Slashdot Mirror
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.
What's the % of female users on Slashdot, seriously?
https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech-leader-and-i-m-sick-of-our-approach-to-diversity-17008c5fe999
This topic comes up with my wife fairly often; even more often since we had two daughters. She is a business / data analysis at a smallish multinational manufacturing company, and while it upsets me when I see this behavior directed at my female software engineer counterparts it is even worse when you hear first hand accounts from someone you care about deeply. From being treated like a secretary to having her comments dismissed, it is all behavior any reasonably educated male should notice even without having it pointed out by female coworkers.
It is often hard to give advice to my wife because I simply don't have to deal with the same obstacles. She cannot really complain about misogynistic behavior without being branded a trouble maker, and she has to walk a very fine line between being assertive or just a bitch.
A quote from Bob Thaves about Ginger Rogers sums up the plight of women in the workforce in general, and women in STEM field especially. "Sure [Fred Astaire] was great, but don't forget Ginger Rogers did everything he did backwards and in high heels."
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
most of us would want them to build a system with agents that are compassionate. How will that happen if all of it is run by men who live like we are all on an island like the Lord of the Flies?
Which seems like a stronger generalizing statement than anything I saw in the kids manifesto.
I read the memo and found it well written and I think it pointed out how the SWJ and left leaning bias at Google isn't good for anyone including the class of people that the wrong headed policies seek to help. Google is clearly all about respecting everyone's opinion so long as they are the "correct" ones.
To even ask the question to females only acknowledges that men and women are in fact different, with different views driven by biology. Well done Slashdot.(emphasis mine)
While I agree in principle that men and women have different views and there are biological differences, I don't think this post is emphasizing those biological differences. It's asking for the same reason I often ask female coworkers the same thing: they have different experiences than I do. I want to better understand the problem, but I can't do that until I know what it is, and I can't know what it is myself because I can't experience it.
These different experiences can be attributed to different views that can then be ascribed to being based on gender, but that's an indirect relationship. This post is asking women, not because of their biology, but because they're the ones with the experience. That difference is important.
Asking for views on a matter specifically from the group most directly affected does not acknowledge any differences directly. It only admits incomplete knowledge on the part of the person doing the asking, an admission of ignorance.
Yes, female brains are different -- but not in a way that would affect engineering or science reasoning.
Which leads more to: female engineers are just as good as male engineers.
But because of the differences, fewer females want to be engineers or scientists. But it isn't like 100% of men want to be engineers or scientists either.
Bad User. No biscuit!
I started to read that post from The Economist until I got to this section:
Have you ever noticed how no one takes sentences that start “I’m not a racist, but” at face value? Here’s why, in the words of Jon Snow in “Game of Thrones” (season 7, episode 1). When Sansa Stark tells him: “They respect you, they really do, but,” Snow laughs and comes back with: “What did father used to say? Everything before the word ‘but’ is horseshit.”
Seriously....they argued with the science, but quoted Game of Thrones.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Also leads to the counter-argument:
"If there is no difference between the way women and men think or operate, then it is wrong to claim that diversity would improve a company, or have any effect on business"
If women bring nothing unique to the table, then diversity becomes solely a placating effort.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
The hypothesis Damore argued against is that all gender-differences in workplace representation are due to discrimination. You only need a single counter-example to disprove this hypothesis, and Damore provided several. The Economist article doesn't even try to tackle these (in fact it seems to avoid acknowledging them except implicitly).
Instead, the Economist brings up counter-points to Damore's memo. e.g. That there are statistical differences between men and women which favor women, to counter his point that there are statistical differences which favor men. In other words, it is written as if the hypothesis in dispute was "there is no gender-based discrimination." Which AFAIK nobody is arguing except those using it as a straw man to try to justify draconian anti-discrimination measures.
Basically, the SJW crowd argued "all wood floats." Damore pointed out "hey these types of wood sink." And the Economist in response argues "well these types of wood float." Well that's nice, but it doesn't really support the original argument nor counter Damore's point.
This whole debate boils down to using gender ratio in the workplace as a measure of discrimination. All Damore is arguing is that there are other reasons than discrimination which cuase the ratio not to be 50/50. The SJW crowd doesn't want to give up this disproven hypothesis because it makes it easy to justify their anti-discrimination measures. Anyone who's published any real paper using statistics knows it's never this easy - that is why statisticians have jobs. There are always caveats and other factors you have to try your best to control for.
Sorry, but it doesn't work like that. If you don't speak up for yourself, others will decide to speak up for you; and then people will attribute that to you, and you'll have to deal with the fall-out.
If people are making an issue of something you don't think is an issue, and they're doing it on your behalf, the best thing for you to do is step in and drag the conversation back to reality. People will want to pull things far-left, other people will want to pull things far-right, and the correct place--optimal or objective, depending on whether we're debating a solution or examining the state of a problem--is somewhere left-leaning, right-leaning, or nearly dead-center. If the problem they're debating is purportedly your problem, you should probably step in before they take this problem they've invent it and burden you with it.
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I suppose it was just wishful thinking that anyone reading the site would have the requisite math skills...
Google is shouting from the rooftops that they are seeking gender diversity with 31% women, plus trying to hire even more women.
No, I think they have just recognized what lot of other companies have also recognized, which is that the gender disproportions have more to do with company and workplace culture, educational opportunities and encouragement, role models, social acceptance, and work-life balance than with any inherent biological predispositions.
Now yes, I read the paper. And I agree with some of what was written, I disagree with some of what was written. I've also read analysis by social scientists who studied the paper and they said the science aspects were fundamentally correct. But that's beyond the point.
But that skips over a few points. We aren't talking about people going to school. We aren't talking about people in school. We aren't talking about who will be entering the workforce. Instead we are talking about the numbers and percentages of people who are in the workforce right now today.
In the post I wasn't talking about biology. I was talking about math of right now today.
Let's do the math, because apparently you missed it. And lets use really easier numbers.
Right now today about 20% to 25% of the software engineer workforce is female. The other 75%-80% is male.
Let's say there are 1000 workers in the marketplace. 20% of the workers are female. That means 800 men and 200 women. Some really big companies try to look like they hire an equal number of men and women even though that doesn't reflect the actual number of people out there. They hire a bunch of women, giving them a 31% female workforce. They've 155 women and 345 men, with 500 employees total. That means 455 men remain in the workforce, and only 45 women remain in the workforce. Because that one company scooped up so many women, disproportionate from the marketplace, now everybody else in the marketplace is going to look like they're discriminating. The company who scooped up a higher percentage of women left the entire marketplace skewed, the remaining workforce is only 9% women. Companies can now either hire fairly -- getting only 9% women in their workforce, or they can try to over-hire women and leave other companies with an even worse disproportionate number of men and women in the workforce.
In this case Google and Apple and a few other large employers have scooped up a disproportionate number of the workforce in an attempt to look fair, even though from a statistical analysis it is completely unfair. Not only does their communication hurt the market as a whole (because they are wrongly stating that the starting balance is inherently unfair), but their actions hurt everyone else; nobody else can begin to approach the same percentages because the big companies have skewed the numbers even more.
If Google wants to help in the short term, they can completely ignore gender in hiring. They can hire based on merit. If more women get hired, or more men get hired, then let it be by merit alone. Statistically it will quickly balance out, merit tends to be roughly equal across large groups, so Google and every other company would quickly reach a balance of about 20%-25% women because the entire workforce is 20%-25% women.
In the long term they can start looking at the entrance to the pipe. They can look for ways to address elementary school teachers who tell little kids "That's okay, I didn't understand it either. Math is hard, draw me a picture with these crayons." They can look for teachers of twelve-year-olds who tell their students, "It's okay Jenny, most girls don't like math, go talk with the other girls about clothes." They can look for teachers of sixteen-year-olds who tell their students, "Michelle, you shouldn't be taking AP Calculus, have you considered pep squad instead?" They
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I didn't say we need 50% of technology workers to be women. But I am saying that sexism is not yet a solved issue in education or in the tech industry, and I think it's reducing the number of women in the field. I'm open to the possibility that when sexism is not an issue in education or in technology work, women still pursue the field less often than men do on average.
But we're not there yet. We have women losing interest in the field at school and especially dropping out of careers because of discrimination, harassment, and other similar treatment. And that kind of thing has a ripple effect - fewer mentors for other women interested in the field are available, and there are stories of mistreatment.
So the value of many of Damore's points are undercut by that. He points out that women are more vulnerable to stress. Enduring sex-based harassment and mistreatment while most of your colleagues do not would cause additional stress, so how many women with stress problems are simply more susceptible to stress and how many are in fact reacting the same way a man would to higher stress in their environment? I don't know the answer, but he doesn't even raise the possibility.
Damore points out that women tend to focus more on work and life balance for the sake of family, and it hurts their career prospects. But there again, I took plenty of time off for the birth of my kids and my male colleagues with children did the same, and we rearrange our work schedules for medical appointments, award ceremonies, recitals, chaperoning field trips, etc... and nobody ever used that as an excuse to deny us a raise or give a promotion to someone else. So how many women with a faltering career due to a work and life balance are actually just being punished for being women, while their male colleagues with the same balance climb the ranks?
And again, there are enough stories of harassment and sexual harassment floating around that I'm confident some portion are true. I'm sure some are fabricated and some are exaggerated, but hysterical theatrics aren't restricted to women - I've worked with delusional narcissistic men too. Most likely, a big portion of those accusations hold up - and that means a lot of people are being driven out for reasons wholly unrelated to intelligence, competence, and work ethic.
We're not even a hundred years out from women's suffrage in most of the world. It's too early to call this topic settled.