I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.
It may very well be that men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant, and I find this line of argumentation very frustrating as it completely ignores the actual complaints at hand.
Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they are disrespected, unrightfully criticized, and scrutinized to a degree unlike their male counterparts. As a whole, they have recognized that this is not the fault of individuals in their workplaces. It's "natural" to be more critical of the few women in your workplace because as a human, that's how your brain is built to work. Correcting that requires conscious effort on your part, and most are unwilling to correct themselves.
Instead, as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM - is to have more women in STEM. This will slowly correct the negatives by causing more individuals to come into contact with women and have to learn how to behave properly. But these same systemic issues prevent many women who would otherwise enter STEM from doing so. No one is claiming that a perfect 50/50 ratio is all we need and then "we're done, pack it up folks". Simply that making efforts to get women into tech is actually a good idea.
Women are interested. Women want to do the work. Many that do are forced out for one reason or another, and this makes many not want to do it any longer.
Claiming that men and women just have different criteria, and thus the problem should be ignored entirely completely misses the point.
I missed when the voting took place. You mean a group of activist women (and men) assumed to talk on behalf of all women in the field?
It is not fair that all womens' positions have been decided by activists, and many women in tech have specifically noted this issue. However, activism is available for any individual interested in it.
This is interesting - what do you mean by this? I'm not sure what you mean in this context, but in an overall, general sense I strongly disagree.
Certainly there is significant incentive for activism from a satisfied person. A person may be satisfied but that does not mean that there is not room for improvement or change. Satisfaction is something that is static, stagnant, and doesn't last forever. One day you may be satisfied with a product or political situation, and the next day you might not be even if it remains unchanged itself.
Activism is a method of creating change. Everyone is incentivized by it because everyone can benefit immensely from change, even the ultra-rich.
> Also, most conservative opinions tend to be met with anything from disgust to derision online, further disincentivizing counter-protest.
I have found the opposite to be true, actually. Depending on the online community, sometimes it is the conservative opinions that are the only ones deemed acceptable by the community (as is often the case here on HN), and in others perhaps the liberal comments.
But I have been a liberal commenter on the internet for nearly 20 years and I have found, time and time again, that the internet has little room for acceptance of left-wing opinions.
Not everyone. And, some people don't feel like they need charge. Some people are actually happy with their life, career and situation.
> even the ultra-rich.
What does the ultra-rich have to do with anything? You've kind of jumped the shark there.
And what kind of social or career impact on their lives do you expect from such activism against the current flow?
I expect one will claim that James Damore offers evidence of a life being "ruined" by their views, but I think the kid is doing pretty damn well for himself - especially due to his views. If you are a conservative activist in tech then feel free to shout your views from the rooftops, I'm sure there are many on 4chan who would love to follow you and help you succeed.
Nobody’s perfect, if you need a decent excuse you’ll find one.
Political views and affiliations are not protected under federal law, though at least some states have protected them. See this page: https://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html
I'm not sure you understand the goal of gender equality.
> then I highly encourage you to become more involved with activism because that is the only way to make your voice and opinions heard.
I'm a software engineer. Every woman on our team is treated as an equal. Because they are. But apparently your experience = every experience.
Maybe, just maybe, the women that you speak of are in the minority?
I never made any such claim. Instead you're the one arguing that because your team has no issues, then clearly the women who speak out are in the minority.
I'm simply arguing that these women who speak out exist, and we shouldn't just ignore their claims without evaluating their merit. Instead, you say we should ignore them because they are "in the minority?". Maybe it is you who does understand the goals of gender equality. A view should never be ignored because it is the minority - it should be evaluated on the basis of its own merit.
I really think it matters how we get there and most people advocating for it seem to think that piece does not matter, so I certainly have sympathy for the skepticism with which the idea gets met. But observation of actual reality pretty strongly bear's out the idea that if you can succeed in passing a certain threshold, it will tend be self perpetuating beyond that.
If you cannot participate in a field where not enough of the people look and act like you, then perhaps you have the problem.
The data does not support correlating those two. "Gender equality" in this report refers to the factors in Table 1 at http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2016/mea... , which is about things like life expectancy and number of female politicians and salary - not about disrespect, unrightful criticism, and scrutiny in technical fields on the basis of sex.
Well since these are claims you can undoubted produce data that all of these issues are significant across the entire field?
For tech in particular, see the Kapor Center's report: https://www.kaporcenter.org/tech-leavers/ (which, it should be noted, reports on people who have left tech: the percentages in that report should not be read as the fraction of people in tech who decide to leave).
For example, when "left due to unfair treatment" is unpacked by group, white women are the lowest percentage! (28% vs. 38% for white/asian men).
Why, then, are other people commenting here claiming that bad treatment of women is the main reason they leave tech, and at alarming numbers, no less?
Also, it's certainly the case that unfair treatment is a problem worth solving regardless of gender.
(I don't think the design of that particular study was equipped to answer the question of what the raw fraction is / whether the numbers are in fact alarming, so people who are making that claim are not making it solely on the basis of information in that study.)
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. Apart from those who buy into the world view that the only two groups in any society are the oppressed and their oppressors, which is clearly just toxic bullshit.
Given that the leader of the free world has said that he's not a feminist, I'm not sure I would say that it's ingrained into the culture. It's a recent cultural phenomenon of these countries, sure. But Western civilization has a much deeper culture of patrilineal succession, of the priesthood being restricted to men, of only men having political representation, of the father being the head of the household, etc. That stuff doesn't evaporate from a culture quickly, and even today many of those are strongly believed by huge parts of Western civilization.
These are the countries that are the most egalitarian in the world, where 3rd wave feminism forms a major part of social policy, where women have an equal level of opportunity to men and the freedom to choose their own paths in life. The data shows that under these conditions, this freedom has a negative correlation to women choosing a career in STEM.
You can't say that this is a remnant of some patriarchal system of oppression, because as women's freedom has increased in those countries, their participation in STEM has decreased.
Which part of the parent comment was a "marxist talking point"?
However, I'll indulge you and hazard a guess:
* The historically naive and somewhat incorrect generalization of some ill-defined "Western" culture (what time frame is he using?) * the negative portrayal of it * and the implicit assumption that any part of the portrayal is somehow unique to all Western countries, but not the rest of the world.
I will give you that this criticism of "Western culture" probably doesn't really relate to traditional Marxism, which more or less worked within the framework of Western culture.
I believe your parent might have had the concept of "cultural Marxism" in mind.
Don't take my word for it though, there are actually plenty of studies showing that the "people vs. things" theory far better explains these gender disparities.
> In countries with the highest levels of gender equality, where women are least likely to experience any of these negative forces
That is absolutely not what a high level of gender equality means. Countries that have "higher levels of gender equality" do not guarantee or even suggest any likelihood of not having these negative forces in a girl or woman's life. (I would privately posit that it may be the opposite, in fact - that perhaps those countries would find that in private home lives, those forces are as strong or stronger than elsewhere. But I don't know this, I'm speculating on that point.)
Often the forces in a person's life are from close friends or their family - these are not measured in this article and certainly have an impact on how people choose their careers and interests in life.
You also made up the idea that they are "self-selecting" to not be a part of the system. The article does not make that claim - you did, out of thin air.
In fact, my main issue with this article is how it defines "gender equality".
> If you cannot participate in a field where not enough of the people look and act like you, then perhaps you have the problem.
I never made any such claim - you have twisted my words in order to make me appear irrational and prejudiced. I claim that women do not participate in tech because they feel actively ostracized and unwelcome. More women would help alleviate this issue. Do not put words into my mouth instead of addressing the statements that I make.
If people do what they love they will be driven to overcome barriers, perceived and real.
Being so skeptical of these opinions because they're in the minority, rather than evaluating their actual merit is horribly toxic.
Also this is just a damn job. You don't have to love it completely to want to do it. I sure as hell don't love programming wholeheartedly but I still do it as a career—I'm one of those folks who doesn't do side projects when they get off the clock.
But I don't believe for a second that women "are systematically encouraged to get out, and do something else with their lives."
The truth is it doesn't matter what the data says. There's an entire political philosophy that's based on everybody being either oppressed, or an oppressor. For people who subscribe to that, they will always claim that invisible forces are at work oppressing people, no matter how much reality proves otherwise, and they will never offer any proof to support these claims, because it's just so axiomatic to them.
OP did not draw that conclusion.
If they don't feel that way, they are free to correct my assumption.
1. There are a minority of women in tech. 2. Trying to correct (1) will do more harm than good.
aspaceman's scenario:
1. There are a minority of women in tech, because on the whole, more men like tech jobs than women. NOT that NO women would do tech jobs, but in the "absence of discrimination", maybe gender ratios would be 60-40 men or something. 2. Because women are in the minority, male co-workers take them less seriously, and their opinions aren't as valued as mens'. 3. Womens' opinions being less valued, etc., results in women leaving tech for other fields. 4. Tech gender ratios are further skewed than they otherwise would be (Maybe 80-20 men).
Now here's where it gets tricky. It _is_ entirely possible that trying to correct these imbalances would do more harm than good. However, it is _also_ possible that there are some "low-hanging fruit" corrections which would bring tech gender ratios back into balance without really inconveniencing anybody. Given that it's possible that some interventions might bring about a more natural gender ratio, it's reasonable to try many different types of interventions, and see which ones work.
Note that the root of this problem is men not taking women seriously. The more serious men take womens' views, the better everything gets.
"the root of this problem is men not taking women seriously"
is what I find to be the most important takeaway. As a person in STEM, you need to take women seriously when they talk about this stuff. Ask yourself why you're so quick to dismiss the "minority of women" and "activists'" experiences.
That's a good question. Personally, I take people seriously if they take the problem seriously. I don't take activists seriously because too many of the them come from a subjective "feels before facts" place, and my strong belief that the main reason there is a gender disparity in tech is that women simply aren't interested (which TFA proves).
I emphatically think that tech would greatly benefit from having a more equal gender ratio, but I think that the programs and solutions activists want to implement -- and have implemented, like affirmative action -- and the impossibility of discussing their validity is absurd.
What we should focus on is the reasons behind women's disinterest in engineering fields. What are they?
None of their friends want to pursue the field? Culture? Biology? Lack of role models? That they simply, given the chance, would rather do something else?
Perhaps a mix of the above?
Once we've identified what the reasons are, and which reasons we can actually do something about, we should use this information to eliminate any external obstacles preventing women to choose a tech career.
My sad anecdotal experience from asking many brilliant women why they wouldn't pursue a career in IT even though they clearly possess the potential for it, is that because they are brilliant they can choose any career path they want, and they are more interested in things that are not tech, because tech is not social enough.
In the end, I believe much of it is a PR issue; we need to get rid of the cultural idea that IT is only for the anti-social 80s hacker living in his mom's basement.
Affirmative action, e.g., "positive" discrimination, may indirectly deal with this PR issue, but surely there are many, many methods that are better and more fair to everyone?
Men are systematically forgotten in every single « equality » program. Case in point :
> Women in STEM complain that...
Have we EVER interviewed men in STEM in this whole story ? How do they feel abour the recognition of their skills and hard work ? Oh, yeah, the last one who « talked » was James Damore.
Edit: Thanks for the downvotes. I totally feel men are going to be listened to, I totally feel we’re on an equal basis with how women’s problems are equal to men’s problems. Men can go fuck themselves in this society, that’s all I witness.
Oh is that a surprise that mens commit suicide at 4x the pace of women? Sure that can’t be because we tell them to fuck off?
My favorite is reddit.com/r/MensLib
Why must we respond to legitimate concerns with "but it's hard for us TOO". We can address both at the same time. This does not have to be framed as men vs. women.
A lot of the girls I meet in tech tell me stories of positive discrimination. One even said she didn't take a higher paid job because she didn't want it offered to her just because she was a woman (I believe the interviewer said that was why they offered it).
I didn't hear these kinds of stories 5 years ago but I do now.
It all kind of makes me a bit uneasy - I'm not sure this newfound enthusiasm for companies biasing hiring specifically to women is actually making things better for women in tech.
This doesn't make much sense if we assume that "It may very well be that men and women have different criteria".
According to what you wrote, the real problem is that women in STEM have "have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions".
For this, the desired solution would obviously be "better treatment of women in STEM" -- not, "more women in STEM".
Now, getting more women in STEM might indeed be ONE way to achieve "better treatment of women in STEM", but it's the wrong way to achieve that if more women don't really want to go into STEM. If we are willing to accept that
(a) women in STEM have "have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions".
(b) "It may very well be that men and women have different criteria" (and might be less inclined to go into STEM)
then we should just fix (a). Ensure that women in STEM are treated better -- WHATEVER their percentage of STEM jobs.
>Claiming that men and women just have different criteria, and thus the problem should be ignored entirely completely misses the point.
At the same time not entertaining the thought that - as the linked study shows - that women might not just have "different criteria" but like some STEM careers less (and not just the treatment they get while in STEM careers, but some STEM fields in general as fields) makes it a "thought crime" and stops searching for truth in favor of what's the fashionable ideology of the day.
This is a good point, which is why my argument rests on the claim that more women will want to go into STEM if they are going to feel more comfortable in those positions.
In my view, it all comes down to why you think women aren't in STEM. Is it because they don't want to do STEM work, or is it because they don't want to be in these spaces? Based on the myriad amount of women who can do work of a similar calibre (in medicine especially), AND the evidence that women used to be not only more welcome in programming, but absolutely DOMINANT in it: I disagree with the former, and subscribe to the latter opinion.
I feel that many think that women don't want to do STEM work because they think of the women who made fun of them in high school or some other such rubbish and use that to infer how all women think about STEM (and tech especially). One's reasoning for not being inclined to do STEM is just as important as them not doing it.
It's just insane that people make the leap from "STEM might not have equal interest between men and women" to "Diversity-promoting programs are harmful".
Any other position is literally assuming the existing culture is full of bigots that must be stopped and forced to comply via "diversity promoting programs", all of which may ultimately have zero positive effects. How is that not insane?
You would be incorrect. Programming used to be considered an offshoot of secretarial and data entry work, which is why it was once dominated by women. Then men's engagement skyrocketed while women's ambled along at a more gradual pace.
Secondly, this isn't about ability. Women are just as capable of doing this work, but there does exist an innate interest component. I recommend you read up on the people vs. things hypothesis, which has a high degree of predictive success in categorizing those who ultimately choose STEM work [1]. Those interested in working with things are driven towards pure STEM, and those interested in working with people largely avoid STEM or do STEM where they can apply those skills to work with people (think chemistry degrees to become pharmacists, math degrees to become teachers, etc.).
And lo and behold, wouldn't you know that those interested in working with things are largely men, by a significant margin, and those interested in working with people are largely women. Some of these tendencies may be socially influenced, but these preferences show up as young as grade 3!
Now there's definitely discrimination in STEM, but I haven't seen a comparative analysis that demonstrates that STEM exhibits worse rates of discrimination than other fields, such that it deserves all of this negative press. People just seem to assume that's the case because of the gender ratios and some terrible discrimination stories you've no doubt read about. I've read such stories about medicine and law, which have long since achieved gender parity.
So then empathetic people naturally conclude that the best way to stop this discrimination is by balancing the gender scales, but this whole edifice is based on very questionable premises, and the remedy consists of literally forcing women to pursue careers they're not interested in. The cure seems frankly worse than the disease.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018...
So, doesn't the post contradict this? Less women are in STEM in countries with BETTER equality.
That's because it's a good comment.
> men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant
No, it's not at all irrelevant, because the fact that fewer women choose STEM fields has been used to design a narrative about the causes when the evidence does not actually support that narrative, and in fact the simplest explanation is simply that women prefer other fields, and therefore choose these fields unless other pressures override those preferences.
> Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions.
Citation needed. All we have are (a) individual stories, read anecdotes, not data on actual problems occurring and (b) hard statistical data on the distribution.
These two independent facts are woven together to create the narrative that (a) is systemic, for which there is no evidence and the cause of (b), for which there is also no evidence.
(I am assuming you mean either "all women" or "women in general", rather than "some women")
The only actual data I am aware of was a survey by the ACM a while back[1]. It showed few if any significant differences in job experience, socialization and attitudes between men and women.
The differences it did find were "supervisor support, career related", where women reported slightly higher support, and "comfort with technical language" and "confidence in technical skills" where men supported slightly higher levels (but still not huge).
Motivation for entering the profession were also largely the same, with men supporting slightly higher for "love of technology/computers" and women reporting slightly higher for "ease of entry into profession", "job security" and "flexible working hours".
And of course there's the Ceci/Williams study showing a 2:1 hiring advantage for women in STEM fields (academia).
>Women are interested.
Yes, some are. But not very many. In fact, most people in general aren't that interested in STEM, it's a minority occupation.
> Many that do are forced out for one reason or another
In a big survey, the biggest reasons for leaving were "spend more time with family", "lost interest", "no advancement" and "didn't like daily tasks".
Again: you are being duped by the narrative. Neither the science (see article) nor the other data back this narrative.
[1] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2008/2/5453-women-and-men-in-...
I either don't find this particularly simple or a particularly explanatory.
On one reading it's just banal/tautologous; most of this discussion (innate inalienable preference, versus systemic bias, versus cultural pressure) concerns preference in some sense - people choosing to do something rather than being directly forced or prevented. My understanding of this discussion is that it is about what influences preference, and whether we should try and alter those influences across the life of a person.
Furthermore it's only really explanatory if you have some a priori expectation that the class of 'woman' ought to possess some group characteristic in this respect. So to me again this seems like a phenomenological observation ('people called Harry are less scared of heights') rather than much of an explanation.
The only way I can make sense of it as an explanation is if we are linking some innate biological preference in sexual females with some intrinsic quality inherent in STEM work. I am not ideologically opposed to either biological biases or intrinsic qualities of work from a cognitive standpoint. But the casual chains I have seen spun out from one to the other seem highly inconclusive, partial, or dubious (e.g. some notion of 'mechanical reasoning' to 'preference across all of STEM'). If the argument based on this simple explanation is intended to dismiss or substantially dismiss theories of systemic biases or structural inequality then I would need to be persuaded that there are not too many nooks and crannies for these cultural mechanisms to work. But it seems to me there are. At the start of this chain there are potential biases in early education (even in the neurological bootstrapping of infancy), and at the end of the chain the link between intrinsic quality of work versus how the work is done within a cultural context.
To try and be more concrete and hypothetical, what of the effect of the teaching of discursive comprehension based subjects to boys that may make it less likely to be their best subject, what about the types of things given to babies to play with (I see this regularly with a 6 month year old daughter), what about the differential effect on working hours across pregnancy, what about the way in which daily tasks in STEM are defined, etc. Seems to me like there are many degrees of freedom here.
To me the cognitive difference between women and men seem like minor cognitive perturbations - so it is surprising that this could cause large differences in distributions in some higher order effects many steps removed like profession.
Perhaps this article might shed some light on things:
http://neurosciencenews.com/women-in-neuroscience-4548/
(Why are females underrespresented in neuroscience)
What complicates this even further is that there are more women in secondary education than man and the ratio is growing men are also considerably more likely to drop out of school than women.
Both men and women have much bigger problems than the so called STEM ratio problem which is also only apparent in engineering and computer science faculties and less so in other science and then pops up again in the PhD figures.
> No one is claiming that a perfect 50/50 ratio is all we need and then "we're done, pack it up folks". Simply that making efforts to get women into tech is actually a good idea.
Not true. The concern IS over statistical gender bias and the automatic assumption by many on the radical left that if women (no concern about men) do not make up at least 50% of some occupation's workforce, then it MUST be because of sexism or implicit bias or whatever. The problem with that claim is that there is little or no evidence for any of that in today's workforce. Furthermore, there is positive evidence that would explain the differences in terms of sex differences, something that is ideological heresy for the radical left.
The negatives you speak of, what is the evidence that women are leaving because of hostility toward women in STEM fields? If there is evidence[0], why not address the problem instead of using dubious measures like trying to force other women into fields they don't want to enter just so the ones in STEM feel comfortable. This compulsion to get women into these disciplines against their own wishes is not only intrusive and weird. It's using people.
[0] I know of certain types of things women tend to have difficulty with not just in STEM but everywhere, like asking for raises. But that's not hostility nor particular to STEM. Again, that may be something women need to learn to do instead of trying to adapt the world to themselves.
Which is definitely a problem. But there seems to be an implicit assumption that it happens at a higher rate than discrimination in every other field, and thus STEM deserves this criticism. Is this actually true? The only data I've seen keeps harping on gender parity as if parity is its own end, rather than a means to an end as you've suggested.
> Instead, as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM - is to have more women in STEM.
Did they? Was there a group meeting and they all voted? Where is the evidence that gender parity would actually yield this result? If so, where is the evidence that the gender parity measures being taken would actually lead to parity? This seems to rest on a lot of suppositions.
Also, from what I've seen, women in STEM largely aren't driving this movement, contrary to what you seem to believe.
> Claiming that men and women just have different criteria, and thus the problem should be ignored entirely completely misses the point.
There are two problems being conflated here: the gender parity "problem", and the sexism/discrimination problem.
Articles like this are attacking the arguments that gender parity is a) actually a problem, and b) one that can be solved by simplistic measures like quotas, marketing directed at women, etc. If women truly are less interested in CS and similar fields, then none of these measures are likely to work. And so far they haven't made a dent.
I'm also skeptical the discrimination problem will be solved by these measures either. I'd prefer something far more direct.
Not only is this true, it has been fairly exhaustively researched.
> Cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and male-versus-female-typical occupational preferences. Men and women differed on all four traits. 200,000 participants from 53 nations.
> Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality.
(Also I don't think a single paper counts as "exhaustively researched")
> Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things–People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = 0.35), Social (d = 0.68), and Conventional (d = 0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests.
> The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.
If the status quo is 90/10 or worse, I don't agree: 50/50 is the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis can certainly be disproven, but the amount of evidence needed to hold a belief that 50/50 is probably correct is much smaller than the amount of evidence needed to hold a belief that 90/10 is probably correct. I don't think the right approach is "We should let the status quo stay indefinitely until we've convinced ourself of what the right number is" - if we have evidence that the status quo is potentially right, that evidence should be plenteous and easy to gather.
(That said, I do agree that programs focused on improving "the pipeline" and getting more girls interested in STEM are misguided and it would be better to focus on removing the barriers that cause women already interested in STEM careers to leave. But that's a little bit of a different subject.)
For instance, do you know that the proportion of female software engineers is approximately the same as the proportion of females that pass the AP computer science exam in high school? This implies strongly that if there is some effect that's shifting the distribution against women, it happens before high school. That is to say, it has nothing to do with workplace culture or discriminatory hiring practices. Of course, that doesn't mean that those things aren't important - they are. But they likely aren't causing under-representation of women in CS.
> 3233 young and old adolescents representative of the population
> For the young adolescents, the observed difference in Mechanical Reasoning is equivalent to 10 IQ points, and this difference increases to 13 IQ points for the old adolescents.
> Beyond the observed small average sex difference in the general factor of intelligence (g), the boys' large advantage in mechanical reasoning (MR) must be strongly underscored. This sex difference is not explained by g, and therefore the probable contributions of what is measured by relevant subtests such as abstract reasoning (AR) or spatial relations (SR) can be excluded. The MR difference is still present with almost the same magnitude when the general factor of intelligence (g) is removed. It is also noteworthy that, for the old adolescents, more than half of the variance associated with numerical reasoning (NR) cannot be attributed to g. Thus, we suggest that mental processes captured by these psychological measures are behind the documented male advantage in STEM disciplines
http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri...
This means that, at the average point in the distribution, the average everday man has a one standard deviation edge in measurements of mechanical reasoning over the average everyday woman. This explains why you would see such a large skew in the field of engineering.
There are fundamental biological differences, sure. What do those fundamental biological differences mean for specific career fields and why - and given the mean and standard deviation, which presumably we have, what's the right number, if it's not 50/50?
One way to bound this is to look at the number of people in STEM careers. 6.2% of US jobs were in STEM in 2015 (https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/science-technology-engine...), meaning that STEM employment requires at most being just under 2 standard deviations above the mean—and that only if you assume that society optimizes perfectly to fill all of those careers with the people most suited to them in terms of base biological aptitude. Once you throw in other factors like location and access to education, it probably gets significantly lower than that.
Would you say that all your coworkers at all STEM jobs you've been at have been at least one standard deviation above the mean at aptitude for the job?
https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...
Sure, it is always "possible" to do harm by taking action, but is it likely? There is widely acknowledged bias that is not believed to be a natural intrinsic gender difference by many scientists who study this, so is it better to do nothing, or to try and address the issue?
To me, this question seems a little like asking whether I should avoid erasing some files when my computer fills up, because I might delete something important. Yes, you could accidentally delete something you wanted to keep, but on the other hand, if you want to continue using it, you have no choice.
My personal guess would be that there's indeed sexism, particularly in the programming industry. This overall "not my problem" attitude from men about anything regarding this subject is a clear hint of it.
Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things. We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).
More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.
Another point he raised was that Google's hiring initiatives 'lower the bar' for their targeted groups.
Google has created several discriminatory practices: [...] Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversity...
Could you please point to the exact sentence that says this? Because I did a quick search for "biolog" and I did not find a single passage that proposed what you wrote. What I did ̶s̶a̶y̶ find is sentences like "women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men" which say nothing about women being less capable of performing any software-associated tasks.
From his article:
On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because...
How do you conclude "women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks" from merely that sentence?
Indeed, I have read the article in its entirely before. And I didn't remember such a passage (my memory isn't great), so I went back and Ctrl-F'd to try to find it and still didn't find it. Then I read on in each instance and saw that, just as I remembered, he was talking about preferences everywhere I found. So, yeah, I've already done everything you're saying, and that's why I think your claim is baseless, but I acknowledge maybe I'm still missing something. So instead of telling me to RTFA, it would behoove you to just spend 5 seconds pasting the full passage you are concluding this from. It isn't any harder to copy-paste the relevant portion of the passage than to comment about why you're refusing to do so when it actually exists. It's only harder when it doesn't exist.
I'm not sure what you'd like me to do, as I pasted the passages I was referring to in my initial comment. I don't think he's referring to preferences when he says that Google women have higher levels of self-reported anxiety due in part to their innate neuroticism[1].
Fundamentally, my problem with this article is that it makes an enormous leap from psychology studies to innate capabilities to unsuitability for certain types of work. We just don't know enough about each of these areas to make the generalizations that are put forth in the essay.
[1] Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs
The line and paragraph that quoted above makes no judgments about the capability of men or women for software tasks or otherwise, as far as I can tell. (Edit: I’ve read the whole memo at least twice)
The statements that men and women differ biologically, and that this impacts occupational preferences, is not scientifically novel or controversial. Writing about Damore's memo in Quilette, Deborah Soh (PhD in sexual neuroscience) said:
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
Another other article by Koh goes into more detail about the specific scientific research into this topic, and includes links to several original research publications (so you don't need to take her word for it): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manife...
I see nothing there about "capability" but about preferences and about how much the work & teams can/can't be (re)shaped to match those preferences.
We should strive to create conditions where people can be effective in jobs they enjoy as it makes teams, projects, and companies better overall. How responsibilities are divided, teams are formed, and people interact are all variables that should be tweakable to some degree.
> Google has created several discriminatory practices: - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
To me, that translates to: "Google creates programs that lower the bar for hiring "diverse" people. This directly implies to me that at least some "diverse" people who got hired got hired primarily because of their gender/race/whatever. Now, I work in a team with 3 female software engineers (out of ~10). According to his conclusions, probably at least one of them didn't pass the mustard, and only got the job because of her gender.