tends to be a win-win, not a "you lose so we can win" situation.
I have yet to see any solid evidence why having a majority white male tech population is a bad thing(and I'm not even going to get into the are Asians white or not argument).
Overall my issue with your point of view is that I have yet to see any proof for anything that it's based on. Most people with your point of view will point to some statistics that are convenient to them (earnings of all women vs. men) and ignore inconvenient ones(male vs. female mortality rate) and interpret it the way they want it (we less women in tech, must be because of sexism).
At Google, something like only 1 in 5 tech workers are female, and their diversity practices are fairly extreme compared to the norm. It's logically more difficult to find qualified female coders because there are less of them applying for positions. REQUIRING a certain benchmark of females to be hired each month or year, when HR is picking from a much smaller candidate pool, is going to result in hiring potentially less qualified individuals. That could actually cause a greater gender bias if women are being hired to hit a metric but potentially performing at a lower quality than their male counterparts. I say "potentially" because obviously there are a ton of great female coders, but there are a lot of shoddy ones too. Same with men.
As an example: You have ten applicants for one position. 2 are female, 8 are male. Just for fun, lets say "33% of all programmers, male and female, produce good code and have a qualifying resume". The chances that you will have a qualified male candidate are going to be greater based on those two facts alone. If you need to hit a 50% men/50% women hiring metric, you're taking a gamble on the work quality of women hired.
~BUT~: WE HAVE TO OFFER STRONGER INCENTIVES FOR WOMEN IN TECH IN ORDER FOR THE PLAYING FIELD TO BE LEVELED. Future female coders aren't going to feel inspired or motivated to enter a workforce that's dominated by men. The solution sometimes looks faulty when viewed on a case-by-case basis, but we need to offer an olive branch in the form of better job placement opportunities until women are inspired to pursue tech and have equal rights and job prospects.
As a woman in STEM, I don't want someone to hire me just because I'm a woman. I want someone to 1) think I'm awesome at what I do, and 2) by the way I happen to be a woman. But I also think it's true that if 2) is a fact about you, it's harder for you to prove 1) than it would be otherwise, and that's not right. My belief is that the reason for encouraging diversity initiatives are that there are lots of talented women (and other minority groups) out there who are being overlooked but deserve to get noticed and hired, and the goal is always to surface talented people to hire, women or otherwise.
I'm a man in STEM - weird to put it that way - but I have a lot of issues in dealing with hyper aggressive people in the workplace. Unfortunately I've found that sometimes the only way to be heard in the workplace is to be aggressive and repeat myself over and over again.
Being aggressive in the workplace has resulted in me, against a company full of people who don't appreciate methodical software development, introducing less bugs, having more time to work with customer issues, and spending more time on testing and maintenance. Admittedly, it's very emotionally and mentally fatiguing.
As I write this I'm thinking about nurses and how insanely aggressive you have to be in a hospital, which is a women dominated field. I suppose that the difference is that the work is incredibly high-impact whereas it's easy in software development to feel that your work is for nothing because often it is.
I don't know what the solution is, or if the question I'm asking is the right question, but I'm fairly certain that the current practice of diversity hiring doesn't help the issue but instead hurts it more. Same thing with this unconscious bias training.
Now, I do strongly believe that encouraging women to consider STEM in school is a very good idea and that it opens a lot of doors that otherwise may of not been open. I believe this, in the long-term, is a giant step in the right direction because of cultural pressures and norms for people at a very young age.
1) "Now, I do strongly believe that encouraging women to consider STEM in school is a very good idea and that it opens a lot of doors that otherwise may of not been open. I believe this, in the long-term, is a giant step in the right direction because of cultural pressures and norms for people at a very young age."
100% agree! I was lucky enough to be blissfully oblivious at an early age, but as I grew older it became very clear to me from middle school onwards that I was considered "unusual" as a girl so interested in STEM, and people had lowered expectations for me, even from well-intentioned people I loved and respected. Luckily I'm pretty boneheaded and I like to prove people wrong, but it's unfair to expect and require that of women to stick with STEM. I agree it's a real shame, and there's just no reason to discourage people early on.
2) The problem is that even the perception of aggression in and of itself includes some gender bias issues. Multiple studies have confirmed that within the workplace, women are disproportionately for showing assertiveness and labeled "aggressive", versus men, when the evaluator is male. However, when the evaluator is female there is no such bias.
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cfawis/bowles.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-price-women-leaders-pay-for...
So if the goal really is to achieve a workplace where aggressiveness is no longer perpetuating gender inequality in the workplace, that would actually be even more support for encouraging more women to join the team. If you were surprised by this statistic, as many people (both men and women) are, I think that's an example of why unconscious bias training is helpful, because that helps all of us resist these tendencies we are unaware that we have.
3) Aggression, while one part of the problem, is far from the only piece, unfortunately. It's fine and dandy to tell me "this isn't an aggressive workplace," but there's actually a lot more needed. Do you have a thoughtful maternity (and paternity, to show that you understand that women alone aren't responsible for childcare) leave policy? Are women not disproportionately interrupted in meetings, or penalized for speaking up (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0001839212439994)? Will I be given fair professional feedback and evaluations (https://www.wsj.com/articles/gender-bias-at-work-turns-up-in..., https://hbr.org/2017/04/how-gender-bias-corrupts-performance...)? Can I rest assured that your workplace isn't a bro enclave where the male manager who interviewed me secretly emails the company to tell them that he thinks I'm attractive and pressures me for personal contact information, when I want to be taken seriously as a professional and evaluated on my actual skills (yes this really happened)? Can I reliably network with my colleagues in and out of the office without worrying whether they will turn into "surprise" dates that have 0% to do with the professional intent I had, forcing me to extricate myself from wasted time and energy again and again? I used to think it was just me, but literally every single one of my female friends in Bay Area tech has some story along these lines.
It's true that these are all things where sure, I could cross my fingers and trust that the existing, mostly male-run institutions are enlightened enough to recognize the pervasiveness of these issues, and fix them, and solve everything for the future. But truth be told, I think they'll get fixed a lot faster when there are more women in the workplace and in leadership who have personally experienced, and think about, these issues, for them to get fixed anytime soon. I certainly did not realize how pervasive these issues were before beginning my own career in tech--it had to happen to me before I believed it, sadly. Today I'm lucky to be working at a company that cares deeply about these issues and creates an environment that I feel proud to recruit other women into, vs. one where I feel I can't do so in good conscience.
Again, though, I do completely disavow the notion that hiring more women should mean lowering the bar. I am in total agreement that that would be a terrible idea that does no good to anyone, and in fact that's just an insulting idea to women anyway. I just simply believe that there is a lot more talent out there than gets into the door / feels welcome to stay in the industry, and that there are concrete things we can do about that.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply! Would be happy to chat more about any of the perspectives I'm sharing here.
(FWIW, I know this is tangential to the point of your argument but, I also don't think it's true that hospitals are women-dominated. Perhaps you are referring to the fact that women hold 75% of healthcare jobs; however, only 25% of hospital CEOs are women and only 21% of execs and board members are women, so it might be more accurate to say, women only dominate the least influential positions, where they would have the least say in policy and culture-norm setting. And even among doctors, nurses, and the other job positions you might be thinking of, there's a significant gender wage gap and men receive appreciably higher salaries in almost every single one. For these reasons I would not call it a woman-dominated field. http://fortune.com/2017/03/08/international-womens-day-healt...)
I'll have to read the first two links later - super busy right now - but I have heard before (and seen a few times) that assertiveness is often termed as aggressiveness in women which is horribly unfortunate. I also do think that I really simplified the issue a lot in my previous post, partly because I don't have all of these experiences or talk with much people who do (at least in tech). I can see how having more women speak about their experiences openly can help other people understand although it's such a hard issue because what if they get identified at their workplace..
Ugh surprise dates sound like the absolute worst. I know quite a few women who have stories about this in and out of tech. I strongly agree with you that having more women in the workplace and as leaders will combat a lot of these issues. I also agree that we don't need to lower the bar to do this. It has been my own personal experience that social norms and expectations from peers can really destroy people who otherwise would be at the top of their field.
I should've been more specific and was strictly referring to nurses. The only reason I brought it up is because during school I met some nurses and heard some horror stories about men becoming nurses. Particularly in social situations men aren't 'respected' if they are a nurse which is a silly norm since they are working on the floor in a high impact job saving people's lives. I do recognize that there is another issue with women not holding influential positions where they can have a large affect on culture.
I'm sorry, what human rights are women lacking now?
EDIT: I should clarify, in western democracies and developed eastern countries
If these services were a right (even at the level of "you have a right to purchase these if you can afford them") that practice would be illegal and perhaps even unconstitutional.
And this does more than affect women seeking abortions. Many women with hormonal regulation issues cannot get the care and medication they need because access to medicines which are also birth control is not a right. Largely because of religious objections.
Meanwhile men have an unchallenged right to vasectomies. Feel free to correct me, but it appears to be legal and obtainable as a procedure in every state.
We could also point to evidence that there is a practical lack of rights to fair trials in sexual assault cases, but I'll leave that to someone else.
But also, this is a "well actually" that attempts to dodge the substance of my post to chip away at it. Ostensibly, these cheaper tactics are frowned upon here and generally considered beneath the desired level of the discourse here.
I'm not sure it is. Your assertion was a central tenet of your argument. Abortion, although I totally agree with it being allowed, is admittedly a messy issue, and I can see why it's polarizing. Trying to frame that as an example for why women supposedly don't have equal rights is IMHO disingenuous.
Because I really question if you'd know simply by casually inspecting your surroundings.
The analogy you made was a pretty central part of your post, and it's really disingenuous to compare abortions to vasectomies. They are utterly different procedures. There simply is no analogy to an abortion procedure for men.
wait, what?
>many localities have made it effectively impossible to obtain health care services that are related to reproductive health care.
oh. so by framing access to birth control/abortion as "health care", it's now a "health care" issue. that's a interesting way of grabbing attention.
>We could also point to evidence that there is a practical lack of rights to fair trials in sexual assault cases
are you talking about the men or the women in this case?
You could read the paragraph where I point out those drugs have other uses. Women with endomitriosis or PCOS need them and can't get them in many states, living in pain and increased mortality because of moral panic over health care.
But even ignoring that, managing when to have children IS a health issue for many women and for their unborn. For example, many women over 40 take birth control because they're concerned about increased rates of birth defects for children with mother's over 40.
Your attempt to frame a phenomenally complicated biological process as anything but a health issue is your politically informed opinion.
Honest question; I am Canadian and am not wholly aware of the state of medical affairs south of the fourty-nine.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/states-fighting-womens-a...
Women have different health care requirements that in some cases have hormonal treatment and those are both under-subsidized and over-stigmatized because religious people of all stripes think it's okay to override women's rights for the sake of their religion.
Tubal ligation doesn't solve a thing for PCOS and Endomitriosis sufferers. It doesn't solve anything for people with thyroid issues. But these women get substandard or no treatment in the efforts to restrict access to birth control.
But hey, the far less reliable tubal ligation is covered and that makes it fine, because I mentioned casually that men's reproductive care is almost never on the table.
Folks were terribly activist about body autonomy when it was medical marijuana on the table. But you mention "oh also this is birth control" and suddenly questions about why governments should be subsidizing medical care for poor people crop up like this isn't a well studied and decades old public health issue. Children of parents with access to pre-natal care cost less to society and offer more than those without, and this is reflected in the health outcomes of planned vs unplanned children.
No, it was not. I mentioned it in passing. There is no analogue in male health care.
> but you ignore that men have no government subsidized reproductive health care either.
This isn't even about subsidization. The defunding of Planned Parenthood is just insult to he injury of making affordable women's clinics essentially impossible to operate in many places in the US.
No one does. Overall in the US, greater amounts are spent on/by women (https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...).
Men don't even have birth control, although that is generally no fault of anyone (although searching up "feminist opposition to male birth control" brings up some interesting hits: https://www.google.com/search?q=feminist+opposition+to+male+...)
I'm pretty sure female sterilizations aren't banned anywhere in the US either.
About sexual assault cases and lack of rights pertaining to due process, I would suggest that the evidence points to the opposite: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/laura-kipniss-endle...
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-ba...
... What?
> female sterilizations aren't banned anywhere in the US either.
They are as a matter of practice unobtainable in many states that have tried to engage in moral panic over abortion, since many of the same clinics that provide such services are viewed as abortion providers.
> About sexual assault cases and lack of rights pertaining to due process, I would suggest that the evidence points to the opposite:
Thanks for providing a link to a broad survey of data and not a cherry picked article.
They don't have the option of birth control, what's confusing about that?
> They are as a matter of practice unobtainable in many states that have tried to engage in moral panic over abortion, since many of the same clinics that provide such services are viewed as abortion providers.
As far as I understand such clinics are cut off from federal/state funding, in line with the Hyde amendment, and in only three states, right? I'm not sure how this qualifies as systematic oppression of women.
Okay.
But also vasectomies are an unremarkable part of what many government subsidized clinics.
Again, tubal ligation isn't really frowned upon and it is also subsidized. And the ACA requires health insurance...
Also I don't think hysterectomies/"getting the tubes tied" are illegal or even controversial, which would be a far more similar comparison to vasectomies.
But to answer your question, horrible maternity and paternity leave policies come to mind.
The divide is really whether you want force extra diversity at the expense of a meritocracy or if you want a meritocracy. With all the 'more women' vs. 'boys club' nonsense, a person not thinking critically could forget that some people want to work with the best people so they can do the best work and all the labels in between don't mean shit. If that ends up being more women or any other group that is a minority in tech it makes a tiny difference compared to being able to really achieve something meaningful.
Getting closer to a meritocracy implies weeding out cognitive biases already.
Framing doing that as supporting gender equality is the Orwellian doublespeak that people are starting to object to -- you can support diversity without supporting hiring on the basis of race, gender, etc.
Though, after leaving the field from extreme burnout (definitely something to be said there), I haven't seen anything that even remotely matches the meritocratic systems in the finance world. It's kinda bittersweet.
You also gave nothing to back up your assertion, but again, I'm talking about priorities.
I'm not sure that Jesse Owens would agree with you.
The only reason why it seems that we don't is because there are rules which determine the winner, and those rules reflect the worldview of those who have set them. Even today the athletic sprint is not full "meritocracy", as women compete separate from men.
One more note: I've put the word meritocracy in quotes because 100m sprint has nothing to do with meritocracy. That term means that the most capable ones rule, while in athletics those with best results certainly don't rule, even if they reap other rewards.
Being able to "ignore" labels is a perfect example of the kind of privilege men have access to in our society. And the fact that these comments from from a username that is reference to a penis / sexual act is just another layer to tech's issues creating a tolerant space for meritocracy to thrive.
The assumption itself is highly discriminatory and completely contradicts the stated goal.
Norwegian countries are by far more "advanced" in their implementation and encouragement of "gender equality" at the work place, but they've eventually have had to come to terms with certain facts that betrays the whole "gender equality" narrative. You can't force women to choose. Not to mention why isn't there a push for more women working trade jobs like construction, plumbing, underwater wielding, etc. that in itself betrays the entire "gender equality" narrative.
There's a Norwegian documentary exploring this subject called "The Gender Equality Paradox" https://vimeo.com/19707588. It's a good documentary and suggest people view it.
This same comment is made every single time there's a discussion of gender equality in tech, and when examined betrays the entire "anti gender equality" narrative.
People are in fact pushing for women in every single one of the fields you mentioned:
Construction: http://www.nawic.org/nawic/NFSFScholarships.asp
Plumbing: https://www.aspe.org/WOA
Welding: https://app.aws.org/foundation/scholarships/air_products
The next point that's brought up is "well then why aren't people pushing for more men in female dominated industries." To which the answer is, they are, and have been for a long time: http://www.aamn.org/about-us/scholarships
It seems fishy to me when people are willing to speak out against diversity in tech without bothering to research any part of their argument.
You can push for diversity all you want, but what if that's just not how people behave? Again watch the documentary I think Norwegian society is a far better a case study for Gender issues than anywhere else on the planet.
Not to mention misrepresenting what "the argument" is about, but I guess you've already moved on from that.
I think you are missing the point of the argument for encouraging diversity. Discrimination is one aspect yes, but there's a lot to be said for encouraging young women to explore these fields just by having a visible number of women in those roles.
To me it would be wildly inconceivable for predisposition to certain jobs to be an inherent biological trait rather than something shaped by society.
Doesn't really matter what would inconceivable to you. What matters if that's the reality of the situation. Watch the documentary it addresses it.
No. I'm saying we don't know whether the current representation is the "most natural", but what if it is?
Furthermore if you had looked through the video you would have realized that the entire basis of the documentary is an attempt to answer why labor force participation often becomes gender segregated. You say that it's because of lack of "encouragement", but maybe there's something else at play.
Please don't talk like this.
I'm don't think that anyone prominent or in the mainstream is arguing that it should be.
The last time I had this kind of surprise was with Audrey Tang, the developer of Pugs, an early Perl 6 implementation. Turned out she was not born female.
So, just by curiosity, I looked into the authors of this KaTeX thing. To my amusement, I guessed well : at least one of them is a trans[2].
There are certain kinds of IT projects in which women are formidably rare. I can't quite put my finger on what kind of projects I'm talking about, but let's just say it's a case of "I know it when I see it".
At some point we should consider admitting that there is something, I don't know what, that draws men towards this kind of projects much more than for women. And that this thing, whatever it is, may be a reason for the observed gender disparities in the tech industry.
I'm absolutely OK with nurses earning good salaries but I do think people are often surprised to hear how much nurses actually do earn.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2015/03/124266/male-registered-nur...
https://www.esportsearnings.com/players/female_players
I would expect that trans women are actually more targeted and discriminated against than normal women so this result is strange.
Here is the list including both genders as a comparison for the interested, only Scarlett is on that list and she is on position 316 which seems more reasonable given how rare trans persons are:
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