> nearly half of U.S. jobs would be vulnerable to automation within 20 years. But “computers aren’t good at simulating human interaction,” Deming said. That means a job as a manager or consultant is harder to automate, and the skills those jobs require become more valuable.
If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
> Women are getting jobs that require more social skills.
If the share of jobs that require interpersonal skill has in fact increased over the years just as the author postulates, is it really a wonder that share of women who hold these types of jobs have also increased ? Why exactly did the author show only the graph representing how the nature of jobs has changed for women ? Is the author trying to prove women are naturally better at these things ?
> Although cognitive skills don’t vary by gender, Deming cites research from psychology showing that women consistently score higher on tests of emotional intelligence and social perceptiveness.
This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
>This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things.
Does anyone truly believe that this is not the case? People are different, sets of people differ along various, sometimes similar parameters.
>This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
It really shouldn't though. Differing from one subset of people should not impact your rights as a human being. 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights.
> 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights.
The GP was being very sarcastic (there's no way he/she actually meant this).
What you wrote is what gender equality should be about. However, the gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media is the one of conveniently pretending there's no biological differences between genders when it suits you, and then complaining that different results must surely be a result of conspiracy of one gender against the other.
> What you wrote is what gender equality should be about. However, the gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media is the one of conveniently pretending there's no biological differences between genders when it suits you, and then complaining that different results must surely be a result of conspiracy of one gender against the other.
Gender equality being fought in the media is about presuming that disparities in representation are the result of discrimination unless there is evidence to rebut that presumption. Nobody in the mainstream media is talking about the low representation of women in positions that require lots of physical strength because we have evidence of such differences.
The difference is not being willing to accept "oh it's just different preferences" as a reason for observed disparities without evidence.
> The difference is not being willing to accept "oh it's just different preferences" as a reason for observed disparities without evidence.
Not accepting such an explanation is fine, but making unwarranted assumptions about the cause until they're disproved is not.
The goal isn't statistical equality of outcomes. It's minimized injustice. When a woman is passed over for a job or offered less money than a less qualified man, that's an injustice. Those who seek to equalize outcomes by adding injustice "the other way" are missing the point.
> The goal isn't statistical equality of outcomes. It's minimized injustice
The mainstream presumption is that statistical inequality presumes the existence of injustice unless proven otherwise. That's a reasonable presumption.
> Those who seek to equalize outcomes by adding injustice "the other way" are missing the point.
That's a short-run versus long-run issue. From 1970 to 2010, the proportion of women earning medical or law degrees increased from under 10% to almost 50%. That was, in part, the result of affirmative action measures to increase the representation of women. But those measures are no longer necessary and no longer applied. The new ratios are self-perpetuating.
The point that people preoccupied with short-term injustice miss is that skewed gender ratios in professions are often the result of past discrimination and so are in and of themselves a continuing injustice. All else being equal, a rational person would rather enter a profession where they will not face career headwinds as a minority than one where they will. Some measure of additional injustice in the short term can set up a more just equilibrium in the long term.
The opposition to that is an emotional rather than a rational argument. The rational approach is to look at the net level of injustice integrated over time.
> statistical inequality presumes the existence of injustice unless proven otherwise. That's a reasonable presumption.
I disagree. There are too many other factors that are plausibly contributing. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.
I'm fine with attempting to change the culture to make e.g. STEM more appealing to women. Achieving this by enforcing an artificial prioritization of women over men in tech jobs seems to me a last resort approach. Is that really the only way to achieve the culture shift? In any event, at least I would find reasoning along these lines honest and am not opposed in principle.
> The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.
Who properly bears the burden of proof is a question of your policy objective. For example, we place the burden of proof on the prosecutor in criminal proceedings because we have a policy objective of rather having guilty people go free than innocent people imprisoned. But nothing intrinsically says the burden of proof has to be with the prosecutor. If our goal was to prioritize making sure guilty people are held accountable, we could shift the burden of proof to the defendant.
Placing the burden of proof it on the person making the claim simply prioritizes the status quo, which may or may not be what you want. Given our status quo is the product of proven, vicious discrimination against women, protecting the status quo through allocation of the burden of proof is the opposite of what we want.
So instead, we have chosen to place the burden of proof on the party citing intrinsic differences as an explanation/excuse for evidenced disproportionate representation.
> Achieving this by enforcing an artificial prioritization of women over men in tech jobs seems to me a last resort approach
It has the strong advantage of being an approach that has actually worked in the past.
> Placing the burden of proof it on the person making the claim simply prioritizes the status quo, which may or may not be what you want. Given our status quo is the product of proven, vicious discrimination against women, protecting the status quo through allocation of the burden of proof is the opposite of what we want.
Except that presuming the opposite allows us to flap around on the whims of opinion, unsupported by factual evidence, and thus allows us to do things that are massively harmful to the long-term well being of women (such as raising a generation of men after the inflection point on gender issues which faced institutionalized discrimination in places such as universities), and thus undermine our own end-goals through emotive decisions rather than rational ones.
The problem with the current approach is that you can't continue it long enough to cause the necessary change to restabilize the social trends, because the accumulated backlash of your intentionally inflicted injusticed builds faster than your positive social change, and you've simply entrenched a good reason to retaliate (they were intentionally discriminated against by a group who had previously suffered discrimination and knew what they were doing), and have already entrenched that intentional infliction of injustice is the means of correcting past injustices.
Far from changing the underlying social dynamic, the intentional discrimination against men actually reaffirmed the status quo one meta-level up from where your concern was: women will be just as sexist towards men as men were ever to women, given the chance, and even when they are personally "concerned" with the topic of discrimination.
Because it failed to use science in developing its methods, recent feminism has been a massive failure: far from standing against discrimination, modern feminism has demonstrated that women believe gender relations is a game of tit-for-tat, and they should be positively discriminated against by men looking for retaliation over their intentional discrimination anywhere that feminism has acted in excess.
This is a destabilizing force in gender relations, and should be set aside as an immature view. Instead, we should look honestly at the situation and develop a stance from actual ethics, rather than emotions.
> Except that presuming the opposite allows us to flap around on the whims of opinion, unsupported by factual evidence
Flapping around on the whims of opinion, unsupported by factual evidence, seems like a pretty good description of the situation to me whenever someone invokes "but, but, preferences" to explain why women are vastly more represented amongst high SAT math scorers than among programmers and engineers.
> Letting the legacy of past discrimination stand in perpetuity because fixing it would require temporary discrimination in the opposite direction?
I'm skeptical of the explanation that pay inequality between genders is caused by irrational business-hurting discrimination when the vast majority of people I meet in tech don't seem to have any aversion to hiring women. Suppose 10% of companies won't hire you because of irrational reasons. What does that do to your market value? Under the simplest economic model, it does nothing. Because there is still competition between the 90%. For irrational discrimination to cause pay inequality, it has to be widespread. (Edit: Disclaimer -- the above argument may be flawed. Feel free to correct my reasoning.)
> Suppose 10% of companies won't hire you because of irrational reasons. What does that do to your market value? Under the simplest economic model, it does nothing.
Under simple economic models, given fixed supply, small changes in demand can have large impacts on prices.
Depends. There obviously has to be a large change in the demand curve at the supply point if that point is fixed. But I agree that a small horizontal shift in a demand curve can have a big impact.
I don't think that's the right way of looking at it, though, because it treats the men and women supply-demand problems as independent. As long as the prefer-men employers are outnumbered by men, they won't affect equilibrium in this simplistic model.
Because there isn't irrational business-hurting discrimination among programmers!
>> to explain why women are vastly more represented amongst high SAT math scorers than among programmers and engineers.
Except they're not! Pretty much every source I've seen puts women as underrepresented on SAT math scores, and this trend apparently goes back down to secondary school or earlier.
> Who properly bears the burden of proof is a question of your policy objective.
Well, the context was the discussion of policy objectives. If you're saying that we should presume the existence of ongoing discrimination to be the cause of gender inequality during those discussions, then that seems flatly wrong. The rational way to discuss policy is to have an honest assessment of the current situation and then predict how policies will affect outcomes. You don't start by making unproven assumptions. The burden of proof in an argument is on the person making the claim.
You can certainly weigh potential outcomes and decide to go ahead with a course of action even though the benefits haven't been proven.
> It has the strong advantage of being an approach that has actually worked in the past.
There are basically only two kinds of possible causes for observed disparities in gender representation: discrimination (either active, passive, or social), or intrinsic preferences and aptitudes. Once you've established that a disparity does exist, the cause has to be one or the other.
Presuming that the cause is some sort of discrimination is equivalent to presuming that the cause isn't intrinsic differences, at least unless that presumption is rebutted.
And remember the usual posture of these situations. People establish a prima facie case that something is wrong by showing that there is a gender disparity. Then defenders of the status quo invoke "preferences" (i.e. intrinsic differences) to explain the disparity. I see no problem with requiring them to adduce evidence in support of their explanation.
> The mainstream presumption is that statistical inequality presumes the existence of injustice unless proven otherwise. That's a reasonable presumption.
That's just begging the question. We may be able to attribute some proportion of statistical inequality to factors other than injustice, or affirmatively attribute some proportion to specific injustice, but we will never be able to fully explain everything.
If you assume malice in all cases of uncertainty then it becomes impossible to recognize defeat of the injustice. Once you have actually defeated it you end up fighting your own shadow forever because the biased assumption always tells you that you haven't.
> From 1970 to 2010, the proportion of women earning medical or law degrees increased from under 10% to almost 50%. That was, in part, the result of affirmative action measures to increase the representation of women. But those measures are no longer necessary and no longer applied. The new ratios are self-perpetuating.
Those anecdotes don't generalize unless you assume the conclusion again. We don't know what the equilibrium proportion of women in each profession is "supposed" to be. Some professions may already be near their only stable equilibrium even if they are heavily unbalanced. Even the idea that there is a "correct" stable equilibrium proportionality in every profession is flawed. There could be professions with tipping points such that whichever sex dominates the culture becomes a substantial majority.
> The point that people preoccupied with short-term injustice miss is that skewed gender ratios in professions are often the result of past discrimination and so are in and of themselves a continuing injustice. All else being equal, a rational person would rather enter a profession where they will not face career headwinds as a minority than one where they will.
Being prohibited by law or violence from working a job because of your sex or race is an injustice. Being the first woman or minority in the old boy's club is a challenge. They are not the same thing. And the subtlety of the latter is not amenable to fine tuning via Uncle Sam's sledgehammer.
> The opposition to that is an emotional rather than a rational argument. The rational approach is to look at the net level of injustice integrated over time.
"In the long run we are all dead." -John Maynard Keynes
It isn't irrational to consider justice on a timescale that affects the people who are alive today.
> The goal isn't statistical equality of outcomes.
Given that statistical inequality is frequently and loudly trumpeted as proof of injustice, one could be forgiven for reaching precisely this conclusion.
> Gender equality being fought in the media is about presuming that disparities in representation are the result of discrimination.
That's the problem, making assumptions of discrimination and identifying as a victim when it's convenient. If you're the one making the accusation, the onus is on you to support that with evidence.
The cultural narrative is to identify those who aren't straight men as victims (women, LBGT). Drunk female has sex with drunk male? The female is a "victim" and not responsible for her actions, while the male gets kicked out of school (this happened at Occidental College). Female prostitute willingly has consensual sex with a man for $1,000? The male is a criminal and the woman is a victim (that's the law in countries like Sweden, and I once spoke to a human trafficking prevention worker at a top non-profit who tried to convince me that all prostitutes are victims). Male tells a woman on the street she's cute? Sexual harassment (unless he's Brad Pitt).
And look at the media. Lead male celebrity actors in Hollywood movies get paid more than female leads? This is seen as a "problem" and must be the result of discrimination, and articles about it go viral on social media. Female models and pornstars get paid significantly more than their male counterparts? Supply and demand baby, nobody gives a shit.
The worst part is that it's heresy for a straight male to even question assumptions of discrimination without being accused of misogyny. Even the mildest joke alluding to differences between the sexes is grounds for being fired from your job and ostracized (eg. recent Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt).
>The cultural narrative is to identify those who aren't straight men as victims (women, LBGT).
As one of those people who isn't straight (B and T for me), I am a victim. It's a fact of life that in the United States if you are openly LGBT you will get hurt or even killed. So, unless you got FBI crime stats that says otherwise, I'm sure your conservative/reactionary nonsense will fly for long.
Don't get me wrong, women and LBGT can definitely be victims of discrimination. I'm sure you suffer from real harassment on a daily basis, and that's totally unacceptable.
I was just trying to say that when there is a conflict between a man and a woman, we tend to want to identify the woman as a victim and "protect" her. The mere questioning of this by a straight male makes him a misogynist and subject to a ton of scrutiny, but if a woman or a gay male does the same it's somehow permissible and given more weight. This guy (a gay male) summed it up pretty well https://youtu.be/VCaEO6ue_io?t=3m36s (3:36-3:54).
My statement probably applies less to transexuals, so apologies for that.
I was just trying to say that when there is a conflict between a man and a woman, we tend to want to identify the woman as a victim and "protect" her. The mere questioning of this by a straight male makes him a misogynist and subject to a ton of scrutiny, but if a woman or a gay male does the same it's somehow permissible and given more weight
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But in reality feminists don't assume women are mere victim as many have illustrated how women reinforce the patriarchy sometimes to their own benefit. Consider the fact that folks like Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin exist. They're not just cold and calculating in their views as they genuinely believe in the patriarchal values they espouse. For them, it gets them votes and political power. The rest of us get screwed over.
> Nobody in the mainstream media is talking about the low representation of women in positions that require lots of physical strength because we have evidence of such differences.
The hundreds of articles about lack of women in combat positions and in the special forces tend to disagree with you. In both of those areas, pure physical strength is one of the first requirements.
The articles about women in combat positions are almost all about the military's removing explicit bans on women in combat positions and instituting gender neutral physical requirements.
Gender neutral physical requirements just means you change "men who can lift Xkg" into "people who can lift Xkg". If that still happens to exclude most women, so be it.
That isn't what happens. What happens is women can't do it, so they change the physical requirements. Which is why for years, "lady marines" or whatever you're supposed to call them didn't have to do pull ups, and when they gender normed it, the standard went from 10 to 3 chin ups (which 55% of women failed).
> The difference is not being willing to accept "oh it's just different preferences" as a reason for observed disparities without evidence.
Take a look at The Gender Equality Paradox. https://vimeo.com/19707588 Sweden, considered the most "gender equal" place in the world, has an extreme gender bias in certain professions like engineering and nursing. The documentary tries to uncover why that bias still exists, even though the genders have very little influence in terms society imposing gender roles. It's a fantastic watch.
That's well and good, but the composition of such interviews itself is a synthetic action, and the result has now interpreted its sources in some particular way. Is the video itself peer reviewed? I doubt it.
Interpretation is an important part of science and itself is subject to peer review.
Unless you've seen it in its entirety, I'm not sure how you can comment on how the interviews are presented. It seems like you're suggesting that you think there's a bias in it that you don't like. Do you have a problem with any specific parts of the documentary?
Maybe I'm missing a lot of the important media, but I haven't seen what you're describing. Which are the media outlets where you're seeing a fight and push for pretending that biological differences don't exist? Even the original article states that there are differences. Could you provide some examples so that I can see what you're seeing?
Most reasonable people that I know, of either gender, understand that the average man is physically stronger than the average woman. That's a clear distinction. But, lots of other traits are not clear at all, even though they are implied without good evidence. And, in most or all cases there is enough overlap in ability (e.g. the strongest woman is much stronger than the weakest man)
As others mention, the issue of gender rights that I see is one of opportunity and access. The question that's raised is whether the culture imposes biases, implicit restrictions and even punishments when there should be none.
> Which are the media outlets where you're seeing a fight and push for pretending that biological differences don't exist?
It started in academia, but quickly spread to media, but the Larry Summers kerfuffle at Harvard comes to mind. In an academic context, Summers decides to be provocative and asks if biological differences could account for some gender gaps. He later gets run out of town.
Funny, I was going to use his example to prove the opposite point. How many people in the mainstream media are talking about the underrepresention of women among Fields Medalists? The vast amount of attention is focused on jobs where the distribution of genius-level IQs,[1] is not relevant: programmers, CEOs, business executives, etc.
And speaking of Summers, it's hilarious how people will cite him while ignoring his underlying point about aptitude distribution. Almost 40% of kids who have a 700+ math SAT are girls. Using Summers' reasoning we should see a lot more women in programming and engineering.
[1] This is leaving aside findings subsequent to Summers' comments that over time the disparity between men and women in IQ scores is narrowing.
every article that compares people who hold job 'x' with the percentage of the population with trait 'z' makes the very assumption you are blind too. the issue is like wondering why sprinters and endurance athletes are no evenly distributed at the olympics in the various events. (eg, a marathoner is not a crap athlete because they cannot sprint).
xx and xy simply puts different brain chemistry at work. it doesn't mean that the variation disqualifies anyone from anything. the issue is much, much more subtle (like fast twitch vs slow twich muscles in athletes).
oversimplyin it simply makes a mockery of understanding & analysis.
the fact that you use 'brute strength' as an obvious irrelevant characteristic seems to play into this ignorance. ('brute strentgh' doesn't even matter amongst most athletes in most endeavors, at best its a gating criteria, but again what about endurance vs speed vs hand-eye co-ordination vs tactial application of effort?).
The biological differences between genders are fairly small in comparison to the standard deviation. Consider on average men may have 20% more upper body strength than the average women. But, some men have 1/2 the upper body strength of the average women, and some women have twice the upper body strength than the average man.
Further there are lot's of trends that run counter to the biology, for example on average women make better snipers than men.
That's all good. In the case you described, in a perfect egalitarian, meritocratic society you would expect to find more men than women in the army in general, but maybe more women than men doing sniper duty. That's how averages will play out with zero gender discrimination.
In other words - just because an industry is not 50/50 men/women, doesn't mean there's sexual discrimination going on.
Even if the differences themselves are small, the very fact that they're there mean that women have comparative advantage over men in some areas, while men have that advantage over women in other. We exploit that concept in international trade, and yet many find it wrong to exploit it at the society level.
The question we should be asking is: which "social biases" arise from comparative advantage of sexes? Maybe they're ok and we should leave those biases be, while removing those that don't give any utility? Hard-equalizing everything (by e.g. pushing for 50/50 ration of genders in every industry) seems to be an outcome worse for everybody.
Even a small difference in the mean or sd for a given attribute will result in enormous gender imbalances for jobs requiring an extreme value of that attribute.
If you select people totally at random (no discrimination!) from the population of people with >130 IQ to work at Facebook and the sd for men in the general population is 11 IQ points instead of 10 for women, you'll wind up with a 70% male workforce at Facebook.
Similarly if men had a mean IQ of 101 instead of 99 for women, Facebook would have a 66% male workforce.
From R:
women <- pnorm(130, mean = 100, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE)
men <- pnorm(130, mean = 100, sd = 11, lower.tail = FALSE)
scaling <- 100/(women+men)
men * scaling
[1] 70.28561
women * scaling
[1] 29.71439
women <- pnorm(130, mean = 99, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE)
men <- pnorm(130, mean = 101, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE)
The centeral problem with that line of thinking is it's really hard to both set aside "social biases" and it's really hard to seperate what's useful for getting a job done and how we currently measure thinks. Consider, in an 100% egalitarian society the NBA might end up with 1-5 women. However, a similar game in an egalitarian society might be much closer to 50-50 if the rules focused on slightly different gameplay. Ex: does making the basket 5% higher change the gender balance.
Granted, the NBA is entertainment which complicates things, but the same line of thinking probably applies to the Navy Seals. IMO, whenever you see a biased rule you need to deside if it's useful before you can view it as egalitarian.
Even if the averages are the same, differences in deviations could still result in differences in outcomes.
Say that men and women were, on average, completely identical at programming computers (average of 50). But say that men had greater deviation. So you had more men with a 10 and more men with a 90. But there were more women with a 40 and a 60. 75 and 25 are the break even points.
But, software development companies don't want average programmers, they want good programmers. So they only hire those who are a 80 or better. End result: more men hired as programmers even though men and women are equal on average.
Nothing personal, but I'm calling bs on that statement of companies hiring the "best" in any position. The reality is that companies hire what they can afford and are willing to take a hit on productivity in the short term if it means getting a service or product out of the door. You can always make something better later but you can't make something if you have no one you can hire to get it done. As for women in programming, I would argue that I know more women programmers that are far better than me at the job despite my knack for teasing out oddities in bugs. My own talent doesn't always make up for solid performance. So that Cowboy Programmer schtick doesn't work when you're trying to get hired at any company that most of the Valley would consider boring.
First consider that I was initially talking about all people. The average person probably can't even get hello world to run (also depend if we mean mean, median, or more).
>The reality is that companies hire what they can afford and are willing to take a hit on productivity in the short term if it means getting a service or product out of the door.
Redefine best to be a more complex variable that depends upon what the individual is willing to work for, how good they are, and set limits on the max they can pay.
For example, perhaps best is defined as highest skill for those willing to work for no more than 50k. Anyone who isn't willing to work for it is eliminated. You still have a remaining group, that when divided by gender, has both male half and female half each with an average and a standard deviation, and which the company is wanting to hire from the top.
>You can always make something better later but you can't make something if you have no one you can hire to get it done.
Perhaps best is defined not by who can make the most perfect program given infinite time, but who can make the program that best fits the business needs for a minimally viable product in the least amount of time. Once again, best can be redefined as you want. My argument doesn't depend upon any given implementation of best.
>So that Cowboy Programmer schtick doesn't work when you're trying to get hired at any company that most of the Valley would consider boring.
Once again (again), I never defined best. Best may mean a cowboy to some group who only needs one or two individuals, and it may mean a great team player to a far larger organization.
Average man in the US is 5' 10" and out of shape. Which is my point the average is a low bar.
Now, 0.1% of females might be at the fit 6' male standard but that's over 150,000 in the US. And there are sub 6' NBA players which suggests is an unreasonably high bar for the vast majority of things.
Speaking of gender equality, neither he/she nor she/he (though I've been told by those who've focused on that in college that both are correct) is equal. True equality is the use of singular they; though they is really a set of any (unspecified) size.
I find rigid rules for language to be Orwellian, and I've always found the singular 'they' to be at least as awkward as the gender-neutral 'he'.
An alternate "true equality" would be to generously extend the benefit of the doubt to everyone. And to teach our children to be strong enough to deal with inaccurate pronouns, on occasion. I'd rather my daughter get her strength from better sources than offense and identity politics.
I try to use singular "they" whenever it doesn't sound utterly awkward or doesn't make sentence ambiguous (e.g. "OP went to see the group but they're late"). But singular they is a relatively new concept for me (I haven't heard of it when I was first learning English), so I sometimes default to he/she when writing quickly.
> However, the gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media is the one of conveniently pretending there's no biological differences between genders when it suits you, and then complaining that different results must surely be a result of conspiracy of one gender against the other.
Not at all. The idea is that the sexes (and the races) be treated similarly in society, and not have their choices limited -- not just by laws but by hidden biases which translate to social pressure.
Most of what you call "gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media" is actually the ideology of gender equality which was formed after studying the results of decades of research. OTOH, most of its opponents base their opposition on nothing but their personal perception of the world, which is, of course, skewed and very inaccurate. Like in some other issues, there's a huge knowledge gap between both opposing sides.
> by hidden biases which translate to social pressure
There are two kinds of biases here. Those which are just accidents of history and those which arise from the observable biological differences between sexes. If you deny the existence of the second group, you also have to deny that there are biological differences between sexes (apart from reproductive organs), at which point I'd suggest going outside and taking a look around.
Conversely, if you accept that different sexes have different strengths and weaknesses, you should expect nonequal representation of genders in various occupations even in the most perfect, utopian, egalitarian and meritocratic society.
My issue with the way gender equality is currently discussed is that people deny the existence of biological differences and their consequences, treating everything as baseless cultural bias that needs to be conquered.
(Actually, my real issue is with people who are being assholes about promoting their side. Which happens equally on both sides of the issue, and that makes the whole topic toxic.)
And whatever results are of those "decades of research" (I've never personally seen being invoked, by either side), they have to agree with observable reality - otherwise, they're just results of crap research. Given the state of psychology and social sciences, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest (and no, I don't approve or criticize research based on wich side it supports, I view all soft science research with very strong suspicion).
> If you deny the existence of the second group, you also have to deny that there are biological differences between sexes (apart from reproductive organs), at which point I'd suggest going outside and taking a look around.
I don't deny the existence of the second group, but you'd have to prove that those biases are somehow justified, which is a hard task because there are very few completely universal and immutable biases (or at least biases that change at the same temporal and spatial pace as biology). So, in short, that seems to comprise of a very small, very insignificant, set of social biases.
> My issue with the way gender equality is currently discussed is that people deny the existence of biological differences and their consequences, treating everything as baseless cultural bias that needs to be conquered.
That's not how it's discussed. It's just that there is very little evidence that biological differences are a significant cause of the great power inequality we see in society between the sexes and among the races, and a lot of evidence to suggest that mutable social biases are by far the dominant cause. So there's very little reason to talk about the biological differences if so far they've not been shown to be too pertinent to the discussion of inequality.
> Which happens equally on both sides of the issue, and that makes the whole topic toxic.
But there is a big knowledge gap. Those in favor of feminism, while not immune from assholishness -- at least have decades of study to at least support the premise of their position, while those against have just their own personal feelings on the matter.
> they have to agree with observable reality - otherwise, they're just results of crap research.
They do.
> I've never personally seen being invoked, by either side
They're invoked often by the only side that has them. Most government policy choices refer at some point in their inception to academic studies.
> Given the state of psychology and social sciences, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest (and no, I don't approve or criticize research based on wich side it supports, I view all soft science research with very strong suspicion).
Suspicion is good, and it is quite probable that many specific findings are questionable, but when you're confronted with such a huge body of evidence -- from history, sociology, anthropology and psychology -- you must admit that it accounts to much more than a gut feeling (which is what the other side base their arguments on).
I'm quite suspicious about your statement that your side is supported by "such a huge body of evidence", whereas "the other side base their arguments on [...] a gut feeling".
I think from that we can safely assume that you (at best) massively overstate your position and massively understate your opponents.
Why, that many of those biases disappeared completely after a social struggle. And I don't mean disappeared from the lawbooks, but from the minds of most individuals.
One notable example is the struggle for women's suffrage. For a long time it was a wide-held belief that women shouldn't vote because they lacked the mental state of mind for making decisions in matters of state. Then, after that idea slowly faded, other excuses were given from preserving tradition to encouraging women to stay at home because that's what's best for the children.
Other notable examples are women education, and especially allowing women to become doctors and lawyers (both medieval professions or earlier) only in the late 19th or early 20th century. It was obvious to everyone that women simply did not have the mental faculties required.
Yet, all of that has thankfully changed, society is better for it, and very few people still believe that women are unfit to vote or to be lawyers or physicians.
And yet through all of that, some gender differences have remained.
History is open to interpretation. I actually see what you mentioned as evidence against your position.
It's clear that people were able to overcome pervasive biases far more extreme than our current biases.
And yet some argue that implicit biases are responsible for the remaining differences.
History shows that bias can be overcome even when overt and widespread. The intractability of the remaining differences in a nation where bias is widely opposed suggests a cause stronger than bias.
That just like saying that the fact there are a lot of things science has no answer for shows that those things can never be understood.
> some argue
Nobody who has studied the subject argues that, at least not regarding differences that greatly effect the change in the power distribution.
> The intractability of the remaining differences in a nation where bias is widely opposed suggests a cause stronger than bias.
No intractability. The struggle simply started with the big stuff, and now moves on. The pace of change hasn't slowed. History shows that anything that women or minorities struggled for, they eventually got and old entrenched biases dissipated.
The thing that really annoys me about a comment like this is that it completely ignores decades of research about why women choose what they choose. It also completely ignores decades of research about how anyone chooses anything.
It, like, lacks all hint of intellectual curiosity. It's like saying, "well, an electron behaves this way and a photon behaves that way because that's the way things are, and I'm done. Why is it behaving that way? I don't know and I don't care." And then I say, "but, you know, some smart people have actually studied this and have some interesting findings", and you say like, "meh, that's probably bad science because I've heard those stories about scientists fabricating data, so I'm not even going to look at this". Now, all of this would have been fine if people with no curiosity and no knowledge wouldn't have an opinion on the matter, but like I said, we have two sides where one has spent decades studying the subject in lots of disciplines, and the other is like "la la la, I don't want to hear, you're wrong".
The saddest part is that we even know why the other side behaves like this (it's the superposition of a bunch of well-known psychological phenomena), but are not allowed to say because that just makes them angrier.
The thing that really annoys me about a comment like yours is that it implies the choices people currently make are wrong. You’re suggesting that social scientists know better than the people themselves what they should choose.
And then you attempt to demonize anyone who disagrees with you.
Wrong? When did I say wrong? Being right or wrong is a value judgement. Believing the choices we make are free is, on the other hand, delusional and stands in complete opposition to what we've learned about this world.
And I don't demonize those who disagree with me, I just state the simple fact that most of them have zero knowledge of the matter and zero willingness to learn, yet an endless desire to argue about these things (that, honestly, they couldn't care less about except that occasionally something inconveniences them a bit) and the lack of shame to make definitive arguments based on absolutely nothing but wishful thinking, gut feeling and exaggeration.
I have actually had similar arguments in the past with people who were at least willing to argue about data and interpretation. But this?
> Do you disagree with that factually, or were you annoyed because you don't like the choices people make?
I don't disagree with that factually, but I strongly disagree with the implied sentiment that this is due to some law of nature, whereas research so far indicates that all human choices, and in particular "aggregate" or statistical choices made by groups are very, very strongly influenced by social pressure.
> Would you, if you could, change other people’s choices by changing social pressures to fit your agenda?
Thing is, research shows that any choice is made under external influences, they shift constantly, and so far those influences result in a very skewed balance of power. The thing we feminists care about is this distribution of power. Our agenda is to reduce the strong social pressures that actively maintain power inequality so that they maintain it less strongly. Opposing this agenda means you're in favor of keeping the social pressures as they are, i.e. continuing the ongoing practice of actively maintaining inequality.
> all human choices, and in particular "aggregate" or statistical choices made by groups are very, very strongly influenced by social pressure
Influenced, perhaps, yet recent history is full of people defying immense social pressure and even the law in order to do things they want to do. Subtle social pressure is clearly not the only, nor the strongest, influence.
> The thing we feminists care about is this distribution of power.
And so you try to influence other people, and in particular other women, to do what you want them to do.
That’s certainly common enough in both business and politics.
But it is advertising. Not science, not especially noble, nor a moral imperative.
> Opposing this agenda means you're in favor of keeping the social pressures as they are, i.e. continuing the ongoing practice of actively maintaining inequality.
No, I’m in favor of allowing, and helping, all people to do what they want to do (as long as it doesn’t harm others). I’m against controlling people to advance any agenda.
> And so you try to influence other people, and in particular other women, to do what you want them to do.
No, we try to influence you so that you wouldn't influence women to do what you want them to do, even though you may be doing this subconsciously.
> Not science
The science part is that we've uncovered the current influences, their origin, their development and their mechanisms and they turn out to be quite onerous.
> No, I’m in favor of allowing, and helping, all people to do what they want to do (as long as it doesn’t harm others). I’m against controlling people to advance any agenda.
So are we! Except, we are interested in how the world actually works, so we've spent a very long time studying it, and it turns out that society is not allowing (and certainly not helping) people do what they want to do, partly by making them want things that they wouldn't otherwise want. So we actually want the same thing, but we know more about the world than you do, hence our course of action to achieving that goal is radically different.
At this point, however, it is clear to me that there is no difference in values between us, but what separates us is a vast knowledge gap (I spent some years in graduate school studying certain aspects of this issue). I only hope that, one day, if you are truly sincere about your professed ideology, you will care about it enough and be blessed by intellectual curiosity to stop and ask yourself, "a lot of educated people who have spent years studying human society are saying that we are actively limiting women's choices (perhaps subconsciously) in a way that reduces their power; could they possibly be right?" and then you’d Google for it, read an article or two, and realize that you have been very, very wrong.
I’ll end with this Rebecca West quote: "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."
> "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."
There's a vast difference in values between us. I'm happy to let you do anything you want to do - even try to convince others that they should do what you want.
You accuse people who don't agree with you of being uneducated automatons who want women to be doormats.
But the fact is that society really doesn't. So you're happy to let anyone do whatever they want only as long as it doesn't require society to change... And you'll go to great lengths not to learn the facts that would show you you're wrong just so that you could keep things the same.
> You accuse people
I don't accuse anyone of anything. I am stating the obvious fact that anyone who denies that society is actively limiting women's choices is simply ignorant of what we know on the subject. Just like anyone who thinks electrons couldn't possibly behave so strangely is simply uneducated of the facts. Not an automaton, just unfamiliar with the findings. It's not an accusation, either, but a simple statement of fact.
> not just by laws but by hidden biases which translate to social pressure.
The fallacy with this line of thinking is that the 'hidden bias' is being determined by someone with 'hidden bias' which translates to 'social pressure'. Its completely subjective. Its an accusation based on a belief not a set of external facts. You can not be free of 'hidden bias' any more then you can be free of self conciousness. You are protected from certain forms of 'discrimination' under the law. The burden of proof for 'hidden bias' is simply not attainable by any standard of law.
1. We don't wish to eliminate personal biases (like your preference for blue over green), but social biases (like that Africans are sub-human)
2. We don't wish to eliminate all social biases (like murder is bad and fairness is good), but only those that increase power inequality (like that Africans are sub-human or that women belong in the home)
So there is a subjective ideology here (preference for fairness), but it makes recognizing incompatible biases rather objective and very much based on a set of external facts.
> The burden of proof for 'hidden bias' is simply not attainable by any standard of law.
No one has said that this change is to be done by changing the law alone. It is mostly educational.
I'm going out on a limb here, but did anyone consider that some of those "social biases" you want to eliminate arise naturally from society exploiting comparative advantage of sexes?
When women are on average better at doing X and men are on average better at doing Y, even if the advantage is very slight, it's beneficial to let women focus on X and men on Y. I think some of the customs may have arisen there. I'm not saying that they haven't become twisted or outdated and shouldn't be pruned - just that we should take a closer look before deciding to get rid of them.
I think that the near universality of many of those biases, and the fact that civilization arose pretty much independently around the world, it's pretty clear that that is the case. I don't think saying that is even controversial.
However, you must be careful with your history, because many biases (such as the place of women in the workplace) have actually changed considerably through history and across different cultures, and many of them actually peaked in Victorian times, and it is mostly the Victorian biases that we in the West are left with.
Nevertheless, the origin of the biases says nothing about their benefit. Obviously, beneficial behavior in pre-historical times was very different from what benefitted it in classical times, medieval times, the early-modern period, and certainly after the industrial revolution.
Finally, it is very hard to define what you mean by "a benefit to society" by any objective means. For simple organisms, increasing the population count is beneficial (although even that is not clear because that's assigning a value judgment to a mere fact). But what does it mean for human society? Obviously many people thought for a long time that slavery is very beneficial, although the slaves obviously disagreed. So the basic ideology of feminism basically has one tenet -- that of fairness -- and says that power should be more-or-less equally distributed among social categories that are determined at birth (except for individual misfortunes etc., which is another matter).
I would be very, very wary of a statement like "we wish to eliminate only those social biases that increase power inequality".
Yes, there untrue and unfair biases that increase power inequality, and those should be eliminated.
But what about preferences which, after careful deliberation, turn out to be actually objective to the best of our knowledge? If I understand your statements correctly, then they would imply that in this case, the if that bias/belief/preference/opinion would benefit the socially dominant group (thus increase power inequality), then then it should be eliminated; and if/when that same bias would benefit the socially disadvantaged group (this increasing power equality) then the exact same thing should be praised... which feels not okay to me.
I mean, people are different, and groups of people are also pretty different. For pretty much any useful property, when we split people in groups (e.g. by genders, by ager, or "all the current USA citizens with X ethnical background") we see examples where one of the group will have (on average) a significant objective advantage over another group in that property. Most likely it's not because of something they did or deserve, it's some effect of past generations of socioeconomic situations, ingrained cultural practices that favoured different attitudes to e.g. directions of education, or simple genetics - but there differences are real.
If you would achieve perfect equality of opportunity for each individual - you would still have a significant inequality of results and power between such groups.
If you would achieve perfect equality of results or power equality - that could only be done through very significant inequality of opportunities for individuals, significantly aiding or hampering them depending on which social groups they belong to. This does not seem acceptable to me at all; the goal is nice, but it definitely doesn't justify such (IMHO horrible) means.
But those differences aren't the laws of physics. We can change them, and we do change them all the time. The only question is in which direction? Saying "leave things alone" simply means let the existing dynamics continue and is as much of an ideology as "let's figure out what change would be in accordance with our values and do that".
> you would still have a significant inequality of results and power between such groups.
Between what groups? Struggle over power never stops. It's not a problem that can be solved once and for all, and people fight over it all the time. Even the most powerful fight to stay in power and even increase their power. All I'm saying is, find out what your values are and fight for those, rather than believe that the current state of affairs is "natural". It isn't. It is simply a recent snapshot of the situation after all previous struggles. Not fighting for your values is simply yielding to those who do.
> If you would achieve perfect equality of results or power equality - that could only be done through very significant inequality of opportunities for individuals, significantly aiding or hampering them depending on which social groups they belong to. This does not seem acceptable to me at all; the goal is nice, but it definitely doesn't justify such (IMHO horrible) means.
I said nothing of the means, and all of those fears are completely unfounded. Decades of research show us that people are being "aided or hampered them depending on which social groups they belong to" right now. All we want is to people to study and be aware of the state of affairs, and the goal is not to achieve perfect equality among all individuals, but to exactly remove the existing pressures on social groups -- that's all.
> It seems to me that the dictionary definition and common understanding of personal bias is "a bias held by a particular person".
Yes, and some biases are shared by many and propagate through social mechanisms. Those are called social biases.
> I've often seen social engineering redefine terms to redirect or derail discussions and find that very Orwellian.
Much of it is no more than a more careful, organized terminology designed to assist academic study. I find that many people who find stuff like that to be Orwellian are simply not interested to learn what it's really all about. If they did, they's find a fascinating field for research, and a clearer understanding of human society. Instead, many of them dismiss the study of human society because it eludes simple mathematical models (as all complex systems do), and may require a re-examination of things they take for granted.
Comments like this sounds to someone with a social sciences education as the statement "I feel this messing about with particles angers the gods, and, in particular, Zeus" would sound to anyone with a science education.
When a scientist measures the behaviour of particles in a carefully-defined system, they can replicate that behaviour such that they can say, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the particles always behave that way under those conditions.
Such replicability has not been demonstrated in systems as complex, chaotic, and essentially unmeasurable as the human brain, let alone a human society. A field of study is not a science without replicability.
Academic terminology, especially in the social "sciences," creates a scaffold of "theory" without any replicable data, and uses it to pass judgement on the behaviours of individuals without actually examining the individual's own motives for a behaviour. It's a dehumanizing assumption of determinism to believe that individuals are incapable of making decisions for themselves, or that conjectured Foucaultian structures (which could be said to exist only as linguistic sign for the speaker's own level of education) govern all human behaviour.
I'd even go so far as to say that if you believe that Power Structures determine all human behaviour, you're living in the worst sort of Bad Faith.
One either accepts that all study of human society (and all reexamination of values which occurs in its pursuit) is little more than observation, conjectures, and untestable hypotheses--or, one accepts that they do not understand what science is and how it is conducted and how it proceeds.
Calling the social sciences "science" is about as disingenuous and unscientific as calling Art History "Temporal Paint Physics."
> A field of study is not a science without replicability.
What's your point? That unless we achieve the same certainty we do in physics we can't know anything?
> without any replicable data
That's just an outright lie.
> and uses it to pass judgement on the behaviours of individuals without actually examining the individual's own motives for a behaviour.
I don't think you have any clue what research says. Now you're just making stuff up.
> I'd even go so far as to say that if you believe that Power Structures determine all human behaviour, you're living in the worst sort of Bad Faith.
You're speaking from such total ignorance and justifying it by stating (with no clue) that our research is worthless, and hence you don't need to know it. No one is saying what you're saying. It's like me saying, "oh, so you're saying that all matter is energy? So how come my car can't drive on water?" In short, utter ignorance and lack of understanding and curiosity.
> One either accepts that all study of human society (and all reexamination of values which occurs in its pursuit) is little more than observation, conjectures, and untestable hypotheses--or, one accepts that they do not understand what science is and how it is conducted and how it proceeds.
Listen, buddy. After I studied math and computer science in college and graduate school, I went to study history, and, again, you have absolutely no clue. There are different practices and tools, and a different level of certainty -- sure -- but we still know a lot.
> Calling the social sciences "science" is about as disingenuous and unscientific as calling Art History "Temporal Paint Physics."
And dismissing the work of brilliant researchers without even studying it is juvenile and idiotic. No one is saying history is science in the same way that physics is science (neither is medicine, BTW). You're making up ridiculous strawmen just to convince yourself that it's OK to stay ignorant.
Yes, I am a strict logical positivist. Without reproducibility and meta-analyses (or rigorous empirical observation as in climatology, paleontology, etc.), no theory exists, because no meaningful and logically-consistent observations have been made.
I used Foucault's theories as an example, but if you think I am "making stuff up," then I would be pleased to hear your opinions about the other theorists and researchers who admit to the subjectivity and reporting bias intrinsic to the social sciences and instead formulate more "theory" with which to explain and evaluate the behaviour of chaotic systems.
I am not your buddy. I am not making up strawmen, nor do I dismiss the work of researchers without having gained at least a dilettante's familiarity with the field.
I am fascinated by cultures, history, human behaviour, etc. However, I am skeptical of "experimental conclusions" which arrive from surveys and observations of cultures. Incredibly noisy data.
Furthermore, I object to the ambiguation of a term like "science," which exists to connote the certitude of rigorous observations and analyses of systems, and to bestow a certain truth value upon these observations, to describe studies for which our best explanations for observed behaviours are guesswork.
I do believe that human beings, as tribal animals, are (sometimes, and with the possibility of override) governed by evolved ingroup/outgroup behaviours, and that this seems as likely an explanation as any for all the myriad strife in the world. Beyond that? It's anyone's guess.
Do you believe that political manipulation by careful use of language exists?
That's a big difference between Zeus's wrath and Orwellian tactics. One is real.
Perhaps social science should be more aware, or more open about, the political influence of its chosen terms, if it wants to be a neutral search for truth.
But I admit, I may have misinterpreted your definitions. From your examples, I thought you meant that personal bias was about something of little social import, like blue vs green, while a bias regarding other people (even one held personally) was not a personal bias.
"'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights.
Am I not getting this?"
You're so 10 years behind the ball. Equality now means equality of results.
Since everybody [important] knows that women have the same skills & work the same jobs & the same hours as men, their being paid less is only result of misogyny & sexism on part of their employers.
I think the dangerous part is taking something biological and trying to make a direct association with something as vaguely defined as emotional intelligence. This kind of thing is extremely dependent on culture. If you take an American with high emotional intelligence and plant them in Finland, they aren't necessarily going to be able to read people the same way. It's hard to imagine a case where this kind of thing isn't a learned ability.
It's like saying men are better at Algebra. Most people are capable of being perfect at Algebra with the right training and focus. It's just a matter of moving numbers around in a very predictable way. Responding to people's emotional cues is similarly something trainable, but because it's cultural and more difficult to define precisely (and what isn't less precise than math?), it tends to acquire a more mystical aura and lends itself to being defined as something gender specific when that might not really be the case at all. Maybe it really is, but we have no hard evidence either way, and any statistics about it have a high probability of being culturally biased.
In the long run, I don't think that training new generations of people to respond to emotions will be any more effective than recording successful interactions and using the data to train computers to do the same thing. With a large enough data set, a good enough algorithm that can vary tone of voice in response to emotional cues is going to be more consistent than a large workforce doing the same thing. With humans, you'll get more exceptional talents, but you'll also get more really awful people, and with the state of the Internet, just one awful customer service experience can go viral and ruin a company's reputation. Even if computers aren't as good as the most exceptional people at responding to emotions, I think the jobs will tend toward the computers there too for the sake of protecting against those few employees who aren't good, don't care, or are just having a bad day and take it out on customers. There will still be high-end services where people care about being served by people, but for commodity customer service, computers will win within a few decades (and this applies to managing employees too, particularly in situations like scheduling, but I think middle management will be slower to switch for cultural reasons, since managers actually have some control over keeping their jobs).
> Does anyone truly believe that this is not the case?
Of course! Especially with the "naturally" part. Biological differences in pertinent cognitive abilities, while they certainly exist, have never been shown to be too big (certainly not big enough to be the major cause for observed differences in representation). It is certainly logical to believe that most observed differences are mostly explained by social causes.
> 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights.
Not exactly. Equal rights implies legal rights, and gender equality (as well as racial equality) goes beyond that. The idea is that the sexes (and the races) be treated similarly in society, and not have their choices limited -- not just by laws but by hidden biases which translate to social pressure. The desired result is equal power not equal rights (but, as you correctly note, not "sameness"), as rights alone are a necessary but insufficient condition in the change of the power distribution.
It's demonstrably true that, while men and women are, on average, about the same in cognitive abilities, it's also true that the distributions are not the same. There are much bigger "tails" for men[2] - you've got more men at the top end of the spectrum, and also more men at the absolute bottom of the spectrum[1].
I really don't think that the prevalence of geniuses or mentally retarded among any social group has any significant effect on the overall distribution of power. You are speaking of people who are, by definition, outliers.
But even more theoretically, I don't see your point, though. History has proven beyond a doubt that society can and does change in rather extreme ways. In terms of changes to the power distribution in society, we are still far from hitting any biological limitations (and when we do, we often find technological solutions to them). So just because there are some biological limitations we should stop way short of them?
And we can take it further. Suppose (this is not the case, but suppose) that some large population is biologically significantly stupider than other groups (they're not idiots, just far from smart), and as a result, that group is constantly subservient to other groups, and has far less power to advance its interests. Don't you think we should actively help them? I mean, people can't fly, yet we've gone to great lengths to overcome that biological barrier through technology. We also go to great lengths (though that depends also on who suffers, but never mind) to overcome physical medical conditions. Shouldn't we also make some effort to fight social problems, or should we say, "let nature run its course" even though we never do that for anything else?
Finally -- and I'll repeat that because it's a relevant historical fact -- for centuries people (men and sometimes women, too) honestly believed -- they were certain, really -- that women are too stupid to be doctors and lawyers (although they put it gently with phrases like, "their wisdom lies elsewhere"). Then they said that regardless of intelligence, no one would put their life in the hands of a woman (or a black) doctor. But guess what? They were wrong and we got used to it. So while this is not a very scientific argument, history shows that -- so far -- if you base your arguments on what you believe are biological limitations or the persistence of social customs, you'd be on the wrong side of history.
I was thinking about this concept abstractly (deviations from the norm evolutionarily). I'm not trying to dispute the data you have here, but rather play the devil's advocate to propose an alternative theory which might contradict the data. I'll preface this by saying I already know the (correct and definitive) rebuttal to this line of thought, but it's fruitful to mention the problem nonetheless.
Men are the risky sex, relative to the propagation of the gene lineage. Men have a higher chance of not reproducing either as a result of sexual competition or death, but also the capability of reproducing many times in the proper scenario. Why does it make sense for men to be more variable? Why aren't women the variable sex?
Females get a huge advantage in reproduction of their genes: they are the gatekeeper of the gene line. An undesirable female will probably still reproduce, whereas an undesirable male probably won't. Why aren't females extremely variable instead of males? Females could biologically "get away" with extreme (but viable) variation because they're practically guaranteed to reproduce anyway. Males being extremely variable merely results in a lot of detritus at the edges-- wasted energy from the perspective of the parents / gene line. Isn't there an evolutionary pressure against wasteful reproduction?
> Of course! Especially with the "naturally" part. Biological differences in pertinent cognitive abilities, while they certainly exist, have never been shown to be too big (certainly not big enough to be the major cause for observed differences in representation). It is certainly logical to believe that most observed differences are mostly explained by social causes.
Huh?
Are you saying that you truly believe that everyone is the best at everything?
I read him as saying that while men and women are different they are not _that_ different and that social causes is probably a bigger factor than any biological one.
Who is naturally better at lifting heavy objects -- men or women?
Who is naturally better at bearing children -- men or women?
Reality isn't gender-equal, or even finely balanced like a Starcraft game. Equality means equal rights, not equal abilities. (A strict belief in the latter gets us into Harrison Bergeron territory.)
If we're talking cognitive skills, there is rough equality in ability, but a difference in approach which makes one sex better for a particular job than the other. If women tend more to seek social consensus, for instance, they would fare better in a software engineering job with a high degree of peer collaboration, as opposed to the same job in a more "cowboy coding" environment.
My problem with this line of reasoning is the inferential leap. The other day my wife was surprised that I could box jump higher than her, even though I rarely work out, while she had been training for a stair climbing competition. Being a man has its advantages. But then we're going to make the jump from that to saying "and that explains why men just prefer/are better at programming and thus make up 90% of the industry!"
My second problem is that men set the metrics in ways that benefit them. Let's take the stereotypes as an assumption. What is a good programming team? One full of cowboys and rockstars, or one full of people who can concentrate on detail work for long periods at a time and communicate with each other? Studies of children show that girls are better at the latter (which is why they get higher grades).
Obviously it's not the whole picture, but I think the most quantitative answer is that the human resources field is one of the most female-dominated out there (source: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf).
In companies I worked, they make a lot of them. HR is part of the panel that votes on a interviewee's fit and also handles a lot of the salary negotiation (which is as important as the whole hiring process).
I also detect a 'for programmers' added in that wasn't present before...
Handling salary negotiations means being able to say 'yes we accept your offer' or 'no, we don't think we can make that work'. That is making a decision.
They don't even do that. The company positions HR people between candidates and the hiring manager as a way of thwarting negotiation, but the HR person is invariably required to escalate back to the hiring manager if they can't get to "yes".
The idea that women have an outsized role in tech job screening because of the demographics of HR is totally specious. It also has nothing whatsoever to do with Rayiner's point.
The notion that HR has any meaningful role in selecting candidates is fallacious. Any appearance of such a role in an HR organization is a deliberately constructed artiface, intended to take the heat off the real decision makers and to trap candidates with poor negotiating skills.
Neither. Hiring is done a thousand different ways involving both genders (and sometimes involving those who don't care to be classified by binary genders). Which group may be in the majority depends upon location and industry and even on the way hiring works; in some cases direct report has 100% control, in some cases direct report has 0% control and HR has all of it.
If you don't think that men are currently making the vast majority of hiring decisions for programmers in the US right now then you are simply unaware of what's going on in the world.
Odd. See the original article is a discussion of needing people skills for the best jobs, and the branch that started this comment chain was based on someone calling out one gender for rigging the system, to which my only response was to ask if the other gender does not do the same. Programming was not the primary focus here and keeps being brought up to try to prove a claim that wasn't ever actually disagreed with, but which I just asked a question to give some equality to.
>My second problem is that men set the metrics in ways that benefit them
If you think going to war is a benefit then you may have a different concept of "benefit" than most.
And you are extrapolating stuff, just because men are better at lifting weights doesn't mean we are going to close female weight competitions. The same thing happens with programming or any career where one of the sexes may be better by biological predisposition.
I'd argue that the above questions aren't well formed. Gender equality is such a sticky issue that it's really important to use precise language.
For the first question, it might be fair to say that the average amount men can lift is more than the average amount women can lift. However it's really important to realize that given 2 individuals of different genders, there's no reason to make any assumptions about which one is able to lift more weight. You could just assume, and if you had to assume, you'd be most accurate by assuming the man could lift more than the woman, but why assume?
Be very careful when taking a statement that's accurate wrt to populations and applying it to 2 individuals in the population.
This is a false comparison since even most industrial jobs have machinery which does the heavy lifting and most dangerous part of production (I know from personal experience). As for how women work in an office it largely depends on the job and the social norms in the office. I've seen women act as cut throat as the men in some offices and I've seen men work toward consensus in others. It's not biology that drives the behavior patterns at jobs it's the factors of production: the input, the tools, and the desired output. Everything else is an accident of history.
Seems plausible on the surface, but not supported by research. The average elite female athlete is only as strong as an average male. Quote: The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men.
I agree its a puff piece. They are basically saying 1+1 > 1+0 - of course its better to have tech skills AND social skills on top instead of just tech, but thats trivial.
10 years ago at university a professor in economics told us that skills like design and social competence would become more important, as the actual tech would be outsourced to India or east europe, and focusing on tech would be unwise.
When I look at the programmer consulting rates, the opposite has happened. Glad I made the right choice.
"This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality."
Good job comrade, drawing attention to someone (perhaps an innocent mistake - but we can't let these pass either) about to embark on danger-noticing and danger-think.
Hopefully you will stay vigilant and the offender will not relapse.
Do you honestly believe that women aren't naturally worse at certain things? How about physical strength? Any man ranked in the top 50 of the tennis pro tour can smoke pretty much any woman who plays tennis. You'll find the same is the case with squash, cricket, basketball, you name it. It is a natural inequality, and there is no point in denying it. "Equality" does not mean equality of results. It means equality of opportunity.
The difference is that the mainstream left-wing themselves routinely say that they want equality of outcome:
Paul Krugman's -- "we should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn’t know in advance who we’d be."
Or as Ezra Klein put it -- "In truth, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome aren't opposites. They're partners. Companions. Inseparable amigos. You can't have real equality of opportunity without equality of outcome. A rich parent can purchase test prep a poor parent can't. A rich parent can usher their children into social networks a poor parent can't. A rich parent can make donations to Harvard that a poor parent can't."
Or Jonathan Chait -- "the attempt to draw a distinction between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity collapses immediately."
No mainstream right-winger is getting anywhere close to arguing that people should starve to death.
In the UK we have a government that is actively starving the terminally ill to death, by classifying them as "fit for work" and stopping subsistence benefit payouts for them.
Careful, you're using "Starving" in that instance as hyperbole. Losing your benefits and starving are two very different things.
In the US we have a government safety net, and a private safety net.
If someone falls out of the government safety net, as they are sometimes known to do, there are still churches and non-profits across the country which will provide them with food and shelter. They may lose benefits, but they're not starving. That distinction is important.
I'm sorry, but I find your comment astonishingly insensitive and disrespectful to those on the wrong end of this change.
tl;dr People are dying because of government policy. Some people have in fact quite literally starved to death. There is absolutely no hyperbole involved here. It's a literal, physical, undeniable fact.
The possibility that others may perhaps find their way to private help is largely irrelevant, because private help - if it exists at all - is geographically patchy, resource constrained, and often disorganised.
I hope you never find yourself in a situation where you have to experience what this means in practice.
Republicans agree in-so-far as we believe we need to create a society with the best possible outcomes for the most people. Despite what Liberals pundits often claim, that's never been in disagreement.
The disagreement is about what type of system produces the best results -- be that using cultural change and market forces to bring up the general tide, or giving increasing power to a central government to try to force equality of outcomes.
We believe that if you try to force equal outcomes, you end up destroying your civilization. The best you can hope for is freedom.
That means we believe in making the world better without government coercion, and we believe that history supports that position.
Even if they were saying that, which they aren't, it doesn't really matter given that no one (outside of three special cases) in America starves.
Those three cases are abused children, the mentally ill, and forgotten elderly. In all cases food scarcity was not the problem. They're problems of community oversight.
There is an argument to be made here. The majority of the money is in men's sports. Arguably that means that's where the best trainers, nutritionists, and sports doctors go. The edge that those things can give you cannot be discounted.
The Williams sisters had a lot more money and access to better nutritionists than Karsten Braasch, who was placed a lowly ~200 in the ATP rankings (and he used to smoke cigarettes, also). Nevertheless, he beat them 6-1 6-2. From here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Braasch:
> Braasch competed in a "Battle of the Sexes" contest against Venus Williams and Serena Williams at the 1998 Australian Open when he was ranked 203. A decade and a half older than the sisters, Braasch was described by one journalist as "a man whose training regime centred around a pack of cigarettes and more than a couple bottles of ice cold lager."[2] He nonetheless defeated both sisters, playing a single set against each, beating Serena 6–1 and Venus 6–2.
The onus would be on you to prove that this "edge" explains the entirety of men's domination in sports. I don't quite know how you'll explain away in social terms greater muscle mass, greater testosterone, and all other physical differences, but you are welcome to try.
> If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
Lower demand of workers and over-supply of candidates = employers' market = greater expectations placed on workers for lower pay. This would change nice-to-have attributes of excellent candidates from nice-to-have to compulsory as workers have to be even more perfect just to keep their job against the 100 other people lined up ready to take it from them. Besides, if there are 3 equally-qualified people with people skills and 5 without, it's a no brainer because the non-people-skilled folks are liabilities: they can kill the team dynamic, put people off and waste time & money (finding new coworkers to replace those that left whom will put up with their antics, finding new customers/vendors/partners/etc. that they put off, etc.). I know of a number of first-hand cases where some arrogant developers were passed over for hiring consideration at a successful enterprise startup because it was clear they would be too difficult to work with.
In labor markets with a foreseeable overabundance of talent, the future of work may include a number of people willing to work even longer for free, far longer than internships, simply to showcase their chops, get real experience and edge out other candidates/employees. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, but it certainly seems headed down that path.
Its not a simple equilibrium as you make out to be. No one at this point can predict what automation will do to the workforce.
I find it hyperbolic that off all people programmers are most paranoid of automation. Did commodity C compiler make compiler designer obsolete ?
what will happen is productivity is going to shoot up for your average person on a per dollar basis.
A bioinformatician can outproduce 10 farmers , etc.
There is no shortage of things to do on the planet. There are still 3.5 billion people living on 10 dollars a day, have some perspective.
We can take about the robotic dystopian future when we have succefully homed,clothed and fed every person on the planet. Also provide free healthcare for everyone. I can go on but this terrible paranoia about automation needs to stop before you let animalistic emotions stop progression of science and technology.
And why people are so scared about automation even here is:
They know our current way of splitting up wealth and resources is not sustainable. Capitalism itself calls for lowering costs and beating "opposition's prices". This in turn leads to a downward spiral.
Automation is inevitable. And that itself is not a bad thing. What is bad, are the people it displaces, and the resulting lack of money to pay for rent/utilities/necessities/extras. People in the US are still scared by the socialist and communist boogeyman, in that they won't look at those systems and ideas as tools.
One thing it seems most of the comments replying to are missing is that women are trained, in the US, to be "nice", emotionally observant, and socially fluent. Even throwing innate differences to the wind, watch family interactions and see four-year-old Lucy get reprimanded for not hugging Grandma and four-year-old Lionel not hugging Grandma and everyone laughing and saying, "How cute, little man!" and giving him an out (a wave, a handshake). Through the power of social ostracism women have learned to act nice and be emotionally observant even when they don't feel it.
Guys have their own pressures, of course, starting with the basic "don't cry" and "man up" and going from there. Imagine Lucy and Lionel scraping up their knees mildly on a rock: Lucy will get a lot of cuddles and hugs when she cries, and Lionel will be treated rather differently -- a range of responses from a briefer hug to "You're fine!" This definitely influences peoples' ideas of appropriate interpersonal interactions.
Agreed. But what I put to even more suspicions are your arguments...
> If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
No, when non-human tasks get delegated to non-humans, human skills will be where humans will be most needed, and this goes in line with data presented, and is fairly self-evident.
> Is the author trying to prove women are naturally better at these things?
Author gives research in support to that and you quote quotation of it yourself.
> If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things.
There's no need to stretch anything, that's a fact. It is dangerous thinking, I agree. But so is atomic energy, AI, gene splicing... Besides being dangerous, it's also inevitable.
> This could be impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
I resent generalization our without further specification on who exactly.
> No, when non-human tasks get delegated to non-humans, human skills will be where humans will be most needed, and this goes in line with data presented, and is fairly self-evident.
The point of simula67 is that the quintessential job that requires good interpersonal skills is management. Managers are there to manage technical workers. If there is less of a need for technical workers, managers have fewer people to manage, and you don't need interpersonal skills to machine-manage. The end result might be that we can cut out all of middle management, and that this "purge" will offset the higher (relative) demand for people with interpersonal skills in other areas of the workforce.
All very hypothetical and full of assumptions of course, but then, so is the original article.
There's orders of magnitude more consumer-facing jobs than there are managers, who, basically by definition, are always in smaller numbers.
Analysis of statement "quintessential job that requires good interpersonal skills is management" will give me food for thought today, thanks. Not sure what I think about that. Some could argue that it's even anti-social role in a way.
You should see where I work! We have a "database" meeting every two weeks (though it end up being more of an "organizational workflow" meeting, which then gets implemented in my database application).
There are about ten people who attend, all managers, except me. I have my team lead, and his manager. Everyone asks for requests to be implemented in the database and I am theonly one person to implement them.
(Anyway it was getting crappy enough that I just quit).
Well how do you define "naturally better"? If you live in a world that is dominated by people who are not like you, with more political power, more money, and more physical strength, wouldn't it be logical that you would learn more how to handle people than them because you require their cooperation more than they require yours? I don't think "naturally better" must mean genetically better. In this case it would mean formed by society in that regard and therefore better.
"Naturally better" could also mean a result of survival bias. There are hundreds of reasons why there are more male physicists than female ones in the line of history. But we see more of them. So one simple (but as we know now incorrect) conclusion might be that men are better at physics. In the same regard we could observe more socially skilled females in the work place because these are the ones that make it there.
>This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
Ideally gender equality will be reached when we are judged by our own skills, without regard to our gender. Yes, a man may do better at X and a woman may do better by Y, but I'm hiring you because you are good at Z and I need someone good at Z and I don't care which gender is better in general, because you are the one I'm interviewing and you are good at Z.
But we still need to factor in X and Y sometimes because there will always be areas where that X or Y advantage will cause disparity. Are we going to draw a hard line and say the military should be exactly 50/50 representation of men and women? That nursing, teaching, and other female-dominated fields should be 50/50 male/female and that engineering, computing should be 50/50 male/female? That doesn't sound like equality. That sounds like the type of compromise reached between parties that would other engage in violence against each other, not the sexes that are mutually necessary for human existence.
>But we still need to factor in X and Y sometimes because there will always be areas where that X or Y advantage will cause disparity.
But why do we care about gender anymore than disparities that are the result of different X and Y when the population is divided by f. Why is f = gender treated differently than f = height, eye color, parental income, weight, amount of time spent playing games per week > 10, number of veggies grown in the garden last year < 20, or any other metric we can come up with?
10% of people have gene ABC123, then 10% of every group must be made up of people with that gene? Only madness lies down that path.
He doesn't say or even suggest that they are naturally better. Anyone who has an interest in the topic knows that boys and girls are treated differently by parents and society. Perhaps if boys were given a chance to express any emotion other than anger and encouraged to resolve disputes without fighting they would also be better at these skills.
> If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
It's more complex than that. Having natural ability does not mean those without that ability cannot excel in that area with hard work. Also, by the same token, some people with a lot of natural ability for certain things never take advantage of their talent because they never put the effort into realizing their potential.
So, in summary, acknowledging that natural ability is real does not give an automatic debating point to the other side of the argument because it's often the case that what you do with that innate talent will be more important.
>If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
This doesn't cause a decline in jobs, any more than the decline of mainstream farming (90%+ of the population used to be farmers, but in the last few centuries it's less than 3%) caused the majority of the population to be unemployed.
What it causes is more jobs in other areas. Or alternatively, it makes everything more profitable and therefore allows the relevant companies to bloat themselves up needlessly with more layers of management, because they can afford it.
Historically people moved from food generation to jobs that use up resources (energy for example) and produce goods. Western society has become consumption focussed and so the production of goods and services for consumers has swelled. But this has a natural end as the resources used to generate the goods run out.
In short one might say that machines will enable us to produce even more and open even more areas of manufacture and consumption, areas that were previously unknown - we'll be in flying cars and every item of clothing will have a computer in it and ... - but that relies on infinite resources. Without sufficient resources there is a natural brake on our ability to produce out of such a crisis in jobs.
Moreover there are certain costs to production that we have not paid, the current ecological state of the planet, the increased climate change, the other ecological impacts from chemical abuse (eg fracking), deforestation, stripping of raw materials - we haven't really paid for these things (proper filtering of toxins, development of renewable energy, clean-up of chemical impacts, planting of new forest, etc.) instead we've been on a relatively free ride. It's like a hoarder, they can keep being pathological and filling their house with crap but eventually they get sick and there's no more room in the house.
> If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
Here's my answer to this paradox. The humans vs machines is just another "good old boys club". Of course humans don't want to relinquish control and be managed by machines, they are not silly. So they create another layer of "soft skills" which prevents from machines (or people who understand them) taking over.
Take a high-frequency trading company as an analog. The job is done by computers and technicians running them. Still, the CEO and investors into this are probably better paid than those technicians, and make all the important decisions. (In fact, today you could probably create a completely self-managed HFT company that would just put all the profit into hiring more technicians who manage its algorithms.)
And I think this was always the case in human history (although not against machines, just against other social groups); and many technical people here seem to be in denial of this reality. What we can do though is to attempt to change this, but it will require political, not technological, solutions (that is people skills).
Computers have learned to manage computers and people, and they learned to program themselves. Almost all job offerings are for professional huggers, preferably human.
>> This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
No, it should inform our quest to bring about gender equality. We should be hiring people based on who they are as an individual, and not because of their gender or some quota, right? So if it's a fact that gender brings with it a tendency to be better / worse at different things, we shouldn't ignore it. Knowing the difference can help us measure when a statistical difference is explainable with gender-related tendencies, and when it's clearly because of discrimination. Trying to force a 50/50 split in cases where gender-related tendencies are significant seems silly to me.
edit: I do, however, agree that just dismissing something as "women are different" is bad, because people often fail to take into account what is an inherent chromosomal difference and what is because of stereotypes that people grew up with. So let's distinguish between biases and facts, but facts should not be considered "dangerous". It's what we do with the facts that matters.
> This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
I think human skills remain important in order to figure out what the customer wants. Computers might do a lot of the work, but these computers still need to be programmed. You need to understand the customer's needs and translate these into a user friendly experience.
The essence of this change seems to be that it's 'easy' to program a computer. It's harder to know what to program so that people will want to use it.
>> The Best Jobs NOW Require You to Be a People Person
"Even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15% of one's financial success is due one's technical knowledge and about 85% is due to skill in human engineering, to personality and the ability to lead people" - Dale Carnegie 1936
Of the people in the world who are the most wealthy, I don't think many of them come across publicly as 'people person' types. There are myriad stories surrounding Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, etc and how they're dreadful to work with. Jobs especially - people can't write entire listicles about how awful you are if you're a people person, but Business Insider managed it - http://uk.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10?op=1
Maybe if you want a high paying job working for someone else then you should brush up on your 'soft skills'; but if money is really the driving force behind that decision then you'd be better off developing a fiercely ruthless attitude and starting a business of your own.
The article is talking about ongoing changes in what skills are most valuable. Bill Gates got super-rich by running Microsoft from 1975 to 2000. There's no inconsistency between "hard tech skills were most valuable 15-40 years ago" and "people skills are going to be most valuable over the next 20 years".
And I think you may be mixing up two things that could be meant by phrases like "people person". It could be that being nice isn't very effective in bringing dramatic success, but that *understanding people and being able to manipulate them" is.
(And ... very, very few people are Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Even if your goal is to get rich, you probably do better by asking "how can I get into the top 0.1% of the population by wealth" than by asking "how can I get into the top 10 of the population by wealth", and the answers to those might be quite different.)
I thought for a moment you the SAS and not SAS the company - "fierce and ruthless" being pretty much the the point of the former.
Mind you, I can think of at least one military leader who was not only exceptionally good at doing his "day job" (bomber pilot) but who was also a remarkable leader and a thoroughly decent chap:
Those people are not just ruthless. People also believe in them and their vision. When that's the case, people understand that when they are pushed hard to complete something it's so that they will be successful. Any run of the mill manager or entrepreneur can't just push their people hard and expect to be the next <Insert favorite CEO>.
What if they succeeded despite their attitude not because of their attitude? Don't confuse correlation and dependencies. I'm too lazy to collect the sources but I think the general conclusion is that these "ass holes" made it because they had a well established family and a resilient personality, not because they treated people poorly.
Also I'm not sure if looking at the top alone is a good way to learn how to improve your own upward mobility. If these people at the top already been their since their birth they might not be able to teach you much about how you can get up from the ground. What I would do is looking at people that are very likely coming from a worse background and how they made it to the top (or even the middle). If you are in an IT company in the US or UK and you have an Indian coworker you might be able to learn more from him then from Steve Jobs. If you look at successful female, black artists (music, movies, etc) you might be able to learn also something, because in general this social group is considered to be at the bottom by many statistics.
Per my other post, I postulated that "people person" should be replaced with "strong communicator" to discuss future success.
In this regard, both Jobs, Musk, et al are very accomplished communicators. They are/were simply forceful. Or, in the case of Jobs, more than likely a sociopath. Sociopaths are known to be very convincing people to reach the ends they desire.
Training in mathematics, computer science and other STEM fields (what Deming would count as “high cognitive skills”) is still a great investment; that “plugging away at a spreadsheet” is still valuable. “High-cognitive-skills workers still earn more,” Deming said, “but social skills increasingly are a complement to cognitive skills.”
Lumping together droning on a spreadsheet and being a pleasant socialite as being not a bad asset and overall trendy.
Well, they were still people dealing with people, not just people sitting in their basements. Because how else, could they have made other people do the real work? :)
Interpersonal skills don't necessarily mean you are pleasant. You can use your interpersonal skills to be pleasant. You can also use them to skillfully drive a team.
In the case of the people you mention, it's also worth noting that only some had technical chops, and all succeeded on the strength of business acumen & leadership rather than skill with assembly.
I went on a tour with my son's robotics club to a company that makes robotic arms and such for factories.
At the end the CEO said if their is one thing he can recommend to all kids (I was ready for him to say take STEM classes), is for them to take public speaking. He said it's so critical for them to be able to properly share your ideas and listen to people. Quite interesting.
Very interesting anecdote. I wasn't able to compete in physical competitions so I did get support undertaking Speech & Debate, eventually earning enough points to become a National Forensics League member. Having the self-assuredness to stand in front of 5 people (waiter) or 300 strangers (movie theater employee) and deliver information and interact is a skill that can't be taught out of a book.
Also, unlike calculus or basic physics, human interaction and social norms are very fluid. As in math through high school and college and in the professional field is pretty static. Human interaction in each of those spheres / times of life, not so much.
I think in certain disciplines there's study in "code switching" which attempts to describe the phenomenon. Such as an educated, excellent speaking person sliding into a drawl and slang when hanging around family members which don't share the same expectations of communication.
While I don't necessarily disagree with this, its clear this is from a CEO's perspective where public speaking is a very important role. If you have 1000 hours of personal and technical development a year at your disposal and you spend 500 of those at toastmasters instead of learning libraries, tooling, and messing around with robotics projects, then who do you think will win out during an interview? You or the guy who had his nose in robotics textbooks and websites for that 1000 hours?
I'd rather hire the guy who is a little mumble-mouthed and who knows his shit over the chatty guy who can't compete technically with the first candidate. The original guy can work on his social/speaking/managerial skills as his career develops. In the meantime, he needs to compete as a skill worker.
If that guy doesn't know how to convey that knowledge at all, and gets all nervous and trips up, he's at a far worse disadvantage. Which, I suppose, fits the narrative about how technical interviews are part of a broken hiring process.
Replace "people person" with "strong communicator" and I can buy into such a premise very easily.
For many years I've expressed a belief that the only skill set that will remain viable throughout technological change is the ability to communicate. In simplified form, there are many friction points in social or commercial interactions which can be worsened by mis-communication or conflicting social norms. For example, certain cultures have very low opinions of women, and when expressed as though it's a norm in a different environment, that doesn't promote a successful outcome.
For a shorthand example, just check out advertising. Yes, there's a significant amount of data-driven research, and I know Google is at the top of this pile of...commerce...with its AdWords, so I take that to infer advertising is one of the most hit-or-miss areas where disruption was beneficial.
But here's the thing: Algorithms can't write jingles or colloquial slogans that will resonate with a particular audience. They can analyze them, but not create them, and I'm comfortable holding this belief until I see something which really revolutionizes technology in this field. I try to keep up with progress in conversational AI and the Turing Test challenge when I can, because I see that as the first major field where progress can be quantified and proven a success.
Oh, and this is legitimately tongue-in-cheek, but if you want to see a great example of what I mean, just look at the role of a Chief Executive Officer. They don't actually work as we might define it by input of labor, crunching numbers, or assembling information - they take loads of input, run it through their internal processor, then tell people what to do. They network, socialize, and communicate and for some reason, in the US, get paid vast sums of money for performing this role. I find it kind of funny and sad how high they're held in esteem, when realistically, they put in fewer hours, less effort, and reap rewards far greater than the run-of-the-mill high school teacher.
The hardest things for machines to get right is to act human - i.e. social skills. As tasks that are easy to automate will continue to be rewarded less, and tasks that are hard to automate will increase in cost (e.g. education, health care), it pays, literally, to develop good social skills and become a people person, no matter what field you're in.
It is by achieving the essence of what it means to be human, a person is valued within human society.
Automation is a given, more-and-more things are going to be automated. People jobs are going to be the last to be automated too, perhaps these jobs never will be automated, although a lot of low-level traditionally people-facing jobs will, e.g. shop assistants, it's already started.
But notwithstanding the above, there are logical holes in the rest of the article. I won't even mention that slight on high-tech work by equating it to "plugging away at a spreadsheet".
The biggest flaw was the assumption that the automation to make the aforementioned spreadsheet obsolete would be done without those people. In reality, any person highly-paid to "plug away" at a spreadsheet would be paid due to their domain/industry knowledge and skills rather than purely Excel skills and would still be employed operating a new system, or even directly involved in building and maintaining such systems.
This pattern is repeated throughout the article. Technology will obsolete low-tech grunt work first, mainly because contrary to the central premise of that article, technology is a people business. It's not a people business in the same was sales or marketing is, it's not about who's got the biggest set of contacts[0], but you'll never build a successful product without understanding the world it fits in to; building good technology requires a good deal of listening and empathy, both toward the customer, but also to the system as a whole and your fellow engineers.
In the short-to-medium term, any acceleration in automation will also increase demand for engineers in that field. And any such systems will only be as good as those who made them, even knowledge-workers not in the automation business will still be required to operate/design/improve such systems. Maybe in smaller numbers...
What happens after that, no one knows. The effects on the economy would be difficult to predict. And one day in ten, fifty, a hundred, several thousand years from now, fully autonomous AI will be here... and all bets are off. Long-term predictions would be foolish.
[0] - except for the sale and marketing of a technology business, of course, it's not a binary situation.
most importantly, who's gonna build the automation?
there are engineering needs for a hundred years or more* to transform current work centered society in an automation centered society, and even then those things won't just maintain themselves forever.
*not because technical challenges, but because the resistance from who detains the status quo
Didn't we just have a story on HN claiming that introverts make the best something-or-other? I'm not even trying to keep up with things like this anymore.
This is starting to remind me of health and fitness "advice". Every day there's a new article "debunking" yesterday's claims, in favor of something that will be "debunked" in another week.
Here's some advice - work hard, do your best, say "yes" to as many opportunities as possible, and be kind. You'll make out in the end.
Personal anecdote indicates that "work hard" and "do your best" have slight negative correlation to a positive observed outcome in some workplaces.
Minor titration efforts suggest that "appear to work at slightly above the observed median level of effort" and "if doing your best and following orders conflict, follow the orders" work better in practice. This strategy has yielded more positive performance reviews than opening up full throttle. It depends a lot on workplace culture.
Save your best efforts for personal projects, or for a company of which you own at least a whole 1%.
Companies in this decade generally do not reward competence or diligence, or respect vocational passion. If your specific company does, then by all means, give them your best. Otherwise, don't cast your pearls before swine.
I have been rather too busy avoiding failure lately to even know what success is--at least in terms of my career. Positive performance reviews help me to continue putting food on the table while I try to find something better for my life. And leaving at the end of the day with a good portion of my creative energy left unspent gives me more options when I get home.
You need to be able to work hard do your best in some aspect of your life to be happy. But it might have to be something other than your job.
On the contrary, the software production value chain is fragmenting. On one end you have the hardcore mathematicians building things in Idris in the evenings (it's the future, right?), on the other the slick business folks with an arts background and enough experience to know where to steer the company/project/department. Neither wants to expend mental energy in the other's area of competence.
As software gets increasingly more complicated and moves up levels of abstraction, there is an ecosystem being created in the middle to bridge the two. A business-minded, but aware-of-computer-science middleman who translates from one end to the other, produces a clean functional spec from a messy, day long conversation with the user, or tells the CEO "sorry, that's not actually technically possible". One does not need to know category theory to be useful there.
Exactly the reason why I did a Bachelor in International Business Administration and a Master in Computer Science (Embedded Systems)! I feel that the gap in between is a good niche to be in. I have to say that there are some education programmes where the focus is on IT management that try to fill this niche too although I have some doubts about how effective it is to study IT management in itself.
As opposed to an animal person? So someone spent a few thousand words saying that emotional and inter-personal intelligence is a valuable skill to develop. Got it, thanks.
I find that some of my co-workers who work the best are ones that are not necessarily good at talking to others, but are good at shutting themselves out from others for periods of time, which helps them get lots of work done. The risky part being that sometimes they get a lot of work done in a totally wrong direction.
Yeah, I know a guy who quit and is planning on working at a grocery store. He's an amazing c++ dev (who did iOS) but got sick of everything else related.
One of the theories I have is that the best jobs in the U.S. require you to be culturally american. The U.S is great in that it is far more meritocratic than other countries but at the highest levels you still need to be culturally american.
This helps with things like understanding other people's motivations as well as day to day rapport which builds up into deep camaraderie.
People who are culturally un-american expend far more energy building rapport in this american way. (e.g. dealing with the "How's it going." exchange.)
The advantage is the the cultural natives don't need to wear "masks" while cultural non-natives are required to keep their masks on at the correct times, draining energy that could have been used for thinking/maneuvering.
Chinese and American culture for example have different default states for friendship amongst co-workers. Americans treat all people in a friendly manner but distinguish between co-workers and true friends. Friendship is not the default and is sought out based on mutual compatibility.
In Chinese culture though, friendship based on environment (school, work) IS the default. Through their eyes, American's are two faced while from the other side, they are just trying to avoid awkward forced friendship.
Another theory is that this difference in culture creates an exponential acquisition of skills in communication and selling yourself as well as avoiding awkward situations. Since these social skills are a constant part of life growing up, it is a natural strength in adult life.
Chinese culture tends to structure growth of their children in a "follow the rules, memorize all the textbooks" way so Chinese children only start their social skill education in adult life.
So to sum up...American culture creates people with stronger social skills because there isn't a "God" to tell you which road leads to heaven that you can diligently follow heads down. Immersion into American culture helps increase social skills the longer you are in it. Obvious acceptance of it (rather than avoidance) may make you seem more "coachable".
How does the dupe detector work anyway. First I thought one could resubmit after a certain amount of time... but no, I submitted this only a day or two ago. Maybe links can be modified (add a ?resubmit at the end, for instance), but nope, I submitted with exact same URI. I wonder. (Not complaining, just curious if anyone has insight into this).
A few decades ago, I felt frustrated in college because the library had been remodeled to emphasized "shared workspaces." Some of us would wander around campus looking for open classrooms for the evening, to get a little peace and quiet. We weren't "non-people" people, by the way. We just studied and performed a hell of a lot better without constant distraction -- even distraction "in the background".
Funny that often, those same people formed a good part of the top rank in my classes.
I get out of school, to find workplaces pushing the same damned thing.
Well, flash forward some decades, and the popular press is finally catching on that such "shared workspaces" are often a nightmare -- particularly for high performers.
So now, the same yutzes are telling us that "people" people are the key to success. "Be more people!" (TM)
I actually get along better with most people than, well, most people. Red necks to stereotypical gays, and everything in between. In each place I've worked, I've ended up getting to know and collaborating with people throughout the organization. BIG organizations.
Why? In good part, because I identify and other people apparently identify in me people who "get things done." And not in the broke-ass way of the serial multi/many/manifold tasker. Rather, expeditiously but carefully: What's the most right we can do without unduly straining the resources at hand.
So: "People" people. I've worked with them. A subset are truly good. The majority are, to some degree... "working their lines" and "working the system."
Their value, to the extent it exists, lies in getting other people to do things. In the corporate world, too often this starts coming too close to being "manipulators."
Keep your "people" people. Park them in some cubes, hopefully out of my way.
I was going to add another sentence, but I guess that's about the best I can hope for.
Great move by the author preventing his article from becoming garbage clickbait:
>he doesn’t know how much influence it might have, exactly. “I deliberately chose not to” estimate this effect, he said. “I didn’t want to give the illusion of certainty.”
You can almost hear the journalist crying, wishing for that hard number they could put in the headline. Author displays great social skills in an article about social skills.
"People Person" is something I still see on resumes and frequently accompanied by the ever popular: "Enjoys Swimming, Reading, and playing guitar". Do I yet care? I really want to see if you are bursting with enthusiasm when applying for a job. Any less than full enthusiasm for a place and you are fired before you even get the job.
This is because the best skill to have is still to lure your potential clients to your product. Whether it is by special psychological sales techniques, by writing the coolest CSS, or by making the most appealing visual design. We can see it here on HN every day.
Being good at social skills also means being effective at manipulating other people. That doesn't sound so warm and fuzzy, but it sure is a valuable skill in management. I'm not sure if women have an edge over men there.
No. There will be a bunch of us in sales, or sales support if the actual selling is "icky." And that's pre-sales, or "applications / systems / solutions engineering" which equals, "engineer a perception of value in the customers mind so the sales person can close a deal. I have and continue to make a pretty good living doing that kind of work. Demand is high too. Growing.
And a pile more in consulting, because we can't seem to automate the perception bias inherent in an opinion we pay for as opposed to one produced "in house."
This is a bizarre article. The author seems to think that being a doctor, a lawyer, a management consultant or a dentist requires some kind of advanced interpersonal skills but this is not true at all.
The primary thing that qualifies to you become one of those is detailed technical knowledge and analytical skills, not too different from being a software engineer or a plumber. Virtually no one tries to become a doctor and drops out either at pre-med or in medical school because they realize they can't hack the social part of the job. There's a big difference between a job requiring social interactions and a job where you're primarily judged by social and interpersonal skills. If you place most jobs on the technical knowledge to the social skill spectrum, those jobs would be near the far technical end.
The author also seems to think that there was ever a point in time where social skills weren't extremely important. Management always paid very well and it's by definition a job that requires social skills. Jobs requiring primarily social skills and not much else are on a decline and also the types of social skills required in the marketplace have changed dramatically. The internet as a medium massively increases connectivity and discoverability, obsoleting a lot of shallower social skills, like comfort with making introductions and being a low-level connector because it's easier to find the people you need and verify their trustworthiness without having to rely on a connector. On the other hand, it's probably easier to build a truly massive network and those skills are probably valuable, even if they aren't similar to traditional social skills.
One major trend I see is that being book smart is more important than ever because more interaction is taking place over online and face-to-face interactions are becoming less necessary. This means understanding the medium and technology is more important than natural face-to-face social skills we learn when we're younger and also the ability to communicate concisely and precisely and the ability to predict its impact ahead of time are more important. Also the world is more complicated and simple technical knowledge is very easy to look up and learn - this makes advanced analytical and learning skills more important than simple, rote, static knowledge. Being a well-adjusted, normal, sociable and outgoing person, which I think most people would associate with "social skills" speaking colloquially, is less important than it has been for a while. The kind of social skills that get you paid well are more like the social skills that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have in abundance.
The other trend is that women are increasingly outperforming men at school, resulting in more book smart women. That bodes well for women, much more than the author's bizarre insistence that social skills are suddenly more important and that somehow women have better social skills than men, both of which are really questionable assertions.
I've definitely seen this after spending two summers at Airbnb. They take pride in being very selective re: culture fit and personality, and I think this is one of the most critical reasons why it's a great place to work.
> nearly half of U.S. jobs would be vulnerable to automation within 20 years. But “computers aren’t good at simulating human interaction,” Deming said. That means a job as a manager or consultant is harder to automate, and the skills those jobs require become more valuable.
If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
> Women are getting jobs that require more social skills.
If the share of jobs that require interpersonal skill has in fact increased over the years just as the author postulates, is it really a wonder that share of women who hold these types of jobs have also increased ? Why exactly did the author show only the graph representing how the nature of jobs has changed for women ? Is the author trying to prove women are naturally better at these things ?
> Although cognitive skills don’t vary by gender, Deming cites research from psychology showing that women consistently score higher on tests of emotional intelligence and social perceptiveness.
This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.