Stanford's Women Won Just a Sliver of Silicon Valley
nytimes.com
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We should not work to equalize men and women objectively. What we need to do is make sure that our daughters and sisters have the same opportunities that they would have if they were men, and aren't prejudiced by what society tells them to be.
That's a terrible way of thinking about it. Unless some difference is proven to be biological, we should certainly assume it is not. That's how we deal everything else that has to do with technology: unless something is proven to be impossible, we try as hard as we can to achieve it. Some people believe cryonic re-animation is possible, and some people believe in indefinite extension of life or even uploading one's mind to a computer. If those notions are credible enough for technologists to put a lot of effort into achieving, then surely something as simple as equal representation for all groups in the seats of power is something we must work towards, no?
Many differences have been proven to be biological.
> unless something is proven to be impossible
But what is your goal? Is your goal just for that number? What if parity is not better? What if the problem of parity is that there is something intrinsic in women that they're just not stupid enough to work 80 hours a week for 3-5 years to have a chance at a few million dollar exit? What if women just tend to not have the same values as men do during the time when their career priorities are most important?
It's much more important that a woman can become a CEO if she has the skills and desire than that 50% of CEOs are women.
> equal representation for all groups in the seats of power
I think you start to tread into different territory here. While I don't believe that half of the women on the board of a company need necessarily be women, I do believe that half(ish) of the women on any sort of government body should be women.
Absolutely none that are pertinent to the matter at hand.
> What if the problem of parity is that there is something intrinsic in women that they're just not stupid enough to work 80 hours a week for 3-5 years to have a chance at a few million dollar exit?
Sure. And what if it's impossible to find intelligence in the universe, create true AI and extend life? There are good signs that that's indeed the case. I guess you would argue we should stop pursuing those goals.
> I do believe that half(ish) of the women on any sort of government body should be women.
And don't you think Silicon Valley is a center of concentrated power?
These are scientific endeavors. If you want to try and get to the heart of why men are so much more prevalent than women in successful SV exits, be my guest, but that would be a scientific goal.
Trying to force the model of what you think the world should be is not scientific, it's ideological - even if that ideology were to be backed up by science. In your case, it isn't.
They are absolutely not (well, except for ETI)! They are technological goals, some funded by private businesses with monetary interests (i.e., they are driven by values).
And besides, what is it that you're saying? That in order to increase our knowledge of the universe we must stop at nothing, but when it comes to sharing power and improving the lives of disenfranchised groups we must stop... well, right here would be good?
> Absolutely none that are pertinent to the matter at hand.
Are you saying that a propensity for risk-taking is unrelated to gender or that it's not pertinent to entrepreneurship?
And it's clear those things impact participation in startups.
[1]http://edge.org/event/the-science-of-gender-and-science-pink...
First, are you saying that whatever "differences in risk preference" found (for some definition of "good level evidence": I haven't seen the studies, but I'm sure they weren't done on, say, a sample of a ten-thousand people) account for the huge difference seen in SV startups? I mean, I don't know what the effect size was in the studies you were referring to, but I'm sure it was nowhere near that we see in SV.
I call such an attitude "sciency" -- ascribing small-n studies with low effect size the scientific rigor of proof or strong evidence to reinforce existing biases. You will never seriously consider this level of evidence "good" if something important to you depended on it.
Second, and much more importantly: even pretending those studies were conducted on a billion people and showed a 5x difference (or whatever it is among SV entrepreneurs), all it means is that this is how people behave now.
Sociology doesn't purport to be physics, and those aren't laws of nature. I mean, you could have done literacy studies in the 1800s and shown that blacks are illiterate (with much more statistical rigor, BTW); what does that mean? You must remember that sociology (and often psychology) studies snapshots of society that are a result of forces that we have the power to change (and probably the moral obligation to). Sociology studies things so that we could change them. It doesn't claim (in fact, it claims the opposite) to uncover fixed laws of nature.
And secondly i'm not saying they account for all the differences in SV, just that there are large biologically based differences.
Or to phrase the question in a different way. If risk behavior is a socially learned behavior, and risk behavior is the cause of gender imbalance in SV entrepreneurs, what would the ethical action be to create equal opportunity for people of both genders?
Risk tolerance leads boys and some girls to take stupid risks from adolescence to? Well, for boys, over-representation in correctional institutions.
If one could just get all to avoid stupid risks but take other more acceptable risks, I suppose but can they be decoupled?
This is not to say that oppotunities should not be there for all to consider and take, if they so desire... just making risk in general more acceptable can have unintended consequences --unless there is a way to direct the risk energy into productive avenues (i.e more job risk tolerance but less risk of engaging in dangerous activities..
Let's ask the question another way: if schools (and parents) are currently educating boys to take more risk (or educating girls to take less risk), should they start treating both sexes the same way?
What schools could do is educate about actually risks, so that any personal or cultural level of risk aversion is confronted with reality. That would be treating children of both genders equally and could mitigate differences between genders.
Those biases are subtextual, but very powerful. There's a nice recent article demonstrating some of them: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wom...
What I find most disturbing is the "sciency" reliance of people on studies showing small effect size as an excuse to not even try to change an unfair power structure, and ignore the findings showing cultural impact. I mean, even if it's not possible to erase any-and-all difference, shouldn't we at least try to eliminate some? If anything, you're showing a clear cultural bias by treating this situation differently from other scientific findings.
Also, how do you explain the constant decline, since at least the 1980s, of women participation in CS?
Being a dick to women is what misogynists do. Feminists want to do away with sexism, which is a set of systemic (usually unconscious) biases deeply engrained in culture. So the goal is to do away with sexism, and that, in turn, would probably result in a much more equal distribution.
yep. A real representative democracy is when for any government body of size N (city council, state House, etc...) and for any trait being present in more than 1/N share of the population governed by the body such trait must be possessed by a member of the body. If the trait is present in more than 2/N share of the population - then at least 2 member must possess it, etc...
So unless I can scientifically prove that "men are better than women at American football" I should assume that talent is equally distributed? Your statement is very politically correct but it seems to me that your null hypothesis was selected due to ideology. The problem I have with it is that if you are incorrect, your statement is essentially unfalsifiable.
It's not a null hypothesis (we're not talking about conducting an experiment but deciding on a policy) but a value statement. Like all values -- including those at the core of startup culture and "disruption" -- it, too, is based on ideology. I believe this ideology is far superior to an alternative one (that would choose to preserve the current power structure where whole groups of people are allocated less power than some others).
> whole groups of people are allocated less power than some others
I'm not sure if you're using "allocated" in a technical way that I'm not familiar with, but to me the word "allocated" implies some level of top-down distribution of a limited resource. I don't think it's an accurate way to think about things (wealth is not a zero-sum game).
Of course! But choosing to emphasize this value and to identify the exact nature of the problem (let alone acknowledge its undesired existence) are prerequisites. This[1] is a nice recent article showing the problem (and, by extension, suggesting solutions).
> I'm not sure if you're using "allocated" in a technical way that I'm not familiar with, but to me the word "allocated" implies some level of top-down distribution of a limited resource. I don't think it's an accurate way to think about things (wealth is not a zero-sum game).
I was not referring to a centralized distribution (and neither was I talking about wealth alone, though wealth, and probably power, while not quite "zero-sum" are probably quite finite), but to a property, a snapshot if you will, of our society as it currently exists.
[1]: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wom...
To what end, in programming, would this be important. To what end, in the field that women invented, would this be important?
You see men don't even necessarily need to have inherent (biological or social) advantages over women... they may just be more erratic and have a higher spread, and bam, they're producing both more serial killers and more geniuses. You can speculate as to why they might have a higher st. dev, but I think it is an interesting line of thought.
PayPal had a hard time hiring women, Max Levchin, another co-founder, later told a class at Stanford, “because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?”
“The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong,” he added. “The more diverse the early group, the harder it is for people to find common ground.”
Later, in an interview, Mr. Levchin said he had been speaking about diversity of programming backgrounds, not race or gender.
Is this PR, self-delusion intended to make the (powerful) speaker not feel bad, selective blindness or just mind-boggling ignorance? If it's the latter, how can society educate these people, who hold ever-growing power over us all?
Of course, he could have meant "meritocracy" in its original, parodic, sense, in which case he's absolutely right.
I had no idea about the etymology of the word (a good explanation from the man who coined it: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment). Thanks for the insight!
I'm reading the Times Magazine profile of Mayer at Yahoo (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-whe...) right now: "Even though the actress Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog, Mayer, who habitually asked deputies where they attended college, balked at hiring her as a contributing editor for Yahoo Food. According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college."
Maybe it is none of the above? The fact that you have such a deep ideological belief that you can't even acknowledge the possibility that there are other options says more about you than the statement you are quoting says about the person saying it.
No it does not. I can only select from the candidates who apply. I am the only woman here. I do the hiring. I have had ZERO applications from women. How exactly do you want me to meet your woman quota?
What pressure is that? How am I supposed to remove pressures that I can't see and whose existence is almost exclusively attested to by men who insist they know what my life is like better than I do?
Here's a recent article about parents to a girl who try to fight all those pressures placed on her so that she's free to choose what she wants to do in life:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wom...
> How am I supposed to remove pressures that I can't see
By their very definition, cultural pressures are invisible (because they're culturally ingrained) until we learn to see them. So, step one: learn to see those biases.
> and whose existence is almost exclusively attested to by men
That's just not true at all. Sexist biases have been conclusively, convincingly proven in too many studies to count, with effect sizes dwarfing most other medical and psychological research.
> ... who insist they know what my life is like better than I do
It's sad that you think so, because those proven, well established, well ingrained cultural biases already limit your choices (or place pressure on you) in a lot of ways. All we're trying to do is remove those pressures so you have more freedom; quite the opposite of anyone knowing better than you what your life is like. I don't need to know what your life is like if I see an obstacle in your way and remove it (and it is there even if you can't see it; we know it's there because of all those hundreds of helpful studies) so that you can do what was hard for women before... or choose not to.
No, that is an article about a couple who want to push their child away from what they consider "traditional gender roles" because they think they need to for some reason. There is nothing to indicate the girls was pressured to act like a girl. I may be old, but I can in fact still remember being a girl. I remember that girls could excel in school and be popular, but boys were "nerds" if they did well in school. I remember being selected as one of the "advanced students" to go learn about computers. I remember that there were only two boys selected. It is hard for me to ignore my experiences just because it is politically incorrect to be a woman who doesn't claim to be a victim.
>By their very definition, cultural pressures are invisible
That is not in the definition
>So, step one: learn to see those biases.
I've had that pushed on my many times. Imagine being a woman in university. I don't think you realize just how hard and how frequently it was pushed on me. But it was not about learning to see invisible biases. It was about learning to blame everything on biases that could not be seen, and you have to take it on faith that they exist.
>That's just not true at all.
What are you supposed to do when a woman tells you about her lived experiences again?
>It's sad that you think so, because those proven, blah blah look I know better than you just shut up and accept my gracious help because I am a man so I clearly know better than you and you are just blind to it because you've only spent the last four decades living it
Yes, please save me from the imaginary boogeymen. I need a big strong man to rescue me and assuage his misplaced guilt.
... which she is being pressured into right and left by the movies and toys made for her.
> It is hard for me to ignore my experiences just because it is politically incorrect to be a woman who doesn't claim to be a victim.
Victim? Popular? What in god's name are you talking about? Sexism is as real and as scientifically proven as gravity. It doesn't make women victim, but marginalized. That is a fact regardless whether or not you think it's in vogue.
> That is not in the definition
Well, it immediately follows from it. The most basic building bricks of our own culture are almost always invisible from us as our internal organs are. We can easily see how other cultures work, but not our own.
> I've had that pushed on my many times.
If you don't want to you don't have to. Just as you don't need to learn about the French Revolution or Newton's Laws. You can choose to learn about whatever parts of our world you want to. But if you don't, don't argue out of ignorance.
> and you have to take it on faith that they exist.
No. Just tons, and tons and tons and tons and tons of research. No more than you need to "take it on faith" that the French Revolution actually happened.
> What are you supposed to do when a woman tells you about her lived experiences again?
I don't understand. If no one in your family has never been murdered, does that mean murder isn't a problem? Are we supposed to discard vast amounts of research -- from psychology, sociology and anthropology based on particular anecdotes?
> Yes, please save me from the imaginary boogeymen.
Not imaginary and not a boogyman. I just don't understand your argument -- if you don't directly feel, say, economic forces, are they imaginary? (Well, it's theoretically possible that the moment you close your eyes the world ceases to exist, or that we all live in your imagination, but I think that's not your working assumption.)
> I need a big strong man to rescue me and assuage his misplaced guilt.
I see that you, too, confuse sexism with misogyny. Well, misogynists hardly ever feel guilt. Sexists don't need to because they're not to blame (most women are probably as sexist as men). Sexism is a description of society as it came to be. There is no necessary conspiracy or ill-intent for sexism to blame, just as gravity is not "guilty" of killing people falling off of buildings. It's just there, and it's just as real. Unlike gravity, though, sexism (and racism) can be fought. I don't need to rescue you. I don't even know you. I think that society is going to be more interesting and more fun and a lot richer if all groups were able to participate in those places where power resides.
So, yes, there is evidence for biological differences, but there is stronger evidence for cultural differences with vastly bigger effects.
Also -- and this is an entirely orthogonal discussion -- it's also known that humans can overcome their instincts, often quite easily. So no matter what behavioral changes are due to biology, most of them can probably be easily overcome by humans. The question then becomes, should humans overcome their instincts to create a more fair society.
And just to clarify, the only subjective/moral issue in the previous paragraph has to do with "should we try it". That society is unfair towards women is objectively true: women are not just underrepresented in certain random fields, but they are underrepresented mostly in fields that bestow a lot of power. So objectively, men have a lot more power than women in society, so it's not just "unevenness" but "unfairness".
Making up random nonsense just reinforces the obvious fact that you are an ideologue pushing an agenda, not someone interested in reality or equality.
>it's also known that humans can overcome their instincts
Yes, parents should force their children to "overcome their instincts" in order to meet arbitrary quotas demanded by hyperliberal babies with guilt complexes. That sounds very reasonable.
>That society is unfair towards women is objectively true
No, it is quite literally not objectively true. You subjectively believe that. I understand you believe that. But it is not an objective fact any more than me enjoying pie makes "pie is good" objectively true.
>women are not just underrepresented in certain random fields, but they are underrepresented mostly in fields that bestow a lot of power
No, we are also underrepresented in the worst jobs. The apex fallacy does not get any less ridiculous through repetition.
>So objectively, men have a lot more power than women in society, so it's not just "unevenness" but "unfairness".
That would only be true if the tiny minority of people in power were using that power to manipulate things to the benefit of men. They are not. Simply having a penis does not grant one special powers because other people with penises have power. Notice how US politics is completely dominated by made up "women's" issues despite most politicians being men?
Of course I'm an ideologue pushing an agenda! (Who isn't?) I think it's our moral obligation to push this agenda. But in order to actually make society better rather than just talk about it, research is crucial, and thankfully a lot of research into this has been done over the past three or four decades, and we now know a lot more about how sexism works. What some people are doing though is using the real fact that there are biological behavioral differences between the sexes to hide the equally true fact that cultural effects have been shown to dwarf them by orders of magnitude.
It has also been shown that humans -- like many other animals -- have instincts driving them to subjugate others. Still, we've abolished slavery to alleviate the painful conscience of hyperliberal babies, and I think society is better for it. Some (most famously Freud in the very unscientific but thoughtful and fascinating Civilization and its Discontents) believe that all of civilization is one big mechanism for exerting control over our instincts, a mechanism that's even been internalized by us (see Norbert Elias for a demonstration on the power of this internalization). Most recently, this view has been modified (mostly by conjectures made by evolutionary psychologists) to say that civilization is some instincts overruling others (many instincts clash with one another: our desire for sex sometimes overpowers our fear of strangers and is sometimes overpowered by it).
Power and influence in society is objective reality. That women possess less of it is as objective as the Sun fusing hydrogen into helium. Perhaps you think that's fair. The fact that men have more power does not imply that every man has more power than every woman.
Of course, if we're to be totally honest, we must admit that both research into biological differences between the sexes as well as cultural researches is not up to the highest theoretical standards in experiment design and statistical rigor, so whatever it is we know (i.e. that both are real, but the cultural difference is a lot more prominent) is suspect. But hey, this is HN and geeking out is the name of the game.
Anyway, it's been fun arguing over this. If you want to learn more about the subject, I suggest you look up Susan Fiske. Yes, she's a hyperliberal baby crying for her quotas, but a good researcher nonetheless.
We have, repeatedly. We got a lot of interest in our events. We got no interest at all in actually applying for a job here.
Like who?
Also, religious groups that were traditionally very liberal/voted Democrat (e.x. Catholics) on social issues also broke off from the Democrats over abortion and reproductive rights related issues over the course of the '80s, which isn't to say they were specifically /for/ those things at any point, they just became something more political in the '80s.
I wouldn't really have said that 1991 was a clear date for the 'start' of that process, though. Perhaps more "When it got into full swing." The other thing is that the loss of large groups like the Catholics and the involvement of the Christian Right in general caused the Democrats to swing right as well, which means that even when the Dems were in power in the '90s their attitudes and the policies they enacted were often more conservative than they had been before RE: women's lib/rights/etc., even if they still supported most of the issues on paper.
No, clash in fundamental values is why the abortion debate is so heated (its also the reason for the dishonest rhetoric, since extremists on both sides feel that the cause is so important as to justify any dishonesty.)
Except most of the people who "like murdering babies" don't actually like murdering babies and most of the people who "want to control women's bodies" don't actually want to control women's bodies. Most people's feelings on the subject are actually a lot closer than the rhetoric makes it appear. The rhetoric was created by people with agendas, who don't want people to recognize that both sides have valid points and are actual human beings who care.
Most of the people who use the phrase "control women's body" of the "pro-life" side do, in fact, see that as the motivation of the pro-life side, and ditto with most of the people who use "murdering babies" to describe the "pro-choice" side.
There's nothing dishonest about those particular examples. Yes, they aren't accurate to how the described side sees themselves, because they are using descriptions based on interpreting the described side in context of the values of the describing side.
That's not dishonest rhetoric, its a clash of fundamental values.
> Most people's feelings on the subject are actually a lot closer than the rhetoric makes it appear.
Most people's feelings on the subject may be a lot closer than the descriptions by the loudest voices would make it appear, because they don't fully hold the values of either of the clashing sides. But that has nothing to do with why the debate is heated -- the people in the middle, and what they believe and feel, have nothing to do with that.
> The rhetoric was created by people with agendas, who don't want people to recognize that both sides have valid points and are actual human beings who care.
To the people who hold the extreme positions, the people on the other side don't have valid points. The validity of a moral argument -- which both sides arguments are -- isn't a matter of fact, its something that only exists within a particular value framework.
That's the point.
>There's nothing dishonest about those particular examples. Yes, they aren't accurate to how the described side sees themselves,
So they are dishonest.
>That's not dishonest rhetoric, its a clash of fundamental values
No amount of making a random baseless assertion will turn it into a fact. Try spending some time working as a mediator with people with "extreme" views on this subject. You'll find their views are not actually extreme, they are just misrepresented.
>To the people who hold the extreme positions, the people on the other side don't have valid points.
Again, that's the point. Is this some kind of joke? Yes, the whole point is what A thinks about B is false, and what B thinks about A is false. A doesn't think B has a valid opinion because they don't know B's actual opinion, just a deliberate misrepresentation of it by the people who created the harmful rhetoric in the first place.
"Honest" means that the speaker believes it, not that it is true. If it accurately represents what the speaker believes -- colored by the speakers values -- it is honest even if it is not accurate.
> No amount of making a random baseless assertion will turn it into a fact.
Its neither random nor baseless, but, in any case, "honest" doesn't mean "well-founded".
> Try spending some time working as a mediator with people with "extreme" views on this subject.
I've spent quite a lot of time with people with views at pretty much every point on the spectrum, from hardline activists on both sides to people everywhere in between.
There are plenty of people with actually extreme views. There are plenty of people with relatively moderate views that are seen -- honestly -- as indistinguishable from opposing extremists by extremist of one or the other side (sometimes from both sides.)
> >To the people who hold the extreme positions, the people on the other side don't have valid points.
> Again, that's the point.
Its the exact opposite of what you said when you claimed that the rhetoric was merely an expression constructed to prevent people from seeing that the opposing side has valid points, and the opposite of your claims of dishonesty. So while it is my point, I think its directly opposed to yours.
Unless your point contains multiple self-contradictions.
The issue wasn't just abortion: abortion was, perhaps, a catalyst or a trigger issue, but it also had implications on the rhetoric surrounding the passing of anti-discrimination laws, domestic violence laws, etc.
Discrimination on the basis of sex is, in fact, not as illegal as, e.g., discrimination based on race -- particularly, government acts discriminating based on sex are subject only to intermediate scrutiny, while race-based discrimination is subject to strict scrutiny.
Correcting this has been expressly cited by ERA backers as a key motivation for the ERA. As a woman, you are not, under existing law, guaranteed to be legally equal to a man even to the extent that a Black person is guaranteed to be legally equal to a White person.
It seems to be a plain description of how the supreme court rules on things:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_scrutiny#Sex-based...
Or maybe you think it is some sort of misdirection to bring it up in the context of this thread?
Next time read a whole sentence before accusing someone of lying.