I'd really like to see this document as a whole before judging.
By the way, I think that being really open means listening to opinions without "rage quitting" for holding an unpopular opinion, or calling him a "racist" or "white male supremacy supporter", which is a way to turn down an argument whatever its merit is.
Is the document's author a jerk? Let's explain that to him, and maybe shame him on a data-driven basis.
Has the author some valid point, but went too far with speculations? Maybe he/she doesn't deserve all this uproar.
At the same time, if the data supported his claims, I wonder what Googlers would have to say. If Google wants the best, what is it willing to risk?
Personally I think for most companies you're better off with a diverse crowd regardless, lest you end up with a bunch of out of touch yuppie guys trying to "change the world" by building an IOT coffee machine. That is to say, all types of diversity be it race, socioeconomic status, gender, etc. will inevitably contribute to your company's collective wisdom, which is probably generally has a larger impact than ensuring everyone you hire has all the sorting algorithms memorized.
Of course, it depends on what you mean by "best". If "best" means "like me", you're at risk of creating a monoculture.
Personally, I think that we should stop looking for "the best" at all times and enormously rewarding them, because this is creating a lot of disparity, and maybe "the best" sometimes carry with them some large drawback (possibly "the best" engineer spends 10 hour working, and 6 more hours a day studying in order to improve; but, then, his social life and his human skills may be... lacking). If we pick all the best in this sense, we may end up with a lot of similar, great people with a lot of drawbacks.
What if we ask "is this candidate good" or "is this candidate really good"? We should try to identify a bar, then pick people (maybe randomly, maybe with a diversity target) that go beyond that bar without looking at finding "the best".
Do you have any data that suggests that monoculture is bad? My anecdotal evidence suggests that monocultures are the most efficient and effective teams. An important note here is that culture != skin color. Being from the same culture expedites a lot of communication and results in easier/greater team cohesiveness.
A study recently came out about diversity in communities (not workplaces). Diversity and civic engagement are inversely related. The more diverse a neighborhood fewer people vote, fewer people volunteer, they give less to charity, etc. I can't imagine there aren't similar impacts in the workplace.
The problem with monoculture, by the way, is that you might end up discarding somebody for "wrong culture fit" rather than actual skills. And that's something I'd like to avoid.
That's only a problem if there's a shortage of people with applicable skills, which doesn't apply to the vast majority of businesses. All other things being equal, a "good culture fit" should make a better member of the team. If monoculture improves team effectiveness, then a better culture fit is likely even worth paying a price premium.
> That's only a problem if there's a shortage of people with applicable skills, which doesn't apply to the vast majority of businesses.
What makes you say this? The economy is at full employment right now. A lot of businesses are having a hard time finding employees with applicable skills. In the tech industry this is certainly true.
"That's only a problem if there's a shortage of people with applicable skills"
No, it's a problem to the discarded person, too, and potentially any future colleagues they might have worked with (or even hired/fired). Hiring and firing are not zero-sum games, they impact more than the just immediate individuals concerned.
"If monoculture improves team effectiveness"
This is a big "IF" in my eyes. Everyone going to the same bar to have a good time may be great fun, but isn't it nice to have some people who prefer other work hours who can start or finish something up for a team member in odd hours? Conversely isn't it nice for the odd-hour or solitary team member to have a more group-oriented colleague who can bring things to/from the solitary person to the group session? Etc... to other specifics.
Basically the only real assertion that could be made is that Americans are more scared of diversity than other countries.
As to monocultures being bad, if we are looking at the rest of nature, then it's bad in the sense that it leaves massive vulnerabilities to being wiped out in one go. For example the potato blight, black death, bananas and so on, which arguably isn't the same thing as culture is far more adaptable. No one says monocultures are bad, they say they are risky. The reason everyone loves McDonalds french fries is because they are the same anywhere you get them, but if that particular potato has a bad year everyone will notice.
If the "unpopular opinion" is euphemism for "dude assumes I am less competent without even knowing me" then being "really open" is indistinguishable from being one massive doormat.
We can't know that if we don't read the full document.
I think you're jumping to conclusions without assessing facts first; that's exactly the issue I'm talking about. As soon as somebody says something about "politically correct" practices, he must fear retaliation.
Maybe he/she is saying that such diversity practices don't work as intended, and that diversity should be achieved in a different way. Maybe he/she is saying that such diversity practices led to hiring women or other minorities, but that the mindset is not growing different enough. Have you ever considered such possibilities?
I am not jumping to anything. I am answering your general point with another general point.
I did not addressed specific point you raised "is the author jerk", because I find his jerk-status irrelevant. There are plenty of charizmatic sexists and plenty of jerks that are not sexist.
Dragging this to public and trying to shame the person is absolutely the wrong move. They're just proving his point that these people are not open to rigorous discussions.
The perfect example is Milo. Every time he gets kicked out of a campus, his point gets proven. But almost every time I've seen someone sit down with him and debate his flawed arguments, he got pretty much proven wrong on most of them.
how much energy are we supposed to devote to sitting down with and debating people like Milo? that works out well for him because he has nothing else to do with his time; most people don't have the luxury.
Then don't go to the event. No one's forced anyone to attend it, just like no one's forced anyone to read this document or agree with it. There are millions of shitty discussions being conducted on the web at any given second. If you tried to stop every single one, you'd probably waste far more time.
It's not a secret that companies like Google hire women / minorities over better qualified men. Politically correct nonsense like this is how you end up with buggy code and security risks.
> "I feel like there's a lot of pushback from white dudes who genuinely feel like diversity is lowering the bar,"
Well, it is, if they'd hire based on ability it'd mainly be a bunch of Asian and White males working there.
Asians, especially Asian males, don't rank high enough on the average leftist's imaginary oppression scale to count as "diversity" - "diversity" being mostly code for "not White", "not male" and sometimes also "not Asian or Jewish".
Is it legal to employ anonymous people (or entities I guess) in any country? I guess both parties can pay taxes separately and I assume it has happened for some security research, insider info, special consulting, but I don't know if that's actually legal. (It seems to me to go against the common way for governments to regulate workforce.)
Google is substantially located in the Bay Area. Of course they hate ideological diversity, in practice if not in principle. It is an attitude common in their workforce.
This is a tendentious statement, so I will relate my own experience. Once upon a time I was working in California, at a tiny startup, and was reading some election results from "back home" in North Carolina, which had just passed Amendment One by about a 3:2 margin. Observing the results thoughtfully, my coworker casually remarked "wow, 60% of North Carolina is literally horrible, terrible people."
I just quietly sat back and thought "why, how nice of you, sir, to refer to some unknown fraction of my family and the friends I had growing up in such a lovely manner."
At one point my girlfriend (now an ex-girlfriend) attended a party that he was hosting. She had just left Missouri out of disgust for its Missouri-ness, and was very much in love with San Francisco and its people – yet left the party modestly offended – not for saying anyone in particular was bad this time, but just with all the best of intentions saying it was inevitable that they'd all come around to the modern views on things like gay marriage (and, in the process, utterly trivializing their religion, values, and world-views).
I do not seek to cast him as a bad person for this remark. This is a man who, if anything, is one of the nicest people I know, easily far above the average, and a quitessential San Franciscan (well above and beyond your typical tech hipster). But he is immersed in a culture which specifically and explicitly denies human dignity of people who are not alike and do not think alike.
This is very sad. You would think if there is one lesson we could take from the history of the US, religious tolerance in the colonies, slavery, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, our wars with Native Americans, the likes of the Japanese Internment, women's suffrage, everything ... if there's one resounding strain here, it's that you don't un-people people.
(but it's okay to un-people these people, because they're bad people!)
In conclusion:
I sympathize with this guy who wrote this manifesto. It is also unfortunate that, from what I hear and understand of the matter, this guy is factually in error, probably sexist, and almost certainly undermining his cause.
> "wow, 60% of North Carolina is literally horrible, terrible people."
The worst thing here is the suggestion that there was 100% turnout, instead it was closer to 30%, so only about 20% voted for it. The amendment was found unconstitutional a short time afterwards anyway, finding that marriage is a fundamental right for everyone.
Suppose there is a referendum in, I don't know, Venezuela or something; that's adequately hypothetical. Imagine they put a referendum banning gay marriage on the ballots in Venezuela, and it passes with similar levels of turnout and support. There's a guy in your office from Venezuela who's reading about it, a little bit troubled by the news, and you say, "wow, I guess 60% of Venezuelans are literally horrible terrible people."
Do you think that he is going to be most upset with the precision and accuracy present in the percentage you used, and not, say, the idea that you just casually pass judgement on what might easily be 60% of his family, extended family, friends, former co-workers, schoolmates, acquaintances, and the like? Not with the way you dismiss entirely their value as moral actors, without any further attempts to seek understanding of them as human beings, pre-emptively closing the door on learning about their culture and their values, not even pretending that you've an interest in understanding their lives as flawed, imperfect human beings, implicitly disclaiming all need to sympathize with their troubles? Not with the way that you, hailing from a background of substantial privilege in the San Francisco Bay Area, college-educated, and now happily earning six figures in a software job, feel that it's right and just to look down on these people, some of whom are fighting to live somewhere better than a shack in the woods?
Fighting their way out of their shack in the woods while, in their spare time taking a moment to vote against gay marriage? What a misunderstood nobility...
People are going to a lot of trouble to defend having lousy values. It doesn't mean that's all you are, that one opinion, but having other aspects to your life doesn't let you off the hook. We all have troubles.
Yeah, and no one is going to let you off the hook for your intolerance of other cultures.
You’re not going to change anyone’s mind with this attitude. If you really want progress, and not just to look down on people, why not take a more constructive approach?
It's not a statistically random selection though. See the 1936 Literary Digest presidential election poll. (They polled 1/4th of the total number of eligible voters, and of that number almost 1/4th responded. They were off by a 19% absolute polling error.)
>from what I hear and understand of the matter, this guy is factually in error, probably sexist, and almost certainly undermining his cause.
That's my take too, having read the doc. Reminds me of The_Donald -- sometimes correctly identifies an issue, but misses the point entirely on so many levels and does more harm than good to whatever the author's goal was.
>you don't un-people people
And that's exactly how the doc started from the get-go. It decried anyone who dared disagree with it as shunning communication. That's really not the case -- people discussed it, and disagreed with it. It reminds me of those religious freedom laws, that guarantee people's freedom to discriminate to protect their own beliefs. The more layers you follow down, the more of a contradiction the laws become.
But without trying to devolve into the actual politics of it, a large portion of Americans (I'd wager it's the majority) believe that it's okay to exclude people for one reason or another. Americans have voted since Pres. GW Bush on protectionist principles, even President Obama was barely for extending rights until he was forced into it by VP Biden. America is in the middle of a massive demographic shift from the Baby Boomers who have ruined the economy, created massive public debt, destroyed worker protections, and shifted the political power from those in the middle to those at the very top. They did this by unpeopling people. This was an intentional thing done by the religious right starting in the late 70s and really gaining steam in the 80s. Their brand of us vs them found a receptive audience in America, because the Baby Boomers are afraid that what they've created will change, and for the moment there's more of them than other voting populations. Of course this is the natural outcome. Look at how many centrist politicians have left. So yes I personally disagree with what this guy said, but in a public sphere he has every right to say it. Inside of Google however they have the right to fire him for any reason, because there are no worker protections for free speech.
Of course Bay Area people hate ideological diversity? As opposed to religious North Caroliners? Are you telling me that Bay Area culture should look to North Carolina to learn a little more about what diversity and tolerance look like?
What's your sense of scale here? What does ideological plurality mean to you? What does North Carolina secularism look like? Does North Carolina have a cultural embrace of secularism? Is the bathroom bill a good thermostat for what issues have play in North Carolina?
I would argue that the Bay Area is very fertile ground for diversity. The Bay Area Christians build enclaves of high quality here, bastions of middle-to-high SES wealth, aspirations, and sensibilities. They stand as quality in contrast to the community right outside their legally protected walls.
I would say that the Bay Area is a cutting-edge experiment of secularism and plurality that the world is watching.
Where did OP say anything about looking to NC as a cultural role model? S/he was making a point that people in SF are intolerant, not that people in NC are tolerant.
If you say that someone is short, it goes to say that you have a comparison model, and that something is tall. Measuring SF as intolerant naturally invites a comparative measure, and here we are discussing how inviting SF is to North Carolina Christians.
I am discussing vice versa by asking mere questions.
It might enrich the discussion to say that it's still illegal for men to have sex with men in North Carolina, it's just unenforceable. North Carolina is also working to say that sodomy laws are not unconstitutional.
The Christians I know around the Bay Area are under no such threat. If anything, churches are enclaves of extreme quality in the Bay Area. It goes to show what a fertile ground this is for diversity.
> If you say that someone is short, it goes to say that you have a comparison model, and that something is tall.
Since you bring it up, I will observe that I found New York to be a lot more tolerant in practice. Statistically, the political leanings are pretty comparable, but somehow people are less strident in practice, even during my tenure at a company with an explicit institutional commitment to social justice causes.
Among other things, I suspect it may simply be that a lot of people come to New York from a lot of places for a lot more reasons than they do San Francisco. But at the end of the day, it's not even really that Bay Area culture is stridently anti-Christian per se. It's just strident about everything. San Francisco is the sort of place where people scrawl anti-parenting graffiti on the changing tables in the restrooms at Whole Foods to shame new parents for their crimes against the planet.
(My circle of acquaintances in London is still quite small, so I hesitate to generalise, but at least in the tech scene, everything is very international.)
> The Christians I know around the Bay Area are under no such threat. If anything, churches are enclaves of extreme quality in the Bay Area. It goes to show what a fertile ground this is for diversity.
1. There's something about describing religion merely in terms of "churches" and "enclaves" as if there's a box around the realm of acceptable religious activity. Telling people that they are permitted to meet in a consecrated building weekly is the start of religious tolerance, vaguely akin to not prosecuting people under sodomy laws.
2. If you don't know someone with a strong negative opinion of AB 569, you're not really in touch with that diversity.
1. Telling people are they permitted to meet... is the start of religious tolerance?
Was there a thought even slightly in your mind that this was even mildly in tension? Like there will be laws on the books striking people from meeting in a Christian church? Like a political momentum is coming?
That churches are allows to operate tax-free, that Churches often operate businesses flagrantly in view of the community but nobody cares (education), and that there isn't any political force close to bringing tension on this matter, shows that churches are not merely tolerated... they are politically privileged.
? Can you think of any other group with this much power?
And in the Bay Area, I think that's clearer. Churches are bastions of middle-to-high SES wealth, revenue, sensibilities, and aspirations. They are places where parents can aspire for their children to be lawyers, doctors, or engineers. Black churches in other areas work differently; worse. I wonder if a lot of Bay Area Christians never attend even one black church.
I cannot believe it when Christians talk about persecution in California inside their churches. It blows my mind. Will there be a Proposition 8 for Muslims? If you're talking about religious diversity, then I understand. I'm promoting secularism, not religion.
Try to think of any group that has this much political privilege, while simultaneously talking about religious oppression, as if they stand for churches as well as mosques.
2. Why are you talking about whether I'm in touch with diversity?
> Was there a thought even slightly in your mind that this was even mildly in tension?
Not in any practical sense, but that's a pretty low bar, isn't it? The point is that even your own comments are loaded with views about how
> Churches often operate businesses flagrantly in view of the community but nobody cares (education)
Look at the world-view implicit there. This is what I am pointing at. You seem to propose that a church doing things outside "be a place for crazy-people to gather" is something like fundamentally overstepping boundaries.
They have a parable for that. "You do not light a lamp, only to place it under a bushel basket."
> I cannot believe it when Christians talk about persecution in California inside their churches.
Imagine that you are working in California and hold what is an altogether-common Christian view: that "the legal vehicle of marriage should be offered only to man-woman couples with the general idea of founding a family."
Now imagine you donate, in secret, to a cause which supports that view (e.g. Proposition 8) — whilst being sensitive of the fact that many people would find this to imply that they are invalid as people, and so you make a point of not breathing a word of it, instead making it a special point in your daily life to treat any person who would be affected by this with respect. Suppose all of your colleagues and all those who interact with you will rush to your defence if you are accused of any impropriety in this regard.
There is a credible case that you should live in fear of being found out, being decried a hateful bigot in public forums, and losing your job. It has been amply demonstrated.
> Black churches in other areas work differently; worse... Will there be a Proposition 8 for Muslims?
The problems faced by black churches or Muslims may be more acutely serious in a variety of cases, and more serious overall as well, but of course this fails to justify any mistreatment of anyone.
Well said. It seems like it's human nature when your side gets the upper hand, you demonize and attack the other.
One of my friends is fairly liberal-oriented and she openly says that the "hateful" right doesn't deserve rights or free speech. Her and her friends motto is "tolerance of the intolerant is an oxymoron". For all her talk of love of humans, animals ( she's a vegan ), etc, she has a terrible anger inside her.
I don't know how we fight against our ugly impulses other than adhering to our principles of equality, free speech and individual rights.
It is a difficult and worrying time we live in because neither side is interested in dialogue and each side accuses the other of be hateful and sequesters themselves in their respective echo chambers which radicalizes them even further.
I like how some of the commenters try to force HR to take an action by threatening to leave. That's hell of a way to promote diversity, and freedom to express yourself. Diversity is a double edge sword: you need to be able to accept other people opinions if you expect them to accept you. P.S. I obviously haven't read the document, and all the comments really reference only short statement without any context, so it's really hard to comment on it.
Indeed. Honestly, I would let them leave. That atitude makes them IMO unfit for teamwork, if one such incident makes them abandon their jobs and blackmail entire department.
You and GP don't cite any commenter in particular, but none of the tweets mentioned in the article strike me as trying to force HR or blackmail anyone to do anything.
They seem to me like they're saying they don't want to work somewhere their teammates think they're biologically inferior, but they're hoping that HR will ensure that people who think so don't stay on the team.
That is exactly the tweet I had in mind. Does it not seem reasonable to you for someone not to want to work on a team where their coworkers think they're less biologically suited to the work, and to hope that HR agrees that they shouldn't be expected to work with such coworkers?
> went around the wrong way with the manner of her expression
So it's only ok for women to be frustrated by systemic stereotyping and marginalization, if-and-only-if she acts like a traditionally oppressed woman in public? Women should just stay in the closet instead of pointing out porblems in the workplace?
> violence against others is not one of them.
What "violence"? What kind of framing or mental gymnastics are you using to interpret any of those posts as "combative" or interpreted as "violence against others"?
>What "violence"? What kind of framing or mental gymnastics are you using to interpret any of those posts as "combative" or interpreted as "violence against others"?
The same violence you are imposing upon on me with your words. Albeit these are in the realm of microagressions, it is violence nonetheless. A more modern violence.
Throwing pejoratives at people is verbal violence: What kind of framing or mental gymnastics...
As is responding with loaded questions, like: Women should just stay in the closet instead of pointing out problems in the workplace? This is intellectually dishonest and does more to insight altercation than have an informed and open discussion.
Coincidentally, these are not too far off from the author's comments.
Why does US have these diversity problems? Is it such a huge deal that most women are not interested in technology? Is it such a huge deal that you have to work with a few women? Is it such a huge deal that as a technical woman, you have to work mostly with men?
I can tell you, in Belgium, in my experience and what I hear, this is not an issue whatsoever. Most women I worked with actually preferred working in teams of mainly men.
Do you really care so much whether the person you work with is male, female, black, white, comes from a different background, etc?
I just want to work with people that I like and who can handle the job.
Eh-- work in tech in Norway and our female engineers definitely feel outnumbered and sometimes avoid outings unless another woman will be there. That's in egalitarian Scandinavia.
The fact that women prefer to be around women just highlights the simple fact that men and women are fundamentally different and that egalitarianism is a pipe dream.
> sometimes avoid outings unless another woman will be there
I do this, regularly, in the UK. I really, really don't want to be the sole target of the one bigot in the room who none of the other men think is a problem (or at least not enough to speak to) - I'm meeting people to enjoy myself, and navigating the social complexities involved in accommodating people who attack me based on gender (plus other visible things I can't do much about) is not fun. Having another woman present tends to result in such behaviour being dialed down a tonne, or at least the ability to step out with her for a few minutes.
This is mainly because academia - the humanities primarily - in the US has been infiltrated by postmodernists and cultural marxists and colleges pump out social justice warriors like crazy nowadays.
After it became obvious that the classic marxist idea of proletariat and bourgeoisie and the practical implementation of ideologies based on this idea led to some of the worst crimes on humanity, marxist academics replaced the whole thing with oppressed and oppressor, which has now become the basis for the ideology these SJWs operate on today. Everyone who belongs to a group that does well for themselves is now an oppressor, while the people belonging to groups that do badly are the oppressed. That's why White people, Asians and Jews (who usally count as White) are the oppressors who need to be diversified to ensure social justice, while women, "Minorities", LGBTQI+ people etc. are the oppressed "diversity". Skill and abilities take a backseat.
Of course these SJW bullies find an easy footing in software development, a discipline that is not exactly known for being pursued by the most assertive and confident males (or women for that matter).
In Europe the problem isn't quite as bad yet, though here in Germany it's getting worse with increasingly more university activites relating to feminism, diversity, history revisionism through marxist lenses etc. popping up. But since (at least in Germany) we don't have the admixture of humanities and STEM many US colleges and universities have, this stuff is mostly contained within the social sciences so far.
The Twitter feeds of some of the people linked in this article read like a Conservative's caricature of an SJW btw.
> I just want to work with people that I like and who can handle the job.
As do other people. People just want to do work in an industry they want to work in with people they want to work with and don't want people to use use their gender, sex, racial or cultural background to prevent them doing it.
> Is it such a huge deal that most women are not interested in technology?
If this is because they have been systematically discriminated against in tech and primed at a young age with BS like "cars are for boys and dolls are for girls" then yes, absolutely this is a huge deal. If it just so happened that they were not interested because they don't have the "technology gene" then this would not be a big deal, but that is nonsense and all the evidence points to the former.
There is an interesting documentary called "The Norway Paradox"[1] that explores why do we see a much higher rate of gender segregation in developed countries. The thesis the documentary advances is that there are indeed innate differences between the sexes, and with higher freedom that can be found in advanced societies, the people are freer to choose a job that fits their innate tendencies rather than be forced into something else by economic or social circumstances.
That question appears to be addressed in the post to which you are responding. I won't be as bold as some to lay causation purely on biological differences, maybe there could be some factor we're not accounting for on why socially flattened societies tend to have larger exaggerations in traditional gender roles. However, if your policy platform wants to push equality of outcome for career paths on the sexes then this deviation from expectation should be disconcerting.
Another video worth watching on this subject is the debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on The Science of Gender & Science[1] which was held in the wake of the Larry Summers controversy at Harvard in 2005. They both make many good points, and it is clear that while discrimination exists, it is probably not adequate to explain outcomes which are aligned with innate preferences and distribution of specific skills.
I have 1 son and 2 daughters, and I have plenty of nieces and cousins. The personality of each child has a bigger impact on how they behave than I had imagined. And also, boys are way different than girls. They are equal, but they are different none the less.
So instead of trying to throw them all in one pile and expect to have a 50-50 men-women working in technology, accept the difference, and let any person decide what they want to do in their lives.
Boys are different than girls. They are equal, but different. If you can't accept this, then I can imagine you have all kinds of diversity problems where you expect that everyone is the same, likes to do the same things, etc.
I recall a funny answer when one of my computer science professors asked "What can we do so that more girls sign up of Master in Computer Science". One smart guy answered: "Make sure it has less to do with computers". (In US you would probably get kicked out of the university because someone felt offended, or that it's a sexist remark)
Women are very welcome in technology, I worked with a lot of very nice and smart women, and had one of the best managers that was a woman and mother of 2 kids. But why do you expect that the average woman will have as much interest in technology as the average man?
You might be interested in this blogpost which cites 27 different peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting an argument that social priming can explain much of observed gender gaps in STEM (and another 9 more scientific papers just to flesh out the argument): http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s...
> "Make sure it has less to do with computers"
> someone felt that it's a sexist remark
Ignoring for a moment whether that's "sexist", can we agree that if those 27 scientific papers are to be believed, such remarks directly hurt women in computer science who would otherwise be do better?
That is patently false, and you should not make factual claims under these circumstances. These claims add to the noise, not the signal.
The scientific evidence for innate psychological differences between girls and boys is overwhelming. There is a clear scientific consensus on this. I cannot fathom how this can still be controversial.
Specifically about your "cars vs dolls" example, I'll give you two quotations right of the bat:
- Shown two pictures, one of a mobile (physical-mechanical object) and one of a face (social object), there is a clear gender difference how much a child will look at the mobile vs face. (Yes, boy likes mobile, girl likes face.) In newborns btw. so that is hardly an artifact of human societal norms. [1]
- Offered a choice between a toy truck and a doll, there is a clear gender difference how much an adolescent will play with the truck vs doll. (Yes, boy likes truck, girl likes doll.) In monkeys btw, so that is hardly an artifact of human societal norms. [2]
I don't think it makes that claim? Clearly women can be capable and competent software engineers. I think the study was showing there is an inherent preference for different interests among large population of the sexes and then people who are concerned about the gender gap take this study to argue that the differences (and others) may manifest later in life as choices in career path.
You are correct that narrowly speaking, it is false to say that "all evidence" points in any one direction.
However, your claim that there is a "overwhelming", "clear scientific consensus" is lacking in citations, your one broken link to what I assume was supposed a scientific study and one link to a pop science blogpost (which links only to other posts on the same blog and not any actual scientific papers) notwithstanding.
In fact the overwhelming scientific consensus is that the opposite is true. Check out this blogpost with working links to 22 different peer-reviewed scientific papers on how social priming can differentially affect how men and women, or white students and black students, etc perform at various academic and cognitive tasks (there are actually 27 links to such papers but 5 are broken; there are also links to 9 more scientific papers besides, just to flesh out the argument): http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s...
I challenge you to find working links to 22 different peer-reviewed scientific papers arguing that women's underrepresentation in STEM is not due to systemic discrimination but is explained wholly by other factors such as innate psychological differences.
In fact, I'll give you a head start. The blogpost I linked to already links to 6 such papers, so if you can find 16 more, I'll concede that maybe there isn't the scientific consensus I thought there was.
As noted by the other reply to GP, even if your links worked and were to actual, peer-reviewed scientific papers, they do little to support the argument that women's underrepresentation in STEM is not due to systemic discrimination. I think it would be an uphill battle for you to argue that they count towards the 16 in my challenge.
The scientific consensus is real, it's just not the one you seem to make it out to be. It's about the claim that there are "innate psychological differences" between boys and girls. I did not claim that these differences are solely responsible for 100% of observable statistical variations between genders. To try to ascribe all effects to a single set of causes, be it nature or nurture, is really a fool's errand. The blank slate is out of the window. Humans come into the world primed, and boys and girls are primed differently.
That notwithstanding, I wouldn't think of claiming that societal norms do not at all affect outcomes. Because it would be next to impossible to prove, and I'd give it a rather low a priori probability. Just what these effects really are and how big they are is a matter of ongoing debate. C.f. "The Norway Paradox".
It's good to hear that. I guess that was a communication problem then. I'd be careful with any kind of hyperbole on the net because, just as with sarcasm, it will be taken seriously. People will read what you wrote and take it straight and it will mislead and confuse them.
So I guess we're roughly on the same page then, that the observable variation in outcome is caused by a mix of innate and societal factors, and the real discussion to be had is about how to tease them apart and quantify their respective contributions?
This has been proven false several times. Men and women are also biologically different. This doesnt mean they're limited in capability but that they have slight natural biases. Why is this such a hard reality to accept?
Obviously they are biologically different! That is not the question. The question is: Do these differences make women less interested in tech, or are there less women in tech because experiences they have had since birth make them feel unwelcome or unable.
> Most women I worked with actually preferred working in teams of mainly men.
Have you considered survival bias?
The women that were bothered would have left those conditions in greater numbers.
The problem in not caring about this statistical filtering is that it creates a blind spot for your company. It is harder to empathize with the unknown.
When you build products that extend the world's social experience, this becomes a severe competitive danger.
> When you build products that extend the world's social experience, this becomes a severe competitive danger.
Sorry, but that is just bullshit. I'm currently making a tool to create RPGs. I'm the sole male developer.
To my surprise, I have more women creating games in it than men. It seems that they really love the whole storytelling aspect of it.
So to say that you can only build something that is only useful to people similar to yourself, is just plain wrong. I'm a programmer building something for non-programmers.
If you want to make something for your customers, listen to them, see how they use your product, look at their interests etc. Is it really mandatory to hire the same demographic as a product manager???
> If you want to make something for your customers, listen to them
That is absolutely good advice. Note that I only said it was harder to empathize with the unknown.
However, an obvious result of the Two Generals' Problem is that you can only communicate through common knowledge. Getting it takes more work than having it.
For instance, it is likely that when you first built the tool, you made its UI use a language you understand. Let's say there is suddenly a large amount of interest in having that tool from a country with a language and culture you do not know.
Learning the specifics of that culture takes more work than having someone with that knowledge in your company. They may know what keyboard those people have, how they expect their right-to-left language to be input, how they react to specific UIs.
A company that has this knowledge in-house is more likely to get that market than one which relies on surveys. For companies that target a large number of markets with shifting needs, it makes diversity a business requirement to outpace competitors.
As a counterpoint, lots of women have loved fantasy novels for a really long time. However, until recently, the vast majority of the authors were male, and it's still a majority. The result is that there is a lot of fantasy with badly written female characters who occupy damsel roles more often than hero roles. Said fantasy is nevertheless read by women for lack of options, but they'd like better fantasy with better female characters better.
It's not impossible for men to write good female characters, of course, it's just something that a man is less likely to be able to pull off, or to focus on.
Do you have evidence for that? Are there really solid cases where, say, 20% female team handled certain features far better than a 5% female team, due to their gender?
I see this implicit assumption everywhere that diversity comes up, yet at best I've only seen studies indicating better workplace environment or higher productivity on mixed teams. But never anything in detail.
And why does diversity fail so hard when it comes to physical activities?
This is interesting. I'm a female Electrical Engineer in the United States. Females are obviously a minority in the Engineering teams, but interestingly enough, there are a few older female Engineers I know who came from Eastern Europe after spending 10-15 years doing Engineering there, and said they never had an issue with sexism until they came to the U.S.
I'm not sure whether an elaboration by them would indicate that they experience more sexism by men, or that overall its more of a topic brought up by women, but they did say there were more issues with men here.
I think alot of the issues with women in the U.S. vs Europe are due to the fact that Europe is more urbanized and concentrated. Women and men live and work in closer quarters with more socialized economics where women are overall more educated, urbanized, financially independent, and the sexual and in general culture is more liberally progressive.
In the U.S., we are way behind when it comes to womens socioeconomic equality, and education quality in general. Concurrently, there are large number of men live suburban lives, with housewives who are to some degree financially dependent on them, and the idea of an a women who doesn't fit the housewife/trophy wife/soccer mom/etc etc whateve that American culture props up as a way of life for women to idolize, causes more cultural friction and results in more emotional isolation for women working in male dominated work forces.
Not all of it is intentional. Most guys I work with are fine, but older than me, married. I'm 27 single and don't intend to settle down anytime soon, maybe travel more if anything. So every company I've worked for, is filled with men who golf together or do other things. I'm not explicitly excluded anymore than I'm not interested in doing those things and they know that. If I was invited, I wouldnt go.
This is overall pretty a pretty trivial example, but I am trying to emphasize how the undercurrent of culture in America is a large contributer to this, and not necessarily any one persons fault or a mans conscious decision to come across as exclusionary.
Regardless, the document this article refers to goes far beyond that, and I have to say, as an INTJ female, this biology crap is ridiculous. I am introvert and would prefer any day to stay inside and read, code, play video games than go out and "socialize".
In my experience, as an educated female introvert, I am demonized for NOT being a social butterfly, I have been called a bitch for not smiling when I say something in a meeting, because there is a subconscious expectation that girls are supposed to be adorably cute in everything that they do, or ease poltiical or social tension and are viewed as "out of line" for being the source of it, and men are rewarded for agressive aberrhant behavior and lauded as the leader of the group for equally outlier behavior. If a man is confident in his capabilities, I've found him to be considered respected, but if a women is confident in her opinion in a meeting or her belief in her own capabilities, I've often been told I'm a know it all, and am reminded immediately why I need to be "knocked" down a peg to be reminded how I'm not as great as I think I am. It can be a little confusing to work in male dominated environment and be punished for the same behavior that men are rewarded for. This does not happen to me as much at my current job, or on my team or my department, but you have to wonder how much day to day life in the long term impacts what paths women take in their lives and careers based on the rewards and punishments they receive and their economic incentive to act and perform like a man, which is all subject to current socioeconomics and politics, moreso than a woman's "biology"
This document serves one purpose and on purpose only, to perpetuate stereotypes that many women do not meet, and recategorize all actions and behaviors they have that women DO meet the &...
> but I WOULD care if a coworker propogated a document saying I'm inferior to them because of my biology as a female.
You wouldn't if you were working in Europe.
If this would happen here, all colleagues would have a great laugh out of this document, sharing it with others to show "What crazy John has done this time, making a whole document about his retarded idea."
If this guy is the asocial hunchback working in his office all day, avoiding others, but none the less doing great work, the company probably would keep him. Because everyone already knows what kind of a nutcase he is.
If he is working with other colleagues, this is probably a reason to fire him. First of all because this is not professional whatsoever, and because this obviously shows that he is not able to work with other people.
It this is a manager or HR person, he would be fired on the spot. Everyone would agree with that. If not what would raise some eyebrows too.
I fully understand that in US, you would care, but this is also the reason why the whole situation in US so surreal to me. I read that some coworkers even agree with them. And that makes it a problem indeed.
It is just strange that US and EU cultures are so alike, but still have such a big difference in how female colleagues are treated at the workplace.
A great comment. I'm wondering have you access to the document and have read it? It seems as if there's no copies around for us to look at and see what it's actually saying, compared to what it's reported as saying. I'd agree with most here in saying that it sounds really bad, bad enough to elicit strong responses but I'd like to make my own mind up if possible.
> Females are obviously a minority in the Engineering teams, but interestingly enough, there are a few older female Engineers I know who came from Eastern Europe after spending 10-15 years doing Engineering there, and said they never had an issue with sexism until they came to the U.S.
Re: Eastern Europe.
You can thank communist regimes for more female workers in technology.
> I have to say, as an INTJ female, this biology crap is ridiculous.
That's an interesting way to put it. The estimates I've seen (e.g. [1], [2]) have the frequency of INTJs among men significantly higher than the frequency of INTJs among women. If INTJs are more likely to become engineers, then those frequencies predict that there will be more male engineers than female engineers.
As far as I can see, those statistics are from the US. Which means there might be more to this INTJ-engineer relationship beyond sex. Such as cultural expectations that an engineer is an introvert, which may not be true.
I don't remember the study, but apparently in former communist countries, while gender roles are very strong, women were expected to work in factories along side men for a very long time.
Which is probably why you have a relatively more balanced tech workforce there today vs the West.
However, if you read the document, the author basis the premise of his perception of faulty and "good intentions gone wrong" programs to correct for gender pay gap disparity as due to the "underlying biologicial differences" between men and women.
Women are far less likely to be INTJs, but most female Engineers I know are not INTJs, and furthermore, if you are using the idea that INTJ is an indicator of someone being more likely to be an engineer or STEM I guess we can say in this case, and that somehow there is a biologicial difference (plausible, were not advanced enough in biology and sciences, psychology and neurobiology to be able to atribute personality genres to unique biologicial differences that can correctly an consistently identify a Meyers Brigg personality type, maybe its possible in the future, maybe not, maybe thats not the underlying relationship, who knows yet), then the entire premise of the author is debunked.
If my personality type whether as a male or female, is going to kick me in a direction more likely to end up in STEM (interest in math and sciences) then youre statement reconcludes there is no "underlying biological differences" that exist for all women that never occur with men.
The idea that personality traits contribute to biological nuances that can occur in men and women, then the author loses his point.
I'm also not aware of any Meyers Briggs personality type that comes with the term "neurotic" but according to the author, all women are, and this is not even up for debate.
I'm also leaving out the entire obvious consideration that I would assume is a given in all these conversations, but seem not to be addressed in any way whatsoever by the authors 10 page document, that even if we could attribute say INTJ or similiar MBriggs personality types to highly correlating with females in STEM, and then showing less women are likely to have those personality types, we still don't know what causes personality types, or have biologicial blueprints for them, so we can not assume "underlying biological differences between sexes" especially considering MBs are not sexually based.
Furthermore, we are leaving out the fact that humans are an evolving species and we experience a microcosm of our own societal influences that influence how people think, act, perceive, spend, procreate, educate, eat etc based on our socioeconomic construct. To throw aside the mere idea that being surrounded by men who actually write off most of your actions as neurotic and believe this as truth, could not have some lng term damaging effect on your ability to be taken seriously or perceived as successful or result in an imposed biased with a positive feedback loop on how the gender who is not in an economic majority of empowerment may be held back, is just about as childish and ignorant as missing the point of a first science experiment where you failed miserably because you didn't have controls for your experiment, or consider that different contributing factors could result in different outcomes and calibrate for them.
No, from this authors perspective, women are neurotic. This is a fact:
"Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."
Right: it's clear that there's no sharp divide between men's and women's aptitude for STEM jobs. There are many excellent women engineers, and many men who have no aptitude for engineering.
It's also true that there seem to be population-level differences that are connected to aptitude for engineering. If we're trying to answer the question "to what extent is sexism excluding women from engineering?" then these differences become important. If there are no population-level differences then any deviation from a 50/50 sex ratio among engineers is probably due to some kind of sex discrimination. But if there are real population-level differences then it would be a mistake to insist on a 50/50 sex ratio, and a mistake to assume that sexism is the problem if the ratio is not 50/50. (Of course, there might still be sexism, even if there are also population-level differences.)
The problem comes when people try to apply population-level sex differences at an individual level. Even if fewer women have an aptitude for engineering, that says nothing at all about any individual female engineer. The right way to assess an the ability of an engineer, whether male or female, is by looking at the information about what they've done -- they've achieved X qualification, won Y award, built Z product etc. -- not by assuming gender differences that can only be observed at the population level. Unfortunately, both negative and positive discrimination muddy the waters here, making these signals less useful.
"Is it such a huge deal that most women are not interested in technology? Is it such a huge deal that you have to work with a few women? Is it such a huge deal that as a technical woman, you have to work mostly with men?"
Yes, for various reasons.
1. There is less diversity of experience/thought.
2. Programming/engineering fields are generally good for society (and hence highly rewarded). There is a lot of unfulfilled demand for more engineers. If we can increase the number of people available for these jobs, that's good for society, and if we are for some reason "excluding" or "depressing" some people from entering, that's bad.
3. Not sure about this, but I think the incidence of sexual harassment or similarly bad things goes way up when there are fewer women.
None of this is to say we should be forcing anyone to work in something they don't want to. But as I heard it, it seems like there are societal reasons why women tend to be less interested in technology than men, and these are not biological. Again, not clear on the science here, but I'm just answering your main objection, which is "should we even care" assuming it is a cultural problem and not something biological. (For what it's worth, it seems clear to me that it's at least partly societal).
The 'biological differences between the sexes' is scientific data that needs to be mindfully assessed - Google of all companies ought to embrace this data and act on it accordingly. Statistically, I'd say there absolutely are majority differences between the sexes, so the sophisticated action is what do we do with this knowledge.
It depends what the company wants to achieve. Some smarter R&D/focus group/more intelligent way of integrating diverse populations into the company's DNA, not just blunt diversity employee policies in some PR-friendly reactionary manner.
And the book recommendation: "Why Aren't More Women in Science?: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence". (researchers from either side of the arguments debate each other in the same book.)
This manifesto may or may not have a valid point, without seeing the contents we will likely never truly know. Apologies for the lengthy post to follow.
Let me start by saying that diversity is always important. Without diversity you tend to end up with an echo chamber that produces things that are only worthwhile for the subset of people represented within the group.
However, it is important to think about the cost that diversity targets can have on both the under-represented and over-represented groups within a company. Diversity targets for hiring or promotion will mean the over-represented group(s) will tend to view those who are hired or promoted with disdain. Meanwhile the under-represented group(s) may well doubt their position within the company, worrying that they are in their position only due to belonging to the flavour of the month diversity target. The other part is that members of the under-represented group who were previously employed on their own merits are likely to hold a similar position to that of the majority group(s), for similar reasons.
Now it's time for an anecdote... My girlfriend works as an engineer in an oil and gas company. Her company is fully on board with the current gender diversity push, and has created several new positions at a fairly high level specifically to meet their diversity targets. These are high level positions with no one reporting to them in the current structure (which was defined by the massive restructure following the fall in oil prices). Her issues with the positions and their seniority boils down to education and time in the industry. If they were being filled by candidates based on skill, a large proportion of them would be male (and probably white). This would be because the vast majority of the people with the relevant experience are white males. By pushing the female agenda, she fears that not only will these roles be filled by poor candidates, it will also promote the stereotype that women are unsuitable for the job.
There is room for diversity targets, but they must be mindful of the talent pool available for the specific job. Whilst it hurts at this point, the most reasonable course is to promote equality in education. If your company is hiring on skill, then the equality issues will resolve in time, without making anyone resentful of the first year grad who got promoted to team leader because the company needed to meet a quota.
To derail myself slightly following the above wall of text. Would the current white, male disgruntlement be as bad had there not been the GFC etc, and the subsequent (and continuing layoffs/stagnation of wages?
Ignoring or repressing that there are differences in women and men doesn't seam wise. However, there are a few important things to keep in mind about it. The difference is multivariate and some people may have some properties of the other gender. As a consequence, infering the capabilities of a person just from the gender written on the ID card is plain stupid. Another thing I want to say about this is that IT is a vast domain requiring various competences. Each gender has some properties that make it more fit for some of these competences. So in practice there is room for everybody.
The conclusion is to get the right person for the job. The gender shouldn't be considered because the reality is not black and white.
Base on this reasoning, complains about imbalance of gender quota or salaries are not acceptable. The salary is/should be attached to the job and performance, not the gender.
In France we have a similar issue with the porportion of black football players in the national team. People who complain about that don't understand that they just picked the best players. This gender debate is the same problem.
> In France we have a similar issue with the porportion of black football players in the national team. People who complain about that don't understand that they just picked the best players. This gender debate is the same problem.
I'd argue that it's not the same problem. I'm not French, but I doubt that there are calls to make the Football team more representative of the population by forcefully limiting the number of black people in football teams starting at the junior level.
Which is what we effectively are seeing in the US - Harvard class of 2021 will be <50% white, while the country obviously isn't.
It is the same problem because the argument invoked is that the proportion of people of color should match the one of the french population. So the women proportion in context X or Y should match the one of the population. That argument would be valid if people were chosen randomly, but that's obviously not the case. So this argument is really bogus and falling for it is the real problem.
Less than half of babies born in the US in 2012 were white. So while the demographics of the country as a whole haven't reached that point yet, due to a previously heavily white population that's aging but still alive, the demographics of kids born in 1999 and entering Harvard in 2017 are pretty darn close.
IIRC Harvard listed 2.5% of people graduating from that same class of 2021 as being Native American or indigenous people from Pacific Islands (don't remember what they were called precisely) which are actually 0.2% of general population.
I strongly doubt you can make an argument that these people are there on merit alone.
If the most prolific group (Asians) has a growth of 2.9%, then the possibility of one group, even if minor to have had a growth of 1000%+ (0.2% to 2.5%) is virtually impossible.
I think this proves my point that Native Americans (including Native Hawaiians and other peoples) are vastly overrepresented at Harvard.
The concept of "ideological diversity" is definitely a clever tactic for changing the subject away from gender and racial diversity. But that's all it is -- or are you really clamoring to hire people who think the world is flat, who believe monarchy is the only acceptable form of government, or who indent using precisely 17 spaces?
Everything anyone will say publicly with their name about this, is lies.
He did not shit on leftist values. That can't even be a misunderstanding, that was just a lie (plain and simple). He simply pointed out that society uses a mix of leftist and rightist values, and neither side is 100% right.
Google has people openly say that "if you are republican then you should be fired" (and much much worse).
Nobody will criticize these lies, because this is a witch hunt, and one where this guy must be publicly shamed and destroyed, and anyone who speaks up against it must also be destroyed.
I hope many Googlers take notes and screenshots, because this is a clear discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen. I know some Google employees who are adding to their lists of future discrimination lawsuits. Harassment for political opinions.
This is what happens if you express an opinion against the dogma that is "There is ZERO difference between genders, it's ALL societal, NOTHING innate".
The guy started with a whole section about how you cannot use averages to judge individuals (he even had graphs showing exactly how you cannot), but that a 50/50 equal men/women engineering pool is not a realistic goal nor helpful because there are innate differences between men and women.
He then sprinkled it with some cherry-picked and possibly incorrect research, but is the basic premise wrong? No.
> He then sprinkled it with some cherry-picked and possibly incorrect research, but is the basic premise wrong? No.
If I say "There are clear differences between the performance of black and white people on various cognitive tasks." That's a true statement. If I follow it up with "and that's due to the biological inferiority of the black race", I'm probably a racist, even though my basic premise is not wrong.
The arguments one uses to support a conclusion are as important as the premises one started with.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadThe only hint we have is that;
- women choose to work with people, men with things
Or something like that.
However that is a psycho sociological FACT and studies show this to be true.
The diversity programs are ridiculous.
How come there are no diversity programs in the military, coal mines, and other jobs demanding hard labour and shitty working conditions?
Apparently we want a 50% male - female split in the cushy office programming jobs, but not coal mines where 99.8% of employees are men.
Why are employees wasting time at work gossiping about some other employee's power point slides/PDF? Don't they have work to do?
We're not talking about crimes against humanity here, just a person's politically incorrect writings that seem slightly offensive.
Thank God I don't work with the losers at Mother Google
https://twitter.com/rakyll/status/893324341630218241
By the way, I think that being really open means listening to opinions without "rage quitting" for holding an unpopular opinion, or calling him a "racist" or "white male supremacy supporter", which is a way to turn down an argument whatever its merit is.
Is the document's author a jerk? Let's explain that to him, and maybe shame him on a data-driven basis.
Has the author some valid point, but went too far with speculations? Maybe he/she doesn't deserve all this uproar.
Personally I think for most companies you're better off with a diverse crowd regardless, lest you end up with a bunch of out of touch yuppie guys trying to "change the world" by building an IOT coffee machine. That is to say, all types of diversity be it race, socioeconomic status, gender, etc. will inevitably contribute to your company's collective wisdom, which is probably generally has a larger impact than ensuring everyone you hire has all the sorting algorithms memorized.
Of course, it depends on what you mean by "best". If "best" means "like me", you're at risk of creating a monoculture.
Personally, I think that we should stop looking for "the best" at all times and enormously rewarding them, because this is creating a lot of disparity, and maybe "the best" sometimes carry with them some large drawback (possibly "the best" engineer spends 10 hour working, and 6 more hours a day studying in order to improve; but, then, his social life and his human skills may be... lacking). If we pick all the best in this sense, we may end up with a lot of similar, great people with a lot of drawbacks.
What if we ask "is this candidate good" or "is this candidate really good"? We should try to identify a bar, then pick people (maybe randomly, maybe with a diversity target) that go beyond that bar without looking at finding "the best".
Sometimes you need the whiz kid who can rewrite Torch from scratch in a weekend. It's OK if they eat the gunk between their toes.
Sometimes you need the gregarious former athlete. It's OK if they got an A- in real analysis.
A study recently came out about diversity in communities (not workplaces). Diversity and civic engagement are inversely related. The more diverse a neighborhood fewer people vote, fewer people volunteer, they give less to charity, etc. I can't imagine there aren't similar impacts in the workplace.
http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/...
The problem with monoculture, by the way, is that you might end up discarding somebody for "wrong culture fit" rather than actual skills. And that's something I'd like to avoid.
What makes you say this? The economy is at full employment right now. A lot of businesses are having a hard time finding employees with applicable skills. In the tech industry this is certainly true.
No, it's a problem to the discarded person, too, and potentially any future colleagues they might have worked with (or even hired/fired). Hiring and firing are not zero-sum games, they impact more than the just immediate individuals concerned.
"If monoculture improves team effectiveness"
This is a big "IF" in my eyes. Everyone going to the same bar to have a good time may be great fun, but isn't it nice to have some people who prefer other work hours who can start or finish something up for a team member in odd hours? Conversely isn't it nice for the odd-hour or solitary team member to have a more group-oriented colleague who can bring things to/from the solitary person to the group session? Etc... to other specifics.
Basically the only real assertion that could be made is that Americans are more scared of diversity than other countries.
As to monocultures being bad, if we are looking at the rest of nature, then it's bad in the sense that it leaves massive vulnerabilities to being wiped out in one go. For example the potato blight, black death, bananas and so on, which arguably isn't the same thing as culture is far more adaptable. No one says monocultures are bad, they say they are risky. The reason everyone loves McDonalds french fries is because they are the same anywhere you get them, but if that particular potato has a bad year everyone will notice.
I think you're jumping to conclusions without assessing facts first; that's exactly the issue I'm talking about. As soon as somebody says something about "politically correct" practices, he must fear retaliation.
Maybe he/she is saying that such diversity practices don't work as intended, and that diversity should be achieved in a different way. Maybe he/she is saying that such diversity practices led to hiring women or other minorities, but that the mindset is not growing different enough. Have you ever considered such possibilities?
I did not addressed specific point you raised "is the author jerk", because I find his jerk-status irrelevant. There are plenty of charizmatic sexists and plenty of jerks that are not sexist.
The perfect example is Milo. Every time he gets kicked out of a campus, his point gets proven. But almost every time I've seen someone sit down with him and debate his flawed arguments, he got pretty much proven wrong on most of them.
I somehow think that if one aims for "ideological diversity" then "gender/race/minority diversity" will come for free.
But the question is how to you target "ideological diversity" when hiring.
Also, extrapolating anything from a text we cannot see rapidly brings us in strawman arguments territory.
Well, it is, if they'd hire based on ability it'd mainly be a bunch of Asian and White males working there.
Asians, especially Asian males, don't rank high enough on the average leftist's imaginary oppression scale to count as "diversity" - "diversity" being mostly code for "not White", "not male" and sometimes also "not Asian or Jewish".
Still no confirmations about the sexism of the manifesto, but the article rolls out their own.
The story link is to some opinionated article that seems to hate it.
This is a tendentious statement, so I will relate my own experience. Once upon a time I was working in California, at a tiny startup, and was reading some election results from "back home" in North Carolina, which had just passed Amendment One by about a 3:2 margin. Observing the results thoughtfully, my coworker casually remarked "wow, 60% of North Carolina is literally horrible, terrible people."
I just quietly sat back and thought "why, how nice of you, sir, to refer to some unknown fraction of my family and the friends I had growing up in such a lovely manner."
At one point my girlfriend (now an ex-girlfriend) attended a party that he was hosting. She had just left Missouri out of disgust for its Missouri-ness, and was very much in love with San Francisco and its people – yet left the party modestly offended – not for saying anyone in particular was bad this time, but just with all the best of intentions saying it was inevitable that they'd all come around to the modern views on things like gay marriage (and, in the process, utterly trivializing their religion, values, and world-views).
I do not seek to cast him as a bad person for this remark. This is a man who, if anything, is one of the nicest people I know, easily far above the average, and a quitessential San Franciscan (well above and beyond your typical tech hipster). But he is immersed in a culture which specifically and explicitly denies human dignity of people who are not alike and do not think alike.
This is very sad. You would think if there is one lesson we could take from the history of the US, religious tolerance in the colonies, slavery, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, our wars with Native Americans, the likes of the Japanese Internment, women's suffrage, everything ... if there's one resounding strain here, it's that you don't un-people people.
(but it's okay to un-people these people, because they're bad people!)
In conclusion:
I sympathize with this guy who wrote this manifesto. It is also unfortunate that, from what I hear and understand of the matter, this guy is factually in error, probably sexist, and almost certainly undermining his cause.
The worst thing here is the suggestion that there was 100% turnout, instead it was closer to 30%, so only about 20% voted for it. The amendment was found unconstitutional a short time afterwards anyway, finding that marriage is a fundamental right for everyone.
The worst thing?
Suppose there is a referendum in, I don't know, Venezuela or something; that's adequately hypothetical. Imagine they put a referendum banning gay marriage on the ballots in Venezuela, and it passes with similar levels of turnout and support. There's a guy in your office from Venezuela who's reading about it, a little bit troubled by the news, and you say, "wow, I guess 60% of Venezuelans are literally horrible terrible people."
Do you think that he is going to be most upset with the precision and accuracy present in the percentage you used, and not, say, the idea that you just casually pass judgement on what might easily be 60% of his family, extended family, friends, former co-workers, schoolmates, acquaintances, and the like? Not with the way you dismiss entirely their value as moral actors, without any further attempts to seek understanding of them as human beings, pre-emptively closing the door on learning about their culture and their values, not even pretending that you've an interest in understanding their lives as flawed, imperfect human beings, implicitly disclaiming all need to sympathize with their troubles? Not with the way that you, hailing from a background of substantial privilege in the San Francisco Bay Area, college-educated, and now happily earning six figures in a software job, feel that it's right and just to look down on these people, some of whom are fighting to live somewhere better than a shack in the woods?
People are going to a lot of trouble to defend having lousy values. It doesn't mean that's all you are, that one opinion, but having other aspects to your life doesn't let you off the hook. We all have troubles.
You’re not going to change anyone’s mind with this attitude. If you really want progress, and not just to look down on people, why not take a more constructive approach?
https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...
That's my take too, having read the doc. Reminds me of The_Donald -- sometimes correctly identifies an issue, but misses the point entirely on so many levels and does more harm than good to whatever the author's goal was.
>you don't un-people people
And that's exactly how the doc started from the get-go. It decried anyone who dared disagree with it as shunning communication. That's really not the case -- people discussed it, and disagreed with it. It reminds me of those religious freedom laws, that guarantee people's freedom to discriminate to protect their own beliefs. The more layers you follow down, the more of a contradiction the laws become.
But without trying to devolve into the actual politics of it, a large portion of Americans (I'd wager it's the majority) believe that it's okay to exclude people for one reason or another. Americans have voted since Pres. GW Bush on protectionist principles, even President Obama was barely for extending rights until he was forced into it by VP Biden. America is in the middle of a massive demographic shift from the Baby Boomers who have ruined the economy, created massive public debt, destroyed worker protections, and shifted the political power from those in the middle to those at the very top. They did this by unpeopling people. This was an intentional thing done by the religious right starting in the late 70s and really gaining steam in the 80s. Their brand of us vs them found a receptive audience in America, because the Baby Boomers are afraid that what they've created will change, and for the moment there's more of them than other voting populations. Of course this is the natural outcome. Look at how many centrist politicians have left. So yes I personally disagree with what this guy said, but in a public sphere he has every right to say it. Inside of Google however they have the right to fire him for any reason, because there are no worker protections for free speech.
What's your sense of scale here? What does ideological plurality mean to you? What does North Carolina secularism look like? Does North Carolina have a cultural embrace of secularism? Is the bathroom bill a good thermostat for what issues have play in North Carolina?
I would argue that the Bay Area is very fertile ground for diversity. The Bay Area Christians build enclaves of high quality here, bastions of middle-to-high SES wealth, aspirations, and sensibilities. They stand as quality in contrast to the community right outside their legally protected walls.
I would say that the Bay Area is a cutting-edge experiment of secularism and plurality that the world is watching.
I am discussing vice versa by asking mere questions.
It might enrich the discussion to say that it's still illegal for men to have sex with men in North Carolina, it's just unenforceable. North Carolina is also working to say that sodomy laws are not unconstitutional.
The Christians I know around the Bay Area are under no such threat. If anything, churches are enclaves of extreme quality in the Bay Area. It goes to show what a fertile ground this is for diversity.
Since you bring it up, I will observe that I found New York to be a lot more tolerant in practice. Statistically, the political leanings are pretty comparable, but somehow people are less strident in practice, even during my tenure at a company with an explicit institutional commitment to social justice causes.
Among other things, I suspect it may simply be that a lot of people come to New York from a lot of places for a lot more reasons than they do San Francisco. But at the end of the day, it's not even really that Bay Area culture is stridently anti-Christian per se. It's just strident about everything. San Francisco is the sort of place where people scrawl anti-parenting graffiti on the changing tables in the restrooms at Whole Foods to shame new parents for their crimes against the planet.
(My circle of acquaintances in London is still quite small, so I hesitate to generalise, but at least in the tech scene, everything is very international.)
> The Christians I know around the Bay Area are under no such threat. If anything, churches are enclaves of extreme quality in the Bay Area. It goes to show what a fertile ground this is for diversity.
1. There's something about describing religion merely in terms of "churches" and "enclaves" as if there's a box around the realm of acceptable religious activity. Telling people that they are permitted to meet in a consecrated building weekly is the start of religious tolerance, vaguely akin to not prosecuting people under sodomy laws.
2. If you don't know someone with a strong negative opinion of AB 569, you're not really in touch with that diversity.
Was there a thought even slightly in your mind that this was even mildly in tension? Like there will be laws on the books striking people from meeting in a Christian church? Like a political momentum is coming?
That churches are allows to operate tax-free, that Churches often operate businesses flagrantly in view of the community but nobody cares (education), and that there isn't any political force close to bringing tension on this matter, shows that churches are not merely tolerated... they are politically privileged.
? Can you think of any other group with this much power?
And in the Bay Area, I think that's clearer. Churches are bastions of middle-to-high SES wealth, revenue, sensibilities, and aspirations. They are places where parents can aspire for their children to be lawyers, doctors, or engineers. Black churches in other areas work differently; worse. I wonder if a lot of Bay Area Christians never attend even one black church.
I cannot believe it when Christians talk about persecution in California inside their churches. It blows my mind. Will there be a Proposition 8 for Muslims? If you're talking about religious diversity, then I understand. I'm promoting secularism, not religion.
Try to think of any group that has this much political privilege, while simultaneously talking about religious oppression, as if they stand for churches as well as mosques.
2. Why are you talking about whether I'm in touch with diversity?
Not in any practical sense, but that's a pretty low bar, isn't it? The point is that even your own comments are loaded with views about how
> Churches often operate businesses flagrantly in view of the community but nobody cares (education)
Look at the world-view implicit there. This is what I am pointing at. You seem to propose that a church doing things outside "be a place for crazy-people to gather" is something like fundamentally overstepping boundaries.
They have a parable for that. "You do not light a lamp, only to place it under a bushel basket."
> I cannot believe it when Christians talk about persecution in California inside their churches.
Imagine that you are working in California and hold what is an altogether-common Christian view: that "the legal vehicle of marriage should be offered only to man-woman couples with the general idea of founding a family."
Now imagine you donate, in secret, to a cause which supports that view (e.g. Proposition 8) — whilst being sensitive of the fact that many people would find this to imply that they are invalid as people, and so you make a point of not breathing a word of it, instead making it a special point in your daily life to treat any person who would be affected by this with respect. Suppose all of your colleagues and all those who interact with you will rush to your defence if you are accused of any impropriety in this regard.
There is a credible case that you should live in fear of being found out, being decried a hateful bigot in public forums, and losing your job. It has been amply demonstrated.
> Black churches in other areas work differently; worse... Will there be a Proposition 8 for Muslims?
The problems faced by black churches or Muslims may be more acutely serious in a variety of cases, and more serious overall as well, but of course this fails to justify any mistreatment of anyone.
One of my friends is fairly liberal-oriented and she openly says that the "hateful" right doesn't deserve rights or free speech. Her and her friends motto is "tolerance of the intolerant is an oxymoron". For all her talk of love of humans, animals ( she's a vegan ), etc, she has a terrible anger inside her.
I don't know how we fight against our ugly impulses other than adhering to our principles of equality, free speech and individual rights.
It is a difficult and worrying time we live in because neither side is interested in dialogue and each side accuses the other of be hateful and sequesters themselves in their respective echo chambers which radicalizes them even further.
They seem to me like they're saying they don't want to work somewhere their teammates think they're biologically inferior, but they're hoping that HR will ensure that people who think so don't stay on the team.
It was quoted in the main story.
The tweets she put out today come off as combative and hammy.
>It actually gives me motivation to leave Google for the first time in years; the only reason why I enjoy Google is our unified networking.
>Fact: White men are not marginalized like me in tech. White man: You are racist, my grandpa was a great man. You are this relevant.
>Dear white men who thinks they are marginalized, my single eye lash is more marginalized in tech than all of you.
There are proper ways to voice one's concern, but violence against others is not one of them.
So it's only ok for women to be frustrated by systemic stereotyping and marginalization, if-and-only-if she acts like a traditionally oppressed woman in public? Women should just stay in the closet instead of pointing out porblems in the workplace?
> violence against others is not one of them.
What "violence"? What kind of framing or mental gymnastics are you using to interpret any of those posts as "combative" or interpreted as "violence against others"?
The same violence you are imposing upon on me with your words. Albeit these are in the realm of microagressions, it is violence nonetheless. A more modern violence.
Throwing pejoratives at people is verbal violence: What kind of framing or mental gymnastics...
As is responding with loaded questions, like: Women should just stay in the closet instead of pointing out problems in the workplace? This is intellectually dishonest and does more to insight altercation than have an informed and open discussion.
Coincidentally, these are not too far off from the author's comments.
I can tell you, in Belgium, in my experience and what I hear, this is not an issue whatsoever. Most women I worked with actually preferred working in teams of mainly men.
Do you really care so much whether the person you work with is male, female, black, white, comes from a different background, etc? I just want to work with people that I like and who can handle the job.
http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2017/08/04/men-women-work-stud...
I do this, regularly, in the UK. I really, really don't want to be the sole target of the one bigot in the room who none of the other men think is a problem (or at least not enough to speak to) - I'm meeting people to enjoy myself, and navigating the social complexities involved in accommodating people who attack me based on gender (plus other visible things I can't do much about) is not fun. Having another woman present tends to result in such behaviour being dialed down a tonne, or at least the ability to step out with her for a few minutes.
After it became obvious that the classic marxist idea of proletariat and bourgeoisie and the practical implementation of ideologies based on this idea led to some of the worst crimes on humanity, marxist academics replaced the whole thing with oppressed and oppressor, which has now become the basis for the ideology these SJWs operate on today. Everyone who belongs to a group that does well for themselves is now an oppressor, while the people belonging to groups that do badly are the oppressed. That's why White people, Asians and Jews (who usally count as White) are the oppressors who need to be diversified to ensure social justice, while women, "Minorities", LGBTQI+ people etc. are the oppressed "diversity". Skill and abilities take a backseat.
Of course these SJW bullies find an easy footing in software development, a discipline that is not exactly known for being pursued by the most assertive and confident males (or women for that matter).
In Europe the problem isn't quite as bad yet, though here in Germany it's getting worse with increasingly more university activites relating to feminism, diversity, history revisionism through marxist lenses etc. popping up. But since (at least in Germany) we don't have the admixture of humanities and STEM many US colleges and universities have, this stuff is mostly contained within the social sciences so far.
The Twitter feeds of some of the people linked in this article read like a Conservative's caricature of an SJW btw.
As do other people. People just want to do work in an industry they want to work in with people they want to work with and don't want people to use use their gender, sex, racial or cultural background to prevent them doing it.
If this is because they have been systematically discriminated against in tech and primed at a young age with BS like "cars are for boys and dolls are for girls" then yes, absolutely this is a huge deal. If it just so happened that they were not interested because they don't have the "technology gene" then this would not be a big deal, but that is nonsense and all the evidence points to the former.
There is an interesting documentary called "The Norway Paradox"[1] that explores why do we see a much higher rate of gender segregation in developed countries. The thesis the documentary advances is that there are indeed innate differences between the sexes, and with higher freedom that can be found in advanced societies, the people are freer to choose a job that fits their innate tendencies rather than be forced into something else by economic or social circumstances.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bTKRkmwtGY
First of all, what evidence? And secondly, does it? (Like the horrific experiment on David Reimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer)
I have 1 son and 2 daughters, and I have plenty of nieces and cousins. The personality of each child has a bigger impact on how they behave than I had imagined. And also, boys are way different than girls. They are equal, but they are different none the less.
So instead of trying to throw them all in one pile and expect to have a 50-50 men-women working in technology, accept the difference, and let any person decide what they want to do in their lives.
Boys are different than girls. They are equal, but different. If you can't accept this, then I can imagine you have all kinds of diversity problems where you expect that everyone is the same, likes to do the same things, etc.
I recall a funny answer when one of my computer science professors asked "What can we do so that more girls sign up of Master in Computer Science". One smart guy answered: "Make sure it has less to do with computers". (In US you would probably get kicked out of the university because someone felt offended, or that it's a sexist remark)
Women are very welcome in technology, I worked with a lot of very nice and smart women, and had one of the best managers that was a woman and mother of 2 kids. But why do you expect that the average woman will have as much interest in technology as the average man?
You might be interested in this blogpost which cites 27 different peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting an argument that social priming can explain much of observed gender gaps in STEM (and another 9 more scientific papers just to flesh out the argument): http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s...
> "Make sure it has less to do with computers" > someone felt that it's a sexist remark
Ignoring for a moment whether that's "sexist", can we agree that if those 27 scientific papers are to be believed, such remarks directly hurt women in computer science who would otherwise be do better?
That is patently false, and you should not make factual claims under these circumstances. These claims add to the noise, not the signal.
The scientific evidence for innate psychological differences between girls and boys is overwhelming. There is a clear scientific consensus on this. I cannot fathom how this can still be controversial.
Specifically about your "cars vs dolls" example, I'll give you two quotations right of the bat:
- Shown two pictures, one of a mobile (physical-mechanical object) and one of a face (social object), there is a clear gender difference how much a child will look at the mobile vs face. (Yes, boy likes mobile, girl likes face.) In newborns btw. so that is hardly an artifact of human societal norms. [1]
- Offered a choice between a toy truck and a doll, there is a clear gender difference how much an adolescent will play with the truck vs doll. (Yes, boy likes truck, girl likes doll.) In monkeys btw, so that is hardly an artifact of human societal norms. [2]
[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.627...
[2] https://www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-truck...
{Ed. spelling}
However, your claim that there is a "overwhelming", "clear scientific consensus" is lacking in citations, your one broken link to what I assume was supposed a scientific study and one link to a pop science blogpost (which links only to other posts on the same blog and not any actual scientific papers) notwithstanding.
In fact the overwhelming scientific consensus is that the opposite is true. Check out this blogpost with working links to 22 different peer-reviewed scientific papers on how social priming can differentially affect how men and women, or white students and black students, etc perform at various academic and cognitive tasks (there are actually 27 links to such papers but 5 are broken; there are also links to 9 more scientific papers besides, just to flesh out the argument): http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s...
I challenge you to find working links to 22 different peer-reviewed scientific papers arguing that women's underrepresentation in STEM is not due to systemic discrimination but is explained wholly by other factors such as innate psychological differences.
In fact, I'll give you a head start. The blogpost I linked to already links to 6 such papers, so if you can find 16 more, I'll concede that maybe there isn't the scientific consensus I thought there was.
That notwithstanding, I wouldn't think of claiming that societal norms do not at all affect outcomes. Because it would be next to impossible to prove, and I'd give it a rather low a priori probability. Just what these effects really are and how big they are is a matter of ongoing debate. C.f. "The Norway Paradox".
So I guess we're roughly on the same page then, that the observable variation in outcome is caused by a mix of innate and societal factors, and the real discussion to be had is about how to tease them apart and quantify their respective contributions?
Have you considered survival bias?
The women that were bothered would have left those conditions in greater numbers.
The problem in not caring about this statistical filtering is that it creates a blind spot for your company. It is harder to empathize with the unknown.
When you build products that extend the world's social experience, this becomes a severe competitive danger.
Sorry, but that is just bullshit. I'm currently making a tool to create RPGs. I'm the sole male developer.
To my surprise, I have more women creating games in it than men. It seems that they really love the whole storytelling aspect of it.
So to say that you can only build something that is only useful to people similar to yourself, is just plain wrong. I'm a programmer building something for non-programmers.
If you want to make something for your customers, listen to them, see how they use your product, look at their interests etc. Is it really mandatory to hire the same demographic as a product manager???
That is absolutely good advice. Note that I only said it was harder to empathize with the unknown.
However, an obvious result of the Two Generals' Problem is that you can only communicate through common knowledge. Getting it takes more work than having it.
For instance, it is likely that when you first built the tool, you made its UI use a language you understand. Let's say there is suddenly a large amount of interest in having that tool from a country with a language and culture you do not know.
Learning the specifics of that culture takes more work than having someone with that knowledge in your company. They may know what keyboard those people have, how they expect their right-to-left language to be input, how they react to specific UIs.
A company that has this knowledge in-house is more likely to get that market than one which relies on surveys. For companies that target a large number of markets with shifting needs, it makes diversity a business requirement to outpace competitors.
It's not impossible for men to write good female characters, of course, it's just something that a man is less likely to be able to pull off, or to focus on.
I see this implicit assumption everywhere that diversity comes up, yet at best I've only seen studies indicating better workplace environment or higher productivity on mixed teams. But never anything in detail.
And why does diversity fail so hard when it comes to physical activities?
Off the top of my head, spelunking would likely be a pretty diverse physical activity.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/10/homo-naledi-...
I'm not sure whether an elaboration by them would indicate that they experience more sexism by men, or that overall its more of a topic brought up by women, but they did say there were more issues with men here.
I think alot of the issues with women in the U.S. vs Europe are due to the fact that Europe is more urbanized and concentrated. Women and men live and work in closer quarters with more socialized economics where women are overall more educated, urbanized, financially independent, and the sexual and in general culture is more liberally progressive.
In the U.S., we are way behind when it comes to womens socioeconomic equality, and education quality in general. Concurrently, there are large number of men live suburban lives, with housewives who are to some degree financially dependent on them, and the idea of an a women who doesn't fit the housewife/trophy wife/soccer mom/etc etc whateve that American culture props up as a way of life for women to idolize, causes more cultural friction and results in more emotional isolation for women working in male dominated work forces.
Not all of it is intentional. Most guys I work with are fine, but older than me, married. I'm 27 single and don't intend to settle down anytime soon, maybe travel more if anything. So every company I've worked for, is filled with men who golf together or do other things. I'm not explicitly excluded anymore than I'm not interested in doing those things and they know that. If I was invited, I wouldnt go.
This is overall pretty a pretty trivial example, but I am trying to emphasize how the undercurrent of culture in America is a large contributer to this, and not necessarily any one persons fault or a mans conscious decision to come across as exclusionary.
Regardless, the document this article refers to goes far beyond that, and I have to say, as an INTJ female, this biology crap is ridiculous. I am introvert and would prefer any day to stay inside and read, code, play video games than go out and "socialize".
In my experience, as an educated female introvert, I am demonized for NOT being a social butterfly, I have been called a bitch for not smiling when I say something in a meeting, because there is a subconscious expectation that girls are supposed to be adorably cute in everything that they do, or ease poltiical or social tension and are viewed as "out of line" for being the source of it, and men are rewarded for agressive aberrhant behavior and lauded as the leader of the group for equally outlier behavior. If a man is confident in his capabilities, I've found him to be considered respected, but if a women is confident in her opinion in a meeting or her belief in her own capabilities, I've often been told I'm a know it all, and am reminded immediately why I need to be "knocked" down a peg to be reminded how I'm not as great as I think I am. It can be a little confusing to work in male dominated environment and be punished for the same behavior that men are rewarded for. This does not happen to me as much at my current job, or on my team or my department, but you have to wonder how much day to day life in the long term impacts what paths women take in their lives and careers based on the rewards and punishments they receive and their economic incentive to act and perform like a man, which is all subject to current socioeconomics and politics, moreso than a woman's "biology"
This document serves one purpose and on purpose only, to perpetuate stereotypes that many women do not meet, and recategorize all actions and behaviors they have that women DO meet the &...
You wouldn't if you were working in Europe.
If this would happen here, all colleagues would have a great laugh out of this document, sharing it with others to show "What crazy John has done this time, making a whole document about his retarded idea."
If this guy is the asocial hunchback working in his office all day, avoiding others, but none the less doing great work, the company probably would keep him. Because everyone already knows what kind of a nutcase he is.
If he is working with other colleagues, this is probably a reason to fire him. First of all because this is not professional whatsoever, and because this obviously shows that he is not able to work with other people.
It this is a manager or HR person, he would be fired on the spot. Everyone would agree with that. If not what would raise some eyebrows too.
I fully understand that in US, you would care, but this is also the reason why the whole situation in US so surreal to me. I read that some coworkers even agree with them. And that makes it a problem indeed. It is just strange that US and EU cultures are so alike, but still have such a big difference in how female colleagues are treated at the workplace.
Re: Eastern Europe.
You can thank communist regimes for more female workers in technology.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/women-in-tech-why-bulgaria-and-...
That's an interesting way to put it. The estimates I've seen (e.g. [1], [2]) have the frequency of INTJs among men significantly higher than the frequency of INTJs among women. If INTJs are more likely to become engineers, then those frequencies predict that there will be more male engineers than female engineers.
[1] https://www.capt.org/mbti-assessment/estimated-frequencies.h...
[2] https://mypersonality.info/personality-types/population-gend...
I don't remember the study, but apparently in former communist countries, while gender roles are very strong, women were expected to work in factories along side men for a very long time.
Which is probably why you have a relatively more balanced tech workforce there today vs the West.
However, if you read the document, the author basis the premise of his perception of faulty and "good intentions gone wrong" programs to correct for gender pay gap disparity as due to the "underlying biologicial differences" between men and women.
Women are far less likely to be INTJs, but most female Engineers I know are not INTJs, and furthermore, if you are using the idea that INTJ is an indicator of someone being more likely to be an engineer or STEM I guess we can say in this case, and that somehow there is a biologicial difference (plausible, were not advanced enough in biology and sciences, psychology and neurobiology to be able to atribute personality genres to unique biologicial differences that can correctly an consistently identify a Meyers Brigg personality type, maybe its possible in the future, maybe not, maybe thats not the underlying relationship, who knows yet), then the entire premise of the author is debunked.
If my personality type whether as a male or female, is going to kick me in a direction more likely to end up in STEM (interest in math and sciences) then youre statement reconcludes there is no "underlying biological differences" that exist for all women that never occur with men.
The idea that personality traits contribute to biological nuances that can occur in men and women, then the author loses his point.
I'm also not aware of any Meyers Briggs personality type that comes with the term "neurotic" but according to the author, all women are, and this is not even up for debate.
I'm also leaving out the entire obvious consideration that I would assume is a given in all these conversations, but seem not to be addressed in any way whatsoever by the authors 10 page document, that even if we could attribute say INTJ or similiar MBriggs personality types to highly correlating with females in STEM, and then showing less women are likely to have those personality types, we still don't know what causes personality types, or have biologicial blueprints for them, so we can not assume "underlying biological differences between sexes" especially considering MBs are not sexually based.
Furthermore, we are leaving out the fact that humans are an evolving species and we experience a microcosm of our own societal influences that influence how people think, act, perceive, spend, procreate, educate, eat etc based on our socioeconomic construct. To throw aside the mere idea that being surrounded by men who actually write off most of your actions as neurotic and believe this as truth, could not have some lng term damaging effect on your ability to be taken seriously or perceived as successful or result in an imposed biased with a positive feedback loop on how the gender who is not in an economic majority of empowerment may be held back, is just about as childish and ignorant as missing the point of a first science experiment where you failed miserably because you didn't have controls for your experiment, or consider that different contributing factors could result in different outcomes and calibrate for them.
No, from this authors perspective, women are neurotic. This is a fact:
"Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."
https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...
It's also true that there seem to be population-level differences that are connected to aptitude for engineering. If we're trying to answer the question "to what extent is sexism excluding women from engineering?" then these differences become important. If there are no population-level differences then any deviation from a 50/50 sex ratio among engineers is probably due to some kind of sex discrimination. But if there are real population-level differences then it would be a mistake to insist on a 50/50 sex ratio, and a mistake to assume that sexism is the problem if the ratio is not 50/50. (Of course, there might still be sexism, even if there are also population-level differences.)
The problem comes when people try to apply population-level sex differences at an individual level. Even if fewer women have an aptitude for engineering, that says nothing at all about any individual female engineer. The right way to assess an the ability of an engineer, whether male or female, is by looking at the information about what they've done -- they've achieved X qualification, won Y award, built Z product etc. -- not by assuming gender differences that can only be observed at the population level. Unfortunately, both negative and positive discrimination muddy the waters here, making these signals less useful.
Yes, for various reasons.
1. There is less diversity of experience/thought.
2. Programming/engineering fields are generally good for society (and hence highly rewarded). There is a lot of unfulfilled demand for more engineers. If we can increase the number of people available for these jobs, that's good for society, and if we are for some reason "excluding" or "depressing" some people from entering, that's bad.
3. Not sure about this, but I think the incidence of sexual harassment or similarly bad things goes way up when there are fewer women.
None of this is to say we should be forcing anyone to work in something they don't want to. But as I heard it, it seems like there are societal reasons why women tend to be less interested in technology than men, and these are not biological. Again, not clear on the science here, but I'm just answering your main objection, which is "should we even care" assuming it is a cultural problem and not something biological. (For what it's worth, it seems clear to me that it's at least partly societal).
It depends what the company wants to achieve. Some smarter R&D/focus group/more intelligent way of integrating diverse populations into the company's DNA, not just blunt diversity employee policies in some PR-friendly reactionary manner.
https://vimeo.com/9270320#t=1525s
And the book recommendation: "Why Aren't More Women in Science?: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence". (researchers from either side of the arguments debate each other in the same book.)
Let me start by saying that diversity is always important. Without diversity you tend to end up with an echo chamber that produces things that are only worthwhile for the subset of people represented within the group.
However, it is important to think about the cost that diversity targets can have on both the under-represented and over-represented groups within a company. Diversity targets for hiring or promotion will mean the over-represented group(s) will tend to view those who are hired or promoted with disdain. Meanwhile the under-represented group(s) may well doubt their position within the company, worrying that they are in their position only due to belonging to the flavour of the month diversity target. The other part is that members of the under-represented group who were previously employed on their own merits are likely to hold a similar position to that of the majority group(s), for similar reasons.
Now it's time for an anecdote... My girlfriend works as an engineer in an oil and gas company. Her company is fully on board with the current gender diversity push, and has created several new positions at a fairly high level specifically to meet their diversity targets. These are high level positions with no one reporting to them in the current structure (which was defined by the massive restructure following the fall in oil prices). Her issues with the positions and their seniority boils down to education and time in the industry. If they were being filled by candidates based on skill, a large proportion of them would be male (and probably white). This would be because the vast majority of the people with the relevant experience are white males. By pushing the female agenda, she fears that not only will these roles be filled by poor candidates, it will also promote the stereotype that women are unsuitable for the job.
There is room for diversity targets, but they must be mindful of the talent pool available for the specific job. Whilst it hurts at this point, the most reasonable course is to promote equality in education. If your company is hiring on skill, then the equality issues will resolve in time, without making anyone resentful of the first year grad who got promoted to team leader because the company needed to meet a quota.
To derail myself slightly following the above wall of text. Would the current white, male disgruntlement be as bad had there not been the GFC etc, and the subsequent (and continuing layoffs/stagnation of wages?
The conclusion is to get the right person for the job. The gender shouldn't be considered because the reality is not black and white.
Base on this reasoning, complains about imbalance of gender quota or salaries are not acceptable. The salary is/should be attached to the job and performance, not the gender.
In France we have a similar issue with the porportion of black football players in the national team. People who complain about that don't understand that they just picked the best players. This gender debate is the same problem.
I'd argue that it's not the same problem. I'm not French, but I doubt that there are calls to make the Football team more representative of the population by forcefully limiting the number of black people in football teams starting at the junior level.
Which is what we effectively are seeing in the US - Harvard class of 2021 will be <50% white, while the country obviously isn't.
It is the same problem because the argument invoked is that the proportion of people of color should match the one of the french population. So the women proportion in context X or Y should match the one of the population. That argument would be valid if people were chosen randomly, but that's obviously not the case. So this argument is really bogus and falling for it is the real problem.
I strongly doubt you can make an argument that these people are there on merit alone.
If the most prolific group (Asians) has a growth of 2.9%, then the possibility of one group, even if minor to have had a growth of 1000%+ (0.2% to 2.5%) is virtually impossible.
I think this proves my point that Native Americans (including Native Hawaiians and other peoples) are vastly overrepresented at Harvard.
He did not shit on leftist values. That can't even be a misunderstanding, that was just a lie (plain and simple). He simply pointed out that society uses a mix of leftist and rightist values, and neither side is 100% right.
Google has people openly say that "if you are republican then you should be fired" (and much much worse).
Nobody will criticize these lies, because this is a witch hunt, and one where this guy must be publicly shamed and destroyed, and anyone who speaks up against it must also be destroyed.
I hope many Googlers take notes and screenshots, because this is a clear discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen. I know some Google employees who are adding to their lists of future discrimination lawsuits. Harassment for political opinions.
This is what happens if you express an opinion against the dogma that is "There is ZERO difference between genders, it's ALL societal, NOTHING innate".
The guy started with a whole section about how you cannot use averages to judge individuals (he even had graphs showing exactly how you cannot), but that a 50/50 equal men/women engineering pool is not a realistic goal nor helpful because there are innate differences between men and women.
He then sprinkled it with some cherry-picked and possibly incorrect research, but is the basic premise wrong? No.
If I say "There are clear differences between the performance of black and white people on various cognitive tasks." That's a true statement. If I follow it up with "and that's due to the biological inferiority of the black race", I'm probably a racist, even though my basic premise is not wrong.
The arguments one uses to support a conclusion are as important as the premises one started with.