Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

Until you remove social blockers that prevent women from entering tech, you cannot claim legitimacy of any social survey in regards to that. This letter belongs to a time when a generation of women are equally pushed to enter tech as men. Then we can debate whether it's their lack of interest of not.

When I was a student in computer science more than 30 years ago, in our class of more than 30 students there was only one female. There was no entrance selection or any filter or money involved (not in USA).

We are dealing with overlapping gaussians.

Girls and boys are today educated without making a difference through all their childhood, and I think that this may give the false impression to them that there is no difference. But whoever had children or has seen many children will see that some differences in behavior and interest are blattan and can't be socially induced.

I do not deny that blocking MAY exist and some men are sexists, I have seen such discusting behavior. I considr them disfunctional. But this is not 100% the cause of gender imbalance in tech.

There is no blocking to contribute to OSS, and good programmers get hired regardless of gender. You should read back the [Donner Kruger effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect) to remind you of you own bias when evaluating your competence.

I sincerely don't think that anyone is proposing that there is no difference between men and women, the discussion is over the extent of the differences.

We are dealing with overlapping gaussians.

The question is the extent of the overlap. If the overlap is very close on many abilities, men exceed women on some (like say maths), and women exceed men on some others required for a programming job (like say, empathy), then you'd expect distribution of jobs to be around 50% with slight variations. There is no indication that they vary by the amount required to explain the disparity of jobs in tech, indeed, this is easily refuted by looking at the number of women in technical jobs in the US in the 70s.

PS It's Dunning-Kruger

You should really just google 'gender difference education' and you'll see there's dozens and dozens of papers that say education is very gendered. The experience of girls in pre-college (and college too for what it's worth) is very different from that of boys.

> I do not deny that blocking MAY exist and some men are sexists... [b]ut this is not 100% the cause of gender imbalance in tech.

The "percentage" thing is something that comes up in global warming discussions too; people will ask "what percentage of global warming is caused by humans", and because the issue is extraordinarily complex, the answer comes out sounding like equivocation.

You're probably right, social cues are probably not 100% the cause of the gender gap in tech. But the issue is complex; it's not like you're gonna see a pie-chart of simple gender gap explanations and then say, "we'll just 'allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive' and crank up pair programming and part time work; that should cover 80% of it".

You can get complex reasons though, i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/dec/14/many-women-i.... But good luck fixing "balancing work-life responsibilities" and "workplace culture"; those are complex issues that deal with early education, social and cultural expectations of women (and men), federal and state social policies and workplace policies, politics, and deep-seated gender roles. There's not really a knob you can turn to fix this stuff, and that's why we don't use percentages to talk about it.

You could make your point stronger if you propose an explanation to what changed since then. It's very unlikely that men (and society in general) become more sexist, if anything we have made a lot of progress.

I can tell you what the opposing side says though. They say women had little choice back then and just did what was needed. Today women have more choice, freedom and there is less discrimination so they feel free to pursue what is interesting to them which is not tech more often than in case of men.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Studies show prenatal testosterone affects differences in that men tilt towards an interest in intresting things, and women in insteresting people. Damore has the scientific literature behind him (which others can then dispute if they'd like). Also look to scandinavian attempts to flatten out differences. Thousands were involved, and the diffrences were simply exasturbated. Interesting talk on just this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSIEs1ngNiU Loads have very much taken the social aspect into account. What I think everyone in the dominant culture seems to miss, are the relevant scientific biological and psycological findings.

Medicine and law are not like engineering. Engineering is particularly gendered; you can look at medicine and see "caregiving", or you can see law and see "people" and "social issues". It's not easy to look at engineering and see any stereotypically female attributes there.

Girls are discouraged from pursuing math and hard sciences through pre-college education, explicitly, culturally, and socially. The social blockers between girls and engineering are particularly acute compared to those between them and law or medicine. You can look at college degree numbers for example. Women now outnumber men when it comes to college enrollment and graduation, but women are far more likely to pursue "soft sciences" like psychology or sociology.

> That's the point Damore was trying to make that people don't want to hear - there might be more to the gender gap than just social blockers, and if so, we should be aware of that at the same time we're working to solve the existing issues around bias, harassment, etc.

In fairness, Damore was advocating for the ending of Google's pro-diversity policies in hiring and minority support for employees. It wasn't just a "truth telling", he wantetd Google to dismantle programs that had a dramatic, positive effect on diversity. I'm not saying he didn't suggest alternatives, but those alternatives had no basis in research and felt pretty thin. Like "[a]llow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive"; honestly what does that even mean?

Is this a common belief? Nobody I've read has claimed this, just that the known social effects are so large as to legitimise efforts to improve the situation regardless of whether or not there is some minor biological factor at play here too.

That's what I found strange about the memo. It spends lots of time arguing for the existence of biological differences between men and women and then draws the conclusion that diversity programs should be stopped. The existence of biological differences is not surprising to me or probably to the people who came up with the diversity programs and nor is it likely relevant to whether the diversity programs are a good idea or not.

Seems like a bad tack to me - staying on topic is good enough for this kind of corrective comment.

But given that, how is it possible to discuss the possibility of gender differences? Without the discussion itself being a social blocker?

I'm not sure. Certainly by experts. And certainly around debate on legislation. Also in whatever social forums allow it. Such as here. But arguably not in discussion among staff at Google or wherever. There are likely no experts there, so it all comes down to bullshit. But among senior management, in private, sure.

This point keeps getting brought up, but the actual statistics are quietly ignored.

Women make up over 40% of math and statistics graduates; A majority of accountants and biologists are women; Chemistry majors are evenly split between the genders.

If girls are socially discouraged from pursuing math and hard-sciences, why does this not actually manifest itself across fields requiring math and hard science? Does a math major require less mathematics than an engineering one? Is accounting not mostly about math and numbers any more? Are chemistry and biology no longer considered hard sciences?

I'm not saying the cause is necessarily not societal pressures, but this popular assertion being repeated ad-nausea seems to be, at best, incomplete. Women that have been told their entire lives that math is for boys seem to have no problem pursuing a higher-education in math in droves; Why?

http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor... http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-accounting https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/membership/acs/welcom... http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/28/359419934/who-s...

Citation needed.

If your theory were correct, that it is "social blockers", then you would predict that as societies get more egalitarian, you would get more equal representation. The opposite happens.

And this is not about absolute levels, this is about the direction of the arrow, which is pretty binary, and the "social pressures" theory makes exactly the wrong prediction.

> interested in tech when only a handful of her peers understand her interest

Doesn't stop the guys interested in tech. Being a "nerd" or a "geek" is the surest way to social ostracism, and yet these guys do it anyway.

> Until you remove social blockers that prevent women from entering tech

Again, this experiment has been done, on a society level, and the outcome is the opposite of your prediction: as "social blockers" are removed, you get fewer women going into tech fields.

To be honest, the "social" sciences have rarely been interested in scientific accuracy, more than they have been interested in promoting specific political ideologies.

I doubt they will consider this a problem with their "science". To them it will probably be obvious that the problem here, again, is with society.

In short: When you're stuck inside a delusion, it's everything on the outside which looks crazy.

> Girls are discouraged from pursuing math and hard sciences through pre-college education, explicitly, culturally, and socially.

The data simply does not support this statement. Take a look at [3]. Relevant quotes for you: "Girls are equitably represented in rigorous high school math courses.", "Girls outnumber boys in enrollment in AP science", "Girls are evenly represented in biology and outnumber boys in chemistry, but are underrepresented in physics." Even when it says "In AP mathematics (calculus and statistics), however, boys have consistently outnumbered girls by up to 10,000 students." this is only about a 5% difference.

> he wantetd Google to dismantle programs that had a dramatic, positive effect on diversity

What dramatic, positive effect are referring to? Google's self-reported numbers on the impact of its programs are laughable. We're talking single percentage point increases at best in percentage of women and minorities in tech positions and leadership roles [4]. Damore wanted Google to take a long, hard look at its diversity programs and have an open discussion about whether they are actually 1) the right tool for the job, 2) accomplishing what they are trying to do, and 3) making progress without alienating existing and new hires.

> honestly what does that even mean?

I thought it was fairly clear, actually. He pairs statements like that with suggestions to encourage more collaborative workplace practices, like pair programming. The idea is that Google and other tech companies should encourage and reward individuals who cooperate with each other on teams, help train and mentor each other, and actively try not to alienate anyone for arbitrary reasons. The negative alternatives are to have a workplace with a bunch of lone wolf technical workers who don't help each other, or to have a workplace composed of cliquey groups that ostracize individuals who don't fit norms (ex. "brogrammer" culture fit).

You seem to be creating your own narrative here, which I interpret to be, "women are socially discouraged from pursuing careers that don't involve at least some stereotypical female qualities, and that's why we don't see them entering tech." But the equally plausible alternative interpretation is, "women don't want to pursue careers that don't involve at least some stereotypical female qualities, and particularly don't want to pursue engineering, thus expecting there to be gender balance is unrealistic."

[1] tea.texas.gov/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=2147484887

[2] http://www.myplan.com/careers/medical-and-clinical-laborator...

[3] https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/gender-equit...

[4] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/06/29/google-d...