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Google's Diversity Chief: Mamas Don't Let Their Baby Girls Grow Up To Be Coders
theodp writes: Explaining the reasons for its less-than-diverse tech workforce, Google fingered bad parenting for its lack of women techies. From the interview with Google Director of Diversity and Inclusion Nancy Lee: "Q. What explains the drop [since 1984] in women studying computer science? A. We commissioned original research that revealed it's primarily parents' encouragement, and perception and access. Parents don't see their young girls as wanting to pursue computer science and don't steer them in that direction. There's this perception that coding and computer science is ... a 'brogrammer' culture for boys, for games, for competition. There hasn't been enough emphasis on the power computing has in achieving social impact. That's what girls are interested in. They want to do things that matter." While scant on details, the Google study's charts appear to show that, overall, fathers encourage young women to study CS more than mothers. Google feels that reeducation is necessary. "Outreach programs," advises Google, "should include a parent education component, so that parents learn how to actively encourage their daughters."
heard this last millennium: little boys want a place to 'perform', while little girls want a place to 'relate'.
C'mon, you can troll better than that!
there is no power in being a corporate droid programmer, what a load of bullshit. So corporate america wants to increase the number of coders and we should change our child rearing accordingly? And this STEM push is bullshit also, why are they not also having advanced classes in the fine arts and humanities? neither my son nor daughter are being encouraged to be coders, if they desire that on their own that's fine
Same as for males, actually.
Human beings in general aren't very rational, even though we may think we are. Those who have these grand notions of purpose behind their actions are usually merely very good at rationalising.
Society forced her to like ponies. And conversely, society rewarded you for spending hours with computers.
This is *so* obviously true: Don't you remember in high school, all the computer-club guys getting all the girls and being invited to all the cool parties?
Oh wait...
I thought this was true for all genders and species. I'm constantly pushing myself to be more logical and have more control over my emotions, but I'm nowhere near completely there. And some of that might also aid in social awkwardness.
For the record, in regards to the post, I didn't learn how to use Linux extensively through playing around with Gentoo or learn to program C and whatnot because my parents encouraged it. Having said that, my mother bought me an HTML book when I was young, and only after seeing that I was starting to make my own websites. Now I'm studying electrical engineering at school, and my parents never told me or suggested what I should do. It was entirely my choice driven by what I found to be my own interests. So having said that, why must we assume that women don't participate in STEM as much due to outside influences?
Anyway, someone said something about Feminist Friday... It's been what, 3 days?
So you and your brother were interested in computing, but your sister wasn't? Dude, you were literally brogrammers! It's your fault your sister wasn't interested!
Why would *anyone* encourage their child, regardless of gender, to spend a decade or more training for what is quickly becoming a minimum-wage job at best.
We should instead be encouraging kids to become investment bankers, hedge fund managers or politicians.
Actually, men do get raped far more often than women. Just clearing that one point up.
(Real rape, that is. Not this silly "new" rape concept).
And the rest of your points seem to assume that crime is inherently emotional. This is a highly questionable thesis.
And... I've never seen a man cry at work btw. ...Just saying.
This tenet is absurd and provably false.
I coach an after school program in robotics and programming at my local elementary school, and I agree that this is baloney. The parents are pushing hard for their girls to pursue tech, and it is the girls themselves that are disinterested. We have tried many things to keep girls in the program. I recruited an engineer mom as a co-coach to provide a role model. We let the girls form "all-girl" teams, so they can use more collaborative teamwork, and consensus decision making, which they feel more comfortable with, rather than the hierarchical teams that is natural to boys. But we still got only a few girls to sign up this year, and most of those only signed up because of parental pressure, and half of them dropped out when the try-outs for the school play were announced. It is very frustrating, and I don't know what the solution is, but blaming the parents is hogwash. I don't see that at all.
You complain, but these articles get 1000 posts. Your corporate overlord is doing exactly as expected.
Google fingered bad parenting for its lack of women techies.
More like: Google disagrees with their parenting.
Just because their values as parents didn't agree with your values today, Or your general desire to have more people in computer science, in order to reduce wages, Or your desire to have more diversity among computer scientists to help you comply with arbitrary government-imposed regulations on your employee population : does not make them bad parents.
There's good studies that there are as many male victims of battering as there are female. Males are less likely to get hurt when battered by a female, obviously, and are less likely to report battering, so there is far less need for a 'battered male' shelter. Just remember it's not because females are any less likely to resort to violence than males are.
A great documentary about how biology (not culture) effects genders and differentiates males/boy from females/girls, so that males/boy choose masculine jobs/toys (e.g., coding... yes, its "masculine"!) while females/girls choose feminine jobs/toys (e.g., nurses... good for them!) - a great point was that the most "free" a society is, the more those gender differences will be observed: Brainwash: The Gender Equality Paradox (note: i watched it just yesterday, thanks to user "popo" posting it in the "Science Still Seen As a Male Profession" story - by the way: ENOUGH WITH ALL THE GIRL-CODERS FUCKING STORIES)
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Although GP is clearly a troll, you are attacking his point fallaciously.
1. Even if men were by far the most emotional irrational beings on earth, that would not disprove "emotion is [females'] fundamental mental underpinning"
2. Risk taking, murder and aggression are not necessarily driven by emotion. It's a fine line, but technically those behaviors can be (and might often be) about attaining social status or power.
3. There is evidence that there should be many more 'husband shelters' and that their lack is driven largely by a culture of (implicitly) shaming 'weak men', not by a lack of battered husbands.
Let me state clearly that I do not agree with the GP. The only thing I'm trying to do here is point out some logical fallacies in the hope that this will improve the quality of the discussion.
Really? And that must be why there are more battered husbands shelters than battered wives shelters ...
60-70% of domestic violence is initiated by women. The reason we don't have "battered men" shelters is that it is socially acceptable for women to be violent, and that any man that "can't handle it" isn't a real man, and should be ashamed of himself. In the media, when women are depicted as violent toward their partners, it is almost always supposed to be funny.
It would seem to me that if you need to be "reeducating" kids about what they want, you're doing something wrong. Let's examine a few of these points in the summary.
Parents don't see their young girls as wanting to pursue computer science and don't steer them in that direction.
And... should they be? You seem to be coming at this from the perspective that it doesn't matter what the individuals want, there should be more women in tech because reasons.
There's this perception that coding and computer science is ... a 'brogrammer' culture for boys, for games, for competition.
A couple thoughts on this point. This retarded "brogrammer" media push has happened much more recently than 1984. I seriously doubt that people perceived it the same way back then. And even if they do now, you seem to gloss over the fact that it could simply be the result of this shrieking media push about the culture. In other words, it may be that this push has caused the results that you're looking at now.
There hasn't been enough emphasis on the power computing has in achieving social impact. That's what girls are interested in. They want to do things that matter.
Okay, you raging sexist. Let's take it down a notch for a second here. We'll just assume for a moment that you're right and that's what girls are interested in. How is it the case that "achieving social impact" and "things that matter" are the same? What a ridiculous conflation. First off, you assume that social impact is always good. Secondly, you assume that nothing else matters besides social impact. Could these be, I don't know, products of your bias?
Q. What explains the drop [since 1984] in women studying computer science? A. We commissioned original research that revealed it's primarily parents' encouragement, and perception and access.
And now for this point. I looked at the linked abstract and it only focuses on the individual's decision-making process without taking into account factors that the individual may use. For example, it doesn't even bother to look at hours worked. And then has the gall to call the perceptions of the field "flawed." It still blows my mind that every time this comes up, almost nobody talks about the elephant in the room: Women are smarter and value their time better than men in general.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/11/19/gifted-men-earn-more-than-gifted-women-and-they-value-time-differently-but-both-report-being-happy/
http://www.bentley.edu/centers/center-for-women-and-business/millennials-workplace
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/31/professional-women-time_n_1068291.html
There are more if you're curious about this phenomenon.
If we look at the numbers for women in CS, we see:
http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/10/21/womencoding-d463ab944849ed2fce2df3d7d27d2f1c4daa7689.jpg?s=1400
I looked pretty deep trying to find a graph of hours worked in the sector since the mid-1980s (or earlier too), but couldn't find anything. The closest thing I could find was "services" sector hours worked, which I assume includes things like restaurants and so on. Not very useful for this purpose. If hours being worked was a part of the discussion at all, you would think that information would be a bit easier to find. But it's not, despite the fact that it's probably kind of important. If anybody can wrangle that info somehow, I'd love to see it.
That said, if we look at when the Internet hit big (circa 1995), we see a lag time before the sharp dropoff. Once the Internet became popular, 24/7 on call became a common thing and hours worked went way up. If the industry is the input and schooling is the output of that industry, you would expect something like this.
Pissing and moaning about "the culture" doesn't seem all that useful, especially because it paints women as delicate beings that need everyone around them to give them big toothy smiles and pats on the head. I don't deny that there is likely to be a perception problem (or more than one perception problem), but the question is whose perception problem(s) it is/they are.
The real takeaway from their research seemed to be the bit about promoting CS as a vehicle for social change / making a difference / getting noticed.
Out of curiosity, what is the goal of the after school program? Is it just to build neat things, or are their goals or competitions associated with it?
In your case, it's competing with the school play, which enables the girls to be the focus of an entire audience with much applause. It has weeks/months of buildup with ads in the school and community. It has a number of accessible topics that people who aren't in the play can take part in, and it has a hierarchy (their girls don't like hierarchy thing is pure hogwash) where different people can get "better" and "worse" parts in the play, as well as default exclusivity (not everyone can play the leading roles). It also enables them to communicate under the guise of a fictional character. Beyond this, it likely involves a bit of fundraising and some costume building/time sunk in by parents where they're forced to spend time with their daughters helping them prepare.
I bet if you set up the after school program to check off all those qualities, you'd get girls flocking to it and the play would become a distant second. Maybe have an end-of-year project that encorporates what they've been doing all year, and the resulting "performance" goes up on youtube? Have some "milestones" throughout the year that they can share with friends in the same way? Create some sort of plot arc that can grab their imaginations?
You may already be doing all this, but it's what has always made school plays popular with the girls.
The spokesperson at Google making these claims, is not a tech. She is a lawyer. So there is likely no connection between what she says, and what she actually believes. Anyway, since she is a lawyer, her parents clearly didn't raise her right, so she may just be projecting the failure of her own parents onto others.
Disgusting straight white cishet male shitlord here.
My parents, particularly my dad, discouraged me from pursuing any kind of work with computers. He wanted me to go into trades (blue collar, not Wall Street) like he did, specifically to follow in his footsteps and continue his one-man business as a painter. Then you've got the whole NEEERRRRD thing from the jocks in schools. In short, many males aren't particularly pushed into STEM either. They take it upon themselves, under their own agency, to pursue those goals. I wonder how so many boys who got bullied for their STEM related interests throughout their young lives managed to stick to their interests and goals. It must be the penis.
Except that women who enter STEM (to actually WORK in a field) are in the same boat. They see past any discouragement from their families/pees, and they ignore all the "I deserve a free-ride into the field" rhetoric from gender ideologues, and they put in the time and effort to become proficient with whatever it is they want to do. Granted, there's fewer of them than men ...BUT DON'T YOU EVEN TALK ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY THAT EACH GENDER MIGHT HAVE DIFFERENT CAREER PROCLIVITIES.
Not hard to find on Google.
But the "more male rapes" fact should say: More men than women are raped IN THE USA. ( Globally more women are raped. )
And the reason more men are raped in the USA is because the US has an absurdly large prison population.
Or, just maybe, we could teach children of both sexes that it's a harsh fucking world out there, and if you don't learn the skills needed for a good job, your life will suck forever. No? Well, the social pendulum will swing back that way eventually, from the opposite extreme we're at now, and once that happens you won't need much to get everyone interested in fields that pay really well, and won't be displaced by automation.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
And that must be why there are more battered husbands shelters than battered wives shelters ... oh wait ...
Did you know most domestic violence in initiated by women? Did you know that by far lesbian relationships have more physical abuse than any other gender pairing? Abused men are just SOL - why do you need support or a shelter? Just man up! Perhaps not an argument for rationality, I'll grant you.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You have to be intelligent to code well, and it is a very specific form of intelligence that often comes with weakness in other areas. So is it genetics or nurture that is responsible for that particular gift/curse? I say it is genetics and that it is also probably x-linked therefore more males are affected by it in the same way they are far more likely to suffer from x-linked disorders too. Why had this not ever occurred to people before I do not know but if you can have an x-linked disability there is the same chance that you can have x-linked abilities that are exceptional. Why are autism spectrum disorders correlated with programming skills and with being male, because they are both x-linked!
For the record my oldest girl can code like a kid twice her age can, sure I encourage her because it is a form of literacy that scientists need but she will never be somebody else's "programming slave", she will use the skill as just one facet of her projects.
Can I claim credit where others have received blame from Nancy Lee? No, my kid is just very intelligent and that is as much or more her mother's fault and if you say otherwise you are being (how ironic!) sexist.
Exactly.... Personally, I don't see the problem with the concept that some jobs are predominantly of interest to one sex over the other? Isn't this exactly why we had predominantly females in nursing for decades? There simply weren't as many guys interested in doing that particular job (though obviously, *some* do, and that's fine too).
What I do see is some blow-back from the fact that with mostly guys making video games, the games have catered mostly to guys. You do have more females interested in actually playing games now, instead of just watching the guys do it. So yeah, there's some understandable irritation that the games are almost all "guy-centric". But most people who play video games don't have an interest in WRITING them, just like most people who drive cars don't want to become auto mechanics or work in the auto industry.
Ultimately though, markets always follow the money, so even if it takes a bunch of male programmers to do it, they'll build more titles that appeal to females if that's an untapped market. No social manipulation required here.
Parents don't see their young girls as wanting to pursue computer science
OR
and don't steer them in that direction.
Which is it? I get the feeling it's that girls just aren't that interested. People like to point out that more girls were interested in the 80s but that was a very different era. Few people actually knew what was involved with "programming computers".
All of this effort reminds me of a similar misunderstanding that I came across years ago. In the 50s Lionel decided that girls didn't play with trains because they weren't "girly" enough. They were black and steel and perhaps too boyish. So the genius marketers came up with this:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadsh...
http://www.lionel.com/Products...
Should you wish to see one in person go to Holiday World and check out the old toy museum.
It flopped badly. The reason was simple: girls generally don't like trains, but those who do want an authentic train. Black, steel, menacing - a real train.
Every time I see people trying hard to make computer science appeal to girls I see the same thing. It simply doesn't appeal to most girls, and to those to whom it does appeal it will have that appeal without any sugar coating.
Ultimately, the SJW crowd needs to understand that men and women - and boys and girls - are very different creatures who aren't interested in the same sorts of things. The roots of this are genetic and stem from the social order tens of thousands of years ago. Nothing's going to "fix" it, but, then again, there's nothing to fix.
Do you have ESP?
We're so busy trying to play the blame game that nobody has actually asked the young girls what they want to do with their lives.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
In the USA, men are just as likely to be domestically abused, but less likely to ask for help and when they ask for help, rarely given help. Pretty much every bad thing that happens to women also happens to men.
(Full disclosure: I am neither female nor a parent; I'm a male who studies physics.)
There are too many links in the summary. The most relevant one is the google study, which has some interesting data and is fairly neutral. I don't think the study supports the flamebait headline, but instead paints a complicated picture. In particular, see the charts on page 5 of the study.
The story headline is in the same style as this interesting article titled "Papas, please let your babies grow up to be princesses". That article makes the case that interests in "girly" things are not mutually exclusive with interests in STEM fields. There are anecdotes in the above comments about girls being pressured by parents into STEM activities (like robotics clubs), and how it often doesn't work. Perhaps this is because some parents push STEM at the expense of "girly" things rather than simply encouraging STEM without taking a hostile stance towards "girly" things.
Just a thought.
You mean social engineering like this?
http://www.strengthvillain.com...
https://jonathanturley.files.w...
http://thetoydetectives.com/co...
https://alanabeeblog.files.wor...
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnne...
You are welcome on my lawn.
I see you've never had to live with a vindictive woman. They can abuse the crap out of you and nothing you can do about it. Just stupid little shit. They're really good at staying on the fine line of being a bully without quite being assault. Women that I know who were in an abusive relationship just left and that was that. But men in a abusive relationship, no matter where they went in the country, the woman was great at making their life a living hell.
I've seen women call in false reports over and over and over and over. The police don't seem to care. I got to listen in on one first hand when I was voice chatting with a friend for almost 8 hours about how his wife was abusing him, when she suddenly came home, I could hear her screaming and yelling in the other room. She threatened to kill him several times, then she called the police on him, they showed up, and she immediately began crying and told the police how she was home all day and her husband just came home and started to beat her. Lucky for him, the police saw the bruises on him and she was fine. The police actually talked to us on mumble.
He wasn't so lucky the next week. she called the police, got a temporary restraining order just before the weekend, and the police kicked him out of his own house. He was homeless for the weekend, no money, no phone. Welcome to the USA.
Eventually we had to take him in to help him get back on his feet. We had her calling police on us, making false reports. Police refused to do anything about it. We were able to get a restraining order, but it took several months of constant harassment and a few death threats. Eventually what it took was my wife to call in and fake cry just like the other woman. That seems to get shit done.
Police do not respond well to yelling and they don't take being calm seriously. Wife calls police, talks to them in a pissed off tone, they think you're crazy. She calls the police and talks to them calmly, they don't think anything is really happening. Call them and be crying like your child died and you get somewhere. You need to be crying. How often do you see a man bawling his eyes out? A lot of women can do this on demand.
Why is western society so obsessed with proving the idea that men and women are exactly alike? That doesn't even make evolutionary sense.
Stop this bullshit SJW slashdot.
The problem with this is that companies don't really pay that well for the labour, skills, experience, talent and education necessary to succeed in IT.
"IT" is a crap career no one should enter. Answering calls on the helpdesk? No thanks - well, better than starving, but so are a lot of things. But we were talking about software development
Why would girls want to sit in front of a computer for hours on end, sometimes, even evenings and work also on weekends in order to launch etc.?
Check out the hours lawyers work, or the oncall duties as a surgeon (or a vet - but dentists, that's the job!). It's not the hours that's the problem, it's the lack of dignity of the profession. When the field was doubling every few years, that meant most software developers were in their 20s, and management could get away with treating all of us like college students. My work environment is more like a dorm room or college lab than a professional office environment - that's what we need to push back against.
As far as pay, after your first 5 or so years in the field, jobs that pay well are there for the taking, though you may need to move to where the work is. If you're past your apprenticeship in the field and you're not making at least 1.5x the national median income, you're likely at a bottom-tier employer: shop around. While we may top out lower than the doctors and lawyers, they don't hit peak earning potential until later in life - a doctor or dentist is typically in his 40s before lifetime earnings net of school costs put him ahead of a plumber or other skilled tradesman.
Personally, I think many women are put off by the limited social interaction involved in the job, or at least that's my theory for why so many female software developers choose career advancement into management or product management over the dev tech track.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
...it's a harsh fucking world out there, and if you don't learn the skills needed for a good job, your life will suck forever...
There are vast differences between countries. North and South Korea are good examples for people who like to claim that the differences are all due to race, culture, religion, etc. But people in South Korea and other "successful" Asian countries aren't all that happy.
So better examples would be to compare the happiest countries in the world (e.g. the Scandinavian socialist countries) to countries countries that are clearly dysfunctional - but not in the middle of a civil war. Myself, I'm familiar with Southeast Asia, so Indonesia and the Philippines would be good examples. But there are lots of dysfunctional countries all over the world.
Anyway, the point is that someone growing up in, say, Denmark will be very likely to have a secure comfortable life even if they make some mistakes and don't try all that hard. On the other hand, someone growing up in, say, Indonesia, will be very likely to remain trapped in poverty even if they try really hard and don't make any mistakes. Life in Denmark is a positive sum game - most people are winners. While life in Indonesia is a negative sum game - most people are losers.
Obviously a person's individual effort and judgement do matter. But so do government policies. It's useful to think about what a person can do as an individual to increase their chances of having a secure comfortable life. But it's also useful to think about what governments can do to increase everyone's chances of having secure comfortable lives.
Good government matters.
I coach an after school program in robotics and programming at my local elementary school, and I agree that this is baloney. The parents are pushing hard for their girls to pursue tech, and it is the girls themselves that are disinterested. We have tried many things to keep girls in the program. I recruited an engineer mom as a co-coach to provide a role model. We let the girls form "all-girl" teams, so they can use more collaborative teamwork, and consensus decision making, which they feel more comfortable with, rather than the hierarchical teams that is natural to boys. But we still got only a few girls to sign up this year, and most of those only signed up because of parental pressure, and half of them dropped out when the try-outs for the school play were announced. It is very frustrating, and I don't know what the solution is, but blaming the parents is hogwash. I don't see that at all.
Its been my experience also, although your's is much more in depth than mine. The young ladies by and large are not interested.
People seem to look at this as a situation where something is keeping women out of STEM. Yes, it's the young women themselves. They are not interested.
Any young lady that wishes to get into science and technology should be encouraged and supported.
Any young lady that wants to go into other career should also be encouraged and supported.
My experience, especially with the sons and daughters of STEM people, just teaches me that even in a seriously supportive environment, if those young ladies don't want to get into STEM, it's an impossible task, unless you start forcing them into it.
And last time I checked, gender equality was not about forcing women into living their life in a manner other than what they wished. Wasn't that what women were trying to escape from?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
India has Bollywood, yes, but Indians seem to have a much more realistic grasp of what career paths are actually feasible and which aren't. Of course, there's also a huge number of middle-class (for India) Indians, since their population is enormous. Finally, I've never heard of sports being a big thing in India. They have cricket of course, but I don't think it's like the sports-mania we have here in the US.
China, having an authoritarian government, probably does things to strongly discourage too many people from wasting their time on dead-end career paths like acting. Here in the US, it's easy to get student loans or even scholarships to go to college for theater. I knew a girl who did this not that long ago; she had a full-ride scholarship, and what did she blow it on? Theater. Did she get a job in theater? Nope; she moved towards make-up and costumes in her senior year thinking that would be a more realistic career path, graduated, and ended up working at a hotel in customer service. A complete waste of a degree. I wouldn't be surprised to find that China doesn't allow silliness like this with student loans or other public funding.
As for Africa, that's hard to say, because Africa has no industry at all to speak of. I can't imagine that software engineering has much prestige there because people probably can't think much beyond life in a mud hut. Even if you go to South Africa or one of the Arabic northern countries, there's not much industry there either, and not much employment for programmers.
software dev pays well, but compare the pay to those of the fields you compared it to. All of them make significantly more than software devs do. Friend of mine, his wife is a dentist, she's pulling in nearly 300k a year
Yes, dentists are well paid - eventually - but they start earning late, a few years after a software dev, they have a much larger school debt to pay off, and just like a software dev, the early years don't pay so well.
You can't just look at peak earning power, but at lifetime earnings at a given age, and it takes a long, long time for a dentist or doctor to pull ahead. BTW, you can certainly make $300k as a software dev at a big company - that's common for tech track paygrades equivalent to a second-level manager at the big names. Of course, there are far fewer such positions than there are dentists in America, and for someone capable of both I'd recommend dentistry, but the gap isn't as big as you might think.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Obviously the only real solution is to force all children to be taken at birth to be raised and educated in government-run facilities until the age of majority, safe from bad parenting decisions and dangerous political/ideological ideas. /s
I felt the need for the '/s' sarc tag, as there are actually a number of people, some in positions of power, who would take the above as a given, that children belong to the State first and parents second.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Because, about 60 years ago, Cornell had the brilliant idea to offer a degree in "Women's Studies", so that college could be both expensive *and* useless. The recipients thereof have since spent better than half a century driving the point that a vagina is a suitable substitute for competence.