Sorry, how are these two arguments equivalent in your mind:
1. There are few women engineers at Google because there are few candidates in the pipeline.
2. women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism
I don't see that at all. The only way you get there is to assume a common causality. But that assumption (that some people are inherently bad at coding) is offensive if made without good science. You can't start with bad pseudoscience and "prove" that Damore was fired because he pointed out the pipeline problem!
The argument is: because of 2), less women enter the pipeline that leads to a job that's less social and more about things, relative to other occupations, therefore 1).
2) is presented here as a plausible explanation of 1). The connection is very clear, so the validity of that view depends entirely on the validity of point 2) itself. Damore presented a boatload of links to research supporting that point, and plenty of other people did too. See e.g. SSC's take on it here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge....
Now one big aspect of the whole drama is that 2) is being rejected out of hand as offensive wrongthink. The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist, and instead a narrative of systemic oppression is proposed. Another big issue with the memo is that a lot of people couldn't - and a lot still can't - understand the fundamental concept that you cannot take population-level statistics and use them to pass judgements on individuals. Just because a certain population doesn't like X on average, does not mean that a particular member of that population currently doing X is somehow wrong or unsuitable because of that. Damore didn't make this mistake, but was widely accused of it (and from what I remember from reading the memo two years ago, he repeatedly warned the readers against making this mistake).
I'd agree with your observation about different realities, and I think it's woefully underappreciated. I think it only truly clicked with me once I entered a stable, long-term relationship with my now wife - which made me immersed in the daily minutiae of a woman's life, the stories, the perspectives, the concerns, the emotions. It's something that's hard to learn from just brief, casual interactions, no matter how open-minded one is.
Personally, I feel the issue of gender balance in tech is approached completely wrong from every direction. The goal should be to give opportunity for anyone who wants to join and excel in the field, and to let them feel comfortable and safe in it. But the topic became a battleground for interest groups that demand fixed ratios and discrimination in their own favor, and there's also the strong confounding factor of money - IT is currently one of the easiest, if not the easiest, way to make lots of money with little training and up-front investment, so the media spotlight is focused on tech (vs. other occupations).
There's also history to consider. Computing was a woman-dominated field until relatively recently in history, which strongly suggests that the root causes of the shift in male/female ratios in technical fields isn't biological (unless there was a massive biological upheaval in the human species in the past 50 years).
the root causes of the shift in male/female ratios in technical fields isn't biological
I agree with this, but I'd just note that the shift isn't as dramatic as you are making out.
Computing was a woman-dominated field until relatively recently in history
The field of computing started in the 1950s (generously). Worker proportions are difficult to estimate, but the maximum proportion of female computer science degrees was 37% in around 1987[1]. In 1986 The Atlantic noted that "[in the federal government] only seven percent of the employees in the top five CS [pay grade] ratings were women, while more than three quarters in the bottom grades were."[2]
Going by computer science degrees is the wrong metric because computer science as a unique discipline only arose as late as the '50s. Before that, the field's predecessor was the human computer, a field dominated by women for quite some time.
This is also unlikely to be due to some inherent biological differences and instead reverse prejudices; women were assumed to be more patient and reliable and were favored in both human computation and telegraph / switchboard work.
Before that, the field's predecessor was the human computer, a field dominated by women for quite some time.
Sure, this is true. But it's a pretty different job to programming.
This is also unlikely to be due to some inherent biological differences and instead reverse prejudices; women were assumed to be more patient and reliable and were favored in both human computation and telegraph / switchboard work.
Also typing pools, which is another job that has disappeared.
Well it's basically always possible to claim that society has some hidden variable, but I'll bite. As a woman, if you want children/family you need to secure at least a certain baseline of living quality and stability before the age of 35 and realistically much earlier. This alone dramatically changes the timeline and priorities of women.
I'm not even suggesting some "hidden variable"; there are plenty of obvious variables that stare us right in the face without even having to look all that hard. Doesn't take much imagination to come up with a few.
The cost of freezing eggs is pretty small compared to tech salaries though, so if women's instincts are telling them not to go into tech because they need to hurry up and have kids, those instincts are out of date wrt what modern medicine can do.
With what modern medicine can do, sorta, kinda, in the West, if you're wealthy enough. Freezing eggs is nowhere near standard practice (though with ever growing credentialism, it may well just become such), and having kids (really: starting a family) involves a lot of other things than just getting some sperm and an egg to occupy the same space at the same time.
(Also, really, modern tech is currently one of the most family-friendly profession out there, because of demand surplus. I think GP is talking about women living a different reality than men, not about women not wanting to go to tech strictly because of it.)
I think enough are due to societal environment that this is something we can work on, but not by arbitrarily saying things like "We want to hire more women in tech."
It's currently downvoted and has one not very nice reply. I guess it's far less of a shit show than it really "should" be, but this is kind of par for the course. People want to believe that sexism is some nebulous problem "out there" and it's not anything they, personally, are doing and if you try to point out what can be done differently in the here and now, well, people are offended and use that to justify doubling down on mistreating people who are already suffering from social exclusion based on gender, skin color, whatever.
I've had college classes in things like Social Psychology and Negotiation and Conflict Management. I'm a woman and I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and then I spent about two decades doing the full-time homemaker thing and wondering where the hell my life went wrong that I didn't get the two-career couple modern American dream that I had expected.
So I know a lot about the space. I've read a lot of books on women's issues and I spent a lot of time in therapy and so forth, but most people don't really want to hear what I have to say. It makes them uncomfortable.
Some points I have been trying to make on HN for years:
1. Most men will not genuinely engage me in a substantive and positive way that leads to some kind of professional development or professional opportunity. They either argue with me or they hit on me. Neither fosters the kind of professional connections I need.
Among other things, I need people to talk with me in earnest about my work. I need people to promote my work, which historically has just not been done. Only recently has anyone other than me apparently posted any of my writing to HN that wasn't basically mud slinging and gossip.
And I think I can't get that primarily because men basically are nice to women when they are looking for sex and that's pretty much it. And they actively avoid being too nice to any woman they aren't trying to sleep with for fear of it having some kind of negative outcome, such as an unintended affair or career-damaging gossip.
2. I need income and no one really wants to hear that. I was a homemaker for years and the things I'm good at combined with my gender cause people to feel that I am supposed to do nice things for them out of the goodness of my heart because I care like I'm their mother. I have a pretty good idea where that pattern comes from, but it's a broken mental model that harms the incomes and lives of a great many women. This shitty expectation that I should benefit others for free out of the goodness of my heart was hung on me even when I was literally homeless.
-----
Decades of trying to sort out my own problems and reading up on what happens with other women has me convinced that the lack of ability to seriously connect with men socially in a professional way is a huge barrier to professional development. I'm convinced that a lot of female-led startups fail because they don't get those small nudges about what needs to happen with the business or code base that men get from having a beer with buddies or whatever and discussing it casually. So pivots happen much later and involve much larger changes and it's deadly to a lot of businesses.
I've been on HN for over a decade. Only in recent weeks do I have contacts via HN with men who will talk with me via email about something other than personal bullshit. I've been exchanging emails with two different men met through HN about housing issues.
Two contacts is something I should have been able to come up with in the first year, not more than a decade later. Everyone else has basically either emailed me to bond personally while doing not a fucking thing to further my professional goals, was actively trying to victimize me because they were shitty people, or they were hitting on me or they were writing me basically out of pity as their good deed for the day and not because they really had anything meaningful to discuss with me in earnest.
I feel I've been endlessly patient with a truly appalling situation and it hardly budges and if I get frustrated and upset because I'm still dirt poor and still can't make my life work and my gender is a very large factor there, then I get amazingly shitty feedback like it's somehow my fault for being rude or something. So basically no matter how virtuous I am, it's never enough and there is always some shitty BS excuse to blame me for it.
This boils down to "People don't really want it to change." It doesn't directly negatively impact the men here that they are aware of, so not their problem that there is a woman in their midst who routinely can't afford enough food to eat every day.
I'm quite fed up and if I had some means to go postal and murder a bunch of people that in my mind are "at fault," I probably would at this point. I just have no means to somehow blow up HN and multiple people met through HN.
I no longer know what to do. Being patient, diplomatic, articulate, long-suffering and blah blah blah isn't solving it. At the rate I'm going, I might have a middle class income in another hundred years, assuming I live that long and it's mind boggling to me that people who routinely claim they are interested in addressing issues like sexism are amazingly content to continue to basically step over my body in the gutter and mutter to themselves "Not my problem."
So the world isn't likely to change because the world doesn't actually want to change. It would rather look for excuses and justifications than viable solutions.
>>>And I think I can't get that primarily because men basically are nice to women when they are looking for sex and that's pretty much it. And they actively avoid being too nice to any woman they aren't trying to sleep with for fear of it having some kind of negative outcome, such as an unintended affair or career-damaging gossip.
You're not wrong....but I'm in no way, shape, or form surprised by this gender dynamic. Although I think the "career-damaging gossip" is a fairly recent phenomenon. Enough men have had their lives destroyed by either awkward romantic attempts on their part or flat-out lies on a woman's part that guys have reacted in an entirely rational manner by simply avoiding females. The assumption is that there is NO professional benefit to the guy that is worth the risk.
My (totally unsolicited) ¥2 is you probably need to overcome that assumption very early in any conversation if you expect assistance.
>>>I just have no means to somehow blow up HN and multiple people met through HN.
Do some social engineering to reveal their physical locations. Then strap tannerite-based nailbombs to UAVs? As long as we are brainstorming here...
My (totally unsolicited) ¥2 is you probably need to overcome that assumption very early in any conversation if you expect assistance
I've been celibate for medical reasons for over 14 years. I've been a member in good standing here for over a decade. I've gone to great lengths to avoid trouble. So far that seems to benefit me just enough to not yet be banned and that's it.
And it really shouldn't be that way. And I don't feel any good would come out of digging into those details here and now.
Do some social engineering to reveal their physical locations. Then strap tannerite-based nailbombs to UAVs? As long as we are brainstorming here...
That's good for a chuckle, but the reality is I'm far too poor to do anything like that. I'm not exaggerating when I say I routinely don't have enough money for food.
If I could come up with the means to assassinate six or ten assholes across the globe from a distance, I probably would be wealthy enough to pay cash for the building I want and would, therefore, have no reason to be sitting around stewing and wishing a few assholes would choke to death on their next bowl of soup.
> The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist
The concept that men and women may have different interests due to biological differences is extremely sexist, yes. For all the sources Damore cited, there's an entire body of academic work (and an entire cultural revolution in the United States spanning upwards of a century) to the contrary on that topic specifically. A large chunk of the feminist movement was and is women and men actively working to prove that biology is not a limiting factor in what women can choose to do with themselves.
Had he kept his comments to a realm of "men and women might have different representation in computer engineering because they have different interests on average," he would have been treading on thin ice with people disinclined to assume good faith but could have probably kept his job. Attempting to hang the causality on biology really did him in (and when his memo became public, it put Google in a situation where they ran serious risk of tolerating a hostile work environment if they kept him).
A large chunk of the feminist movement was and is women and men actively working to prove that biology is not a limiting factor in what women can choose to do with themselves
That's got nothing at all to do with what was being suggested.
Saying women have different "interests" -- or priorities, which is a better word in my opinion -- isn't suggesting they are incapable nor suggesting society should constrain their role. It's suggesting they have agency and make choices which fail to serve some abstract narrative about the theoretical importance of so-called equality of the sort that gets debated and hypothesized about in articles like the one under discussion.
I was a homemaker for a lot of years. Self-proclaimed feminists have a long history of being incredibly ugly to me.
I'm not the only person who has noticed that feminists are basically openly hostile and contemptuous towards homemakers:
I'm sorry that happened to you, because whoever did that to you utterly missed the point. It's about choice, and if you chose to be a homemaker, it's exactly as valid a choice as someone who chooses to pursue a career that leaves no time to raise a family if they don't want to raise a family.
What we should avoid is choices being constrained by assumptions about what you want because of your biology (such as the assumption---clearly illegal to act upon but still acted upon nonetheless---that young women are a higher-risk hire and promotion because they probably want to leave the workforce to raise a family in three years). Assumptions like that constrain women who do want a career because the company is going to invest in the male employees who are assumed to be in it for life.
For various reasons, I've thought very long and hard about what I think of as "human sexual morality." A great deal of our historical cultural norms, such as expectations of monogamy, virginity prior to marriage and shotgun weddings, boil down to the fact that sex is a profound human drive and very often has unintended consequences. This includes both pregnancy and disease.
You talk about women and their lives as if what they want is or should be the driving factor in their lives. I don't think that's accurate at all.
A serious career woman I was close to for many years had serious fertility problems. After many years of intervention, she managed to have one child in her mid to late thirties. She had read enormous research and concluded that infertility was a driving factor in the lives of many career women.
Careers and children are both serious commitments. Studies show that every dollar invested in our small children for things like preschool saves multiple dollars down the line on things like prison.
I enjoyed being home with my sons. They both have special needs and I have a serious congenital defect that wasn't identified until my mid thirties. Getting a diagnosis was extremely empowering and allowed me to be able to more effectively pursue school, work and even a divorce at long last.
But to a large degree being a homemaker was not something I chose. To a large degree, it was a circumstance foisted upon me by circumstance beyond my control.
I'm not a feminist. I see feminists as people who feel women are entitled to a career as if a spiffy title with a big salary is a prize in a Cracker Jax box that unfairly is handed out to men arbitrarily based on the dark heart of society being a sexist pig. This attitude is fundamentally disrespectful of both what it costs men to have a real career and what it takes to adequately raise healthy kids.
Society is not going to solve these problems as long as it continues to chase this insane delusion that children are a casual choice no harder to get or avoid than picking your lunch from a menu.
Our current mental models throw everyone under the bus, men, women and children alike. Many women soak up a lot of the damage to lessen it for their children which is the morally and practically correct choice given the shitty state of the world. But we shouldn't be designing a world like that. It's evil to design a world where that's basically the norm and not some bizarre stastistical outlier.
I wish most self-proclaimed feminists would go die in a fucking fire. They are generally worse than most self-proclaimed Christians who all too often are just assholes giving Christianity a bad name.
I would like to see the birth of a post feminist world where we deal realistically with the thorny issue of human sexual morality, including the fact that sex can lead to pregnancy and this can have huge consequences for the lives of the parents. I hate labels but I tend to think of it as a humanist model, which to me means a model that is humane and cares equally about men, women and children.
The feminist narrative mostly cares about women having serious careers and it mostly cares about empowering a subset of very privileged women to live their lives like very privileged men. The reality is that when you have a very privileged woman who has a serious career and also children, it's usually some less privileged woman raising her children under a title like nanny.
Our current feminist narrative pretends that it wants equality for all. It actually doesn't.
It actually wants equality between a small subset of very privileged upper class women and very privileged upper class men and it expects that so-called equality to come largely at the expense of lower class women working as maids and nannies to make it possible for a few upper class two-career couples to "have it all."
Career paths must be reimagined if we are ever to escape this bullshit. Our current career paths are posited on an implicit assumption that the worker is a heterosexual man with a wife and kids to support and her labor is freeing him up to put all his time and energy into the job while she worries about making sure he eats healthy and arranges to make that possible for him. That pattern served humanity well when most families had multiple children and it improved quality of life for men, women and children.
The world has changed and our mental models are failing to adequately catch up. We aren't going to invent better ones while chasing bullshit delusions based on ridiculous ideals that cannot actually be achieved and are actively undermining the claimed goal of creating a better world.
> You talk about women and their lives as if what they want is or should be the driving factor in their lives. I don't think that's accurate at all.
Is "what they want" the driving factor in men's lives? If so, it's a somewhat fundamental principle of American cultural philosophy that we do all we can to make the option available for women too, if they want it. To do otherwise is to abandon the notion of "created equal."
The American experiment may be founded on flawed reasoning there, but it's going to be a heck of an uphill battle to convince people that's true. A battle I'm not going to fight because I'm on board with the "created equal" notion.
America has a generally worse track record for women's rights than Europe. It boils down to the fact that the American attitude of "we were created equal and I can too achieve just as much as a man if you will just get out of my way!" is a broken mental model.
European women asked for help with carrying the burden entailed in bearing and raising children. They asked for things like maternity leave. America is the only wealthy, developed country on the planet that still lacks a strong national maternity leave policy.
American "rugged individualism" is a delusion. It always has been. It serves the needs of women especially poorly.
Once a woman gets pregnant and has a child, she needs other people to help her raise that child, like it or not. We can't do what some mammals do of hiding the kid up under some bushes while we go get food.
Society as a whole has to make it easier for parents to do right by their kids. America has an atrocious track record in that regard.
And women like me are the ones that get ROFLstomped in the process, often while very much benefiting other people. I spent a month playing nanny for my sister and her child. She got a serious career. I still am failing to pull that off.
Yes. And that elite class can only exist in a system where servitude by the masses is the norm. To call it a search for equality is straight up a lie.
It's a narrative that actively seeks to trade gender-based inequality for class-based inequality. And then that class-based inequality has a strongly gendered bent to it. You don't typically see men working as nannies and maids.
Nobody is saying biology is "limiting" anything. That's the crux. They are choosing something else. Not better and not worse, but something they feel better suits their needs or desires.
CS isn't some magical field that floats on air. In fact, it's mostly a miserable profession with managers who don't understand how it works, cooped up in an office the whole day under artificial white light while sitting on your ass.
I can’t shake the feeling that the women who leave programming because it’s “unwelcoming” don’t realize that it’s just as miserable a profession with managers who don’t understand how it works cooped up in an office the whole day under artificial light for men as it is for women.
Uh, sure, there are common negatives. But from what I can tell, it really does appear that women have to put up with a boatload more shit than men in addition to the negatives they have in common. And a lot of it hits in exactly the areas that make up for the rest of the shit - try having every one of your nonobvious decisions challenged, subtly or overtly, and see how easy it is to work through your problems with managers or whatever.
Actually any psychologist can contradict you easily. If you find arguments like "men are on average taller and heavier than women" to be sexist, you have a wrong sense of what sexism is.
Your examples are not related to software engineering. Please name software engineering related biological differences between men and women, backed by solid scientific studies.
Do we even have a scientifically-backed set of essential biological or cognitive skills related to software engineering?
I would probably start with [1] and [2].
Paper [3] concludes that sex-based differences in risk tolerance tangibly impacted approaches to spatial navigation AND program development.
There's a few others on spatial cognition and mental information processing: [4][5][6]. Paper[5] in particular links spatial cognition to mental modeling, which was identified in [1] as a software engineering skill. And [6] directly connects it to navigating source code.
[1] and [2] are not studies. [2] isn't even peer reviewed.
[3] is behind a paywall. It appeared in the "2006 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance", which is a pretty good indicator that this is not work done by social scientists, i.e., not scientifically backed. I have worked in science, the good papers appear in journals highly relevant for the topic.
[4] and [5] are not about software engineering.
[6] is also behind a paywall, and is based on a study with 24 students.
As I can't access the full-text papers, what is the reported strength of the effect, i.e., if person A is x% better than person B in spatial recognition, how much better is A in software engineering?
1. There are few women engineers at Google because there are few candidates in the pipeline.
2. women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism
I don't see that at all. The only way you get there is to assume a common causality. But that assumption (that some people are inherently bad at coding) is offensive if made without good science. You can't start with bad pseudoscience and "prove" that Damore was fired because he pointed out the pipeline problem!