This is an aspect that has always been bugging me as well. There is this implied notion that for men, it was ok or even encouraged to be nerdy and spend all their spare time in front of a screen.
In my experience, committing to this lifestyle meant being socially crowded out. Some people were unpopular to begin with and sort of found refuge in the computer world out of necessity, some of us accepted being unpopular/uncool because we did not care.
One possible explanation, but potentially an offensive one, and only based on personal experience: fewer women were willing to make this sacrifice, at least in school. Interestingly, this was not because boys would be unwelcoming but because other women would judge them harshly for stepping out.
On a related anecdote, I frequently observed girls in school downplaying their math abilities in front of their friends - not because men judged them, but because they did not want to stand out in front of their friends.
I suppose the interesting question is why they felt this way, and I would not wager to answer it. I just think the theory 'men are not letting women into tech' simply does not hold up in the formative school years.
Only very recently (since the social network movie) there has been this glorification of tech in combination with the startup lifestyle.
I would argue that boys and girls today still have this attitude, and now Radio Shack has died (and in that context, isn't Raspberry Pi such a blessing?). It's hard to persuade boys and girls that math and science are cool. It's also unfortunate because a lot of parents think that throwing an iPad in front of their kid will make them more technical, when the characters coming over YouTube / Minecraft are just cancer.
>Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.
+1 - that's how I remember it too!
I asked the following 12 days ago [0]:
>One thing I'd like to ask the women in this forum:
>If you'd grown up back in the day before tech was cool and techies were (generally) just nerds with no money, would you have still been interested in tech?
This is how I remember it in the UK, too. Computers were incredibly uncool and only people with zero interest in being cool were willing to invest their time in learning about them. If anything, these people were crowded out from lots of other domains and picked computing because it was the only place which would accept them.
Now everybody is trying to turn this around, and imply a conspiracy to "[create] the now-familiar stereotype of the computer programmer as a reclusive, eccentric man".
The stereotype wasn't created be a shadowy group of men to exclude women. That is absurd. Why would sexists block women from programming, while letting them into plenty of other more high status jobs?
Reclusive, eccentric men have difficulty finding jobs in sales, law, finance and management, and technology is one of the few jobs where they can make a difference.
The stereotype wasn't created be a shadowy group of men to exclude women. That is absurd. Why would sexists block women from programming, while letting them into plenty of other more high status jobs?
Well, we should be careful with claims like that. Think of the gender of most of the secretaries at all the jobs we've had. And little things, like if you're in a relationship, how often do you do the laundry and dishes?
More directly, women really weren't allowed to become the things they wanted to be until the 70's. We like to act like that was so long ago, but that's one grandpa's lifetime. Not even a very old grandpa.
I'm not saying it's due to systemic sexism, just that we're talking about a group of people whose very recent ancestors were denied opportunities we take for granted. They must have faced enormous social pressure to conform.
That is my point though: as sexism reduced women joined high status industries to take jobs that require high verbal intelligence. They didn't join programming despite it being a high growth industry: why?
I'd source this but what I'm discussing is just a Google away and a bunch of studies are never going to convince anybody.
Anyway, my point is that the narrative of the article goes against my lived experience. One is allowed to believe their own eyes.
And little things, like if you're in a relationship, how often do you do the laundry and dishes?
I've been in a relationship for 3 years. I do literally all of the dishes, all of the cooking, all of my own laundry and my GFs laundry more often than she does. I'm also the only one who vacuums. I'm probably selfish here: caregiving and housekeeping can be very rewarding.
We like to act like that was so long ago, but that's one grandpa's lifetime.
But there is no reason we have to do things like our grandfathers. Change can be hard, but it's also incredibly liberating to do what you believe is right without worrying about so-called "social pressure". Change comes from the inside out.
There was a really interesting nerds vs feminists war on Scott Aaronson's blog a few years ago:
> I believe that “the problem of the nerdy heterosexual male” is surely one of the worst social problems today that you can’t even acknowledge as being a problem
1. Programming didn't start in the 80s or 90s. It started in the 40s-50s, and we've been doing it for seventy years now. When you were (by your own admission) a socially awkward boy interested in PCs, there were 50-year-old professional programmers working in banks, defense, aerospace and other industries whose programming culture was very different, because they didn't have computers at home at all, and all of them were first exposed to computers in college at the earliest.
2. When historians and sociologists say terms like "crowd out", they do not mean there was any conscious intent behind it, let alone ill-intent. They describe social dynamics. Also, since the eighties at least, professional programmers in the industry have had a lot of power -- whether you felt it or not -- as evident by the size and influence of the tech companies where they worked.
I think number two is a very important point. My problem is that the entire media, including this article, is using it with ill intent to paint men as sexist.
But that's the point. The term "sexist" itself, at least in its scholarly meaning, does not imply intent. Sexism is a feature of a social structure where women are granted significantly less power than men. The prevailing hypothesis -- which has a lot of supporting evidence -- is that we are all sexist, men and women alike, merely by virtue of being socialized in a sexist society.
When people first discovered microbes and claimed that people were spreading diseases by, say, not washing their hands properly, they did not mean that people were spreading disease intentionally, but it was nevertheless a fact that they were. But to understand why, you had to know about germs (which are invisible to the naked eye, and were only known to those who study the subject), and you had to be proactive in order not to spread diseased.
While that would be a nice narrative, I don't think it matches reality. If it did, the people outraged by apparent sexism would be trying to educate the sexists instead of getting them fired.
Certainly such people exist, but they're drowned out by the outrage machine that's trying to take away their livelihood.
I find it funny how the few of men whose livelihood may have been affected by unfair allegations is compared to the millions of women who are harassed while earning their livelihood and/or pushed away from earning one, every year, for centuries. Frankly, I'm amazed at how level headed the "outrage machine" is given at how much bigger the real outrage should have been. Also, those who want or are willing to be educated have plenty of resources at their disposal. The evidence is so overwhelming that there can be few if any those who are exposed to it and yet remain unconvinced. At this point, it's mostly diehards that are left, and the reason they are left is precisely because they don't want to see the evidence. Dawkins doesn't really think he can educate all evolution deniers on apparent evolution, and we don't think we can educate all those who wish to perpetuate sexism.
Your analogy to evolution is a textbook false equivalency. That you think the evidence for your narrative is as strong as the evidence for evolution is frankly absurd.
And your patent acceptance that outrage is a legitimate response to these scenarios highlights exactly the problem with how this has been playing out. Suddenly your comparison to Dawkins falls apart quite spectacularly.
> That you think the evidence for your narrative is as strong as the evidence for evolution is frankly absurd.
It really isn't, but seeing how adamant you are not to study the topic, I have no idea how you'd know whether it's absurd or not. But you are forced to declare the subject absurd, as that is the only thing that can justify, in your mind, not even bothering to examine it with any care (as, I assume, you consider yourself otherwise curious), which is what you want; namely, you don't want to see the fossils, and I really can't make you.
> Suddenly your comparison to Dawkins falls apart quite spectacularly.
Oh! You got me there! But one should bear in mind that creationism isn't what condemned millions to dependence and humiliation. A wise man once said that it's easy to remain cool-headed about other people's problems.
A 1987 study found 700 out of 480,000 Earth and life scientists don't believe in evolution. Are you suggesting these gender topics have a comparable consensus ratio? If so, evidence of this consensus should be trivial for you to produce.
So go ahead, I firmly believe attacking the strongest opposing argument, and I'm only interested in facts. Pick what you believe is Damore's weakest evidence, just one point, and show me the evidence of consensus contrary to Damore's position with a ratio on the same order as above. Then I will happily acknowledge that your analogy to evolution is 100% faithful.
> But one should bear in mind that creationism isn't what condemned millions to dependence and humiliation
A humiliation and dependence that none of the outraged people actually lived through. It's amazing that women could put up with the insane discrimination and sexism to achieve gender parity in so many other male dominated fields, like law and medicine, all without needing the outrage machine, but they are somehow powerless against a bunch of nerds who, by and large, just want to play with cool tech.
Frankly, it makes one question whether outrage is really a useful response at all.
> Are you suggesting these gender topics have a comparable consensus ratio?
Uh, yeah. A comparable ratio of social scholars are convinced that sexism is a major cause of the power disparity between the sexes.
> If so, evidence of this consensus should be trivial for you to produce.
It is. Like I said, it's on fucking Wikipedia!
> A humiliation and dependence that none of the outraged people actually lived through.
Really? You must lead a charmed life. Do you have any idea how many women experience sexual harassment at work every year in the US alone?
> It's amazing that women could put up with the insane discrimination and sexism to achieve gender parity in so many other male dominated fields, like law and medicine, all without needing the outrage machine, but they are somehow powerless against a bunch of nerds who, by and large, just want to play with cool tech.
Ha! Are you aware of the "outrage machine" (or "political action", in the professional academic jargon) that was required to get us to the point where women are even allowed to practice medicine or at all (or to vote)? That achievement wasn't gained by "putting up" with anything. You think "this is outrage?! Take a look what it took to get women the right to vote in Britain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette#Early_20th_century...
I always find it funny (and indicative of a complete ignorance of the subject) when people think that feminists today have taken it too far (of course, conservatives often acknowledge the justice of past progress yet claim that this time it's too much).
The fight with nerds isn't the longest or hardest -- far from it; it's just the most recent.
> Frankly, it makes one question whether outrage is really a useful response at all.
That is a good question, but one that history can thankfully answer. Yes, it turns out that outrage can be extremely effective. Of course, it's hard not to be outraged in the face of injustice (just look at how outraged some people were after Damore's firing, even though this is a truly rare occurrence, and he did cause a scene that required the CEO of Google to cut short his family vacation).
> Uh, yeah. A comparable ratio of social scholars are convinced that sexism is a major cause of the power disparity between the sexes.
That's not the claim being disputed. Either you're trying to participate in too many threads and losing the context, or you have serious reading comprehension problems.
> It is. Like I said, it's on fucking Wikipedia!
Show it. You keep saying this, yet your comment history cites no specific link showing this consensus, and particularly for the topic we're actually discussing, not the topic you seem to think we're discussing.
> Do you have any idea how many women experience sexual harassment at work every year in the US alone?
Every single one. But that's a false equivalence to what we were talking about.
> Take a look what it took to get women the right to vote in Britain:
Now look at the effect these actions actually had in convincing people. Public opinion only turned in their favour when world war I started and they ceased all violent activities and showed how they could positively contribute to society by stepping into traditional male roles.
> I always find it funny (and indicative of a complete ignorance of the subject) when people think that feminists today have taken it too far
Yet another straw man. Saying it's taken too far today does not entail feminists didn't also take it too far in the past.
> That is a good question, but one that history can thankfully answer. Yes, it turns out that outrage can be extremely effective.
It also led to the election of Donald Trump. Yay for outrage!
Like our other thread, it's clear you have some particular axe to grind and instead of addressing my specific arguments, you're shouting down some imaginary opponent. This is an unfortunate tactic employed on both sides, and I frankly don't have the patience for it.
That's not at all what I claimed. There is rampant sexual harassment, not just in tech but in many fields, but we should have been horrified indeed to learn that sexual harassment is so pervasive as to drive a large percentage of women out. What we see is that culture drives away a significant portion of women.
You're supposed to see that the media considers it to be malevolently sexist. Redefining the terminology so that "sexism" somehow is a neutral term is, for lack of a better phrase, "not an argument".
I don’t see it. I certainly see many references to it as a bad thing that needs addressing, just like germs are a real and serious problem that needs fighting, but that doesn’t mean that the people who spread germs do it with the intent to cause others harm. So I don’t see “malevolent sexism”, and I don’t see references to Damore as a misogynist.
> 1. Programming didn't start in the 80s or 90s. It started in the 40s-50s,
Programming in the 40s and 50s was very different from programming in the 80s or 90s and it's disingenuous to conflate them or suggest that they are the same.
This is just one anecdote, but I'd like to share my personal experience. Fitting in with the typical boys who took computer classes in high school was really difficult and unpleasant. I'd been using computers and writing code longer than anyone there thanks to parental encouragement, but as a girl that didn't matter.
Girls in the class got picked on all the time. I got nicknamed "secretary" and singled out every class by the other nerds, getting told to go be a secretary because I could type fast, should input their code for them instead of writing my own, etc etc. People pulled classic bully moves like pulling my chair away when I went to sit down. I felt more bullied by them than I ever did by other kids. In my personal experience, the socially awkward computer boys were actively unwelcoming to girls, and awkwardness did not preclude meanness.
This resonates with my own experience as well. I have been programming since I was 10 in a country where I was the first of my peers whose family got a PC. I got bullied both by the "jocks" and by the "nerds." The jocks bullied me because I was a nerd while the nerds made fun of my ambitions and disparaged my looks. Fun times!
The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a western (probably American) cultural artifact. For instance I have worked with a lot of Indian immigrants who are programmers and I don't find the correlation between social awkwardness and the people doing programming.
While programming might be appealing to socially awkward western/American men , I don't think one should go from that to concluding that they're the only people innately drawn to it.
The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a western (probably American) cultural artifact
It was around that time in the 80s that "the nerd" or "the geek" became a staple movie character. Computers up 'til then had just been a piece of industrial machinery like a lathe or a microscope. Now they were associated with "losers". Richard Pryor in Superman III. Revenge Of The Nerds. Etc etc.
And by and large society was perfectly happy to relegate computing to these losers and shun them. Noone cared about the demographics of these losers, either, it was not "problematic". It's only recently when the geeks have built something that took over the world, that people are saying, hey, I didn't do the work or make the sacrifices but I deserve the rewards. That's where we get "brogrammers" et al.
The article posted a few days ago suggested that people from places like India are pushed into tech for financial reasons, being one of the few options to escape extreme poverty. Because of that there is also a more equal distribution of men to women.
Whereas Americans have far greater choice when it comes to being able to sustain oneself, and thus tech is not a top choice of – well – anyone, except among those 'socially awkward men'. The harsh reality, and one that is difficult to imagine for the small few of us who actually enjoy this kind of thing, is that tech is a highly undesirable career path for most people. Men and women alike.
But the tech worker gender gap is much higher in the US than it is in India, so isn't this evidence of exactly what the parent comment is implying? US -> computers associated with nerds and social outcasts for a long time, now we have a big gender gap in CS degree holders and tech workers. India -> computers much less stigmatized, now we see a lower gender gap there.
I don't think it's a stretch to imagine the socially awkward men you've met in the field aging into slightly less socially awkward older men tasked with hiring new developers. When hiring, it seems a small logical jump that they will higher more people like themselves (socially awkward men) and avoid people who differ. It's a pretty commonplace dynamic and an easy trip to fall into.
What surprises me is how hard people are resisting recognizing this dynamic, and insisting the current state is somehow the "natural state".
I have not citation but from the recent articles on HN, is the problem not that they are not enough female CS graduates to hire from? The crowding out is happening in high school and college.
Nope, the argument was that the current state was caused by both social and biological effect, and that it is harmful to insist that the cause is entirely, or mostly social. Honestly we don't really know how large are contributions from social and biological effect.
>>Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.
Actually this true of any area of work that is kind of relatively new with progress and overall scene changing very rapidly.
What you see in Tech, there are plenty of such examples in early Industrial revolution or Renaissance.
Most people only want to get in because their either want a job, or they think there is an element of easy money. Its only when the effort vs return equation becomes clear and you realize its way harder than you thought - The 'make it easy for me' chorus grows.
> Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.
> These are not the kind of people I would attribute any power to "crowd out" anyone.
These are also the reasons the SJWs and other bullies from the regressive left have had such an easy time finding footing in the software development world lately and continue to do so.
> Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included. These are not the kind of people I would attribute any power to "crowd out" anyone.
The "crowding out" happened in the 1960s. Like the article points out, the stereotypical image of a computer programmer as a "socially awkward man" did not exist before the 60s. The creation of that very image is what led to "crowding out". And now, you are mentioning the same self-fulfilling prophecy.
> Computers were new and complicated, a unsafe bet for people who were so good included into society.
That's precisely the main point of the article. The reason why programming was left to women. Then men just took over when it was field tested and proven to be a profitable business. Doesn't matter how awkward those men were, they were still men.
Second, nerds can do a perfectly effective job pushing women out of the profession without being aggressive or having social power. We do a lot to gender the profession in ways that has little to do with the work. Think about all the references to hiring "cowboy coders" and "code ninjas." We emphasize hiring the lone gunman coder who learned to code in their basements, while the job actually is highly collaborative and team oriented.
> Second, nerds can do a perfectly effective job pushing women out of the profession without being aggressive or having social power. We do a lot to gender the profession in ways that has little to do with the work. Think about all the references to hiring "cowboy coders" and "code ninjas." We emphasize hiring the lone gunman coder who learned to code in their basements, while the job actually is highly collaborative and team oriented.
If the casual use of innocuous phrases such as those are "pushing" women out of the software development profession, then I would conclude that either:
a.) women, on average, have fragile psyches and avoid working in rough-and-tumble environments where phrases such as "cowboy coder" (the horror!) are tossed around. They need an environment where speech is tightly controlled so as not to upset them or scare them off, or
b.) an overwhelming majority of women tend to not be interested enough in software development as a career to pursue one.
So, they're engaged in other STEM fields at 2x-3x the extent they're engaged in CS, despite the fact that those other fields are often more intellectually rigorous and challenging and despite the fact that most of those fields are dominated by computers and software --- in fact, many of them are even more challenging from a CS perspective than computer science itself as it is practiced in the industry, which is mostly about connecting database rows to HTML forms --- but despite all that, you're convinced that women just "tend not to be interested enough in software development"?
> So, they're engaged in other STEM fields at 2x-3x the extent they're engaged in CS...
That statement is so broad as to render it utterly meaningless. I don't doubt it applies to medicine, for example. But does it apply to automotive or mining engineering?
And even if it did apply to every non-CS STEM field, that still would not preclude the possibility that women, as a group, are simply not as interested in CS to the same extent men are.
All double-digits better (some have actual parity) in female representation than computer science, which shares its gender disparity distinction with only two other (generally defined) STEM fields: ee/mech engineering and physics.
Nobody is disputing that women are less interested in working in CS than men. They clearly are. What is obvious to some of us is that the reason for that disinterest is that the field is hostile to them. It is hard to explain otherwise how something like three times as many women might obtain post-graduate mathematics degrees --- a pursuit that is more intellectually demanding and less lucrative than computer science, which routinely pays six-digit salaries to people immediately out of school simply to wire database rows up to HTML tables.
tptacek I agree with you that software needs more women, I think it would be good for women, and good for software. And contrary to that recent memo I think we should do more to encourage women to join CS.
I think it's really important to get the cause right because if we fix the wrong problem we'll be spinning our wheels instead of getting women to join tech. And I haven't been entirely convinced the gender gap is due to sexism and hostility in the workplace because what my female friends and developers say doesn't jive with that theory.
When I ask my female friends, who are very smart and would kick ass as developers, "why don't wanna you wanna join programming? Pay is great you could double your salary in two years", they usually say something along the lines of "I don't think I'd like it" or "sounds boring to sit in front of a computer all day".
And when I've heard my female friends talk about leaving programming its never been because someone made a slightly sexist comment once every couple of months. They all talked about how that was annoying but didn't really bother them. But they usually said that sometimes they fantasize about a job where they get to work with people more, and make a positive impact one they could see like therapy and teaching. (granted the female developers I know work for large companies with powerful HR departments so the level of sexism probably isn't representative of the startup scene)
I'm curious if you've had a very different experience. Do the women in your life like to program but have been turned off from doing it professionally because of perceived or actual hostility and sexism in the workplace?
What resources(ideally empirical) would you recommend to convince someone who was skeptical but open minded to the hostility hypothesis that it's true? Do you think this hypothesis is tentative but likely or do you think the evidence is so overwhelmingly in support of this hypothesis that it's an open and shut case?
> They clearly are. What is obvious to some of us is that the reason for that disinterest is that the field is hostile to them.
Oh yes, hostility manifested by half-century old magazine ads or phrases like "cowboy coder." If they're allowing their career paths to be altered by innocuous stuff like that, or what a teacher might have told them, I don't think they want it that badly.
There are no qualified women banging on the door of the software development profession demanding to be let in. The door is wide open to them, and it always has been.
No, sorry, I'm not going to play Calvinball. You directly challenged a statement I made upthread, and now that I've taken the time to clarify it, you've decided to respond to an earlier comment I didn't write. If you'd like to keep discussing this with me, you're going to either have to rebut what I said, or acknowledge it.
> No, sorry, I'm not going to play Calvinball. You directly challenged a statement I made upthread
Could you clarify? In every one of my replies to you in this thread, the part I quoted came directly from the post (of yours) to which I replied. And where did I directly challenge any of your statements? I think you have me mixed up with someone else who responded to you.
You claimed that my statement about greater female participation in what turns out to be most of the rest of the stem fields was "so broad as to be meaningless". I responded in greater detail. You re-rebutted Rayiner's original comment without acknowledging mine. Acknowledge it or rebut it; don't pretend you didn't see it.
> You claimed that my statement about greater female participation in what turns out to be most of the rest of the stem fields was "so broad as to be meaningless". I responded in greater detail.
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that you thought naming a handful of other STEM fields along with a rough participation ratio made your premise any more meaningful.
You seem to think that, from the fact that women participate in other STEM fields at a greater rate than CS, you can infer the reason they aren't well-represented in software development. To you, it's "obvious" that "the field is hostile to them." And others who share your view have defined "the field" so broadly as to include boys in jr. high school computer clubs.
Well, to me at least, it's "obvious" that your logic there is faulty.
> Are you acknowledging that I have effectively provided that accounting? You should, but it's not clear to me that you have.
Well, I think its noteworthy that you distinguished statistics from mathematics, but apparently felt automotive engineering (which I specifically asked about) to fall under ME, and you didn't comment on mining engineering, which does not fall under EE/ME.
But for some reason, you seem to think it's meaningful, so I'll acknowledge that for the purposes of this discussion, you have indeed effectively provided that accounting.
And I stand by my earlier response, to wit, that even a full accounting of all STEM fields would not make your logic any less faulty.
Thank you. Now, to avoid what would otherwise be a special-pleading argument on behalf of CS, you'd have to explain what innate preference would lead women to avoid CS despite:
* The fact that the other STEM fields are usually more intellectually rigorous than CS.
* The fact that some of those STEM fields are in fact the intellectual foundation for CS (Daniel Bernstein has an old quote about how mathematics is fundamentally the "easiest" of the STEM fields, and has as a result advanced much further into the frontiers of human knowledge than the other field, which creates the impression that it is more forbidding than it actually is).
* The fact that almost all of these fields are dominated by computers; in fact, I know professors in bio fields who do more hardcore programming than the typical CS grad does (to wit: they're sometimes forced to write things in C, even in 2017).
* The fact that many of the STEM fields that feature significant female participation are more "things"-oriented than CS, which, as it is practiced in the industry, is largely abstractions wrapped around human social interactions.
* The fact that the rest of STEM, in which women excel, feature large amounts of long-term solo investigative work, while CS as practiced in the industry is universally a team pursuit which has been recognized at least since Fred Brooks as being overwhelmingly about communications and coordination skills.
If you'd like to broaden the analysis outside of STEM --- for instance, to observe how much other professions impinge on personal lives, make demands of home life, have poorer work-life balance, have utterly inflexible hours and workplace location requirements, and require short-notice travel, and still have nearly 50/50 participation of men and women, we can do that too.
It seems plainly obvious to me that there's not much of an argument for an innate female aversion to computer science that wouldn't contradict these observations. When you have to gerrymander an argument around inconvenient facts like that, we call the result "special pleading". Can you make a clear argument that won't be that thing?
Tptacek, you're the one that seems hung up on the whole STEM aspect. Let's leave aside the fact that STEM is just an arbitrary grouping of fields that happens to include both doing research to find cures for cancers and hooking up database rows to HTML forms.
Your logic seems to be:
1. Women are well-represented in many STEM fields other than CS or software development.
2. These other fields often involve use of computers and software development.
3. Therefore, it logically follows that they SHOULD also be well-represented in CS and software development.
4. Since they're not, it's "obvious" that "the field is hostile to them."
I think that's ridiculous. Women, as a group, can, and do, pursue just about any career of their choosing in the US. For years, efforts have been made to lure them into STEM fields, including CS/dev, in greater numbers. For all of the pontificating from feminists, I have yet to encounter a single documented example of a qualified woman who is banging on a closed door demanding to be let into the profession, that is being denied entry. That woman, like Santa Clause, is mythical. She doesn't exist. Of course, I can't prove she doesn't exist any more than I can prove that Santa Clause doesn't exit. But neither of them exists.
Her existence can be proven by a single example. But for all of the years of male-blaming in regard to this issue, no one has yet provided such an example.
No, it's not OK for you to collapse 6 (10, if you want to stop "being hung up on STEM") bullets into a single "These other fields often involve use of computers and software development" bullet. That's a bogus argument with another name: the "straw man".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your logic seems to be:
1. Women are well-represented in many STEM fields other than CS or software development. (I don't dispute that, or the bullet points you provided to support it.)
2. These other fields often involve use of computers and software development. (I don't dispute that, or the bullet points you provided to support it.)
3. Therefore, it logically follows that they SHOULD also be well-represented in CS and software development.
4. Since they're not, it's "obvious" that "the field is hostile to them."
I think that's ridiculous, for previously stated reasons.
Using CS as a tool to solve other problems is a different proposition than the study of CS itself. I don't see why they'd have to be connected in people's minds in the way you're suggesting.
For instance, undergrad math enrollment is almost at gender parity, but postgraduate math study has similar gender ratios to CS. This is because you need an undergraduate degree for teaching and other careers, and so the interest in pursuing math for maths sake appears to be much lower among women. This could be for a number of reasons, some of which might be fixable to improve ratios, but some may be innate.
Wrong on both counts. Mathematics PhDs are issued at a ~70/30 ratio, substantially higher than that of CS PhDs (and way higher than CS undergrad degrees) --- this despite mathematics being among the small number of heavily gender-segregated STEM fields.
Further: almost nobody practicing computer science in the industry has a PhD. There are, believe it or not, places where having a doctorate is frowned on. For the degree that actually matters --- the bachelors --- math has as you say something approaching parity.
Tell me again about the innate limitations women have performing in STEM.
> Mathematics PhDs are issued at a ~70/30 ratio, substantially higher than that of CS PhDs
It drops from ~50% to just under 30%, where CS degrees hover between 18-22%. Frankly, that's not "substantially higher than CS".
> Tell me again about the innate limitations women have performing in STEM.
No one is making that claim except people like you who love tearing down absurd straw man arguments. Please read more carefully and stop making assumptions.
You've ignored one argument in favor of hinging your entire argument on a double-digit improvement in women's participation in mathematics not being "significant"?
What argument have I ignored exactly? Your CS PhD argument has bearing on anything that I've said as far as I can see.
Finally, it's not a double-digit improvement, but of course we can quibble endlessly over how meaningful that exact number is, but it's irrelevant. The number is still piss poor compared to undergrad enrollment, indicating that women don't pursue higher math degrees for various reasons.
The link I initially provided cited evidence that they're interested in undergrad maths because of opportunities it provides outside of pure maths. It's not apparent that similar opportunities exist for CS undergrad degrees, which would be one explanation for the disparity in undergrad math and CS. So I'm still not seeing how anything you've said bears on this at all.
Certainly graduate maths have more women than does CS. So what? What exactly do you think this proves in light of the above?
> CS was a third women in the mid 1980s, dropping to under 20% today
This is a profoundly misunderstood statistic.
1. Programming in those early days was considered more secretarial work,
2. the greater sexism in other jobs made CS more palatable, ie. women took what jobs they could, not necessarily the ones they wanted; this same trend is why Iran and other oppressive countries have such high female enrollment in STEM
3. Female enrollment gained slowly, but male STEM enrollment sky rocketed in the 80s. You can't point to a huge spurt of interest among men and use that to say that obviously those men somehow prevented the same growth in interest among women. There are clearly other factors in play.
I am well aware that the climate is well against this position, but you cannot just dismiss the 'Damore' view out of hand. He is not just 'wrong'. The Damore view is at the very least plausible and tarring a whole industry filled with many thoughtful and introverted (i.e. not messing with others, often taken advantage of themselves) individuals to support some view of gender economics is morally wrong.
We now live in a time where we are increasingly told what we should believe. In my view morality shouldn't extend to belief. For one it leaves certain individuals (like myself) out in the cold. Sorry, I cannot be told what to believe.
Maybe this is just the current hot topic and many people want to read it, but to me it reads as a form of propaganda (by definition media created to determine what people believe) or at least journalistic activism, and who is this guy (apparently some business journalist) to write authoratively on the subject, based on one fact (the predominance of women in early programming jobs). The fact of the matter is that programming has changed beyond recognition, particularly between 1950 and 1980 or so and that is more than enough to at the very least plausibly explain the change in programmer demographic. Anyone who is in the industry knows these eras cannot be compared (surely?).
> but you cannot just dismiss the 'Damore' view out of hand
But it is not dismissed out of hand. It is dismissed by serious scholars after significant research. It is Damore who dismisses their well-informed position out of hand by taking out of context some papers whose significance he is not qualified to judge. It is he who rejects scholarship and serious investigation in favor of gut feelings. If Damore's view were as well researched as the prevailing view, then it would merit more careful consideration. But as it stands, he is some lay person who, for his own reasons, decides that the scholars are wrong.
Physicists don't debate all the bloggers who misunderstand or take out of context physics papers, so why should social scholars debate some random guy at Google who wrote a rant? After all, the couple of papers he cites are scholarly works. Do you think those works are not debated in the research community? But you can't debate some layperson who clearly did not bother to put any effort into studying the issue (e.g., he does not discuss any other paper that contradicts his political views, and there are many more of those). If you want, there are some venues (like /r/science, /r/AskHistorians and others) where experts discuss research with laypeople, and you're welcome to ask them questions there. The belief that there is any serious scholarship behind Damore's rant that's being silenced by non-experts is the exact opposite of what's really going on.
Both are conservative publications, which is fine, but: There are certainly some researchers, like those in the first article, who agree with Damore's position, but they are by far the minority; if you're interested in the subject, I suggest you at least read some research written by the majority opinion. The second link is written by a non-expert, and therefore does not constitute a scholarly opinion at all. I occasionally enjoy reading some of Alexander's writing, but he is clearly not a serious social scholar, and his writing suffers from some obvious methodological problems that have been well covered in social scholarship.
So far I haven't seen a single article opposing him that didn't (have to) resort to crass misrepresentation of what he actually wrote, when it even bothered at all.
If you have to lie about your opponent, you're probably not in the right.
He's not an opponent; he's just some random guy on the internet, who, by his own admission, has no idea what he's talking about, because he writes about a subject he has not studied nor shown interest in studying. Many of the people arguing against him or for him are other random guys on the internet, and your entire opinion on this very important matter, which has occupied hundreds of researchers for decades and affects the lives of many people is based on some online debates you've read between various random guys on the internet. Do you see how ridiculous this is? It's like forming an opinion about Bell's theorem by listening to debates among fourth-graders who've heard the term "quantum mechanics" on Rick and Morty.
He's famous only because his office shenanigans caused such a massive PR shitstorm for his employer, that the CEO of Google had to cut short his family vacation to deal with the mess this low-level employee had caused.
Hmm...a "report" created by and for an advocacy group.
Which links very tenuous studies about performance on tests to interest in tech by...nothing.
And of course it doesn't address what I think is the elephant in the room: how can people be so arrogant as to claim that all the women flooding into other fields don't know what they want? "You poor girl, you may think you like early childhood education, but you're deluded, you really want to to do CS and are prevented by the evil sexism"
Which is about par for the course for the "blank slate" side of the debate.
First of all, it's a report written by actual experts on the subject, and one that actually cites more than two sources, not all of them affirming the same point of view. It’s not the Principia, but it’s scholarly work, and a hundredfold better than some rant written by some random guy who has not studied the subject at all, not even as an amateur. But if it’s not to your liking, you’re welcome to go down the list on Google Scholar. If you’re looking for scholarly confirmation of Damore’s views, you’ll have to dig deep. If, however, your intent is to dismiss serious scholarship in a subject you have not studied at all so you don’t have to read it and can continue believing what some dude wrote because it fits with your gut feeling, then there’s really no point to discuss this subject seriously at all.
Second, your question is answered in the vast literature of the field who's scholarly conclusions you so dismiss without study. Just to give you an elevator pitch: the starting point of the discussion isn't tech at all, but the overall position of women. It is a fact disputed by no expert that 1. women have overall far less power in our society than men, and 2. this structure was created by at least centuries of social policy. The only assumption is that women do not want to have less power than men. The discussion about tech is merely an offshoot of that, as now tech is a significant source of power in our society. You can learn the rest if you're interested, but just to make it clear: your presentation of the feminist side is completely and absolutely wrong. Also, while you imagine this arrogance simply because you have not studied the subject, it is an undisputed fact that women have actually been commanded by society for centuries what to do and learn (which, for much of history, was very little). So I wouldn’t start talking about arrogance, because that on the side of men has been pervasive for centuries.
Very simple: As a first approximation, we are concerned about women being marginalized from positions of power, not about them being underrepresented in any particular profession. Tech (and politics, law, finance, entertainment, journalism, medicine and upper management) is a position of power; bricklaying, nursing and k-12 education aren't (it's not necessarily an intrinsic property of the professions, but rather an empirical observation). Sexism (and racism) is an unequal distribution of power; feminism is simply the attempt to rectify that. That's the whole story in a nutshell.
However, you will find concern over the lack of women in construction, as well as the lack of male nurses. This is due to less direct effects on power distribution. E.g., some of the power that a profession endows on its practitioners is related to its perceived prestige, and it's known that an over representation of women in a profession lowers its prestige -- another sexist effect -- and therefore its power. When it comes to construction work and other "low power" blue-collar professions, I believe that the desire to increase women participation is mainly due to a general desire to reduce (though not necessarily eliminate) the gender association of professions in general.
> Very simple: As a first approximation, we are concerned about women being marginalized from positions of power, not about them being underrepresented in any particular profession.
...
I think that's all I need to know here. So feminists think that it's okay to go into an industry and demand that there be more women because it is a "powerful industry"? And somehow those of us who support Damore are the unreasonable ones?
What? No! After researchers having established, with thorough researched that's available for all to see, that women have been marginalized from positions of power -- which includes the tech industry, where women participation, in the US, has been declining in the past three decades or so -- we feminists demand that the practice stop. That's all.
You literally just stated that you are interested in the tech industry because it is a "powerful" industry, and you feel that women have been historically marginalized from positions of power. Consequently, you feel that females are entitled to obtain these positions in order to "balance this power distribution". Am I correct?
No, you are certainly not correct, although right now I would be happy to balance the very unequal distribution of knowledge you and I have on this subject (although I am far from being an expert myself), because I feel like Richard Dawkins debating evolution with some Christian from Kansas who insists there is no evidence for evolution because that's what they read on a Christian website that scientifically debunks evolution. Seriously, you are so engaged with a topic that you clearly haven't even bothered to read a couple of Wikipedia articles about.
We want the marginalization of women from power, that has been going for centuries, to end. In other words, we want society to lift its hand from the scale against women.
To fight sexism. The problem is this discussion is that you clearly don't have the first clue as to what sexism is, in spite of me having provided links for you to learn what it is that you're arguing about. But just to explain a bit: 1. sexism isn't misogyny; 2. it isn't a concerted conspiracy against women, either. It is the name given to the social dynamics by which discrimination (often unconscious and perhaps even benevolent) causes women to have less power in society. I don't know exactly what "BS terms" mean to you other than terms you haven't bothered to look up in the links I provided.
So what exactly does the tech industry have to do? You said you're only interested in tech because it is powerful. It seems to me that you feel that you think it is reasonable to demand positions in the tech industry independent of qualification because it will help rectify your imagined "power imbalance".
You're giving extremely vague and hand wavy responses like "remove the hand from the scale against women" And other flowery phrases that mean nothing.
I have a question: why does anyone think this tired soundbite is a smashing knock-down utterly destructive CHECKMATE FEMINISTS rebuttal when anyone who thinks about it for a moment can discover that
1. Advancement and representation in high-status positions has a strong normalizing effect which spreads beyond just those specific job titles, and
2. Plenty of people do acknowledge and want to encourage better gender balance in professions like nursing, teaching, etc.?
For someone who claims elsewhere to be making serious rebuttals, you're curiously resorting to some pathetically-weak talking points instead.
And the key difference (at least for me) is that these programs encourage men and don't accuse women of coordinated sexism. By contrast, the women in tech movement is happy to paint us all sexist.
Huh? Everyone is sexist. That's the whole idea of sexism. Just like everyone is covered in germs and potentially spreads disease. Just like proactive action is required in order not to spread disease, proactive action is required in order not to spread sexism. When we point out people (or, more commonly, actions or policies) as "sexist", we mean that they either choose not to take that proactive action, or worse, choose to take action to increase sexism. So yeah, of course you're a sexist, and so am I.
I have neither the time nor inclination to go through feminist theory "papers" or the related "scholarly papers" about how the tech world is obviously sexist/misogynistic/racist/bigoted/etc.
You said that Damore's view was held as wrong as by the "majority view".
Where is the "majority view" point by point rebuttal of Damore's memo?
I'm sorry, but I have no inclination to do that. If you have a strong opinion on some subject which is based on things said by people who you know are not expert and have not researched it -- namely, your opinion is knowingly based on ignorance of the issue -- yet you can't be bothered to look up what the experts say on the matter, then I have no desire to educate those who don't wish to be educated. Either you care about this subject or you don't. And if you do, I hope you have the scientific curiosity to actually learn about it, and only then shape your opinions. Thankfully, after decades of study and action, we no longer need to convince the world that germs exist — the world now knows. So we no longer need you to listen; we have critical mass. You wish to remain spitefully ignorant? Be my guest. My comments are intended to those who are interested in learning, not to those who say, "thank you, but I'd rather take the word of some schmoe who knows nothing about the the subject he so vehemently writes about than spend some time actually learning about it from those who have".
I will, however, say this: Damore’s email is deeply misguided regardless of the merit of the couple of papers he cites (and must have run across in some conservative blog, as that is the extent of his real interest in the issue). It is basically a memo written by the owner of a chemical plant who dumps radioactive waste in a river, and claims that the pollution should not be stopped in spite of an increased incidence of cancer in the area by citing some papers showing that not all cancer is a result of exposure to radioactive waste.
And don’t worry, there's no need to learn any feminist theory; just some sociology and history, even at Wikipedia level. Anyway, I don't know why you put the word papers in scare quotes, as I don't think you have any idea as to what feminist theory is, and I don’t understand how you can ridicule something without even knowing what it is that you ridicule (I guess you’re basing your disdain on connotations you have of the name and maybe writings by others who have similarly not bothered to find out what feminist theory is before writing against it). And the fact that you, again, confuse sexist/racist with misogynistic/bigoted, shows that you don't even understand what the issue is, and instead wish to ridicule some strawman position that you imagine your imagined opponents possess.
> If you have a strong opinion on some subject which is based on things said by people who you know are not expert and have not researched it -- namely, your opinion is knowingly based on ignorance of the issue -- yet you can't be bothered to look up what the experts say on the matter, then I have no desire to educate those who don't wish to be educated. Either you care about this subject or you don't.
No, because, again, all I'm saying is look at the entire field, and you, like Damore, wave some specific research at me. I have read everything Pinker has to say on the subject, because that's how you do research.
The same as that of most researchers: that his conclusions are scientifically problematic, but regardless of their merit, they are ultimately irrelevant to the issue of sexism, which is far better established, seems to have a much bigger effect, and can and should be rectified regardless of other possible contributing factors. That there are other causes for cancer is irrelevant to the issue of whether the chemical plant should be allowed to dump waste in the river. Certainly, the possible existence of those other causes must not be used as an excuse to allow the plant to continue polluting.
And your take-away was obviously to copy the tactics he described in the book: ignore the actual science and the actual arguments put forward, because you know those show you to be clearly in the wrong.
Instead, weave around the facts, do advocacy and sell it as science, vilify your opponents etc.
Quite the opposite, in fact. And I don't know what you base your opinions on, because clearly, you know so little about the subject, having read no more than a couple of popular, very one-sided books. I find it mind-boggling how someone can read just one side of a debate and believe that they "debunked" the other side. But I'm guessing you probably also read Joy Christian's book and believe that that Bell's theorem has been "thoroughly debunked", and that those who contest that notion ignore the "actual science" and "actual arguments", and "vilify" Christian in some crazy emotional witch-hunt.
I hope you realize, however, that it is those who least have the fact on their side, yet constantly demand to be acknowledged, who claim that there's some witch-hunt against them, and that the reason they are not taken as seriously as they think they should be is because people are afraid of the truth.
The main problem with Pinker, BTW, is not at all the merit of his claims about biological inclination, but that none of that has anything to do with the undisputed, completely noncontroversial, and far better established fact that women have been socially marginalized from positions of power for centuries. Like in my allegory of the polluting plant, even if there are indeed other causes for cancer, that has very little to do with the demand that the plant stop dumping chemical waste in the river. Waving science supporting the claim that there are other causes for cancer as an excuse to continue polluting shows a very basic misunderstanding of the issue. My goal is not to prove that there are no innate psychological differences between men and women; it is to end the marginalization of women that no doubt exists, regardless of whether or not those innate differences are real (what's funny is that even those who believe they are real, don't notice that the effect size they claim to find doesn't even come close to explaining the situation on the ground, nor that it is constantly changing).
It's interesting how much you "know" without, you know, actually knowing anything.
Anyway, thanks for writing that up in detail, I will just leave it at that, because you've done a better job at discrediting yourself than anyone else could ever possibly do.
This is how free speech works: just let the other side talk.
Now you're just being a dick. I spent a few studying this subject. But you'll go to great lengths to justify to yourself why you shouldn't look at the fossils.
It does. But an academic literature review by actual experts does require a bit more effort to process than an office memo written in an afternoon by some programmer.
Yes, I saw that. It is yet another of the posts which basically say "the science is not saying that the differences are 100% certain, so somehow that means that Damore is totally wrong".
I actually did a half-way pickthrough of that post on twitter, not gonna repeat it here. Annoying enough with 140-character per message limitation. I'm done with this memo.
As I explained in another comment (chemical plant pollution), Damore is totally wrong regardless of the merit of the couple of papers he (a layman with zero knowledge or interest in the field) picked. My problem with that medium post is that an actual scientist shouldn't argue with some random dude on the internet who's clearly not interested in learning about the subject, while using actual science (and the very careful, measured wording that is common in this very inexact science). After all, anyone who chooses to believe someone as uncredentialed as Damore, and his explicit non-research in the first place, is unlikely to be persuaded by actual scholarship. I also
I would rather we stop treating Damore as someone other than a dude who wrote some memo in an afternoon. He did no original research, no secondary research, and expresses not a single idea we have not read hundreds of times since at least the eighteenth century. Just last week I read a text from 1795 by a Scottish minister who translated some of Leonhard Euler's work, where he says that maybe it's time people would stop repeating the claim that women are naturally incapable of doing science and using that as an excuse to exclude them from learning it.
I also think it is misguided to debate the effect size of biological causes just because Damore happened to say something about that, while not starting the discussion with the much better established social causes. Like my pollution analogy, we know social causes exist, we want to fix them as they cause harm, and once we do we can scientifically debate whether nature has indeed decided to imbue women, blacks and Asians with such flawed intelligence, and why the Jews and the French are so smarter than everyone.
Before we proceed, please provide a clear, coherent, short summary of what you personally believe Damore's argument is, and then agree to personally commit to that belief for the duration of debate.
99% of the problem of this debate is that his "memo" was so vague in places -- despite being so allegedly well-written! -- that we end up being able to attribute zero claims and zero positions to him, since any alleged position can be disclaimed on vagueness/indirectness, leading to the conclusion that, until someone will commit to interpreting him as making a claim, he apparently wrote a memo which said literally nothing whatsoever.
But suppose I were coming to it fresh, with no background whatsoever, and simply reading it through, and let's try to Socratically figure out what's going on in it. Since you're apparently very concerned with people misinterpreting it, perhaps you'd like to help.
So, first off: would you agree that the memo was intended by Damore to communicate some type of argument, reasoning from evidence, in support of some particular conclusion, and that he felt this was not merely idle speculation but something genuinely important in need of attention from many people?
I'm asking this because:
1. I'm attempting to be charitable, and assume that his choice of what to write was inspired by what he believed to be a logical argument structure, and to convince readers of something he himself believed to be the conclusion of that argument. In other words, I'm assuming that if something is in there, it's not a non sequitur -- it's in there because he believed it was relevant to or supported the argument he was making.
2. He chose a wide distribution channel within Google, and now appears to have chosen an even wider distribution channel outside of Google. My experience is that people generally don't do this for things they believe are idle or trivial, but rather for things they believe are genuinely important.
Oh, I intend to advance an interpretation based on the actual words that Damore actually wrote and actually published. But since you're going to fight every step of the way to kick and scream and move goalposts and argue that "he didn't actually say that!" in response to basically anything, I have to start from first principles on you.
So: would you agree that the memo was intended by Damore to communicate some type of argument, reasoning from evidence, in support of some particular conclusion, and that he felt this was not merely idle speculation but something genuinely important in need of attention from many people?
"Before we proceed, please provide a clear, coherent, short summary of what you personally believe Damore's argument is, and then agree to personally commit to that belief for the duration of debate."
Considering my complaint was that none of his defenders will do that, and thus it's impossible to engage with what he wrote (since inevitably the response will be "He never argued that and I never said he did!"), I feel it's reasonable to say: you first.
Damore says that there are possible non-bias reasons that women display less affinity towards the tech industry thus possiblypartially explaining the difference in gender representation.
OK. So what do you believe is the logical course of action to take based on this? Since he mentioned diversity programs, presumably he thinks there is some logical link between his argument and some proposed course of action, though of course for any such proposed course someone will pop up and say that he didn't advocate that and obviously anyone claiming he did must never have read what he wrote.
Do you believe that, if this position were to be conceded for sake of argument, there would be any logical change to be made to, say, how Google approaches interviewing and hiring?
Stop illegally preferring less qualified women over more qualified men to meet quotas.
(Before i get straw manned, I'm NOT saying that all women at Google are less qualified, just that it does happen, and Google even apparently makes its diversity meetings secret)
The specific hiring approach Damore objected to was "reducing the false negative rate" for women.
A false negative in hiring occurs when a qualified candidate is rejected (as opposed to a false positive, where an unqualified candidate is hired). So Damore's objection was not to "preferring less qualified women", it was to an attempt to raise the proportion of qualified women being hired.
So I'm curious why you chose to jump to "preferring less qualified women".
Well, Damore made some strongly-worded and poorly-cited claims in an attempt to pass off his "science" as somehow uncontroversial and irrefutable. The fact that multiple people have chimed in pointing out that A) it's very far from uncontroversial/irrefutable and B) his arguments are based on studies whose effect sizes would not produce the results we see, is a pretty convincing rebuttal.
Also it's telling that "the differences are not 100% certain" is your comment while it's still taken by people on the internet to mean "Damore was absolutely right about everything ever and we should all stop diversity efforts since women are too hobbled by their genetic ladybrains to work in tech in large numbers anyway".
>"Damore was absolutely right about everything ever and we should all stop diversity efforts since women are too hobbled by their genetic ladybrains to work in tech in large numbers anyway"
Do you want to build a strawman?
All we are resisting is being told we are sexist for not having a higher proportion of females in our industry despite having approximately the same proportion of which there are female graduates.
No one is asking the tech industry to hire more women engineers than there are graduates. It might just be nice to have a bit fewer women report such horrible experiences working in the industry, so that maybe we'll have more graduates, which everybody should agree is a good thing.
> #1 reason: "Don't like the actual work". Also, a significant number leave engineering for management.
Huh? I don't understand your argument at all. Of course hostile culture isn't the #1 cause! Very rarely are very serious social problems -- even the most serious social problems -- the #1 cause of pain. Poverty and crime aren't the number one causes of death. Lack of jobs isn't the #1 cause of illness etc. What percentage of women experiencing an inhospitable culture (let alone leaving because of it) do you consider acceptable?
> And of course the Ceci/Williams study showing a 2:1 hiring advantage for women for tenure track positions in STEM fields.
What does this have to do with anything? I don't think you understand what the issue is at all.
> > And of course the Ceci/Williams study showing a 2:1 hiring advantage for women for tenure track positions in STEM fields.
What does this have to do with anything? I don't think you understand what the issue is at all.
His point is that there is no "hand on the other part of the scale holding down women" or whatever quasi-poetic phrase you use.
That sound we're hearing is the goal posts breaking the sound barrier.
I'll explain this to you step-by-step.
Your claim was that, well it's a little difficult because you dodge and weave all the time. Anyway, you claimed that there was simply no scientific evidence for what Damore said. When that turned out to be wrong, you claimed that the science was wrong, again without any evidence. When it turned out the science is actually pretty established (even if you don't agree with it), you again switched and said it didn't matter whether the science was wrong or right (huh?), because:
> "issue of sexism, which is far better established, seems to have a much bigger effect"
Now again, you never showed any actual evidence for that theory being either "better established" or having a "bigger effect". Instead you just claimed it and claimed that you knew better, and therefore it must be true. Showing a complete lack of knowledge as to how science works (your approach is religious, not scientific, and of course that is par for the course for "gender and women's studies", which are quite blatant about being about political advocacy rather than scientific truth).
So the people published in the ACM and Professor Fouad did something radical: they asked actual women instead of deciding on their behalf.
And it turns out the biggest issue was not sexism, contrary to what you claim, but "didn't like the work" or "not interested in the work". Which, not entirely coincidentally was what Damore was claiming, though he made the much weaker claim that interest could be a contributing factor. Turns out he was right. Dead on right.
Again, your claim is "sexism >>> interest". Actual science shows "interest >>> sexism". Damore's claim that "interest could be a factor" is right, if much weaker than the truth.
Clearer now?
Does that mean that "sexism is OK"? Of course not, where on earth did you get that from? (Well, you obviously got that from "holy shit what I wrote was complete BS, let's switch the topic", which is of course also why you have steadfastly refused to do what you demand of others and clearly + succinctly state your position. Dodge and weave is all you got)
However, it does show that sexism isn't the primary factor that explains why there are far more men in tech than women. Interest is the main factor that explains the difference, and there are multiple layers of interlocking scientific results, with large sample sizes and large effect sizes that show this to be the case. And as to Damore's point: if you have a wrong theory as to the causes, you're unlikely to get the results you want.
In fact, even though sexism exists (everywhere) it is unclear whether it plays any part in causing the disparity, because (a) women in CS report that they receive more support from the companies than men, not less and (b) there is a well-supported 2:1 hiring advantage.
If anything, sexist practices appear to be preferential towards women, so if sexist treatment stopped you'd have even fewer women in tech, not more.
And as to this whole "women in tech" being a coordinated effort to keep women out of positions of power ("we are concerned about women being marginalized from positions of power"): again, one of the highest targets for women leaving engineering work is management, so they leave for positions of more power, lording it over the menfolk who prefer to do the techie stuff.
And as to the series of incidents that you appear to be referring to.
(a) The plural of anecdote is not data. The data show something else.
(b) Simple math shows that gender disparities are the primary cause of skewed incidents of a sexist nature, not their result. (Though of course you can have feedback loops).
(c) Tech is a shitshow for everyone. If a woman were to recount the things that happened to me in my career, you would take it as the clearest indication of "sexism" possible.
(d) But I don't know if any other professions are better.
That sound we're hearing is your willful ignorance and lack of interest in the subject you so vehemently argue over breaking the sound barrier, and the meaningless buzzing of someone who has zero knowledge about a subject yet continues to debate it with furor.
> you claimed that there was simply no scientific evidence for what Damore said.
No. I said that what Damore wrote is completely irrelevant, whether true or not, just as the question of whether there are other causes of cancer is irrelevant to the question of whether a chemical plant should be allowed to continue polluting the water. This makes his argument wrong.
> Now again, you never showed any actual evidence for that theory being either "better established" or having a "bigger effect".
No. I did show actual evidence. You refused to look.
> And it turns out the biggest issue was not sexism, contrary to what you claim
A. Never claimed that, B. that's not what that data shows in the slightest.
> Which, not entirely coincidentally was what Damore was claiming, though he made the much weaker claim that interest could be a contributing factor. Turns out he was right. Dead on right.
Not in the slightest. Again, his point was "please allow us to continue as before". That point is not remotely made by any of his irrelevant claims. The only reasonable arguments in favor of allowing the plant to continue behaving as usual are to show that 1. there's no pollution, or 2. pollution is harmless. He doesn't make such arguments.
For example, he says that we should stop assuming sexism is the cause of the gender gap. 1. There are good reasons to assume that, but regardless, 2. that assumption is completely unnecessary.
> they asked actual women instead of deciding on their behalf.
That's ironic, because the only thing that's been conclusively established beyond any doubt, as I've shown, is that society has been deciding on women's behalf for centuries (at least).
> Again, your claim is "sexism >>> interest".
Nope. My main point is: sexism is pervasive (and is bad although that's a value not a fact) => stop sexism. A more nuanced point, which I could discuss with someone who knows what sexism is, is that it's difficult to separate interest from sexism.
> Clearer now?
The only thing that's clear is that you have no idea what are the claims you supposedly oppose and haven't bothered reading what sexism is.
> where on earth did you get that from?
Uh, from Damore saying that diversity programs must be stopped/changed because he thinks a couple of papers show that there are other causes than sexism.
> However, it does show that sexism isn't the primary factor that explains why there are far more men in tech than women
NOOPE. If you bothered to read just a tiny bit about sexism, you'd see that the conclusion is quite the contrary. It's like you're saying, "a ha! it's not germs that cause disease, but contact with other people!"
Please, it's ridiculous to continue debating this if you have not the slightest idea what sexism is.
> And as to this whole "women in tech" being a coordinated effort to keep women out of positions of power
Sigh. Who said "coordinated effort?" Do germs have a coordinated effort? It's a dynamics! Please, just learn an itsy bitsy bit about this thing that you're talking about.
> The data show something else.
No, they don't. Of course, if you don't know what sexism is, you don't know what's not sexism.
> Simple math shows that gender disparities are the primary cause of skewed incidents of a sexist nature, not their result.
Please. This statement is total BS, beginning to end. We have no clear idea even what the effect size is or whether it exists at all, let alone to determine that it's an underlying cause. Even Steven Pinker doesn't belive that.
> Tech is a shitshow for everyone. If a woman were to recount the things that happened to me in my career, you would take it as the clearest indication of "sexism" possible.
Again, you don't know what sexism is, but you keep talking about it and getting it wrong every single time.
As before, I have to thank you for clearly exposing the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of this position more clearly than I ever could have.
Science? Irrelevant.
Truth? A distraction.
Math? Don't understand, don't want to understand.
Logic? Don't bother us with that.
What people say/write? Who cares?
What people want? I know what they should want.
It's a pure power play with no redeeming qualities and nothing to back it whatsoever. The whole thing hinges on the rhetorical trick of redefining words in such a way that the definitions already contain the conclusion you wish to reach, for which there is no actual evidence, and therefore you demand that as a precondition for having a discussion with you one must already accept your conclusions.
Well, it's such a cheap trick that it doesn't even pass the "debating 101" silly tricks laugh test, and just because you've constrained yourself to being inside an echo chamber that reinforces these religious beliefs (because that is all they are) unquestioningly doesn't actually give you any authority to speak on the subject.
Speaking of the subject of telling women what to want and logic, let me quote you something from the translator's introduction of the 1795 English translation of Leonhard Euler's Letters to a German Princess -- which contains some important advances in the algebraization of logic, and directly influenced Augustus De Morgan -- by the Scottish minister Henry Hunter, D.D.:
> Euler wrote these Letters for the instruction of a young and sensible female, and in the same view that they were written, the are translated, namely, the improvement of the female mind; and object of what importance to the world! I rejoice to think I have lived to see female education conducted on a more liberal and enlarged plan. I am old enough to remember the time when well-born young women, even of the north, could spell their own language but very indifferently, and some hardly read it with common decency... While the boys of the family were conversing with Virgil, perhaps with old Homer himself, the poor girls were condemned to cross-stitch, on a piece of gauze-canvass, and to record their own age at the bottom of a sampler.
> They are now treated as rational beings, and society is already the better for it. And wherefore should the terms female and philosophy seem a ridiculous combination? Wherefore preclude to a woman any source of knowledge to which her capacity, and condition in life, entitle her to apply? It is cruel and ungenerous to expose the frivolity of the sex, after reducing it to the necessity of being silly and frivolous. Cultivate a young woman's understanding, and her person will become, even to herself, only a secondary concern; let her time be filled up in the acquisition of attainable and useful knowledge, and then she will cease to be a burden to herself and to every body about her; make her acquainted with the world of nature, and the world of art will delude her no longer.
So you are deeply mistaken about who it is that tells women what to want and who precludes them from making choices. An 18th century Scottish minister was more enlightened than you on the subject (although no less patronizing, but hey, 18th century) and more knowledgable. I'm guessing that's because he actually bothered to study math, logic, science and history, rather than just throw those words around.
-------------
> Science? Irrelevant.
You can't even understand simple sentences now? Science is not irrelevant. But chemistry is irrelevant to Goldbach's conjecture. A scientist would see that immediately.
The interesting question of nature vs. nature (to which, almost everyone agrees, the answer is "both", but may debate on degree), is simply unrelated to the question of how best to fight sexism.
> Math? Don't understand, don't want to understand.
Is that that same myth of "feminists tell women what they want" by those who haven't even spent an hour reading what feminism is, and know nothing about the history of gender relations? You really have no clue what you're talking about. You are repeating myths by others who think it is possible to express intelligent opinions about a subject without studying it for even a second. If you want to know what we feminists actually say (rather than parrot newspaper headlines and conservative blogs), why don't you take an hour or two to actually read it?
> It's a pure power play with no redeeming qualities and nothing to back it whatsoever.
It's clear you haven't even read the link I posted (to Wikipedia!) about what power even is. You're like one of those new-age folks who talk about "positive energy".
> The whole thing hinges on the rhetorical trick of redefining words in such a way that the definitions already contain the conclusion you wish to reach
Nope. Again, the same trope by those who believe that's what social scholars and feminists do, without ever having studied a thing about the subject. You are like a Reiki practitioner telling a physicist that her definition of "energy" is redefining words to reach the conclusion she wants to reach.
The truth is that someone who's learned nothing of a subject (and, no, reading blog posts by other equally ignorant people doesn't count) can't intelligently debate it, and, confused and angry, is reduced to attacking the rhetoric of his opponent.
> for which there is no actual evidence
I've provided links to mountains of very actual evidence, which you just refuse to look at. Shutting your eyes doesn't really make the world disappear.
> Well, it's such a cheap trick that it doesn't even pass the "debating 101" silly tricks laugh test, and just because you've constrained yourself to being inside an echo chamber that reinforces these religious beliefs (because that is all they are) unquestioningly doesn't actually give you any authority to speak on the subject.
Dude, you are speaking about something that you know nothing about. You call it religion because, knowing absolutely nothing about the subject, you want it to be that. Why are you afraid of reading research? Ignorance is not a virtue.
> If your formal education was math, then you should probably demand your money back.
Why? Have you spotted any errors in my lectures? They're usually very well received and I haven't had any complaints. Or perhaps your knowledge of math is as rich as your knowledge of sexism, and you say I'm wrong because that's what you think you're supposed to say in a debate and you really have no clue?
> Your idea of "science" laughable.
Why, what's my idea of science and what's wrong with it?
> Your attempts at drawing analogies is nothing short of desperate. Comically desperate.
For once I agree. Debating a topic with someone who knows absolutely nothing about it yet insists on making bold assertions tends to strain my rhetorical skills. I'm used to debating with other knowledgeable people. People ignorant of a subject usually just start flinging personal insults when they realize they have nothing intelligent to say, and it takes a lot of patience to keep them engaged. Analogies, even bad ones, often do the trick.
> Anyway, it's been fun.
Has it? I find it frustrating to debate something with someone who knows nothing of the subject they're debating.
It is a social dynamics (or the state of a society where this dynamics exists) that causes women to have significantly less power[1] than men. That dynamics is, of course, discriminatory, but the discrimination is not necessarily legal or bureaucratic; it may well be in attitude, pressure, education etc.
Occasionally, this discriminatory treatment is due to misogyny (disdain or disrespect of women), but much more often it is unconscious. This is why the first defense against sexism is knowing what it is and learning to see it, and why I like comparing it to germs. They're there, but we need to look for them to see them.
[1]: Power is one of the most important concepts in the social studies. I've already provided a link to the definition(s), but here it is again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political) No one should engage in a debate over social matters unless they at least know what power means (which is covered pretty well on Wikipedia). That's like debating physics without knowing what force, mass or energy are.
> There are certainly some researchers, like those in the first article, who agree with Damore's position, but they are by far the minority;
This is a pretty wild claim. I'm not aware of any surveys or polls of social scientists on these topics, the way we've done surveys on, for instance, climate change. How could you possibly know what proportion of social scientists accept any given proposition? If you have a link to such a survey, I'd love to see it.
Also, calling those sites "conservative" is grossly inaccurate. You're just trying to spin the evidence they present as biased.
> How could you possibly know what proportion of social scientists accept any given proposition?
Umm, because I studied history in grad school for a few years? It's not "any given proposition", but the well-accepted, long-ago-established fact that social policy has marginalized women from positions of power for centuries, and continues to do so (although to a lesser extent, due to political action).
> If you have a link to such a survey, I'd love to see it.
But you don't really. That information is available within minutes on Wikipedia and Google Scholar. If you were truly interested in the consensus opinion, you would have found it by now. If you're too lazy, I've posted some links on this page for the sake of others who care so deeply about this issue yet couldn't be bothered to read the Wikipedia page on sexism or the top hit on Google Scholar for women in tech.
> Also, calling those sites "conservative" is grossly inaccurate.
Number of citations on Google scholar says nothing about the quality of that scholarship, and so says nothing about how many social scientists accept any given position. And your study of history is hardly relevant to the status of these topics now, at best, you might be able to claim that you knew what the prevailing opinion was at some point.
So basically you have nothing, which is what I figured.
Dude, do you really think that I thought there was any chance you would have a different conclusion out of this discussion? See, you're already dismissing studies that you haven't even bothered to look at, and still haven't even read the most basic Wikipedia pages on the topic. Actually, "I" have mountains of incontrovertible evidence, which, like Dawkins's fossils, are available for all to see. The only reason you can still doubt this is if you don't want to learn the subject, and there is absolutely nothing I say that can make you interested at this point.
2. without detailed scholarly knowledge, it's too easy to be mislead by flawed studies, or to improperly generalize the results
3. as a proxy for scholarly knowledge, most people operate on the evidence of a consensus among scholars for any given position; such a consensus is easily produced for any topic for which such a consensus exists
4. you've claimed such a broad consensus on these topics
5. I've asked for evidence of this consensus
6. you respond that I should read thousands of papers on the topic, effectively becoming a scholar in the field, thus defeating the entire use of consensus as proxy
7. The replies by non-experts and experts, like Sadedin, that I've read, literally attack a straw man of Damore's arguments, or cite no evidence of their own, instead hand waving away their existence (like you).
8. The replies from experts that agree with Damore's empirical claims reinforce that narrative quite well.
What exactly am I supposed to find convincing? I think you should take a step back and review how you and others are approaching this topic, because you're frankly not doing yourself any favours.
You've now written 15 or more replies to a number people who have asked for evidence similar to my request. You could have saved yourself a lot of time and aggravation by either producing verifiable evidence of this consensus, or by acknowledging that such a consensus has no easily verifiable evidence, and so skepticism is perfectly warranted.
1. True, but I did study it in grad school for a few years. That was over a decade ago, but I remember the basics.
6. Not at all. I said you should start from one of the handful of links I posted, all to Wikipedia pages and to the top hit on Google Scholar. You can equally start from any of the top hits on Google, as at this point, anything would be better than nothing. You can read the whole thing in a couple of hours. And don’t worry, that won’t be enough to turn you into a scholar by any means.
8. I am not sure what narrative you're referring to. Reminder: we are not talking about whether or not there are innate biological differences that can be partial explanations to the lower interest of women in tech. We are talking about whether or not that has any bearing on the subject of sexism or relevant policy actions. Like in my analogy of the polluting chemical plant, the subject under discussion isn't whether cancer can be caused by factors other than exposure to chemical waste, but whether that possibility should be used as an excuse for the plant to continue polluting.
> What exactly am I supposed to find convincing?
Either you're being too sophisticated for me, or that you're naive in an almost cute way. Obviously, I am not trying to convince you of anything. That undertaking would be completely impossible until you yourself show some interest in the subject. Don't get me wrong: I would be happy to have an interesting discussion, or even a debate, with someone who's at all interested in this, but you can't have a meaningful discussion with someone on a subject they know virtually nothing about and are not interested in studying even superficially. My only intent is to convince other curious people who may be following this discussion to read a couple of Wikipedia pages and be exposed to a fascinating subject.
> 6. Not at all. I said you should start from one of the handful of links I posted, all to Wikipedia pages and to the top hit on Google Scholar.
Except the links you posted don't dispute Damore's arguments at all. Damore's arguments are perfectly consistent with the recommendations in the survey, with the possible exception of stereotype threat, whose studies have come under fire recently.
> We are talking about whether or not that has any bearing on the subject of sexism or relevant policy actions.
You must be confusing threads. Your pollution example has nothing to do with anything we've discussed. I questioned your claim that Damore's arguments disagree with the consensus in the field and asked for evidence supporting your claim. Everything since then has been some bizarre pissing contest in which you repeatedly asserted your position without any apparent understanding of contrary arguments.
> Either you're being too sophisticated for me, or that you're naive in an almost cute way. Obviously, I am not trying to convince you of anything.
Nice, insults and ad-hominem. I've read plenty on the subject thanks, and your condescension is just the cherry on top of a now completely pointless thread in which you convinced no one of anything. Congrats. Have a nice day.
> Except the links you posted don't dispute Damore's arguments at all.
Which argument? That there could possibly be innate psychological differences between the sexes etc. (which is not Damore's point, but a distraction), or that this has anything to do with the problem we're trying to solve with diversity programs? The consensus is absolutely that there is a sexism problem. Damore pays lip service to the "existence" of sexism, yet seems to mistakenly believe that the research he cites means that diversity programs must be changed, just like in my chemical plant analogy.
> I've read plenty on the subject thanks
You clearly have not read even the basics. There is no condescension here. I am not smarter than you, nor more moral. I just spent a considerable time learning about this, and it is obvious that you don't even understand what sexism is (Neither does Damore, BTW), and it's become clear that you're not even interested enough to bother reading the most introductory material. You say, "there are no fossils," and I say, "here are the fossils," yet you refuse to look. How can I hope to convince you? The reason this doesn't bother me is that I believe that the problem of sexism is so obvious once you care to look and so well studied, that the only people who still resist it are those who insist on not learning what it is. Learning what it is would not make you a leftist, as facts do not prescribe values, and you'd still be free to contend that the situation does not merit intervention in the form of diversity programs, but at least it would make true discussion possible as it would make your arguments relevant.
You have no idea what I know or believe, and you clearly are even having trouble reading the arguments presented to you rather than some ridiculous straw man you've built in your head. I don't have time for people who argue in bad faith and who make absurd assumptions about anyone who disagrees with them.
How can you even know you disagree without knowing the most basic concepts? You are arguing over the likelihood of Goldbach's conjecture being true without even knowing what the natural numbers are, while relying on some chemistry studies, whose relation to the natural numbers is unclear to you. I don't know how it's possible to argue "in good faith" with someone who is completely unfamiliar with the subject and refuses to learn.
To summarize, Damore wrote some memo whose intent was to show that Google should not invest in diversity programs. Those diversity programs are intended to fight sexism; I don't know how effective they are, but neither does Damore. His "arguments" consisted not of denying sexism (the meaning of which he clearly does not know), but of quoting some papers in yet another field he's not an expert in that purport to show that there are other factors involved. Those papers and others similar to them have been largely debated in the research community, and knowing nothing about that field, I could add nothing to that argument except parrot others. But I do know what sexism is, and I know the basics of logic well enough to see that there is no relevance to those findings even if they were true (again, a heavily contested point in itself).
He was fired for making a scene that required the CEO of Google to cut short his family vacation. If he were working for me, I would have fired him for incompetence and stupidity. Incompetence, because the guy does not know how to make a logical argument, lacks critical thinking, and failed to do even cursory study of the topic he discusses. Stupidity, because he didn't realize or didn't care that expressing himself -- a complete layman, and a rather disinterested one at that -- in that particular way, would have a negative effect on his coworkers and his employer. He's one of those people whose professional contribution to a company is negative.
Scott Aaronson is not an expert on this matter, either, and, as far as I know, he hasn’t even seriously studied the subject as an amateur.
I didn’t say that being conservative negates the argument in the first article (and the second is irrelevant regardless of Alexander’s conservatism); I just pointed it out to note that the publication picked scientists who reflect their views rather than attempted to neutrally present the current state of affairs in the relevant social scholarship.
> I just pointed it out to note that the publication picked scientists who reflect their views rather than attempted to neutrally present the current state of affairs in the relevant social scholarship.
In stark contrast to liberal publications who never do that. /s
Again, your reaction to the word sexism suggests you may be confusing it with misogyny, but anyway, here are some starting points, and you can follow the references from there:
James Damore's arguments are only plausible in the weakest sense of the word. The only way someone would find his arguments convincing is if one's priors already favor his conclusion.
If one weighs the evidence for social factors against biological factors, the question is how should a critical person weigh one against the other? It turns out if one ignores all the evidence for social factors and squint really hard at the biological ones, one can, I guess, scam oneself into thinking there's a strong argument there.
Biology and culture are not unrelated, there are very tight feedback loops at play there, the two factors are deeply intertwined. I'd be distrustful of anyone who suggests it's exclusively one or the other.
I found evidencs from CAH(Congenital adrenal hyperplasia) rather convincing, in that it is hard to imagine how that effect is entirely social. Admittedly, this evidence was not presented in Damore's memo, so I guess "The only way someone would find his arguments convincing" may stand, if we strictly restrict to "his arguments", but I think it's more useful to consider the best possible version of his arguments augmented by other people.
If you don't consider evidence you are aware of in an argument, it means you don't think that evidence is necessary to consider. He wants his argument to be considered rigorously in which case it is appropriate to make inferences about what he didn't consider as well as what he did.
It's a quiet truth that most disagreements between people have a crucial basis in the implicit nature of how we weigh and consider information.
A great deal of defense of Damore's arguments are to only consider what is explicitly said and not how it fits into the broader discussion, which is implicit by definition.
So Damore can claim he isn't saying that he thinks some female engineers currently at Google are there because the bar has been lowered (explicit) and this is accepted uncritically by some defenders, but it's not hard to draw the inference from his arguments and his policy suggestions that he thinks Google's current practices have a negative impact on the quality of engineers it recruits (implicit).
Likewise we are told to evaluate the information he gave (explicit) but not consider why he omitted discussing the mountains of evidence that suggest alternative positions and how his arguments should be evaluated in light of it (implicit).
My position is that there is the evidence of negative social feedback is significant enough that companies should experiment with changing their demographic compositions and empirically measuring performance.
Because software engineering requires a great diversity of skills, including people skills, empathy and whole-systems thinking, I think it's very plausible that making the gender balance less skewed will lead to more productive teams.
So basically, you are saying that you can judge him and what he writes not by what he writes, but whatever you want to arbitrarily insert into his writing.
Even the inquisition had higher standards than that.
Honest question in good faith: have you ever read a serious, rigorous exchange of criticism in any field like philosophy or politics? Because what I described is literally par for the course in critical thinking. If Damore and his ilk want to participate in an honest critical debate then their arguments are sure as fuck going to be analyzed the same way everyone's arguments are analyzed in every serious intellectually rigorous setting.
Your refusal to take this idea seriously is a microcosm of what's rotten in this whole discourse (or am I not allowed to draw a connection between what you wrote and literally anything else?).
He wasn't participating in a rigorous exchange of criticism in philosophy or politics.
>Because what I described is literally par for the course in critical thinking.
No, what you described is completely arbitrary.
> his ilk
Right, "rigorous" and "critical" debate. No pure ad-hominems to see here. Move along.
> every serious intellectually rigorous setting.
Er, no.
Just making shit up and attributing it to your opponent is the opposite of "intellectually" rigorous. It maybe ideologically rigorous, but that's about it.
> He wasn't participating in a rigorous exchange of criticism in philosophy or politics.
Um, his memo was intrinsically political. The matters of policy of a company are political matters. Therefore it is completely valid to scrutinize it politically and of course at a serious level which integrates it into the surrounding context.
> No, what you described is completely arbitrary.
No, not really. If it was completely arbitrary then I would be considering things like "Well James Damore didn't mention the ongoing debate on ham and pineapple pizza and clearly shows his bias in doing so". There is an inherent context to his memo that is completely obvious to everyone involved as evidenced by the fact that literally every side in the discussion involving it makes some sort of connection to that context.
On the side defending him, usually calling people who condemn his memo as irrational or the intolerant left, or some-such hostile dismissal.
> Right, "rigorous" and "critical" debate. No pure ad-hominems to see here. Move along.
Ad hominem is "James Damore is a doofus, therefore he's wrong". "James Damore is wrong, and because he is wrong in this way, he's a doofus", on the other hand, is not ad hominem. The only thing more odious than whipping out the latin is doing it incorrectly. From all the digital ink spilled on the topic, I have concluded that there are only a very small group of people defending him that earnestly consider the idea that he fucked up. The most common discourse is to simply presume that he didn't and then demand that everyone engage with him and his memo on their terms. Yawn.
> Just making shit up and attributing it to your opponent is the opposite of "intellectually" rigorous. It maybe ideologically rigorous, but that's about it.
James Damore's arguments are neither novel nor exemplary. The fact that he A) insists that he's being shut out of conversation and B) proceeds to make the same exact argument that has been discussed ad nauseum without bringing anything new to the table is telling. Everyone has already met a James Damore; they don't need another.
There is a lot wrong here, but what bothers me right this minute is the idea that computer programming has "changed beyond recognition" between 1950 and 1980 and that is the cause of the gender imbalance we see today. For sure, a lot of progress was made in the field during that time span. But did the work materially change? I don't think that's the case at all, we simply saw huge steps made in the quality of the tooling and the machines; they didn't fundamentally transform into different things. The tools improved a great deal and allowed the same amount of people to accomplish more work in the same amount of time, progress that continues to this day (we can complain about Electron until we're hoarse, but it does make it easier to get an application out on every device and one person could conceivably so just that).
This is just more painful gymnastics and contortions trying to find another reason for the gender imbalance when the actual cause is obvious and well documented: one gender is working to keep the other out. Damore's memo is an example of this: entirely lacking in applicable science and with a basis grounded almost entirely in the man's existing biases.
Talk to some of the people of another gender currently in the field and just listen to what they are saying. You'll hear about educators with axes to grind, encouraging them to pursue another field. You'll hear about coworkers and employers who suspect their work is not their own. You'll hear about job interviews where no answers are correct. And you'll come to Hacker News and read posts like these, from people in the field, insisting that there is no problem.
> did the work materially change? I don't think that's the case at all
How much money was the computer programming industry creating 1950 vs 1980.
In the memo, one of the larger points was that men are exceptional pushed/forced/heavy incentivize by society towards high paying jobs. Would you argue that this claim is false?
> men are exceptional pushed/forced/heavy incentivize by society towards high paying jobs
This is a very curious way of explaining how men end up with most of the money and power. They're forced to do it!
A perhaps plausible alternative theory: once jobs become high paying, men campaign to recast it as "men's work". This theory is supported by the true history of our profession, succinctly reviewed by this article.
"Forced" in the same sense that we say that women are forced to care about their physical appearance.
If we had an article claiming that men are being crowded out of the beauty industry, both as workers and customers, I would question the article if it did not take outside influence into account. The alternative theory that women are crowding out men and making it "women's work" would sound exceptional, and require exceptional good data.
Your premise is supremely flawed. Men actually dominate the beauty industry's top ranks.[1] This perfectly supports the theory that men put up obstacles to women around higher-paying jobs.
Also note that the Bloomberg article is well supported. It provides data on changing attitudes as programming became a higher-value profession. It cites studies on programmer psychology. It details the specific discriminatory mechanisms by which men shifted the composition from mostly-female to mostly-male. It is worth reading all the way through with an open mind.
Men only dominate positions that have high income in the beauty industry. Follows directly the predictive model as stated above.
Young women (ages 12-24) out-buy all other age groups when it comes to haircare, skincare, cosmetics, and fragrances (Source: “Junior League” by Kelley Donahue. American Salon
, January 2000).
Feel free to provide statistics that men are the majority customer for those products. You assume incorrectly that incentives has no role in how people behave. That is terrible flawed, both as a predictor in how society look like today and as a explanation in how we got there. By ignoring it you are doing anti-science and arguing out of belief. If you are just going to continue then this is a waste of time.
The focus by men on physical appearance, and the focus by women on wealth is a dominating factor in dating. It is the single strongest correlating variable out there (A worth reading are the OkCupid blog on the subject). In a separate survey done in china, over 90% of the women responded that they would not date a man earning less than average income (which eliminate more than half the male population), and a majority of responses thought that men should not be outside when they earn below average income. They should instead be inside working and try become marriageable. That is about as strong social pressure that you can get, similar to how certain countries think about women that are not married.
If you want to present how some mythical barriers to entry shaped the industry rather than plain incentives, then you got to actually bring some data. Not empty theories, but data and experiments that show how barriers to entry is the best explanation to explain gender segregation in the work force. Bloomberg is not attempting to do that, and only present it as their theory with some chosen quotes by a few people in order to support it.
> Men only dominate positions that have high income in the beauty industry. Follows directly the predictive model as stated above.
Nope. There are two predictive models, one that men were "forced" to take higher paying programming jobs, for which you've offered no support, and the other is that they worked to exclude women and recast it as "men's work", which is thoroughly detailed in the article with interviews, studies and specific mechanisms.
You attempted to discount the latter theory by citing the beauty industry, where you said it "would sound exceptional" if women were putting up barriers to men. This assumption is fatally flawed, as it is men who dominate the higher-paying jobs in the beauty industry. Thus it carries no weight as a counterexample, and we are again left to contemplate the total lack of support for your preferred predictive model.
You now seem to have regressed to talking about consumer preferences, a non-sequitur. This in no way contradicts the "men's work" theory, since the work here is running companies, not purchasing their products. You also again claim that no data or experiments have been offered to support the theory, when in fact the article cited data and studies, as I called your attention to. This smacks of willful ignorance.
Finally you state that men face pressure to make money. However you must admit that this does not in any way refute the theory that men place obstacles to women's access to higher-paying jobs. Thus it remains possible that our positions are compatible: that men face greater pressure to earn income, and thus have a strong incentive to exclude women from competition.
You attempted to dress up quotes from a Cosmopolitan news paper as it was a study based on data. It don't work, and I am not sure why you trying such a futile attempt at misdirection. That is anti-science, and is fatally doomed to fail at persuasion.
It clear that you won't admit that consumer preference exist, as it would shows a clear link between gender specific incentives and behavior. You can try to play ignorant, but it won't change the data. Incentives has a real impact on human behavior, and it is trivial fact in psychology.
Finally you admit that men, just maybe, just possible, just as a theory perhaps, might face a unique pressure to make money. Funny that. And yes there is a strong possibility that gender segregation has a multitude of factors (a fact that was well written in a government issued report on gender segregation in the field of education). The problem statement then changes at this point to define which factor has the bigger impact, and we get back again to look at experimental data to see what has a strong impact and what has a small impact.
Let for example guess there exist a study on what jobs children want to do when they grow up. What will the average income of those jobs be when comparing boys vs girls preferences?
Or let say a study at a bit later time in life, and look at when people enter the work force. Will we see men entering the work force earlier and with greater haste than women, and what incentives is there for young unmarried men to get an income around the ages of 18-25?
We can look at studies that survey what teens want in a job, and how they select which profession to study. We can continue by looking at whom and what impacts behavior during this crucial time period in a person life.
We can also look at the primary cause of gender segregation as highlighted in that government report I mentioned earlier. Do people feel more confident when entering a group that they belong? do they feel more self-doubt when they are a local minority (such as in a class room or work place). Does ingroup and outgroup exist as theories, what is the scientific proof for it, and does herd behavior exist in human psychology.
I will note that in the government report, no where does it even entertain the idea that women are crowding out men from the education system. Similar to bloomberg it does record a historical change where men used to be the dominating gender in education, but is no longer. Instead it gives other explanations, such as the government cutting funds and thus the social status of teachers dropped. When money disperse from a profession it also caused the gender ratio to favor more women. When money increase, the opposite happens. Fairly simple statement to prove or disprove by data. Here is your golden opportunity: convince someone on the Internet of your theory by disproving that a influx of money has an impact on gender segregation.
I don't understand where you are going with this... Is your argument that since society seems biased to pay men more money, we should blindly do so? Does that logic apply to race as well as gender?
IMHO, Damore was playing to the misplaced belief held by some men that they are innately better then everyone else and that societal biases have played no role in their successes.
The claim in the memo is that men are pushed towards jobs that are high paying. If a man tries to go to low paying jobs they are generally punished by society, often by being called things like lazy, weak, unfocused, and so on. Those that do seek and get high income get rewarded with high social status and strong correlation with dating success. It has nothing to do with getting paid equally.
Ugh. So basically when programming was unskilled and considered one step up from being a secretary, women did that and men built the machines themselves.
As software became a larger and larger component of the machines, and more and more complex, it became dominated by men. This, we learn, is because men made it more rigorous and scientific as part of some bizarre sexist plot.
Or maybe the nature of programming today is pretty different to how it was in the immediate post-war years, and the kinds of jobs women can get changed too.
I'd bet that as the field grew, they eventually had a surplus of engineers working on new hardware and a deficit of people working to write new software. Once there were men willing to do the work, they were seen as a better bet than the women already in the field.
The same thing happened after WW2, this isn't a new pattern.
Even if the author's premise that women were "crowded out" of programming 40 years ago is true, that does not imply that “innate dispositional differences” between sexes don't influence one's tendency towards pursuing certain fields.
The author suggests that the current stereotypical portrait of a geeky socially awkward neckbearded male engineer was socially engineered, causing a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's idiotic conspiracy nonsense. Geeky reclusive men tend to pursue computer programming because dealing with a machine doesn't involve dealing with a human, not due to society's marketing of computer engineers as geeks.
The author is clearly not a computer programmer (professor of history apparently), nor someone capable of basic logic. If you're going to cash in on the diversity scandal for views, at least make a coherent argument.
(Also this post is a dupe, I submitted the same post before this and this is a copy and paste of my comment on the original thread)
> They found some predictable ones: a love of solving puzzles, for example. But the only “striking characteristic” that defined successful male programmers was “their disinterest in people.” A subsequent study -- one that was overlooked in subsequent years -- found this to be true of female programmers as well.
Isn't this trait much more prevalent among males though? Could explain why we saw women flock to more social fields when the barriers were removed.
When do we start looking at articles like this as misandry? The author is seriously implying there was some sort of conspiracy that all men partook in, with the intent to exclude women from software development. Are you fucking kidding me? This shit has gone too far.
There's no conspiracy, there's only satisfaction with the status quo that leads to those with the upper hand working to preserve the status quo. This dynamic is discussed all the time on this forum.
Notice how they make the claim that males used underhanded tactics to force women out of the software industry, but they never provide a single bit of evidence for that.
The entire article is basically about the software industry evolved into more male positions and things like altitude tests and requirements of advanced degrees which are apparently part of some coordinated conspiracy to be sexist against women.
I agree that aptitude tests and degrees are stupid , but for totally different reasons. This is just incredible mental gymnastics to push an agenda.
If this is at all accurate, then all it is saying is that programming started as a pink collar ghetto. The article itself indicates it was dominated by women as long as it was considered "glorified clerical work." This is actually really normal stuff, not peculiar to the computer industry. "Serious jobs" tend to get dominated by men. This may be related to "the second shift" -- that women seek jobs that don't take an excess of their energy so they can go home and cook, clean, etc. Men are much more often in a position to say "Woman, get me a beer" and just collapse after giving their all to their job.
I don't know a solution. But, I think we aren't going to find one if we don't first recognize that one of the roots of such problems is not that women are predisposed to certain kinds of labor, but that society as a whole expects women to do "women's work" at home and this is rooted in the reality that women can get pregnant, men cannot. A lot of traditional gender roles grow out of that and a lot of societal expectations grow out of that and it wasn't intended to oppress women. It evolved organically as a way for both adults in a household to contribute meaningfully to making ends meet, raising the kids, etc at a time when birth control was not readily available and yadda.
> Sexist stereotypes are used today to justify not hiring women programmers,
[Citation Needed]
Only once (recently) have I ever had the chance to interview a woman for a job. She was fine. I gave my approval. We didn't end up hiring her. Why? Because someone else had more of the specific skills we were looking for. She was just unlucky.
5-6 other people were also turned down for the same reason. The guy that was hired just happened to have experience in some of the products we were working with.
I see an article with some variation of this argument here every week. I’m starting to believe that society has become obsessed with getting more women to open up Visual Studio every morning.
But this isn't like recycling, saving the rainforest, stopping ozone depletion or global warming. All of humanity benefits from doing those things. I couldn't care less if the person who develops the next hot phone app is a man or a woman. I don't think any end user cares.
Because the fact is it doesn't matter. A Git repository doesn't treat code any differently depending on the gender of the person who pushed it.
And yet I see a new article about getting women to code every week.
Are women themselves fighting for the right to hit F10 and step through code every day? Is it akin to another woman suffrage movement?
I don't think so. In fact, I think the majority of women just don't seem to be interested in coding.
It's as if this is someone else’s agenda. An agenda to get more women to code, whether they want to or not.
So who’s pushing this agenda? If corporations are pushing it, then the end goal is probably to save money, because that's why corporations will push any agenda.
It's hilarious that they criticize the stereotype of nerdy outcast male. If you're a girl, 9/10 you will never get flak for being nerdy (yes, exceptions exist, i know, but in my experience), on the other hand, emasculating the male nerd is practically a national pastime.
To add to the irony, a surprisingly large proportion of the anti - Damore tweets were criticizing his appearance and/or calling him a virgin.
Luckily programming or computing hasn't changed at all since the 50s and 60s, so we can effortlessly assume that what people said about it then still applies perfectly to today's distributed, abstract, always-on landscape.
Even more, we can use the view from the 50s and 60s, a time which was not sexist at all, to explain why today is more sexist than ever.
Women outnumber men in colleges. Women have an easier time getting jobs. Single, childless women outearn men in that category.
Women just aren't choosing STEM. And apparently the solution is to tell them loudly how horrible the people they'd get to work with are. Who are some bizarre amalgam of a Goldman Sachs elevator and the cast of Big Bang Theory. Which you can effortlessly get a flood of coverage about, even though you're supposedly oppressed and are fighting the status quo.
Go away old media, go away tech feminists, go away white knights. If people stopped seeing women as victims, you'd lose your meal ticket, your power fetish and your moral superiority.
Why is the obsession with this topic? I have never been to the US but is there a problem for a female to be a software developer in the US? Is this problem just in the US?
By the way, there are countries where over 50% of CS Students are female.
It's sad the article starts with the use of the Ada Lovelace trope, she is not widely considered to be the first computer programmer, or maybe on a pop culture way, not in a scholarly way.
Slatestarcodex in the article cited here multiple times made a point that men didn't push out women out of other high paying fields like law or medicine.
If the theory is right, why did it only happen in IT?
I have always wondered: People often point to graphs showing a massive decline in the percentage of women in CS in the 80's. But has anyone seen a graph of the absolute number, not percentages?
If 1 million women were coding, then 100 billion men started coding, those 1M women would still be coders. So there wasn't necessarily a decline. Or maybe there was, and the numbers will reflect that.
I am interested in the actual numbers, not graphs or interpretations. But I've never found a data source, so hopefully someone knows of one.
The whole debate is interesting because there are at least four separate sides: men who don't believe it exists, men who recognize it as a systemic problem, women who believe it's the most important aspect, and women who wish the debate would go away so they can focus on doing good work instead of on doing good work as a woman.
Me, I don't know enough about it. I'm just curious about the numbers over time. And if I have a daughter hopefully I'll think of some crafty way to make programming seem interesting. The one badass female dev I know said she regretted not getting into it from a younger age, so it seems worth fixing.
Thank you. Perfect. Now I feel like we're in a position to have a productive debate. For example, there was a sharp decline in the rate of bachelor's degrees for women, but not master's degrees. Those remained nearly the same, then declined at the same rate as men's.
It's interesting to see the actual numbers because it clearly shows there is/was a problem. Now, how best to solve it?
One issue with quotas is that the rate of women graduates can't necessarily keep up. It seems like we could use an influx of new students (in addition to the current efforts).
There are now 60 women graduating for every 40 men who do so (in the US). There has also been huge growth in the number of overall graduates. To find absolute numbers you need to adjust your percentages by these factors.
This has been my question as well, and few people want to consider it. The best data I've been able to find on actual gender split over that period only goes through 1996 [1] - just when the dotcom bubble was getting going. However, if you look at total CS degrees (look under "The third surge" in [2]) it at least seems pretty obvious what happened. Right around 1980 the number of CS degree students exploded, with men consistently outnumbering women about 2 to 1. Then around 1985 the absolute number gap started widening rapidly and never got better.
We should definitely consider that women may have been discouraged from entering CS degree programs more than they were in the 70s, but at least in statistical terms, it seems like men just got more interested in the field for a variety of reasons and naturally came to massively outnumber the women interested in the field. Also see [3] since the new CS men had to come at the expense of other majors, and it's interesting to look at what they chose not to pursue (note: the stats are complicated by the fact that women represent an increasingly large overall percentage of college students over the same time period). Men seem to have declined as a % of graduates over the 80s-90s period most strongly in non-CS Engineering, physical sciences, and biology. This paints a really interesting picture since it's hard to argue a systemic push against women in science degrees when CS is pretty much the only one with an increasing gender imbalance issue over the same period.
> it seems like men just got more interested in the field for a variety of reasons and naturally came to massively outnumber the women... it's hard to argue a systemic push against women in science degrees when CS is pretty much the only one with an increasing gender imbalance
This is a bad premise. What sets CS apart from most sciences, and correlates perfectly with the 80s, is that it became a professional path to vast wealth (the rise of software giants like Microsoft). This supports the article which details some of the mechanisms by which the composition of CS was engineered to shift from women to men through a series of professional and cultural obstacles, once it was clear that software would be a high-paying career.
Sorry, I don't see how that's a bad premise. Men are more drawn to career paths with prestige and high earnings than are women. That's one reason in the "variety of reasons" I said. You seem to be saying that because CS became a path to a lucrative profession, therefore women were forced out en mass via artificial obstacles. But that's assuming ill intent when there doesn't need to be any to explain the difference. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I do think that the degree to which the current gender imbalance is due to the mechanisms in the article is largely overstated.
Let's shift it around another way and do a thought experiment. Public school teachers in the US today are overwhelmingly female and also rather poorly paid. What if tomorrow all the states decided that the starting salary for new teachers would be a minimum of $100k, and you would no longer need a teaching license. Do you think we wouldn't see more men suddenly entering the profession of public school teaching and dropping the percentage of women? I certainly think we would. Does that necessarily mean that men would be actively sabotaging women to keep them out of teaching entirely?
Your thought experiment doesn't go far enough. The issue is not merely that men entered the previously female-dominated programming profession, it is that they now dominate it overwhelmingly.
Consider that if as you believe men are more motivated to seek higher-paying positions, that would actually incentivize them to throw up obstacles to female competition. If the teaching profession suddenly shifted to mostly-male upon raising salaries, it would be correct to examine if sexism was at work. If we found marketing campaigns like "are you the man to command a classroom", "aptitude" tests that discriminated against women, and male-dominated professional societies acting as gatekeepers (to use some historical examples from our industry), they could very well lead to a significant gender imbalance.
A much more plausible explanation, at least, than women magically becoming disinterested in teaching because they have an aversion to making lots of money...
I feel like we're talking about different things here. I'm saying that it's entirely plausible for one gender to come to dominate a profession simply because that profession aligns with their interests moreso than do the alternative professions available. More interest from one gender means more individuals of that gender, in absolute numbers, seeking to make themselves qualified candidates for the profession. More qualified candidates from one gender applying to open positions means statistically you're going to end up hiring more of that gender on average. The starting gender ratio has nothing to do with it if the profession is small in the beginning and expands massively in just a few decades.
Again, I'm not saying women were not discriminated against (and continue to be subject to bias), but I don't buy that this is the primary reason why we have a large gender imbalance today.
Here's another question for you - medicine and law were massively male-dominated for a very long time, and yet both of those professions are now far closer to gender parity than tech is. Are we to believe that the anti-women practices that forced women out of tech were simply never applied to these other professions to keep women out? If so, why is tech a unique industry for this?
Sexism is far from unique to the tech industry. See for example [1][2].
You note that "medicine and law were massively male-dominated for a very long time," yet confusingly you wonder whether "the anti-women practices that forced women out of tech were simply never applied to these other professions" (emphasis mine). Another possibility comes to mind: That anti-women practices were in fact applied to these professions, and some modicum of progress has been made in dismantling them, with varying degrees of success.
"Although junior lawyers are split roughly equally between male and female, the senior positions at law firms, barristers’ chambers and in the judiciary are still overwhelmingly dominated by one demographic – white, upper-class men"
You're kind of stacking turtles here to arrive at a conclusion. Let's assume that you're correct in that anti-women practices were in place in medicine and law, but were subsequently dismantled (which I don't agree with). Why weren't they dismantled in tech over the same period of time? You're basically arguing that sexism was everywhere, but somehow it's only still keeping women out of tech today.
Also, on your article references, you've shifted the discussion. We're talking about gender representation in professions, not income parity or senior-level representation, which have nuanced reasons for favoring one set of people over another (including bias). You need to answer the question of why women aren't even entering CS degree programs in the first place, while they enter med school and law school at close to parity with men.
> Let's assume that you're correct in that anti-women practices were in place in medicine and law, but were subsequently dismantled (which I don't agree with).
Nor do I. I just gave two citations demonstrating that sexism has not been dismantled in medicine and law. You merely repeated your implication that no sexism exists today. You also failed to explain by what mechanism these fields changed from being "massively male-dominated" (your words). Did men suddenly lose their enhanced interest in "career paths with prestige and high earnings"?
I also very explicitly referred to "high-paying careers" in my original reply, which is the only sensible way to look at sexism, since delegating the more menial, lower-paying work to women is not equal representation.
Please don't do that. I went to great lengths to explicitly say multiple times that I do not believe sexism is non-existent. I said that I do not believe sexism is the primary cause of the current gender gap in tech. You went and turned the conversation around to fit your own narrative, and now you're asking literally the exact same question I asked you, back to me? Come on. You're the one that thinks there is a massive concerted effort to keep women out of tech. It's on you to explain how tech is unique in this regard, when other professions are not nearly as affected. It's also on you to explain how sexist tactics used 30 years ago are keeping women from pursuing CS degrees today.
> I also very explicitly referred to "high-paying careers" in my original reply, which is the only sensible way to look at sexism
What??? That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Here's what you're saying if we follow your logic: If male person A wants to pursue a high-paying job, and female person B wants to pursue a low-paying job, sexism is keeping person B out of a high-paying career. That's not how sexism works. You're just arguing in circles here without showing me how the hypothesis that maybe women don't want to work in tech at the same rate as men is incorrect.
Someone else also pointed out that the U.S. population has increased by about 20% since the 1980s, so although the absolute number of women CS students are about the same, that still means it's proportionally going down.
But the percentages are very important. In your example you if 1M women were coding then 100B more men started, but there are still 1M women, there isn't a decline... But there is.(Couldn't you have used more realistic numbers?) if a lot of new men entered the field, but there was not a similar increase in women, then there is a problem, why did the number of men to up, and not the numbers of women?
As long as the distribution doesn't match the population, within reason, the is an issue. That is why the actual numbers don't matter, but the percentages do.
Women make up roughly half the population, but less than 20% in the computer industry. Why is there such a discrepancy?
Just once, I would like to read in one of these articles about an actual non-anonymous woman who could plausibly demonstrate that a.) she had a strong desire to be a software developer, b.) she had developed sufficient skills in a marketable language to be employed as one, and c.) she had made a prolonged effort to find employment as one, and d.) she was unable land a job as a software developer.
Instead, it's always about something that a magazine ad said in 1969, or a teacher who told them that woman couldn't be programmers, or the boys in their school computer club ignored, them, etc. etc.
And the prescriptions, as usual, are that in order to get more woman into software development, that changes must be imposed on men, not woman.
Such bunk. I spent thousands of hours fighting with computers due to obsession, certainly not because I had some notion that it was important or that it would be considered a good occupation 20 years in the future. I was practically living a double life as a computer bodybuilder, despite the reaction society gave me about it. When I look back over how I got good at computers and programming, I see no reason women could not have done the same thing. Yet most didn't. Why they didn't, I don't know. Sexism could probably stop a woman from being in construction, but not so much programming. Let's stop with these persecution myths.
I don't think it is a prestigious job today. When was the last time you remember a movie starring a computer programmer? How often do you hear the phrase "We better consult the computer programmers before we make this important decision"? How many novels center on the daily procedures of computer programming?
It was pretty prestigious in the 90's and seems to remain so today. At parties where I'm required to mix with other adults from varying backgrounds (i.e. a child's birthday party), they are almost universally impressed that I am in software development. As a child, people did seem impressed (in the 80's) that my father was a developer and we were one of the few families in town that had a proper computer (not an Atari 2600 or an Intellivison).
That's because the women "programmers" were largely doing things like plugging wires into a certain configuration as dictated to them by the (usually male) engineers. What the article terms as programming as essentially operating a switch board - it had nothing to do with programming as we know it today.
Perhaps, but even if the article is correct, and male programmers in the 1960s did intentionally crowd out women, doesn't that demonstrate what Damore posited when he said women are less assertive and less aggressive, in general? It seems disingenuous for the author of the article to declare Damore "wrong," when studies back up what Damore said, and this article itself suggests those tendencies to be accurate, at least to some degree.
The Damore argument as I read it said not only that women are less aggressive in general, but was premised on the idea that the reason for that difference was primarily biological, and that therefore efforts to promote diversity in CS were pushing things away from the natural gender ratio. Even if I were to grant that women are statistically less assertive (probably true, though anecdata suggest that women's ideas are likely to be misattributed in discussions), it seems unlikely to me that there's not a huge cultural component. For instance, "bossy", which has negative valences, is used almost exclusively of girls compared to boys. The objection I have to Damore is less the science, and more the conclusions from the evidence.
I wish you would read what I said, rather than conflating it with Damore's memo. What I said was that Damore posited that one reason women are under represented in the technology field (and managerial roles) is that they are less assertive and less aggressive than men. I said that studies back that up, which they do. I never said that it was biological, though it's possible that it may be. What I said was that it is disingenuous of the author to declare the entirety of Damore's memo "wrong," when, in fact, studies suggest he's right. He may be wrong in his use of the word "biological," and we can debate that, but to suggest that his entire memo is wrong is intellectually dishonest.
Here are some links to studies regarding women's interest in technology, and their tendency to be less aggressive and assertive than men:
And here are links to a poll from Indeed.com and the gender distribution in Georgia Tech's online Masters of Computer Science program that demonstrate the lack of interest that women have in technology.
You may want to research your position before making such a bold statement. Please note the links I posted in another response in this thread. Just because something doesn't agree with your worldview does not make it untrue, or, at the very least, unworthy of intelligent consideration.
Also, please don't conflate my targeted point with Damore's multi-page, multi-themed memo.
James Damore asserted that women are less aggressive than men because of mostly biological factors which is ridiculous if one has ever at all paid attention to the social signals given to women.
Also, why the fuck would we ever stand for our industry to be organized along hierarchies of dominance and aggression? What exactly is the argument here?
Had he said psychological differences instead, would you then agree with him? There are differences, which is obvious. So I am curious what you think the root cause of those differences is, and why you're willing to throw out the whole premise, based solely on Damore's understanding of the root cause? Isn't that a bit like denying the sunrise, simply because someone says the sun moves in the sky because it revolves around the Earth?
Please read the links I offered in another response in this thread for more information.
To answer your last question: Because if we didn't, our competitors would put us out of business. Try running a competitive business on kindness and feelings and see how long you last.
More on this, computer were expensive toys, and traditionally boys get more expensive toys than girls. It's quite understandable the marketing decision there.
This is an important and well-written article that succinctly exposes the history and mechanisms of sexism in the industry. How once software became a valued profession a complex of obstacles at the cultural and professional level were put in place to change its composition from primarily women to men.
It is also a damning indictment of the HN community. It is clear this post has suffered a campaign of down voting. Every comment that is positive toward the article, even just summarizing its content, has been downvoted. By the time I finished reading it it had disappeared off the front page entirely.
Meanwhile, many of the comments merely state anecdotal experiences and armchair theories reinforcing why men end up dominating the field, while entirely ignoring the content of the article.
There are clearly some high-karma men aggressively censoring this topic. I hope this article makes it back onto the front page because it's really worth a read by our whole community -- even if you disagree.
> It is also a damning indictment of the HN community. It is clear this post has suffered a campaign of down voting. Every comment that is positive toward the article, even just summarizing its content, has been downvoted. By the time I finished reading it it had disappeared off the front page entirely.
I don't know for sure, obviously, but based on the patterns I've casually observed on HN in the past, I suspect this article was flagged not because it promotes a male-blaming POV, but because the anti-male-blaming types seem to be winning the arguments in the comments.
And on topics as polarizing as this one, I suspect that every comment, on either side, gets some number of downvotes and upvotes. It's the countering effect of the upvotes that keep them from getting killed.
Personally, I upvote a lot more than I downvote, and I routinely upvote posts I disagree with if it appears they were made in good faith and some thought was put into them, but are nonetheless suffering a lot of downvotes.
Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.
These are not the kind of people I would attribute any power to "crowd out" anyone.
To me it seemed that they started doing computer stuff, because no one, including women, wanted to have anything to do with them.
The "cool", way more aggressive, kids wanted to do sales, law, finance, management and stuff.
Computers were new and complicated, a unsafe bet for people who were so good included into society.