Speaking not only as a Woman but as a Mother (Happy Mothers Day everyone) nothing would of persuade me away from STEM career. My parents were both in STEM and the love for science was as early as I can remember. HOWEVER on my most difficult days I feel like it is so hard because of the awfully short maternity leave, not enough vacation days to spend with family, no sick days to care for sick kids, 40 hour weeks when I can be done my work in 30 or less.
I dont feel negativity about interactions with other males in the industry. The bad interactions are usually from socially awkward individuals in general
I think the author may really be onto something here. I have teenage and twenty-something daughters. My youngest is very excited about her stats minor but when I suggested computer science to her the horror that crossed her face...like it was a personal insult. Another one is into math and science and also wouldn't consider CS if her life depended on it -- physics or chemical engineering, sure, but never CS. Both do have very active social lives -- maybe that's it, or maybe it's because their parent wants them to do it -- kids never want to do what their parent suggests. Whatever it is, as a mom who fell into tech who would love her daughters to get a CS degree, I have yet to find way to make the degree appealing to them, even though they like what I do and actually find the act of coding enjoyable.
> physics or chemical engineering, sure, but never CS.
I think ultimately a career in real engineering field would be easier and more satisfying to your daughters than CS. Because CS is thick with toxic lord of the flies man child's at this point.
Most of the theories I've seen about the women-in-tech gap don't resonate with my experience because there was a very obvious 'women-in-tech' gap in about... 5th grade? in my (typical, I think) American elementary school.
It was nerdy boys, almost entirely (I remember one exception), who wanted to stay after school playing games on the iMacs in our classroom, and I am pretty sure that it would only be the boys in my class who might have, for instance, received and gotten excited about a copy of "C++ for dummies" in ~2000 (granted, the book was terrible and I didn't really start coding for 6 more years, but the spark was already there).
Sure, video-game-interest is not the same as going into tech, but it correlated a lot as I grew up -- these kids ended up being the ones who were, like, coding on graphics calculators or in HTML/CSS a couple years later. There were a few more girls involved by then, but the ratio was still very skewed.
An interesting data point here ia that girls at all-girls schools tend to take much more interest in STEM subjects, which suggests that he issue might be more to do with social percpetions of what is for girls and boys rather than inherent interest differing between genders.
Maybe, but there is selection bias when looking at just girls who go to all-girls schools. Assuming they are mostly private, this would likely select for wealthier families, which may have a correlation with STEM careers. Furthermore, girls from all-girls schools have parents that are willing to enroll them in all-girls schools, which likely correlates with a certain personality type, whatever that may be.
> Most of the theories I've seen about the women-in-tech gap don't resonate with my experience because there was a very obvious 'women-in-tech' gap in about... 5th grade? in my (typical, I think) American elementary school.
I think your experiences are typical, thanks for sharing.
I'm curious what theory-of-the-gap you've found that you like more than the ones you've seen? You were (intentionally or not) a little cagey about your ultimate position. :)
For my part, I usually see that young girls are the ones who are pressured the most to stay out of STEM. I'm sure that by the time they got to 10, the little girls in your class already "knew" that afterschool computer games weren't really "for girls". Kids are very impressionable to even off-handed comments, and they will self-censor if they think they don't belong.
Anyways, it's all to say that I think there's no secret--if you actually make little girls believe they can do math or code, they'll do it. It's just that as a society we spend a lot of time telling them they can't.
I know lots of really smart women, many whose careers pay less than software. When I asked if they ever thought about coding all but one basically said they weren't interested.
The one who was interested said she didn't pursue coding(is a PM instead) because during her first year of college she felt behind because some of her fellow students had 5-6 years of coding experience and she'd only had 1-2. So she switched to MIS.
Ah, it's really complicated. My hunch is that that's part of it but not the full story. I think it takes a mix of factors to make a person self-define as a 'computer geek' by high school, which is -- imo -- a point at which the gender divide in college is already determined. Various efforts blend the categories later on, but they're fighting against the categories that already exist by HS-age.
Some factors:
1a. being socially allowed to love computers, OR 1b. not caring what's socially allowed <- me
2. obsessiveness (3rd-grade me would happily play videogames for 12 hours straight if allowed. Or read, legos, etc. Other kids would, like, learn everything about airplanes.)
3. not caring very much about socializing. 'play over people', if you will.
4. being intelligent
5. having 'growth mindset', the idea that you could go learn something if you wanted to. (I think I got this from books and RPGs and from not being demoralized early on.)
6. not caring very much about pop culture (in my case, because I didn't know about it. sports and music weren't on my radar).
7. being competitive: wanting to learn cool things to, basically, seem cool to other nerdy kids.
8. an innate desire to build things
I would characterize (1b) and (2) and (3) together as being, basically, the 'autism spectrum' angle, which is (I perceive) more prevalent in boys, and I think that's where the main difference comes from.
I think what the social effect you mention exists, but it might come before these categories -- ie, from a young age I was constructed so as to not care what was socially allowed and to want to obsessively play, and so I was basically destined to be obsessed with computers. I don't know how much is nature vs. nurture though.
I also think that on average girls are less (7) naturally competitive and (8) naturally motivated to build things (citation needed), but that very well could be a social effect also.
I think lots of people of any gender have their (5) 'growth mindset' squashed from a young ago.
I also think lots of boys have almost everything on the list except for '(8) desire to build things', so instead of learning to make games, they get really good at Halo and play every day in college, or whatever.
I also think that by the time college rolls around, these categories are all smeared together, and people end up going into tech or STEM (and I guess I mean specifically CS/Math/Physics) for lots of reasons. I'm only trying to describe the commonalities across the nerdy kids in HS.
Disclaimer: all of this is hunches and is from ~2000-2008 and is probably not correct or true and if it was it probably isn't anymore.
I keep reading about a "women in tech" gap, but if it exists, it must be regional. I've lived and worked, as a programmer, in the Dallas, TX area for over 20 years across 5 different employers. There have always been _lots_ of women in technology-related roles, everywhere. The vast majority of them (as well as the vast majority of the men) have been Indian, though. Is this different in San Francisco/Silicon Valley?
I've held a few software jobs in Iowa, Kansas, and the valley. Between the three places I worked at in the midwest, I worked alongside a total of four women doing engineering work (the numbers get much, much larger if you include support and QA roles).
I've worked with many more women in engineering roles here in Silicon Valley, but the percentages are still low.
I think the gap varies dramatically by ethnicity. Its possible, perhaps likely, that different cultures have different biases towards women in tech fields. If you add that as a variable to all these charts, I think things may look significantly more skewed than they already do.
> It was nerdy boys, almost entirely (I remember one exception), who wanted to stay after school playing games on the iMacs in our classroom
I wanted to as well. I used to sort of hover behind the boys playing Oregon Trail or making stuff in Hypercard or whatever, trying to participate. They ignored me like I wasn't even there. Gave up after a while.
It wouldn't surprise me that both angles are true: that the divide exists by ~elementary school, but still for the same reasons commonly cited (social pressures / etc).
Sorry that happened to you, though. In my school we had 1 girl in our nerd group. I like to think we weren't exclusive; there just weren't many people interested. But I was 10 so I dunno.
Actually that's one possible explanation for why boys tend to grow more interested into tech today, that they become interested in videogames at early age, videogames that are mostly targeted for boys, so in order to "fix" this we'd have to have more diversity in videogames target market.
No, that's an uncharitable simplification. I'm talking about statistical trends, and specifically about games- and nerdery- _in lieu of all socialization_.
> Go befriend a girl in your class or company. It’s not creepy.
"Honey, there is this random blogger who thinks I should befriend a girl in my company. It's supposedly not creepy or anything. What do you think?"
If I didn't care what my wife thinks, I'd still have to think twice and consider the gender-political climate of the modern age.
The mere perception of having some intention of wrongdoing can harm you.
In all corporate ethics training courses, you're always hammered with the message of avoiding even the perception of a conflict of interests and such.
Usually, those "avoid perception" messages are with regard to corruption. The rhetoric isn't used in sexual misconduct training, but the concept naturally carries over. If I'm to avoid creating so much as the perception that some official is being bribed into signing a deal, of course it must also be good to avoid so much as the perception that I have some sort of designs of a female coworker. I want simpler rules that are more general.
> In all corporate ethics training courses, you're always hammered with the message of avoiding even the perception of a conflict of interests and such.
Some years ago I participated in a first aid course (these are required around here for many things). One of the others did it as part of retraining after leaving the navy. Problem for him was: He couldn't do any of the practical exercises in a group with women, because it seems the Navy had a sexual harassment problem some time ago and kinda overshot in the "teaching men not to touch women" department. It's of course entirely possible (plausible, even), that this guy had some issues before that, though.
I actually remember reading somewhere that women are more likely than men to die in situations that call for CPR because men are so shy about touching women's chests.
Quoting: "It’s as clear cut as this: Treat all women like you would treat Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson." and "But definitely don’t hit on her. It looks like she could kill you with the chair you’re sitting on."
If someone happens to idolize "The Rock", the rule doesn't go down very well.
It possibly devolves to "behave like a bumbling star-struck fool around all women".
Or possibly to "treat women like goddesses". Example: if I run a cafe, and idolize "The Rock", should I give every woman a free coffee and muffin, because that's what I would do if "The Rock" walked in?
People who are famous get all sorts of unwanted attention that would easily amount to sexism or sexual misconduct if it were lavished upon a person because she's a woman. Fans want to get near you, touch you, take a picture with you and whatever.
Isn't that just the problem? The moral of that insufferable article is not to treat women like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, but to fear women as if they're going to smash your head into the pavement like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson for saying the wrong thing. If women as a group actually want men to see them this way, it's no wonder men don't want to #mentorher.
This completely misses the point. The Rock isn't going to take things to HR or try to ruin anyone's life. The Rock is going to handle things like a man.
The first part of this had great citations to cite that women are more social. Where the data was lacking is that 1) software is perceived as anti-social and 2) that other anti-social careers face similar problems to software engineering.
For example if socialization was such a critical decider, why are some many women maids or professional housekeepers? Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socialization. Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?
While socialization may be a part of the equation, there's a lot more going on here and simply blaming women for being "too social" just panders to common stereotypes.
Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?
Women were programmers very early on. I think we should look for some common thread between computer programming in the late 1950's/early 60's and accounting and book keeping today.
While socialization may be a part of the equation, there's a lot more going on here and simply blaming women for being "too social" just panders to common stereotypes.
I don't think you should be characterizing it as "blaming." Things are as they are. I remember reading a paper in grad school finding that software engineers actually had more need of interaction than other fields, despite stereotypes. I think there is some important factor we don't quite understand.
Programming started as a field very similar to Accounting. You manually assembled a list of operations to get the necessary numerical result. There was creativity, but in the same vein of creativity in accounting it was confined to the realm of statistics and business intelligence. Computers were used to calculate numbers from other numbers, and rarely did much else. The set of computer instructions were limited, and nothing was automated so there was a lot of tedium in physically writing programming out on paper.
With the advent of personal computers and monitors the fields diverged rapidly.
The way I've read it, "programming" was the name of a job where you take a flowchart from a "systems analyst" and punch machine code onto card decks. Then computers became cheap enough to run compilers, and that job was automated away.
IME about 90 % of that is enforced and actively pursued by the workers. E.g. preferring HCCH-based reviews over pair reviewing, "don't disturb me", [noise-cancelling] headphones, locked office doors, mail and instant messaging over talking and so forth
> Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socialization. Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?
Another question would be, why in the early days of computing, programming was predominantly seen as women's work? Does it mean its social factor changed somehow?
> Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?
That's the difference though. Accounting is professional. Software engineering is often not. Moreover, while accounting is often asocial (not much social interaction), many software engineers (male and female) can be downright anti-social (against common means of social interaction).
IMO anti-socal wasn't the best choice of words. I'm pretty sure in this context she intended "social" to mean "a pursuit where the bulk of your time is spent interacting with people", and "anti-social" meant "a pursuit where the bulk of your time is spent time interacting with things".
>Between the ages of 16 and 24, girls have more sophisticated social lives than boys of the same age. Young women talk to their friends more often [1], care more about their reputation [2], spend more time talking about their friends [3], and assign more emotional value to close relationships [4]
I admire that she provided links for these, but I really don't believe any of those statements. That list of 4 things is difficult to measure because they probably occur in different forms for boys vs girls and the studies consequently "found" what they were looking for.
Sexism is dripping in irony. Damore can't say there are biological differences between males and females, but it's ok to say that as a male I care less about my friendships.
Try to be nice, try to be fair, try to be honest. Ignore everything and everyone else...
It seems to me that the author would generally be sympathetic to Damore's memo (but who knows for sure) based on the views espoused in this post, so I don't quite understand your point.
The point seems fairly clear to me. arkis22 is pointing out that this author is making unfavorable generalizations about men, and stating that these generalizations are probably partly due to biology. Here, it is that women assign greater value to close friendships. Later, she states that:
"My experience confirms that teenage and college-age girls care more than boys do about solving real human problem (as opposed to competitive, self-oriented gain), forming close bonds with peers, and earning colleagues’ respect. I will not comment on whether this is caused by society or by biology; likely, it’s both and many factors in between."
This isn't wildly slanderous, but I think we can agree that caring more about real human problems is more admirable that pursuing "self-oriented" gain (or maybe not, randians might say self-oriented gain is the highest moral pursuit there is. I'd disagree, and I suspect the author here would as well).
So, we have that men pursue self-oriented gain, and women pursue solution to real world human problems, and this is partly due to biological differences between men and women.
Personally, I'm really not offended or bothered by this. She has every right to make this claim, and overall, I though it was a good essay.
I also think that arkis22 is interpreting these comments somewhat uncharitably. I don't need someone to go through a million footnotes and provisos and stating repeatedly that these are just averages. I am nearly certain that this writer would agree that some men care deeply about real human problems and relationships, and some women care more about self-oriented gain. I certainly don't think it improves the conversation when people get bogged down because they have to protect themselves against every possible uncharitable interpretation of an argument (she didn't say that arkis22 cares less about his friendships).
But we do live in a world where people who make comparable (perhaps less dramatic) claims about women face pretty serious censure.
Thank you! I was thinking the exact same thing about this particular part. I don't think it tanks her argument, but it is irritating to see this repeated so often.
Are the rest of the STEM career paths seen as more social than CS? Is mathematics more social than CS? Because CS is almost (not quite: physics is almost as bad) unique among STEM specializations for its gender disparity.
I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technology, you have to coordinate and cooperate amongst teams of people. And yet if you go to a cryptography conference and then a technology convention, the difference will be starkly apparent: there are far more women in the former than the latter.
I don't think this is a persuasive explanation for the whole phenomenon.
I agree, Math and Physics are in many ways similar to CS, and yet have more women. And I can think of a pretty good reason to explain it: Math and Physics are more classically respected and authoritarian. CS is the wild-west by comparison.
In Math and Physics in high school and college, you can just study what you're supposed to study, do the problems you're supposed to do. You can mostly do that in CS too, of course, but that's not ubiquitous. In CS you're programming, and when programming you're running into bugs and devising work-arounds. Some stuff does not work like it's supposed to. Sometimes the best implementation for a purpose is a clever but not-quite-correct shortcut that's way faster. Some of my CS classes had automated code submissions testing and grading systems, and some students managed to hack the system in novel ways, and were given full points for doing so. My experience in school is that the smartest girls studied a lot more, and the smartest guys messed around a lot more. CS is programming and programming is a lot of messing around.
I agree, Math and Physics are in many ways similar to CS, and yet have more women.
I think it might be useful to ask: In what ways are Math and Physics are different from the programming field? I think the requirement to work together on larger projects is different. What is the gender distribution of physicists working at CERN?
My experience in school is that the smartest girls studied a lot more, and the smartest guys messed around a lot more.
Sounds about right.
CS is programming and programming is a lot of messing around.
Is it? Back in the day, there were CS professors who proudly declared they didn't like programming.
I don't know how true this is; I've also had the experience of sitting around a restaurant table with academic math nerds and other times with computer programmers, and the differences there was pretty stark as well.
But another point: pay attention to the distinctions we're drawing, because "computer science is less social than other STEM fields" is not the same argument as "computer science is more forgiving of antisocial behavior".
The latter statement is one I could easily be convinced of! We all know about dev cultures that thrive on toxic behavior, and a lot of us have seen firsthand how homogenized groups of developers have mistreated people from outside their narrow social experience. A lot of this is well-studied human behavior: you pay a different kind of attention to the only woman on your team, or the only black person, than you do to the nth 20-something male nerd from central casting, and that can cause people to falsely attribute things to the outsiders.
I think CS is unique in two ways.
The first one way is it has a unique pipeline. Many CS majors started off tinkering around with their computers in ways that many high school girls don't.(where as most people's first experience with math/other stem is through classroom instruction)
The second is that programmers are perceived(rightly or wrongly) to be more lacking of social skills than other equivalent professions.
> Are the rest of the STEM career paths seen as more social than CS?
This guy actually put some pretty decent work into researching this - he found that women dominate "sociable" STEM fields like veterinary sciences and obstetrics, while men dominate the "cold" STEM branches like surgery and computer science.
Alexander believes a lot of things. But you can just look up the stats on STEM fields yourself; they're not hard to find. There are STEM fields that approach parity, there are a couple in which women slightly lead men, and there are a bunch with more men than women. But CS is, by what to a casual glance looks like multiple stddevs, worse than the rest.
Unless math is "warmer" than CS --- it isn't --- this explanation doesn't hold much water.
I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technology, you have to coordinate and cooperate amongst teams of people.
I recall a paper I read in grad school which found that programmers actually had more need of interaction than other fields. As jdavis notes elsewhere, accounting and bookkeeping employs more women nowadays. I also note that very early on, computer programming was seen as a desirable job by women. Is there a common thread between computer programming in the very early days and accounting and bookkeeping today?
I don't know. But I do know that the masculinization of computer science seems to line up chronologically with the emergence of the home computer movement, which was began as a male-dominated 1970s hobby.
And I don't think it's hard to find serious CS people who can trace other malign influences from "homebrew hobbyist CS" in our field. We're basically a field that experienced a bizarre and potent deprofessionalization a few decades ago, and then rebuilt back up from that. Forget about the social and equity issues and just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing.
In some sense yes. I don't have the stats at hand, but women who study math are very n likely doing so because they want to become math teachers which I would say leans social.
Big difference to me is how does the core work get done. If it’s like coding where you need zero distraction time and actively have to turn off socially, it becomes less appealing. As a former PM turned dev, the difference is striking in how isolated the work can require you do be.
I believe this. The problem is, it's not unique to CS (it might be unique to knowledge work, but CS is far from the only species of knowledge work). So for it to have demographic explanatory power, it would have to account for the intense solitary concentration required for elite research in other STEM fields --- including fields like math, which are very closely related to CS, and the multitude of random STEM fields which have been taken over by computational approaches where the underlying work is really just domain-specialized programming by another name.
I think part of the programmer stereotype is that you basically have to be socially handicapped to fit in. Which may draw more people like that in and keep more well adjusted (or socially conscious) people out. In general, it seems that from a relatively young age women are given the impression that "nerds" are to be avoided at all costs -- we're stereotypically "weird" (meaning creepy perverts). Even though I haven't met a single person out of hundreds of people in this profession that overtly acted that way (although I've heard 2 anecdotal stories from people who had). Of course I'm not trying to say that there isn't a legitimate problem there, because there likely is, and especially with the small proportion of women in this profession they are very likely to run into those types. But I think the perception of the problem, or the quality of the people who are in CS, is probably greatly exaggerated by the stereotypes and that keeps people away.
I feel like if you talked to code conference runners, you might have a different opinion - being one of the few women at a social event really brings out the socially awkward or aggressive advances.
It seems to me less a question of how social the various STEM fields are than that CS is more closely tied into the larger internet culture. Especially for young men I can see this making them more insular as a group even if they're, in lots of ways, just as social
> young men are less likely to approach women and invite them to join a study group or happy hour, poker night, or whatever else they do with their male peers/coworkers.
As a man I've never been approached and invited to anything like this..
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I dont feel negativity about interactions with other males in the industry. The bad interactions are usually from socially awkward individuals in general
I think ultimately a career in real engineering field would be easier and more satisfying to your daughters than CS. Because CS is thick with toxic lord of the flies man child's at this point.
It was nerdy boys, almost entirely (I remember one exception), who wanted to stay after school playing games on the iMacs in our classroom, and I am pretty sure that it would only be the boys in my class who might have, for instance, received and gotten excited about a copy of "C++ for dummies" in ~2000 (granted, the book was terrible and I didn't really start coding for 6 more years, but the spark was already there).
Sure, video-game-interest is not the same as going into tech, but it correlated a lot as I grew up -- these kids ended up being the ones who were, like, coding on graphics calculators or in HTML/CSS a couple years later. There were a few more girls involved by then, but the ratio was still very skewed.
In many science fields, women have reached near parity or are even in the majority now. Computer programming is much different.
I think your experiences are typical, thanks for sharing.
I'm curious what theory-of-the-gap you've found that you like more than the ones you've seen? You were (intentionally or not) a little cagey about your ultimate position. :)
For my part, I usually see that young girls are the ones who are pressured the most to stay out of STEM. I'm sure that by the time they got to 10, the little girls in your class already "knew" that afterschool computer games weren't really "for girls". Kids are very impressionable to even off-handed comments, and they will self-censor if they think they don't belong.
Anyways, it's all to say that I think there's no secret--if you actually make little girls believe they can do math or code, they'll do it. It's just that as a society we spend a lot of time telling them they can't.
The one who was interested said she didn't pursue coding(is a PM instead) because during her first year of college she felt behind because some of her fellow students had 5-6 years of coding experience and she'd only had 1-2. So she switched to MIS.
Some factors:
1a. being socially allowed to love computers, OR 1b. not caring what's socially allowed <- me
2. obsessiveness (3rd-grade me would happily play videogames for 12 hours straight if allowed. Or read, legos, etc. Other kids would, like, learn everything about airplanes.)
3. not caring very much about socializing. 'play over people', if you will.
4. being intelligent
5. having 'growth mindset', the idea that you could go learn something if you wanted to. (I think I got this from books and RPGs and from not being demoralized early on.)
6. not caring very much about pop culture (in my case, because I didn't know about it. sports and music weren't on my radar).
7. being competitive: wanting to learn cool things to, basically, seem cool to other nerdy kids.
8. an innate desire to build things
I would characterize (1b) and (2) and (3) together as being, basically, the 'autism spectrum' angle, which is (I perceive) more prevalent in boys, and I think that's where the main difference comes from.
I think what the social effect you mention exists, but it might come before these categories -- ie, from a young age I was constructed so as to not care what was socially allowed and to want to obsessively play, and so I was basically destined to be obsessed with computers. I don't know how much is nature vs. nurture though.
I also think that on average girls are less (7) naturally competitive and (8) naturally motivated to build things (citation needed), but that very well could be a social effect also.
I think lots of people of any gender have their (5) 'growth mindset' squashed from a young ago.
I also think lots of boys have almost everything on the list except for '(8) desire to build things', so instead of learning to make games, they get really good at Halo and play every day in college, or whatever.
I also think that by the time college rolls around, these categories are all smeared together, and people end up going into tech or STEM (and I guess I mean specifically CS/Math/Physics) for lots of reasons. I'm only trying to describe the commonalities across the nerdy kids in HS.
Disclaimer: all of this is hunches and is from ~2000-2008 and is probably not correct or true and if it was it probably isn't anymore.
I've worked with many more women in engineering roles here in Silicon Valley, but the percentages are still low.
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I wanted to as well. I used to sort of hover behind the boys playing Oregon Trail or making stuff in Hypercard or whatever, trying to participate. They ignored me like I wasn't even there. Gave up after a while.
Sorry that happened to you, though. In my school we had 1 girl in our nerd group. I like to think we weren't exclusive; there just weren't many people interested. But I was 10 so I dunno.
https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...
"Honey, there is this random blogger who thinks I should befriend a girl in my company. It's supposedly not creepy or anything. What do you think?"
If I didn't care what my wife thinks, I'd still have to think twice and consider the gender-political climate of the modern age.
The mere perception of having some intention of wrongdoing can harm you.
In all corporate ethics training courses, you're always hammered with the message of avoiding even the perception of a conflict of interests and such.
Usually, those "avoid perception" messages are with regard to corruption. The rhetoric isn't used in sexual misconduct training, but the concept naturally carries over. If I'm to avoid creating so much as the perception that some official is being bribed into signing a deal, of course it must also be good to avoid so much as the perception that I have some sort of designs of a female coworker. I want simpler rules that are more general.
Some years ago I participated in a first aid course (these are required around here for many things). One of the others did it as part of retraining after leaving the navy. Problem for him was: He couldn't do any of the practical exercises in a group with women, because it seems the Navy had a sexual harassment problem some time ago and kinda overshot in the "teaching men not to touch women" department. It's of course entirely possible (plausible, even), that this guy had some issues before that, though.
Quoting: "It’s as clear cut as this: Treat all women like you would treat Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson." and "But definitely don’t hit on her. It looks like she could kill you with the chair you’re sitting on."
It's really that simple.
It possibly devolves to "behave like a bumbling star-struck fool around all women".
Or possibly to "treat women like goddesses". Example: if I run a cafe, and idolize "The Rock", should I give every woman a free coffee and muffin, because that's what I would do if "The Rock" walked in?
People who are famous get all sorts of unwanted attention that would easily amount to sexism or sexual misconduct if it were lavished upon a person because she's a woman. Fans want to get near you, touch you, take a picture with you and whatever.
"Hey, how much can you squat?"
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For example if socialization was such a critical decider, why are some many women maids or professional housekeepers? Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socialization. Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?
While socialization may be a part of the equation, there's a lot more going on here and simply blaming women for being "too social" just panders to common stereotypes.
Same reason so many men are janitors.
Women were programmers very early on. I think we should look for some common thread between computer programming in the late 1950's/early 60's and accounting and book keeping today.
While socialization may be a part of the equation, there's a lot more going on here and simply blaming women for being "too social" just panders to common stereotypes.
I don't think you should be characterizing it as "blaming." Things are as they are. I remember reading a paper in grad school finding that software engineers actually had more need of interaction than other fields, despite stereotypes. I think there is some important factor we don't quite understand.
With the advent of personal computers and monitors the fields diverged rapidly.
My experience is that this perception has a strong grounding in reality.
Another question would be, why in the early days of computing, programming was predominantly seen as women's work? Does it mean its social factor changed somehow?
See: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi...
That's the difference though. Accounting is professional. Software engineering is often not. Moreover, while accounting is often asocial (not much social interaction), many software engineers (male and female) can be downright anti-social (against common means of social interaction).
IMO anti-socal wasn't the best choice of words. I'm pretty sure in this context she intended "social" to mean "a pursuit where the bulk of your time is spent interacting with people", and "anti-social" meant "a pursuit where the bulk of your time is spent time interacting with things".
> why are some many women maids or professional housekeepers? Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socialization.
is this actually true? I've gotten the impression that housekeeping services often send multiple people to the site.
I admire that she provided links for these, but I really don't believe any of those statements. That list of 4 things is difficult to measure because they probably occur in different forms for boys vs girls and the studies consequently "found" what they were looking for.
Sexism is dripping in irony. Damore can't say there are biological differences between males and females, but it's ok to say that as a male I care less about my friendships.
Try to be nice, try to be fair, try to be honest. Ignore everything and everyone else...
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"My experience confirms that teenage and college-age girls care more than boys do about solving real human problem (as opposed to competitive, self-oriented gain), forming close bonds with peers, and earning colleagues’ respect. I will not comment on whether this is caused by society or by biology; likely, it’s both and many factors in between."
This isn't wildly slanderous, but I think we can agree that caring more about real human problems is more admirable that pursuing "self-oriented" gain (or maybe not, randians might say self-oriented gain is the highest moral pursuit there is. I'd disagree, and I suspect the author here would as well).
So, we have that men pursue self-oriented gain, and women pursue solution to real world human problems, and this is partly due to biological differences between men and women.
Personally, I'm really not offended or bothered by this. She has every right to make this claim, and overall, I though it was a good essay.
I also think that arkis22 is interpreting these comments somewhat uncharitably. I don't need someone to go through a million footnotes and provisos and stating repeatedly that these are just averages. I am nearly certain that this writer would agree that some men care deeply about real human problems and relationships, and some women care more about self-oriented gain. I certainly don't think it improves the conversation when people get bogged down because they have to protect themselves against every possible uncharitable interpretation of an argument (she didn't say that arkis22 cares less about his friendships).
But we do live in a world where people who make comparable (perhaps less dramatic) claims about women face pretty serious censure.
I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technology, you have to coordinate and cooperate amongst teams of people. And yet if you go to a cryptography conference and then a technology convention, the difference will be starkly apparent: there are far more women in the former than the latter.
I don't think this is a persuasive explanation for the whole phenomenon.
In Math and Physics in high school and college, you can just study what you're supposed to study, do the problems you're supposed to do. You can mostly do that in CS too, of course, but that's not ubiquitous. In CS you're programming, and when programming you're running into bugs and devising work-arounds. Some stuff does not work like it's supposed to. Sometimes the best implementation for a purpose is a clever but not-quite-correct shortcut that's way faster. Some of my CS classes had automated code submissions testing and grading systems, and some students managed to hack the system in novel ways, and were given full points for doing so. My experience in school is that the smartest girls studied a lot more, and the smartest guys messed around a lot more. CS is programming and programming is a lot of messing around.
My dangerous 2c ;)
I think it might be useful to ask: In what ways are Math and Physics are different from the programming field? I think the requirement to work together on larger projects is different. What is the gender distribution of physicists working at CERN?
My experience in school is that the smartest girls studied a lot more, and the smartest guys messed around a lot more.
Sounds about right.
CS is programming and programming is a lot of messing around.
Is it? Back in the day, there were CS professors who proudly declared they didn't like programming.
This is only an anecdote, but it's not obvious to me that mathematics isn't more social than CS.
But another point: pay attention to the distinctions we're drawing, because "computer science is less social than other STEM fields" is not the same argument as "computer science is more forgiving of antisocial behavior".
The latter statement is one I could easily be convinced of! We all know about dev cultures that thrive on toxic behavior, and a lot of us have seen firsthand how homogenized groups of developers have mistreated people from outside their narrow social experience. A lot of this is well-studied human behavior: you pay a different kind of attention to the only woman on your team, or the only black person, than you do to the nth 20-something male nerd from central casting, and that can cause people to falsely attribute things to the outsiders.
The second is that programmers are perceived(rightly or wrongly) to be more lacking of social skills than other equivalent professions.
i.e. the office versus silicon valley
This guy actually put some pretty decent work into researching this - he found that women dominate "sociable" STEM fields like veterinary sciences and obstetrics, while men dominate the "cold" STEM branches like surgery and computer science.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
Unless math is "warmer" than CS --- it isn't --- this explanation doesn't hold much water.
Many people who major in math are aiming to become math teachers, so yes.
I recall a paper I read in grad school which found that programmers actually had more need of interaction than other fields. As jdavis notes elsewhere, accounting and bookkeeping employs more women nowadays. I also note that very early on, computer programming was seen as a desirable job by women. Is there a common thread between computer programming in the very early days and accounting and bookkeeping today?
And I don't think it's hard to find serious CS people who can trace other malign influences from "homebrew hobbyist CS" in our field. We're basically a field that experienced a bizarre and potent deprofessionalization a few decades ago, and then rebuilt back up from that. Forget about the social and equity issues and just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing.
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As a man I've never been approached and invited to anything like this..
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