Damore did write that women "generally" have differences vs. men that would make them not so good at tech.
Damore: "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things , relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)."
Controversial theories that Damore may have learned in evolutionary biology…
Damore did write that women "generally" have differences vs. men that would make them not so good at tech.
Damore: "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things , relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)."
Controversial theories that Damore may have learned in evolutionary biology classes should not be used at work to speculate that a bunch of employees are biologically unsuited to their tasks. He should have stayed in systems biology (his PhD subject before dropping out) instead of muck-raking at Google.
Even the quote you provide is hedged with a key word ("generally") and focuses on the interests of the individuals in question rather than innate ability to succeed
Exactly. When you say something like "men are stronger than women", somebody always points out this one chick they know who's totally buffed out. I think ask how many women they know who AREN'T and if this one person is the exception rather than the rule........
"But on Twitter recently I saw an article which quantifies the difference in concrete ways. To be honest the difference shocked me. The paper is Hand-grip strength of young men, women and highly trained female athletes. As you can see in the figure above the sample sizes are large".
Yep. Roughly 1 in 4 women are stronger than the weakest 25% of men. Only the very very very top of them will rival even average men.
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The upshot is that the very strongest female athletes are barely above the median of grip strength for men. The top 75th percentile of female athletes are below the bottom 25th percentile of men.
Another way to look at it is cumulative distributions. You can tell looking at this that there is overlap between the two sample distributions. How much? Ten percent of women have stronger grips than the bottom five percent of men. The difference in distributions is big enough that the very strongest non-elite athlete female in the whole data set has a weaker grip than most of the men.
On the other hand women maintain their physical strength to a much greater age than men, or so I have read. Since we spend most of our lives outside of our prime, it may be that the aggregate average physical output of women is greater than that of men. 'Stronger' can have more than one meaning.
I'm just reporting something I read a long time ago ('or so I have read'), and that is the sum of my contention. I have neither cites nor experimental evidence, but the proposition accords with my personal (anecdotal) experience and might be worth looking into if one is interested. We do know that women live longer than men on the average. My main point, though, is in the last sentence above.
It was some kind of filler or 'content', a long time ago, and I am pretty sure no references were given. The more exact statement was that at age 60, women's average physical output is 90% of what it was when they were 20, whereas men's is 50% etc. This seemed to comport with what I observed informally/anecdotally, but I have not studied the question closely. I would think you might find something by putting the proposition in a search engine.
Men are obviously faster/stronger in sprints and marathons, but in ultra-marathons-races of 100 miles or more, women are superior. Women also survive war/famine situations at a higher rate than men. Physical prowess and the “ability” to physically grind/survive are not necessarily correlational.
Women survive famines better because they carry more fat, proportionally and on average. Also cold water, because their subcutaneous fat serves as insulation. They may also respond more rationally to crises - eg the Donner party.
Also, women are typically spared in combat/massacre situations for obvious, distasteful selfish reasons. That shows up over long periods, for instance comparing female (mitochondrial) lines vs. male (Y-chromosome) lines. There are a LOT more female lines; more women have survived and reproduced, long term.
I’m just going with what I heard on Rogan-women are competitive with men in their nitrate-marathoning, and have better survival rates in famines, concentration camps,etc.
I'm not talking about "this one chick" I know. A large fraction of girls from nearly age zero are told to play with dolls. We have no idea whether this, or biology, explains later differences in interests and abilities between sexes.
I need to read up on this, but I've heard on some podcast (don't remember which, may have been Sam Harris) that looking at Scandinavian countries, where the most consistent and long standing effort has been made to make opportunities for men and women as equal as possible, that over time women and men have become even more stratified along professions traditionally considered male vs female.
That's interesting. I worked for a couple of months in Denmark in the 1980s. The workplace was extremely stratified by gender: the techies were all male, and the women did other kinds of work, usually secretarial or administrative-bureaucratic. In New York, where I normally worked, there was some stratification, maybe 70-30 or 60-40, but nothing like Denmark. No cause was obvious -- there was no overt discrimination. It occurred to me, though, that Denmark's population at that time was ethnically almost entirely Scandinavian, whereas New York, as everyone knows, is very mixed in race/ethnicity, culture, religion, life experience, and political framework.
My experience in technology in NYC in the 90s was different. It seemed every company I worked for had a very limited number of women in the IT department. There was always one woman who was responsible for tracking property. At one company, there was just that person. I hired on the first IT female help desk person. She was quite good at the job, left unfortunately before she hit a year. Relationship with one of my other help desk people, didn't want to continue working with him, I think.
Banks had more women in the IT department, but they were always either in that inventory role, or were project managers. Didn't seem to be any female coders. Actually, the only female coder I ran into during the 90s was a System/36 person who did payroll processing and such for one firm.
I heard some very sexist things in meetings and also witnessed some very unethical relationships at one company. I suppose that is par for the course, used to happen all over before the sexual harassment thing gained steam. I generally took care of notification in exit interviews, the people generally weren't with the companies for long afterwards. It was the dotcom era and we were all job hopping a lot, anyway. Sticking around for payback for reporting stuff wasn't my cup of tea.
I met my wife at work and we both worked for a computer manufacturing company aimed at serving the financial community. Both of us were software engineers and she was assigned to do quality assurance on the product I was writing. How's that for a conflict? :)
I can say with absolute certainty the both of use were treated equally in some respects, in fact she had better possition than I; she was fast tracked into senior management while there were very few opportunities for me to advance in a tehcnical role. It came between us after many years (decades) and probably has contributed to our divorce 40 years later.
If anything, my report from the trenches would be women in the specific field of computer systems engineering had a slight advantage? They were seen as rational, compasionate, "people persons", while men were most likely seen as pocket pen protector nerds?
It occurs to me that there is also (as in all things?) much-overlooked nuance wrt that "sexual harassment thing", in that while there is ugly abuse of imbalance of power, there is also gaming the system by my gyno-American sisters. This is equally if not more disruptive, because people NOT favored by the high-value woman are resentful and women who see their careers harmed because they are not perceived as "high-value" (whatever their undoubted virtues as human beings) are understandably disapproving.
It's good we are confronting such problems with a more enlightened approach than "No Broads Allowed, they just cause trouble!". It would be even better if we allowed women full agency in what they choose to do. And ultimately, we're going to have to confront the very real dynamic that men seek wealth and power in order to obtain access to a plentiful supply of sexually available young women. Some men have this as the primary motivation underlying their efforts to gain wealth and power, some secondary, but look at rich men, politicians, cult leaders...they have a single thing, amongst their various motivations, in common. And we can't even speak about it.
Be careful. Larry Summers (a nasty piece of work, in general and as an economist, but still...) got in a lot of trouble for raising exactly this awkward question:
"What constitutes equality? What if there really are inherent differences that average out (eg, in IQ scores) but lead to big differences in, eg, career choices? Is it equality if some fields are dominated by men and others by women?"
The more ideological members of his audience (he should have known better) didn't want to deal with that, so they misrepresented his comments and intent (granted, interpretable as making excuses). And got away with it because nobody really wants to touch that one, and anyway he's a nasty piece of work.
Summers was fired because U. presidents aren't supposed to cause controversy; they're primarily fundraisers. Should have known better.
"There is a great deal of absurd political correctness. Now, I’m somebody who believes very strongly in diversity, who resists racism in all of its many incarnations, who thinks that there is a great deal that’s unjust in American society that needs to be combated,” Summers said. “But it seems to be that there is a kind of creeping totalitarianism in terms of what kind of ideas are acceptable and are debatable on college campuses."
That appears to be a different topic, but one that would also get him in trouble. But he's right about that one, too. Maybe it's just economics where he's systematically wrong.
I didn't know there was a transcript - there were claims that there was none. Student journalism being useful.
PT, More lies. Juvenile primates in other species show the same differentiation of interests (male juvenile primates play with trucks, female juvenile primates prefer dolls) that human children show.
RR, Sorry that you haven't kept up with the literature. It's hardly secret. See 'Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/). Type 'juvenile primates toys' into Google and you will get many hits.
That's very interesting. I can't imagine what a rhesus monkey of either sex would make of a wheeled toy, since it's a very unusual rhesus monkey that has experience with wheeled vehicles of any kind in the first place. I think someone should examine the protocols for these experiments closely.
I often wonder how the dog figures out how to work a rubber ball and rip out the bell at the center of them. Time for a new ball after he does this.
Such things obviously don't occur in nature. Conclusion (and i'm not being snarky) is that animals are capable of learned behavior based on environmental objects. I can't imagine a rhesus monkey with a toy truck would be much different.
In my experience, tearing things up is rather normal dog behavior, so getting a bell out of a rubber ball might not be a long step conceptually speaking. The first experience might even have been a lucky accident. I am not sure how to apply this to rhesus monkeys as I have considerably less direct experience of them.
Just Google it Rajeev, It was an experiment (I believe there are more, but I just pulled up this one): "When offered the choice of playing with either a doll or a toy truck, girls [monkeys] will typically pick the doll and boys [monkeys] will opt for the truck. This isn't just because society encourages girls to be nurturing and boys to be active, as people once thought. In experiments, male adolescent monkeys also prefer to play with wheeled vehicles while the females prefer dolls — and their societies say nothing on the matter."
I was just reading about a sleep study published by Dement in 1960. The scientists thought their results confirmed the Freudian idea that people go crazy without dreams. Of course this result was picked up by the media and became common knowledge for some. In 1965 the same researchers invalidated their previous study, but the mainstream idea persisted that dreams are needed for sanity.
The moral of this story is that behavioral science is a soft science, and we shouldn't get too invested in one theory over another.
I don't understand the comment. Are you saying you are glad that I don't imagine biologists or zoologists being interested in this study, that I don't confuse psychometry and psychology or have I made some kind of embarrassing mistake that has covered me in shame?
None of th above. Sorry, I was being a little playful and I literally appreciated the spelling. I'm still getting used to this "no edits, no corrections" interface and had just tripped over my own feet in a related discussion.
Sorry to say it wasn't anything complicated or mysterious.
That may be true and is interesting data. Yet we should be very careful when generalizing from primates to people, and that kind of research-level speculation does not belong in a workplace where people just need to get stuff done. Witness Coinbase and Basecamp discouraging political chatter at work.
A manager's first concern when hiring is what and how many they have budget for, so they can't just hire all the people who seem to have the experience, training, etc. and can play well with others. After that simple analysis the manager is in the realm of intuition, guesswork, luck, and prejudice. Some people are very good at simulating competence.
In an organization, there are often also political hurdles to get over as well -- upper management or peers may veto your choices for some reason.
Sometimes it is a superficiality, sometimes it is the most important thing in the world. Sometimes it is a social construct, sometimes it is deeply rooted biology that evolved over hundreds of millions of years. Sometimes it is all of these things at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
We all have ignorance on our side, but maybe you have a magic scope to tease out people's "innate dispositional differences"? I'm sure having a bunch of monkeys play with toys beyond their comprehension is going to clear everything up.
You may have no idea, because you don't seem to read much.
Ideas in which men and women have significantly greater legal, social and economic equality show far greater disparity in careers chosen than the U.S. Fewer women really do like engineering. AND THAT'S OK.
Is it OK? Is it what people really want? Even as a child I was irritated by gender, racial, age, and other expectations, as if we were all a bunch of robots waiting to be programmed.
Do we actually get what we want in all cases? My daughter wants to be a (big) wild animal vet. Like in Africa. She has RA and Crohn's and is on a constant diet of methotrexate and <insert biologic of the month here>. Her being on the savanna away from hospitals where they could drain her joints (at least 4x a year...she had her left hip replaced due to necropsy of the ball of the thigh bone at 18) is not realistic.
She's probably not going to get what she wants as a result. I wanted to be a cartographer when I was a kid. Satellite imagery and GPS made that mostly pointless by the time I was an adult.
I'm thinking about more general social conditions, and as I'm an active part of society, there are going to be conditions I like, which I'll try to keep or enhance, and conditions I don't like, which I'll try to change or eliminate, just like almost everybody else. Primarily, with reference to this discussion, I don't like the deal where everyone is supposed to be programmed by their sex -- or their 'race' or ethnic group or their astrological sign -- because it makes people more stupid than they already are.
And that's the essence of equality isn't it? Not equal outcomes, equal opportunity.
When we pigion hole people using the gross characteristics you underline, all we're really doing is limiting the outcome based on our own preconceptions. We should do our best to recognize it and avoid it.
Well, I think equality of opportunity is impossible -- we can't all come from the same parents, grow up in the same neighborhood, go to the same school, and so on. We can't seriously modify opportunity, whereas we can modify outcomes. However, I think it would be more to the point to create adequacy of opportunity, one point of which would be to enable everyone, especially the young, to develop their talents according to their desires -- at least the positive ones. I suppose this is Karl Marx in social-democratic mode, but it does seem kind of reasonable to me anyway.
I disagree about opportunity vs. outcome; I feel it's the responsibility of a free and egalitarian society to assure equal opportunity, but it's the responsibility of the individual granted that opportunity to determine his or her own outcome.
I auppose at the root of my value system you'd call me a meritocrat? A supporter of meritocracy? I sincerely believe everyone should be given equal opportunity to screw up there life as they see fit? I'm not responsible for your success, but I don't have the right to discriminate against you for any reason other than your ability. If you're a hot shit programmer and you just happen to be Scandanavian, that's no reason to pass you by?
But don't you think it's a little odd that women in general are attributed with the gift of creation and a propensity for it, while men are most often characterized as mechanical? Yet engineering, by it's nature, is inherently creative?
I'm male and I'm a successful engineer. I'm also a musician and vocalist. My father was a distinguished engineer who was responsible for the US Navy's fleet balistic nuclear missile system, from Polaris through Trident. My mother was an accomplishd female vocalist. I apparently inherited both traits?
I can't escape the opinion my gender isn't all that important an influence on my talent?
For reference, the method I used back "in the day" is described very completely in Box, Hunter and Hunter's "Statistics for Experimenters". Can't remember the edition or publication date off hand, but it's a definitive text on the subject.
PS: My education on the subject was derived from a man named Jake, who held a PhD. on the subject and taught under the aegis of the Rochester Institute of Technology. I applogize if my understanding of the topic is dated? I've been retired for nearly twenty years.
My specialty is the design of experiments. I usually follow the Taguchi methodology of experiment design, as you no doubt already know, Taguchi's optimization for fractional design is considered by many to be the current state of the art.
Or maybe lots of men don't like engineering much either, but they have fewer choices. So they get decent grades and a technical career because of social pressure, which women experience less. You don't seem to think much.
Gee, if only there was actual research on precisely this question. Should we go and look for it first before flapping our gums? Nah, let’s just make shit up and insult people.
"It [a 1903 dissertation] shows both how much and how little the science of sex differences has advanced in the last 100 years. Thompson had almost no empirical work to build upon, whereas contem porary psychologists have an extensive base of empirical studies to inform our conclusions; yet, in many ways, we are still asking the same basic questions."
There is more data now but the basic questions are unanswered.
I agree with not pigeonholing and that sometimes "conventional wisdom" leads to discriminatory behavior. I agree that it's OK to criticize someone's statements. Debate is healthy. But what's happening now is over the top. It's not meant to make things better, but to tear certain people down. Make examples. It's mob rule.
Yes, it is mob rule. I was recently watching some videos about Evergreen State College. We should be emphasizing our common humanity rather than our differences. That is a political message most people could support.
At the hospital child care center I administered (20 years ago), the children played with what ever they wanted....much to the chagrin of some of the dads. Boys played with dolls, girls built with Lego bricks, etc. And yet, inevitably the boys a tree stick or carrot stick and fashion it into a gun. And often it was the girls who were the first to empathize with another, but they didn't always fall into stereotypical male/female roles. It was always our goal to help them develop the best of both genders. After all, my master's thesis argued that the best leadership was androgynous.
For every question, there is an answer that is simple, easy to understand, and wrong. You seem to seek such banalities.
Also, while we're in ''anecdote' as the singular of 'data'" territory, I'm reminded of the liberated young mother who gave her son dolls and her daughter trucks and construction equipment to play with, only to find her son having the dolls fighting each other and jumping of cliffs and the daughter tucking her baby backhoes and monster trucks in to bed after a nice "oil party". Called and raised!
ps) We actually DO have lots of "idea" about sexual predelictions, including experimental, anthropological and historical. YOU may not have such "ideas" because you snatched at the first, easiest to understand, and best-fit-to-agenda answer you saw.
Actually, we have some data. It turns out that juvenile monkeys have exactly the same toy preferences as human children. Is this enough to prove that biology (not sexism) dominates child toy preferences. Probably not. However, It does suggest the answer.
We don't consider men's generally lower interest in being preschool teachers and nurses to be a deficiency. Why would women's generally lower interest in being auto mechanics and programmers be a deficiency?
My husband was a carpenter and tried to convince three daughters to go into the trades. None did. It wasn't they couldn't do the work it was the mess, the sanitation facilities and getting dirty. There still are not many women in the building trades. Entire work structures need to accommodate better. Tech support where I work seems to have more women because the larger organization has tried to accommodate their preferred working conditions. I think the org. structures are where change needs to start. Not sure if large construction sites ever will, but tech could.
A dirty secret is that the autists are the problem in tech. They have social issues and it bothers women more than it does men. Most women find the environment abhorrent.
The problem is that the key feature of the autists, along with high function in things that make them good in tech, is that social issue. I've made a whole career acting as a translator for people much farther out on the spectrum than I am. Telling them to stop doing it doesn't fix the problem.
There is an effort to consider the world of the neuro-diverse in public libraries. My field is librarianship and we strive to be responsive to everyone. A fair number of people come to libraries and get upset that we (librarians) now try to make the library a fun place with no more sh-sh-sh (not that we will every get over that idea). This has made us not a good place for people who can't tolerate chaotic situations--esp. autists. But with recognition that people who don't like chaotic situations have rights too (fancy that?) we are trying to reintroduce quiet spaces. Also, librarianship attracts autist people as future librarians who have the idea from popular culture that libraries are orderly. I, a teacher of librarians, have worked to find my autist students library jobs that are like tech jobs. This would be digitization work, cataloging. I guess given the world today there needs to be some larger recognition that everyone does not have the neurological makeup to be like the signers at Apple want them to be. Thank you for your opening at SNL, Elon Musk.
It figures that Elon would at least make the nod to that. Though, he's found coping mechanisms that make it a lot less apparent in him than many I know. I actually got the line from a therapist once that whatever mechanisms I had figured out in (45 years at the time) was going to be much better than the drugs her associated psychiatrist would prescribe.
I appreciate and understand your efforts. I only wish it were so simple to carve out a place in technology for people who aren't autistic and have no particular talent in dealing with same. My employer does make an effort. It's kind of funny that my job nowadays is salesy. The dedicated sellers are quite tolerant of my foibles, surprisingly, though you can imagine that they are driven extroverts thriving on chaos. I can think a little like they do while remaining a geek at heart, which is why they keep me around.
We just have to remember that all of us have a range and it can also vary over life and everyone isn't the same. Honestly, I think current world expects everyone to be the same in our responses to them not realizing there are two sides. Think about vision...I have low vision and can cope only by all kinds of accessibility work arounds. This grey type here at Substack means I cut & paste longer responses to a word doc. Bold them and upsize them. What would be accessible to me would be unpleasant for readers with normal vision. How much accommodation will the world provide? And there is a spectrum and seeing the others' point of view takes a lot more intense empathy than based on outward characteristics which get the maj. of attention.
I'm sorry you have to do that. I'm a web dev and all sites should be accessible. It's super easy to do - there are several services that offer tools that enable users to resize fonts, change colors, contrast - the works. I am surprised that Substack doesn't make an effort. Very few of the big sites do - and they should be setting an example. Check it out: https://accessibe.com/ Click on the little blue figure bottom right and have fun!
As someone who works in biotech, and has worked with tech companies as AI got more important in healthcare, I think it's a world of difference. The people in biotech are wonderful, it's just a joy. The people in tech seem to me like they often can't even communicate with one another.
As a general framework, try this: if you're good at math and not words, you go into tech. If you're good at words and not math, you go law, polysci, journalism, etc. If you're equally good at both you go into science or medicine. People good at words are also good at people. Tech has social problems because they don't get the best people at dealing with people.
The framework fits with the logic that if one gender tended to be better at words, members of the gender would choose tech less. It's not a deficiency, it's a superiority.
I don't doubt you are correct. That said, the poor communication in tech has been a godsend for me personally. I can take direction from leadership and turn it into concerted action from geeks who otherwise would be lethargic at best in response to upper management direction. I speak their dialect and can assuage their issues without compromising the goals leadership wants to achieve. I don't think someone without the affliction would have an easy time communicating with the people doing the grunt work of tech and extracting maximum performance out of them. Which is mostly about getting out of their way and letting them innovate.
So I guess I am pushing back on the social problems thesis a little. Yes, it's dysfunctional compared to more 'normal' groups, but you can still get things done and we can still communicate. It's just not for everyone.
Yes, I would never say you don't get things done... social interaction and accomplishment are certainly not correlated. Probably just lower on the conscientiousness.
It's refreshing to realize that there is a real difference that provoked all those negative reactions over the years. One of the things I have discussed in therapy has been the framework of learned (unnatural) social behaviors that I have formed to get around the problem. It's my coping mechanism. It's very efficient, but it's fake and draining. It turns me from a borderline extrovert to an introvert, realistically. Accepting this has made me a better communicator and to construct social interactions to be less draining to me, and more positive to the participants other than me. My daughters, for instance, who do not have the same issues I do. Hopefully this is something that you can leverage also.
BTW, I am a big proponent that telling them to stop doing it CAN fix the problem. It's the expecting them to stop doing it because you made a facial expression or stormed out of the room that doesn't fix the problem. Those nonverbal cues are not in their vocabulary. If you say "Jennifer stopped talking and left the meeting quickly after you held up that bottle and made a sort of sexual reference because those kind of references to sex make her uncomfortable, and many other people would feel that way too", that's the level to address it on, non-judgmentally and without fanfare, and get the point across. It's more effective than most would expect, but that's because most people poorly understand how the spectrum person works.
One of the earliest times I used this technique effectively (it's not always effective), the person actled like a light bulb had turned on and said something along the lines of "oh this explains why person Y reacted that way to what person X said the other day". It was just data, it was fit into the equation, and there was some self-correction afterwards, which was a breakthrough.
I'm not denigrating what you are doing, but it's fixing the problem for _that_ particular social situation. There's no amount of correcting the autist that is going to make them feel natural socializing and understand nonverbal cues, etc. You've added a rule to his repertoire. This is great, but most of us can only process a limited set of rules. Also, being rules bound increases social anxiety to the point that someone who might have been an extrovert becomes an introvert because they find the whole acting out society's rules thing tiring. That's me in an nutshell. I have a great set of rules that work in a whole gamut of situations, but it's tiring and I prefer to avoid people when making money isn't involved. The only time I feel relaxed and at ease is in the company of other people on the spectrum. So I have a biweekly (mostly) D&D game. A bunch of geeks who I have license to stop acting with. I'm super social there.
My wife likes to say that when I meet people, say a new doctor or someone i'm supposed to sell to at work, i'm the best me that I can possibly be, but it isn't the truth. She is right.
This is all highly insightful, thanks for sharing. TBH it resonates even if you're someone like me that is in theory not on spectrum at all, but I push myself into high-social requirement situations professionally and as a parent, while mostly actually an introvert. Then I need to be alone, for a good long while.
Isn't the "spectrum" a medical invention? Why do people voluntarily associate themselves with a mental disorder? It seems like a pretty benign deviation from the norm with pros and cons that are merely worth recognizing. As with any stereotype, it may be unreliable and also lead to self-fulfilling expectations.
This is breathtakingly on the spot. It's also germane to the very debate here, because Damore would never know how clunky and ill-advised some of the wording (e.g., "neuroticism," scientific term that is more benign than our colloquial use of it) in his Google memo was, things the socially savvy would know instinctively, because he's autistic.
Thank you Deco for saying this. Exactly. You know why? Because traditional women's work is devalued. A programmer at Google is more important than a kindergarten teacher. Our values are screwed up!
The kindergarten teacher gets paid more because she has a bachelor's or possibly a master's degree. This example has nothing to do with gender. And if it makes you feel any better for the first three years of my teaching career I made $8900, $9700, and $10,400---then $18,000 for the next three years. Pretty sure the garbage collectors were making that or better.
It doesn't have anything to do with the BS/BA degree, it's about how hard it is to fill the position. And filling garbage collectors' position is a fairly hard task, as many people feel they are above it.
And what evidence do you have of that? They're mostly unionized. A quick search shows the salary range is $28,800 - $$50,240. Salaries of teachers are all over the place depending on region and private v. public and yes, a college degree or two most often catapults you into a higher bracket.
Yes, it would show that now, but then, my first position out of college was as a computer programmer in 1978, and $18,000 a year was pretty darned good for a guy who came from a State university? I wasn't complaining. And Jolly is spot on with the observation "it's about how hard it is to fill the position". No doubt in my mind about that. I just picked the right thing to study at school and it paid off big. Back in '78, there weren't too many people who could speak FORTRAN fluently and I was one of them?
Here's the difference between teachers and software pros: In the tech industry there is massive differentiation between top talent and mediocrity. A google architect gets paid much more than the IT lackey at a small business. Teachers don't get that deal; they generally get the same compensation within a fairly narrow band determined by school boards and unions.
Comparing a teacher to the google architect, while ignoring the small time IT lackey, is an example of the apex fallacy.
Teachers' salaries are literally all over the place depending on region, private/public, and degree (they are on a ladder system). There's no way the teachers in the San Antonio school district I taught in were making the same as they were on the north side. Property taxes play a large part in determining salaries. I know plenty of HS teachers making 6 figures and in at least one case, one is a gym teacher and another an AP history teacher. Throw in college professorships and that, too, is all over the place.
Damore's point isn't that no women are interested in nuts and bolts. Many are and thrive at Google. But the fact that Google hasn't achieved a 50% female engineer employment roster can't be explained away as Google's sexism. You also have to look at whether women are even interested in the first place, in the same numbers as men, in being engineers.
There's also a very interesting conversation to be had on how one solves this "problem." If one is actually interested in root causes, rather than a dogmatic commitment to individual solutions, then it definitely makes sense to interrogate the funnel feeding the company. For example, if CompSci programs are 75% male (made up number), then why would we expect anything other than a 75-25 split in hiring, assuming even distribution of talent and lack of bias in the process. So, then the question becomes why is that the case. And there are upstream factors at play there, likely.
The true root cause analysis is at odds with the equity analysis that considers any disproportionality from the population at large as per se evidence of bias/prejudice.
This issue is more muddled in legal field, for example, where female law students outnumber male law students 54% to 46%, yet women lawyers make up a much lower percentage of corporate general counsel, top earners, and law firm partners. The women's bar will tell you it's all sexism. A root cause analysis paints a more complex picture. I'm not saying sexism is not a factor at all, because that would be like saying there are no sexist people in positions of power anywhere, an absurd statement. But sexism does not explain the disparity at the top level of the profession, especially when law schools put out more newly minted female lawyers than male lawyers.
I get a lot of women students with law degrees interested in the law and not the combativeness. They become law librarians--including several now at major courts. Everyone is mart and capable but put off by the aggression aspects.
When I was getting my CS degree belatedly at about 40, getting past the Calc classes was a pain in the ass for me. My wife is much better at advanced math than I am. She had no problem with the questions and could explain how to do integrals and derivatives to me (limits were easy) after looking at the book for a couple minutes. Mind you, Calc 1 and Calc2 were the difference between me and a 4.0 GPA. I squeaked through the first with a C and the second with a B. With her help.
When I asked her why she wasn't interested in taking advanced math classes herself (she got a degree in Psych), her response was that she wasn't interested because it bored the crap out of her, her ability to solve the problems notwithstanding. It just didn't make her tick.
I had a similar conversation with her about employment. She could make a mint doing something technology related, but she'd never even consider it. More boredom. The idea of coding is repulsive to her, even though i've seen her do things that closely resemble it (Excel macros, rewriting PHP that is broken, etc) on occasion in the past.
My older daughter got her degree in Bio. If I had suggested something like Math or CS, she'd make a puke face. It wasn't that she had any issue with the classes themselves, it just wasn't what she is into. Wants to be a vet, doesn't want to inhabit a cubicle farm even though she could double or triple the salary.
I know this is way more anecdotal than the level you are going for, but it seems relevant.
To go a little further off topic, one of the issues in this area is that people who are good at math, and enjoy it, cannot seem to understand that others do not enjoy it, no matter if they are good with it or not.
I have two acquaintances who have PhDs in math, and they both love it. I, who never had much interest in the subject but no real trouble with it either, find it exquisitely boring, and would much rather spend my time in the lit/history world (I ended up in the antiques business). But this is completely foreign to them, as in their eyes everyone either loves math or is stupid.
Also anecdotally, my sister was an electrical engineer for over 15 years, and she loathed every second of it because it "wasn't her." She did very well and made a good living, but she saw it as nothing but a means to an end, a good salary. Eventually she got out and got an MBA and went to work on the business side.
But while she was still a techie, she would talk about how so many of her co-workers lived and breathed the techie stuff in their spare time, into the wee hours of the night, and shop talk on the weekends and at social events was fun for them.
She couldn't wait to turn work off when she went home at night and spent no extra time reading journals and working on her side tech project. She made jewelry in her spare time, something that "was her." Many of the guys never turned work off, because it "was them".
I see that kind of logic in a lot of places in tech. Some of the egoes are ...well, I have one too. But it's not as unconcealed as many of my coworkers over the years.
I think the one thing that I usefully learned from college was how much I didn't know about, that fields existed that I had no subject matter knowledge about and no particular insight into. It's too bad that some people that spent more time there than I did never got the idea.
I work in video games and while we have a reasonable number of women in the art, animation, design and production areas, we have hardly any in programming. The ones we do have are very good, but we simply don’t get the applicants.
In our last set of interviews for programmers, out of 19 people only one was female. Whatever the causes are for our company having so few female programmers, they clearly are occurring long before we get their application.
I can add that my wife has MSc in CS and her sister too. My wife stayed in the business but went to management. Her sister after some years in programming went back to school and got a degree in psychology and is now a successful therapist.
Just lately I met a young real estate agent woman with a degree in CS. She said she had decided she was not interested in sitting in front of a computer screen.
You're misunderstanding the problem they are solving. The real problem is appearing suitably pious to social concerns and pressures that mainly exist to protect wealth. What would help more women in this nation: 100% parity at Google or Medicare for all? They blew out a couple of employees for massive PR while fanning the flames of the modern PC movement that pro or con infuriates a large portion of the country so much that we forget to argue over important issues. The tech/military/plutocracy alliance that runs this country is now we'll protected and empowered to DESTROY any critics by policing their ideology.
I'm not arguing that Google needs to be 50 % female, or even that Damore's speculation about the source of sex-imbalances is wrong. I'm saying that kind of speculation is like porn in the sense that it does not belong at work.
Damore didn't jump out of nowhere to offer up gratuitous (yet entirely science-based) musings on the differences between sexes. He offered it as his contribution to the endless navel-gazing and tortured gyrations at Google about the horrors of sexism prevalent at Google, based solely on women not representing 50% of the programmers/engineers at Google. After years of meetings and sessions and memos and workshops and trainings devoted to this topic, he made his contributions to at least inject some studies into the male-flagellation performances. Ironic that he lost his job as a consequence of contributing to a topic Google assured its employees they could engage in openly and honestly.
I agree with you, Deco. I am a woman who started my working life as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, and retired as a business exec who had responsibility for large businesses. I am also an immigrant and 'of color' as the saying goes, which I bring up solely to say that I found Google's behavior towards Damore abhorrent. He did NOT say anything sexist or derogatory towards women, he merely restated research findings that reflect the real world, whether the woke populace likes that reality or not. I spoke out strongly at the time on fb (I had retired by then) and have not changed my opinion - Sundar Picchai acted like a moral coward and a bully.
God bless women like you who speak up. The woke reserve their most vicious attacks for “women of color”, especially immigrants, who offer not just counterarguments, but living proof against the woke narrative.
Like Taibbi pointed out w/ Dre and Apple, it’s the hypocrisy that stinks the most. Companies are private entities-they can be woke or be closed on Sunday like Chk Fil-a. The problems start with hypocrisy-as Orwell notes in Animal Farm.
Yes, like the NBA criticizing/sanctioning the (was it Houston) manager for tweeting support of Hong Kong protesters. Thank God those Apple warriors could investigate their fellow employee's history somewhere. If they work in China and want to find out the anniversary date of the Tiannamen Square crackdown, I wonder if they can Google when that is. June 4, BTW.
Is there some resource to find out which companies' products are in any way linked to forced labor in China or anywhere else? Seems like MT ended his piece with a call to action. The least I can do (and I always do that) is start calling out the corporate creeps that are on top of US voting procedures, but MUST be unaware their stuff is manufactured by imprisoned people forced from their homes.
Remembering the religious boycotts of the 1980s, I have a little bit of angst thinking of getting involved in that myself. I know it's perhaps the most effective way to pressure companies. I have this fear of assisting something that has unpredictable and probably negative results in the long term.
To think i'd still be worrying about Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in 2021.
I don't think Google granted blanket immunity for saying things that would otherwise violate Google policies or the law. The point is that employees were encouraged to contribute, and Damore had no inkling that his memo, a summary of research findings and scholarly papers, would get him fired and slap the misogynist label on him. Add Damore's possible autism to the mix, and there was no way he could win. None of this makes him a misogynist or sexist, but that's how he was demonized.
Two wrongs don't make a right though. This thread started about Damore, not whether or not Google is a hostile workplace for men. I'd be interested in Google's exact words where they "assured ... employees they could engage ... openly and honestly." It would be odd to fire someone for following guidance.
Clearly you've never worked at Google. I have. The general attitude there reminds me of William F. Buckley Jr.'s remark that liberals are theoretically in favor of diversity of opinion but in practice are horrified when they discover that there actually ARE other opinions.
Jumping from the thread above that's falling off the side:
I thought Damore settled with Google and they probably payed him off handsomely. So I don't think he got the same treatment as he would have in your PA scenario.
I am bothered becuse Damore wrote negative things about a group with thin scientific arguments for backup. It reminds me of eugenics and the pseudo-scientific race theories that used to be popular.
It's much better not to speculate about biological causes for the state of society, because those types of arguments are weak, and in other contexts they have been used to justify unimaginable horrors.
Yes, I'm sure Google is as screwed as any place by wokeness, but the problem is wokeness. It doesn't matter to what degree women want to code. As far as we can predict, there will always be too few if the goal is 50% and there is no need to bring up biology when criticizing HR's totally unrealistic goals.
But he didn't write negative things. I'm a woman software engineer who worked my entire life in Silicon Valley, starting way back in 1979 when women were even more rare. I read what he wrote. There was NOTHING negative. And I disagree that certain research data should be off-limits. If even people in science and technology can't engage with data in a thoughtful way, and hear dissenting views, they need to grow up.
Yeah, this reminds me of researchers who dare post scientific data that shows certain "medications" work to reduce effects of COVID or show an analysis that global warming is not a 100% human made issue. You can't disagree with the SJWs or you will be sent to twitter/social media hell for the rest of your known existence.
She was the head of the American Psychological Association in 2004.
She wrote “Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities”. Quote
“In her preface to the first edition, Halpern wrote: “At the time, it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts and mistakes in the research, and bias and prejudice. ... After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles … I changed my mind.””
"the reasons why males are often more variable remain elusive."
[...]
"We conclude that early experience, biological factors, educational policy, and cultural context affect the number of women and men who pursue advanced study in science and math and that these effects add and interact in complex ways. There are no single or simple answers to the complex questions about sex differences in science and mathematics."
That doesn't sound at all like a scientific consensus in support of "innate dispositional differences."
Google actively encouraged their staffers to engage with personal opinions and observations during working hours. It was a point of pride, and a hiring lure.
I'm sure the conversation they asked for was respectful. At a tech company, speculating about how women are biologically less likely than men to be into tech is not respectful.
If the topic of the conversation is, "why aren't 50% of the engineers at Google women", with the company going to great and potentially destructive to all parties involved lengths to correct that imbalance, then it shouldn't be outside the bounds of the conversation to mention that based on heaps of research, part of the reason might be that women in general for a host of reasons by social and biological or a mix of the two are less likely than men to be interested in becoming engineers at Google.
So you HR should be omnipotent hall monitors to the nth degree? I agree about porn at work, but legit criticism/analysis of company culture and hiring practices isn’t fansonly........
I’ve read the Damore memo/rant, and, while blacks not and cogent, it is in no way an unhinged misogynistic rant, nor a criticism of the female engineers present at Google.
Buzzfeed on Damore "James Damore, author of the anti-diversity Google memo". The actual memo begins with "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes". Did that stop Buzzfeed and Gizmodo from lying about Damore? No. Did they suffer any adverse consequences from lying? No.
So you think the source of sex-differences in tech is scientifically understood with the certainty of orbital mechanics? Then you're like those global-warming people who have some interesting data and are immediately convinced that the world will soon be unlivable.
Speaking as one of those aweful dudes who deliberately foisted the internet on society, I can assure you we built it for anyone who had money, regardless of their prefered means of expressing humor, satire, irony or anything else. You got money, we took it.
The couple I worked with, Sandy Lerner and what'shisname :), mastered their desires for fame. took the money and ran. I think Sandy ended up buying an Island somewhere in the strait of San Juan de Fuca, off the coast of Canada. I don't hold the opinion they truly understood what they'd done, but I think they were happy?
Yep, the first multi-protocal encapsulation router that was able to connect all sorts of proprietary network protocols over the ubiquitous TCP/IP transport. That was the internet and it was a couple of Stanford sysadmins that put it all together in their magic box.
They changed the world. I helped, but they were the people who changed it. John Morgridge believed in them and had a boatload of money in his back pocket. That all happened over a very short time in Menlo Park CA. About 1989.
I'll be honest; even if Sandy and Leo didn't have a complete understanding of what they where about to do (and I don't think any of us did), they did know it was big.
It's more akin to quantum mechanics than Newtonian physics. You cannot measure a lot of things with great certainty, but the statistical predictions are meaningful.
Quantum mechanics describes the world to 15 decimal digits, sometimes even more. Behavioral science gets you what, half a bit of predictive power? It is more than the difference between night and day.
On orbital mechanics; "To go faster, slow down. Anyone who understands orbital mechanics knows that." -- Scott Cherf, NASA Ames Research Center, god only knows when...
I think sex-differences in humans are as well understood as orbital mechanics in the time of Galileo. Sex differences in humans are (probably) polygenic and (probably) influenced by society. Of course, orbital mechanics was not all that clear 400 years ago.
That is a big range of possibilities and there is no reason to expect any clarity on the subject in the next 400 years, while orbital mechanics is basically a solved problem (unless you're looking at tiny effects like the Pioneer anomaly).
Your earlier linked paper says this about the rate of progress:
"It [a 1903 doctoral dissertation] shows both how much and how little the science of sex differences has advanced in the last 100 years. Thompson had almost no empirical work to build upon, whereas contemporary psychologists have an extensive base of empirical studies to inform our conclusions; yet, in many ways, we are still asking the same basic questions."
That literally made me LOL. "Don't be evil" eh? From the company that routinely rapes small business ad budgets by recommending increasing your budget by phone sales people literally lying through their teeth. Add Facebook to that pile.
They changed it!! (About simultaneous with their "awokening"??)
They moved from the proscriptive "Don't be evil." (seeking to differentiate themselves from M$ and Apple, no doubt), to the prescriptive "Do the right thing."
PT, Wrong as always. Damore didn't write anything critical about the 'biological deficiencies of some of their workers'. Go look up the original Damore memo. This raises the interesting question. Do you know that you are lying or are you just repeating the lies of others?
I liked your treatment here, but I'm not sure I actually agree with it. It's persuasive and very well presented, that I'm sure of.
What I'm not certain of is that Google, or any other very large multinational coporate entity, has the cohesiveness your analysis implies? Can it have that kind of self awareness?
PT, You are just lying. The Damore quote is about interests, not abilities. Of course, Damore was right. The 'people vs. things' Cohen's D is over 1 for men vs. women.
PT, See "Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/). This analysis produced a Cohen's D of 0.93.
Abstract
The magnitude and variability of sex differences in vocational interests were examined in the present meta-analysis for Holland's (1959, 1997) categories (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional), Prediger's (1982) Things-People and Data-Ideas dimensions, and the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) interest areas. Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests. Average effect sizes varied across interest inventories, ranging from 0.08 to 0.79. The quality of interest inventories, based on professional reputation, was not differentially related to the magnitude of sex differences. Moderators of the effect sizes included interest inventory item development strategy, scoring method, theoretical framework, and sample variables of age and cohort. Application of some item development strategies can substantially reduce sex differences. The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.
Same here. I’m amazing at a multitude of things I have no interest in, and that don’t even pay me to be amazing at. Meanwhile, I suck spectacularly at a multitude of things that interest me to no end. Like playing killer riffs on the guitar, baking sourdough bread, staying organized and chasing after my daughter to clean up her messes. Interest level at 10. Competency at 3.
His point was not that women would “not be so good” in tech. His point is that fewer women were interested in the things. I’m a female engineer and, while I enjoy science talk, the practice of it bores me. Too much mundane detail. I’d much rather be involved in how science and tech affects society and people. Many of my female engineering grads have gravitated to management as a result. So I totally understand and agree with Damore as I lived it and see it all around me.
Odd, but I had almost exactly the same experience vicariously through my wife and the arc of her carrier as a female software and hardware engineet over the 35 years we worked together in the Valley. Not only did she migrate into management, most of the other women we worked with did the same. I'm sure there were some who prefered management to being what, in the vernacular of the time, was an "individual contributor", the career path into management was encouraged by the three large companies we worked for together back in the 70's, 80's and 90's. Not to say she wasn't talented at management, she was, but she was also a talented engineer. Each of the places we worked emphasized that path not only for her but also for the other women we worked and socialized with.
That might be due to the problem men had as well though. There were many of us who recognized that there were few opportunities for advancement, once you hit a certain level of proficiency, that weren't management? I faced somewhat lesser pressure to go into management even though I was absolutely horrible at it, but there was almost no path for advancement other than management. A few companies we worked for had what they called Technical Leader or "Fellowship" possitions, but they were mostly honorary titles and equivalent to Director level management roles. Nothing approaching VP.
I will say that I always prefered female managers. I found them much easier to work with and less likely to consider me a threat.
Generally speaking, I've noticed that most people who do code / programming / systems design etc. burn out after a few years. I don't know if there's a sex difference.
I'm a little obsesive when it comes to spelling, a trait beaten into me by my first boss way back when, before spell checkers were even invented. I'm afraid I've become pedantic. I'll adapt, give me a little more time... :)
LW, In general, women tend to be quite interested in science, but not in engineering. Did you mean "I’m a female engineer and, while I enjoy engineering talk, the practice of engineering bores me".
I don’t agree. Engineering is applied science - more interesting than so-called “pure” science. Practicing both is boring to me. More interesting is the policy and societal implications of the application of scientific principles.
"As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female."
In general, women are more interested in pure science vs. engineering.
"In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine, unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera.
As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.
And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!”
This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there."
When I got into computer programming around 1965, half of my colleagues were female. After all, you had to _type_ (usually at a keypunch or a teletype) and what real man was going to do that? You also had to make it up as you went along -- there was less theory and experience then -- and women seemed to be good at that. In the '70s, regular educational institutions began to tune into the fact that there was a lot of money to be made, and they decided programming was a species of engineering. And we all know what an engineer looks like. Ten years later, ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) was having conferences on the fact that there were so few women in the Craft -- a situation which they, themselves, had created.
As to things versus persons: when you work with code, you're conversing with a human project going back thousands of years, and you're using languages and symbols, a species of thought and activity women have been supposed to be better at than men. You make computers do things by talking to them.
"My impression is that there were lots of women in CS in 1980 for the same reason there were lots of Jews in banking in 1800: they were banned from doing anything else.
Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Everything you quoted is more or less correct (by my personal observation, anyway), except that the trend-spotters at Cosmo were a bit behind the wave. When the job was defined as 'engineering' their numbers declined pretty rapidly.
As for not knowing what one is talking about, you don't know the slightest thing about my knowledge and use of either natural or computer languages, so I don't know why you bother alluding to it.
SG, "You make computers do things by talking to them". Of course, C/C++C#/Java/JavaScript/Perl/Python/etc. are spoken languages and always have been. Everyone knows that.
It was not always so. At one time, computers had to be rewired for a specific computation (usually through a plugboard). This was not much like language. Later, icons and other graphical devices were presented which could be clicked on or moved around a screen, which was not very linguistic either. I imagine the grasping and poking of images of quasi-physical objects was more pleasing to the male brain, and led to what we have now: television with a buy button. But here we are gabbing instead of banging things, so maybe we're a bit femmie too....
SG, Sadly you don't have much knowledge of how computers are actually programmed. Visual programming systems are a rarity. Let me give you a clue. TouchDesigner (a visual programming system) get 538,000 hits. Java gets 681,000,000 hits. Did I mention that JavaScript gets 3.3 billion hits?
I guess I was thinking about how they are used in general, rather than how they are programmed. There was a considerable effort for awhile to provide graphical programming systems, but but as there is no obvious syntax to a field of icons none have succeeded in catching on. Except with games and game-like children's programming systems, maybe.
I should say that GUI tools are widely used for word processing, PowerPoint presentations, HTML pages, moving files (FileZilla), etc, etc. However, computer programming remains utterly conventional. Except for cards being replaced by terminals (and PCs now), nothing has changed since the 1950s.
There have been many attempts to develop GUI programming systems. Basically, they have all failed. TouchDesigner is something of an exception. As it turns out, game programming is completely conventional. A modest counterargument is that GUI layout tools are used to build some GUIs. See https://www.creativebloq.com/how-to/20-best-ui-design-tools for a partial list.
I could also point out that computer languages are rather different than human languages. Of course, if you had experience with both you would know that.
I used to run into these people back in the day. One problem with them was that they did not play well with others, hence, it was difficult to get constructive work out of them. One that I sort of project-managed was assigned to do a specialized file transfer program and in a couple of weeks managed to insert a small interpreter for a BASIC-like language into it which had very little to do with the project. It was cute, though. When party-pooping higher management found out about this and other similar exploits (not through me) they canned him.
Crucially, "talent" and "capability" - technically "aptitudes" vs. "intelligence". Aptitudes are particular skills, eg math vs. verbal. This is familiar to anyone who's taken the College Board tests, or most intelligence tests. "Intelligence" is overall ability. Two people with the same IQ score may have very different aptitudes. So can populations - though there's no knowing at this point whether that's inherent or cultural.
IQ tests do not show that women are “smarter” than men or vice-versa. However, this proves less than you might think. A verbally oriented test will ‘prove’ that women are smarter. A visual-spatially oriented test will show the reverse. Indirect quote from James Flynn (now deceased)
1) I have not read through the memo in a long time so I would have to understand what he means by "social constructionists".
Social constructionist could mean "someone who aims to engineer social incentives in a way that generates particular societal outcomes."
Social constructionist could also mean "someone who believes anything that exists within a person and describes his relationship to the external is a social construct."
If you are "against" the former, you are a doofus. If you are against the latter, you are perceptive and intelligent.
3) The term "innate DISPOSITIONAL difference" implies that the innate differences are oriented around DISPOSITION, not ability or talent.
On 3, disposition means interest, and people become good at what they're interested in. It's strongly correlated with ability. For "social constructionist", I'm pretty sure he meant the second definition. I'm not saying Damore is wrong. But I don't think his theories about sex-differences are firm enough to be widely accepted, and they don't belong in the work place. Porn is not necessarily wrong either, yet we don't have it at work.
It's always possible that Damore was confused about the situation. It is hard for people to fully overcome the prejudices the society inculcates in them from the time they are infants.
SG, isn't it strange that the 'prejudices the society' show up in so many other species? It's almost as if the supposedly omnipotent 'prejudices the society' don't really exist and biology actually counts. Of course, that can't be true. Biology is just a myth of racist, sexist, patriarchal, cisgendered, homophobic, transphobic, bigots.
Well, no. Humans look at non-human animals and interpret what they do in human terms. They see what they look at, but they don't usually see what they don't look at. Or, as Uncle Albert said, 'The theory tells us what we can observe.' It also tells us how to interpret it. Biology and ethology, like all other sciences, is a human construction. We may aim for objectivity, but only God (if any) gets to see things as they are. I think this is in Phil. 101, actually.
I think with the explosive development of the human brain in Evolution, and the development of language in particular, humans have partially stepped out of prehuman nature, making the adventures of rhesus monkeys maybe not tremendously relevant to the question of sex roles in computer work.
Toy preferences in juvenile primates are just one data point. There are many, many others. For example, males do better than females (in absolute or relative terms) in math in all countries. There are no exceptions.
Humans have come up with so many myths. Clearly, the Sun orbits the Earth and anyone who claims otherwise is just succumbing to a 'human construction'. Galileo Galilei was just making stuff up.
Actually, whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or vice versa is a matter of how you want to write the math. If you do Fourier analysis of the apparent motion of the classical planets from a point on the surface of the Earth, you can set up equations which will do both. Or I should say all three, because of course the Sun also moves relative to other objects Out There. Slippery. (Not considering Special Relativity here.)
SG, If you want to split hairs then the correct statement is that the Sun and Earth both orbit a common center of gravity (which just happens to be inside the Sun). Of course, the Jupiter/Sun system dominates the Earth/Sun system so using center of gravity of the Earth/Sun system isn't quite right either.
Gravity is racist. Need proof? Gravity affects blacks and whites the same. Gravity is color-blind. Since 'color-blind' is racist, Gravity is racist. Smash Gravity! Smash racism!
Of course, the truth is worse. Gravity made the world round. The roundness of the world facilitated colonialism. More proof that Gravity is racist. Smash Gravity! Smash racism!
Women are huge in STEM, there are only a few subfields where they are currently minority. When you look at these fields, you see “soft sciences” like psychology and social science. But you also see very technical lab sciences like Vet-Med, Pharmacy, Bioscience, Medical and Dental schools with dominance or near equal representation by women. I went through a microbiology PhD program after years in software and a CS degree. FYI — Veterinary medicine is harder. And it is tougher than human medicine because you have to learn multiple species. Veterinarians do much of the medical research. Like others with graduate degrees, we are only qualified to teach MDs. Similar things go for pharmacy, biological science, medicine and dentistry. Across the board, we see that women either dominate or are approximately half. Those are highly technical, but they are friendly to women. Except in computer science and engineering, which are outliers, we see this.
Women used to be very common in the computer field, somewhere around 40% in 1980. When I was hired away to Wells Fargo in 1981, the networking group running point of sale I got hired into was all women except me. My boss was a woman, her boss was a woman, and her boss was a woman. It was mildly worth remarking on. There were all male groups at Bank of America that I came from, but it was mostly mixed and nobody even thought about it.
The best, fastest programmer I knew was a woman. We went from working on computer integrated manufacturing to making transaction and test systems for Mastercard. They had a system for monitoring lines of code per month, subtracting comment lines and compensating for cut and paste. This system tracked from the start of coding to the completion of successful integration test acceptance. Most were in the upper hundreds of lines per month. That was considered good in assembler. I was in the thousands. With her, they thought something was broken. Her stats were near 30,000. She thought she was just a bit above average and struggling to keep up.
Here’s a graph of how the veterinary profession went the opposite way. Isaacson says that in the late 1980’s women had dropped to 17% of college enrollments. If you graphed IT/software it would look sort of like this but the other way around.
It was even more marked in the 40’s and 50’s. Did you know that the night before the ENIAC demo, it wasn’t men working into the night? Yes, it was two women hooking it all up and making it work. In those days, computers were sold with the pitch that all you had to do is re-task your secretaries and they’d write the code and run the computers. The pitch was it would be cheap, because the workforce was inexpensive and wouldn’t expect a career track job. This was an extension of the way women were used in technology and accounting before computers. They did the math.
I can’t prove it, but I think that was also why black people, specifically black women, were hired into those positions of doing the calculations. They were cheap to hire, and they calculated anything. Later, those women became computer programmers. It was a natural thing and, “men didn’t think it was an important job.”
Even today, women dominate as bookkeepers. That’s not because it isn’t intellectually demanding, it’s because of the pay scale. It’s also because it doesn’t require a college degree in the field of accounting, finance, or computers.
Back in the 80’s there was another big difference in computer fields. Degrees in computer science were rare. Most people didn’t have a degree, just a high school education, and they did great. For at least 15 years, a degree was not an asset to getting a job in the field at all. I worked in banking and in computer integrated manufacturing. (I delivered the first successful plantwide system to Ford in 1985.) Once in a while a BSEE would be around, but mostly anything from a high school diploma (if that) to degrees in philosophy, music, art history, english, etc. (Yes, high school dropouts were found in computers back then. It was that era’s version of the college dropout success.) So both men and women who were working in the field didn’t have an inflated sense of themselves. We were all on the same level.
But that started to change in the late 1990’s, and after 2000, there was a big changeover. Kids came out of college who had absolutely no idea of the past, overstuffed with opinions based on ignorance. The job market tightened up. These days, the “wobbler” resumes that used to get called in are discarded instead.
The view from Silicon Valley is also a very US-centric view. I spent time in the former USSR in the 1990’s through to the end of 2005. I ran an office there for 5 years. A curious thing in Russia. Virtually all engineers (civil engineers, mechanical engineers, etc) were women. This made a difference in various small ways in architecture. For instance, stairways had pairs of rails on them as if for a chair lift that was broken. But what that was for was baby carriages, something obvious to a woman, that a man would not think of. Women ran the cities outside Moscow. They did it for no pay, because someone had to do it or everyone would die in the winters. They did it because that is what you do to take care of everyone.
The pissed of ladies are right about the “google manifesto”. Simply put, the memo is complete and utter horseshit. There is nothing else to say. It’s malarkey. Speaking as a biologist, yes, there are differences between men and women, and in other areas I would say so. But does that include “genetic suitability” to do math? To do software? To engineer technology? No.
This is a strange comment. How does someone with your background and training conclude that offering up horseshit that is easily debunked, as you have laid out, is cause for getting fired? Whatever happened to open and free debate? You think it's proper for employees to be terrorized into silence, as they are currently in every industry, because certain academic papers are deemed taboo? If your argument is with the findings of the studies Damore cited, why do you think Damore should take the fall for these experts? How is Damore wrong for trusting that academic papers that have undergone peer review are not universally deemed "malarkey"? Where did Damore argue that women are genetically unsuitable for anything? How do you go from being a scientist, to wanting to snuff out heretics because only your side gets the final word and there is nothing else to say?
Deco, You have facts on your side. Brian has 'truth'. Truth has no need for facts. Truth is what Jonathan Haidt called a “sacred value”. The purpose of truth is to smash facts. Stalin knew this. Lysenko knew this. Mao knew this. Hitler knew this. Brian knows this.
"Damore's problem...is that it was anti-historical."
I see people get things wrong at work all the time. Very rarely do they get sent to a re-education camp, become national news and get terminated from their position. So the problem was probably something else, is what I am trying to say.
(... and that of the the national media and journalists...) I don't know much about Damore personally. Frankly, he (like Mr Schaeffer below) sounded like a jackass propping his Aristotelian thought experiments up with a few studies, and ignoring the empirical evidence. If he was a jackass he may have really lost his job because of that. I don't think it was necessary for Damore to be fired. But, he did make a big statement attacking the role of women in computer programming. He did it as an employee, to push his agenda.
Essentially all (all?) studies have found that men are better than women at mental rotation (rather relevant for programming). Boys are better than girls (on average) in Math (if you double this check the PISA/SAT/ACT/etc.) data. Here is a useful stat. The Fields Medal has been awarded since 1936. Exactly one woman has won. Numerous studies have shown that men are more variable than women (highly relevant at Google). Note that the PISA data shows that boy are better than girls (in absolute or relative terms) in all countries. There are no exceptions.
Of course, the truth is 'malarkey'. PC is truth and no one should ever forget that.
"My impression is that there were lots of women in CS in 1980 for the same reason there were lots of Jews in banking in 1800: they were banned from doing anything else.
Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Wow using a failed state (the USSR) to promote the talents of women. I guess we should use the 'success' of the Khymer Rouge to promote Communism or Mao's famines to promote Maoism. 'Long live the Great Leap Forwards!'. 'Crush Capitalist Roaders!'. 'Crush Trotsyites'.
No, he never asserted that. He simply noted that given the current evidence, women would continue to be less likely than man to seek jobs in tech. This is a simple probability statement based on evidence and evolutionary theory that would be evaluated by looking at group data. No intelligent researcher would assert that it should be used in evaluating individuals.
He wasn’t trying to get women kicked out of their jobs. He was merely stating that women and men have different focuses and that could be the reason more women were not seeking jobs that they wouldn’t find personally enjoyable.
Damore's comments reflect the overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject. The Cohen's D for 'things vs. people' (male vs. female) is roughly 1.0. See "Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/). These results are empirical. They are not derived from 'evolutionary biology classes'. Of course, males also have a higher SD of talent and considerable superiority in 3D rotation.
There is no consensus at all that "abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes". You, Damore, and the tech-bros are just making this crap up. A review paper by Halpern et. al. explains among other things that using your reference to argue for biological causes is circular.
"Experience alters brain structures and functioning, so causal statements about brain differences and success in math and science are circular."
"The state of knowledge on the neurobiology of sex differences does not permit strong statements, predictions, or recommendations."
"A detailed consideration of potential indirect evolutionary influences on sex differences in math and science is beyond the scope of this monograph and, in fact, may not be possible given our current state of knowledge in these areas."
PT, You haven't even managed to Diane Halpern's views right. Let me quote from her.
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
Sounds a bit like Damore.
Of course, you haven't even managed to get your citation right. Let me quote for you
"Sex differences in science and math achievement and ability are smaller for the mid-range of the abilities distribution than they are for those with the highest levels of achievement and ability. Males are more variable on most measures of quantitative and visuospatial ability, which necessarily results in more males at both high- and low-ability extremes; the reasons why males are often more variable remain elusive. "
Sounds more than a bit like Damore.
What does 'necessarily results in more males' mean to you? Something along the lines of 'Damore was right'? Does Google hire at the median level of ability?
Your book quote is from 1991. The paper quotes are from 2007. That Halpern changed her mind in 1991 presumably means she no longer thinks the source of the sex differences is "clear", which is also the view taken by the 2007 paper and I would agree with it.
> What does 'necessarily results in more males' mean to you?
It means males do better in those skills, but it's unknown whether that is due to social or biological factors. What do the below statements mean to you?
"The state of knowledge on the neurobiology of sex differences does not permit strong statements, predictions, or recommendations."
"Experience alters brain structures and functioning, so causal statements about brain differences and success in math and science are circular."
The older I get, the more I wonder if Damore and his bros were just unhappy with their sissy jobs that didn't actually require masculinity, so they made something up.
Damore read Diane Halpern's work and choose to believe in reality vs. PC. Shame on him. He (Damore) probably thinks that 2 + 2 is 4 and that the Earth orbits the Sun. Utterly shameful.
T, Basically, the political system has dug in with “The Sun orbits the Earth and you will pay dearly for daring to disagree” while the scientific community has embraced “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”.
The biological basis for sex differences in science/math achievement is a highly controversial topic in science. Show me the paper where it is a settled matter.
PT, " Show me the paper where it is a settled matter". Easy, how about the book (not a paper) that Diane Halpern wrote. Let me quote for you
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
1. We are talking about interest -- not ability. Obviously, high "achievement" is related to interest in the field.
2. Nothing in science is a "settled matter."
3. In rebutting someone's assumption that any variance from 50/50 "achievement" in a field MUST be due to discrimination, it is entirely reasonable to point to the well-evidenced science establishing average sex differences in interests, whether entirely biological or not.
4. This paper summarizes the scientific evidence as of 2007, which has only become more established since then. The evidence is deep and broad, and entirely consistent with Damore's points: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270278/
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
What did she change her mind to? That it's not clear where the differences come from? I would agree with that. The book is from 1991, and the paper that has my quotes is from 2008.
Ok, 2007 not 2008. The order of publication remains the same and your quote was from the preface to the first edition (1991). That the book has gone to a fourth edition makes no difference here.
I disagree with Damore's attribution of sex-differences to biology and the 2007 quotes show that Halpern would also not make this attribution.
You and Damore might be living in a dream world where Halpern changing her mind about something being clear means that she nows believes the opposite is clear. As shown by her later statements, her evolved thinking is that it's unclear.
First, I want to thank you for doing so much of my homework for me. Your link was very useful for me.
A few quotes from your link
“But over the past 15 years or so, there’s been a sea change as new technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work.”
What does ‘sea change” mean to you? Perhaps something related to a (large) change? Nah, can’t be true. My religion says otherwise and my faith has not wavered.
“Why? There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people.”
That a quote from D. Halpern in the article you linked to. What does ‘biological basis’ mean to you? Perhaps something related to biology. Nah, can’t be true. My religion says otherwise and my faith has not wavered.
“Many of these cognitive differences appear quite early in life. “You see sex differences in spatial-visualization ability in 2- and 3-month-old infants,” Halpern says. Infant girls respond more readily to faces and begin talking earlier. Boys react earlier in infancy to experimentally induced perceptual discrepancies in their visual environment. In adulthood, women remain more oriented to faces, men to things.”
That a quote from D. Halpern in the article you linked to. What does ‘sex differences’ mean to you? Perhaps something related to sex differences? Nah, can’t be true. My religion says otherwise and my faith has not wavered.
Let me quote from ‘ProgramThyself’
“"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes [...]"”
Halpern and Damore appear to be more or less exact agreement.
So you're confident in extrapolating from animals and 2- to 3- month old infants to something that humans have developed over millenia and women have only begun to study for a few generations. That is a wild leap, but I'm the quasi-religious believer for being more careful?
How many Black men pursue advanced math? Fewer than women I would guess. Is that because of social or genetic factors? It would seem that culture is dominating genetics.
Halpern said some innate differences in brain structure are observed. Nobody knows if they favor men or women in math.
Do these observable structure differences show up between males of different races? Probably not. Then they don't seem to have much explanatory power for achievement differences.
No, what he's questioning there is the competence of Google HR in assigning people to tasks using intersectional political bullshit as a guide. Do you think you're smart when you "spout talking points" (as the kids say)?
Damore did write that women "generally" have differences vs. men that would make them not so good at tech.
Damore: "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things , relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)."
Controversial theories that Damore may have learned in evolutionary biology classes should not be used at work to speculate that a bunch of employees are biologically unsuited to their tasks. He should have stayed in systems biology (his PhD subject before dropping out) instead of muck-raking at Google.
Even the quote you provide is hedged with a key word ("generally") and focuses on the interests of the individuals in question rather than innate ability to succeed
Exactly. When you say something like "men are stronger than women", somebody always points out this one chick they know who's totally buffed out. I think ask how many women they know who AREN'T and if this one person is the exception rather than the rule........
If you want some actual science on this subject, see "Men are stronger than women (on average)" (https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2015/02/25/men-are-stronger-than-women-on-average/). Quote
"But on Twitter recently I saw an article which quantifies the difference in concrete ways. To be honest the difference shocked me. The paper is Hand-grip strength of young men, women and highly trained female athletes. As you can see in the figure above the sample sizes are large".
Yep. Roughly 1 in 4 women are stronger than the weakest 25% of men. Only the very very very top of them will rival even average men.
------------------
The upshot is that the very strongest female athletes are barely above the median of grip strength for men. The top 75th percentile of female athletes are below the bottom 25th percentile of men.
Another way to look at it is cumulative distributions. You can tell looking at this that there is overlap between the two sample distributions. How much? Ten percent of women have stronger grips than the bottom five percent of men. The difference in distributions is big enough that the very strongest non-elite athlete female in the whole data set has a weaker grip than most of the men.
Well, also size of a person makes a difference.
On the other hand women maintain their physical strength to a much greater age than men, or so I have read. Since we spend most of our lives outside of our prime, it may be that the aggregate average physical output of women is greater than that of men. 'Stronger' can have more than one meaning.
So your contention is that old women are stronger than old men?
I think men--esp. those who worked physically--have worn out some of their joints. So old women may seem stronger.
I'm just reporting something I read a long time ago ('or so I have read'), and that is the sum of my contention. I have neither cites nor experimental evidence, but the proposition accords with my personal (anecdotal) experience and might be worth looking into if one is interested. We do know that women live longer than men on the average. My main point, though, is in the last sentence above.
Can you say where that thing that you read was at least?
If we want to redefine the term "stronger", we should probably have some sort of alternate definition or at least data that shows it?
It was some kind of filler or 'content', a long time ago, and I am pretty sure no references were given. The more exact statement was that at age 60, women's average physical output is 90% of what it was when they were 20, whereas men's is 50% etc. This seemed to comport with what I observed informally/anecdotally, but I have not studied the question closely. I would think you might find something by putting the proposition in a search engine.
Men are obviously faster/stronger in sprints and marathons, but in ultra-marathons-races of 100 miles or more, women are superior. Women also survive war/famine situations at a higher rate than men. Physical prowess and the “ability” to physically grind/survive are not necessarily correlational.
"Women also survive war/famine situations at a higher rate than men."
LOL I wonder why that could possibly be!??!?!!?
Women survive famines better because they carry more fat, proportionally and on average. Also cold water, because their subcutaneous fat serves as insulation. They may also respond more rationally to crises - eg the Donner party.
Also, women are typically spared in combat/massacre situations for obvious, distasteful selfish reasons. That shows up over long periods, for instance comparing female (mitochondrial) lines vs. male (Y-chromosome) lines. There are a LOT more female lines; more women have survived and reproduced, long term.
I would assume that combat deaths were controlled for in the study.
Like you assumed that women have better times at Very Long Races?
I’m just going with what I heard on Rogan-women are competitive with men in their nitrate-marathoning, and have better survival rates in famines, concentration camps,etc.
S, "but in ultra-marathons-races of 100 miles or more, women are superior". Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon#IAU_World_Best_Performances. Men hold all of the listed records.
100 mile race records:
11:28:03 Oleg Kharitonov
12:42:40 Camille Herron
1000 mile race records
10d 10:30:36 Yiannis Kouros
12d 14:38:40 Sandra Barwick
I'm not talking about "this one chick" I know. A large fraction of girls from nearly age zero are told to play with dolls. We have no idea whether this, or biology, explains later differences in interests and abilities between sexes.
I need to read up on this, but I've heard on some podcast (don't remember which, may have been Sam Harris) that looking at Scandinavian countries, where the most consistent and long standing effort has been made to make opportunities for men and women as equal as possible, that over time women and men have become even more stratified along professions traditionally considered male vs female.
Deco, You are correct. It is called the Gender-equality paradox.
That's interesting. I worked for a couple of months in Denmark in the 1980s. The workplace was extremely stratified by gender: the techies were all male, and the women did other kinds of work, usually secretarial or administrative-bureaucratic. In New York, where I normally worked, there was some stratification, maybe 70-30 or 60-40, but nothing like Denmark. No cause was obvious -- there was no overt discrimination. It occurred to me, though, that Denmark's population at that time was ethnically almost entirely Scandinavian, whereas New York, as everyone knows, is very mixed in race/ethnicity, culture, religion, life experience, and political framework.
My experience in technology in NYC in the 90s was different. It seemed every company I worked for had a very limited number of women in the IT department. There was always one woman who was responsible for tracking property. At one company, there was just that person. I hired on the first IT female help desk person. She was quite good at the job, left unfortunately before she hit a year. Relationship with one of my other help desk people, didn't want to continue working with him, I think.
Banks had more women in the IT department, but they were always either in that inventory role, or were project managers. Didn't seem to be any female coders. Actually, the only female coder I ran into during the 90s was a System/36 person who did payroll processing and such for one firm.
I heard some very sexist things in meetings and also witnessed some very unethical relationships at one company. I suppose that is par for the course, used to happen all over before the sexual harassment thing gained steam. I generally took care of notification in exit interviews, the people generally weren't with the companies for long afterwards. It was the dotcom era and we were all job hopping a lot, anyway. Sticking around for payback for reporting stuff wasn't my cup of tea.
I met my wife at work and we both worked for a computer manufacturing company aimed at serving the financial community. Both of us were software engineers and she was assigned to do quality assurance on the product I was writing. How's that for a conflict? :)
I can say with absolute certainty the both of use were treated equally in some respects, in fact she had better possition than I; she was fast tracked into senior management while there were very few opportunities for me to advance in a tehcnical role. It came between us after many years (decades) and probably has contributed to our divorce 40 years later.
If anything, my report from the trenches would be women in the specific field of computer systems engineering had a slight advantage? They were seen as rational, compasionate, "people persons", while men were most likely seen as pocket pen protector nerds?
It's possible I was attracted to companies which employed more women, of course.
It occurs to me that there is also (as in all things?) much-overlooked nuance wrt that "sexual harassment thing", in that while there is ugly abuse of imbalance of power, there is also gaming the system by my gyno-American sisters. This is equally if not more disruptive, because people NOT favored by the high-value woman are resentful and women who see their careers harmed because they are not perceived as "high-value" (whatever their undoubted virtues as human beings) are understandably disapproving.
It's good we are confronting such problems with a more enlightened approach than "No Broads Allowed, they just cause trouble!". It would be even better if we allowed women full agency in what they choose to do. And ultimately, we're going to have to confront the very real dynamic that men seek wealth and power in order to obtain access to a plentiful supply of sexually available young women. Some men have this as the primary motivation underlying their efforts to gain wealth and power, some secondary, but look at rich men, politicians, cult leaders...they have a single thing, amongst their various motivations, in common. And we can't even speak about it.
Be careful. Larry Summers (a nasty piece of work, in general and as an economist, but still...) got in a lot of trouble for raising exactly this awkward question:
"What constitutes equality? What if there really are inherent differences that average out (eg, in IQ scores) but lead to big differences in, eg, career choices? Is it equality if some fields are dominated by men and others by women?"
The more ideological members of his audience (he should have known better) didn't want to deal with that, so they misrepresented his comments and intent (granted, interpretable as making excuses). And got away with it because nobody really wants to touch that one, and anyway he's a nasty piece of work.
Summers was fired because U. presidents aren't supposed to cause controversy; they're primarily fundraisers. Should have known better.
OC, The problem is that you have fallen (apparently) for the BS. Larry Summers never said anything even vaguely like the words you attribute to him. See https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/18/full-transcript-president-summers-remarks-at/ for his actual words. Please note that the following really is from Larry Summers.
"There is a great deal of absurd political correctness. Now, I’m somebody who believes very strongly in diversity, who resists racism in all of its many incarnations, who thinks that there is a great deal that’s unjust in American society that needs to be combated,” Summers said. “But it seems to be that there is a kind of creeping totalitarianism in terms of what kind of ideas are acceptable and are debatable on college campuses."
That appears to be a different topic, but one that would also get him in trouble. But he's right about that one, too. Maybe it's just economics where he's systematically wrong.
I didn't know there was a transcript - there were claims that there was none. Student journalism being useful.
OC, Take a look at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/02/18/what-larry-summers-said. It was Summers that released the transcript. I just found it over at the Crimson web site.
PT, More lies. Juvenile primates in other species show the same differentiation of interests (male juvenile primates play with trucks, female juvenile primates prefer dolls) that human children show.
Sorry, what? That sounds ridiculous. I have never seen any other primate species play with trucks, or dolls, or anything even remotely close.
RR, Sorry that you haven't kept up with the literature. It's hardly secret. See 'Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/). Type 'juvenile primates toys' into Google and you will get many hits.
Fair enough, I stand corrected.
That's very interesting. I can't imagine what a rhesus monkey of either sex would make of a wheeled toy, since it's a very unusual rhesus monkey that has experience with wheeled vehicles of any kind in the first place. I think someone should examine the protocols for these experiments closely.
I often wonder how the dog figures out how to work a rubber ball and rip out the bell at the center of them. Time for a new ball after he does this.
Such things obviously don't occur in nature. Conclusion (and i'm not being snarky) is that animals are capable of learned behavior based on environmental objects. I can't imagine a rhesus monkey with a toy truck would be much different.
In my experience, tearing things up is rather normal dog behavior, so getting a bell out of a rubber ball might not be a long step conceptually speaking. The first experience might even have been a lucky accident. I am not sure how to apply this to rhesus monkeys as I have considerably less direct experience of them.
Just Google it Rajeev, It was an experiment (I believe there are more, but I just pulled up this one): "When offered the choice of playing with either a doll or a toy truck, girls [monkeys] will typically pick the doll and boys [monkeys] will opt for the truck. This isn't just because society encourages girls to be nurturing and boys to be active, as people once thought. In experiments, male adolescent monkeys also prefer to play with wheeled vehicles while the females prefer dolls — and their societies say nothing on the matter."
But what did Dr. Zaius think?
OK, I'm childish but I immediately thought of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2E1m90YSpA
If they're the subjects of experiments being carried out by human beings, then they are in human society and are surrounded by its communications.
This is when I start muting the thread.
I was just reading about a sleep study published by Dement in 1960. The scientists thought their results confirmed the Freudian idea that people go crazy without dreams. Of course this result was picked up by the media and became common knowledge for some. In 1965 the same researchers invalidated their previous study, but the mainstream idea persisted that dreams are needed for sanity.
The moral of this story is that behavioral science is a soft science, and we shouldn't get too invested in one theory over another.
Actually, it would be kind of shocking if psychologists hadn't studied this.
Thank you for writing "psychologists".
I don't understand the comment. Are you saying you are glad that I don't imagine biologists or zoologists being interested in this study, that I don't confuse psychometry and psychology or have I made some kind of embarrassing mistake that has covered me in shame?
None of th above. Sorry, I was being a little playful and I literally appreciated the spelling. I'm still getting used to this "no edits, no corrections" interface and had just tripped over my own feet in a related discussion.
Sorry to say it wasn't anything complicated or mysterious.
Best Regards,
Scott.
That may be true and is interesting data. Yet we should be very careful when generalizing from primates to people, and that kind of research-level speculation does not belong in a workplace where people just need to get stuff done. Witness Coinbase and Basecamp discouraging political chatter at work.
>does not belong in a workplace where people just need to get stuff done.
What a great idea. Makes as much sense as just hiring the most qualified person for the job without regard to superficial factors.
But who is the most qualified person for the job, and how do we know?
Shouldn't it be up to the hiring manager to decide, and live with the consequences?
Sure, but then 'the most qualified person for the job' isn't necessarily the most qualified person for the job.
Hence
>and live with the consequences
A manager's first concern when hiring is what and how many they have budget for, so they can't just hire all the people who seem to have the experience, training, etc. and can play well with others. After that simple analysis the manager is in the realm of intuition, guesswork, luck, and prejudice. Some people are very good at simulating competence.
In an organization, there are often also political hurdles to get over as well -- upper management or peers may veto your choices for some reason.
Oh, I should clarify. We think gender is a superficial factor. Right?
Now I’m confused, I thought “gender” was just a sociological construct?
Or did I miss a class?
Sometimes it is a superficiality, sometimes it is the most important thing in the world. Sometimes it is a social construct, sometimes it is deeply rooted biology that evolved over hundreds of millions of years. Sometimes it is all of these things at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
That approach is totally fine with me. My beef is with Damore's speculation at Google.
No one cares what your problem is. You are uniquely uneducated on these topics. You argue from ignorance because it’s all you have.
We all have ignorance on our side, but maybe you have a magic scope to tease out people's "innate dispositional differences"? I'm sure having a bunch of monkeys play with toys beyond their comprehension is going to clear everything up.
You may have no idea, because you don't seem to read much.
Ideas in which men and women have significantly greater legal, social and economic equality show far greater disparity in careers chosen than the U.S. Fewer women really do like engineering. AND THAT'S OK.
Is it OK? Is it what people really want? Even as a child I was irritated by gender, racial, age, and other expectations, as if we were all a bunch of robots waiting to be programmed.
Do we actually get what we want in all cases? My daughter wants to be a (big) wild animal vet. Like in Africa. She has RA and Crohn's and is on a constant diet of methotrexate and <insert biologic of the month here>. Her being on the savanna away from hospitals where they could drain her joints (at least 4x a year...she had her left hip replaced due to necropsy of the ball of the thigh bone at 18) is not realistic.
She's probably not going to get what she wants as a result. I wanted to be a cartographer when I was a kid. Satellite imagery and GPS made that mostly pointless by the time I was an adult.
I'm thinking about more general social conditions, and as I'm an active part of society, there are going to be conditions I like, which I'll try to keep or enhance, and conditions I don't like, which I'll try to change or eliminate, just like almost everybody else. Primarily, with reference to this discussion, I don't like the deal where everyone is supposed to be programmed by their sex -- or their 'race' or ethnic group or their astrological sign -- because it makes people more stupid than they already are.
And that's the essence of equality isn't it? Not equal outcomes, equal opportunity.
When we pigion hole people using the gross characteristics you underline, all we're really doing is limiting the outcome based on our own preconceptions. We should do our best to recognize it and avoid it.
Well, I think equality of opportunity is impossible -- we can't all come from the same parents, grow up in the same neighborhood, go to the same school, and so on. We can't seriously modify opportunity, whereas we can modify outcomes. However, I think it would be more to the point to create adequacy of opportunity, one point of which would be to enable everyone, especially the young, to develop their talents according to their desires -- at least the positive ones. I suppose this is Karl Marx in social-democratic mode, but it does seem kind of reasonable to me anyway.
I disagree about opportunity vs. outcome; I feel it's the responsibility of a free and egalitarian society to assure equal opportunity, but it's the responsibility of the individual granted that opportunity to determine his or her own outcome.
I auppose at the root of my value system you'd call me a meritocrat? A supporter of meritocracy? I sincerely believe everyone should be given equal opportunity to screw up there life as they see fit? I'm not responsible for your success, but I don't have the right to discriminate against you for any reason other than your ability. If you're a hot shit programmer and you just happen to be Scandanavian, that's no reason to pass you by?
But don't you think it's a little odd that women in general are attributed with the gift of creation and a propensity for it, while men are most often characterized as mechanical? Yet engineering, by it's nature, is inherently creative?
I'm male and I'm a successful engineer. I'm also a musician and vocalist. My father was a distinguished engineer who was responsible for the US Navy's fleet balistic nuclear missile system, from Polaris through Trident. My mother was an accomplishd female vocalist. I apparently inherited both traits?
I can't escape the opinion my gender isn't all that important an influence on my talent?
Does your talent include any ability to understand how statistics works?
For reference, the method I used back "in the day" is described very completely in Box, Hunter and Hunter's "Statistics for Experimenters". Can't remember the edition or publication date off hand, but it's a definitive text on the subject.
PS: My education on the subject was derived from a man named Jake, who held a PhD. on the subject and taught under the aegis of the Rochester Institute of Technology. I applogize if my understanding of the topic is dated? I've been retired for nearly twenty years.
Well, in a nutshell, yes?
My specialty is the design of experiments. I usually follow the Taguchi methodology of experiment design, as you no doubt already know, Taguchi's optimization for fractional design is considered by many to be the current state of the art.
Or maybe lots of men don't like engineering much either, but they have fewer choices. So they get decent grades and a technical career because of social pressure, which women experience less. You don't seem to think much.
Gee, if only there was actual research on precisely this question. Should we go and look for it first before flapping our gums? Nah, let’s just make shit up and insult people.
Indeed. People here link some paper and then draw the exact opposite conclusion of what the authors wrote.
"A detailed consideration of potential indirect evolutionary influences on sex differences in math
and science is beyond the scope of this monograph and, in fact, may not be possible given our current state of knowledge in these areas."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2007.00032.x
If one thing is certain in the sciences, it's that "current knowledge" absolutely will change.
From the same paper:
"It [a 1903 dissertation] shows both how much and how little the science of sex differences has advanced in the last 100 years. Thompson had almost no empirical work to build upon, whereas contem porary psychologists have an extensive base of empirical studies to inform our conclusions; yet, in many ways, we are still asking the same basic questions."
There is more data now but the basic questions are unanswered.
Luckily, you know best what's good for those girls and will instead demand they work at places like Google.
They sure are blessed to have you looking out for them and telling them what they should do!
My attitude is to not pigeonhole someone from an early age.
Without knowing if that's actually happening!
Your ego is impressive.
I'm talking about my own family. For everyone else, we see correlation but have little knowledge about the direction of causation.
I agree with not pigeonholing and that sometimes "conventional wisdom" leads to discriminatory behavior. I agree that it's OK to criticize someone's statements. Debate is healthy. But what's happening now is over the top. It's not meant to make things better, but to tear certain people down. Make examples. It's mob rule.
Yes, it is mob rule. I was recently watching some videos about Evergreen State College. We should be emphasizing our common humanity rather than our differences. That is a political message most people could support.
Glad you spelled pigeonhole right :) Better than I did.
At the hospital child care center I administered (20 years ago), the children played with what ever they wanted....much to the chagrin of some of the dads. Boys played with dolls, girls built with Lego bricks, etc. And yet, inevitably the boys a tree stick or carrot stick and fashion it into a gun. And often it was the girls who were the first to empathize with another, but they didn't always fall into stereotypical male/female roles. It was always our goal to help them develop the best of both genders. After all, my master's thesis argued that the best leadership was androgynous.
For every question, there is an answer that is simple, easy to understand, and wrong. You seem to seek such banalities.
Also, while we're in ''anecdote' as the singular of 'data'" territory, I'm reminded of the liberated young mother who gave her son dolls and her daughter trucks and construction equipment to play with, only to find her son having the dolls fighting each other and jumping of cliffs and the daughter tucking her baby backhoes and monster trucks in to bed after a nice "oil party". Called and raised!
ps) We actually DO have lots of "idea" about sexual predelictions, including experimental, anthropological and historical. YOU may not have such "ideas" because you snatched at the first, easiest to understand, and best-fit-to-agenda answer you saw.
Actually, we have some data. It turns out that juvenile monkeys have exactly the same toy preferences as human children. Is this enough to prove that biology (not sexism) dominates child toy preferences. Probably not. However, It does suggest the answer.
*then ask. Stupid no edit button.
I'm pretty sure Google wants a positive atmosphere at work, rather than speculation about the biological deficiencies of some of their workers.
We don't consider men's generally lower interest in being preschool teachers and nurses to be a deficiency. Why would women's generally lower interest in being auto mechanics and programmers be a deficiency?
My husband was a carpenter and tried to convince three daughters to go into the trades. None did. It wasn't they couldn't do the work it was the mess, the sanitation facilities and getting dirty. There still are not many women in the building trades. Entire work structures need to accommodate better. Tech support where I work seems to have more women because the larger organization has tried to accommodate their preferred working conditions. I think the org. structures are where change needs to start. Not sure if large construction sites ever will, but tech could.
A dirty secret is that the autists are the problem in tech. They have social issues and it bothers women more than it does men. Most women find the environment abhorrent.
The problem is that the key feature of the autists, along with high function in things that make them good in tech, is that social issue. I've made a whole career acting as a translator for people much farther out on the spectrum than I am. Telling them to stop doing it doesn't fix the problem.
There is an effort to consider the world of the neuro-diverse in public libraries. My field is librarianship and we strive to be responsive to everyone. A fair number of people come to libraries and get upset that we (librarians) now try to make the library a fun place with no more sh-sh-sh (not that we will every get over that idea). This has made us not a good place for people who can't tolerate chaotic situations--esp. autists. But with recognition that people who don't like chaotic situations have rights too (fancy that?) we are trying to reintroduce quiet spaces. Also, librarianship attracts autist people as future librarians who have the idea from popular culture that libraries are orderly. I, a teacher of librarians, have worked to find my autist students library jobs that are like tech jobs. This would be digitization work, cataloging. I guess given the world today there needs to be some larger recognition that everyone does not have the neurological makeup to be like the signers at Apple want them to be. Thank you for your opening at SNL, Elon Musk.
It figures that Elon would at least make the nod to that. Though, he's found coping mechanisms that make it a lot less apparent in him than many I know. I actually got the line from a therapist once that whatever mechanisms I had figured out in (45 years at the time) was going to be much better than the drugs her associated psychiatrist would prescribe.
I appreciate and understand your efforts. I only wish it were so simple to carve out a place in technology for people who aren't autistic and have no particular talent in dealing with same. My employer does make an effort. It's kind of funny that my job nowadays is salesy. The dedicated sellers are quite tolerant of my foibles, surprisingly, though you can imagine that they are driven extroverts thriving on chaos. I can think a little like they do while remaining a geek at heart, which is why they keep me around.
We just have to remember that all of us have a range and it can also vary over life and everyone isn't the same. Honestly, I think current world expects everyone to be the same in our responses to them not realizing there are two sides. Think about vision...I have low vision and can cope only by all kinds of accessibility work arounds. This grey type here at Substack means I cut & paste longer responses to a word doc. Bold them and upsize them. What would be accessible to me would be unpleasant for readers with normal vision. How much accommodation will the world provide? And there is a spectrum and seeing the others' point of view takes a lot more intense empathy than based on outward characteristics which get the maj. of attention.
I'm sorry you have to do that. I'm a web dev and all sites should be accessible. It's super easy to do - there are several services that offer tools that enable users to resize fonts, change colors, contrast - the works. I am surprised that Substack doesn't make an effort. Very few of the big sites do - and they should be setting an example. Check it out: https://accessibe.com/ Click on the little blue figure bottom right and have fun!
Computers would make it fairly easy to provide both options - just a button labelled, perhaps, "enhanced visibility."
They sure make the "Post" button visible.
On the other hand, an edit function would be even better.
If the font could just be darker. I can read poster names fine.
As someone who works in biotech, and has worked with tech companies as AI got more important in healthcare, I think it's a world of difference. The people in biotech are wonderful, it's just a joy. The people in tech seem to me like they often can't even communicate with one another.
As a general framework, try this: if you're good at math and not words, you go into tech. If you're good at words and not math, you go law, polysci, journalism, etc. If you're equally good at both you go into science or medicine. People good at words are also good at people. Tech has social problems because they don't get the best people at dealing with people.
The framework fits with the logic that if one gender tended to be better at words, members of the gender would choose tech less. It's not a deficiency, it's a superiority.
Curious though? Are you personally good at math?
I don't doubt you are correct. That said, the poor communication in tech has been a godsend for me personally. I can take direction from leadership and turn it into concerted action from geeks who otherwise would be lethargic at best in response to upper management direction. I speak their dialect and can assuage their issues without compromising the goals leadership wants to achieve. I don't think someone without the affliction would have an easy time communicating with the people doing the grunt work of tech and extracting maximum performance out of them. Which is mostly about getting out of their way and letting them innovate.
So I guess I am pushing back on the social problems thesis a little. Yes, it's dysfunctional compared to more 'normal' groups, but you can still get things done and we can still communicate. It's just not for everyone.
Yes, I would never say you don't get things done... social interaction and accomplishment are certainly not correlated. Probably just lower on the conscientiousness.
HBI, All true... For the record, I am (high probability) one of them.
It's refreshing to realize that there is a real difference that provoked all those negative reactions over the years. One of the things I have discussed in therapy has been the framework of learned (unnatural) social behaviors that I have formed to get around the problem. It's my coping mechanism. It's very efficient, but it's fake and draining. It turns me from a borderline extrovert to an introvert, realistically. Accepting this has made me a better communicator and to construct social interactions to be less draining to me, and more positive to the participants other than me. My daughters, for instance, who do not have the same issues I do. Hopefully this is something that you can leverage also.
BTW, I am a big proponent that telling them to stop doing it CAN fix the problem. It's the expecting them to stop doing it because you made a facial expression or stormed out of the room that doesn't fix the problem. Those nonverbal cues are not in their vocabulary. If you say "Jennifer stopped talking and left the meeting quickly after you held up that bottle and made a sort of sexual reference because those kind of references to sex make her uncomfortable, and many other people would feel that way too", that's the level to address it on, non-judgmentally and without fanfare, and get the point across. It's more effective than most would expect, but that's because most people poorly understand how the spectrum person works.
Have you been involved in any workplace related lawsuits? Interactions with your Human Resources department?
Are you, perhaps, part of an abnormal psych research project?
One of the earliest times I used this technique effectively (it's not always effective), the person actled like a light bulb had turned on and said something along the lines of "oh this explains why person Y reacted that way to what person X said the other day". It was just data, it was fit into the equation, and there was some self-correction afterwards, which was a breakthrough.
I'm not denigrating what you are doing, but it's fixing the problem for _that_ particular social situation. There's no amount of correcting the autist that is going to make them feel natural socializing and understand nonverbal cues, etc. You've added a rule to his repertoire. This is great, but most of us can only process a limited set of rules. Also, being rules bound increases social anxiety to the point that someone who might have been an extrovert becomes an introvert because they find the whole acting out society's rules thing tiring. That's me in an nutshell. I have a great set of rules that work in a whole gamut of situations, but it's tiring and I prefer to avoid people when making money isn't involved. The only time I feel relaxed and at ease is in the company of other people on the spectrum. So I have a biweekly (mostly) D&D game. A bunch of geeks who I have license to stop acting with. I'm super social there.
My wife likes to say that when I meet people, say a new doctor or someone i'm supposed to sell to at work, i'm the best me that I can possibly be, but it isn't the truth. She is right.
This is all highly insightful, thanks for sharing. TBH it resonates even if you're someone like me that is in theory not on spectrum at all, but I push myself into high-social requirement situations professionally and as a parent, while mostly actually an introvert. Then I need to be alone, for a good long while.
Isn't the "spectrum" a medical invention? Why do people voluntarily associate themselves with a mental disorder? It seems like a pretty benign deviation from the norm with pros and cons that are merely worth recognizing. As with any stereotype, it may be unreliable and also lead to self-fulfilling expectations.
This is breathtakingly on the spot. It's also germane to the very debate here, because Damore would never know how clunky and ill-advised some of the wording (e.g., "neuroticism," scientific term that is more benign than our colloquial use of it) in his Google memo was, things the socially savvy would know instinctively, because he's autistic.
Thank you Deco for saying this. Exactly. You know why? Because traditional women's work is devalued. A programmer at Google is more important than a kindergarten teacher. Our values are screwed up!
How much do we pay to do yardwork versus childcare?
This isn't quite right. The kindergarten teacher gets paid more than a garbage collector, another traditionally male-dominated profession.
Why, oh why, do we devalue the garbage collectors?
The kindergarten teacher gets paid more because she has a bachelor's or possibly a master's degree. This example has nothing to do with gender. And if it makes you feel any better for the first three years of my teaching career I made $8900, $9700, and $10,400---then $18,000 for the next three years. Pretty sure the garbage collectors were making that or better.
It doesn't have anything to do with the BS/BA degree, it's about how hard it is to fill the position. And filling garbage collectors' position is a fairly hard task, as many people feel they are above it.
And what evidence do you have of that? They're mostly unionized. A quick search shows the salary range is $28,800 - $$50,240. Salaries of teachers are all over the place depending on region and private v. public and yes, a college degree or two most often catapults you into a higher bracket.
Yes, it would show that now, but then, my first position out of college was as a computer programmer in 1978, and $18,000 a year was pretty darned good for a guy who came from a State university? I wasn't complaining. And Jolly is spot on with the observation "it's about how hard it is to fill the position". No doubt in my mind about that. I just picked the right thing to study at school and it paid off big. Back in '78, there weren't too many people who could speak FORTRAN fluently and I was one of them?
Because we write them in a couple of days and forget them until they break.
Very nicely played :). That's why we use C++ - it doesn't generate much garbage. Right? :)
Garbage doesn't kill software; people kill software. :)
In Soviet Russia, software kills people!
!!?? I was of the opinion that right around 1989 Soviet Russia folded up its tent and went home?
On a less political note, the truth is software kills people in various ways all over the world...
Good point. I think it has to do with the perceived intelligence or skill required for the job.
Here's the difference between teachers and software pros: In the tech industry there is massive differentiation between top talent and mediocrity. A google architect gets paid much more than the IT lackey at a small business. Teachers don't get that deal; they generally get the same compensation within a fairly narrow band determined by school boards and unions.
Comparing a teacher to the google architect, while ignoring the small time IT lackey, is an example of the apex fallacy.
Teachers' salaries are literally all over the place depending on region, private/public, and degree (they are on a ladder system). There's no way the teachers in the San Antonio school district I taught in were making the same as they were on the north side. Property taxes play a large part in determining salaries. I know plenty of HS teachers making 6 figures and in at least one case, one is a gym teacher and another an AP history teacher. Throw in college professorships and that, too, is all over the place.
For low-level Googlers, not being so interested in the nuts and bolts of tech is certainly a deficiency.
Damore's point isn't that no women are interested in nuts and bolts. Many are and thrive at Google. But the fact that Google hasn't achieved a 50% female engineer employment roster can't be explained away as Google's sexism. You also have to look at whether women are even interested in the first place, in the same numbers as men, in being engineers.
There's also a very interesting conversation to be had on how one solves this "problem." If one is actually interested in root causes, rather than a dogmatic commitment to individual solutions, then it definitely makes sense to interrogate the funnel feeding the company. For example, if CompSci programs are 75% male (made up number), then why would we expect anything other than a 75-25 split in hiring, assuming even distribution of talent and lack of bias in the process. So, then the question becomes why is that the case. And there are upstream factors at play there, likely.
The true root cause analysis is at odds with the equity analysis that considers any disproportionality from the population at large as per se evidence of bias/prejudice.
This issue is more muddled in legal field, for example, where female law students outnumber male law students 54% to 46%, yet women lawyers make up a much lower percentage of corporate general counsel, top earners, and law firm partners. The women's bar will tell you it's all sexism. A root cause analysis paints a more complex picture. I'm not saying sexism is not a factor at all, because that would be like saying there are no sexist people in positions of power anywhere, an absurd statement. But sexism does not explain the disparity at the top level of the profession, especially when law schools put out more newly minted female lawyers than male lawyers.
I get a lot of women students with law degrees interested in the law and not the combativeness. They become law librarians--including several now at major courts. Everyone is mart and capable but put off by the aggression aspects.
Exactly my excuse, and that was 1978. Ironically, I switched to Computer Science.
When I was getting my CS degree belatedly at about 40, getting past the Calc classes was a pain in the ass for me. My wife is much better at advanced math than I am. She had no problem with the questions and could explain how to do integrals and derivatives to me (limits were easy) after looking at the book for a couple minutes. Mind you, Calc 1 and Calc2 were the difference between me and a 4.0 GPA. I squeaked through the first with a C and the second with a B. With her help.
When I asked her why she wasn't interested in taking advanced math classes herself (she got a degree in Psych), her response was that she wasn't interested because it bored the crap out of her, her ability to solve the problems notwithstanding. It just didn't make her tick.
I had a similar conversation with her about employment. She could make a mint doing something technology related, but she'd never even consider it. More boredom. The idea of coding is repulsive to her, even though i've seen her do things that closely resemble it (Excel macros, rewriting PHP that is broken, etc) on occasion in the past.
My older daughter got her degree in Bio. If I had suggested something like Math or CS, she'd make a puke face. It wasn't that she had any issue with the classes themselves, it just wasn't what she is into. Wants to be a vet, doesn't want to inhabit a cubicle farm even though she could double or triple the salary.
I know this is way more anecdotal than the level you are going for, but it seems relevant.
To go a little further off topic, one of the issues in this area is that people who are good at math, and enjoy it, cannot seem to understand that others do not enjoy it, no matter if they are good with it or not.
I have two acquaintances who have PhDs in math, and they both love it. I, who never had much interest in the subject but no real trouble with it either, find it exquisitely boring, and would much rather spend my time in the lit/history world (I ended up in the antiques business). But this is completely foreign to them, as in their eyes everyone either loves math or is stupid.
Also anecdotally, my sister was an electrical engineer for over 15 years, and she loathed every second of it because it "wasn't her." She did very well and made a good living, but she saw it as nothing but a means to an end, a good salary. Eventually she got out and got an MBA and went to work on the business side.
But while she was still a techie, she would talk about how so many of her co-workers lived and breathed the techie stuff in their spare time, into the wee hours of the night, and shop talk on the weekends and at social events was fun for them.
She couldn't wait to turn work off when she went home at night and spent no extra time reading journals and working on her side tech project. She made jewelry in her spare time, something that "was her." Many of the guys never turned work off, because it "was them".
I see that kind of logic in a lot of places in tech. Some of the egoes are ...well, I have one too. But it's not as unconcealed as many of my coworkers over the years.
I think the one thing that I usefully learned from college was how much I didn't know about, that fields existed that I had no subject matter knowledge about and no particular insight into. It's too bad that some people that spent more time there than I did never got the idea.
I work in video games and while we have a reasonable number of women in the art, animation, design and production areas, we have hardly any in programming. The ones we do have are very good, but we simply don’t get the applicants.
In our last set of interviews for programmers, out of 19 people only one was female. Whatever the causes are for our company having so few female programmers, they clearly are occurring long before we get their application.
I can add that my wife has MSc in CS and her sister too. My wife stayed in the business but went to management. Her sister after some years in programming went back to school and got a degree in psychology and is now a successful therapist.
Hmm... sounds familiar. My wife also has a masters in CS, later took a PhD in psychology, and is now a successful clinical psychologist.
You probably shouldn’t be making assumptions about what my company has been doing. How about we start with that.
Just lately I met a young real estate agent woman with a degree in CS. She said she had decided she was not interested in sitting in front of a computer screen.
You're misunderstanding the problem they are solving. The real problem is appearing suitably pious to social concerns and pressures that mainly exist to protect wealth. What would help more women in this nation: 100% parity at Google or Medicare for all? They blew out a couple of employees for massive PR while fanning the flames of the modern PC movement that pro or con infuriates a large portion of the country so much that we forget to argue over important issues. The tech/military/plutocracy alliance that runs this country is now we'll protected and empowered to DESTROY any critics by policing their ideology.
I'm not arguing that Google needs to be 50 % female, or even that Damore's speculation about the source of sex-imbalances is wrong. I'm saying that kind of speculation is like porn in the sense that it does not belong at work.
Damore didn't jump out of nowhere to offer up gratuitous (yet entirely science-based) musings on the differences between sexes. He offered it as his contribution to the endless navel-gazing and tortured gyrations at Google about the horrors of sexism prevalent at Google, based solely on women not representing 50% of the programmers/engineers at Google. After years of meetings and sessions and memos and workshops and trainings devoted to this topic, he made his contributions to at least inject some studies into the male-flagellation performances. Ironic that he lost his job as a consequence of contributing to a topic Google assured its employees they could engage in openly and honestly.
I agree with you, Deco. I am a woman who started my working life as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, and retired as a business exec who had responsibility for large businesses. I am also an immigrant and 'of color' as the saying goes, which I bring up solely to say that I found Google's behavior towards Damore abhorrent. He did NOT say anything sexist or derogatory towards women, he merely restated research findings that reflect the real world, whether the woke populace likes that reality or not. I spoke out strongly at the time on fb (I had retired by then) and have not changed my opinion - Sundar Picchai acted like a moral coward and a bully.
God bless women like you who speak up. The woke reserve their most vicious attacks for “women of color”, especially immigrants, who offer not just counterarguments, but living proof against the woke narrative.
very true.
Like Taibbi pointed out w/ Dre and Apple, it’s the hypocrisy that stinks the most. Companies are private entities-they can be woke or be closed on Sunday like Chk Fil-a. The problems start with hypocrisy-as Orwell notes in Animal Farm.
Yes, like the NBA criticizing/sanctioning the (was it Houston) manager for tweeting support of Hong Kong protesters. Thank God those Apple warriors could investigate their fellow employee's history somewhere. If they work in China and want to find out the anniversary date of the Tiannamen Square crackdown, I wonder if they can Google when that is. June 4, BTW.
Is there some resource to find out which companies' products are in any way linked to forced labor in China or anywhere else? Seems like MT ended his piece with a call to action. The least I can do (and I always do that) is start calling out the corporate creeps that are on top of US voting procedures, but MUST be unaware their stuff is manufactured by imprisoned people forced from their homes.
Remembering the religious boycotts of the 1980s, I have a little bit of angst thinking of getting involved in that myself. I know it's perhaps the most effective way to pressure companies. I have this fear of assisting something that has unpredictable and probably negative results in the long term.
To think i'd still be worrying about Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in 2021.
Not sure why I followed this comment thread but I'm glad I did because I learned something. Deco's last point is quite persuasive.
Wait for Google's exact words. Some how I doubt they gave people license to let it all hang out.
I don't think Google granted blanket immunity for saying things that would otherwise violate Google policies or the law. The point is that employees were encouraged to contribute, and Damore had no inkling that his memo, a summary of research findings and scholarly papers, would get him fired and slap the misogynist label on him. Add Damore's possible autism to the mix, and there was no way he could win. None of this makes him a misogynist or sexist, but that's how he was demonized.
Two wrongs don't make a right though. This thread started about Damore, not whether or not Google is a hostile workplace for men. I'd be interested in Google's exact words where they "assured ... employees they could engage ... openly and honestly." It would be odd to fire someone for following guidance.
Clearly you've never worked at Google. I have. The general attitude there reminds me of William F. Buckley Jr.'s remark that liberals are theoretically in favor of diversity of opinion but in practice are horrified when they discover that there actually ARE other opinions.
Such is life. As an outsider I see that they come up with decent products, certainly better than we got from MS, who seemed more traditional.
Jumping from the thread above that's falling off the side:
I thought Damore settled with Google and they probably payed him off handsomely. So I don't think he got the same treatment as he would have in your PA scenario.
I am bothered becuse Damore wrote negative things about a group with thin scientific arguments for backup. It reminds me of eugenics and the pseudo-scientific race theories that used to be popular.
It's much better not to speculate about biological causes for the state of society, because those types of arguments are weak, and in other contexts they have been used to justify unimaginable horrors.
Yes, I'm sure Google is as screwed as any place by wokeness, but the problem is wokeness. It doesn't matter to what degree women want to code. As far as we can predict, there will always be too few if the goal is 50% and there is no need to bring up biology when criticizing HR's totally unrealistic goals.
But he didn't write negative things. I'm a woman software engineer who worked my entire life in Silicon Valley, starting way back in 1979 when women were even more rare. I read what he wrote. There was NOTHING negative. And I disagree that certain research data should be off-limits. If even people in science and technology can't engage with data in a thoughtful way, and hear dissenting views, they need to grow up.
Yes, he did write negative things. He wrote that women tend to be neurotic and not very into tech, the latter likely for biological reasons.
Yeah, this reminds me of researchers who dare post scientific data that shows certain "medications" work to reduce effects of COVID or show an analysis that global warming is not a 100% human made issue. You can't disagree with the SJWs or you will be sent to twitter/social media hell for the rest of your known existence.
PT, As always you no idea what you are talking about. The scientific consensus strongly supports Damore. Let me offer one example.
You will find a good summary of the topic over at “The Science of Sex Differences in Science and Mathematics” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270278/).
Diane Halpern was/is one of the authors.
She was the head of the American Psychological Association in 2004.
She wrote “Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities”. Quote
“In her preface to the first edition, Halpern wrote: “At the time, it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts and mistakes in the research, and bias and prejudice. ... After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles … I changed my mind.””
From your citation:
"the reasons why males are often more variable remain elusive."
[...]
"We conclude that early experience, biological factors, educational policy, and cultural context affect the number of women and men who pursue advanced study in science and math and that these effects add and interact in complex ways. There are no single or simple answers to the complex questions about sex differences in science and mathematics."
That doesn't sound at all like a scientific consensus in support of "innate dispositional differences."
Ah, he said something you interpret as incorrect, therefore Nazi. The main argument in all American discourse.
Because human behavior is the only thing Darwin's theory applies to?
Google actively encouraged their staffers to engage with personal opinions and observations during working hours. It was a point of pride, and a hiring lure.
I'm sure the conversation they asked for was respectful. At a tech company, speculating about how women are biologically less likely than men to be into tech is not respectful.
If the topic of the conversation is, "why aren't 50% of the engineers at Google women", with the company going to great and potentially destructive to all parties involved lengths to correct that imbalance, then it shouldn't be outside the bounds of the conversation to mention that based on heaps of research, part of the reason might be that women in general for a host of reasons by social and biological or a mix of the two are less likely than men to be interested in becoming engineers at Google.
"heaps of research" = weak science
I suppose software types, so used to their make-believe virtual world, have fallen down the "Trust the Science" rabbit hole.
So you HR should be omnipotent hall monitors to the nth degree? I agree about porn at work, but legit criticism/analysis of company culture and hiring practices isn’t fansonly........
I guess it's also ok then if DiAngelo drags white people through the mud, based on some hokey theories.
Damore said absolutely nothin hateful or intellectually honest nsupportable.
I'm sure DiAngelo's defenders would say the same.
Clearly you are right, the last thing you would want at Google would be people who make data-based decisions.
You think being interested in people instead of things is a DEFICENCY?
Sounds sexist.
Exactly true! And it is.
I’ve read the Damore memo/rant, and, while blacks not and cogent, it is in no way an unhinged misogynistic rant, nor a criticism of the female engineers present at Google.
Buzzfeed on Damore "James Damore, author of the anti-diversity Google memo". The actual memo begins with "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes". Did that stop Buzzfeed and Gizmodo from lying about Damore? No. Did they suffer any adverse consequences from lying? No.
blunt-not blacks not. Give us an exit feature Substack pleeeeeeeeease!
You mean an edit feature? :-p
He may just want to escape.
I just saw this, LMAO
Deco, Matt just wants to capture your true, unvarnished opinions I think? And he may be right about that :)
At least it seems to be working well?
Yes, if some Google employees think that the Sun orbits the Earth, then we must fire anyone who dares to disagree.
So you think the source of sex-differences in tech is scientifically understood with the certainty of orbital mechanics? Then you're like those global-warming people who have some interesting data and are immediately convinced that the world will soon be unlivable.
PT, Apparently you can't recognize sarcasm and/or analogies.
The internet wasn't made for sarcasm and your analogy is false.
Speaking as one of those aweful dudes who deliberately foisted the internet on society, I can assure you we built it for anyone who had money, regardless of their prefered means of expressing humor, satire, irony or anything else. You got money, we took it.
The couple I worked with, Sandy Lerner and what'shisname :), mastered their desires for fame. took the money and ran. I think Sandy ended up buying an Island somewhere in the strait of San Juan de Fuca, off the coast of Canada. I don't hold the opinion they truly understood what they'd done, but I think they were happy?
I like to think they were happy?
Leo Bozsack? Is that right? It's been 30 years, but I think so?
Yep, the first multi-protocal encapsulation router that was able to connect all sorts of proprietary network protocols over the ubiquitous TCP/IP transport. That was the internet and it was a couple of Stanford sysadmins that put it all together in their magic box.
They changed the world. I helped, but they were the people who changed it. John Morgridge believed in them and had a boatload of money in his back pocket. That all happened over a very short time in Menlo Park CA. About 1989.
I'll be honest; even if Sandy and Leo didn't have a complete understanding of what they where about to do (and I don't think any of us did), they did know it was big.
I like the humor PT, but I can't agree the 'net wasn't made for sarcasm? :)
Near as I can tell it was made for just about everything, inclusing sarcasm? You might want to lighten up a bit? :)
I think "inclusing" may be a typo? That isn't a real word is it?
And don't we all? It's what makes us special.
It's more akin to quantum mechanics than Newtonian physics. You cannot measure a lot of things with great certainty, but the statistical predictions are meaningful.
Quantum mechanics describes the world to 15 decimal digits, sometimes even more. Behavioral science gets you what, half a bit of predictive power? It is more than the difference between night and day.
You do acknowledge there is some validity to the field then?
On orbital mechanics; "To go faster, slow down. Anyone who understands orbital mechanics knows that." -- Scott Cherf, NASA Ames Research Center, god only knows when...
Oh come now; the global warmists aren't that bright to begin with, how could they possibly be so coniving?
I think sex-differences in humans are as well understood as orbital mechanics in the time of Galileo. Sex differences in humans are (probably) polygenic and (probably) influenced by society. Of course, orbital mechanics was not all that clear 400 years ago.
That is a big range of possibilities and there is no reason to expect any clarity on the subject in the next 400 years, while orbital mechanics is basically a solved problem (unless you're looking at tiny effects like the Pioneer anomaly).
Your earlier linked paper says this about the rate of progress:
"It [a 1903 doctoral dissertation] shows both how much and how little the science of sex differences has advanced in the last 100 years. Thompson had almost no empirical work to build upon, whereas contemporary psychologists have an extensive base of empirical studies to inform our conclusions; yet, in many ways, we are still asking the same basic questions."
Not clear for most folks now? "To go faster, slow down..."
That literally made me LOL. "Don't be evil" eh? From the company that routinely rapes small business ad budgets by recommending increasing your budget by phone sales people literally lying through their teeth. Add Facebook to that pile.
They changed it!! (About simultaneous with their "awokening"??)
They moved from the proscriptive "Don't be evil." (seeking to differentiate themselves from M$ and Apple, no doubt), to the prescriptive "Do the right thing."
Pretty telling.
PT, Wrong as always. Damore didn't write anything critical about the 'biological deficiencies of some of their workers'. Go look up the original Damore memo. This raises the interesting question. Do you know that you are lying or are you just repeating the lies of others?
My read is that she (like Damore) believed the BS (that Google welcomes dissenting views). Like most companies, Google does not.
I liked your treatment here, but I'm not sure I actually agree with it. It's persuasive and very well presented, that I'm sure of.
What I'm not certain of is that Google, or any other very large multinational coporate entity, has the cohesiveness your analysis implies? Can it have that kind of self awareness?
And, in an adjacent reality, Bob wanted to be close to his family, fish on the weekends, and make lots of money.
I don't think pointing out differences in interest equates to differences in ability.
PT, You are just lying. The Damore quote is about interests, not abilities. Of course, Damore was right. The 'people vs. things' Cohen's D is over 1 for men vs. women.
And what is Cohen's D for interest vs. ability in tech? Nobody would want to hire someone unintersted for in job, because they would suck at it.
PT, See "Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/). This analysis produced a Cohen's D of 0.93.
Abstract
The magnitude and variability of sex differences in vocational interests were examined in the present meta-analysis for Holland's (1959, 1997) categories (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional), Prediger's (1982) Things-People and Data-Ideas dimensions, and the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) interest areas. Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests. Average effect sizes varied across interest inventories, ranging from 0.08 to 0.79. The quality of interest inventories, based on professional reputation, was not differentially related to the magnitude of sex differences. Moderators of the effect sizes included interest inventory item development strategy, scoring method, theoretical framework, and sample variables of age and cohort. Application of some item development strategies can substantially reduce sex differences. The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.
What the hell? I have completely lost interest in my job and I'm still amazing at it.
Same here. I’m amazing at a multitude of things I have no interest in, and that don’t even pay me to be amazing at. Meanwhile, I suck spectacularly at a multitude of things that interest me to no end. Like playing killer riffs on the guitar, baking sourdough bread, staying organized and chasing after my daughter to clean up her messes. Interest level at 10. Competency at 3.
I hate to bring this up, but grade inflation is a thing, even when we grade ourselves.
His point was not that women would “not be so good” in tech. His point is that fewer women were interested in the things. I’m a female engineer and, while I enjoy science talk, the practice of it bores me. Too much mundane detail. I’d much rather be involved in how science and tech affects society and people. Many of my female engineering grads have gravitated to management as a result. So I totally understand and agree with Damore as I lived it and see it all around me.
Odd, but I had almost exactly the same experience vicariously through my wife and the arc of her carrier as a female software and hardware engineet over the 35 years we worked together in the Valley. Not only did she migrate into management, most of the other women we worked with did the same. I'm sure there were some who prefered management to being what, in the vernacular of the time, was an "individual contributor", the career path into management was encouraged by the three large companies we worked for together back in the 70's, 80's and 90's. Not to say she wasn't talented at management, she was, but she was also a talented engineer. Each of the places we worked emphasized that path not only for her but also for the other women we worked and socialized with.
That might be due to the problem men had as well though. There were many of us who recognized that there were few opportunities for advancement, once you hit a certain level of proficiency, that weren't management? I faced somewhat lesser pressure to go into management even though I was absolutely horrible at it, but there was almost no path for advancement other than management. A few companies we worked for had what they called Technical Leader or "Fellowship" possitions, but they were mostly honorary titles and equivalent to Director level management roles. Nothing approaching VP.
I will say that I always prefered female managers. I found them much easier to work with and less likely to consider me a threat.
Generally speaking, I've noticed that most people who do code / programming / systems design etc. burn out after a few years. I don't know if there's a sex difference.
"engineer" not "engineet". Why can't I edit a posted comment? And why doesn't this site have a built in spell checker?
Welcome to Thunderdome.
My unsolicited advice is to embrace the typos. People generally know what you meant.
I'm a little obsesive when it comes to spelling, a trait beaten into me by my first boss way back when, before spell checkers were even invented. I'm afraid I've become pedantic. I'll adapt, give me a little more time... :)
*obsessive
Never mind. I see it wasn't a quote? Had to fetch my reading glasses :)
Would be a 10 pointer but you dropped a trailing quote :)
LW, In general, women tend to be quite interested in science, but not in engineering. Did you mean "I’m a female engineer and, while I enjoy engineering talk, the practice of engineering bores me".
I don’t agree. Engineering is applied science - more interesting than so-called “pure” science. Practicing both is boring to me. More interesting is the policy and societal implications of the application of scientific principles.
LW, You will note that I used the phrase 'In general, women". That turns out to be true. Quote from "Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/)
"As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female."
In general, women are more interested in pure science vs. engineering.
Differences in interests and a tendency to make different choices ≠ different innate talent and capability
RR, If you are interested in a detailed discussion of this subject, see "Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/). Quote
"In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine, unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera.
As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.
And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!”
This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there."
When I got into computer programming around 1965, half of my colleagues were female. After all, you had to _type_ (usually at a keypunch or a teletype) and what real man was going to do that? You also had to make it up as you went along -- there was less theory and experience then -- and women seemed to be good at that. In the '70s, regular educational institutions began to tune into the fact that there was a lot of money to be made, and they decided programming was a species of engineering. And we all know what an engineer looks like. Ten years later, ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) was having conferences on the fact that there were so few women in the Craft -- a situation which they, themselves, had created.
As to things versus persons: when you work with code, you're conversing with a human project going back thousands of years, and you're using languages and symbols, a species of thought and activity women have been supposed to be better at than men. You make computers do things by talking to them.
Somewhat predictably, you have no idea what you are talking about. Quote from SSC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/#comment-533527).
"My impression is that there were lots of women in CS in 1980 for the same reason there were lots of Jews in banking in 1800: they were banned from doing anything else.
Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Everything you quoted is more or less correct (by my personal observation, anyway), except that the trend-spotters at Cosmo were a bit behind the wave. When the job was defined as 'engineering' their numbers declined pretty rapidly.
As for not knowing what one is talking about, you don't know the slightest thing about my knowledge and use of either natural or computer languages, so I don't know why you bother alluding to it.
SG, "You make computers do things by talking to them". Of course, C/C++C#/Java/JavaScript/Perl/Python/etc. are spoken languages and always have been. Everyone knows that.
It was not always so. At one time, computers had to be rewired for a specific computation (usually through a plugboard). This was not much like language. Later, icons and other graphical devices were presented which could be clicked on or moved around a screen, which was not very linguistic either. I imagine the grasping and poking of images of quasi-physical objects was more pleasing to the male brain, and led to what we have now: television with a buy button. But here we are gabbing instead of banging things, so maybe we're a bit femmie too....
SG, Sadly you don't have much knowledge of how computers are actually programmed. Visual programming systems are a rarity. Let me give you a clue. TouchDesigner (a visual programming system) get 538,000 hits. Java gets 681,000,000 hits. Did I mention that JavaScript gets 3.3 billion hits?
I guess I was thinking about how they are used in general, rather than how they are programmed. There was a considerable effort for awhile to provide graphical programming systems, but but as there is no obvious syntax to a field of icons none have succeeded in catching on. Except with games and game-like children's programming systems, maybe.
I should say that GUI tools are widely used for word processing, PowerPoint presentations, HTML pages, moving files (FileZilla), etc, etc. However, computer programming remains utterly conventional. Except for cards being replaced by terminals (and PCs now), nothing has changed since the 1950s.
There have been many attempts to develop GUI programming systems. Basically, they have all failed. TouchDesigner is something of an exception. As it turns out, game programming is completely conventional. A modest counterargument is that GUI layout tools are used to build some GUIs. See https://www.creativebloq.com/how-to/20-best-ui-design-tools for a partial list.
I could also point out that computer languages are rather different than human languages. Of course, if you had experience with both you would know that.
I used to run into these people back in the day. One problem with them was that they did not play well with others, hence, it was difficult to get constructive work out of them. One that I sort of project-managed was assigned to do a specialized file transfer program and in a couple of weeks managed to insert a small interpreter for a BASIC-like language into it which had very little to do with the project. It was cute, though. When party-pooping higher management found out about this and other similar exploits (not through me) they canned him.
Crucially, "talent" and "capability" - technically "aptitudes" vs. "intelligence". Aptitudes are particular skills, eg math vs. verbal. This is familiar to anyone who's taken the College Board tests, or most intelligence tests. "Intelligence" is overall ability. Two people with the same IQ score may have very different aptitudes. So can populations - though there's no knowing at this point whether that's inherent or cultural.
IQ tests do not show that women are “smarter” than men or vice-versa. However, this proves less than you might think. A verbally oriented test will ‘prove’ that women are smarter. A visual-spatially oriented test will show the reverse. Indirect quote from James Flynn (now deceased)
“He points out that if you try to intentionally create a gender-neutral IQ test by throwing out items that favor one gender over the other, you find that you can't eliminate a female verbal advantage and a male advantage for visual-spatial items.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beautiful-minds/201207/men-women-and-iq-setting-the-record-straight)
Damn. Edit: "-technically "aptitudes" vs. "intelligence" - are not the same thing. They vary independently." An accidental erasure messed me up.
True, but on the next page he argues against "social constructionists" and for "innate dispositional differences".
1) I have not read through the memo in a long time so I would have to understand what he means by "social constructionists".
Social constructionist could mean "someone who aims to engineer social incentives in a way that generates particular societal outcomes."
Social constructionist could also mean "someone who believes anything that exists within a person and describes his relationship to the external is a social construct."
If you are "against" the former, you are a doofus. If you are against the latter, you are perceptive and intelligent.
3) The term "innate DISPOSITIONAL difference" implies that the innate differences are oriented around DISPOSITION, not ability or talent.
On 3, disposition means interest, and people become good at what they're interested in. It's strongly correlated with ability. For "social constructionist", I'm pretty sure he meant the second definition. I'm not saying Damore is wrong. But I don't think his theories about sex-differences are firm enough to be widely accepted, and they don't belong in the work place. Porn is not necessarily wrong either, yet we don't have it at work.
It's always possible that Damore was confused about the situation. It is hard for people to fully overcome the prejudices the society inculcates in them from the time they are infants.
SG, isn't it strange that the 'prejudices the society' show up in so many other species? It's almost as if the supposedly omnipotent 'prejudices the society' don't really exist and biology actually counts. Of course, that can't be true. Biology is just a myth of racist, sexist, patriarchal, cisgendered, homophobic, transphobic, bigots.
Well, no. Humans look at non-human animals and interpret what they do in human terms. They see what they look at, but they don't usually see what they don't look at. Or, as Uncle Albert said, 'The theory tells us what we can observe.' It also tells us how to interpret it. Biology and ethology, like all other sciences, is a human construction. We may aim for objectivity, but only God (if any) gets to see things as they are. I think this is in Phil. 101, actually.
I think with the explosive development of the human brain in Evolution, and the development of language in particular, humans have partially stepped out of prehuman nature, making the adventures of rhesus monkeys maybe not tremendously relevant to the question of sex roles in computer work.
Toy preferences in juvenile primates are just one data point. There are many, many others. For example, males do better than females (in absolute or relative terms) in math in all countries. There are no exceptions.
Yes, prior to 100 years ago, men were also much better than women at voting.
So women need more practice at math?
Humans have come up with so many myths. Clearly, the Sun orbits the Earth and anyone who claims otherwise is just succumbing to a 'human construction'. Galileo Galilei was just making stuff up.
Actually, whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or vice versa is a matter of how you want to write the math. If you do Fourier analysis of the apparent motion of the classical planets from a point on the surface of the Earth, you can set up equations which will do both. Or I should say all three, because of course the Sun also moves relative to other objects Out There. Slippery. (Not considering Special Relativity here.)
SG, If you want to split hairs then the correct statement is that the Sun and Earth both orbit a common center of gravity (which just happens to be inside the Sun). Of course, the Jupiter/Sun system dominates the Earth/Sun system so using center of gravity of the Earth/Sun system isn't quite right either.
Gravity is racist. Need proof? Gravity affects blacks and whites the same. Gravity is color-blind. Since 'color-blind' is racist, Gravity is racist. Smash Gravity! Smash racism!
Of course, the truth is worse. Gravity made the world round. The roundness of the world facilitated colonialism. More proof that Gravity is racist. Smash Gravity! Smash racism!
I've complained to the authorities about gravity, but I haven't gotten much of a response yet. Bureaucracy, I suppose....
Damore's problem (and that of the mass media's journalists) is that it was anti-historical. https://brianhanley.medium.com/when-you-look-at-these-fields-you-see-soft-sciences-like-psychology-and-social-science-4fe4bca88f39
Women are huge in STEM, there are only a few subfields where they are currently minority. When you look at these fields, you see “soft sciences” like psychology and social science. But you also see very technical lab sciences like Vet-Med, Pharmacy, Bioscience, Medical and Dental schools with dominance or near equal representation by women. I went through a microbiology PhD program after years in software and a CS degree. FYI — Veterinary medicine is harder. And it is tougher than human medicine because you have to learn multiple species. Veterinarians do much of the medical research. Like others with graduate degrees, we are only qualified to teach MDs. Similar things go for pharmacy, biological science, medicine and dentistry. Across the board, we see that women either dominate or are approximately half. Those are highly technical, but they are friendly to women. Except in computer science and engineering, which are outliers, we see this.
Women used to be very common in the computer field, somewhere around 40% in 1980. When I was hired away to Wells Fargo in 1981, the networking group running point of sale I got hired into was all women except me. My boss was a woman, her boss was a woman, and her boss was a woman. It was mildly worth remarking on. There were all male groups at Bank of America that I came from, but it was mostly mixed and nobody even thought about it.
The best, fastest programmer I knew was a woman. We went from working on computer integrated manufacturing to making transaction and test systems for Mastercard. They had a system for monitoring lines of code per month, subtracting comment lines and compensating for cut and paste. This system tracked from the start of coding to the completion of successful integration test acceptance. Most were in the upper hundreds of lines per month. That was considered good in assembler. I was in the thousands. With her, they thought something was broken. Her stats were near 30,000. She thought she was just a bit above average and struggling to keep up.
Here’s a graph of how the veterinary profession went the opposite way. Isaacson says that in the late 1980’s women had dropped to 17% of college enrollments. If you graphed IT/software it would look sort of like this but the other way around.
Women took over this STEM field, at the same time that men were pushing women out of software. https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/Pages/100215g.aspx
It was even more marked in the 40’s and 50’s. Did you know that the night before the ENIAC demo, it wasn’t men working into the night? Yes, it was two women hooking it all up and making it work. In those days, computers were sold with the pitch that all you had to do is re-task your secretaries and they’d write the code and run the computers. The pitch was it would be cheap, because the workforce was inexpensive and wouldn’t expect a career track job. This was an extension of the way women were used in technology and accounting before computers. They did the math.
I can’t prove it, but I think that was also why black people, specifically black women, were hired into those positions of doing the calculations. They were cheap to hire, and they calculated anything. Later, those women became computer programmers. It was a natural thing and, “men didn’t think it was an important job.”
Even today, women dominate as bookkeepers. That’s not because it isn’t intellectually demanding, it’s because of the pay scale. It’s also because it doesn’t require a college degree in the field of accounting, finance, or computers.
Back in the 80’s there was another big difference in computer fields. Degrees in computer science were rare. Most people didn’t have a degree, just a high school education, and they did great. For at least 15 years, a degree was not an asset to getting a job in the field at all. I worked in banking and in computer integrated manufacturing. (I delivered the first successful plantwide system to Ford in 1985.) Once in a while a BSEE would be around, but mostly anything from a high school diploma (if that) to degrees in philosophy, music, art history, english, etc. (Yes, high school dropouts were found in computers back then. It was that era’s version of the college dropout success.) So both men and women who were working in the field didn’t have an inflated sense of themselves. We were all on the same level.
But that started to change in the late 1990’s, and after 2000, there was a big changeover. Kids came out of college who had absolutely no idea of the past, overstuffed with opinions based on ignorance. The job market tightened up. These days, the “wobbler” resumes that used to get called in are discarded instead.
The view from Silicon Valley is also a very US-centric view. I spent time in the former USSR in the 1990’s through to the end of 2005. I ran an office there for 5 years. A curious thing in Russia. Virtually all engineers (civil engineers, mechanical engineers, etc) were women. This made a difference in various small ways in architecture. For instance, stairways had pairs of rails on them as if for a chair lift that was broken. But what that was for was baby carriages, something obvious to a woman, that a man would not think of. Women ran the cities outside Moscow. They did it for no pay, because someone had to do it or everyone would die in the winters. They did it because that is what you do to take care of everyone.
The pissed of ladies are right about the “google manifesto”. Simply put, the memo is complete and utter horseshit. There is nothing else to say. It’s malarkey. Speaking as a biologist, yes, there are differences between men and women, and in other areas I would say so. But does that include “genetic suitability” to do math? To do software? To engineer technology? No.
This is a strange comment. How does someone with your background and training conclude that offering up horseshit that is easily debunked, as you have laid out, is cause for getting fired? Whatever happened to open and free debate? You think it's proper for employees to be terrorized into silence, as they are currently in every industry, because certain academic papers are deemed taboo? If your argument is with the findings of the studies Damore cited, why do you think Damore should take the fall for these experts? How is Damore wrong for trusting that academic papers that have undergone peer review are not universally deemed "malarkey"? Where did Damore argue that women are genetically unsuitable for anything? How do you go from being a scientist, to wanting to snuff out heretics because only your side gets the final word and there is nothing else to say?
Deco, You have facts on your side. Brian has 'truth'. Truth has no need for facts. Truth is what Jonathan Haidt called a “sacred value”. The purpose of truth is to smash facts. Stalin knew this. Lysenko knew this. Mao knew this. Hitler knew this. Brian knows this.
It’s just disheartening to see long time scientists who’ve been there done that succumb to anti-science methods and cheer on the purge.
"Damore's problem...is that it was anti-historical."
I see people get things wrong at work all the time. Very rarely do they get sent to a re-education camp, become national news and get terminated from their position. So the problem was probably something else, is what I am trying to say.
(... and that of the the national media and journalists...) I don't know much about Damore personally. Frankly, he (like Mr Schaeffer below) sounded like a jackass propping his Aristotelian thought experiments up with a few studies, and ignoring the empirical evidence. If he was a jackass he may have really lost his job because of that. I don't think it was necessary for Damore to be fired. But, he did make a big statement attacking the role of women in computer programming. He did it as an employee, to push his agenda.
Essentially all (all?) studies have found that men are better than women at mental rotation (rather relevant for programming). Boys are better than girls (on average) in Math (if you double this check the PISA/SAT/ACT/etc.) data. Here is a useful stat. The Fields Medal has been awarded since 1936. Exactly one woman has won. Numerous studies have shown that men are more variable than women (highly relevant at Google). Note that the PISA data shows that boy are better than girls (in absolute or relative terms) in all countries. There are no exceptions.
Of course, the truth is 'malarkey'. PC is truth and no one should ever forget that.
Somewhat predictably, you have no idea what you are talking about. Quote from SSC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/#comment-533527).
"My impression is that there were lots of women in CS in 1980 for the same reason there were lots of Jews in banking in 1800: they were banned from doing anything else.
Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Wow using a failed state (the USSR) to promote the talents of women. I guess we should use the 'success' of the Khymer Rouge to promote Communism or Mao's famines to promote Maoism. 'Long live the Great Leap Forwards!'. 'Crush Capitalist Roaders!'. 'Crush Trotsyites'.
No, he never asserted that. He simply noted that given the current evidence, women would continue to be less likely than man to seek jobs in tech. This is a simple probability statement based on evidence and evolutionary theory that would be evaluated by looking at group data. No intelligent researcher would assert that it should be used in evaluating individuals.
General preferences are not the same thing as biological differences.
He wasn’t trying to get women kicked out of their jobs. He was merely stating that women and men have different focuses and that could be the reason more women were not seeking jobs that they wouldn’t find personally enjoyable.
Damore's comments reflect the overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject. The Cohen's D for 'things vs. people' (male vs. female) is roughly 1.0. See "Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/). These results are empirical. They are not derived from 'evolutionary biology classes'. Of course, males also have a higher SD of talent and considerable superiority in 3D rotation.
There is no consensus at all that "abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes". You, Damore, and the tech-bros are just making this crap up. A review paper by Halpern et. al. explains among other things that using your reference to argue for biological causes is circular.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2007.00032.x
"Experience alters brain structures and functioning, so causal statements about brain differences and success in math and science are circular."
"The state of knowledge on the neurobiology of sex differences does not permit strong statements, predictions, or recommendations."
"A detailed consideration of potential indirect evolutionary influences on sex differences in math and science is beyond the scope of this monograph and, in fact, may not be possible given our current state of knowledge in these areas."
PT, You haven't even managed to Diane Halpern's views right. Let me quote from her.
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
Sounds a bit like Damore.
Of course, you haven't even managed to get your citation right. Let me quote for you
"Sex differences in science and math achievement and ability are smaller for the mid-range of the abilities distribution than they are for those with the highest levels of achievement and ability. Males are more variable on most measures of quantitative and visuospatial ability, which necessarily results in more males at both high- and low-ability extremes; the reasons why males are often more variable remain elusive. "
Sounds more than a bit like Damore.
What does 'necessarily results in more males' mean to you? Something along the lines of 'Damore was right'? Does Google hire at the median level of ability?
nuance is hard when you're an ideologue.
Your book quote is from 1991. The paper quotes are from 2007. That Halpern changed her mind in 1991 presumably means she no longer thinks the source of the sex differences is "clear", which is also the view taken by the 2007 paper and I would agree with it.
> What does 'necessarily results in more males' mean to you?
It means males do better in those skills, but it's unknown whether that is due to social or biological factors. What do the below statements mean to you?
"The state of knowledge on the neurobiology of sex differences does not permit strong statements, predictions, or recommendations."
"Experience alters brain structures and functioning, so causal statements about brain differences and success in math and science are circular."
Grow up.
The older I get, the more I wonder if Damore and his bros were just unhappy with their sissy jobs that didn't actually require masculinity, so they made something up.
Damore read Diane Halpern's work and choose to believe in reality vs. PC. Shame on him. He (Damore) probably thinks that 2 + 2 is 4 and that the Earth orbits the Sun. Utterly shameful.
Interest and ability are different things. Is that hard to understand?
There is nothing "controversial" within science about biological sex differences. They may be "controversial" politically, as I suppose is evolution.
T, Basically, the political system has dug in with “The Sun orbits the Earth and you will pay dearly for daring to disagree” while the scientific community has embraced “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”.
The biological basis for sex differences in science/math achievement is a highly controversial topic in science. Show me the paper where it is a settled matter.
PT, " Show me the paper where it is a settled matter". Easy, how about the book (not a paper) that Diane Halpern wrote. Let me quote for you
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
1. We are talking about interest -- not ability. Obviously, high "achievement" is related to interest in the field.
2. Nothing in science is a "settled matter."
3. In rebutting someone's assumption that any variance from 50/50 "achievement" in a field MUST be due to discrimination, it is entirely reasonable to point to the well-evidenced science establishing average sex differences in interests, whether entirely biological or not.
4. This paper summarizes the scientific evidence as of 2007, which has only become more established since then. The evidence is deep and broad, and entirely consistent with Damore's points: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270278/
Halpern et al.:
"Experience alters brain structures and functioning, so causal statements about brain differences and success in math and science are circular."
"The state of knowledge on the neurobiology of sex differences does not permit strong statements, predictions, or recommendations."
Damore:
"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men
and women differ in part due to biological causes [...]"
Halpern et al
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
What did she change her mind to? That it's not clear where the differences come from? I would agree with that. The book is from 1991, and the paper that has my quotes is from 2008.
PT, The book is from 2000 (not 1991). The paper is from 2007 (not 2008). However, it is good to see that you agree with Damore.
Ok, 2007 not 2008. The order of publication remains the same and your quote was from the preface to the first edition (1991). That the book has gone to a fourth edition makes no difference here.
https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html
I disagree with Damore's attribution of sex-differences to biology and the 2007 quotes show that Halpern would also not make this attribution.
You and Damore might be living in a dream world where Halpern changing her mind about something being clear means that she nows believes the opposite is clear. As shown by her later statements, her evolved thinking is that it's unclear.
PT,
First, I want to thank you for doing so much of my homework for me. Your link was very useful for me.
A few quotes from your link
“But over the past 15 years or so, there’s been a sea change as new technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work.”
What does ‘sea change” mean to you? Perhaps something related to a (large) change? Nah, can’t be true. My religion says otherwise and my faith has not wavered.
“Why? There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people.”
That a quote from D. Halpern in the article you linked to. What does ‘biological basis’ mean to you? Perhaps something related to biology. Nah, can’t be true. My religion says otherwise and my faith has not wavered.
“Many of these cognitive differences appear quite early in life. “You see sex differences in spatial-visualization ability in 2- and 3-month-old infants,” Halpern says. Infant girls respond more readily to faces and begin talking earlier. Boys react earlier in infancy to experimentally induced perceptual discrepancies in their visual environment. In adulthood, women remain more oriented to faces, men to things.”
That a quote from D. Halpern in the article you linked to. What does ‘sex differences’ mean to you? Perhaps something related to sex differences? Nah, can’t be true. My religion says otherwise and my faith has not wavered.
Let me quote from ‘ProgramThyself’
“"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes [...]"”
Halpern and Damore appear to be more or less exact agreement.
So you're confident in extrapolating from animals and 2- to 3- month old infants to something that humans have developed over millenia and women have only begun to study for a few generations. That is a wild leap, but I'm the quasi-religious believer for being more careful?
How many Black men pursue advanced math? Fewer than women I would guess. Is that because of social or genetic factors? It would seem that culture is dominating genetics.
Halpern said some innate differences in brain structure are observed. Nobody knows if they favor men or women in math.
Do these observable structure differences show up between males of different races? Probably not. Then they don't seem to have much explanatory power for achievement differences.
No, what he's questioning there is the competence of Google HR in assigning people to tasks using intersectional political bullshit as a guide. Do you think you're smart when you "spout talking points" (as the kids say)?