If Damore had just written that one paragraph, it’s unlikely we’d be even discussing him or his letter. But come on, he said more than that. You’re faulting IvoryTD for mischaracterizing him, but it equally disingenuous to treat his least controversial statements as the sum total of what he wrote.
Like I said, he’s letter wasn’t that offensive to me. I’ve read much more provocative things on this message board. Where he really fell down was showing too much of his own bias with his unnecessarily detailed as well flawed argumentation. In particular, he jumped the shark with the “neuroticism” bit, as it a call out to old school “women are hysterical, child-like creatures” thinking that has led to everything from dismissive attitudes towards women when they report pain to physicians to workplace discrimination.
As others have pointed out, women have a long history of working high-stress jobs. Never mind that anyone who has stayed home with young kids all day can attest that there is plenty of stress in this work, but plenty of professions that are stressful (like medicine) are rife with women.
It’s not the sum of what he wrote. But it’s improper to interpret whatever else he wrote as inconsistent with that paragraph unless he explicitly contradicted himself in that regard.
So if you (or IDT) can find someplace where he wrote that all women (or all men) are the same in some characteristic or other, then IDT’s post would be an appropriate rejoinder. But as long as whatever else he wrote is consistent with his disclaimer that he was referring to distributions within populations, then it’s a mischaracterization to depict him as denying intra-gender differences. Which is what IDT did.
But why do you think this? Just asserting non-comparability is not all that persuasive if you don’t even posit a theory behind it.
Was there something about programming back in the day that made it more warm, fuzzy, and socially-oriented (or whatever it is women supposedly crave) than programming today? Because that’s essentially what Damore is claiming; women are naturally inclined for other kinds of work.
Surely, if you’re going to accuse the authors of cherry picking facts, you have facts of your own worth sharing, right? And obviously you have facts from reputable sources that would never cherry pick either.
…no that wasn’t my question. My question was directed to Dr Strangelove, who was making specific assertions about the gender breakdown of the executive team based on the ratio of the tech team and their computer studies qualifications. You’ve stripped my question of context. You’ve interrupted a very lengthy and detailed exchange with a random non-sequitur. You are welcome to do that if you wish, but you really aren’t answering my question. I’m well aware there are factors other than a computer science degree that affect whether or not one is promoted to the executive level. Which if you were following along with the discussion was entirely the point I was making to Dr Strangelove.
But lets just address what you did say for a minute. Are you telling me that google are incapable of finding 9 women who are as aggressive and as ambitious as men, who haven’t taken time out to have or raise children?
…racism still exists. Does that mean the civil rights acts have failed? The road toll is not at zero. Does that mean road safety initiatives are a waste of time? Silicon Valley companies do indeed have diversity programs. But just have a read of this thread. There are people who work in Silicon Valley who can’t even acknowledge that there is a problem. When there is this much resistance: do you think the problem is going to go away overnight?
Racism didn’t disappear when black people got the right to vote. And a company that has had a diversity programme for a couple of years isn’t going to “achieve all of their goals”.
As I am sure you know, questions on a messageboard can be answered by anyone who cares to.
So you were trying to make the point that women are less likely to be executives because they are less ambitious than men, on average? Good - my point has been carried.
It’s going to be very much more difficult than it is to find nine such men.
You are entirely correct. All other things are not equal. In particular, the number of very well-qualified men is much larger than the number of equally well-qualified women, and thus one should expect that the demographics of hiring would reflect that.
Compared with the workers at Google? Yes.
I do not think someone from the University of Texas - El Paso is considered by most to have equal qualifications as someone from Stanford. I would expect most people would agree with that.
If you think otherwise, then I suspect that this -
Regardless, the comparison to the DC metro area is silly. The DC metro area happens to have a particularly high concentration of black people, as compared to many other areas of the country. You would find a higher percentage of black people working in almost any occupation in that area as compared to most other areas.
Is there actually a racism/sexism problem in Silicon Valley to the extent that they are making the diversity programs ineffective? I don’t see it. Google is only 61% white, so whites are actually underrepresented. That sounds like a diversity program that is working exactly as intended, even if blacks are also underrepresented. The only people overrepresented are Asians, which is not a “problem” to be solved, since Asian racism against everyone else is generally not regarded as a primary cause of underrepresentation of everyone else in tech.
Their goals are likely impossible unless they fire a lot of Asian dudes, which is not really what I’d consider helpful.
As the memo said, when societies become more equal the more gender preferences predominate. Since our society has become much more equal and women have many more choices of employment than they used to, it makes sense that women would choose to enter other fields than computer software.
How have women been blocked from software jobs when the percentage of female software engineers is greater than the percentage of female computer science majors, which is greater than the percentage of females taking the AP computer science test?
There are lots of low status jobs that are almost exclusively male, truck driver, construction worker, HVAC repair, and plenty of high status jobs that tend female such as public relations, HR, nutritionist, occupational therapist, etc.
You know what? I agree with you. I don’t assume the existence of occupational gender disparities necessarily means discrimination is afoot.
But if women in tech regularly attest to encountering bias and discrimination, we can’t shrug that off. We should consider that lingering attitudes may still have a negative effect on women’s entry into and retention in certain positions, and try to work against these attitudes.
For an opposite example, I imagine lots of men would like to go into childcare and elementary school education, but don’t because the pressure against them is tremendous. It would be silly to assume that the lack of men in these roles is merely a reflection of men’s natural preferences, when we know men are working against negative stereotypes (e.g., pedophilia, emotionally unavailability, and violent/scary temperaments).
Why isn’t there a movement to correct these biases like we see with women in STEM? I can’t really say for sure. Maybe it’s because STEM is associated with high status work, and it is natural to want access to what society regards as important.
Sure, no doubt a lot of the lack of men doing child care is due to social pressure or prejudice. But if we somehow eliminated all anti-men-in-child-care prejudice tomorrow, I doubt if the ratio of male to female in child care positions would therefore evolve to 50-50.
where he goes through the idea that discrepancies in the distribution of different sorts of jobs can likely be explained by differences in typical gender interests/preferences. The last response that he posted at the bottom has the following hypothesis:
That being said, even if a slanted distribution of workers in a field is not due to any bias in hiring practices, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still the possibility that there is bias built into the culture of a company or industry - this article indicates that women leave the industry at twice the rate of men, which I would say is more troubling to me than the lack of diversity in the workforce. Funnily enough, the original screed by Damore included some suggestions on how he thought Google could potentially make the workplace more appealing to women (though I’m not sure whether his suggestions are misguided or not).
True, but when looking at a very specific question, “Why are fewer women hired by tech companies?” we have to disentangle various kinds of sexist behavior. I’d imagine most workplaces have pigs, and even non-pigs can have unconscious bias and commit various microaggressions which let women know that they are not considered equal. But those problems are probably universal to every work place and may not have much bearing on whether women get those jobs in the first place. As much as women rightfully complain about discrimination in the tech workplace, are they going to encounter less elsewhere? Only if it’s a female-dominated profession, and even then probably not since there are usually male bosses.
What we need to know is if the diversity programs tech companies establish overcome the existing biases of those who are in charge of recruiting and hiring. And judging by Google’s numbers at least, it appears to be the case that they are hiring about as many women and minorities as you’d expect(minorities as a whole group anyway, obviously blacks and Latinos are underrepresented).
Well yeah, a lot of men are scared off of such careers for those reasons. When I was first starting out I had one real talent: I could type and I was computer literate. I applied for secretarial jobs. You can imagine how that went. “You do this type of work?” Eventually I did get jobs doing data entry, after spending years in fast food, which is apparently acceptable for males even if I was still working mostly with females. Now I’m in IT, which is male dominated. And we do actually have a sexism problem, ironically from my female boss, who won’t hire females because she assumes females don’t want to work odd hours or work alone in an empty building at night(which we are often required to do). My attempts to recruit females for open positions has been unsuccessful in any case, because lo and behold, they say they don’t want to work the odd hours. Sigh.
Movements are generally about specific legal changes that can make things better, like pay equality, anti-discrimination policies, and sexual harassment policies. Getting people to change their views about what it means to be a man or a woman is a lot more difficult, which is why long after racism is conquered, sexism will still be with us.
This isn’t a STEM example, but I thought I’d share it because it pissed me off. A fairly famous female singer was starting a new band and put out a notice on her website for people to send in audition tapes. Men only. When I took it to a discussion board for debate, a lot of women said something along the lines of, “Oh, she doesn’t want to share the spotlight with another woman.”, or “Women are tough to work with, it’s much easier to work with men. Less drama.”
The fact is, women are as much of a problem when it comes to discrimination as men are.
I’m now sure how it’s a straw man. If a group is underrepresented in a field, and it’s believed it’s due to discrimination, how do you know when you’ve “won”? Apparently you never do.
Tries is totally right. Damore didn’t say exactly what I said, and my analogy wasn’t perfect. Therefore, what Damore said is perfectly okay. We shouldn’t read any implications, biases, omissions, or implications. It must be fine to argue the following too:
That doesn’t advocate sterilization or removal of blacks, but it’s a pretty direct line to follow. Removal certainly wouldn’t be genocide, simply a relocation of affected individuals. Likewise, Damore’s screed is a pretty straight line to follow: women tend to be more neurotic and handle stress more poorly; therefore, it’s reasonable that there are fewer of them in tech, especially at the upper echelons where there is more stress. Cultural influences get tossed right out the window in favor of disputed science. The history of women in the early computer industry is passed over without consideration because women score higher on one of the “Big Five” personality factors without ever addressing whether the differences in that or any of the other factors could be a positive influence. It’s like saying a person can run fast so they’ll be a great baseball outfielder without ever considering the fact their vision is 20/2000.
But neither of these analogies is perfect and I paraphrased a little bit, so this can be dismissed. Who cares that women routinely hear that they are neurotic and will probably read the screed and hear Damore call them neurotic?
I suspect that women leave all fields at higher rates than men. (I used to do a lot of postretirement valuation work, which involves (among other things) assumptions about how many people drop out at various ages and thus fail to make it to retirement eligibility, and females generally have higher rates.)
Really the underlying issue behind all these stats including employment and salary discrepancies is that men are under much more societal pressure to be financially successful than women are. Women face much less pressure in this regard, and have much more flexibility to scale things back. As a result of this, men work harder than women (on average) as measured by hours worked, commute distances, and other measures. Until this societal attitude changes (and it’s unlikely it will) it will be tough to equalize the rewards, and attempts to do so will generally involve some form of discrimination against men.
As someone once said, “Women have choices. Men have responsibilities.” It’s simplistic, but certainly true of the work world. A woman can choose not to work and for the most part not be judged. A man must work or be regarded as worthless. Incentives matter. A person working because she can vs. a person working because he must is no contest.
Even looking at graduates in STEM, how many women get degrees and never use them vs. men who get them and never use them?
We can’t shrug the experience of women off, but we should test the hypothesis just as we test the interest hypothesis. If the sexist attitudes are the problem why did more women used to be programmers? Is sexism in society getting worse? If sexism in tech companies is the problem, why are girls in high school less likely to take computer science than boys? If sexism in tech is the problem why hasn’t the 250 million Google has already thrown at the problem done anything at all?
The sexism theory fails to explain any of these, but the interest theory explains them all.
I used to work in the childcare industry and witnessed some discrimination against men but I would bet my eyeteeth that the disparity is because of interest. The biggest reason is that because if you are getting paid to do something you love, then you are not going to let the opinions of others drive you away from that.