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Ask Slashdot: Female Engineers, Could You Please Share Your Thoughts On the Google Memo
Reader joshtops writes: The widely circulated memo written by software engineer James Damore has become the talking point across companies in Silicon Valley, and elsewhere. In an interesting take, The Economist on Tuesday argued with the scientific or otherwise assumptions made by Damore. I was wondering what female engineers -- or females in other STEM beats -- think of the memo.
somewhere around 0%
There are women here at Slashdot who work in technical roles within a variety of industries, and we're tired of all of this bullshit.
When we go to work, we don't want to be subjected to these kinds of arguments.
We're there to work, to make money, and to go home. That's all there is to it.
We don't want to waste our days arguing about genitalia, sexual preference, racism, and transgenderism.
Yes, there are some unproductive people in major corporations and the media who wish to push their left-leaning political agendas on the public at large.
But we want no part of it.
And you know what? It's no different here at Slashdot.
We come here to learn about new technologies, about new scientific and mathematical discoveries, and to discuss computing.
We don't want to waste our days arguing about genitalia, sexual preference, racism, and transgenderism.
We just want this bullshit to end.
We want those on the political left to stop trying to divide society into small groups based on arbitrary traits.
Or at the very least, we want everybody else to ignore the divisions that the political left are trying to create.
We need to work together, regardless of what our genders are, or what our sexual preferences are, or what color our skins are.
We need to stop letting the political left divide us.
We just want to do our jobs, live our lives, and not be subjected to all of this bullshit from the political left, whether it's at work or whether it's at Slashdot.
Note this is a biased sample*. They are the 6 current or former engineers that I associate with, they are very confident and assertive. They all agreed with Demore. They have experienced minimal sexism from other engineers. 3 of them don't mind working as the only woman at a location. They all thought women on average had different job preferences than man. They also thought job security was more important to women than men and that if they were not so good at what they did and guarenteed to always have jobs they might not have been in their current careers.
*Sample - 5 CS and 1 mechanical engineer. 1 is now in finance and 2 are software managers.
This is a week old account which has only posted on topics about the Google memo. Most of the posts appear to be badly copy/pasted.
I tried to read it but it's an impenetrable wall of text.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Considering how forceful and near-universal condemnation from women and women's groups in and out of tech has been to the memo, it is extremely difficult to believe that this Ask Slashdot was submitted in good faith. Particularly in light of the extreme ease of finding high-profile responses. Here is a (small) sample from a simple google search:
https://www.vox.com/the-big-id...
https://www.vox.com/first-pers...
http://fortune.com/2017/08/09/...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
https://patch.com/california/m...
If you really are that out of the loop, that should inform you pretty well. If you're begging the question, then the quantity of vile reactions in these comments have likely confirmed that it was worth it. I hope it is the former.
But, the good guys are still there and they are somewhat left behind as well. They quietly watch the bullies from the Lord of the Flies and go about their business.
I have seen this happen and as a man it can be hard to speak up. You get accused of political correctness, and excluded from anything remotely fun because you are labelled a killjoy. Sometimes it goes the other way, the guy being a dick ends up ostracised, it really depends on the workplace.
Hence why this guy was fired.
I think it was more to do with his unwarranted conclusions. He has been debunked by the authors of the very papers he was citing in the memo.
"Women as a group score higher on neuroticism in Schmittâ(TM)s meta-analysis, sure, but he doesnâ(TM)t buy that you can predict the population-level effects of that difference. "It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. Thatâ(TM)s a huge stretch to me)," writes Schmitt. So, yes, thatâ(TM)s the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore."
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I am not a female engineer, but I work in a scientific field (biomedical research) that is at gender parity. Medicine is at gender parity. Chemistry is at gender parity. Women are even well represented in the computational subdivisions of these fields. These are not the "soft" sciences they might have been 20 years ago; this is quantitative, computationally intensive research. I know women who can put together an fMRI from scratch and write the algorithms for novel data analysis. There is no question that women can and do excel in technical and scientific fields. The only question is why the CS and IT, particularly the Silicon Valley start up culture, actively drive women away.
Did it say anything about women being inferior to men
Yes. To quote directly: "higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance"
There is no qualification. He takes that as a simple statement of fact and proposes solutions based on it.
The author of the source he cites to back it up says that the conclusion is unwarranted:
"Women as a group score higher on neuroticism in Schmitt's meta-analysis, sure, but he doesn't buy that you can predict the population-level effects of that difference. "It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That's a huge stretch to me)," writes Schmitt. So, yes, that's the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore."
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Here's a long interview with an actual female engineer at Google. Some of the best quotes:
During an internal discussion about the memo, "One of the women put her hand up and said, 'Look, I’m a conservative. I completely disagree with everything he said, but I’m still a conservative. And I don’t feel like I can’t voice that opinion here'... Google really does have an open culture of debate, I think."
"It’s hard because I think he couches so much of his document as if it’s fact, when it’s actually not. There’s so little evidence in there. And it’s all really opinion. And the whole argument is couched as, 'Well this is fact.'"
"there were parts of my Google existence internally that I was like I’m going to have to delete this for the fear that someone is going to take this and post publicly and screw me for speaking out against this."
"I just really want us to think about why we’re not asking the women at Google how they feel about it because that to me is the root of misogyny right there. We’re not even asking them to participate in the debate about an issue that directly affects them."
I think you need to check your stats on Medicine. Health and social workers are overwhelmingly more female. I'll use my own country as an example: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/table...
Construction is male dominated 7:1
Natural resource harvesting is male dominated 4:1
Manufacturing is male dominated 3:1
Transportation (trucking) and warehousing is male dominated 3:1
Education is female dominated 2:1
Healthcare and social assistance is female dominated 4:1
It's almost like women don't like to hunt or gather, but rather nurture, heal, and educate. Must be something wrong with these numbers though, that can't be right.
Full disclosure, I posted in the comments section in the article you linked, but my comments are still being held in moderation because they are detected "spam" (this appears to happen any time you provide a lot of links for references with discus). In any event, you can see the thread here:
https://disqus.com/home/discus...
Regarding expert's opinions, the discussion at Quillete has been good and includes very good comments from David P Schmitt, who is one of the authors that James Damore quoted.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/0...
There's also been a very good meta-analysis of studies being performed at Sean Stevens heterodox academy:
https://heterodoxacademy.org/2...
And a very good back and forth between Adam Grant and Scott Alexander here:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017...
You probably need to break the categories down further. I bet that men and women tend to choose different specialties within law and medicine. Also we don't know that in even more time that there won't be majority women in those fields.
This has already been done. It is shown as a chart in the document and I will type in the relevant percentages for the medical fields for people to see them directly.
Specialty --- M% --- F%
Obsetrics/Gynecology --- 15% --- 85%
Pediatrics --- 25% --- 75%
Psychiatry --- 43% --- 57%
Family Medicine --- 42% --- 58%
Internal Medicine --- 54% --- 46%
Radiology --- 72% --- 28%
Anesthesiology --- 63% --- 37%
Emergency Medicine --- 62% --- 38%
Surgery --- 59% --- 41%
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Let's talk about medicine. Women make up roughly 47% of medical school graduates.
Yes, lets talk about medicine. Particularly the different specialties in medicine. And if we collect them based on if that specialty deals with the equipment and high risk, or if that specialty deals more with people. If you haven't read this paper, then you really should. The more egalitarian countries in the world show larger diversity, but places like China and Iran, have 50/50 split in gender for work.
Specialty --- M% --- F%
People Based
Obstetrics/Gynecology --- 15% --- 85%
Pediatrics --- 25% --- 75%
Psychiatry --- 43% --- 57%
Family Medicine --- 42% --- 58%
Thing Based
Internal Medicine --- 54% --- 46%
Radiology --- 72% --- 28%
Anesthesiology --- 63% --- 37%
Emergency Medicine --- 62% --- 38%
Surgery --- 59% --- 41%
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
No one had a problem with these statues and flags until the left started making it an issue in the past year or so.....
These statues and flags didn't exist until 50 years after the civil war when the "state's rights" narrative and the resurgence of the KKK (thanks, DW Griffith!) arose. So first point, their existence is itself revisionist history.
Secondly, they have indeed been consistently disputed since at least the end of segregation and Jim Crow, which is probanky the first time in history that the African-American community didn't have bigger things to concentrate on. It's only now that all the powerful segregationists are dead that there is enough political will to actually do it.
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