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

[ganjadude]

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

Re:her first problem

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

She most certainly DID NOT call it an "anti-diversity" memo, that was the work of some editor (downstream from Fortune) somewhere, trying to get clicks. Try READING what she wrote.

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...

Re:Is that mutually exclusive with the memo?

[serviscope_minor]

And here you are virtue signaling about how much you hate SJWs and virtue signaling.

Kinda ironic really.

boo hoo

[Anonymous Coward]

She was ignored and talked over until she became the CEO, what a sad story. :(

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..

[serviscope_minor]

. Two of them, including the aforementioned one, were obvious diversity hires

Yeah because shit male developers never get hired apart from all the fucking time. I love how only the bad female developers are separated out for comment.

The two of them made the lives of the other female developers miserable, just from suspicion and spillover,

  That's literally sexism in action. No one seems to ever consider "that guy" (you know the one) to some how cast doubt and suspicion on all male developers, yet when you get bad female developers there's suspicion and spillover.

What the fuck ever happened to merit over gender?

Re:Well, not always sexism..

[w1tebear]

I (female) have been in the software industry since the 80's. My first job was with a small company that made custom printer interface cards. I constituted the entire tech support and software maintenance department (as I said, small company!).

I would sometimes get calls from customers having problems who would simply not accept what I was telling them. In cases like these I would go down the hall to a male coworker's office and tell him that I had a customer that "needed a deeper voice". He (manager - no technical knowledge) would take the call with me on the extension at the back of the room mouthing the answers to the customer's questions which he would then speak into the phone. The customer would then be quite satisfied with the answers and we would have a good laugh.

I suspect that things have improved some since then but still run into people who seem to "need a deeper voice".

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:Women and IT donâ(TM)t mix

[bluefoxlucid]

I've had useless coworkers in several fields, races, and genders. Most of the time I encounter a girl programmer, she's not very good--probably because about 95% of all programmers I encounter are not very good. Pigeon hole principle.

So, to recap: I've encountered about 12-15 male programmers who weren't very good and 2 female programmers who weren't very good in the past 10 years. I've encountered 1 non-shitty male programmer and 0 non-shitty female programmers. Jeff Attwood doesn't count because I haven't worked directly with him or had to support his development team. Statistically, there's a huge problem with sample size here.

As for leadership positions? The field of project management is strangely full of men who function as mindless bureaucrats and women with star performance. I don't know why. Tres Roeder spearheaded the inclusion of project stakeholder management in the latest edition of the PMBOK; maybe women are pretty good at that and men are generally fucking terrible. We can make guesses all day, and most of them will probably be wrong.

Let's try not to draw conclusions from low-quality information, or make simple conclusions about vastly-complex topics.

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.

emotional therapy

[Idisagree]

She says her feelings were hurt due to her experiences...

coincidentally this vaguely reminds me of a someone who once wrote up a memo about how men and woman can react differently due to biological differences.

I cant quite remember where or who said it, oh well, I'm sure someone can google it for me.

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.

Re:Why is it so hard to admit?

[brennz]

Lack of equality of outcome (50% or higher females in STEM) does not rampant sexism in technology make.

white washing the news

[Dlin]

Google management is now actively white washing the news never addressing what was in the memo and spreading pure BS, people have to read themselves the memo and compare what Google management is saying, things don't add up at all.

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.

I tried raising my daughter to be an engineer

[t0qer]

When she was 3-4 she started playing minecraft.
When she was 6, we assembled her first PC.
When she was 9, we upgraded her video card.

She's 11 now. She understands underlying components, she understands basic TCP/IP networking. She understands partitions, how to install an OS. She knows what to not click, and how to keep her computer free of crap. At 11, she's got an equal understanding of tech from when I started at 20. Yet she doesn't want to do it. She wants to be an artist. She thinks all babies are super cute. People call her "Mini-me" because she looks like me, and is good with computers like me. There's nothing wrong with saying, "She's biologically predisposed to not go into an engineering role"

She never played with dolls or barbies. Always computers, her choice. Yet she does not want to go into an engineering role like her mom and dad. (Actually, her mom moved onto management years ago)

Re:I tried raising my daughter to be an engineer

[Myrdos]

I'm sure this same scenario is true for someone with a son, so how is gender the determining factor?

XKCD said it well.

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:Woman dominated professions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Women don't need to tell me I'm not biologically suited to nursing. I already know it.

And as a man "in tech", I can state that I do not force women or anyone else out. Maybe you're thinking of management, which frequently seems disproportionately concerned with stereotypical appearances, usually in a negative way. "In tech", we generally take a merit-based view of things. Can you do the job? If so, good. Can you be trained to do the job? If so, train well, and you're on board. Could you do the job or be trained to do the job, but want things handed to you because of some stereotype you think holds you back and so the world owes you? Get. The. Fuck. Out. I don't want you. I don't care if you have a hole or a pole, you're a useless pile of meat that isn't pulling its own weight.

The main problem I see is that the inmates at Google started running the asylum. And when a meritocratic ideology begins to take hold and someone dares to call the SJW's out for being what they are (entitled with a victim complex), they cry like babies in the most public possible forums until they get their way.

Re:Woman dominated professions?

[Strider-]

Also, welding machine / cables can be super heavy. My gf friend is an electrician and need men's help to carry some wire spools because she's too weak to carry these.

A good friend of mine is a female journeyman industrial electrician. She's fully cognicent that she doesn't have the strength to do certain tasks, but has advantages in other ways. On the job, she basically makes a deal with the guys. They do the heavy work, she squeezes into the stupid nooks and crannies where they have to do work, or climbs up on the wire platform, or whatever, where it would be impossible for the guys to get to.

Two words for you: Hidden Figures

[laurencetux]

Not only did a single woman calculate the reentry for Grissom she HAD TO DISCOVER THE NEEDED MATH.

I would like to see you stream a Stock KSP session where you recreate Grissoms flight with only RSS installed as mods.

(i think you have 20 square miles to land in)

Oh and do the calcs by hand on paper with only a simple calculator