It is an implied social contract that forms the foundation of our modern American society, irrespective of functional necessities or efficiencies. Efficiencies are not the point here.
Tread lightly.
As long as you dispassionately and sensibly point out the injustice being done in the name of justice, what is the problem? The biggest issue now seems to be men not speaking up against their detractors.
On the lighter side:
"Women are constantly patting themselves on the back for how difficult their lives are and no one corrects them because they want to fuck 'em." – Bill Burr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoJrMaFlxOk
"But once you’ve won a culture war, free speech is a nuisance, and “eliminating” language becomes a necessity." - http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-no...
Men -- men in tech in particular -- gotta buckle up and speak frankly. Learn to stand up for themselves, without letting other people -- women in particular -- control their every thought.
Kind of a false dichotomy. The APA has found that men are more likely to become substance abusers, which is linked to homelessness and conviction rates.
Why not help both men and women? Why does one need to be first?
I'm not arguing that we should or should not help some group. I just think that if every instance of disparate impact is assumed to be solely due to discrimination, then we also need to start treating homelessness and the prison-industrial complex as gendered issues disproportionately affecting men.
> The APA has found that men are more likely to become substance abusers, which is linked to homelessness and conviction rates.
One could (tongue firmly in cheek) argue that this is due to implicit anti-male biases in society.
That was the point - that these gender biases exist for both sexes and need to be addressed at the same time (not one before the other).
Because whenever there are limited resources available to help people, there's going to be a need-off to decide who takes priority.
A lot of politics flows from this. This is why you will often find lots of jockeying for position and heartstring-pulling from nonprofits and NGOs. If you don't do well enough in the need-off, you might not get any resources.
That's the bone of contention here. Nobody is keeping women out of computer science; they're largely just preferring not to enter the field. The point of the article, echoed by many commentators over the past few years, is that it's a "problem" that women are largely staying out of computer science.
If you believe in the blank slate theory of human nature, of course it's a problem, because under this worldview, women's default preferences are the same as that of men, so some external factor must be pushing them away from computer science. The teach for this factor has become increasingly desperate the past few years: now we're down to Star Wars posters.
I believe it's more parsimonious to reject the blank slate theory and understand the world through the lens of innate differences in life preferences between genders, and that it's this innate difference that leads to different gender balances in various fields.
Ted is the new kid at school, and he wants to make friends. At recess he approaches a group of smiling, laughing boys to introduce himself. But as he nears the group they get quiet. Ted says hi and his name, and mentions he's new and wants to know if they play "tag" here. The boys reply, "we don't play tag, we play Weasel Escape." Ted asks how to play, and they say "How do you not know how to play? You needlefish. Needlefish!" The other boys laugh, but Ted doesn't get the joke. They walk away and Ted feels embarrassed. Over the next few days he continues trying to befriend the group of boys but they have so many inside jokes! There's one nice kid in the group that explains the jokes to Ted, but most of the time one of the other boys loudly interrupts and teases Ted for not knowing, and nobody really enjoys standing around explaining things because standing around means not playing. Ted eventually decides that the boys he's been trying to befriend aren't very nice, and that even though he enjoys playing weasel escape now that he figured out the rules, it's less degrading to spend his recess in the library playing Magic cards with the weird kids. They actually seemed excited to explain their inside jokes and how the game works.
Nobody is keeping Ted out of that group of friends. He just largely prefers not to join them. But of course, why he prefers not to join them changes the story.
Also, the example is interesting in this context because it's usually Teds who become programmers. Or at least it used to be back when programming wasn't a popular career choice but something you did because you were into technology and building things.
Over and over, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues have found that female students are more interested in enrolling in a computer class if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines.
The researchers also found that cultural stereotypes about computer scientists strongly influenced young women’s desire to take classes in the field. At a young age, girls already hold stereotypes of computer scientists as socially isolated young men whose genius is the result of genetics rather than hard work. Given that many girls are indoctrinated to believe that they should be feminine and modest about their abilities, as well as brought up to assume that girls are not innately gifted at science or math, it is not surprising that so few can see themselves as successful computer scientists.
In another experiment, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues arranged for female undergraduates to talk to an actor pretending to be a computer science major. If the actor wore a T-shirt that said “I CODE THEREFORE I AM” and claimed to enjoy video games, the students expressed less interest in studying computer science than if the actor wore a solid shirt and claimed to enjoy hanging out with friends — even if the T-shirt-clad actor was another woman.
Such superficial stereotypes might seem laughably outdated. And yet, studies show that the public’s image of a scientist hasn’t changed since the 1950s. And such stereotypes do have a basis in reality. Who could fail to notice that only one of the eight people awarded Nobel Prizes in science or medicine last week was a woman?
If this is accurate, then the idea that women simply like other things, like rewqfdsa proposes should get more merit.
If that turns out to be the core of the problem, then there may be nothing for people in STEM to do. Because we could be the most welcoming and inclusive bunch but the majority of us are going to turn women off by decorating our walls with Star Wars/Trek posters, reading sci-fi, wearing nerdy T-Shirts and playing video games.
Sounds like they are judging us!
We need to be clear about what's happening here. Otherwise we'll spend millions of dollars trying to 'fix' things and it turns out what should have happened, is that we need to stop watching Star Wars and stop wearing XKCD t-shirts.
Even among proponents of the systemic discrimination theory, the consensus these days seems to be that bias must be subconscious, since overt bias is practically extinct in the wild.
the question then becomes.. why does the little girl care what the other little girls think ? Why isn't she more than happy hanging out with the more open and accepting group of computer cherishing boys ?
I assume it has to do with social norms, early childhood developmental experiences, not wanting to break certain social guidelines passed down through family values, the anticipation of "dating"..
My childhood best friend and college roommate shocked me by calling one of our CS classmates a "huge bitch" for not going on a date with him after they had lunch together our first week of college.
I've lost track of how many sexist lines I've heard, like:
"make me a sammich bitch, haha",
"don't be an emo bitch about it, haha",
"if we don't let people freely express themselves on the CS listserv, then this is a tyrannical school that has been ruined by feminists (this one after of course, a guy posted a several page rant about why women are bitches, 'haha')".
Also, let me tell you this story of two friends I knew who applied at a certain internet start-up on Market Street in San Francisco in 2014:
A was male, 21 years old, a stoner and business school drop-out with a portfolio consisting of a Java tower defense game.
B was female, 30 years old, with several years experience doing QA on computer peripheral drivers who had re-trained herself as a web developer and had a Rails StackOverflow clone and a Meteor KhanAcademy clone for her portfolio.
A got offered a six-figure full time position.
B got offered an internship.
Final point, I've seen so much elitist and arrogant behavior from MEN directed towards OTHER MEN. Nothing could be further from the truth than software being completely welcoming. Of course it's still a very good industry overall; it's by no means the worst.
"that guy was kind of a dick" is an offhand comment that just means "rude" or "jerk" and you hear it all the time from college age women when referencing the slightest deviations from their standards of behavior. It refers to the male genitalia in a negative connotation and is terefor far more explicit than the dog word.
1. One wrong does not make another wrong right.
2. "Dick" is used as an offhand comment usually because it is considered less offensive than other words with the same meaning, like "asshole" or "piece of shit".
3. I agree that women treat men badly as well. People suck.
4. Imagine your daughter or mother being called an "emo bitch" because they reacted angrily to an insult. Would you tell her "well at least they didn't explicitly insult your genitalia?"
True but the two neutralize each other when thinking in terms of a running tally of gender-specific offensive terminology.
> used as an offhand comment usually because it is considered less offensive than other words with the same meaning
the fact that it's considered less offensive simply illustrates a bias towards the acceptance of gender-specific negative remarks or "putdowns" when they're directed away from the feminine and towards the masculine. This goes to my point that actually women do throw a lot of these remarks around but we've just learned to tune them out. If a man makes a 'putdown' remark towards a young lady in class which references the female reproductive anatomy then he's on shaky ground and theoretically could have to worry about a lawsuit, but not the other way around.
> 4. Imagine your daughter or mother being called an "emo bitch" because they reacted angrily to an insult. Would you tell her "well at least they didn't explicitly insult your genitalia?"
I don't know a ton about the word "emo" but I assume it means "overly emotional" and the word "bitch" is a gender-specific word which insinuates that she's not attractive. While I'm sure we both agree that such a rude and insulting phrase is a terrible thing to say to anyone it's still only aimed at the individual.
On the other hand when you use a phallus reference as an implied negative connotation then you've just made a sexist remark because it denigrates an entire gender.
If I had to choose one or the other I'd rather my mother or daughter be exposed to rudeness or insult before obvious yet normalized sexist remarks.
> B was female, 30 years old, with several years experience doing QA on computer peripheral drivers who had re-trained herself as a web developer and had a Rails StackOverflow clone and a Meteor KhanAcademy clone for her portfolio.
> A got offered a six-figure full time position.
> B got offered an internship.
Yeah, sorry but that is a lie
Anyway, the story ends well. B is a front-end engineer at Google now, A didn't take the offer and went to a different start-up.
Unfortunately, that's how college kids talk. I wish they wouldn't be so crude, but the language isn't CS-specific. That women in general are doing so well in college in general relative to men suggests crude language on the part of college men is not a serious problem. In the professional world, that kind of denigration would be completely unacceptable.
> Also, let me tell you this story of two friends I knew who applied at a certain internet start-up on Market Street in San Francisco in 2014
I don't think it's reasonable to generalize from this anecdote. Maybe he aced his interviews and she flubbed them.
That wasn't my experience at all. That kind of attitude or language would have been taboo.
In any other circumstances, this kind of social discouragement would be looked at as a discrimination/exclusion issue. Instead, the prevailing argument seems to be that "they're just different".
Conclusion: The gender disparity in computer science is the result of innate differences between the sexes.
Seems legit...
The idea is that if you believe that humans have no innate differences and you observe group differences, then you must attribute these group differences to external discrimination, and hence injustice.
If you accept that groups of humans might have innate differences, you are no longer required to attribute group differences to discrimination. Some group differences might arise from discrimination, but it's plausible that they might not.
A lot of people take it as an article of faith that there are no human group differences, so they're forced to look for discrimination in order to explain the world. For these people, no amount of evidence can prove the fairness of the CS world, since the idea that (gender disparity -> discrimination) is a necessary logical consequence of their worldview.
We do that in CS because it's a hot sexy field with shittons of money, so everyone wants in (also makes this field sucks more, it was better when people actually cared about doing great work instead of earning a lot, but I digress). Nobody cares that there is serious (intentional) gender imbalance among e.g. shop clerks or bank tellers. Those are not sexy jobs.
On the contrary, most of those who are interested in addressing gender imbalances in fields like computer science are simultaneously interested in addressing the gender imbalances in "unsexy" jobs, since these are just two sides of the same coin. Since higher paying jobs in fields like computer science tend to be had by men, the individuals who tend to hold the "unsexy" low-wage jobs tend to be women. The fact that people don't explicitly name the unsexy occupations does not entail that nobody cares about their gender imbalances.
The reason that high-wage positions are usually the positions of focus may simply be a product of our tendency to be more interested in leveling up rather than down when it comes to addressing distributive injustices.
That's another claim that, if true, would be pretty, but happens to be false. (Just like "men are mean to women in technology and so keep them out of the field.") It's just another bromide to smooth over unpleasant reality.
A Google News search for "women in technology" yields 61 million results. A Google News search for yields 1.5 million. There's nowhere near as much attention to getting men into traditionally women's roles as there is increasing the number of women in technology.
I think that you would be hard pressed to find people who actually believe that. Most who point out problems with the CS environment probably feel no need to have any sort of robust view of innate differences between groups, and many are likely to be open to the possibility that some of the gender gap can be explained by such differences.
Note that much of the discussion of this issue has focused upon ways in which the CS culture is one which is overtly and unnecessarily hostile to women. It's not just that men vastly outnumber women in the field, it's that those men frequently engage in behaviors that are hostile, threatening, and demeaning to women. It is not implausible that these behaviors play a significant role in determining the gender imbalance in CS.
Many people repeat this claim, but I don't think it's true.
But you are right; other innate biases are possible. Men could be better at logical/mathematical reasoning, which is necessary for technical skills. A difference in interest though is the most popular proposal.
One interesting observation, for which I don't have any citation, is that I find there is less trepidation to enter CS and Engineering careers from women who curiously come from Russia and China, which at least historically have been quite patriarchal. In some ways it might be that constant drumbeat to succeed and emphasis on science over softer subjects could have an impact, but it's all speculation on my part.
I personally don't care whether the geeks who work at a given tech firm are of particular gender or race, as long as they produce quality stuff.
I would care if someone couldn't get into the industry because they are X - but if these individuals don't want to - it's not something I consider a problem.
The point I was making that increasing numbers and diversity in something means more stuff is produced and there is greater innovation. It means the pool of candidates for a given role is larger, allowing better selection. This is all self-evident - as Bill Gates has said, doubling the size of your workforce cannot help but improve things.
However - on my side is every single real-life example of success in tech. EVERY SINGLE successful technology company was NOT diverse (and only once they get big enough to be targeted by diversity scammers that they start to pay lip service to this). Therefore if diversity was indeed at all important, wouldn't you be able to point to examples of more diverse companies being actually more successful? Heretofore the empirical argument is 100% against you.
To put it another way, the concept of disruptive change is when some company does something different than all the other companies have done up to that point. I imagine uber, airbnb et al being told by someone that the 'empirical evidence is 100% against them' as well.
Especially for those who are paying the wages and don't like to be in a seller's market.
Your project's total addressable market probably includes a diverse population of people. Meanwhile, the decisions in your project are made by the folks involved in it -- maybe some PMs, hopefully some UX and design engineers, and probably some programmers. I believe that our opinions are informed in part by our environment -- as someone living in California, I come up with California-oriented solutions to problems a bit more easily than ones suited to other locations. (I think this is why Dark Sky came from a team in New York, for example.)
So, I conclude that a diverse team will come up with ideas that are broader, and as a result, solutions that help more people, than would a less-diverse team.
If you want to increase diversity of thought, you'd be better off recruiting from schools other than Stanford and the ivys.
Contrary to what my overly succinct comment may have suggested, I think that diversity initiatives are critical, both for a society and a company. Companies need to stay vigilant for potential sources of bias in hiring and retention and deal with issues aggressively when identified.
My comment about proponents of diversity wasn't intended to malign everyone who recognizes the importance of diversity initiatives (which as I said, includes myself), but rather, a particular philosophical strain that I've encountered as the dominant force amongst diversity initiatives in the companies I've experienced (including within the "big 4").
What frustrates me specifically is precisely what I mentioned: an often unqualified rejection of rational consideration of facts when they even resemble an unpalatable conclusion. In the example we're talking about: there are less women than men in company X. Either the company is discriminating, women are somehow innately less suited to work there, or there's upstream discrimination so that hiring reflects an equal assessment of the candidate pool. The evidence pointed strongly to the latter situation (ie the proportion of women cs majors was equal to the proportion of women technical employees, and non technical employees broke down 50/50).
And yet, any suggestion that the company wasn't explicitly discriminating (and that the problem existed upstream) was shouted down with "If you think we're not discriminating then you must think women are innately unsuitable and will be reported to HR for creating an unwelcome misogynist work environment"[1].
So when I talk about proponents of diversity lacking rigor, it was shorthand for "IME, in places that are quite reasonably considered the mainstream, the prevailing school of thought with respect to diversity initiatives focuses more on appearances and social signaling than actual progress".
[1] note that I was smart enough to stay out of these conversations so I wasn't ever actually the victim of this sort of lunacy.
Will seems like a very strong claim to make. Can, certainly, but will? Maybe it all depends on what kind of sample size you have in mind.
> Yet US has done just ok with males (white and asian) doing this stuff. Ie better than anybody else in the world.
That doesn't mean the US and others can't do much better. Think how much talent is lost - more than half of it. There's a shortage of talent in SV. There is much that needs to be done in the world.
> Is there any proof that increased diversity has any effect
I've read about a lot of evidence that more diverse groups make decisions significantly better.
You have to be careful with this one. It only applies to certain kinds of diversity and certain kinds of decisions, and even then only over a sizable number of decisions. It's not as simple as diversity makes things better, full stop.
And this is without weighing costs!
First-order logic: if (A AND ~B -> ~C) AND C, then (~A OR B).
The persistence of the gender gap in technology despite decades of effort to "fix" it is an annoying refutation of the blank-slate theory of human nature on which the entire worldview of many people, particularly gender activists, rests. In other words, if it's simultaneously true that tech is gender-imbalanced and that there is no systemic discrimination involved in this gap, then groups of human being might have innate differences, and acceptance of this fact has far-reaching and upsetting consequences.
Therefore, there must be no gender gap or there must be systemic discrimination. Since the existence of the gender gap is obvious, there must be systemic discrimination, and the pundit class has been on the warpath trying to uphold this narrative and cherry-pick evidence supporting it.
But, let's say I follow your logic on its own. Should I just believe that there's no systematic discrimination? How could I be confident that there's not any?
And, as a parent of a bright and mathematically-inclined daughter, should I discourage her from a field in technology because she likely has some otherwise hidden trait that will make her less useful or successful? How do I even know what that trait is? Is there a test for it?
> Should I believe that there's no systematic discrimination? How would I be confident that there's not any?
Nobody can prove the absence of systemic discrimination. You also can't prove the absence of lizard people. The burden of proof rests on those making the positive claim. Look at how the technology industry tries very hard to attract women. Look at the outreach programs, the hackathons, and the scholarships from dozens of foundations and open source projects. Look at the mentorship programs available for women. That's some evidence _against_ systemic bias.
Now look at evidence _for_ systemic bias _other_ than the gender disparity itself. We're left with, what, rugs about meritocracy and a few off-color comments about dongles in a private conversation between two friends at a conference?
I just don't think the non-gender-disparity evidence is strong enough to support a claim of bias.
> should I discourage her from a field in technology because she likely has some otherwise hidden trait that will make her less useful or successful?
You should introduce her to many fields and let her decide which one interests her most.
We have two populations A and B. A has walked slower than B. One individual, a1, says 'hey I suspect B (who controls the food) is withholding vitamin X'. Evidence is uncovered showing this to be true. A is given vitamin X, and A begins to walk faster.
However a subset of A still doesn't walk as fast. Again, an investigation is done, and it's shown that B has also been withholding vitamin Y. After vitamin Y is given, that subset of A also begins to walk faster.
Then, a smaller subset of that subset shows initial gains in walking speed, but recently their speed has dropped off significantly. So, A is given even more vitamin X and Y. But, that doesn't help. So, instead of suspecting that B is withholding vitamin Z, we should take them on their word that recently the terrain has changed so that B just naturally walks faster than A?
Gender bias towards a given domain is a generational problem, like racism or homophobia and so on. Changes do not happen overnight, and because they haven't happened over night does not imply that 'white or asian men are innately better at tech than the other 95% of the population'.
Let me ask a different way: in a world where no unjustice exists, is it possible for programming to be 80% men?
Contrast this with, for example, physical professions like professional basketball, where the faster ability to grow in fitness and strength, along with certain racial advantages with height or speed means the population tends to skew in one direction - enough so that creating separate leagues allows for fairer representation.
Software development is not like that. The very fact that the majority of programmers used to be women back when it started should be enough to show that current bias' are societal or fashion-based.
> Programming is a purely intellectual activity, so I would argue that there is no gender or racial advantage one way or the other.
Thank you for so succinctly stating the blank-slate position. I don't see any reason to agree with it. You acknowledge that there are important group differences below the neck; why should there be none above it?
> majority of programmers used to be women
I read that article too. You don't mention that "programming" back then was largely data entry.
Edit: honestly, I'm curious how this mindset comes about. How is it possible to ignore the importance of people being given the opportunity to work wherever they are capable? How is it possible to ignore the impact of being denied access to an incredibly lucrative and glamorous industry? How is it possible to ignore the many ramifications that has on lives and livelihoods?
How would you feel if you were kept out of the tech industry? Would you be placated by sentiments that the industry was seemingly "doing just fine" without you?
It sort of feels like saying there aren't enough people named Gavin in compsci. Why do we need people named Gavin? If Gavin wants to do compsci, that's cool, but if not, then he can go do whatever makes him happy?
The point is, we don't need _person type X_ simply for the sake of an equal number of all types of people. Unequal numbers/types of people don't necessarily mean they're being kept out, that doesn't follow.
There aren't enough male hairdressers? There aren't enough female linesmen? There aren't enough Democrats named Duane?
Whether or not this is true I don't know, I just consider this the popular sentiment.
I could be an elementary school teacher as a male, I'm just not inclined to. I don't feel kept out.
There seems to always has been a problem of diversity in tech. Yet US has done just ok with males (white and asian) doing this stuff. Ie better than anybody else in the world.
Why is this a problem (something the writer - who is a literature professor, by the way) considers a given? Is there any proof that increased diversity has any effect (except employment opportunities for the otherwise underrepresented)?