While that’s true, if the problem isn’t in the corporate world it’s simply not in the corporate world. Assuming Silicon Valley’s tech workers are mostly college graduates with STEM degrees, an unbiased hiring process would mean a lot more men get hired than women.
That’s not “throwing up our hands”, that’s putting blame where it belongs: on the universities, for not doing more to encourage women to choose the STEM fields.
Women tend, on average, to be less aggressive and ambitious than men. They also tend to take time out to have or raise children.
There are lots more men with the requisite experience and qualifications in STEM fields than there are women. Therefore, it is not usually the case that a hiring manager is presented with one man and one woman, both equally well-qualified. More often, it is several men and perhaps one or two women. Even if you play eeny-meeny-miney-mo, you are going to hire more men.
Regards,
Shodan
At what point does encouraging women to choose the STEM fields become counterproductive? Besides the fact that most of the time when you see politicians or activists talk about STEM, what they really mean is just TE, at some point you’re going to hit whatever the natural distribution is. Depending on the field, that could be 50/50 or it could be imbalanced in either direction.
To make up an example, let’s say the overall ratio in majors in all the hard sciences combined is 50/50. But say if you look at the individual fields and physics is 70/30 men, chemistry is 55/45, biology is 40/60, and so on and so forth in varying ratios where differences in larger majors can mask the smaller ones to get to an even overall split. So are we now happy that the genders are equal in the sciences overall, or are we still going to hear about how physics has a woman problem and possibly how biology has a man problem?
…thats an interesting random piece of information, a standard talking point in the gender discussion, that has absolutely no relevance to my question at all.
Perhaps you can start by reading some of the cites I’ve provided in the thread. Like this one, that I will quote for you again.
Studies show a tendency for men to get hired over women with similar experience and qualifications. Are you disputing the results of this particular study? Would you care to offer up some evidence in rebuttal? Does this tendency to hire men go away when there are six male candidates and two female candidates?
First, why would we assume there is ever a “natural distribution”?
Second, I think any time there is a very public set of arguments that someone is ill-suited for mental tasks because of their race or gender, there’s really very little chance that there is no concomitant cultural bias hindering that group. Once people start using genetic just-so stories, we can be pretty sure they are reflecting something about the culture. I hope people don’t really think “Oh, I only think women are less good with computers because studies tell me so! Otherwise, I’m sure I’d think they were just as good!”
We all have a tendency to accept scientific findings that reflect how we think the world works.
It could be that if a company is trying hard to recruit women, as Google is, that the best they can do is get to the STEM graduate ratio. Which is what you’d expect to see in the absence of discrimination.
So the value of diversity programs is proven, but the ability of diversity programs to get you to 50% female representation is questionable at best unless you lower standards.
Why shouldn’t there be? It might be 50/50 for some fields, or skewed in either direction in others. It’s a population-level argument in an idealized situation without external biasing factors. There will probably never be an unbiased distribution in the real world, but that doesn’t have to mean that unequal numbers have that bias as the major cause.
The leaker could have been an offended female who had already had it up to her neck with perceived examples of discrimination and biased treatment and figured it’s time the outside world got a glimpse of the real Google. The leaker would probably have legal protections under federal whistleblower laws/rules, as whoever leaked it could claim that the manifesto was creating a hostile work environment. That, I suspect, was the reason that Google felt compelled to act, irrespective of whatever culture of openness to air controversial views they might want to believe they’ve engendered through the years. Google is a publicly-offered billion dollar company and its investors are not going to take going through the shit storm that has sullied Uber and other Silicon Valley companies. It’s a company that understands and reads Wall Street as well as it reads Interstate-280.
Another equally likely possibility is that whoever leaked the doc the public is quite possibly someone who just didn’t like Damore to begin with. We’re obviously not in a position to know much about his personal life but some of the anecdotes about his college days at Harvard aren’t especially flattering. Not necessarily standing out as a male chauvinist or a bigot, but just awkward. It seems like he’s probably highly intelligent but has problems relating to other people, and I suspect the leaker is someone who already had a negative encounter with him. Damore might not have been aware that his encounter (if it happened) was negative, but someone - perhaps a woman or perhaps even another male colleague who thought he was a shithead - made mental notes and figured he didn’t quite fit in. When this came up, the leaker probably figured it was a good opportunity to throw him into the fire.
According to Vox though, Damore might actually have legal recourse because he was talking about company policy and was retaliated against.
Because I don’t think there is an idealized situation without external biasing factors. I think there is no such things as neutral.
It’s like someone saying “What would it be like if people didn’t have accents?” It’s not possible to have no accent.
No one denies that there are external factors. The question at hand is whether Google can do anything about them. IT’s not Google’s responsibility to hire women who aren’t qualified just so they can get to 50%.
Since it is not exactly a secret that the first computer programmers were largely women, I wonder how Damore and like-minded compadres square this with their opinions about natural gender differences.
As he noted in his essay, men tend to gravitate to high status jobs. But what he neglected to acknowledge is that our society, due to sexism, bestows status to jobs that are perceived as masculine as well. When coding was considered low status, women were not blocked from doing it, so they populated those positions. But when coding became high status, suddenly it became “men’s work”, and stereotypes about women were used to justify keeping women out, thus making the work seem even more elite and special.
How many of us didn’t know until recently that rooms full of female mathematicians were employed in the early days NASA? It took seeing* Hidden Figures *for me to even know this, and I’m a black female scientist.
Actually, no - he didn’t. From his memo:
Please explain how any of that “creates” a hostile workplace, when in reality, he’s calling out Google for having a hostile workplace.
…the tendency for men to get hired over women with similar experience and qualifications still exists though. And while this tendency is so widespread then the ratios don’t really tell us anything.
Lets look at another example. Black students made up 9.7% percent of computer science bachelor degrees in 2014. But in Silicon Valley they only have 2.7% of the jobs. And at google black representation is just at 2%. If the supply is the problem, and if matching the STEM graduate ratios is the “best that google can do”: then why is that figure at 2%?
The google diversity programme isn’t about getting to 50% and most diversity programmes don’t have that as a goal. Its about doing things like “changing the tendency” to hire men over women. Its about removing the inherent biases that employers may have. Its about making work an environment that is safe and not hostile. This isn’t about lowering standards. This is about levelling the playing field.
…this is a strawman. Nobody is advocating google hire unqualified women.
Actually, it appears to me to be directly relevant. Your question was why the executives would be mostly male even if they didn’t have CS degrees. The answer is that there are factors other than a CS degree that affect whether or not one is promoted to the executive level.
I already read that one.
I am pointing out that there are relatively fewer women with similar experience and qualifications for a STEM position than there are men. Therefore fewer women are going to be hired.
No, it remains - the chances of a woman being hired, all other things being equal, is three to one against in that situation.
I’m not sure I understand this. I get that gender and race would be identifying details, or even names. Did they also suppress the information on where the applicants went to school?
Regards,
Shodan
This seems like the type of mischaracterizing discussed earlier in this thread (post #178 et al). The guy went through the trouble of saying pretty much the same thing as ITD, but it seems to have completely escaped her.
But IDT thinks she’s contradicting this by pointing out that not all women are alike. What can you do.
Simply having a BS in computer science is not typically enough to qualify an applicant to work at a high-prestige company like those in Silicon Valley. As your cite mentions -
If it is your belief that a degree from MIT is equivalent to one from a local community college, and the one has no more predictive power regarding career success than the other, we will have to agree to disagree.
Regards,
Shodan
No one advocates it, yet when nearly all Silicon Valley companies have diversity programs that don’t achieve their goals, and they get heat for that, I wonder what exactly critics are advocating?
I think the nature of “computer programming”, both in terms of the work conditions and the programming itself, was likely so different back then from what it is today that it’s hard to compare it in terms of gender distributions.
[And that’s even assuming the premise is true altogether, and I’m highly skeptical. People writing articles of this sort have a point to make, and they are going to cherry-pick until they find something that fits the story they want to tell. You’ll notice in that very article they suggest that a woman (Lovelace) be given credit as the founder of computers simply because she wrote an article about a computer which had been conceptualized by a man. So while I’m not doubting that the specific women they discuss in that article existed in those specific roles, I’m not convinced on that basis that women dominated early computer programming.]