How Women Came to Dominate Neuroendocrinology
nautil.us
nautil.us
A few years ago, I started at company that had a tech department of 15, all male. I made the case to the department that it was in the interest of the company to have a diverse tech team, and my colleagues and management responded. Three years later, the department was 5 women and 11 men.
People who care can make a difference.
Unless you felt as though you were specifically choosing your initial 15 employees because they were men, however, I fail to see where you had a problem to begin with.
I'm sorry for even participating in the beating of this dead horse, but this might just be an argument destined to endure indefinitely.
I can not comprehend why you would not want them helping to build that thing.
Does your cloud ops team rolling out container clusters need 51% female representation to bring the female perspective to devops? How exactly is diversity going to help there?
Don't get me wrong, having an environment where women feel welcome, instead of a locker room boys-club, is quite sensible if you want to open the doors to that 10-20% pool of candidates that otherwise would not be enticed to join you. BUT, the argument that diversity of genitalia, melanin, and sexual orientations will somehow make Docker work better is nonsense.
There's plenty of evidence to show that super homogenous groups perform exceptionally well, and there are countless examples out there of teams that excel without any kind of "perceived" diversity among them. There's likely diversity of thought between them, but that's not what anybody cares about today.
I agree. In fact, Apple's former VP of diversity (or whatever they called it), a black woman, was probably forced to resign because she stated a room full of blond white men could be diverse. It's practically a cult at this point.
Just saying "Hey guys, I don't know if this it totally sensible, can we take a breather and investigate if this really makes sense?" immediately equates you to someone with a tiki torch or an Uncle Tom, if you don't happen to be caucasian.
Ironically, this self-consuming zeal is at its most fervent in the Bay Area, which is AS progressive and left leaning as you can imagine. Everybody's preaching to the choir. And because invoking moderation in the area is seen as a moral transgression, the region cannot but constantly radicalize itself even further, due to lack of opposing opinion.
And yes, the Apple case is amusing. You could have put together a room of white men of all sorts of social, cultural and financial backgrounds from the US, South Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, South America etc and regardless they would have all been immediately reduced to "cisgendered, privileged white men". I guess we have a word for that kind of treatment, but apparently it only applies in one direction.
Are you saying all female developer team could not write good code for a product that is used by males?
Cos that sounds totally crazy to me... Quality of someones work has nothing to do with their gender in general.
You got rid of men in order to increase the number of women on your team. But when someone says they'd merely not hire women citing your own apparent justification, you disagree that it'd be OK and then respond to a strawman that nobody proposed.
Maybe 5 of the original 15 males were gay. Does that change your perspective? I find this whole way of thinking unsettling. Doesn't it simply depend on who these people are as individuals?
I'd also be careful with the argument you've (implicitly) made. It doesn't seem to follow that the distribution of gender of programmers should match the distribution of gender of users. Besides, there must be software projects where 95%+ of users are male or female.
In general, I think most of us here agree that gender discrimination is bad, people being discouraged from making career choices due to gender is bad, and sexual harassment is bad. We may disagree on the frequency with which these things occur or how to fix them, but I think we're a lot closer than it appears from these contentious comments.
The thread-parent's comment made it clear that, in his situation, it made things better. Is it going to in every case? No. But using edge cases to argue against the median is even more specious than the argument you assert I was trying to sneak in.
Then why say this?
> women are on the order of half of their users.
You don't need to have parity between those ratios, but you might want to do better than the "token diversity hire" — assuming you do at all.
His post tells us nothing at all about what impact that had on the quality of the resulting software.
Can you clarify what "trying to fill quotas" has to do with believing in, encouraging, and supporting diversity on a technical team?
"supporting diversity" means absolutely nothing, it's empty buzz-speak. Either you hire people regardless of their genders/religious group/sexual orientation or you make a conscious choice to reject candidates which are not in your approved list of "diversity" (whatever that means).
In a tech world where you have probably less than 10% women, trying to achieve a "diverse" (whatever that means again) team is just putting quotas in place to reject people not in the approved whitelist of "diversity".
Have a good evening.
I don't like much to divide people across arbitrary lines which are often artificial, especially in the modern day where we have so much sub-culture that it's difficult to find anything in common in people supposedly from the same "group".
Here's the thing, the position that people should be judged on their merits, and "regardless of" those things is something I completely and unreservedly agree with.
In the real world, however, that just isn't the case. The overwhelming evidence of implicit bias in, for example, blinded résumés doing better than non-blinded when the candidate is a minority or woman puts the lie to that being the case.
Then, consider the research demonstrating that one of the most effective ways to correct insular and/or incorrect ideas about another group is to interact with members of that group. We're largely operating on internalized, false narratives when we pass on a résumé with the name "Linda" on it, but say, "I want to interview this guy" if it doesn't have a name on it. Exposure to the people we have those narratives about shows us how wrong they are. We need to over-correct for the tendency, in order to encourage the exposure.
"Where a man is judged on the context of his character" (yes, MLK, gender-bias is a thing) is a wonderful world, and one in which I very much wish to live. We have some difficult, uncomfortable work to do before we get there, and all the pushback I see about encouraging the participation of women and minorities in tech tells me it's likely to be even longer and harder than I'd thought.
So first, it's not because woman or black people are discriminated against by racist or sexist people that they make a distinct "group" themselves, they probably have as much in common as two random people in the street.
Secondly, affirmative action, like you are advocating here is also creating pretty bad side-effects. If you make the criteria for hiring much more favorable for women/black people/whoever you think is discriminated against, you just give more fuel to the discrimination. People will just think "Is this women hired because she is competent or just because it's a woman?", and now they have a legitimate reason to think that because they can point to official policies. I would also add that it's pretty bad for the people benefiting from the affirmative action since they are just reduced to their gender/skin colour/disability, they are just hired to fill a quota and they probably would want to be recognised for their skills or their thoughts instead.
Then as a last point, the team can be as diverse as the field in it, if you have 10% woman in IT, you cannot achieve 50% woman everywhere, it's just basic maths. The efforts should be concentrated in tech school.
As another follow-up to another comment of yours suggests, there are probably many ways to accomplish that end without quotas, or any number of other similar approaches. Asserting the problems with those doesn't negate the principle. "The crude, tip-the-scales-a-bit approach we've tried so far has some problems. I guess we shouldn't try to fix this stuff..."
Huh?
But the specific thing I, personally, want to see people do about this stuff is simple: to question their own narratives about it.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool." — Feynman
As per HN guidelines : "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
This subject appears dear to you, so perhaps you want to try again?
"Either you hire people regardless of their genders/religious group/sexual orientation or you make a conscious choice to reject candidates which are not in your approved list of "diversity" (whatever that means)."
Please see my follow-up to 'realusername's comment, which is sibling to yours, for an elaboration of my position.
You -say- you care about diversity, but that's not the explanation you've given. At best diversity is a tool to be used in the very particular case where it would help competence representation. By your comment, it would be in the case of untrue stereotypes.
"Exposure to the people we have those narratives about shows us how wrong they are."
The problem is that studies have shown that most stereotypes are true. (Really!)
This brings me to the next point : you somehow fail to mention the cases where it would be counterproductive to push for diversity, even if they are most cases. (At least for your stated goal.)
So which is it? Do you pursue diversity, or competence representation? If it's competence, will you accept to openly fight against diversity?
We made a couple cross-departmental promotions into the tech team of people who would not have taken the initiative to present themselves as candidates despite having natural aptitudes. In the absence of role models and with the rampant hostility in this industry, good people may take some convincing.
For what it's worth, another cross-departmental recruit matured to be an absolutely incredible engineer, who went from a standing start to making big bucks at Google within 5 years. He happened to be a white guy, haha -- but that's what you get when you cast a wide net.
Maybe we can start by increasing that 10%? I think a variety of approaches can be taken that don't discriminate against anyone. Introducing coding in K-12 is one small example. It helps because it exposes the possibility of a career in tech to girls and minorities. At no point, it denies that same opportunity to boys or white children.
A company may value diversity and still base their hiring decision solely on competence. You could ensure that your job posting reaches a diverse audience, for example. Instead of just posting it through your regular channels, you could reach out to, say, organizations for women in STEM. Thus increasing the number of diverse candidates who apply. The idea is to give equality of opportunity. Nobody reasonable is expecting enforced equality of outcome.
If you have 10 positions and 100 candidates who apply, and instead of the usual 5 women applying, you get 30, all things being equal, you just x6 your odds of hiring a woman. It doesn't necessarily mean that you'll hire 3 women either. But you increased your chances of diversifying your team. Notice that, at no point, you discriminated against anyone or favored them in the hiring process.
1.) Individual women inherently bring a perspective that individual men do not, and vice versa. And more importantly, the needs and perspectives of people in a given group can not be understood by those outside of it.
2.) A technical team necessarily benefits from diverse perspectives. What if they're building low level drivers for circuit boards? What if they're programming an application, but have no bearing whatsoever on the product decisions or design?
I find these ideas, particularly #1, to be diametrically opposed to liberal philosophies of universality and the focus on the individual. I legitimately find that line of reasoning to be abhorrent.
(Generalization of the vocal people in this area.) Their line of thinking is: "only people from those specific backgrounds can cater for their own groups tastes". And there's evidence for this, you have these people getting mad that an actor playing a gay person isn't gay and a trans person not trans.
It's almost as if the narrative is that empathy is dead, no person could possibly ever think about anything other than themselves. Somebody who thinks this would appear to lack personal experience of empathy, draw your own conclusions.
Probably an accurate reflection of the people who are proposing that world view.
Some years ago, a Jewish person on a professional forum told an anecdote about some group trying to do outreach to the Jewish community and scheduling their first meeting on the night of some really major Jewish holiday, a holiday so big he compared it to Christmas. Unsurprisingly, no Jews attended this meeting.
When I worked at Aflac, they always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." If you don't have any members of certain demographics on your team, there will be things that just never occur to you that you may never learn you needed to know if you wanted to genuinely serve such people.
I'd agree that having different perspectives in the idea phase is very important, but when it comes to implementation, diversity doesn't matter at all. Get the data from database, stick it in the views. It's pure technical ability at this phase.
I went and talked to the customers and other stakeholders, and found out that 300 hours was actually a nice-to-have. 48 hours with some margin was absolutely necessary, and 100 hours was better than equivalent devices on the market. We got buy-in to change the requirements and released the next week with a 100 hour lifetime.
Just an idea what a different perspective can bring.
I'm just responding to your anecdote and I do agree that different perspectives are valuable. My point above was just that there are many, many places to include diversity and the hyper-focus on the implementation phase (aka development) means you will miss the more valuable lifecycle phases where diversity has much more impact.
To be honest, the atmosphere when I arrived was not that great -- a case could have been made that it was a hostile workplace environment. However, my colleagues saw themselves as loyal to the company, and they didn't see themselves as discriminators. To their great credit, they found ways to moderate both their their behaviors and their mindsets.
This approach won't always work. Some people are more entrenched in their attitudes and had there been someone like that there, maybe it would have been uglier and more difficult.
But sometimes, one at a time, people can change.
I would rather reject the premise that someone's perspective is a function of their gender. Not least because it would concern me to find myself sharing a premise with sexists.
Furthermore, if you want to hire someone with a particular perspective, using gender as a proxy for it rather than testing if the candidate has that perspective directly looks like poor hiring practice.
That isn’t the only consideration.
Edit: removed duplicate words
Lack of diversity is another way of describing a history of denied opportunities due to the idea that because someone is different from you, they are somehow lesser. Increasing diversity in the workplace just means increasing the potential pool of talented people to work with. If you reflexively don't like this idea, it is probably because somewhere deep down you realise you are going to come up short.
Diversity hiring does the opposite, which is that you explicitly discriminate according to an arbitrary quota, on characteristics NOT directly related to the skillset you're hiring for. This heavily restricts your hiring pool.
Let's say I want to hire 20 diverse engineers. In a blind meritocracy, if I've hired 10 engineers that happen to have been white/Asian men, I still have the entire remaining population as potential candidates. In a diversity-quota-based system, I now have to automatically turn away white/Asian male applicants, as the remaining 10 slots are reserved for different demographics.
You are saying that you believe the counterargument to diversity hiring is "the turning away of people believed to be lesser," but that is simply not true. The counterargument is "I don't care if you're white or black, male or female, human or goose, I'm hiring someone who knows how to build a jet engine. If there are more male applicants than female applicants, I'm not going to be bothered by this or go out of my way to hire equally as many female applicants, because being male or female has nothing to do with knowing how to build jet engines."
In fact, you may even find that often there are actually quite a lot of people who may not look or talk or think like you, but that are more than capable. How many time have you heard people on HN complain that they were not given a chance with tech xyz, even though they had directly transferable skills in abc?
Anyways, as was the point of my post. People who don't care about diversity at work don't care about it in life. If you think it is not worth your time to be 'bothered' to go out of your way to find (ways of attracting or identifying) a diverse group of people to your endeavour. It is probably just because you fucking love the echo chamber.
If your argument is that all 15 of these employees gained employment on their attributes completely independent of gender -- and that gender plays no part -- then it should strike you as statistically improbable that all 15 would be men.
To me that seems outlandish to ignore. Clearly there must be some biases that lead to such a bifurcated outcome.
OR your argument is that men and women are different for some reason, which led to this situation. If that's your argument then you should make that argument.
In that case you're assuming that 80% of engineers should be male - which is a different argument than what was put forward.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code:-why-aren...
https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...
https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2016-10-20/st...
I'd think that most people would be in the same boat. We aren't robots that get fed requirements and magically churn out a product at the other end.
I spend 40 hours a week in the office, a good part of that is taken up with meetings and interacting with my colleagues. I don't want to spend all those hours feeling like I'm talking to a clone of myself.
Obviously, on a whole, you shouldn't hire inferior workers all in the name of diversity, but there two people that you'd be happy to hire and one of them would increase diversity in the team, I'd be inclined to pick that one.
We built bridges to other departments, providing some technical training and helping them to interact with us more confidently and more effectively, and I made sure that everyone received a strong outreach effort (regardless of gender). Those efforts were of course not gender specific, but the non-tech personnel in the company happened to be disproportionately female. The improved cooperation had an impact on both operations and morale.
And lastly, I would say that my male colleagues felt a sense of contentment -- they had always seen themselves as good people, and the change in our department, which they saw as positive, brought them more in line with that self-image.
You say the team was basically the same size at the end of this process as at the beginning. Therefore you clearly replaced a third of the men with women for no better reason than because they were men.
Moreover, you say that you replaced a these technical men with people drawn from the non-tech personnel in the company. So your tech team became one third non-technical. You claim you provided "some technical training" but what kind of tech department is this? If the tech work is so trivial that you could train anyone to do it why bother hiring technical people to begin with, and presumably pay the higher wages that went along with it?
You also say that your outreach was "of course not gender specific" despite admitting right from the start that your entire goal was to have lots more women, and that you targeted your outreach specifically to the rest of the company knowing they were "disproportionately female". So of course your outreach was gender specific. You admit right up front that was the entire purpose of it.
Finally, you assert that your male colleagues felt "contentment" at these changes because they "thought of themselves as good people" and your morally superior gender heroics allowed them to, in your eyes, be less bad.
Frankly I find your entire story absurd and unbelievable. I have never once met a group of technical men who would be "content" with having a third of their presumably competent colleagues replaced with complete newbies who had clearly never worked in their field before, for specifically sexist reasons. Moreover your narration is clearly unreliable because you claim your outreach wasn't gender specific, despite the rest of your story being entirely about why it was gender specific.
I suspect you are projecting. You believe replacing men with women is "good" and not doing so is "bad" and so you assumed everyone else would feel exactly the same way you do.
repolfx's reply is grotesquely uncharitable and I was planning to just let people judge it for themselves. To clarify this one point, though, there was a semi-technical data-cleanup department from which we routinely made cross-departmental hires. My recollection is that one of the women who was hired into a junior engineering position came from there. So did the guy who's now a Googler.
If it would be helpful for you to hear more, let me know if you're also `taneq` on reddit and I'll pm you.
In this case, the pretend reality that we are acting as if it is actually the case is that engineering aptitude and interest is evenly spread amongst all peoples regardless of gender,race,sexual orientation, gender identity, and whatever they come up with next.
All the statistics in the world that show that the pipeline is not even close to getting filled because of lack of aptitude or interest by certain classes is just handwaved away because it is not the pretend reality that will soon become real if only everyone would just believe in it....
(it was just for a period of a few months. This was a pharma company; there seem to be more women in biology, analytic chemistry, medical statistics etc)
What we see today in modern society is more of a phenomenon then a norm from an anthropological and historical standpoint. I want to know why.
It seems however that the default explanation is that men have always oppressed women.
I believe that political correctness has colored the true reason that is more complex, nuanced and not as one sided.
You may get voted down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitability_of_Patriarch...
The Slate Star Codex article is a good reference http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...
This does not mean male dominance and social hierarchy are preferable. It just explains why they are the norm. There are many good reasons to reject them as the norm now that we can.
I agree.