I can't express how infuriating I find the "we just need to treat everyone equally, that's it!" type of comments, and these analogies help me understand why. It's like saying "we just need to write maintainable modular code, that's it!"
Women are underrepresented in applications to engineering school. Are adults who are already in the workforce responsible for that? Do high school girls somehow sense the "hostile environment" in engineering schools before they spend a single day there? If we want to actually solve this problem, we need to go all the way to the beginning: middle school, where girls mysteriously start losing interest in technical fields.
My wife, who has a solid head for mathematics but majored in German once explained to me why she didn't go into engineering: 1) because she didn't want to be surrounded by dudes all day; 2) because she didn't want to enter a field where she wouldn't have women bosses and mentors.
So if you're a high-school girl doing even a minimal bit of career planning, yes, of course you take into account the fact hat you'll be a minority in your field if you go into engineering, with all of the career hurdles that being a minority in any field entails.
Then her own prejudice is keeping her out of engineering. That’s not the fault of the men in that field, that's all on her.
Also, you say she has a "solid head for mathematics" but instead majored in German. Again, that was her choice and this may be why many women don't go into technical fields: they simply choose not to (regardless of their abilities).
I also have some doubts about this being the sole issue. As an undergrad, I watched my school work hard to try to play up the fact that there were female students, female professors, and famous women in engineering. This was done whenever potential students were visiting. This was done in pamphlets sent out to high schools. The effect was not even measurable. I see the same pattern in my graduate program, and the same pattern in other engineering schools, and even among recruiters for corporations. I am not sure what else people in the field can do to try to dispel the notion; if indeed this is a cause, I suspect that girls are learning to dislike engineering from somewhere else, but I think that something happens earlier in life, at least if we believe the research on when girls lose interest in technical fields (somewhere around middle school or early high school).
1. If it's us, then honest self-examination can reveal what we're doing wrong. Are we patronizing towards the women we work with or who are in the ranks below us (grade-wise in school, hierarchically in the workplace) more than we are with the men? Are they more sensitive to it, if so can we change how we approach them to be less off-putting?
2. If it's the wider culture in the US, we can participate in programs that reveal the reality of STEM to a broader audience. Help with youth mentorship programs. Become a teacher. There are many good math and science teachers, but there are many terrible ones too. I like my friends, but some of them teach math because that's what they were qualified to teach by credit hours, not because of an innate interest or understanding. They don't convey the sense of interest and itrigue that can capture children's attention and interest.
3. The reality is some combination of the above, our institutions (educational and professional) contain a great deal of systemic, often unintended, bias. Our media portrays engineers as lonely losers or creeps. As a community we can work to tackle these things if we take it on as a real challenge, instead of dismissing it as just gender differences.
Sure they can. They can simply hire more women. Once the gender ratio is sorted out, the new equilibrium will be self-sustaining.
You're smart enough to know it's not that simple; even if one were willing to "just do it" it's not clear the unintended consequences would not result in a net-negative effect on women in engineering.
Fundamentally, if the source funnel is unbalanced, and you assume that there is a scalar "skill" quantity that is the economic factor of production employers actually desire, then it is mathematically impossible to hire-toward-parity without having a lower standard for hiring from the less-represented pool [0].
If you accept that ratio-correcting hiring mathematically necessitates lower standards for women then you need to answer some thorny economic questions.
Will the women whose skill is below the minimum skill of the men in your quota system be paid the same as the men (all of whom by mathematical necessity, will be more skilled)?. If they are paid the same as the men, it is a subsidy paid by the employer, the employer's customers, and the disemployed men who otherwise would have been hired but-for the quota. It's not clear to me that they bear any culpability for the social problem, or that the economic costs of this subsidy are sufficiently small not to have significant negative effects on those businesses. I know, I know: boo hoo, those poor businesses won't have two golden swimming pools of money, just one. But the reality is that the margins most businesses have between the cost of employment and the productivity of that employment is not, for most companies, rich Google-y numbers like 50%. If the margins are more like 10% it is entirely credible to me that such a subsidy will drive various arms of the business from ROI-positive to ROI-negative (or at least, ROI below just investing that cash in stocks). And then all those jobs we were planning to give to women will no longer exist.
If, on the other hand, the lower-skill women are paid sufficiently less than the men to balance the opportunity cost borne by the employer (for not being able to hire everyone above a minimum skill level) then the women need to be paid less than an open market wage (i.e. less than their skills would justify without a quota system, because the quota system is costing the employer lost productivity in men they would otherwise hire). So now the women are paying for the parity-seeking hiring. This will exacerbate the already high level of concern about fairness in compensation and will provide an additional disincentive for women to join this work force. Never mind that it seems perverse to have the women pay the employers for the privilege of working in a quota system.
Let me make a defensive statement lest it seem I am suggesting that women are less skilled than men: I am emphatically not. I'm saying that if you take the best five of 30 people and the best five of 100 people, the latter group will, with significant statistical regularity, be more skilled.
So what to do if ratio-correcting hire is DOA? It seems that there's an easier solution that has its roots in a long history of women conquering other obstacles; a generation of high-school aged women need to decide, en masse, that they will join engineering departments as a group and that they will stick to it with mutual support. This is direct action by the people whose well-being we are trying to improve, can be done without getting permission or cooperation from anyone outside that group, and solves the "boys' club" problem on day 1 of freshman year classes (because the club will be, by construction, full of women as well). I even have a slogan ready for them: "We're here, we're engineers, get used to it." I realize that coordinating this kind of movement is hard, but it is run-of-the-mill political and social organizing, and it seems to me like something that can actually work (as opposed to solutions that attack the symptoms of a skewed sourcing funnel).
[0] Proof sketch (hand-waving law-of-large numbers arguments, and assuming women's skills are distributed identically to men's):
1) If you reject quotas and hire simply for skill >= min_skill, then you will find more men meeting that criterion because there are men in the source funnel. So fixed-skill cutoffs are out.
2) If you have quotas (say 1 woman for every 1 man) then you can't hire everyone >= min_skill; you will instead hire the best among the people >= min_skill. The men will be pulled from a larger pool, and taking the best from a larger pool will result on average in a higher minimum skill level. So simply by taking the best N of the women and the best N of the men, the source funnel imbalance forces you to have lower standards for women
Who's saying that?
> If we want to actually solve this problem, we need to go all the way to the beginning: middle school, where girls mysteriously start losing interest in technical fields.
What do you mean by "go to middle school" - who do you suggest should take what action in that particular venue?
> mysteriously
What's mysterious about it? What expectations do you have that this observation runs counter to? What needs to be changed in our mental model of this system, so that instead of this being a mystery it becomes a predictable of the system's properties? (At which point we can start asking "how to change the system so that we get different outcomes".)
(This is me being curious, not Socratic, BTW.)
Who's saying that?"
Well, the article itself:
Promoting equality in your organization
If you start actively working to attack inequality in your organization, I guarantee you’ll realize you were already a feminist.
When your heart’s in the right place and you’re constantly examining your own actions and your organization’s, you start to notice bias and prejudice in more and more places. Most disturbingly, you notice it in yourself.
"What do you mean by "go to middle school" - who do you suggest should take what action in that particular venue?"
I did not claim to have a solution, I was just pointing out where the problem lies. At some point in a girl's life, long before she is even thinking about college, something happens to undermine her interest in science and math. Years down the road, she winds up majoring in something that is not engineering or computer science, and fails to acquire the technical skills needed for a career in such fields by any other means. Obviously this is not something that all girls experience, but to a large extent it is the reason that engineering schools have so few women and so many men.
Maybe it is something girls are seeing on TV. Maybe it is something they are reading on the Internet. It is pretty clear that a young teenager is not seeing whatever prejudice exists in the workplace (how often do middle schoolers wander into your office?).
"What's mysterious about it? What expectations do you have that this observation runs counter to?"
Absent some reason to think otherwise, why would anyone assume that girls who have a talent and interest in math before a certain age would suddenly abandon their interest upon reaching that age? If puberty is the answer, why does it not happen to boys? For that matter, why does it seem to happen to a different degree in our country than in others?
I feel like you're getting something else out of this article than I did. The previous section, heading: Wanting equality isn’t enough, seems entirely contrary to the conclusion that you're drawn. The author is indicating that promoting/wanting isn't enough. We have to develop an understanding of why the situation is what it is, and actively work on shifting our culture to rectify it (assuming you think it's a problem in the first place, many around me don't).
Not the same as "the men in the workforce", agreed?
At this point, however, I don't know what measurable impact those programs have had, I should probably talk to the folks I know that are still participating in the programs at a level where they monitor the trends.
Regarding who: Anyone working in STEM with the patience to deal with 12 year olds. Volunteer with FIRST Robotics teams or other after school or summer programs. Female and minority volunteers, in particular, as knowing that there are female and minority STEM workers isn't the same as knowing female and minority STEM workers, it can make a huge difference for kids.
[1] EDIT: It may not be a drop off. It's been too long since I was involved with this, but perhaps instead of them losing interest it's that they don't develop the interest at this point?
I can tell my functional programming hating program lead all day that it's great and very applicable to what we do, or I can write up a program we've been needing for months in two days and 200 clear lines versus the 2000 line C# version that's still got bugs in it.
Quite possibly, potentially in cultural portrayals of what goes on there. This isn't to say that necessarily is the cause, but you've by no means clearly demonstrated the lack of causal relationship you seem to think you have.
In other words, if the problem is the environment within an engineering school, we should expect the trend to be a sudden, sharp change in female representation at the end of the first semester of the first year of college. Instead, we see poor representation in applications to engineering programs. I think that suggests the problem is earlier, and my own experience in engineering schools has been exactly that (my undergrad EE class had no women at all; in grad school, the vast majority of women I met were foreign, which might suggest something about our own culture versus others).
Consider a world (and ignore, for the moment, whether it corresponds to reality) where professional technical environments just genuinely are really awful to female employees. In that case, the teachers and parents are probably doing what's best for the individual girls (though potentially with some long-term tragedy of the commons). Would you condemn, there, the honesty of the well-intentioned messengers?
We should also consider an alternative fictional world, where women never have any issues in technical fields, and the cultural myth has arisen by whatever historical accident. In that case, I agree that it's quite legitimate to lay much of the blame at the feet of those perpetuating the incorrect myth.
Reality, of course, looks absolutely nothing like either hypothetical.
FWIW, my wife says she was turned off of technical studies after getting to Berkeley (having enjoyed physics in high school) by her impressions of the technical students on arrival.
Just.
Fix.
It.
To discuss your comment, I didn't feel that the post brought any particular insight to fixing it, but rather was trying to encourage discussion. Sadly this post seems to have been flagged and is now buried on this discussion site. This problem is not one that we have a handle on yet, and discussion/analysis is key to determining why it exists. Of course, we can't discuss forever, at some point organizations and individuals need to act, experiment with different things and rectify the problems they can (and hopefully not shift them to darker corners).
Let's say I'm the boss at a startup with around 20 employees, but only four women. How do I fix that?
In the end, your 4:1 ratio may be fine, you may have hired the appropriate people for the position and there's no reason to fret. Same with ratios for other demographics. But recognizing that intended or unintended biases can be at play is important if we want to change STEM at large.