My wife and I went through Physics grad school together. To say that the experience was hostile for her, and many other women, would be an understatement.
My daughter is contemplating grad school for next year (senior in college, its been an interesting year). We've been open/honest about the challenges she'll face in Physics, but the state of things is much better now than it was when we went through 30 years ago (ouch). Given that she runs circles around most of her fellow students, I'm not the least bit worried on the academic side.
My concern, as all fathers of exceptional daughters should be (I guess that's all of us?) is the cultural aspects of programs, and potential jobs. I use the word "place" below to discuss grad school and/or jobs.
If the place is overtly hostile, its a hard pass. No need to waste time with that. Think Uber, and other tech-bro places.
If the place is passive aggressive hostile, there are strategies to cope, but again, biased towards pass. Passive aggressive hostility wears on you.
If the place is open, and sane. Worth a look.
Think about the economic aspect of this. You the enlightened consumer/producer of product (grad school, job) have more information than ever about the quality of life at these places. If a place is just bad, they will lose at attracting sufficient consumers/producers of producers. Which means they will have lower ability to operate in market.
Bigger picture. Women are not intrinsically less able to do quantitative or analytical work. Environments that are not conducive to them doing this work will tend to depress the population of them doing this work. Environments which are freer from these stresses will tend to accumulate population doing this work.
I think it might be simple as that. Its not about ability. Its about environment.
Which is how I interpreted what Damore was trying to do with his memo: saying that women are capable, but that the environment was not appealing to them. Either/both of (a) what they got to work on, and/or (b) how they were treated.
IMHO, men and women perceive and react to the world differently, and treating them the same is foolish and counter-productive. Damore was simply pointing out those differences.
I found The Female Brain a good book on this topic:
I've worked with/for brilliant female scientists and engineers before. I personally believe that what makes a good scientist or engineer is a profound insatiable curiosity, and a drive to understand. I've seen this in both females and males.
My point was, when you encourage this, and you help the person understand and adapt to challenges they may face, society is often better off, as we have added to our scientific and engineering pool of talent. If you discourage this by saying "your brain is different", or "you are more interested in feelings than quantitative science", we wind up with a discouraging environment for 1/2 of our prospective scientists and engineers.
I don't see how the latter is a good thing. Damore had a right to author his text. I'd argue that sending it out to others in his company was a bad idea ... generally one should separate personal politics from corporate life. But I disagree with numerous things in the text (I read it when it came out).
The difference in chromosomes trigger all sorts changes in the development cycle of humans. Unless you want to argue that males having 10x the testosterone levels has no effect on behaviour. Not to mention all sorts of differences in brain structures.
From my point of view the current situation is that many organizations are both hostile to women and desperate not to be. what I think was really useful of the Damore memo is that it tried to point a way on how to change institutions to be more inclusive by default.
For sure it would not solve 100% of the problem, maybe just 5%, but I actually think it would have made the remaining 95% easier to solve also.
Agree, but it's also about preferences. When a woman has to choose between medicine, arts, economics, law, education, IT and other fields, they tend to prefer IT less than men. It's just that there are so many other good options.
If you control by the amount of time invested and passion you would probably see little discrimination.
Why would you disadvantage her by poisoning her mind like that? Also, were you open/honest about the advantages she'd have for being a woman in physics? Extra programs, scholarships, internships, guidance, resources, etc set aside for her?
> My concern, as all fathers of exceptional daughters should be (I guess that's all of us?) is the cultural aspects of programs, and potential jobs.
If it was all of us, then it wouldn't be exceptional would it? It would be commonplace/universal, the opposite of exceptional.
> Its not about ability. Its about environment.
It's about personal choice. In wealthier liberal countries where women have choice, they don't go STEM careers. In poor traditional countries where women have little choice, they go to STEM careers. It's not about "passive agressive hostility" otherwise no women would work in nursing. It's about having the ability to do what you want.
"What’s more, the countries that minted the most female college graduates in fields like science, engineering, or math were also some of the least gender-equal countries. They posit that this is because the countries that empower women also empower them, indirectly, to pick whatever career they’d enjoy most and be best at."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
"The trend was most pronounced in places like Norway, Finland, and Sweden. Although this region is known for policies and a cultural outlook that supports greater gender equality, relatively few girls pursue STEM degrees there, when compared to places like Algeria or Turkey."
https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/the-downside-to-greater-ge...
Yes, there are. A lot of public construction projects have goals for minorities and women as a percentage of the labor on the job site. Firms owned by women, minorities, and service-disabled veterans are given priority in the bidding process through different mechanisms. Most of the trade unions have programs to recruit women into the trades.
It was not about "inclination", but rather that the current engineering culture tended to be lean a certain way when it comes to focus:
> Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait).[15] Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.[1][14]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
He argued that if Google wanted to change the gender balance in their engineering divisions, they had to change the types of things that can be worked on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing–systemizing_theory
Google wants more women in engineering (which isn't a bad thing), but do they have a similar program for getting more men into HR?
As to gender balance in professions: are there initiatives to get more men into nursing or kindergarten / primary education, and women into plumbing or carpentry?