OK, what ratio would it be, and how did you arrive at that figure? Or, if you prefer, what should be the percentage of women in STEM fields, and how did you arrive at that figure?
Regards,
Shodan
I wonder how many people on this thread are programmers or work in the tech industry? From being in tech all my working life, there is no absolute assumption you can make about how proficient a certain gender will be. Even if a group is made up of all men, there will be wide differences in strengths and weaknesses. Some people are great at solving very complex problems, some are great at usability, some are great at debugging, etc. Not all men are exactly equally qualified for all problem areas.
I think you can say that over the whole population, one gender will be better at engineering/programming than the other. But within each gender, there will be people who are excellent and others who have no skill. Both genders can have excellent engineers, although the pool of excellent engineers from each gender will be different.
It seems there are two arguments being presented:
- In the general population, there are more men natural engineers than women (I personally believe this to be true).
- In the tech field, men are better programmers than women (I believe this to be false).
I think #2 is false because there is a selection filter in place: women in tech are interested in tech. Women programmers are not randomly pulled from the general population. They personally enjoy the field and have pursued it for the same reasons as men: they enjoy it and they are good at it.
I was once discussing this with an administrative assistant at my firm. She said prior to becoming an AA, she had been a successful sales-person, and had been the head of a sales team with 6 people working under her. She gave it up because she “wanted to get out of the rat race”. I pointed out to her that a man who did that would be regarded as a loser. She said that come to think of it, her brother-in-law had done something similar (he became a small plane pilot out of love of flying, but at a much lower income level) and she herself regarded him as a loser. As for her, we didn’t discuss it directly, but no one regarded her as a loser - she was a fine woman and a capable AA, and her husband was doing OK in some sort of engineering job and no one looked down on her because she was an AA.
I am not aware of anyone in this thread who is arguing #2. #2 is not what’s relevant here.
What’s relevant here is the extent to which the gender breakdown in the programming field is the result of disparate interests and aptitudes between the genders (on average) versus bias. It sounds like you would agree that the disparate interests and aptitudes would on their own and absent any bias produce an imbalance (though not necessarily the specific ratio currently in existence). If so, then you agree with the main point the manifesto-writer was making, as I understand it.
Because back in the day, programming was actually seen as women’s work. It was low profile and not very sexy, and as mentioned earlier, regarded as an extension of secretarial duties. So doors were open to them, that were later closed as we entered the computer age.
As nice as that sentiment is, I think its naïve. First, most people don’t make a career out of things like love…they take jobs that 1) are accessible to them, 2) provides them with enough money, 3) earns them enough respect, and 4) where they see themselves as belonging. Factor 3 and 4 are where we see cultural values and biases come into play: If a young man aspires to be a kindergarten teacher and finds himself contending with raised eyebrows every time he talks about his career goals, it won’t take him long to change his mind to something less eye brow-raising. Humans are conformists by and large.
So we have two alternate hypotheses:
(1) A smaller percentage of women than men are, absent any interference or guidance or pressure, interested in tech fields than men. The women who are interested in tech fields are, on average, just as good at tech as the men, but fewer of them are interested.
(2) Men and women are, absent any interference or guidance or pressure, equally interested in, and equally talented in, tech fields. However, there is subtle but pervasive societal pressure steering girls and women away from the tech fields, resulting in a smaller number of young women entering their professional lives who choose the tech fields.
Which of those two hypotheses better fits the facts that we observe? What experiments might we look at, or what data might we look at, to help distinguish between the two?
I certainly don’t think that we can definitely prove one of these over the other. But… I think there are some strong arguments in favor of the first:
(a) the distribution of women in tech is similar in many places all over the world, arguing against societal bias
(b) many other high-prestige high-pay fields, such as medicine and law, started out male dominated, started out with women discouraged from entering, and lagging far behind men in representation; but have caught up and now have fairly equal gender representation. How likely is it that society as a whole gave up on the women-can’t-be-doctors and women-can’t-be-lawyers prejudices that used to exist, but stubbornly decided to hang on to women-can’t-be-computer-programmers (which would be particularly odd given that it in fact DID used to be totally normal for women to be computer programmers)
(c) the reading I have done (and I am NOT an expert on this area) suggests that little boys like computers more than little girls basically from the moment measurement is possible, again arguing against (although not disproving) societal pressure.
That said, this is all very circumstantial, I’m curious to see new data or hear new arguments.
All cultures (with few exceptions being ignored when that phrase is invoked) also involve patriarchy that everyone agrees is sociocultural, so the observation that this is a crosscultural problem tells us pretty much nothing.
Also, law and medicine are nowhere close to gender equity. I’m astonished you would try to assert that.
…what part of “You are welcome to do that if you wish” did you not understand?
Nope.
The point that I made was the exact point that I said.
Nope. Your point has not been carried.
Are you able to quantify exactly how much more difficult it would be to find nine such women using some sort of objective metric?
We’ve already established that the number of very well-qualified men is much larger than the number of equally well-qualified women. We are talking about **other **things. You said if “all other things being equal”. But the “other things” are not equal.
Would you care to quantify your answer? The only thing we know about this 17.3% of workers is that they are black. Are they inferior to workers at google because they are black? Or were you using some sort of other metric? Would you care to elaborate?
The question was “do you not think that someone from the University of Texas El Paso can do the job as well as someone from Stanford?” It wasn’t a question about qualifications. It was a question about whether or not they could do the same job or not. Would you care to answer the question I asked?
How does someone from the University of Texas El Paso with the same qualifications as someone from Stanford who meets all the same pre-acceptance criteria as someone from Stanford who passes the same interview questions as someone from Stanford who gets hired to do the same job as someone from Stanford…how on earth could you describe this person as “unqualified?”
…I’m not entirely sure you know what a diversity programme actually is.
I’m pretty sure now you don’t know what a diversity programme actually is.
Why don’t you start by firstly finding out what the google diversity programme is all about first. Then you can report back to us on the the goals of the programme actually are. Because you’ve mentioned “50%” a couple of times. But most diversity programmes are not about quotas. Gender ratios are bits of the puzzle, part of the metrics used to get a snapshot of how things are. But they are not necessarily “the goal.”
Whoops, I have confused practicing doctors and lawyers with med school and law school students. Quoting from here: 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.
Thank you for an open minded, tolerant and irenic comment. I actually agree with the second half of your comment: I have no doubt that there is mistreatment of women at Google, as there is in other science and technology workplaces, and to the extent that’s the case, it needs to be redressed. I don’t think that the existence of a deviation from 50:50 parity is evidence of discrimination, necessarily, but I agree with you that there’s other evidence out there which can’t be gainsaid.
For what it’s worth, I work in a 60% female field (at least as far as graduate students and postdocs go), and as skeptical as I am of a lot of feminist thought (and more generally of 21st century American thought in general) I’ve only ever hired women and done my best to prepare them for future success. They simply were the best candidates available.
Neuroticism isn’t a good or bad trait per se. I’m a highly neurotic man. The issue here isn’t to say that women and men are equally predisposed to neuroticism, it’s to try and design our workplaces to be more friendly for people with a variety of psychological dispositions, including those that tend to the neurotic.
For what it’s worth, the “women are less stress tolerant” was one portion of Mr. Damore’s memo that I violently disagree with (and yes I disagree even though it was backed up by Debra Soh, who otherwise I’d like to agree with). I’ve never seen that claim made before and it runs contrary to what you would expect based on biological first principles. I suspect what’s going on here is either a badly done study or a bad definition of stress.
I strongly disagree with your assessment of American culture (at least the culture that matters, which is the culture of universities, large corporations, politics, the mass media, research institutions, etc.), to the point where it seems like we live in different moral universes. I suspect this conversation is going to be unfruitful because it largely is going to involve begging the question: I think American culture is skewed away from the truth regarding race, ethnicity, gender, xenophilia, etc. in a liberal direction, and you think it deviates in a bigoted direction, partly because we disagree about where the truth lies. To some extent this discussion is pointless because your point of view is unfalsifiable: whatever studies I come up with indicating links between androgen exposure and ability, interests, personalities, etc. you’ll probably dismiss them as bias by sexist researchers.
I would just make one factual point though which is that for the purpose of assessing these studies, the population that matters isn’t the American population as a whole, it’s the population of evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists etc. who are much more liberal than the population at large, and at least in the case of evolutionary biology are mostly female (I’ll have to check that but that’s my memory). Cletus McRedneck from Walmart is not running the studies that find, e.g. prenatal androgen exposure predicting spatial ability. To a large extent, female grad students and postdocs in a female dominated field are doing that.
Anyway as far as bias goes, that goes both ways. Not only do you have a bias shaped by your antiracist, feminist, etc. moral commitments, but I presumably have a bias in that I “want” my ethnic group to be as proficient at science as Americans and Europeans. Why is a study that finds ‘no difference in science ability between group A and B’ any more bias-free than a study that finds “yes, differences in ability between Groups A and B exist”?
From here
40% of all CS graduates were women in Mexico to under 10% in Slovenia. That’s a significant difference so it looks like you’re assuming your conclusion.
You should read what Yonatan Zunger, the ex-google programmer had to say about programming. A great developer needs to know more than programming. You are again doing special case pleading. Does someone have to love their job to do it well? Do we only demand this of teachers and female programmers? I know a hell of a lot of doctors (some very good ones) who went into medicine because it was lucrative. I don’t know many lawyers (especially the higher paid ones) who went into law because they loved it. Why the special pleading here? You’re also ignoring why the percentage of female engineers and programmers is dropping and, more importantly, why so many of them complain about harassment and abusive working environments.
There was an earlier stat in this thread:
60 percent of women in tech reported unwanted sexual advances
65 percent of those women had received those advances from a superior at work
90 percent of women witnessed sexist behavior at company offsites or at a conference
This is insane for any industry.
Can you expand on what you mean by “special pleading”?
Well, it hasn’t been refuted, so close enough.
No, we are not talking about other things. We are talking about the demographics of hiring. Since the pool of very well-qualified men is much larger than the pool of very well-qualified women, the number of men being hired is going to be very much larger than the number of women.
Go back and read your own cite - it gives some of the reasons why Washington and Silicon Valley are different.
How well someone can do a job is a question of that someone’s qualifications to do a job. “How well can a one-armed man hang wallpaper” is the same question as “is a one-armed man qualified to hang wallpaper”. I am struggling to find simpler ways to explain that, but without success.
Someone with a degree in CS from a community college is less qualified, on average, than someone with a degree in CS from MIT. Do you understand that?
Regards,
Shodan
“It also found that more women (83 percent) than men (74 percent) said they have a strong desire to advance to the next level of their organizations.”
…I’m well aware there are other studies out there that both agree with that study and “claim the opposite”. But I don’t actually need to refute your assertion because you have not proven your assertion: you have only asserted it. It isn’t enough for you to make the general claim that “Women tend, on average, to be less aggressive and ambitious than men. They also tend to take time out to have or raise children.” You need to explain how this is relevant specifically to how the google executive team was put together.
You literally said "“all other things being equal”. What other things were **you **referring too?
You still aren’t addressing my point.
So it is because they are black? While there are differences between Washington and Silicon Valley do you not think that some of that 17.3% of people were recruited from the same place that Silicon Valley recruited from? Are those worker inferior to workers at google as well? Every single black worker in Washington is inferior? How are you quantifying this?
But the question was “do you not think that someone from the University of Texas El Paso can do the job as well as someone from Stanford?” If they can do the same job: then (using your bizarre interpretation of "qualified) they are qualified for the job, are they not? Why don’t you answer the question that I asked you instead of deflecting with some nonsense about one-armed wallpaper hangers? A yes or no will suffice.
Lets assume for the purposes of debate that what you say is true. That still doesn’t make the person from the community college “unqualified”: and it can also still be true that the person from the community college can do the job just as well as the person from MIT. Google have tripled the amount of schools they recruit from precisely because they have identified that the differences are not as significant as you seem to think they are. Do you think google have got it wrong? Are you a better judge of who should be a google employee than the people at google themselves?
This seems illogical. If it were valid logically, then there could be no possible outer bound for “liberal” correctness.
Suppose I suggested some extreme liberal position that you considered too far left even for you. What happens if at some point many other liberals adopt this position? If your own current position is correct, then you would then become the “conservative” and your own mocking “logic” would prove you to be wrong.
I suspect that where you went wrong here is that you’re looking at “liberals” and “conservatives” across different generations and eras as if they were the same individual liberal and conservative people, with conservatives constantly backing off their positions and adopting new defensive lines. But that’s not a valid assumption (and obviously untrue when you’re reaching back as far as Lincoln’s time, as you are).
My claim is that there have been people arguing that liberals have gone too far in trying to fight racism for over a century. They were wrong in 1850. They were wrong in 1870, while acknowledging that their predecessors in the camp had been wrong in 1850. They were wrong in 1950, while acknowledging that their predecessors in the camp had been wrong in 1870. They were wrong in 1980, while acknowledging that their predecessors in the camp had been wrong in 1950.
At no point in the history of America have the people saying liberals have gone too far in antiracism been correct.
What follows? It does not follow that they are certainly wrong now. It is perfectly logically possible that, this time, liberals are finally going too far. Nor am I saying this is some kind of individual character defect. Yesterday’s advocates of antiracism are often today’s people claiming antiracism has gone too far. Rather, I’m saying that given how often large groups of people have been wrong in precisely the same direction on this issue, without the other side ever having been wrong, the people now claiming that finally antiracism has gone too far should be pretty cautious about thinking they finally have it right. I do not have a claim as to the underlying mechanism here. Just a loose inference from the history.
In your prior post you seemed to be talking about “social liberals” and “social conservatives” generally (though your one specific example involved racism) as was the post you were responding to (which included sexism).
If you’re narrowing it down to racism specifically, your facts are wrong. As one example, affirmative action was a battleground a few decades ago and social conservatives have very much not “decide[d] that the social liberals were right a few decades earlier” about that issue.
But leaving all that aside, the same still applies. Suppose the next battleground becomes slavery reparations. Are you saying that anyone opposed to reparations needs to be “pretty cautious about thinking they finally have it right”? How about if the battleground becomes granting special legal rights to black people? Would that be your position here too?
Bottom line is that the “direction” is meaningless in the context of right and wrong. You can take extreme positions on either side of virtually any issue, and the question is where the correct line is. Societal consensus can change. But it’s not like there’s a sort of momentum, where any time society moves in one direction that implies that any further moves further in that same direction have the weight of history behind them. That’s not logical at all.