Why We're Missing Our Best Chance for Gender Parity
devmynd.com
devmynd.com
In orchestras, there was a tremendous increase in the number of women when the practice of having candidates play their instruments invisible to the judges became widespread.
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
There are no economics by which working at a startup makes sense over a Facebook or a Google. You work longer hours, and make substantially less. Unless you're a founder, even in the event of a successful exit, the stock options will generally barely cover the cost of the paper they're written on. Early employees don't come out competitive with Google until you see billion-plus dollar exits.
Philip's claim was that men tend to make decisions based on testosterone-fueled machismo, and go into areas considered "hard-core" like theoretical math, which rationally, are a waste of time and make no sense to study. As he phrases it, young men make the decision based on:
1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group 2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
This matches my anecdotal experience as well. Women tend to make more rational decisions, and pursue fields with a higher return-on-investment. Men tend to make irrational decisions, and either realize it later (with colossal failures, such as science jobs), or rationalize it later (e.g. "I learned a lot" without really comparing to the alternative -- a job with formal mentorship processes, and both pay and work/life to allow time for pet projects and formal study).
If Philip's claim is correct -- and it does match my anecdotal experience -- the way to draw more women into startups would be to make them appealing to rational players. Typically, an early employee ends up with a fraction-of-a-percent equity at exit (and at best, low single-digit percent at joining). Equity is allocated in numbers (5000 shares) rather than percent, in a successful attempt to confuse.
Is it a full explanation for 2% vs. 28%? Probably not. Bias is surely part of the equation as well. I have no idea what the split is, but I'd be shocked if either explained the gap fully, and I'd be equally shocked if either were insignificant.
If no one did theoretical math or startups, the world wouldn't advance. There wouldn't be a Facebook or a Google to work at. People can rationally pursue goals beyond their own financial interests.
2. Startups would exist -- just not as many. The cost would be slightly higher; they'd have to pay employees either fair salaries, or give fair levels of equity. The current situation -- long hours, low salary, crooked options -- would not persist.
Not yet, maybe. But it does benefit from number theory, which was considered to have no practical applications until people realized we could do encryption with it.
1. Return on investment. Every hour spent on applied math generates a lot more applications (not to mention elegant mathematics) than the same spent on theoretical math. Theoretical math has about as much value as knitting and crochet. Does someone occasionally come up with something of value? Sure. Does it have more value than any other hobby? Not really.
2. With encryption in particular, Diffie-Hellmen is simple enough that public key would have been created regardless of research in theoretical math. Furthermore, most of the people developing such (including Diffie, Hellmen, Merkle, Rivest, Shamir, Adleman, etc.) have applied backgrounds. Indeed, most are computer scientists, rather than mathematicians. The same goes for cryptographic protocols, doubly so. Symmetric encryption, in contrast, does build a little bit on theoretical math, but it's also just an arms race. More knowledge about number theory helps both cryptography and cryptanalysis about equally. There's no reason to believe that more number theory makes us in any way more secure. Cryptography itself would exist without number theory (indeed, history is a bit fuzzy as to whether something like the scytale or number theory came first, and regardless, there is no reason to believe one fed the other).