Microsoft engineer complains that company is biased | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft engineer complains that company is biased

arstechnica.com

She follows up that it is "established fact" that the "specific types of thought process and problem solving required for engineering of all kinds (software or otherwise) are simply less prevalent among women"

I'd like to see where she got this "established fact". Many of the early computer pioneers were women, and many of the early human "computers" were also women.

I've known some extremely talented female software engineers (and some mediocre ones), and well as some extremely talented male software engineers (and some mediocre ones). But, I've met many many more male engineers than female which I believe is because more females are discouraged from entering the field by society.

Since this trend seems to be changing, it will be interesting to see in a decade or two if the field becomes more balanced.

https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/political-correctness/the-ge...

For years Mr. Peterson has criticised people as being Marxists but didn't read the Communist Manifesto until about two weeks ago. I'm not sure he's best positioned to offer commentary on complex topics like this one.

Then who is? Ben shaprio?

Both are hacks.

That is a lie. He said he read it in preparation, because he hadn't read it in a while.

Peterson clearly has no idea what Marxism actually is, outside of the boogeyman created in his head. He proved so in the 'debate'.

When questioned directly about what Marxists he believed represented what he's characterising, he couldn't name a single one. This lends more evidence and fact to the pile of facts that demonstrate he has no clue what he's talking about.

If Peterson is not of your like, you could still take a look at some of the papers and studies referenced in the article from credible sources[1][2], before drawing conclusions from an unrelated subject (whether or not he read the Communist Manifesto).

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6412/eaas9899

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...

Considering that academic rigour is at stake - given we need to trust he's made a rigorous survey of the academic consensus surrounding this topic - it is a very related subject.

Given that none of these papers prove that women are better or worse at programming than men, perhaps you can demonstrate your academic rigour to me, too?

It should be obvious that she isn't saying that female software engineers can't be talented.

Furthermore, it isn't a given that the lack of women in tech is due to society discouraging women from entering the field.

Furthermore, it isn't a given that the lack of women in tech is due to society discouraging women from entering the field.

It's not a given that cultural bias is the only factor, but it is a given that there is a cultural bias against women going into STEM fields. It feels like that trend is changing (I certainly am seeing more female applicants at college job fairs), but it seems that we still have a ways to go before it's erased entirely (if it ever will be).

So it's possible that without any cultural bias at all that fewer women than men would choose a STEM career, but we should still strive to lower that barrier to entry so any woman that wants to go into a STEM field is able to do so freely and without discouragement (whether explicit or implicit)

Why is there an assumption that women are being discouraged to enter STEM fields rather than men being pushed? Lets imagine if there were a social culture that rewarded men who took high income jobs, discourage men who selected their occupation based on interest, and allowed women full freedom to choose any occupation. How similar to our world would that look like?

A find it a good question to ask is how society rewards people based on their decisions. Women that follow gender norms in their career choice, and women that don't. Men that follow gender norms, and men that don't. Using social status as a metric, who reaps the best rewards and who get punished the most?

That’s not entirely true.

Women are actually more equally represented (or over represented in the case of medical sciences) in STEM fields, the discrepancy in computer sciences is where the unequal representation is most apparent.

The female software engineers I've worked with have nearly all been super talented, and incredible at their jobs. Several have been extremely gifted at quantitative reasoning and machine learning applied to geo/spatial problems.

I suspect they've had to be, given how unwelcoming the field has been to them.

Sure, my sample size is like 10, but enough to make me laugh at statements about womens' lacking in technical abilities.

When people talk about a toxic culture, the implicit metaphor is that culture is to people what water is to fish. People default to filling the role that we think we are expected to fill.

Rather than getting into the issue of who was more dominant in a field at a given time, let's look at another field. Literally all early psychologists were men. Today the field is about 70% women with a rapidly increasing "gender gap." Do you think that's because 'men are discouraged from entering the field by society'? Of course not. Should we start trying to 'correct' this? Again, of course not. We should of course always ensure that men and women have equality of opportunity to do as they see fit, but differences in outcome alone do not mean anything.

Scandinavia is the most gender equal region in the world. And one of the many discoveries they made on the way there is that when there is a major push to get people into atypical roles there tends to be a roughly constant increase in participation. After that push fades everything rapidly converges back to where it was before. The constant aspect is also interesting in that it seems to suggest there is no self feedback mechanism as would be implied by simple social differences causing a change.

Some of the biggest companies for trying to get 'x into computing', including women, have been Google, Apple, and Intel. These are the exact same companies that were also engaging in an illegal anti-competitive collusion cartel whereby the agreed to not try to recruit each employees from one another. They were fully aware of the consequences of this action. Eric Schmidt of Google ironically wrote in an email, "[discussion of this agreement should be done] verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later." [2]

As Schmidt was well aware of the possibility of, they've now faced losses at trial in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So why would these companies voluntarily engage in such a high risk behavior? Because it kept wages down. What does pushing for 'get x into computing' do? It would markedly increase the labor pool without a proportional increase in the number of jobs. It would help drive wages substantially down.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...

Do you think that's because 'men are discouraged from entering the field by society'? Of course not

Since I'm not in that field, I really have no first hand knowledge, but if I had to guess, maybe men are encouraged to go into psychiatry instead of psychology while women are discouraged from becoming a psychiatrist?

What does pushing for 'get x into computing' do? It would markedly increase the labor pool without a proportional increase in the number of jobs. It would help drive wages substantially down.

The more important thing it does is bring additional talented people in the field, making it easier to hire top quality people.

It's not about making it "easier" to hire top quality people, but cheaper. Easier would imply that companies such as Google, Apple, and Intel are simply unable to hire enough top quality engineers. That's clearly false. It might also suggest that the engineers that they have are insufficiently skilled - again something I see no evidence for at all. But we are certainly at the equilibrium where supply and demand are in a nice balance. This is unlike most other fields where labor supply has greatly outpaced demand in part due to college becoming as typical as high school. And because of this engineers at these companies are in positions of unprecedented privilege. They can actively try to influence corporate policy, demand wages that in many cases are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and so on.

The idea of increasing the supply is to bring the equilibrium in line with most other industries which is where labor supply generally greatly outpaces business demand. This not only helps drive wages down, but also enables companies greater control over their employee. For instance in tech there is massive turnover. Since employees are in high demand, they can and do job hop much to their own benefit. When employees are less in demand a job becomes more sacred which increases employee "loyalty" giving the company more power to do as they see fit. As but one example employees are going to be less inclined to object to dubious corporate behavior, which has become a running theme at Google, when said employees attach an extremely high value to their job.

What would happen however is that no-name shops who can't offer all that much would be able to hire top quality people. And while that's good for them, I see this no better than the current state of the job market where it's increasingly common to see that the guy serving your coffee has a college degree, and the mountain of debt that entails. Labor oversupply benefits companies and hurts employees. In a 'big picture' view, this is probably a good thing since marginalizing labor means more companies can grow and compete which benefits everybody in the longrun. But from the perspective of labor, it's obviously not a good thing.

Ars did a good job of writing this article to express the opinions of the subjects of the case but still take an opportunity to state the facts: that there is basically no evidence women are naturally unsuited to programming and that in other places in the world it doesn't always hold.

I don't think that was the claim of the original engineer though.

More that women like other things more?

The Microsoft employee wasn't an engineer, and said:

"Many women simply aren’t cut out for the corporate rat race, so to speak, and that’s not because of ‘the patriarchy,’ it’s because men and women aren’t identical, and women are much more inclined to gain fulfillment elsewhere."

and:

"men and women think very differently from each other, and the specific types of thought process and problem solving required for engineering of all kinds (software or otherwise) are simply less prevalent among women."

Source: https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-questionin...

She did, in fact. Please see the other reply to your question, as they beat me to it.

People always try to soften the blow with "preferences" but it's really a non-argument that doesn't stand up to even the most casual scrutiny.

And then, the exact same data that refutes the "women aren't suited" argument also refutes the "maybe women are on average incapable of deriving satisfaction from this work."

In a world without external gender bias, neither males nor females would ever be told, implicitly or explicitly, that any job is unsuitable for them.

"Women like other things more" because fewer men are in those fields to tell them "this is a job for men." There is no overall gender-based bias towards or away from any intellectual interests.

If a field is full of asshole men, it is not indicative of a lack of interest in that field from women. It is a lack of interest in putting up with those asshole men that will keep most women away.

> "Women like other things more" because fewer men are in those fields to tell them "this is a job for men." There is no overall gender-based bias towards or away from any intellectual interests.

Do you have evidence for this?

The evidence I've seen, say, comparing Scandinavian women to Eastern European women, indicates that there are sex-correlated trends in life choices, eg about career.

https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/political-correctness/the-ge...

The article itself debunks these claims with both historical and contemporary evidence, but let's step back for a moment here.

Just note for a moment that Peterson's argument seems to hinge on proving there are sex-differences. I'm not sure how much I believe him (he's not very trustworthy and he mis-cites things a lot in my experience), but let's proceed as if I do not dispute this point. Fine: "There are sex differences on a variety of scales."

This concession is easy, because no one really disputes this![0] What's disputed is what the impact and interpretation of these should be. If a dislike of computer programming is universal under this hypothesis, then we should not find such trivial counter-examples as the article has. Software can be about people. Design can be about things. The outrageous claim is that the minds women possess are unsuited to the task at hand, not that women might be different. And this is the claim Peterson dances around continually. He'd much rather talk about what post-scarcity people in a semi-socialist nation focus on doing than ask the question, "How good is anyone at a given job?"

You know what? If I wasn't living the Bay Area where expenses are so high; I wouldn't work for a tech company either. It's not a friendly place to be, and it's a place that reviles personal growth.

[0]: Not even trans people suggest there are "no sex differences." If they did, then why would so many go to such difficulty to do HRT and even surgical modification? The argument is that there is more to the story of what it means to be a woman or a man, and we should recognize that.

Just like there is basically no evidence men are naturally unsuited to being a mother.

I doubt even you know exactly what you meant by this.

There is some handwavy evidence for the other side that they didn't present. Off the top of my head, there's an Australian study that found removing names from resumes lowered the number of women who made it through, and there's the "paradox" of lower income countries having a much greater proportion of female software developers.

I don't think either of these is particularly strong evidence, but including and then dismissing them would have been more convincing than pretending they don't exist.

This keeps happening. When someone says things like, "Women overall aren't as good at programming", rather than responding, "There's no evidence of that" (and then they argue that, or quietly simmer with resentment that will keep bubbling up), I'm wondering whether it's better to respond, "What do you think that generalization sounds like to your colleagues who are women, and to women and girls considering the many careers and activities involving programming?"

There are other discussions to have, and some of the problems seem very difficult, but maybe starting with a bit more sensitivity, and respecting that, will help make progress on the problems.

(FWIW, when I started as a teen intern at a real software engineering company, half of my team was female. The women included: one with a math degree, who developed a fancy code path instrumentation tool for embedded systems, which integrated with our technical workstation software; one who we'd hired away from working on supercomputer compilers, to develop a language reverse-engineering tool; one who was an EE; one who was an MS and published on a technical computer graphics method; one who was a database expert with published research. The women all were comparable to the men, who also weren't slouches (other than me, who was just an enthusiastic but know-little intern). Everyone was supportive, and worked together well, and there were technical debates and people confident of their ideas, but no strutting. How that is not the norm today, I could venture some guesses, but regardless, I don't see a good reason it can't be the norm.)

Edit: While I typed that comment, the post was marked a dup (without a link to whatever it's a dup of), and has dropped off the front page. Sigh.

I started work in IT in 1990. I do remember more female programmers at the time. (Of all pay grades, some senior programmers.)

At the same time, I believe the female mind thinks differently than the male mind. This is confirmed several times daily as I interact with my dear wife. (This is not to say that either brain is superior for programming. I don't believe this is true. They are just different.)

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