In the absence of social factors, would women make up 50% of the tech industry?

Being a fan of personality theory and temperament theory it is doubtful based on the fact that it is primarily the NT personality types ( known as the Rationals ) that go for studying sciences, engineering and technology and female NT ( intuitive thinkers ) are much rarer than males. Something like only 4–5% of people are in the NT rational thinking category with only 1–2% being females. This, of course, does not mean that other personality types cannot take an interest in technology but usually the NT group of which women are less common, take the lead. Those with a predominant rational thinking trait are much more likely to find tech, engineering and the sciences a draw vs. those female possessed of a feeling predominance that lends itself to the helping professions.

Note interests listed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_temperament

Sooo. IMO, it has more to do with cognitive functions than simply not introducing more females to the technology field.

I’ve got the article saved. I don’t have time to read it right now, but I look forward to reading it when I get the chance!

Pre-reading, my position is that it’d be 50/50 if not for social factors. I think that’s the case for most things.

From what I remember being told (though I don’t know this in any great detail myself,) there were many women who made significant contributions to computer science in its infancy… But then computer science became more strongly gendered.

There was a study done recently that had computer programmers rate each other’s code. It found that, when the gender of a programmer was unknown, a woman’s programming tended to get rated slightly higher than a man’s. Once gender was known, the ratings flipped, even though the code samples were the same. I’m not saying this shows that women are actually the “better” gender. Rather, I think that with fewer women going into the field, the ones who make it are probably more skilled than average… And if the spread was 50/50, we wouldn’t see disparities of skill between gender. (But I also just don’t think men and women are as intellectually different as we make ourselves out to be, anyway.

[Edit: Disclaimer: I’m sure I’ve oversimplified the two pointsI brought up, but I think the gist of each is more or less true… I really should have taken the time to look these things up again to refresh on details… Oh well…]

I think it will happen eventually, sooner than later. Women are breaking the social barriers everyday and most of the establishment are OK with it. They represent just over half the population and the laws in the US have cleared the way for them to be all that they can be. I don’t remember any riots when it was publicised a couple of years ago that 52% of medical school graduates in the US were female. More power to them. Bring it on.

Without reading the document (sorry), but having worked in high tech for most of my career, I think the author is an idiot. I assume he is saying that it is innate for women not to gravitate toward tech work, but I think that’s ridiculous.

It is gender bias, plain and simple, not that women are not interested or able.

Here is one study that I think applies.

“According to The Atlantic, in male-dominated fields such as engineering and law, women with gender-neutral names may be more successful. One study found that women with “masculine names” like Leslie, Jan, or Cameron tended to be more successful in legal careers.” Source. This guiy was forced to apologize on Twitter later, but all he did was speak the truth.

I’ve read the document. It’s obviously intelligent, well thought out, and influential. Even though it has an end point being made regarding diversity, it’s just as much about being open to discussions of diversity without stigmatizing anyone who brings up the problems involved. That’s really the goal for the author, “Let’s just talk about this in the same way Google talks about other things”...

I’ve worked in tech almost my whole career, my mom worked in tech for a good portion of hers, and there’s no doubt there needs to be some change towards the field being more accepting. It needs to become the norm that women are well represented. Many of the initiatives simply push for that, more inclusivity. Claims that someone is shooting for a 50/50 split usually come from outside the people actually working towards those goals.

If we took all the numbers and reports cards away, what we’d really be working towards is simply respect for women in tech rather than representation statistics. That’s all most individuals I’ve ever talked to want. Equal footing and equal opportunities. It’s just difficult to grade “respect”.

So, to me, (and truly IMHO) it doesn’t have to be, and probably shouldn’t be 50/50 representation, at least not unless/until there’s significant changes to society outside the industry. There aren’t an equal number of women interested in tech jobs right now as there are men and for some reason it’s controversial to even say that.

My wife is a nurse, she works specifically with sick babies. It’s a well paying, desirable job, presumably without some inner workings keeping men away in large numbers. But I can count the number of men in her unit on one hand out of a couple hundred nurses. The reasons can be argued, but the result is men do not want that job in the same number that women do. I believe men can do that job, and do it well, but if there isn’t an equal skilled population to draw from, their representation will likely never be 50/50.

The same is true of what I’ve seen in many tech jobs. There isn’t as deep of a pool to draw from when it comes to women in tech and that’s where the programs mentioned come in. Those programs are great and I think it’s misstating the goals for most of them to say they’re looking for 50/50 representation. I believe they just want options and the respect mentioned above for women currently working and those who may in the future.

It’s hard to argue against that and it’s overdue. Tech culture was slow to move in this one area while being so quick in so many others, and that’s why it became a huge issue.

50% ? Hardly.
But the percent may increase.
I won’t deny that women are taught to be interested in other things rather than computers, but it’s equally possible women just don’t care about those things.
We live in times when you can do whatever you want and study whatever interests you, with much broader access to information.
Still, certain jobs dominated by one or the other gender. We still have a lot of female language teachers and male programmers, than the other way around.

I just came from an arcade with 44 people in it. It was EXACTLY 50/50. I counted.

(Note: I didn’t pry too deep. I just went with outward gender presentation)

I think that must mean something.

“In the absence of social factors”, no. Social factors affect gender differences in everything from the kinds of toys kids are given, to where and how they play, to what media they consume, to how much they are encouraged to eat, to how they wear their clothes. And that’s just kids.

We don’t even have the means to determine whether the interests of people of different gender would or could differ in the absence of social factors.

Are there any professions, that are that equal?

I would say there is no obstacle in the tech field, but I have a limited understanding of the requirements.

As a woman in tech I obviously have a stake in this and a strong opinion, but I didn’t think the manifesto was 100% off-base, and I think some people are reading more into it than what was actually said. I wanted to get other views.

The guy said a lot more than just what I put in my summary. One thing he said that I thought was a reasonable point was that conservatives feel the need to be “closeted.” It’s been true at the companies I’ve worked at and I imagine it’s true at a lot of other tech companies too – the population skews young and urban and therefore liberal. People discuss politics openly at lunch at my company sometimes but you can bet it’s all liberal in tone. If I were conservative I’d feel uncomfortable with it. Personally I think politics of all kinds ought to be “closeted” in the workplace just to make things fair. But it’s tough when your industry overlaps with political issues as mine does (I’m in medical tech; we discuss healthcare policy quite a bit).

But anyways, as for the stuff he said about women, I think it’s mostly horseshit. I would say that it’s accurate that, of people who are of a working age now, fewer women than men genuinely want to be in tech. I don’t think it’s pure discrimination keeping us out, certainly. But why don’t women want to be in tech? I definitely don’t think it’s because, as the author argues, woman brains are so different than man brains and that causes them to not tend to like STEM fields. I think it’s because the women who are alive and of working age today were raised in a society that didn’t steer them towards tech. I think if we were to magically achieve a perfectly egalitarian society this instant, in 20 years we’d be seeing equal numbers of men and women entering tech. Of course as @dappled_leaves said there’s no such thing as a vacuum so I can’t imagine how we’d test this.

As @Soubresaut mentioned, computer programming was largely viewed as women’s work at the beginning of the existence of the field – it was thought to be an extension to the typist job, and the field used to be female-dominated. The first computer programmer was a woman, Ada Lovelace. Grace Hopper was a hugely influential pioneer in the field. In the 80’s a bunch of toy computers came out that were marketed towards boys and the field has been skewed male ever since.

I wonder if those who don’t think it ought to be equal can explain further. Particularly, @Coloma, I’m curious about your view on personality theory – do you think more women are not NT because of something to do with our brain physiology or are these personality types influenced by how we’re raised? Does this theory explain whether these discrepancies arise through nature or nurture?

Oh, one other interesting item in the manifesto that I want to bring up, is that the author seemed to discount the role of socialization in how it affects women, arguing that we’re largely not interested in tech because of our biology, but then he brought up the role of social influence in attracting men to the field of tech. He said that men are judged in society almost entirely based on status, and so they gravitate more towards high-status fields. I just found that interesting, the little bit of hypocrisy in an argument that otherwise tried to be very logical.

It may seem regrettable that conservatives feel the need to be “closeted” in any and all environments dominated by educated people. But before bemoaning this fact, I think it vital that consideration be given to the reasons for this. The closeting requirement is of course necessitated by the fractious political polarization rampant in the society at large. Bluntly stated these folks are closeted due to the obtuse and decidedly anti intellectual bullshit prominent in what passes for the current conservative agenda. Unfortunately for conservatives, the reality is that on virtually any topic you care to mention, global warming, voter fraud – it doesn’t matter- the conservative line will defy established truth, as long as the former “fringe” has the wheel.

The explanations regarding the paucity of women in the tech fields are right in line with “traditional” excuses for societal inequities. I’m very suspicious of those arguments about women being wired differently than men. I think it far more likely that girls are subtly yet relentlessly deflected from technical interests beginning at an early age. I also believe that this is changing and probably faster than can be tracked. I read last week that women now currently outnumber men in the country’s medical schools.

@Mariah Personalty in inherent, fixed, though one can be subjected to certain familial and cultural/societal moldings, depending on the value systems imposed upon them, to a degree, a leopard will always remain a leopard at heart.
By nature personality type certainly lends itself to particular interests and career choices. NTs in general are one of the less common personality types, and females of the group even less so. The introverted NTs are found in much larger numbers in engineering, technology, systems development, architecture and the extroverted NTs often involved in the arts, law, engineering. social sciences and investigative work.

Of course there are plenty of people working in areas that are not an ideal fit for who they are intrinsically but in general, the closer one comes to choosing work aligned with their natural predispositions the happier they will be. I speculate that it is more about nature than nurture most of the time.

I think sometimes it’s easy to talk about these problems in large context and hard to see the decisions that have to go into actually correcting them.

Let’s say in 5 years @Mariah is hiring a new programmer to work directly under her. She narrows it down to two candidates

Candidate A is male, has 15 years experience, time at Google and Facebook, not leading teams or anything but working on major projects. He understands how those places do things and could bring that to the team. He’s moving away from the valley and looking for a better work/life balance.

Candidate B is female, has 2 years of experience working with a smaller team and would like to move on to bigger projects and a larger role, so she’s looking to move on from the company that hired her out of college.

Both have good personalities and references. Both did equally well on any testing involved. Both are strong candidates. The team is currently 85% male.

Who gets hired?

These are the decisions that we’re talking about when it comes down to it. Do you hire for diversity or for fit. And how do you promote the experience and diversity of the field as a whole if you don’t at least consider the demographics of a candidate?

If you’re candidate A, and don’t get the job, how do you reconcile that?
If you’re candidate B, and see the company further skew their demographics to male, how do you view that company, and the field as whole?

It really comes down to thousands of these decisions, which have no clear, righteous, answer. Even if we want to believe it’s simple and obvious.

@funkdaddy, those both sound like very good candidates for different jobs. If we needed a principal software engineer to serve as a tech lead on a team, candidate A would be a good choice, and candidate B would not be qualified. If we just need a staff level engineer to just help pump out code for a new feature, candidate A would probably be dissatisfied with that position, and candidate B would be a great choice. I don’t see these two hypothetical people ever running up against each other.

I think encouraging diversity in a company is less about skewing individual hiring decisions in women’s favor and much more about reaching out to women to make them aware of openings in your company. Once they hit the interviewing process they should be judged purely on merit, but it’s great to do a little extra outreach during the hiring process such as representing your company at job fairs held on women-only college campuses, hosting meetups for women’s engineering groups on your company’s campus, and other events of that nature. The author of the manifesto seems to be ardently against doing this sort of thing.

@Mariah – And those programs are definitely worthwhile and how we get away from the culture that exists right now. But also why diversity ends up being a goal for large companies, and is going to take time.

Small organizations don’t do outreach and so I end up sitting in a room having some form of the following conversation after interviews are done with candidates that include people really similar to the two mentioned above.

1: “So we’re going to hire another white guy?”
2: “He’s the best candidate”
1: “I know, but why so many white guys?”

I’d rather we could concentrate on how people are treated. The way my mom was treated and women in general are treated in tech isn’t ok. But it’s hard to draw up numbers and tracking for that sort of thing.

To be clear, the manifesto isn’t correct in my opinion. This is a problem that needs to be fixed and there’s limited ways to do that. But I can also see why hunting down candidates of certain demographics to meet diversity goals is, at it’s base, discriminatory. And while discussing that doesn’t get anything done, stigmatizing the discussion doesn’t either.

My guess is that things are changing faster than we think right now, and hopefully my daughters don’t have to jack with this particular fight in 15 years.

That’s really interesting to hear, @funkdaddy. I’m at a small organization too and have had a totally different experience. To be clear, I think we’re actually on a similar page here with our opinions, I don’t think a candidate should lose points for being a white man. And I agree that stigmatizing the discussion isn’t productive, which is why I was a little dismayed by the reaction to the manifesto by many, which was to utterly shoot it down without reading some of the nuance. I mean, I’m a lot less dismayed by that reaction than I would be if everyone thought it was really insightful and important, to be clear. Because much of it was problematic and harmful. I also agree there should be emphasis on making sure those women who do work in tech are treated fairly.

At the small software company where I’m currently working, we have an unusually high percentage of women, and I have absolutely never heard a conversation like the one you listed. I’m not saying you’re lying or that it doesn’t happen, I’m just trying to illustrate that not all small companies get high diversity by having that kind of attitude. I can cite 3 specific reasons why we have lots of women working here:

1. Early in the company’s history, we hired a woman to serve a high-up role in engineering management. Not because she’s a woman, but because she was great at it. But I think having women throughout the organization at all levels probably attracts women to our company; they can see that we’re clearly an organization where success is obtainable for them.

2. We have a female software developer who is very social and goes to all sorts of programming meetup events, both general ones and ones for women only. We offer a referral bonus and this particular woman has made sooo many referrals, of both men and women.

3. We just decided last year to get interns for the first time. One of our female software developers sort of spear-headed the effort, and she’s an alumnus of a women-only college. She put the word out to people she knew who were still on campus, and we ended up getting a lot of applicants from there. We ended up hiring two female students from that college for our internships last year, and they went back to school and told their friends about their fun internship, and we got a lot of applicants again this year from that college. And of course internships often turn into full-time jobs.

These kinds of activities strike me as in no way discriminatory but also very productive towards getting women into our organization.

Today one of my female friends who’s also an engineer sent me messages about the manifesto, and how down it made her feel. She said it made her wonder if some of her male coworkers are looking at her thinking she’s just a diversity hire and no good at her job. This woman is an absolute rock star at her job. It sucks for us every time a “think piece” like this comes out.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

This is the article I was referring to earlier when I talked about women’s participation in programming dropping off in the 80’s. I misremembered – the field wasn’t female-dominated before that, but the percentages were much higher than they are now. Check out the graph at the top.

My first reaction was that it was a strange argument. In parts, it felt a bit like he was trying to express the frustration of male gender roles… of which, on its own, I’m in complete support. I happen to think that feminism’s ultimate goal is to break down gender roles entirely (and the name “feminism” marks the origin of the movement, with women fighting for equal rights under the law and under societal expectations).

But he seemed to also need to put liberals and women “in their place”—their places being authoritarianism and weaker, respectively (because, you know, women are more likely neurotic and less likely equipped to handle stress than men are). These aren’t new arguments, and I don’t think they’re any more compelling in this presentation than they are on their own.

He presents a lot of arguments without actual support. I mean, he lists many apparent facts, but they aren’t anchored to any source or any sort of thorough discussion to establish their credibility or nuance. (I realize the Gizmodo article mentions omitting hyperlinks—perhaps, then, the statements did at least have a citation attached to them; it would be an awful lot of hyperlinks, though… So if I’m charitable, I guess I’ll give him a pass on the citation side of this.)

My father works in tech, and read this memo on his own as well. I found out when I mentioned it to him, and I thought his perspective was interesting so I’ll just summarize it here:

In short, he’s thoroughly unimpressed. He said he’s seen this kind of argumentation strategy before. He’s sure the author is well rehearsed on these points. What I was seeing as a bit of a messy argument, though having a hard time articulating, he said was strategy. He imagines that if he were talking with this person, and started to argue against one point, that person would simply switch to another. That the author has enough material in this argument to be able to keep a conversation from sticking to one point for too long. He also, as my father termed it, threw in several bones—points where he could say, “Well see, you agree with me on this. You just aren’t listening to me on such-and-such.” It’s an argument that has been designed, or perhaps simply honed over time, to evade initial rebuttals—but it’s not, in the end, a very strong argument. That’s my dad’s take, anyway, for what it’s worth.

Also thanks @Mariah for turning my earlier vague recollections into actual historical information! :P

@mariah – that’s awesome that your company has that base to start from. I think having women founders and upper management is one of the best ways to make the change. And that’s coming.

Just to clarify, most of the organizations I’ve worked with since the dot com boom/bust have been really small, with the exception of two really large ones (State of Texas and Verizon). So the largest of the others would be ~70 people total, and the average is probably 15–20. It’s small teams.

The large companies had forced diversity and I’m not sure that’s the best way. The smaller ones end up having the types of discussions I mentioned above, and I’m not sure that’s the best way either. I just know it’s complicated and just want people to try.

——

More generally

It seems the document being discussed has gotten an enormous amount of coverage and conversation, the author is fired, Google seems embarrassed, and news sites try to summarize a 10-page document by cherry picking a few lines.

One of my favorites…

a 10-page screed condemning the company’s diversity efforts and claiming men are biologically more predisposed to working in the tech industry than women

Again, I disagree with his conclusions, but is that really what the document is about?

It feels like we’re just really hungry for something newsworthy. I’m not sure this was it.

But I appreciate the discussion.

I doubt we’ll see 50/50 representation in tech on the whole. I do think we’ll actually see more women in coding eventually. We’ll still see more men in high-stress high hazard and uncomfortable jobs like construction, field engineering or trades. It’s absurd to to think that biological differences between demographics don’t affect choice of profession. Society should leave it open for everyone but should not try to influence peoples choices to fit an ideological model. Stereotypes are going to be there but individually it is generally crystal clear which people are in a particular job because they really want it.
One social factor that cannot be ignored is that even though we live in 2017 many men simply don’t have a choice but to take high paying but high stress, high risk jobs. Low stress, low risk jobs are not usually sufficient or available to support a family with. While there are stay at home dads it is still not exactly socially acceptable but with women it is still is. Socially women “don’t have to provide” and men “must provide” or at least we are conditioned to think we do. Some of that is ingrained into biology so we’re probably not going to ever see a 50/50 representation on a high hazard construction site. I’m not opposed to programs that encourage women but what we have now are actual quota systems, some of which are mandated by law. I feel this is very wrong. If the reality is that women simply don’t want specific types of jobs then that’s what it is.

I didn’t ask about 50/50 representation on a high hazard construction site, I asked about tech. Men and women have physiological difference and I’m not denying that, but tech is not a physical job.

But….thanks.

Tech encompasess these things too. It’s not just coding or doing drawings in an air conditioned room. I know many female engineers but only one female field engineer. I know many electronic technicians and only one of which is female. I know two female electricians out of like 100. I would like to think that it’s all cultural and some of it is but I think we’ll find there is some organic gender preference. I feel like PC culture wants to stamp out any idea that this could be the case. What if it is?

The problem is that we don’t know yet, and until we counteract the socialization that steers women away from tech, which is what diversity initiatives such as women’s-only coding classes are designed to do, we won’t find out.

But even suggesting that could be the case is potentially career/political suicide. You don’t see a problem with the culture? Don’t you think quota systems and special accomodations for diversity reasons is a little condescending to those in the minority? Does this not actually strengthen some of these stereotypes? Whats wrong with simply systematically killing stereotypes and leaving it up to ability and qualification?

Your boy Damore didn’t merely suggest this though, he presented it as fact and then asked Google to change its policies based on the assumption that it’s true.

If you read above you’ll find that I’m in favor of judging candidates on merit once they’ve hit the interview process, but also of doing a little extra work to find women to interview.

I’m also in favor of programs such as women’s only computer classes because I found it more than a little disheartening to walk into my intro comp sci course and find that I was one of three women in a 70 person class and that half of the men had already been programing for ten years. I found it very helpful, not condescending, that my college had a group called WiCS (women in computer science) that I was able to join. Men weren’t banned from that group, by the way, but the focus was on women. I also found it very empowering when my college paid to send me to the Grace Hopper conference for women in computing sciences. Damore thinks this kind of stuff shouldn’t exist though.

He’s not my boy but he is a victim of PC culture out of control. It’s very damaging and toxic to everyone. I’m sorry you’re not able to see it.

I agree that Google took the wrong path, though I strongly disagree with the premise of the “manifesto”. The proper course would be to ignore the author and concentrate on shredding his argument. Don’t fire him. Reward him by accelerating the programs chasing parity.

http://thewisdomdaily.com/women-used-to-dominate-tech-until-men-pushed-them-out/

In the same article, Admiral Hopper told the magazine, “Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming,” because, as she put it, “It’s just like planning a dinner . . . Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it.”

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Companies used personality profiles to screen for applicants with anti-social tendencies, a stereotypically male trait, after two prominent psychologists observed that programmers shared the “striking characteristic” of “their disinterest in people.”

—-

These sort of assumptions aren’t any better the other way around, right?

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There wasn’t much you could do with home computers in the early days. They were essentially toys; you could play games on them, and perhaps do a bit of word processing. And these “toys” were marketed almost exclusively to men and boys.

I had one of these computers, my parents put it on layaway at Kmart instead of getting me an Atari that I really wanted. They weren’t marketed as toys, and I wrote thousands of lines of code on that thing learning from magazines and books published to teach it. Here’s some ads, we can judge for ourselves. From what I see, if there’s a trend, they seem to be marketed towards families with children. Maybe a slight bias towards men (and I admit that’s my own bias as well, so happy to be presented evidence of being wrong) but the message seems to be consistently education and family oriented for their home ads.

There seems to be at least a touch of revisionist history here. In the 80’s and 90’s, for the majority of society, it wasn’t cool to use the computer for more than games. Nerds/Geeks/whatever weren’t cool until recently. That said, there were about as many girls in the computer camps I helped with, and girls/women on the first local BBS boards I got on. I don’t believe access was the problem, at least not for early education.

CS was seen as more akin to electrical engineering than it is now, maybe it would be worthwhile to dig into women in engineering as a broader topic.

Why do women leave engineering – MIT
Women in Engineering – Factors Leading to Lower Participation

If it was simply the marketing of personal computers, you wouldn’t expect similar drops from other areas of engineering, but participation seems about the same.

I wanted to share an article that reminded me of this question, but I can’t find a copy of it in full, for free, on the internet.

It’s was in the newest Scientific American, which is focused on sex and gender.

It’s titled “The Brilliance Trap” in print, and The Brilliance Paradox: What Really Keeps Women and Minorities from Excelling in Academia online.

In short, the authors (Cimpian and Leslie) found that the single most significant predictor of women and African-Americans receiving PhDs across 30 academic disciplines, as well as sub-fields within each discipline, was how much emphasis the discipline/sub-field put on the importance of “brilliance” or “genius” (as an innate trait)—the more the discipline or sub-field emphasized “brilliance,” the fewer women and African-Americans there were to be found in it. Other common explanations (e.g., mathematical ability, preferences for work-life balance, or interest in people-oriented careers vs. careers involving “inanimate systems,”) didn’t come close… Nor did factors like the content of the discipline. The authors go into more detail, and explain the ways they cross-checked their findings.

Previous studies have shown that children typically acquire gender-based stereotypes at 6–7, and are typically without them at age 5. Leslie and Cimian looked at children between 5 and 7 years old, and had them assess the intelligence of members of their gender. They found that ”[m]ale and female five-year-olds showed no difference in their self-assessment. But by age six, girls were less likely than boys to think that members of their gender are ‘really, really smart.’” The authors also “introduced another group of five-, six- and seven-year-olds to unfamiliar gamelike activities that we described as being ‘for children who are really, really smart.’ We then compared boys’ and girls’ interest in these activities at each age. The results revealed no gender differences at age five but significantly greater interest from boys at six and seven years of age—which is exactly where we saw the stereotypes emerge.”

Their research suggests that: “Given the current societal stereotypes, messages that portray this trait as singularly necessary may needlessly discourage talented members of stereotyped groups. [. . .] Another key takeaway is that we may need to intervene earlier than conventional wisdom suggests.”

The full article is a better read than these fragments, of course, but that’s the gist…