In Response To Anti-diversity Memo, YouTube CEO Says Sexism in Tech is 'Pervasive' (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has responded to the Google anti-diversity memo, writing in a column for Fortune that the questioning of women's abilities is "pervasive" in tech and that the memo is "yet another discouraging signal to young women who aspire to study computer science." Wojcicki opens by saying her daughter asked her, "Is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?" Wojcicki says no, it's not true, but the question has still plagued her throughout her career. "I've had meetings with external leaders where they primarily addressed the more junior male colleagues. I've had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men. No matter how often this all happened, it still hurt," she wrote. In the meanwhile, The Guardian reported on Wednesday that more than 60 current and former Google women employees are considering suing Google on the grounds of sexism and a pay gap.

Comments

her first problem

[ganjadude]

is calling it an "anti diversity" memo... .thats not what it was in the slightest.

Re:her first problem

[Anonymous Coward]

is calling it an "anti diversity" memo... .thats not what it was in the slightest.

Thanks for mansplaining this.

Thanks for an example of sexism.

Re:her first problem

[ganjadude]

mansplaining is nothing but a term sexists use to stifle discussion. please stop being a sexist

Re:her first problem

[bsolar]

How is saying "women are on average me neurotic" not perpetuating negative stereotypes? It's the sort of thing that leads to men being dismissed as thinking with their dicks.

It's not, at least if you know what the words actually mean.

First of all, "neurotic" in the context used in the memo doesn't mean "affect by neurosis", which most critics wrongly assume, it refers to one of the 5 personality traits, and that women on average score higher on this trait than men is recognized in scentific studies cited in the same article.

Furthermore, a stereotype is not stating that some trait appears more on average in a specific group, a stereotype is generalizing upon such average and treating all members of that group as if the trait is a given. The trait, even if more prominent, is not necessarily ubiquitous.

Back to neuroticism as example: if I state that women on average score more on neuroticism, I'm not creating any stereotype. If from that I generalize and state that all women must score more, or start to assume that all women I encounter must score more on neuroticism, then I'm creating a stereotype.

Note that the memo explicitly stated individuals need to be evaluated as individuals and not according to the tendencies of their groups, which means it's not creating nor promoting any stereotype. The opposite, the memo explicitly warns against drawing generalizations and creating stereotypes from these statistics.

Is that mutually exclusive with the memo?

[naubol]

As I read the memo, it acknowledge that sexism was an issue. Even in the first paragraph.

I think not rationally responding to someone's point is becoming rampant in tech.

Re:Is that mutually exclusive with the memo?

[ganjadude]

exactly. as to her complaining about being talked over and people not listening to her questions until "a guy" said them.... well gues swhat? I AM a guy and ive had the exact same thing happen to me by both men AND women!!! Her sexism is showing

Re: Is that mutually exclusive with the memo?

[x0ra]

no better argument than a petty ad-hominem attack ? Come on, I know you're lazy, but you can do better...

Well, not always sexism..

[Junta]

I've had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by

While this may be sexism at work and there certainly is sexism in the field, pretty much everyone experiences having their thoughts interrupted and ignored until rephrased by someone else, with someone else getting the credit for those thoughts.

Re:Well, not always sexism..

[Areyoukiddingme]

I've had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men.

I've seen this happen to a female developer at my last job. Superficially it looked like sexism. In actuality, it was merit-based. She would regularly, even frequently, make comments or ask questions that revealed a profound lack of understanding of the language we were all developing in, and she was not new to the language. On the rare occasions when her comment or question had merit, it required a man to rephrase it before anyone would listen to it seriously because she had trained everyone around her to ignore her or discount her input or answer her only to correct her.

There were half a dozen female developers on the floor. Two of them, including the aforementioned one, were obvious diversity hires who would have been laid off if they were men. The second one didn't even have a technology related degree. Her degree was in English composition, and she did not have an additional one, yet she wrote code all day. It was blatant sexism—in favor of women. The two of them made the lives of the other female developers miserable, just from suspicion and spillover, though they were good developers. It took extra time for new hires to separate their reactions appropriately simply because of those two.

Having said that, everybody did separate their reactions. No one talked over, ignored, rephrased, or repeated the questions and comments of the female developers who were actually good at their jobs. Merit matters in tech. A lot. Sexist policies that are retaining and promoting women out of proportion to their merit are hurting the cause of women in tech far more than anyone is willing to acknowledge. It needs to stop.

Re:Well, not always sexism..

[alvinrod]

Bad developers aren't going to be liked no matter who they are. Bad developers who were specifically hired because of diversity policies are going to be despised more because it's possible that had they not been hired due to some characteristic that has nothing to do with ability a better developer may have been hired instead. There's no guarantee that one would have, but that's not how people tend to think.

Furthermore, affirmative action policies only further serve to feed notions of racism, because when you try to meet a quota system that requires you to hire candidates in excess of their availability, then you need to do one of the following: 1) Hire candidates from the target demographic with lower skill levels than candidates not of that demographic. 2) Pay higher salaries for quota system candidates in order to lure the most capable away from other offers. 3) Accept lower skill levels across the board and turn away highly skilled applicants who are not in the target demographic.

The first is going to result in a perception that a demographic is less skilled, the second will result in a perception of inequality based on demographic lines assuming anyone finds out about the pay difference, and the third is just a poor business decision. Never mind that it's not a great feeling if your peers are more skillful than you are because you were hired for characteristics beyond your control and not for your ability. If you have a corporate policy that mandates some kind of quota system or preference towards one, people are going to tend to assume that the people favored in that process are not as good. This sucks even more for the demographic candidates who are highly skilled, because natural human tendency is going to lead people to judge them as being less capable or undeserving.

All that aside, one would expect female developers to be anecdotally singled out more often due to out-group bias and because in smaller companies, minority individuals stand out more for good and bad. In the case of the first pick any group in any context and if you are a member of it you're less likely to notice poor behavior of people who you identify as being in the same group as you and more likely to identify and remember the poor behavior of the people who you identify as being outside of that group. In the second case, exceptions just stand out more and if you only have a few examples of some mental category you've constructed, you're more likely to draw on those limited observations for future reference and the small number of data points makes it more difficult to have the same broader picture as you would with groups from which there are numerous examples.

Putting it down to sexism in every instance is just a failure to understand the underlying causes and is just going to piss off everyone else who you invariably lump into the sexism category as part of your brains natural tendency to categorize and generalize.

Re:Woman dominated professions?

[Daemonik]

When you decide to get a career in nursing, teaching or other "critically important jobs..." and women tell you that you're not "biologically suited to the job", or you go into meetings with women and the senior women ignore you, talk over you and when you do get to make a comment, only accept it when another woman parrots it back, THEN you can whine about how you've been mistreated.

The problem with Tech isn't that men dominate it, it's that men do so by passively aggressively forcing women out. Discouraging someone every step of the way and then declaring "biological differences" keeps them out is a pathetic echo chamber tactic.

The FACT is that women ruled tech jobs, until men decided they were too profitable for the little ladies and took over. Women were the first computers, calculating endless numbers for a multitude of businesses and government offices. When businesses decided they needed PC's, women where the ones expected to learn how to use them and print off the bosses emails for him. The first programming language was written by a woman.

The fact is that all of this "biological differences" nonsense is rehashed psuedo-science by white brogrammers who feel their self-centered superiority being threatened.

Re:Woman dominated professions?

[mbkennel]

> The FACT is that women ruled tech jobs, until men decided they were too profitable for the little ladies and took over. Women were the first computers, calculating endless numbers for a multitude of businesses and government offices.

That isn't a tech job, that was an accounting job.

Did women rule Edison's laboratories and the radar labs in WW2?

There are more women in technical jobs today, than in 1900.

Re:Woman dominated professions?

[ganjadude]

and NONE of that has anything to do with anything. you obviously didnt read the memo.

Re:So 18th Century

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the one word to describe women who can't handle the idea that men may be better than them at [fill in the blank]?

And is that one word equally pejorative and dismissive?

Why is it so hard to admit?

[HangingChad]

Why is it so hard to admit there is rampant sexism in tech? It's been true for at least 20 years, probably longer. It was definitely true during my time in the industry.

Just start by admitting there's a problem.

Modest proposal

[PopeRatzo]

The fact that so many men line up to express outrage and hysteria over every single Slashdot story like this is the best proof that there is a serious need for more women in tech jobs.

im just gonna leave this here....

[koreanbabykilla]

http://quillette.com/2017/08/0...

Re:im just gonna leave this here....

[gweihir]

Psychology and Sociology are not "bunk", that is just an obvious attempt by you to derail the conversation. They have, however, "soft" and "hard" results. The gender-based statistical differences in the "big five" characteristics are in the "hard" class, i.e. there really is no sane reason to assume they are wrong. They are also _statistical_ differences, i.e. do not tell you much about individuals. And ignoring them is a really bad idea, because it makes all actions in that direction far less effective and may even be counter-productive.

I do have a nasty suspicion by now though: All those claims that women are prevented from going into IT by "toxic work environments" and other invalid claims may well have the effect of preventing countless women from going into that field. That would be the ultimate irony: Those claiming to be for equal outcome actually causing a major part of the issue. Would not surprise me one bit. (Of course, "equal outcome" is bunk as well, as you have to assume all people go in in the same state. The actual thing to be for is "equal opportunity" and let people decide what they want, because people _are_ different.)

Or she's just wrong

[alvinrod]

Wojcicki opens by saying her daughter asked her, "Is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?" Wojcicki says no, it's not true, but the question has still plagued her throughout her career.

Or she's just wrong. Choosing not to believe in something doesn't make it go away.

I'm sure there are plenty of parents telling their children that climate change isn't real, but that isn't going to stop global temperatures from increasing.

And really it comes down to about the same thing. There are some people who have built their world view around a belief that isn't true, and even when presented with large amounts of evidence to suggest otherwise they will continue to dismiss it. I've found that there are very few people who are scientifically minded and rational and even if they did accept the reality of both climate change and sex-based biological differences, there're just as likely to be off the reservation in some other area like the link between vaccination and autism, GMO food, or even something as laughable as the age of the earth.

I don't think anyone's really immune and humans have some terrible cognitive inclinations that make us unwilling to let go of view points once we've latched on to them. I was recently at a family reunion and watched some of my relatives get into an argument over some idiotic event in the past for almost five hours. Even after someone got annoyed enough to dig up an old photo on Facebook to prove their point, the other person still wouldn't admit they were wrong and started inventing all kinds of fanciful reasons to explain away the photo. It was kind of surreal, but I've done the same plenty of times myself. I think there should be a class in school about being wrong about whatever and learning to accept new data that challenges our original assumptions.

Re:Misses the point yet again

[computational super]

Women should not be discouraged from studying CS, Engineering, Math any science

On the contrary. They're encouraged with much more passion than any man ever has been. And they're still not very interested.

Why lie?

[TsuruchiBrian]

I think there are probably some very good and legitimate criticisms that can be made of this memo. I am not even necessarily opposed to this engineer being fired.

But why lie about the contents of the memo? I am very sympathetic to the idea that diversity is a good thing (as apparently the author of the memo was as well), but I am completely turned off by the fact that the strategy utilized by "the other side" (not the other side from me... yet) is to lie about what's in it.

It is not anti-diversity. Maybe it's wrong. But it being wrong doesn't make it automatically anti-diversity. Redistributing this falsehood is intellectually dishonest.

I don't want to be on a side that's wrong. I also don't want to be on a side that's dishonest.

Re:Why lie?

[Yosho]

But why lie about the contents of the memo?

Discrediting your opposition is much easier than refuting them, especially if they actually have a valid point. The vast majority of people aren't going to read that memo; if you can just convince them that the author is a far-right misogynist who hates diversity, then there are many, many people who will jump on the bandwagon against him without doing any research. This is basically the same thing that happened with GamerGate, if you recall that.

Re:What do genitals have to do with programming?

[hey00]

I'm still waiting for somebody from either side of this nonsense to clearly explain what exactly penises and vaginas have to do with programming computers.

The computer hardware doesn't care if you have a penis or a vagina.

The programming language(s) being used don't care if you have a penis or a vagina.

The libraries and frameworks being used don't care if you have a penis or a vagina.

In most corporate environments, it's likely that one's penis or one's vagina is hidden under several layers of clothing while engaging in computer programming. (I know some Rubyists like to type with their penises, but we don't find them in corporate environments.)

So what exactly do penises and vaginas have to do with computer programming?

The computer hardware cares about your code.

Your code comes from your mind.

Your mind is produced by your brain.

Your brain is made from your DNA and bathes in hormones.

That same DNA and hormones that defined your gender.

Gender have biological differences. Claiming there aren't is ignoring reality.

Claiming those differences make a gender better at programming is an unsubstantiated hypothesis.

But if you go back to the original memo, never did he claim that women are worse at programming. He said they are more neurotic, more agreeable, more open toward feelings and aesthetics. Which is supported by science.
He said those differences _may_ explain why less women in average have an interest in STEM. Again, I have seen noone, here or elsewhere, or in the original memo, claiming women can't program as well as men.
He then proposed that to make google friendlier to women, to make software engineering more people-oriented, to make tech and leadership positions less stressful, etc. and to not deceive students by embellish what tech actually is.

On the other hand, I've seen plenty of people who obviously didn't read it strawman it like crazy, a bit like what you're doing, and claiming there is no difference between genders, including youtube's and google's ceos, which is blatant denial of reality on the scale of climate change denial. This is sad.