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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.
Maybe you should post the question to a website with fewer trolls. I suggest 4chan.
Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even if I practiced for years to try and catch up.
I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness. Also benis.
It seems there are no female engineers on here...
What's the % of female users on Slashdot, seriously?
Dear female engineers,
Do you prefer affirmative action or getting the job on your own merits? In other words, do you prefer equal outcomes, or equal opportunity?
https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech-leader-and-i-m-sick-of-our-approach-to-diversity-17008c5fe999
Here's the Google diversity training Damore seems to have been reacting to.
"Google's Bias Busting @ Work | Facilitator Guide"
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yNBCAro6b-S1KifD6PnZWrlyBZ_kEFGWPtUkIpvFljk/edit
I read this article (see bottom of thread), felt like screaming and then felt compelled to write about my experiences and thoughts on the matter. ****I am a women in Information Technology and I have been doing this since 1995. Actually, even before that time since I worked at a computer camp at age 17 teaching BASIC computer language. ****Before there was oodles of money in IT, I rarely experienced prejudice and sexism in my job. I loved what I did and all of the guys in my field were very nice and helpful. They were collaborative and fun to be around. I never felt out of place and I did what anyone else was doing without anyone blinking an eye. When the dollar signs started to increase a lot of men must have thought "Well, I could like Tech if there's money in it." and started studying CS in school. Later, they would emerge into the dotcom time where money was flowing like honey. The boys club moved into my world and it has never been the same. **** I've been marginalized, badgered, stalked, ostracized, been the center of vicious gossip, denied work expenditures, had someone digging into my childhood and family and had IT peers hack into my home PC turn it on and listening to private conversations. Sadly, the list goes on and that last item is more common than you would believe. Note that that kind of voyeuristic behavior would have had someone in jail before the 90s. (Just creepy if you ask me.) 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. ****This hierarchy that these guys have created is brutal. They are each testing boundaries trying to find out where they fit in and the weakest and most insecure pick on women. They pick on women because first and foremost, it bonds them with other men. Secondly, they do it because they can't hack being at the bottom of the pecking order and a woman is a nice target. Woman will often say nothing in a blind attempt to keep the peace. And if they do say something, they become a bitch. Which of course fits in with the first item mentioned, it bonds them with other men. ****So, what does this have to do with Information Technology? NOTHING! Yeah, that's right. Nothing! So, all of your money, all of your private information, all IoT (Internet of Things), all of your Security is exposed to this lot of people! Hence why this guy was fired. Google is smart enough to realize that they hold information about ALL of us. Male, female, straight, gay, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, transgenders etc. And guess what, we all want a say in who has our information and how it is used. We all want them to show empathy with our personal information and lives. And if Google, Facebook and IBM etc. are experimenting with AI, 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? So, I beg everyone to think about these ideas. We cannot afford this kind of behavior at the height of an epoch of science and discovery that has the tell tale signs of a change that will effect all of human existence as we know it. As for James Damore and his so called manifesto, his call for the elimination of empathy in IT is so short sighted that I can barely believe it. How can someone with such intelligence be so blind to how dangerous that would be. Hey wait, I answered my own question. He's on the island of The Lord of the Flies, that's how. He's not thinking properly. http://www.businessinsider.com...â¦
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
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.
I am never anything but appalled by the majority of comments on Slashdot any time a topic related to females comes up, so I cannot imagine why any woman would respond to this. I know that I wouldn't want my daughter to ever have to interact with the kind of ignorant male jackasses who seem to constitute the majority of posters on Slashdot.
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.
These guys have the perfect women for you. (first link NSFW, second link probably NSFW unless in Japan)
#DeleteFacebook
Long story short: nerds are cool, jocks are jerks?
#DeleteFacebook
the whole point was there aren't that many women to speak up.
Frank W. Miller
But please read the full memo with links before settling on an opinion. I was listening to NPR just two days ago and they resorted to straw man arguments and condemnation without being truthful about what it's contents were. Also keep in mind it was written as an internal reply in response to a specific request by google for controversial thoughts on improving workplace diversity practices.
I am sorry to hear of your experiences.
As a cis white male in his 30s teaching CS at a university, would you have an opinion of what I can do to help the situation?
Do you believe that your inability to organize your writings into paragraphs may have adversely affected your employment prospects?
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.
It's the new perpetual frontpage story!
I sent my wife, who is an engineer (AND is a female, FYI), a link to this post to make a comment. Here's what she texted back: "They're still going on about this on that crap /.? I don't have time to comment hun!"
Yes, we're happily married. :)
I would complete with: "...and jocks on IT are extra jerks because they want big bucks by playing the nerd. Not even nerd status is safe anymore when you want a man that treats women with the respect they deserve".
But I would still not generalize it. There ARE disgusting, deuchebaggy nerds and always have been. That's the problem with sitgmas and stereotypes - they're flawed by definition. Christinagirl1 shows a nice view over time of her overview on tech, but you still can't extrapolate universally. Every situation should be analyzed ad-hoc
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!
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 has been going on through both dem and rep administrations.
Well, they ALL want to come here, trust me. Through a system of evil and well-thought out artificial barriers Slashdot has managed to keep them at bay by blocking all female engineers with user imperceptible OSI layer micro-blockers.
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
brains are very close when it comes to most types of work. not related to work that can be performed, men do have a slight edge due to slightly larger brain. this has actually caused problems to reinforce their false beliefs of superiority, as has their economic status which is what men really use to stay ahead. the thing is engineers are not doing that advanced of work anyway, it might make absolutely no difference because they are all working on kid stuff. it's kid stuff we don't even need done on earth. we could kill off all engineering jobs and the world would keep living.
what was wrong is the arguments made by this male engineer forgot the political and economic issues holding women back. they are poorer, have less property and money, and going back in history men mostly white originally crafted the laws to own women and black slaves. women did not own property, the males did. the title deeds all read white male ownership. it was not until later black slaves were freed but were still slaves in the sense they had to work under rich white men in a system of capitalism. women eventually got the right to work, and vote, and even obtain college education but they suffered the same issues. they still had less money and property, and the white rich leadership favored keeping the money in house. what this means is women cannot get elected easily to top positions in government (you have to be a millionaire+ female to get elected), women do not get raises as much, women are forced into different types of jobs where money is offered such as modeling and sex work (partly by choice), etc. the framework for this is installed into laws. laws are very permissive of this keeping the power in the hands of rich people, mostly men who inherited their wealth unfairly from mistakes designed into the first governments.
Modern formatting was bleeding edge stuff about 1300 years ago. Get with the times. :p
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
This is simple unprofessional behavior, unacceptable, period.
If these children cannot act like adults they should be fired.
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.
I get what your saying cloud.pt, I try not to do that but it can be difficult. I do know some misogynists that are nerds too. Overall, the field has changed a lot. I think the whole world has changed in what is being found as acceptable behavior in regards to privacy and just plain manners. I think what really rings true in my head is that these companies are inadvertently paying people to harass one another. And this memo was a way of doing that, though he tried to disguise his point with points from studies to validate himself. Google might want to reconsider trying to get everyone to think of their campus as home, because it appears that people have gotten a little too comfortable and have forgotten that it is actually a publicly traded company.
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
There has been tons of opinions asserting that the brains of females and males are not different in any respect and that there is no reason a female can't be a brilliant scientist or engineer.
There might not be physical differences but they definitely have different wiring. But yeah that's no reason a female can't be a brilliant scientist, engineer or whatever really.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
All I can say, is have them all read threads like these on Slashdot! Get them prepared and teach them to stand up for themselves.
When less than 50% of the responses to this question are female, we should investigate what slashdot can do to make the site more balanced, with an equal number of male and female users.
Because obviously any disparity is due to the inherent sexism of slashdot.
Maybe refuse to add male accounts until we have an equal number of females?
bad ass. so the fact that the boys and girls both live in poverty by default, helped create the good old boys network of women and coworker harassers to get ahead. all those acts you describe them doing would be an effort to steal jobs and get ahead at all costs. competition and capitalism. it sounds like men are generally doofuses but it's probably the fault of capitalism making them that way (our world from moment we are born promotes the behavior).
https://www.trumpsweapon.com/
Stop referring to yourself as "cis"? It just creates more pointless divisions.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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
Female engineers, could you please revisit this topic on Slashdot, yet again, to generate a big spike in ad traffic? In a week, we'll ask male engineers to say what they thought about what the female engineers thought. Because this definitely hasn't been discussed yet, and female engineers certainly wouldn't have participated earlier, not until they were asked to. Really?
They'll be asking for nazi's opinions next time, that'll really get the clickbait going.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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.
Do an MRI and compare. Just like in the rest of nature, human gender is a biological construct in all aspects of physiology. However it is also noted that it's not a clear black/white division you can strike, just like with the rest of biology, there are variations across not just a 2D but a multidimensional spectrum.
Objective truths about it are never going to be accepted by either sides. There are good engineers and bad engineers across all of the gender spectrum. Hire according.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I'm male and work at one of the giant software companies. I don't know what it's like on other teams, i've been on the same team my whole career, but i can say that at least on MY team, i haven't seen nor heard of any woman being treated as anything other than just how awesome she is. We have female engineers, female QE, female managers (who USED to be engineers or QE), and, IMHO, they are awesome at what they do. A best of the best white box QE lead is a woman, and she kicks everyone's ass, we're all like "i can't figure out how to repro this bug, we should give it to !". All the men just love and utterly respect all the women, and vice versa. Maybe i'm in some insulated fantasy bubble, but nobody on MY team acts like the neanderthals we're referring to in this post, and i wouldn't have it any other way.
UnknownSoldier, proper noun, - a slashdotter who finds it necessary to have a directory of names to call people at the foot of his post. The irony of one of them complaining about Ad Hominem labels is apparently lost on him.
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.
Just because a woman is a woman, it doesn't mean she has any background in gender studies or any special understanding of gender issues.
It's just her opinion and experiences.
my CS classes in high school and university between 1990 and 1997 were easily 95% men. In later years, maybe 90% men, so my experiences of a pre dot-com utopia for equality in tech is the opposite of hers.
But then you saw the same in metalshop, welding, electronics, carpentry and other technical fields. Her insulting stance that the bias is a money issue is just sexism.
I found the entire document objectionable.
One of the big problems with discussing this manifesto is that most men have been focusing in on the fact that he cited studies and he used a lot of language that could be reasonably interpreted as "positive." He also claims to be for diversity as long as it is still "fair."
Here is my problem: the entire manifesto is predicated on the assumption that Google's diversity efforts are discriminatory towards white men and are actively harming the company. Neither of those two assumptions is backed up with any evidence. On the other hand, there is abundant evidence across all sectors that simply changing the name on a resume to a female sounding name or to a black sounding name reduces the number of callbacks you receive on that resume. There is also abundant evidence that the software industry has enormous bias against people who are not white men, and it goes far beyond just hiring practices. Women and people of color are less likely to be promoted, to earn similar pay, to have their startups funded, to receive recognition for their work, etc.
There is a trend happening right now where white men feel like their personal challenges are being marginalized. The reaction are things like this memo, or the white lives matter group, or the men's rights associations, or the group of men trying to form a class action lawsuit about the handling of rape investigations on college campuses, or ... the list goes on. For possibly the first time in history, it is possible that a white man MIGHT be discriminated against and suddenly discrimination is the MOST URGENT ISSUE. Forget black people being shot by police, forget the massive pay and gender gaps in the workplace, forget every real challenge facing the world because Google's anti-discrimination policies might, possibly, maybe, cause a white man to miss an opportunity.
The entire manifesto comes across as tone deaf and is essentially one guy screaming "BUT WHAT ABOUT MEEEEE?" Ten years from now or ten years ago we would probably be having a different conversation but context matters.
First off ...Anonymous Coward, this is a thread and not a creative writing class! If you cannot understand that...you are the one with the issue and should get off the internet. Secondly, if you had seen what I created the comment in, you would understand. And lastly, I have written a book and I am published. Have you?
I'll add one more thing. You don't scare me! If you think you can bully me with your comment you've got another thing coming. So for all of you reading this...it's this kind of little jerk that's the problem. Are you trying to invalidate someone else so you feel better? Take my advise, it never works. Why? Because you still will get up in the morning and look in the mirror and fall short. So why don't you fix it and get a constructive HOBBY.
Marie Curie is one of my science heroes, and I posted some of her quotes the other night after at the Heterodox Academy discussion of this. I thought I'd repost them here as a bit of a break from the rest of the arguments over the memo. Also, if you want a great descriptions of why Marie Curie is so cool, look here:
http://www.badassoftheweek.com...
Anyway, Enjoy!
âoeBe less curious about people and more curious about ideas.â
âoeIn science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.â
âoeLife is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.â
âoeYou cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.â
âoeNothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.â
âoeI am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.â
If you were a guy writing your wall-of-text diatribe, this would be the point where women would tell you to Man The Fuck Up and stop being such a crybaby.
Ya know what, I was not thinking of that when I wrote it. Was kind of being creative and spontaneous in an informal setting. But, I suppose I should have written it in a way an imbecile could read it.
When was that? IT has always been well paid (if you're any good at it, helpdesk not so much), if you had actually been there...
That's a tell, someone is repeating mythology. 'Lord of the Flies' in the office? I'm sure it happens, but I'm also sure those places implode shortly after. It's hardly common.
C- try harder.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Ah the old, I'm comparing you to Nazis so I WIN argument.
Sound SJW logic at it's finest.
Hello, moron. He's talking about the actual Neo-nazis in Charlottesville. Take a look at the some of the pictures, the KKK and Neo-nazis were there in force and costume. One of the guys is even wearing the hood and white robe while posing with his buddies. If someone calls themself a Nazi, adores Hitler, and advocates for the eradication of the Jewish people, I think it should be pretty uncontroversial to call them a Nazi.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
godrik, you may want to look at the comments further down the thread. It's a wonderful example of bullying behavior. I am going to try to only answer the positive comments now. I'm getting drawn into the negativity. Not good.
Modelling and sex work also tends to be highly paid while requiring no formal education, and at least in western countries women choose to enter such professions because it pays well, and aren't forced to do so.
These opportunities are typically not available to men.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
First off, one thing I have seen over the decades is that women, in general, are better at multitasking than men. Likewise, men , in general, maintain a stronger focus. As such, men tend to do better at coding than women. By the same token, women are better at management, going from low all the way up to VPs, since they will handle a number of different task at the same time ( ceo typically have to focus on a single issue and solve it).
Secondly, there are 2 issues with my first point. Many women/men break these molds . Plenty of women that can focus, and men that multitask. In addition, we do NOT know the reason for this. Is it genetics or training. It really could be either way.
third, the diversity issue has nothing to do with being conservative or not. Diversity programs are simply a program to capture top ppl that traditionally would not jump into that position. If they put quotas on it, then you have an issue. But just having a diversity programs by itself is NOT an issue, and esp not a political issue.
fire suit on.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ad views, duh.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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 start scrolling, and all I see are the usual suspects.
Guys, a) shut up, or b) you prove the point of shutting down women.
Oh, and one of my daughters is a better programmer than you.
No, the other AC was making a joke. All you had to do was say you posted from a tiny mobile device. People understand that. Don't turn things into personal insults. No one stands up for other people when it seems like they might get flamed from the person for doing it.
It sure grabbed your attention, didn't it? And that, was my goal. So, while you may not care for my style, at least I 'manned up" uh, woman'd up and used my name. How about you? Oh wait, that is your name. Anonymous Coward! Pleased to make your acquaintance. Oh, one more thing. Despite your perspective, I don't have to be perfect for the likes of someone like you.
Nice miss of the point.
There has been tons of opinions asserting that the brains of females and males are not different in any respect and that there is no reason a female can't be a brilliant scientist or engineer.
So, where's everybody?
One possibility is that the women noticed that CS/engineering is pretty biased against women, even if just implicitly (orchestras noticed that when you do blind auditions women score much better; women do better in acceptance of open source code submissions when gender is not known.) High-skill women switched to equivalent high-paying jobs (medicine and law,) where there is less implicit bias because of more objective measures of competence (e.g. MCATs, LSATs, the bar exam.)
I'm a little confused as to how you could have a diversity effort to include employees from groups other than white and asian males without excluding whites or asian males. You have a finite number of employee spots available... how effective would such an effort be if it didn't weigh individuals from the minority groups you are targeting more heavily than whites or asians?
I'm not even saying I object to the effort but to argue that providing a handicap number to minority groups you want in the company doesn't somehow result in candidates less qualified by the objective measurements you use to evaluate candidates.. that doesn't seem logically consistent to me. -Unless you're simply saying that in the rare cases more than one individual is equally tied and qualified you want to pick that from the group who's numbers you are trying to grow.
It follows then that other than the rare case of a tie above, you have the objectively less qualified candidate.
He's not wrong. Within LGBT... communities, transsexuals are usually outcasts and treated with hostility. Even bisexuals aren't seen as true members of their community. The classic example of such conflict across different groups is gays being repeatedly told to wait their turn, now is not your time, etc. during the civil rights era. Just sit back and hang tight, we're dealing with racism/sexism now, and we need to stay on message. You'll get your turn, and then we'll support you. (And of course that support was nowhere to be found.)
That mentality was real and it held gay rights back a few decades.
High-skill women switched to equivalent high-paying jobs (medicine and law,) where there is less implicit bias because of more objective measures of competence (e.g. MCATs, LSATs, the bar exam.)
More objective measures of competence? That is a bold statement. And, besides that, I am not so sure that medicine and law requires the same skill set as software programming or engineering. I think that even medicine requires different skills than law.
Moreover I do not think that those are good example, because law and more so medicine requires a lot of empathy, which is linked to the neuroticism Damore spoke of.
It doesn't matter if the brains work differently as long as they work comparably well.
If two people can solve the same set of problems using different strategies, they are both competent at those tasks.
Personally, I don't care if men and women end up with 50/50 representation in any particular field. However, I very strongly believe that the environment should not discourage that outcome.
There are cultural problems for women in STEM fields and men in education/child care. Not everywhere, but the complaints are frequent enough that the problems need to be addressed systematically.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
The same argument could be made to keep women out of law and medicine. Until Title 9 laws in the US in 1972, women were less than 10% of the students for either profession and even less of the practicing professionals. In 1974 they were 22% of the students. Today they're 50%.
If sexism wasn't "solved" in law and medicine until the last few decades, why is tech any different?
But we have a smoke screen around neuroticism. If you're mistreated on your job - ignored, shouted down, harassed, sexually harassed, passed over for fairly earned promotions - you're more likely to develop nervous problems.
So Damore's argument that neuroticism is a factor implicitly assumes that sexism is a completely solved issue in the industry. If he's wrong - and I would contend he is - then he's confusing an effect with a cause.
....can we please be sure we're actually talking about what he wrote, and not what "everyone says he wrote"?
It seems there's a pretty sizable difference.
Gizmodo stripped all links, charts, footnotes, and data from the document before tearing it apart. Other sources (including the Economist & the BBC) blithely go with the 'he stated women aren't capable of doing the work' which is complete bullshit.
-Styopa
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.
For example if you go back far enough, women weren't veterinarians either, but now the majority of people enrolling in these degree programs are women, almost to the same extent that men enroll in engineering degrees. Does this now mean there is sexism here we need to correct? Of course not, it just means that women are more interested in being vets.
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.
Unless the complaints ore just from complainers. If I complain that the ocean is too salty, does that mean we have to make laws that will force companies to remove the salt so I can go swimming in it? Sometimes complaints are just that. What if I start complaining that there is only 20% men in veterinary fields. Should we stop hiring all the good women that want that job and hire more men so we can get it up to 50/50? And don't forget, veterinarians make more money starting out than programmers do. Am I just a complainer that has no point, or should we correct something that needs to be addressed systematically. Just like the lake of 50/50 representation in prison. We need more women in there also.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
It would be interesting to see how many men have suffered from that in IT. I know I have.
I didn't find the memo sexist at all, but then again, maybe I'm not reading the correct version; people keep saying that he wrote that women are less well-suited for software engineering and I can't seem to find that section. Did Gizmodo edit that part out along with all the links?
Touche. Well played.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Help! I'm being held prisoner in a Chinese fortune cookie factory!
I was mentioning this to the wife recently, "Before there was oodles of money in IT."
Prior to the tech-explosion, there were geeks that were into computers, and anywhere's from 25% to %50 of the computer-related courses were populated with women, depending on the course in question -- math, logic and statistic courses tended to be more diverse than the purely programming side of things.
Yet now, IT can be one of the best paying jobs available, and our fields have been invaded by the commons and alphas.
The problem is that the argument is not intended to 'keep women out' it is questioning the 'orthadox' idea that general population percentage is a good metric for determining the level of minority groups expected to be the population of a specific field. The same argument might be used to explain why are there are fewer straight male nail salon artists. After all shouldn't we apply or logic equally? isn't being straight just as much a protected class as being LBGTQ and being male just as much a protected class as being female. So why are there no protest, legal actions, initiative ect to correct the obvious evil hiring practices which are excluding straight men from the nail salon business. The reason is pretty simple, there is not actual discrimination the potential employment group is discriminating against the employer / career.
So the best way to show the argument false would be prove that the percentage of applicants for engineering positions was about equal to the general population.
If it isn't then the question is why? Does it have anything to do with the people who we are expecting to hire not wanting the job?
( Quick note, my next door neighbor is a straight man who runs a nail salon business, so that's who I was thinking about.)
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that men and women do have different interests that may account for gender disparity in tech. (Even if you only look at research cited by Damore, plenty of research has shown that more fundamental gender differences can only account for PART of the disparity, but let’s put that aside for a moment.)
Question 1: Let’s say that, all OTHER things being equal, we’d still have fewer women in tech jobs. This would just be a statistical bias. What women are interested in, on average, is not really relevant to the individual women who decide to go into tech, despite perhaps a majority of other women not wanting to do the same. *How could this have any impact on recruiting women into tech?* What could possibly be wrong with encouraging women to get into these professions (even aggressively)? I’m not talking about biased hiring or career advancement, just going out there and making it not difficult for women who ARE interested in tech to apply for those jobs and demonstrate their competence.
Question 2: Based on Damore’s memo and things he cites, I infer that workspaces have evolved to suit the needs of MEN. (And based on some other recent discussions about ageism at Google, they have evolved to better accommodate YOUNG men.) *But what could possibly be wrong with giving employees the ability to adapt their work environments to better match the needs of WOMEN?* Ideas in the memo touch on things like making the environment more social, and pairing people up to do coding together instead of always giving people isolated cubes or offices. Not only might this benefit women, but I know plenty of very social men (such as myself) who might enjoy doing pair-coding and other kinds of more cooperative approaches to engineering. Ultimately, it may be best to approach workspaces in a way that facilitates *anyone* adapting the space to their needs, and the fact that current work environments are statistically less suited to women is only a vehicle to highlight a more general problem with cookie-cutter workspaces. (At the same time, we should not try to generalize women out of the discussion. Men have dominated for a very very very long time. It’s about time women got the chance to make some demands and mold things to their tastes.)
Question 3: Finally let’s put gender bias back into the discussion. We’re not denying it exists. It’s just that people like Damore are tired of feeling accused of having unconscious biases and being made to feel bad about them. But what Damore’s memo does is cast doubt upon the extent to which bias is a factor in disparity relative to other factors. Ok, so there are lots of factors besides bias. *Nevertheless bias exists, so what could possibly be wrong with working to eliminate the bias?* Even if it were only 25% of the problem, it still sucks!
Please read the actual memo before commenting on it. The media have persistently lied about what the memo says.
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.
There you go, with your male lack of empathy! You are going to bring on the Terminators!
but to argue that providing a handicap number to minority groups you want in the company doesn't somehow result in candidates less qualified by the objective measurements you use to evaluate candidates [...] it follows then that other than the rare case of a tie above, you have the objectively less qualified candidate.
You're making the false assumption that looking for more diverse candidates inherently means lowering the talent pool and giving a handicap. However, based on the many engineering interviews I've conducted, the non white male candidates do just as well at the same rate; I just happen to see way more white males come through the door.
I see two main reasons for this non-diverse pool:
1. In pure numbers, most current employees are white males, most candidates are referred by current employees, most people will try to refer their friends, and most people are friends with people of the same race and gender. This compounds pretty quickly to create a candidate pool that's largely white male, and recruiters have to work harder to find somebody who's not.
2. Based on discussions and public statements from my female and minority friends, I know with certainty that, as a direct result of callous culture, lack of fair career advancement opportunity, and especially threats to personal safety (yes, seriously), staggering numbers of women and minorities choose to leave certain positions, tech as a whole, or even the entire job market, because that is objectively a better choice for them and their families.
Part of diversity hiring is convincing qualified people that it's safe for them to exist.
If you listen to people who have been working for several decades, you will regularly hear that it used to be better, until suddenly it wasn't.
my CS classes in high school and university between 1990 and 1997 were easily 95% men. In later years, maybe 90% men, so my experiences of a pre dot-com utopia for equality in tech is the opposite of hers.
She did not say that there were more women in IT then than there are now (although I understand most statistics to confirm this). She said that the field had less male assholes in it. And from my temporally limited experience since the late 90ies I would tentatively agree. How is your perception? How were those 5 to 10% of women in your classes treated by the male participants?
The money argument is something that I cannot confirm but also would not dismiss entirely. IT has indeed changed significantly – from a purely academic field to an exotic adventure park for nerds and misfits to a serious multi-billion dollar cut-throat industry with enough economic leverage to blow most nation states out of the water. And its culture has changed with it.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Harvey Mudd cracked the code. They figured out ways to get more women interested in computers.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
3. James has a Ph.D. in Biology. What are your degrees?
Argumentum ad authoritum aside, Damore lied about his Ph.D.
"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."
That's absolute gibberish. Statistically significant differences won't manifest in large workforces?
Unless you believe either that 1. neuroticism has no negative effect in the workplace, or 2. that Google is far better at selecting less neurotic women from the general population than at selecting less neurotic men from the general population.
You don't scare me! If you think you can bully me with your comment you've got another thing coming. So for all of you reading this...it's this kind of little jerk that's the problem. Are you trying to invalidate someone else so you feel better?
That escalated quickly.
Truly amazing, isn't it?
My first IT job paid me 26K per year in mid 90's. Plus bonus. I then moved on to make 38K. Then 42K. Left for the Valley and jumped to 97K plus bonus to 120k during dotcom time. Big jump. Happily. As for the rest, I've seen a lot of it and so have many of my peers and friends. If you have not, consider yourself fortunate.
I'm not saying all men in the industry are treated fairly. I'm just saying that if women are more likely to be mistreated specifically because of their gender and unrelated to all other factors, it will cause more problems for them on average than men experience.
It only makes sense to focus on jobs with high pay, right? Men don't work in daycare as often as women, either - but I've never seen a daycare employee driving around in a Mercedes, either.
Running a nail salon business is different. That can be lot more profitable than working in one.
I'm not saying women definitely should be a half or even a third of engineers. But I think as long as there is still measurable sexism in the industry, we're comparing two uneven things - men who choose to be engineers and don't deal with sexism at work, and women who choose to be engineers or who might choose to be engineers and some non-zero attrition rate in education and in their career due to sexism. When we've had a hundred years of sexism-free society and women are still 20% or less of engineers, then we can declare that the difference is innate to the sexes and stop studying it.
If you go back far enough, women weren't permitted to be veterinarians. So they had a minority position in the field due to sexism.
Since it isn't even a hundred years since women gained the right to vote in most of the world, I'd say it's too early to say sexism is a solved problem. It's entirely possible women will become the majority of engineers naturally (i.e. without diversification programs and other boosts) if sexism is eradicated.
On the other hand, there is abundant evidence across all sectors that simply changing the name on a resume to a female sounding name or to a black sounding name reduces the number of callbacks you receive on that resume.
Most of this is anecdotal evidence, or fake resumes "to test bias", not real resumes and real people.
Here are some real life results.
Hear, hear butchersong. I've been badgered for so long that sometimes I can be a little harsh myself. I need to think on this further and then I will answer your questions in more detail.
That contrary to its propaganda, Google does NOT like diversity of opinion.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
What if you argued for years that they are exactly the same thing. No difference.
Then, when became advantageous to argue that they WERE different, you changed you mind, or just ignored the contradiction and argued for both sides?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Yep.
Yes, that is my observation.
I've consulted into many businesses. Many more than you can possibly have worked for. 'Lord of the Flies' is very very uncommon. Sure indication that the boss is a psycho and the business is doomed. I love to find them when publicly traded, but still more uncommon than dysfunctional small businesses.
First jobs pay for shit. In the 90s, 26K implies working in east bumfuck with a very low cost of living. I made 100k+ in the mid 90s. I know I couldn't have hired anyone competent for that price at that time. I made 50K inside my first year, in the mid/late 80s. But I had to admin Netmare and code Dataflex (spit), so they were getting their monies worth.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The last year I was in grad school, the Computer Science department was having a crisis. There were no female grad school applicants, none. Contrast this with around 40 males (of which Asian and middle eastern nationalities were over represented). The solution is not to force people into equal outcomes based on local populations because it's simple, if you want to do equal outcomes at least have a pool that reflects actual interests.
The real solution is to fix the problem before it becomes one, during youth. Many of the issues around diversity revolves around opportunity. Give scholarships, and perhaps a stipend if they support thier family, to promising youths of low income in disadvantaged areas. No need to discriminate on race or sex either as the people who fit this will be stastically far more likely to be the ones affirmative action or women's programs are intended to help. Further more can be done to nurture and cultivate interest through role models, providing opportunity will make these efforts more effective as they will be within reach. The money spent will fix so many auxiliary problems with society that it is insane not to spend it this way.
Equal outcome before opportunities is like trying to cure STD years after the fact instead of providing free vaccines, education and condoms. It also serves to unite and inflame bigots like the alt right and undermines and cheapens those who really did earn thier positions on merit.
As a graduate student / teaching assistant in the late 1970s, it seemed like a third of the computer science students were female - and I noticed, having come from an engineering school with an 11:1 ratio. CS was useful in all sciences, and education, and business - not a purely tech subject. It was also new and open to all comers, seen as moving away from the engineering side (though again my own background was from that engineering side, and I've worked in embedded systems rather than business applications). This was still the days of Users' Groups yet before the anonymity of BBSs, and it seemed like the heyday of cooperation. I concur that things have gone downhill personality-wise as it became bigger business, and the Open Source "community" has as much show-off competition as useful cooperative product. (Even allowing for some favorite utilities existing because someone said "I can do that better", and did, the fact that those were allowed do wither and die because there's no glory in keeping things running is an ongoing problem.)
If you haven't experienced assholes at work, you've been lucky. If you haven't experienced M&A disasters, and companies folding under you, ditto.
We still have consistent, reliable, measurable sexism in the technology industry. So that is almost certainly a factor in the way that Title 9 had a lesser impact in this industry than in others. For whatever reason, the fights against sexism in law and medicine made progress faster than they did in ours.
When we've eliminated that as a factor for decades and there is still a trend in favor of one sex, then we have interesting data. Until then, James Damore's arguments are shots in the dark.
Even if the brains are different on average, that means nothing because we shouldn't care about the average but about the individual. Who cares if the average fora certain trait is different between mean and women when the variances are so huge? Some women are better at engineering than the average male and some women are worse, so anyone who uses these averages as a rationale to discriminate is being a fool.
So many people claim that technology jobs are a meritocracy which is patently false just be looking around at all the dumb people who get hired. So using meritocracy as a reason why women aren't in technology is also a foolish response.
Who cares if there are differences? We WANT differences in the workplace. We do not want a million clones of Bob from IT. We want a variety of skills, and a variety of ways to look at problems and solutions.
The differences causing fewer women to want to enter the typical computing workplace are sociological, not biological. Women used to be very common in computing, and computer operators would have more women than men, but over the decades this has declined. Public attitudes are probably the biggest factor at work here. In my view the biggest change that can be made is to change these attitudes, treat the technological workplace as appropriate for women, tell daughters that they can grow up to like computers, tell boys to stop pushing out the girls, figure out what is discouraging women from taking these technical majors in college in fewer numbers than in the past.
1. This is an informal thread. For someone who's supposed to be so intelligent, you might have noticed that fact.
2. Thanks for noticing the issue with the link.
3. I don't have a Masters degree from Harvard, does that make me a pissant? No it does not. I have friends that do have a PhD's from Harvard, and well, they think I have some intelligence, so I guess that validates me a little. You know, coming from a State U and all.
4. I'm glad that 4 scientists agree with Demore. There are nearly 6 million scientists and engineers in the US alone. I would say globally, several million. Let's take the US number. So, your 4 scientists work out to ...OMG, its infinitesimal. Hmmm, infinitesimal is a great word, its like " You know, I've always liked that word... 'gargantuan'... so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence. " -Elle Driver
I'm guessing you are not a mathematician, because you would not be so impressed with that number if you were. Get back to me when you've interviewed at least 10%.
Though there were some points that appeared to be injecting some form of nicety to dull the huge slap in the face, it did not work. The undercurrent and spirit of the memo was noticed. I guess we women are not that ignorant after all.
So men being bullied is ok then because we're bullied for other reasons?
First of all, stop identifying as a "cis". It's a ridiculous label created by leftist to further divide us. You're either a male or female.
Why don't you just go all the way and get rid of all labels and simply say you are a person (until we get AI, we are all people right ;^)
It doesn't matter if the brains work differently as long as they work comparably well.
If two people can solve the same set of problems using different strategies, they are both competent at those tasks.
That was not the point of the memo, which didn't argue about competence.
The question the memo poses is not: "Can men and women solve this problem comparably well?".
The question actually is: "Are men and women equally attracted to solving this kind of problem?".
In Australia, women are now in the majority In the legal profession, an outstripping men at the entry level 2 to 1. However, they are still a minority among barristers (who specialise in court work), who are required to be self employed.
In tha past few weeks I have been In a court with a lot of high school legal studies classes coming into the gallery. There the girls seen to outnumber the boys 10 to 1.
If you go back far enough, women weren't anything men did at a level much greater than zero. I think that what is going on here is that fields have opened up to women and those looking for this kind of thing are saying "if this field is equally open to men and women, i.e. there are no formal barriers to entry, then the demographics should be 50/50. If the breakdown is not 50/50 then there must be some other factor denying women access to those roles."
.5 seconds slower than the fastest high school boy at 10.00s. Playing against men in four PGA events Michelle Wie never even made the cut, much less win. If some significant portion of the economy was dominated by women people would say "men are better at X and women are better at Y and we all get along accepting our differences." Instead we have "men are better at X and in the things we can measure women are almost as good as men, but not." Since we can't measure "coding aptitude" or "engineering prowess" like we can time, weight or distance we look to these places for equality, when it may or not even be proper to do so.
What Damore has done, in whatever ham handed way it might have been perceived, is ask the question "Is it possible that there are reasons built into what it means to be male or female that might explain this difference as opposed to it being the result of oppression?" He, of course, had to be destroyed by the "there must be equal representation crowd" because the alternative is unthinkable and unacceptable, even if true.
I felt he actually attempted to qualify his statement when he talked about height. Saying that men are taller than women on average does not prevent there being a tall female or short male, only that in general men are taller than women.
I personally believe that with all the undeniable genetic physical differences between men and women that to claim our brains are somehow exactly equal is illogical beyond comprehension. Just because there are differences shouldn't mean one or the other should be pushed toward or away from a particular field. It would mean, however, that judging participation on demographics alone is the wrong way to go.
The real problem is there there is no thing economically valued by society that women can do measurably better than men. The fastest woman in the world's record 100m dash, 10.49s is
(I can't wait to see the comments or where this gets modded.)
1. This is an informal thread. For someone who's supposed to be so intelligent, you might have noticed that. 2. Thanks for noticing the issue with the link. 3. I don't have a Masters degree from Harvard, does that make me a pissant? No it does not. I have friends that do have a PhD's from Harvard, and well, they think I have some intelligence, so I guess that validates me a little. You know, coming from a State U and all. 4. I'm glad that 4 scientists agree with Demore. There are nearly 6 million scientists and engineers in the US alone. I would say globally, several million. Let's take the US number. So, your 4 scientists work out to ...OMG, its infinitesimal. Hmmm, infinitesimal is a great word, its like " You know, I've always liked that word... 'gargantuan'... so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence. " -Elle Driver
I'm guessing you are not a mathematician, because you would not be so impressed with that number if you were. Get back to me when you've interviewed at least 10%.
Though there were some points that appeared to be injecting some form of nicety to dull the huge slap in the face, it did not work. The undercurrent and spirit of the memo was noticed. I guess we are not that ignorant after all.
Oh, and by the way, he does not have a PhD from Harvard. But, I still think his points should he noted.
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.
I don't think the point of insisting on diversity is to improve a company. No one gives a rat's ass about any company, other than the one they work for. On the other hand, I'm fairly sure that the goal is to improve society as a whole by improving the lives of those who have been treated the most unfairly; which is to say, to put an end to gender and/or race-based discrimination in terms of hiring, promotion, and compensation.
In other words, they punish the people who actually know what they're doing
Not really. Unless by punish you mean they have bigger class sizes.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> "Pro Choice and Pro Life" -- can you have both at the same time? I believe so.
Are you really that fucking stupid???
How do you "half-murder" a baby???
Murder is a pretty binary operation. To kill or not to kill. There is no imaginary third choice.
If women bring nothing unique to the table, then diversity becomes solely a placating effort.
It's a big jump going from the GP's "women make just as good engineers" to "they bring nothing to the table". In raw thinking terms that may be right. That said I have yet to see a field of Engineering or even an individual project where raw thinking was done in isolation, and women and men definitely work differently on an interpersonal level.
Well, you might have asked where I was living! And...I was paid 30K less than my peers with more experience. That being said, why do you find it necessary to put me down? Couldn't you say you're sorry that I felt that way and that I must have been a junior at the time. Which I was. No, you had to infer that I must have been bad at my job to be making so little. "I know I couldn't have hired anyone competent for that price at that time". Really? In THIS post, that is asking for women to relay their experiences, you felt it necessary to do that? Wow. Here is the DOL figures for 2016. 21 years later than the dates I was referring to. Scroll on down. I'm sure a lot of people around the country that would stumble upon your comment are going to look at you as pretty entitled. And well, I'll refrain from saying what I really think for now. https://www.bls.gov/oes/curren...
Agreed.
Ha ha. Yeah, I feel like it was the a different life. I remember my SLIP connection in college. The UMN Gopher and Mosaic was all anyone was talking about for searching. I got "Internet in a Box" which was really over the top to me. I felt as if it would be so cool to have an item to click on and receive information about it. The other biggie was the databases of gifs in Sweden at the U of Upsala I think it was. Either way, we had lots of pride in keeping things up and going and loved to share information. Alas, things do change.
You started the discussion, claiming IT was recently a low paid, 'lord of the flies' environment...I don't buy it, then or now. Called (shenanigans/pushing a narrative), I stand by it, I was there at the time. It's always been well paid. The first computer 'gold rush' was in the early to mid 80s. It wasn't all that different from now.
Does 'lord of the flies' simply mean you didn't get enough 'validation'? Am I being mean to you? Toughen up. Hint: The non-apology: 'I'm sorry you feel that way' is itself a veiled insult. From a male perspective, that's not a phrase you'd use on someone you have any respect for. It's formulaic trope to calm hysterical women.
That nobody competent would work IT in any major city for 26k in about 95 is just history. It's a nice training wage, but if you knew what you were doing, you didn't know how to negotiate salary.
I _am_ entitled to every penny I can squeeze out of the bastards. Let me quess...'lord or the flies'? I hope you never have to work outside IT, you'll be shocked.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"We're trying to get more swimmers in the ocean, by telling them it's full of sharks" Their motivation is not actually getting more women into tech.
"And from my temporally limited experience since the late 90ies I would tentatively agree. How is your perception? How were those 5 to 10% of women in your classes treated by the male participants?"
Normally they were treated like everyone else. Sometimes there was a geek who fawned over them, other times there were guys lining up to "help" her. Women varied in how they responded. I made a point to treat her just like anyone else. Some of these women became my friends, some of these women I never talked to. Just like any other student.
But the worst was when she was singled out in the class and asked a question like: "as a female in technology, can you share your thoughts?"
This reinforced that her that her presence was unusual, that opinion on gender issues was special, that she should be able to come up with a reason as to why she shouldn't be there, and that she should list these to her peers.
It put her in an extremely awkward position that told the rest of the class that she spoke for her gender, that her successes and failures were indicative of "women in technology", that her presence was, intentionally or not, political.
But despite most teachers being clueful about this, and despite 100% supervision during classes, and despite it being the early 90s, there was rarely a girl who enrolled in a highschool course in CS. I don't know why.
Boys clubs? I never actually saw one. I've only read about them in magazines. It seems to be the new thing people are talking about since a certain douchebag CEO made the news a few times in Silicon Valley.
women do better in acceptance of open source code submissions when gender is not known.
And you know what? Men too! And actually, if I was as intellectually dishonest as the media who reported that study, I could focus on one graph, ignore the rest and say that it's even worse for men.
Look at the left graph of the first figure: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016...
Science proves that github is sexist against men!
Your entire class may enjoy this very inspiring speech from Admiral McRaven.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Pretty much every time he wrote "I'm not X but ..."
Assuming men and women's brains are indeed no different then surely diversity makes total sense. Rather than recruiting the top 10 men for your job you can have the top 10 people - it only makes sense to limit the recruitment to a specific group if #10 in your chosen group is better than #1 in the excluded group.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Discrimination is only a problem in fields that pay well. Law, medicine, technology, research.
You don't see anybody screaming that more white men and women should be employed as farm workers in California, and the fact that they aren't is racial discrimination. The only people that take those jobs are people who can't find anything better.
No numbers in your 'study', not even percentages
That you're too blind to read is not my fault.
Quoting the linked page:
"The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview.
Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door. "
and it's maybe 250 words.
Your ability to estimate is terrible too. Removing the colophon, all headers, key points and captions, the text is 469 words.
And if that's not enough for you, that you're too lazy to follow a link is not my fault either.
It links to the study as the only text link, so it should not have been hard to find.
Your article is a textbook example of garbage "journalism" and apologism.
Any data disagreeing with your cemented views is garbage and any publishing of it apologism?
This is a week old account which has only posted on topics about the Google memo.
Is there a problem with that? A possible simple explanation would be that the memo - and all the offensive reactions to it on /. - spurred her into creating an account. And newbies don't get a karma boost, so if it made it all the way up to 5, I guess it deserved it. More than some other score:5 posts, to be sure.
Most of the posts appear to be badly copy/pasted.
I grant you copy/pasted - she said so herself - but the "poorly" could just be a display of unfamiliarity with slashdot's HTML-ish formatting, consistent with the account being new. That and not using the preview function. Shame on her and also on all slahdotters that regularly don't preview their posts. Oops, that seems to include me. Look, a squirrel! *sneaks away*
I tried to read it but it's an impenetrable wall of text.
Maybe try harder - while not everyone will agree with all her points, it's an interesting read nonetheless.
Also, I'm sorry to say so, but this statement is an invitation for the trolls that seem to have been following you around lately and like to poke (puerile) fun at your "reading skills". Then again, maybe you don't/shouldn't care.
On the other hand, there is abundant evidence across all sectors that simply changing the name on a resume to a female sounding name or to a black sounding name reduces the number of callbacks you receive on that resume
This isn't "all sectors" though, this is the IT industry. In this industry, the evidence suggests recruitment outcomes are better for women. e.g.
http://blog.interviewing.io/we...
Not just the IT industry either:
https://pmc.gov.au/sites/defau...
. Women and people of color are less likely to be promoted, to earn similar pay
You have evidence for this? I have evidence that suggests otherwise:
http://media.dice.com/report/m...
Forget black people being shot by police, forget the massive pay and gender gaps in the workplace, forget every real challenge facing the world
Oh no! A population group is demanding the very fucking same equality that everybody else is demanding and suddenly it's wrong?
By the way, there are no massive fucking pay gaps in the workplace and I really can't be arsed providing links to the 78 studies that demonstrate this so you'll just have to take my word on it - or try actually showing some fucking evidence of your own instead of a hate filled sexist racist rant.
No wonder you found the entire document objectionable, it challenged your bigotry.
It never stops amazing me how some people have nothing better to do than spinning the most far-fetched fantasies about people they come across online.
Oh wait... AC on /. Never mind, carry on.
If only the link he shared had included somewhere within those 250 words a hyperlink to the department that did the study, taking the competent reader to a page that doesn't just give you direct access to the full writeup, but also summarises it and offers you downloads in multiple document formats.
If only.
( https://pmc.gov.au/resource-ce... if you were too lazy to check)
Comical. You post an impenetrable blob of text, someone posts a joke and you response with
you are the one with the issue and should get off the internet
The only thing that could be more comical would be if your book was on self awareness.
If you think you can bully me with your comment you've got another thing coming. So for all of you reading this...it's this kind of little jerk that's the problem.
Wait, who is the bully here?
That's absolute gibberish.
Yes, scientists are notorious for assuming knowledge from their audience that may not be present. Here are a couple of hints for you: what do we know about correlation and causation? What might that imply in terms of transferring an observed correlation from the whole population to a non-randomly selected subpopulation?(*)
(*) In case this is gibberish to you to, tough luck, I don't feel like explaining. That, and you might want to consider taking your talking points to the Yahoo News or YouTube comment sections.
Ad authoritum is a bullshit cop-out.
You don't ask a Prof. of Basketweaving about Computer Science problems.
The point is he _STILL_ knows more then armchair critics such as the OP.
I've seen those joke responses to many men too. Are you suggesting that women lack a sense of humour, or that treating them the same as men is a bad thing?
it was also a snide put-down intended (at least in part) to de-legitimise her comment
No. It wasn't. What sort of fucking paranoia are you living under that you could remotely think that to be the case?
Ad authoritum is a bullshit cop-out.
You don't ask a Prof. of Basketweaving about Computer Science problems.
You were claiming his fake Ph.D was in biology, remember? We probably shouldn't ask him about Computer Science problems then either.
The point is he _STILL_ knows more then armchair critics such as the OP.
He knows more about faking things apparently.
> 1. This is an informal thread. For someone who's supposed to be so intelligent, you might have noticed that
No one loves reading a fucking Wall-of-Text. Making excuses for shitting formatting is still an excuse -- informal or formal is an orthogonal issue.
> 4. I'm glad that 4 scientists agree with Demore. There are nearly 6 million scientists and engineers in the US alone. ...OMG, its infinitesimal.
> I would say globally, several million. Let's take the US number. So, your 4 scientists work out to
Quantity != Quality.
McDonalds serves BILLIONS. That doesn't make then experts in _quality_ food -- only cheap, shit food in _quantity._
Of those ~6 million scientists how many have a degree in Biology? You don't ask a Prof of Basketweaving how do Computer Science. Why would anyone pay _any_ attention to yet-another-armchair critic instead of the experts ???
But let's keep talking about things that don't matter and ignore the issue the term "diversity" is an oxymoron and coming to conclusions that are NOT mentioned in the paper.
I'm a bit surprised everyone!
/. for a question like this I'd expect a tire fire.
Usually if I bother to look at the comments on
Other than that one "Anonymous" woman claiming to be every woman. (Be careful how you word things. I know that's maybe not what you meant, but it's what you said.)
Regardless, as many others have said, affirmative action is useful in cases where there's a systemic problem keeping certain groups out of a field. (be it women or other classifications of people)
Where a true meritocracy would see a distribution which roughly matches the population, a false meritocracy (a boy's club or clique) often over-represents one group. Here it is usually men, as they advertised the first personal computers mostly at boys when we were kids in the 70s or 80s.
Numbers of women in computing roughly matched men right up until the personal computing boom, when it became a bit of a boy's club.
If you grew up a boy, chances were that there were a nerdy group of lads at school you could talk computer stuff about. You'd challenge each other and encourage each other.
Girls didn't see the same encouragement. They were often met with scorn, or encouraged to do other things with their time. Any accomplishments they did achieve in computing were probably diminished by their peers or their parents.
Girls in computing either had to be friends with the boys, which can seem insurmountable for nerdy women who are attractive, as the boys often fail to believe you can be smart, or they had to go it alone. (Also the other nerdy girls probably don't think you want to hang out with them.)
Fast-forward to college and you're left with a lot less experience tinkering with focus, and probably big gaps in your knowledge.
Imagine you had to do 12th grade algebra having missed grade 9-11. That'd be pretty harsh, no matter how smart you are.
This is the particular problem we're trying to solve here. It's a systematic problem. Encouragement at every stage is the only answer. (By encouragement I mean removing barriers as well.)
In the work-place it can be a similar problem in that a subconscious bias encourages women less in the field. The ones who did make it through the extra hurdles to even get to the job interview aren't always weighed equally. You can see this in the difference between numbers of grads versus new workforce.
I hope this helps clear things up.
Oh God, why can't I get laid, while any woman can choose to do so and be paid for it to boot?!
FTFY
Disclaimer: yeah, I probably do deserve to be modded down for being grossly offensive and insensitive to the plight of unattractive males who live in their mom's basement. Do your worst, I'll still be giggling like a madman.
Women ARE different, but I've come to believe that the non-physical differences are caused by the cultural/psychological adaptations we've had to make because we're smaller and weaker than men. It would be nice if we didn't have to adapt any more, but I don't see that happening Real Soon Now. Still, more stuff is open to women now than when I was young, and that's a good thing. Onward and upward.
I'm ashamed that whining is apparently one of those adaptations.
The Google guy didn't say that we're unsuitable or inferior, just that we tend to have different interests etc. I don't disagree with anything he said.
Of course they're fake resumes. You aren't going to find lots of people with essentially equivalent qualifications of assorted races and sexes. With fake resumes, you can come up with a pack of resumes, and vary the names you put on them as you send them to companies.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"Cis" doesn't create pointless divisions. The pointless division already existed, in the form of discrimination against trans people. "Cis" is just recognizing it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There are a lot of people who say that fields have opened up to women, and with no formal barriers to entry the gender disparities reflect the real preferences of men and women also. The truth is going to be somewhere in the middle, since there doubtless are biological preferences but there's still discrimination.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Just because a woman is a woman, it doesn't mean she has any background in gender studies or any special understanding of gender issues.
It's just her opinion and experiences.
Isn't that basically what James Damore got fired for?
I haven't read every comment, but it looks like yet another rehashing of the same back and forth as in previous threads and it seems to be exclusively men sharing their thoughts. Do we not have any women on this forum? For the men participating in this, let's pipe down for a sec and hear from women, as the posting suggests.
Alexey
Of course they're fake resumes. You aren't going to find lots of people with essentially equivalent qualifications of assorted races and sexes. With fake resumes, you can come up with a pack of resumes, and vary the names you put on them as you send them to companies.
No, some studies have used real applicants and applications, but changed or blanked the names before handing them to the reviewers.
We're testing two different things here. The apparent 'contradiction' between the results of the two testing regimes might not amount to any contradiction at all.
With fake resume studies we are isolating gender as an independent variable. With gender-blanked genuine resumes OTOH, we are perhaps testing instead which gender generally already possesses the greater portion of relevant qualifications and experience for the particular position. So while at first gloss the BETA study seems to contradict much of the fake resume work, on reflection that is not necessarily so. There may simply be (and likely is) a higher proportion of more qualified men at the relevant level which difference (modest though it appears at ca. 3%) could mask any putative gender preference.
Now there are other considerations of course, eg, in an agency culture where an equal opportunity is already well established, blanking gender relieves the anxiety of including too many of any particular gender on the interview list. Also the nature of the position needs to be considered as not all fake resume studies show a preference for men (from memory a test on child-care worker positions showed one of the most extreme gender preference response ... strongly in favour of female names). If something about a position would recommend to people's preconceptions of what fits particularly female talents, again blanking would be expected to favour men.
However, just by itself, the likely difference between in qualification/experience of one gender (esp. at more senior levels), means that the effects observed in genuine resume studies cannot be taken to contradict the effects observed in those studies where the effect of gender is isolated in purer form.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I take offense to that. I have been both a jock and a nerd since I was small child, you insensitive clod!!!!
:)
Just kidding, I don't take offense so easily, and yes I was one of the biggest nerds in my school and a star football player.
While my lunch time was spent playing Magic the Gathering, my evenings were spent at football practice or lifting weights. Afterward I would play games on my computer.
If this is all you've got...no wonder you lash out! The part I find really funny is that in the early 90s you could barely get a man to type something. You know, it was referred to as a woman's job! Now the misogynist IT types (not all) are all fucking experts in writing, formatting and typing. LOL. So predictable.
True! I was managing and merging systems and networks in several M &A's. Quite interesting to see the array of characters that emerge from that kind of stress and fear. The knives were out and many of the work friendships dissolved.
Fair is fair, and equity between the population is fair.
Woman are 50% of the population and we're grossly underrepresented in countless areas of society. I don't give a shit about "brains are/aren't different" or whatever other hand waving people use to rationalize doing nothing to keep the status quo that benefits men. It's wrong, and you know in your heart of hearts that if the situation were reversed, men would be starting wars to change it so it was equitable.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
Right when I think it is hopeless, my faith is restored! Thanks. It's inspired me to write the blurb below. I look around me, and I see how women are treated in other parts of the world and compare it to these ramblings in this thread and it saddens me. It saddens me because I don't see that the mindset of some of these men are very different from those oppressors in the Middle East. The only difference is that we in the West have experienced the age of Enlightenment and most of us agree that all people have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That includes women. So while all of the haters are spewing their crap, I ask them to look eastward, maybe that is where they belong. Because the West, has other plans and it's called equality. https://www.history.com/topics...
I KNOW!!! It's as if a larva sac of them just opened and they oozed out and proliferated.
Did I lash out? I simply made an observation. Try to be rational even though it goes against your biology. Why don't you do like the women in tech at google who took a day off over that memo? Because reading something that goes against your dogma is just so upsetting.
To be fair, AmiMoJo generally doesn't strike me as the misogynistic type - quite the contrary. My best guess is that he (or she) really got ticked off by the lack of formatting in your message; one tends to get that sort of thing with nerds (the target audience of this site, even though it's not prominently advertised as such anymore). Since the problem persists in your more recent posts, just in case you don't know:
- Slashdot will ignore normal line breaks, but if put <br> somewhere in your text, it will act as a "soft return".
- If you start a paragraph of text with <p> and end it with </p>, you get an effect like "hard returns" between paragraphs.
- More generally, you're supposed to use an (anemic) subset of HTML for posting on slashdot. It got so anemic because it used to be a popular sport to exploit any and all HTML features to annoy others.
- Anyhow, when in doubt, you can use the "preview" function to see if your post is properly formatted.