It's not. Read the original memo.
He especially mentioned that women gravitate to the more social jobs in STEM environments, but Google's diversity programs were trying to force them into the "code monkey" jobs instead, to spread them more evenly.
> Strong technology is important for success, but so is leadership, market fit, team dynamics, understanding the customer, etc. The hardest question in tech companies is not "how" to build, but "what" to build. This is essentially a people-oriented problem, since customers are people.
Absolutely. So why waste your people-oriented employees on jobs that aren't people-oriented?
The current state of science suggests associations between gender, brain development, and career preferences. But women who are applying to Google for coding jobs are clearly stating their own individual career preferences. People apply for jobs they want.
Using population studies to try to contradict clearly expressed individual preferences is nonsensical; that's not how statistics works. It's like the old joke about the guy who carries a bomb onto a plane for safety, because "what are the chances that there are TWO bombs on one plane?"
And obviously associative data about preferences doesn't tell us anything about individual capability or qualifications.
Finally, if you actually ask women in STEM fields why they left or are considering leaving, career preferences are not the only answer. One also hears about disrespect, harassment, abuse--the glass ceiling. Again, this is real data that can't be lightly set aside just because it doesn't fit a narrative of biological determinism.
I tend to think "zero," but you do you, I guess.
Anyway...
https://www.elephantinthevalley.com
http://www.kaporcenter.org/tech-leavers/
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/technology/women-entre...
Etc.
Harassment is bad, but I don't think "unwanted sexual advances" should categorically count as harassment. It all depends (of course some advances can be harassment, but just because some attraction is unrequited it is not harassment) - it is human to be attracted and fall in love.
There's a big difference between:
"Hey would you like to go grab lunch with me sometime?" (ok if not overly persistent)
vs
"You're hot, want to have sex with me sometime?" (never ok at work)
And I would suggest some introspection about why your bar to be convinced is so high. The persistent and sometimes aggressive disbelief that women face from male colleagues when they complain about harassment is a big part of the industry problem.
It is also a very one-sided narrative, omitting the advantages that being attractive also brings.
If it's highly skewed towards "promoted from code-monkey", then there's a big barrier to entry if you're the kind of person who loves managing and dislikes code-monkeying.
From my experience, women in technology have a higher chance of reaching manager level than men. I worked with plenty of female managers, and their people and communication skills were the reason that got them in those positions. Women with families, women working 4/5th.
So yes, I do think they can rise up with those skills, from a European perspective.
In competitive environments men are more willing to fight than women, so they are more likely to get the jobs because women are more likely to give up. And I think we should try to change this because as you said "people skills" have a lot of value in management. We need both skills and try to represent both in management roles.
> WEIRD how none of these guys ever argue that because our ladybrains are better at communication and teamwork we should be paid more
There are profession typical for women like nursing that they have less salary than tech jobs. The reason is economical, tech companies produce more money. But I strongly thing the nursing job is as important as a tech job and we should try to remove the gap between professions. But with a capitalism system you cannot do this easily.
Note: I am one of the persons who agree with the biology differences between male and female.
When people have a scientific theory and that theory can be shown to not be good at predicting the world, it is still science. The point is to find a better theory, one which predictions better match observational data.
So what other theories are there? One that the memo mention in that controversial list is that men are pushed (incentivized) to seek higher earning. So lets put out a few predictions here. At average, jobs with higher risk and higher earnings should have more male applicants seeking them. Promotions that results in pay increase should be demanded by men more even if that risk their current job position. When there is a choice between benefits or increase pay, me should be statistically biased towards increased pay.
Is that theory better or worse? depend on the observational data that can either confirm or dispel the predictions. Personally I am more convinced by the second theory than the first, but that is purely based on the data. Make a better theory and provide convincing data and I would instantly change my mind. At that point the second theory should be abandoned with the same speed that I abandoned the first one.
My impression is that most managers in the tech industry already have a good amount of experience in "mechanical" (development, etc) roles, and to even get there you need an education or experience in relevant skills (correct me if I'm wrong). I don't know about whether the proportion of women vs men with managerial roles in tech is fair, but if what the author of this article is saying is true, the required educational or professional pedigree just to get into the tech industry is probably one of the biggest causes of men vastly outnumbering women in tech already.
I think there was a purposeful gap in the logic since the causality is too convoluted to be definitive about.
1. "Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our _interests_ and _behaviour_... our _interests_ are influenced strongly by biology, as opposed to being learned or socially constructed."
2. It might be reasonable to wonder if a biological mechanism is at play here.
3. ??? some combination of things, including innate gender characteristics, but not limited to sexism ???
4. Women are significantly less likely to work in technology.
_ Accenting mine, not in the article.
The article does mention something about stress resistance, which would be an explanation. Of course, the best managers are able to avoid stress altogether by being effective managers.
There's also something I read elsewhere that men are / can be more competitive; both would explain why there's more men at the top, alongside blatant sexism / gender discrimination.
Maybe it is just difficult to put managers without experience in the trenches in front of people? That is, managers who have no tech skills as such?
There was an article on the front page earlier about how you simply shouldn't put people with no tech expertise in charge of people who have - so far as tech goes.
There is another problem here: the wage gap across industries. Some of our most important workers (teachers, nurses) are paid a pittance, whereas one industry that invents problems to solve is paid the most. The solution is to treasure the work that everyone does - irrespective of what industry they might be in. This would allow people to pursue a respected career in whatever industry they desire, regardless of what gender is typically motivated to engage in that industry.
Tech has been historically awful to women (and some places continue to do so); yet you can find industries where all genders are discriminated against (some being a social stigma) and nobody seems to give a damn about them.
One thing I can say for certain is that, as an extremely young equal society, we seem to be making a heroic effort to improve. We have a very long way to go and the extremes are probably going to be visited multiple times as the pendulum settles to the center.
Nobody is forced to choose Nursing over Tech, so if they are unhappy with the salary, why do people choose Nursing? Presumably more people choose Nursing than Tech, so the salary is lower as per supply and demand (and of course demand is dependent on other factors as well - but if fewer people went into Nursing, prices surely would go up).
Nobody is entitled to any kind of job they want. Jobs exist because people need jobs done, and they are willing to pay for them being done.
Tech has historically not been awful to women. The social networks are full of the reports on how early programmers were all women. Even today tech is not awful to women. They get a red carpet rolled out for them.
Sorry, who are you describing? What group?
Higher levels of programming may be composed of more work with people (coordinating a team, extracting requirements from clients, etc.), but the lower levels, and the education leading up to there, is tech focused. And it's from there that managers are sourced.
I'm not saying that "women should be carers", I'm saying that there are personality traits that women are statistically more likely to have due to how we evolved as primates (the evidence of which has been cited widely). Those personality traits may result in different life decisions being made, especially traits related to being stress-averse. Again, I did not say that women cannot program, I said that there are statistically significant biological biases that need to be accounted for.
In my mind, the biggest problem with the under-representation of women is that school-level education about technology is horrific. That's not a problem you can solve at the tail-end of the pipe (and it's not helpful telling the pipe that it's sexist).
That's a great point. So maybe Google should have said, 'This memo makes sense for programmers but not for managers'. Instead they said, 'You're fired!'
> As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone – higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men.
The assumption here is that employment in STEM industries fundamentally and solely involves "mechanically interesting things".
The reality is that tech companies are composed of people and make products for people. Google themselves have found through their own research that the best managers are defined by their people skills, not their technical skills. So why aren't the management layers of tech companies composed of mostly women?
Strong technology is important for success, but so is leadership, market fit, team dynamics, understanding the customer, etc. The hardest question in tech companies is not "how" to build, but "what" to build. This is essentially a people-oriented problem, since customers are people.
EDIT: this tweet puts it succinctly:
> WEIRD how none of these guys ever argue that because our ladybrains are better at communication and teamwork we should be paid more
https://twitter.com/kelliotttt/status/894770623611682818