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.
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.
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
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
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.
Affirmative action isn't at odds with a merit based system. Actually is a response to a system that in general isn't merit based. For the most part for most Affirmative action complains, it is normally easy to prove the reason why a person didn't get hired was because the person who was, had superior qualifications. Affirmative action normally comes into play when their merits are nearly identical. And this is used to counter act the original existing bias.
However what is more the problem is keeping women in the field after they are hired. With such nasty Slashdot posts lately on these topics, makes me expect the general employees of these companies are making their lives difficult, not management, but the general work of the day.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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."
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?
My wife's a mathematician but isn't on /., she's answered that question to me a few times. She (of course) describes it as a numbers game.
It should be on merit in this case, but in cases where it really is a problem then an "affirmative action" can help fix problems whenever systemic problems actually exist.
In software engineering the field is about 20-25% female. Compared with many fields that is relatively balanced. Pulling up US labor statistics, look at gender distribution in nursing, childcare, education, HR, social services, event planning, civil engineering, construction, librarians, therapists, speech pathologists, hairstylists, secretaries, tailoring and sewing, painting ... all these fields have stronger gender bias than software engineering. People tend to only complain about the industries with high pay and few physical requirements; nobody seems to care that construction workers are near-universally male, nor that early childcare workers are nearly all female.
Google is shouting from the rooftops that they are seeking gender diversity with 31% women, plus trying to hire even more women. Anyone smart enough to read Slashdot should see problems with that; Google is hiring 50% over the general programmer population, plus taking efforts to hire even more than are available. That can be even worse than underhiring; they've got about 7000 more women than stats say they should. Apple similarly has thousands more than they statistically should. By overhiring they are preventing many other companies from reaching parity with the industry's gender distribution, causing even worse stigma because so many other smaller companies have no women in the applicant pool.
Gender is only one concern, but no matter the topic if the numbers are too high or too low, people should ask why that is the case. Gender, race, age, political party, and every other stat could be examined. If the company's demographics don't match the broader environment then there is a concern. It doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem, but it should still be understood if the numbers aren't similar.
Google has two glaringly obvious demographics mismatches. First, women are over-represented; they're flooding the news with "31% female" statistics instead of the 20% that is expected for the field. Second, youth are over-represented with a median age of 29 instead of the industry median age of 43. All the major mismatches should be investigated.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
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