Why No Women on Twitter’s Board: Your Article Was Bad… And You Should Feel Bad

TLDR: This blog post is weak and poorly reasoned, but I share some of his concerns.

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I hadn't read the original article, so I won't comment on how shitty it is or isn't. What I can say is that this blog post is definitely shitty:

1) S?he first says that boards with more woman do better. But the causality is probably the opposite: if a firm is struggling it will get the best guys to fix their problems, but if your firm is cruising, you can be less careful with the seats (and also it's easier to attract the relatively scarce woman in tech to a successful firm)

Moreover, he completely misses the author point. If you have less woman in tech, then by construction you will end up with less woman in tech boards, because the pool to pick from is much smaller.

2) "in Sweden and Finland, 30% of board seats are held by women".

Of course, firms in Sweden are not doing so voluntarily: "the Swedish Corporate Governance Code of 2004 has a voluntary goal of parity for all board members of listed companies. Companies are obliged to justify the composition of the board through a comply-or-explain mechanism." [1]

This renders his point completely moot...

3) " So men, who have had a position of power over women for most of western history, really can’t understand how unfair the world is, and they think their power over women is deserved"

This feels a lot like those crazy "check your privilege" Tumblr posts, specially the part about deserving their power over women.

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All this being said, I do agree that you can't really distinguish nature from nurture. Maybe men are more competitive because our culture views competitive woman negatively? Same for math, and so on. But the original author never said that men being more competitive was because or genetics or the way kids are raised in our culture. He just states it as a well backed observation.

Also, I am also not convinced by the "men are better board members" argument. There is a lot of research saying men and woman are different as board members (Eg [2]), but I wouldn't say that one group is better than the other. Instead, the answer likely lies in the fact that the talent pool (of people with experience in the tech industry) has a lot more men that woman.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/files/womenonboa...

[2] https://sites.google.com/site/patriciafelicitasfunk/home/201...

The original article may have been wrong, but I agree with the last paragraph, that says we should focus on individual discrimination rather than ratio of men and women in particular area.

I think that the position, that men and women are on average completely mentally equal, is untenable. People are not blank slates, and since there are obvious biological differences in physical appearance, I find it very improbable that there are no differences in thinking as well. And there are actual studies to prove that, I believe.

That's my main gripe with the argument by ratios, because it implicitly relies on something biologically factual, that may not even be true. But in my view, equality (of opportunities) and non-discrimination is moral regardless whether or not men and women (or other groups, for that matter) are actually on average different or not. And in my view, by depending on biological facts, rather than arguing from moral standpoint, the equality proponents may shoot themselves to the foot.

But even if they were equal, there can still be perfectly valid cultural reasons for the gap, and no discrimination is necessary to explain those (it's an argument from dynamical systems which I already explained elsewhere). So while percentages can indicate discrimination, and in many cases do, they are not a sufficient condition for that.

I also have to say, although it will sound harsh, that while there is lot of discussion about women in IT and on the company boards, there isn't much discussion about more women in military or plumbing or construction. I think the money and prestige aspect (that the former jobs are better paid) plays a role in this as well. So maybe if the prestige difference between those jobs would be less, the people would be freer to pursue their interests, without ratios or money dictating them otherwise.

In other words, what is the purpose of having equal number of men and women in some field? Is this a complaint about money and prestige, or individual satisfaction with the selected job? Each case should be addressed differently, and I can think of better solutions for either of them than trying to impose equal ratios.

(That said, just for the record, I think that positive discrimination is in many cases helpful.)

If it takes that many words to explain why a blog post is shit, then perhaps there was actually something substantive there which the author disagreed with. I think the argument would be better served by dropping the attack against 'the article' and focus on telling me the real point.

This is how to respond to that kind of article - not by calling names, but by actually addressing the points. Bravo.

I don't think this response really raises the level of discourse. It is probably better than the original, but there are some serious problems. Note that I am not taking a stance on any of the points below, just pointing out the irony in calling out a crappy blog post with one that doesn't quite live up to its own high standards.

For instance, in a paragraph calling out fallacious statements, we have this:

"Getting into circles that are run by men or being selected for a position by a group of men will inevitably give an advantage to men."

Really? This is a known fact? Is it not possible that men actually prefer selecting women, but don't for some other reason?

Regarding statistics:

"But, in Sweden and Finland, 30% of board seats are held by women compared to 16.6% in the US, so if one wants to make the argument that the best people for the board are men, it has to be a cultural argument and not a biological one since there is a significant change over national borders."

Culture isn't the only thing that changes over national borders. Maybe a higher proportion of companies in Sweden and Finland are those that are better-served by female board members.

And:

"Only 6% of women are tech chief executives, but 8% of venture backed startups are women. So women are creating startups at a rate higher than they are currently present as chief executives."

You can't draw conclusions about rates from these numbers.

And:

"And, even better for women, 14% of venture capitalists (who are primarily successful entrepreneurs) being women means that women startups are succeeding at a higher proportion than their male counterparts."

I can't begin to understand how this conclusion is drawn. I'm not sure VCs are primarily successful entrepreneurs, so I'd need to see data on that. But even presuming they are, how do we know that men and women are equally likely to become a VC after having a run with a successful startup? Bias is creeping in everywhere.

On women taking care of the young, old and sick:

"This means women should be better at serving on boards as “care takers” of the company."

Bit of a stretch. This conclusion is only drawn if you assume taking care of something should make you good at taking care of anything.

In all honesty I was hoping to get to the end and have it all be an intentionally ironic piece to start off a meta-discussion about how easy it is to write strongly-worded articles that draw unjustified conclusions.

My disappointment is what led me to point out all of the above.