Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

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.

I'm a huge proponent of the principle of charity, but I found it impossible to apply to the Google Memo. Not because I'm deeply mired in political correctness (I have a range of views people in my circle consider right-wing) but because it's so badly reasoned it makes it hard to presume good faith on the part of the writer.

Damore points to studies showing that, e.g. women are more agreeable and more people-oriented. From that, he concludes women on average are less likely to prefer programming. We can diagram this reasoning as follows (the arrow with the line through denotes a contraindicator):

Women -> (agreeable + people-oriented) -> [???] -\-> programming

As you can see, there is an unstated premise:

(agreeable + people-oriented) -\-> programming

Damore's argument thus reduces to a bit of begging the question. We assume that programming is a "masculine" profession. Thus, being agreeable and people-oriented, which are feminine traits, must be contraindicators for preferring a career as a programmer. We have no studies that show this--we just assume it.

Edith, by the way, demolishes that assumption: "For example, students and professors I met in college that grew up in the USSR thought engineering was stereotypically women’s work." That demonstrates how the "gender" of various professions is a social construct. In India, where men are over-represented in teaching, it's not considered a job for "agreeable" "people-oriented" women. It's men's work. Law was historically considered men's work (it's analytical and adversarial, and could be called "people oriented" only if you hate people). But that view has been redefined as more women enter the profession. Likewise for medicine, accounting, etc. Accounting is an archetypally "masculine" profession (locked away in a back closet crunching numbers), but today more than half of accountants are women.

The moral of the story is that if you're going to make a controversial point, it had better be a good point. Damore's memo wasn't just badly written, it was badly reasoned, and deserved the scorn heaped on it.

That's Diekman 2010:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20631322

"Although women have nearly attained equality with men in several formerly male-dominated fields, they remain underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We argue that one important reason for this discrepancy is that STEM careers are perceived as less likely than careers in other fields to fulfill communal goals (e.g., working with or helping other people). Such perceptions might disproportionately affect women's career decisions, because women tend to endorse communal goals more than men. As predicted, we found that STEM careers, relative to other careers, were perceived to impede communal goals. Moreover, communal-goal endorsement negatively predicted interest in STEM careers, even when controlling for past experience and self-efficacy in science and mathematics."

"Participants were 333 introductory psychology students (193 women) who participated for partial course credit, and 27 paid participants (14 women) from STEM classes. The majority (86.94%) were of European American descent. The median age was 19 years, ranging from 18 to 43. "

"For each of the core careers, participants rated how much the career fulfills agentic goals (“power, achievement, and seeking new experiences or excitement”) and communal goals (“intimacy, affiliation, and altruism”; definitions from Pohlmann, 2001). Participants rated goals according to “how important each of the following kinds of goals is to you personally."

I really found this study not very compelling as jumping from point A to conclusion B. It seems more than they've proved that women from the small subset in this study prefer more "communal goals" and the STEM careers are not perceived that way.

I can say as a women in STEM, I sort of choose tech on a whim. I came to see coding as a tool for many of the creative aspirations I had. If anything, I think some of the STEM career paths are poorly understood and marketed to women. Though I probably would have answered my questions about my career decisions in one way when I started college, it would have been different by the end of it. And after understanding what to expect out of a career, being years into my career, I would answer what's important to me in yet another way. So I really question this study.

If someone agrees with the point the study seems to support, they say, "Hah! Studies!" and call anyone who disagrees "anti-science".

But if someone disagrees with the point, they pull up the study, pick out some section of it where any type of subjective judgment call was made (usually the details of the sample, because that's the most clearly subjective thing, making it the easiest thing to criticize), and say "There are real problems with this study, how about a real study? [that is, a study that agrees with my point]". Also popular is "Yes, but this author is affiliated with former employer x, y, or z".

This is true of all sides, all the time. Very rarely do you see a study actually impact anyone's opinion about an important topic. It is usually only the impression that more studies support a specific position (that is, "the consensus", aka social pressure to appear studious and informed, which affects academics as much or more than it affects non-academics), that does it.