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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

* Intellectual posturing and oneupsmanship in software teams. Participating in intellectual dick waving.

* A strong focus on being "right" over working collaboratively (especially in domains with no right answers).

* Hyper competitiveness - to the detriment of effectiveness.

* A lack of empathy (e.g. PRs with "your code sucks, suck it up and stop being such a baby").

These things are hardly good from the perspective of any software developer (except particular kinds of men who thrive under these conditions) but they're particularly off putting to women.

I tend to find that this aggressive behavior is most frequently exhibited by "senior" developers who aren't actually very good or clever but have built up a reputation that they wish to protect. Some developers are very territorial.

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> but they're particularly off putting to women.

This is the crux of the issue. For this to be true, it must also be true that men and women are, at least in some ways, intrinsically different (otherwise why would these things pose a greater challenge for women relative to men)?

>This is the crux of the issue. For this to be true, it must also be true that men and women are, at least in some ways, intrinsically different

I don't see why it's the crux. It's really only necessary that men and women be socialized differently for this to be true - to grow up surrounded by people telling you that you need to be more "agreeable" and "not too pushy".

I think whether it is true or not is rather beside the point. Toxic working environments are anti-meritocratic and anti productive. Even if we didn't give a fuck how many women entered the profession we should fix them. Intellectual dick waving leads to worse code, not better.

Humans are social creatures and very little of what we do is innate, and we have extremely flexible brains which change based on use. Social cues and training are enormously influential, and arguments based on biological determinism have a steep bar to reach controlling for those factors. For example, there are significant variations around the world on math and science academic performance so it’s unlikely to be innate. Even when you do find differences in a study (e.g. spatial reasoning) it takes years to test whether those are due to practice (i.e. are children equally encouraged to develop those skills?) and also establish whether those low-level differences are key to a high-level task.

There are some low-level differences (e.g. ratios of different cell types in the brain) but there’s no conclusive evidence linking that to academic skills or job performance (just how does 3-d reasoning affect your ability to write Python, anyway?), but there has been a history of earlier results attributed to gender not holding up under scrutiny.

Contrary to a popular straw man, few people deny that men and women are different in some respects. The point is that there is no reason to think that these differences should, in a healthy culture, put women off becoming programmers, or make them less capable of doing a good job.

Sure, and that's not an argument I'd make. But, as Damore suggested in his memo, mightn't these innate differences mean that women are less likely, on average, to prefer careers in software engineering? And mightn't these innate differences also explain why women are strongly over-represented in certain other professions like nursing (91%), elementary and middle school teaching (81%) and social work (80%)?

>Damore suggested in his memo, mightn't these innate differences mean that women are less likely, on average, to prefer careers in software engineering?

As far as I understood it, this wasn't the bit of the memo that people were attacking.

Any difference between two things might turn out to be responsible for some other difference between the two things. Perhaps men are better at software engineering because they're taller. Perhaps women don't enjoy programming because they have breasts. It is pointless -- and in this context, often harmful -- to speculate.

So, because the cause is uncertain, we should not discuss female under-representation in software development at all?

I don't think that the cause is uncertain. Broadly speaking, the cause is sexism. What I'm saying is that there is no evidence whatever for a biological cause, and it is harmful to speculate wildly on biological causes in the absence of evidence.

This seems like a strange argument, given the start to this entire subthread ("women used to be the majority").

Let me get this straight:

1. Most women were programmers.

2. Women aren't sexist, so they let men in.

3. Men overwhelmed the women.

4. Men are sexist, so they stopped letting women in.

5. Now we need to deliberately reverse the results of stage (4).

Is that the sequence of events as you see it?

You have 1 the wrong way round.

Women would not have been in charge of hiring, so no to 2. (The programming jobs men were hired for would likely not have been considered the same kind of job.)

Not sure what you mean by 3.

Roughly yes to 4, although the issue is systematic sexism, not the personal prejudices of men and women. Society in general, including many women, disapproved of women becoming programmers once it began to be seen as a high-status high-skill profession.

Yes to 5, with the preceding caveats.

If it's society in general that is sexist, why have many industries that are "high-status high-skill" seen a serious increase in the number of women in the profession, while engineering has not?

These arguments seem to go in circles a lot.

First it matters that "the majority of programmers were women". But then it doesn't actually matter, because the people in charge of hiring weren't women. Ok. Then it's society in general that is sexist, but actually it's only certain professions where this "general sexism" manifests itself, for no apparent reason. Ok. Then you have the most egalitarian countries in the world seeing more disparate outcomes than other western countries. But this is apparently because sexism and cultural norms are so nebulous and hard to pin down that there must still be some sexism going on there too, we just can't see it. Ok.

There are a lot of claims being made with no evidence whatsoever. While I personally don't put much stock in psychology, at least Damore's points had actual studies behind them. And though it has been thrown around in this thread that "some of the authors disagreed with Damore's interpretation!", I have actually read the studies and found nothing factually inaccurate with the interpretation. That's what is so difficult about a lot of psychology – the hard facts are few and far between, so effectively every result is subject to interpretation. An author of a paper can disagree, but that doesn't make Damore wrong.

>If it's society in general that is sexist, why have many industries that are "high-status high-skill" seen a serious increase in the number of women in the profession, while engineering has not?

Because those industries accepted that they had a problem and took steps to fix it. Altering the perceptions of the broader society can be a big part of that. People no longer see anything unusual about a woman being a lawyer or a doctor. Fifty years ago, that wasn't the case. So there's no paradox here. "General sexism" includes stereotypes about appropriate occupations for men and women. These can change over time, as we've seen in the case of lawyers and doctors.

>First it matters that "the majority of programmers were women". But then it doesn't actually matter, because the people in charge of hiring weren't women.

It matters because it shows that women were, at one time, both interested in and capable of programming. No-one has said that it doesn't matter, so your 'but' makes no sense.

You're quite right that there's nothing to be learned by throwing around citations to half-read and half-understood studies (which is why I haven't done any of that). All you have to do is listen to what women in tech say. If James Danmore had done that for five minutes instead of wasting his time on his half-assed "research", none of this would have happened.

Women did a lot of the manufacturing during the last World War. Does that mean women are interested in being factory workers? As to capacity, nobody, including Damore, claimed that women do not have the same capacity as men to be programmers.

Anecdotal evidence is worse than psychology studies.

I'm not sure why you think there's any analogy between women working as programmers in the 60s and women working in factories during the second World War. But in fact, WWII did effect a huge change in perceptions of women as part of the workforce.

You literally claimed that women working in an industry means women are interested in working in that industry.

That's not necessarily true. Hence the analogy.

It does mean that in the absence of any other obvious explanation. I don't actually know the extent to which women working in factories were conscripted in WWII. But I do know that women weren't forced to work as programmers in the 1960s.

The issue here is that doing something without being forced to do that thing does not then mean you are interested in that thing.

If you have many good / attractive options and you choose one, you probably have an interest in that thing.

If you have precious few, not great options, and you choose one, it does not necessarily indicate the same.

I shouldn't need to provide copious examples for this to be obviously true. Money is only one of many motivators, but it is often strong enough on its own to overcome your interest (or lack thereof) in something if it means you get paid for it.

Take another example: many women throughout history have chosen sex work. That does not mean that sex work interests them. It just means they decided sex work was better than alternatives, for whatever reasons.

Doing something of your own free will does not mean you have a genuine interest in that thing. It can (and often does) just mean that thing is better than alternatives, for a multitude of reasons that are not "I find it the most interesting".

Most people are not genuinely interested in their jobs, so I doubt that variation in genuine interest a major factor in gender balance. But sure, it is impossible to disprove your speculation conclusively. The trouble is that a lot of people seem to think that the mere abstract possibility of such speculations ought to shut down any serious attempt to eliminate sexism in tech.

First off, I don't understand how my stance is "speculation", but yours is not.

Even assuming that your assertion about sexism in tech is not in fact speculation, how exactly is introducing more sexist policies into tech going to help eliminate sexism in tech?

>First off, I don't understand how my stance is "speculation", but yours is not.

Because my stance (that sexism is a significant factor in putting women off from tech) can be trivially verified by, say, asking 10 women in tech about their experiences of sexism. Not to mention that it would be a minor miracle if tech were somehow completely isolated from the sexism that's clearly present in society as a whole.

Out of interest, have you ever tried talking to women about this issue? Or have you (ironically) formed your opinion that there is no sexism in tech without listening to their perspective?

10 women believing that there is sexism rampant in tech doesn't mean that there is, and it certainly doesn't prove out that it is a strain of sexism that is relevant in this particular case.

I generally don't try to collect facts about life by asking randos for their opinions, no.

But yes, I have talked with women in tech about sexism. I have also encouraged other women to get into tech in the first place.

> Not to mention that it would be a minor miracle if tech were somehow completely isolated from the sexism that's clearly present in society as a whole.

Is this the same sexism that is causing the current generation of young women to go to and graduate university at a higher rate than their male counterparts, earn more money than their male counterparts, or commit less suicide than their male counterparts?

>10 women believing that there is sexism rampant in tech doesn't mean that there is

And this attitude is why it's going to be hard work to change things to the better. You have no interest in listening to what women tell you. You'd rather cherry pick studies of dubious quality and relevance, and tell your female colleagues (if any) that they must just be imagining it all.

>[young women] earn more money than their male counterparts

This seems bogus, at least in reference to the USA. At most, it may the case that women earn slightly more than men straight out of college. The gender pay gap still clearly favors men overall.

As for suicide, I think men have pretty much always been more prone to suicide than women. If that's an argument for the non-existence of sexism, then you'd have to draw the absurd conclusion that, e.g., there was no sexism in Victorian Britain. See figure 1 here: https://watermark.silverchair.com/dyq094.pdf?token=AQECAHi20...

All that being said, it is a common misconception that sexism is by definition something that harms women and not men. Sexism certainly harms men too. The root cause of sexism is the power asymmetry between men and women. Generally speaking, men exercise that power in their own broad interests. But of course there are plenty of individual men who lose out.

> The root cause of sexism is the power asymmetry between men and women

The root cause of much disagreement on the subject of sexism is on the claim that there is a power asymmetry between men and women, and the methodology of measuring personal income as the sole means of measuring power in society.

There is far more evidence for biological causes than there is for sexism.

If you look closely, there is very little evidence for biological causes. There are many alleged biological differences which are alleged to be relevant, but rarely, if ever, evidence for a causal link.

Your post seems to make a set of assumptions about women's abilities and preferences (for example their ability to thrive in a hyper-competitive environment).

It's not clear why these should be any more acceptable than the claims Damore made.

There are some quite well documented differences in women's personality traits - particularly surrounding sociability, agreeableness and neuroticism. It's not particularly contentious to state that men and women have differing personalities. What may be contentious is the conclusions you derive from that.

Incidentally:

1) An environment filled with intellectual posturing is not "hyper competitive". The fact that you could confuse the two is concerning.

2) My post may have seemed to you to make a set of assumptions about women's abilities but it didn't (just their preferences).

It's very strange to say that's male only and "off-putting" to women. Have you ever tried exploring female-dominated industries? Because women can and do display all those behaviors as well.

I think these behaviors are toxic and off putting to other men too, but men seem to be more willing to put up with them.

I don't see an equivalence to nursing or primary school teaching since by and large it's not the toxic aspects of these careers that puts off men, it's the lack of pay and status.

So basically men and women are different and have different interests and attitudes. What's the problem with them choosing different professions then?

If the reasons for them choosing different professions is simple preference regarding the nature of tasks, no problem. If the reason is that our profession is toxic in a way that puts them off that's a problem.

So why assume it's the latter and reject the former as an option? If you state that men and women have different personalities and attitudes then you must accept that carries over to interests as well. The fact that STEM fields collectively are balanced while different sectors have different ratios shows that there's really no major underlying issue and that personal preference is the overriding factor.

Your average insurance company's software team behaves like this? Whilst tweaking the payroll software?

Because, if you really, really want gender parity, most programmers don't work at Uber or Snapchat. They work in mundane jobs at faceless companies.

Even more so when you leave the USA. (Since this is about principle).

Fuck yeah it does. Actually I think it's the slightly below average places that are some of the worst. I've tended to find that technical quality correlates to better behavior, probably because insecurity is what drives so much of it.

In my experience, those below average places where people tweak payroll software (where I started out in my career) are the worst. I would expect the below average people in Uber and Google to be among the worst of the worst too, though (they are the most insecure, I think). A lack of psychological safety is what drives a lot of this.

As always there are exceptions, but as a rule, mediocrity breeds insecurity and insecurity breeds toxic behavior and no, none of this can be fixed in five minutes.

All which can be fixed in five minutes.

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