The simple counter argument to this, and what changed my mind utterly, was that the number of woman on boards never changed. "Women will setup companies" was what they said in the 70s, 50 years ago.
It never worked until we started forcing it. There's still a ridiculously small percentage of female chairs. There's still a ridiculously small percentage of female board members.
If they're just as good, as you say, and I also believe, why didn't it change? Because gender discrimination is rife.
Without positive discrimination, the status quo did not change, will not change.
Doesn't matter anything you said above, it's all noise. It doesn't correct itself like you say it will.
The reason why people get board seats is again one of those misunderstood discussions. It has absolutely nothing to do with qualification as in non-at-all. What it has to do with is the board members access to network, political power, special experience etc.
So as long as you and other keep insisting qualification is somehow important in this discussion, you are actually the ones making the noise.
Qualification has nothing to do with this.
If you're having a problem getting a job 'cause you're old in SV, I'm sorry. I have no such age discrimination problem in the UK, loads of jobs here but not any where as well paid as the US. I might point out that you had 20 years to make a ton of bank. If you want to fix age discrimination, campaign for it, but leave it out of this thread.
As for companies being boys clubs, to me that's clearly unacceptable, it's simply wrong to say that a "company culture" can be male only as that's clear discrimination.
If you think that discrimination's ok, it feels as if you want to take it out on women because you want to go back to living in a man-cave, replete with pizzas and then a late night coding sessions followed by a game of Quake, where women don't fit because they spurned us at high school. And if they want to join in, they better start their own company.
Do that with your mates, that view doesn't belong in a company, shouldn't belong in a company. It's not a male-only social club.
But if you agree that's wrong, you and I caused this problem, and we're the ones who have to fix it, have the opportunity to fix it. Perhaps our Dads and Grandads told us computers are for men only, but they aren't and we don't have to wait until your kids are growing up to fix this. We can fix this now, and positive discrimination is a way that works.
Tech is growing up and we need to fix the gender imbalance we helped cause.
But it's now clear that without strawmen you have no arguments just insults and claims about my person you can't back up. But I guess that's kind of symptomatic for this discussion isn't it?
Old white male coders in SV, which it now turns out you have no personal experience of and just making stuff up about:
Try being +40 in Silicon Valley
Try and get a job in SV after you turn 45.
Examples of you saying women can't be part of our club, because they didn't play with the right toys when they were 12:
Women aren't tech nerds as much as men are we know that for a fact
men also takes the most high paying jobs because more of them were interested in technology early on and are better at selling themselves
is that less women start companies or get into tech early on
Examples of you saying women can't be a part of existing tech companies, they should form their own:
get more women to start a tech company
More women will hopefully start companies and I hope some of them will hire only women
Push your girls to start their own companies to build their own networks
In Norway where they have quotas all that happened is that now there is just also an old ladies network with the same women sitting on many of the boards
Those are not arguments they are facts you can educate yourself about them which is obviously not in your interest.
Furthermore I would suggest you learn the language of the country you live in. None of those quotes mean what you claim they mean.
You've just cited an anecdote to try and counter mountains of scientific research.
There could be all sorts of nefarious stuff going on. Could he have been refused a promotion and now blames women? What's the back story? Has he gone on record? Is there a real problem or is a misogynistic manager using it as an excuse to him to cover his own incompetence?
And yes it is an anecdote, so no there's no citations, but most posts in this discussion don't cite citations either.
What if women are just not as intelligent? What if they could be as intelligent, but are lazy?
I appreciate you think you're being rational and reasonable. You're not.
Women do make different choices we know that for a fact. Women aren't tech nerds as much as men are we know that for a fact. Women start far fewer companies than men we know that for a fact.
We also know that women score way higher grades in school which we also know for a fact doesn't matter in real life.
So maybe women (in general) are just prioritizing life differently. That doesn't mean they aren't as intelligent, smart etc.
If you can't make your argument without pushing for strawmen then you don't have one yourself.
It's just trying being polite about it. It's still an irrational bias, no matter how you dress it up.
[1] http://blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-...
Also, can you clarify what you mean when you state that pediatrics is "an example that's a biological function primarily to do with women." Are you stating that women are innately (in other words, due to their gender) better suited to administering healthcare to minors as compared to men?
64% of practicing gynecologists are men, but only women have vaginas.
You don't have to give birth to children to be a pediatrician or a gynecologist.
There is a world of difference between someone having spent their entire life coding and someone only starting at university. Or someone having learned to draw from the age of 5 and someone who starts way later in life. That applies to men as to women.
Being not as good is about experience and knowledge having put in the hours. It is not about intelligence.
The only way to reach truth is to be willing to look for it.
You're just "ask"-ing if women are as "not good/stupid", or that perhaps they "aren't interested/are lazy".
It's just a gender stereotype dressed up as a question. It's an insult dressed in an insinuation.
Please stop making these unqualified statements on very touchy subjects
http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-...
This is hardly the only study. There are many more.
My favorite was the law students from second tier schools where males who signaled coming from middle class backgrounds had a huge statistically disadvantage from males signalling wealth.
The kicker? Wealth killed opportunities for women.
https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-b...
Bias and prejudice are real and evaluating people is hard. To make things worse, your brain likes to save energy by substitution rigorous evaluation with heuristic evaluation and then convince itself it did the rigorous work.
The problem isn't gender discrimination is rife, it's that thousands of forms of discrimination is rife because heuristic-based discrimination is what we excel at, not rigorous evaluation.
I hope that didn't make it more touchy.
Yeah because lower class women do much better compared to lower class men. The study is flawed. It used male hobbies for both males and females. Rich females don't generally sail. I think their stereotypical activity would be humanitarian efforts.
And if it wasn't flawed, what conclusions do you draw from the study? Lower class women did 5 times better than lower class men. The lower class is many times larger than the upper class, so only a tiny percent of men enjoy the the upper class privilege while most men are doing terribly.
Looking at the big picture by aggregating the lower and upper class, women do better than men.
> http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-....
I'll give this some legitimacy but it's one study and not completely convincing. It can't be generalized outside of science research positions.
One bias that I'm concerned about is that most gendered social experiments are hoping to find bias against females. It's a big echo chamber as the manifesto guy would say.
On the disparate power dynamic, I doubt the males with power care about the wellbeing of the other 99.99% of males. They will look out for the interests of super high class males which may not overlap with the interests of lower class males.
I think that non high class females benefit much more than non high class males from the power of super high class males. The super high class males will spend time around females and make transfer payments in the services industry. Sugar babes, prostitutes, strippers, webcaming, regular waitresses, etc. They are more likely to enjoy the wealth of high power males and have a much easier time forming a relationship (romantic or platonic) with a super high class male.
Most structural issues are gone today and those that are left benefit women as much as men. In Norway where they have quotas all that happened is that now there is just also an old ladies network with the same women sitting on many of the boards.
Are you saying the study is flawed because women got more hires in this context and that doesn't reflect the larger aggregate trends? You realize this study doesn't reflect society as a whole, right? It reflects the resume screening habits of a sample of people from a cross section of law firms.
Rather than dismissing a study because it doesn't yield results that fit your worldview, how about you try understanding the context is was done in and reflecting on the culture where it happened? Don't give it a fleeting thought. Really consider the many possible stories it could be telling you, but don't settle on a favorite. Hold the many possible stories in your head instead, ask questions and try different stories.
People have all sorts of biases. I've known my share of bros who only hire pretty girls and other bros with common interests, taste and upbringing. If they were being studied, their numbers would probably yield similar results. Some of the bros I know would call in like-minded bros and then they'll call in the women for an interview to see if they're hot. If they were part of a similar study, their screening habits would definitely skew the numbers toward this trend. If it was up to me, I'd be counting how many of the pretty ones made into round two. (Let's just say they excel at recruiting and only hiring pretty girls.)
This is one small study that reflects an aggregate of biases of a sample of participants in one industry. It does not reflect the world. It doesn't reflect their industry. It doesn't reflect one bias. It is literally a snapshot in time of a sample of a cross section of society. We don't know how if those biases (there are many) were well-distributed or concentrated. Repeating the experiment may even yield very different results.
All that doesn't matter in the bigger picture, because for that slice of time & sample, we have enough evidence to suggest gross discrimination for that sample and time.
It's a reminder that the world is a complicated place and that there are all sorts of ways people discriminate against each other. What it reinforces is that superficial discrimination happens for all sorts of complex reasons, rather than simply saying everyone is guilty of one form of discrimination.
> One bias that I'm concerned about is that most gendered social experiments are hoping to find bias against females. It's a big echo chamber as the manifesto guy would say.
Let's not be obtuse about accepting or dismissing these studies. People have a tendency to either overstate or discount their results when it serves their purpose. I gave you a very small sample and merely suggested that discrimination happens in the world and that discrimination can be complex and nonlinear. Take it with a grain of salt.
Yes we have biases all of us but they are certainly not by any metrics confined to only women. Try being +40 in Silicon Valley, try being black or latino male on WallStreet, try making it as a hip-hop artist as a black guy. Try being fat in the fashion industry, try being a nerd in high-school.
The world is rife with bias and prejudice against all sorts of "these are not like me" but the solution is not and have never been to force quotas through whether in board rooms or on the job market.
If you want to change things changes them at their root cause. Push your girls to start their own companies to build their own networks so that they are less depending on existing ones. Teach them not to excel at school as that doesn't really matter but to learn how to sell themselves. Teach them that if a job posting names 10 skills and they have all but two it's still a job for them.
These are the real barriers to entry not modern day companies light biases.
It's like claiming climate change isn't real.
Or how exactly what are you arguing?
Because some men do more dangerous jobs, totally different men should get all the high paying ones? Perhaps for each man in coal mining, oil rigs, the army or deep sea fishing, we get a plushy finance or tech job exclusively for men?
Or tech workers should be paid less than coal miners?
I don't follow you?
And if you define corporate responsibility as doing only what is needed to put effective people in chairs, then there is no need for diversity programs to meet corporate responsibility (at least, assuming sufficient talent).
But your entire comment misses the phenomenon of biases having affected women their entire lives, from what hobbies they were steered towards, to their experiences during education, to their interviewing process, to their working environments after having jobs. These are all part of what gender diversity programs are trying to combat.
And honestly, I'd say that this statement right here:
> These programs are most likely not responsible for qualified women getting jobs and even if they are they are also responsible for qualified men not getting the jobs so nothing is really gained.
is more of a really effective example of the actual problem, and an illustration of why gender diversity programs are needed, than an effective counterpoint against them.
"from what hobbies they were steered towards"
Ok, but the thing I don't quite understand here is that it's not like men are "steered" towards tech that strongly either. At least when I was young it was not "cool" to be some geek who sat infront of the computer all day, in fact quite the opposite.
"to their experiences during education"
I'm in Europe and I have no clue how a woman can have a worse experience in the educational system over here. Women tend to perform better in school and I'd to so far as to say that things are probably the other way around. Based on anecdata more "traditional" boys/men are probably very poorly served by the current educational system and there could be much done here.
"to their interviewing process, to their working environments after having jobs"
Again, I'm rather confused here. Is this some reference to startups? This whole debacle seems to show that women, at least at the larger corporations, has some clear benefits. As anecdata I can add that I've had women tell me "getting an internship at Corp XYZ was very easy, they kept telling me they were looking to hire more women". I've heard a professor comment on hiring new faculty by saying "If we don't hire a woman we have failed", etc.
Are there boxes with pictures of boys on containing toy guns, cars, trucks, diggers, cranes, computers, science kits?
Is there a section for girls' toys and boys' toys?
That's your cultural steering of gender roles, right there.
Ever seen someone think a particular book isn't "appropriate" for a girl to read? Or another book isn't "something boys will be interested in"?
Did the girls grow up seeing women on TV programmes who were scientists, executives, lawyers? Or were those people almost all men? What does that tell them about the world as they watch?
Okay so you can argue television should reflect the real world, but in doing so and simultaneously acting as part of a child's education in how the world should be (which you are, whether intentionally or not), your TV programme also acts to perpetuate the status quo.
I really don't feel there are any mysteries why we see so much gender segregation in career paths.
Similarly: how many people do you know who seriously consider nursing as a viable profession for a man to pursue? What about preschool childcare? Kindergarten teacher? Who cleans your offices? Are they female? All the cleaners in my current office are female.
It is not hard to see the cultural pressure on both boys and girls to go in certain directions.
Try some science.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
Sure there may be some bias in early childhood between the sexes, but honestly, I have a somewhat hard time seeing this having a serious effect on someone's career decision much later.
Firstly, this whole argument just seems like it could just as well be some urban legend. What possible proof is there that this actually has any effect? I'm not even sure how one would go about investigating this. I feel throwing around some argument which seem plausable (to some people) but in fact have basically no solid support and then treating it as if it were an established fact is, well, maybe not so good. It seems more like something the president would do. [1]
Secondly, and more importantly, there is a very significant number of both men and women who during high school will receive a fairly through introduction to the natural sciences and to me this would seem a much more significant than some trucks and dolls one played with when one were 5 years old. To provide a more precise counterargument, many boys wants to become firefighters or police officers, yet when they grow up, many abandons these career plans.
I admit I may be extremely naive, but the argument about people on TV has always struck me as somewhat odd. It seems to rest on the assumption that most people (well, at least women/girls) in fact think men and women are different, otherwise, why would it matter what gender the people involved have?
Finally regarding the last point about career paths, well, the problem with all the examples is that there are jobs with similar pay where almost all employees are men, compare say kindergarten teacher with being a construction worker. Sure, I can admit that there is some pressure here and it being (significantly) easier for a man to become a construction worker and a woman becoming a kindergarten teacher. But if there was a wage gap between these two professions it is not as clear to me.
I would also like to point out that one can discuss things in different context, if these arguments were just made in general about how (some) women feel and how things have affected them and whatnot, that is one thing. But we are not just discussing things in general, instead there are some (at least to me) very serious accusations of of discrimination, and then we have as a society enacted and allowed a large scale discrimination of men in order to offset this. And now we have a man being fired for daring to even question these accusations that have been made against him.
[1]: If there is some solid support for this view I will happily admit I am wrong.
Biases are affecting men, women, red haired, young people, old people, gays, lesbians, fat people, short people, people with too much education, people with almost none etc their whole life.
Singling out gender is exactly what's so wrong with this whole discussion.
Try and get a job in SV after you turn 45.
The actual problem if you really want to focus on something that would naturally bring more women into the industry, is that less women start companies or get into tech early on.
If you for some reason want to solve the problem of gender diversity, get more women to start a tech company.
It's really that simple.
I would have sworn that this would be "Not being sexist 101", but apparently words do not mean what I think they should…
These programs are most likely not responsible for qualified women getting jobs and even if they are they are also responsible for qualified men not getting the jobs so nothing is really gained.
The idea of qualification is something that is misunderstood far into academia as it assumes some sort of quantitative measurement is possible.
The reality is that short of what you have paper on (she's a bachelor he's a bachelor) qualifications really isn't about skills but about personality and I would challenge anyone to find even close to a way of measuring how a person fits into a company short of asking the people who work there whether they think person X fits or not.
Furthermore the idea that diversity is better for companies really need to die. Diversity is good in many cases but you can easily have one company filled with women and one company filled with men and having the group of women being of very diverse backgrounds and the group of men being of very diverse backgrounds. You still have diversity. Hell you can even have a group of women being of exactly the same background and a group of men being of exactly the same background and do really really well.
The idea the women brings something to the table simply by being women or that men does simply by being men is what is so wrong with this whole conversation. The individual brings something to the table but the individual needs to fit into a culture not being force fed into it.
Having hired and interviewed a great deal of people in my life in the tech industry I think it's fair to say that most companies will look for ANY talent they can get to. Talent is extremely hard to find and being a woman or being a man is not enough.
More women will hopefully start companies and I hope some of them will hire only women if they feel it's better for their culture. But until they start doing that to the same extent that men does and until they start to the same extent having interest in technology early on, gender based anything will always be hurting more than it will help because just having gender diversity isn't going to make your company better off there simply aren't anything proving that.
And just to be clear. I have worked with women and men far better than me. When it comes to the best there really isn't any difference. I have worked for plenty of female bosses and they are as good as the men I have worked with.