A response to the Google Anti-diversity memo

Erika Northcutt
Aug 9, 2017 · 14 min read

People have been dismissing the Google anti-diversity memo as out of touch with science, discriminatory, and a blatant proof of the sexism in tech it tries to disavow. However, I haven’t seen anyone address it point by point. My attempt here was to do that.

I have a degree in neurobiology with minors in chemistry and psychology. I have taken classes in genetics, evolutionary biology, and behavior. I have deleted the portions of the memo that have nothing to do with biology. As a biologist, I would never pretend to be an expert on engineering ect. (unlike a certain male engineer who thinks himself an expert in biology).

“Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech [3]

At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership. Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.”

Yes, women do face biases that are different than men in STEM fields. This starts in college when professors are more likely to respond to emails requesting mentorship from (white) men than women. It continues when they apply for jobs where men are more likely to be hired and offered, on average, $4,000 more in salary. It continues further if they would like to fund their research in grants, where women are less likely to receive grants in a non-blinded process. It continues when they want to publish their research, where women are less likely to publish a first author manuscript if the process isn’t blinded. And it continues when women want tenure, where even with the same body of work, women are less likely to get it.

But what about specific to engineering? Well in engineering, women can expect to be given menial tasks and marginalized in group settings. But enough about these biases, I’m sure men have it bad too- they only make up 82% of tech positions at google.

“On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:

  • They’re universal across human cultures
  • They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
  • Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males
  • The underlying traits are highly heritable
  • They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective

Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.”

Well this is partially true. There are biological differences between men and women that lead to somewhat differing abilities in terms of physicality. No one would argue that. However, when you start saying that there are differences in preferences or mental abilities, well that’s when we start to argue.

However, it also seems we have a fundamental misunderstanding of how population genetics, which is essentially what he is talking about work. So what are population genetics? Population genetics looks within a population (or species) to see variation across groups. The idea is to create distinct genetic groups that can then be traced through time based on the prevalence of their genes. These groups will often have small but distinct differences as the memo states. Based on the genetic differences, there should be a defining difference from the rest of the population. Most importantly, based on genetics alone, population genetics predicts things about the individuals in the group. So when Mr. Memo says that we can’t say anything about an individual based on these population level differences, he is departing from the science he is claiming. Why do this? I assume to better set up his lawsuit. Now he can say he wasn’t talking about individuals. However, this is important because by departing from science this early in the memo, he is losing credibility.

“Personality differences”

One of the biggest personality studies done on the big 5 (openness, contentiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) found that across our lifetimes, our personalities can change to adapt to the long term social situations we are in. So to claim that personality is a fixed genetic trait based on evolution is fundamentally against science.

Genetics do matter to personality. Twin studies suggest that up to 50% of our personality can be attributed to genes. But what does that mean? Looking at the big 5 again, it does not mean that how open, contentious and half of our agreeableness are coded and hardwired into our DNA while the others are left up to the environment. What it means instead is that our genes lay the groundwork for who we are. However, every single attempt to find a gene directly related to personality has failed to be replicated. Google gene for X and you will find a study saying this gene controls such and such behavior, but then look for the replicates, and you’ll find a null replication.

Going back to population genetics here: just looking in the USA, we have 330 million people in our population. We can divide them into two distinct groups based sex to male and female: if there were differential expression of personality genes leading to different personalities, these studies would have found it. We have spent billions of dollars (US alone) trying to find different genes linked to different personalities and have found nothing.

“Women, on average, have more:

  • Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing). “

How many phrases can you think of condemning boys for showing emotion? 20 seconds on the clock… and go! Man up, boys don’t cry, be a man, don’t be a sissy, crying like a girl…. Just to name a few. I recently saw a woman in a store tell her son in diapers “Boys don’t cry” after he tripped. But don’t take my word for it, take a look at this meta-analysis of over 20,000 kids that found that with age children begin to express emotion differently and that it is directly influenced by parental expectations based on gender. Or feel free to check out this piece from an expert in the field on why stoicism (or lack of openness) in men is clearly not a biological trait, but rather a socialized one.

Women do, in general, display an affinity for working with people over things. However, nowhere in this paper is it suggested that this has a biological origin. Instead, it is far more likely that it is the result of girls being given dolls, Barbies, and other “people toys” while boys get trucks, trains, and toy tools.

The results of a search for girls toys and boys toys from walmart. Boys get drones, guns, and building toys. Girls get dolls, “friendship legos”, and things to play house with.
  • These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.

No, they really don’t. Computer coding doesn’t reflect a desire to not work with people or to work with things instead. Nor does engineering, or science as a whole. But I am not an engineer so I will leave that analysis up to Yonatan Zunger a former Google employee who goes through the basic job expectations of a google engineer..

  • Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.

So women tend to be nicer at work? It is almost like women HAVE to be nice at work or are severely penalized by their male coworkers. Women are more likely to be asked for favors by their male coworkers and less likely to receive professional commendation for that work.

So to summarize here, first women are forced into being nice at work in order to be accepted, then Mr. Memo wants to say they aren’t qualified to do their job because of it? Seriously?

  • This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.

Nope. Scroll back up to the links I posted for the last point and I’ll add some to it here. Women who negotiate their job offers are more likely to be penalized with lower salaries. They are likely to be seen as pushy and someone others wouldn’t want to work with or for. Women DO ask for raises as often as their male coworkers, they’re just less likely to get them. Women are less likely to be promoted even with similar bodies of work and while employing similar “get ahead” strategies. In leadership positions, women are more likely to be disrespected. In fact, three different studies show that men feel “threatened” by women in leadership and are more likely to negotiate and act aggressively with them. And women embody all of those traits men claim make them good leaders? Their employees say they are terrible.

So where does all of this anger for female leadership start? Well my guess is long before the employment office. One study looked at college students taking an online course. Half of the course was informed the teacher was a man, half were informed the teacher was a woman. At the end of the course, the male teacher (remember there was only one instructor with two names) got significantly better reviews than the female teacher (another evaluation, and another).

Let’s go back a little further then? In a study of kids 12–13 years old, researchers found that they tried harder for a male teacher than a female and found that teacher to be more respectable.

So is it possible that Mr. Memo writer thinks that women don’t make as good of leaders at google because he’s had the same opinion since childhood? Which is more likely, that this opinion is somehow genetic or that society told him women weren’t as good of leaders and now he just believes it?

  • Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

Neuroticism “describes the tendency to experience negative emotion and related processes in response to perceived threat and punishment; these include anxiety, depression, anger, and self-consciousness” In general women tend to score higher on indexes of neuroticism as well as its indicators of anxiety and low self-esteem. However, men tend to score higher on anger and anger hostility. So why is that? Is it as Mr. Memo suggests, a biological phenomenon?

Probably not. Instead it is probably an issue with the testing population. In general, women for these studies have been found based on those seeking psychotherapy for other issues. Is it possible that women in therapy have lower self-esteem than most? Uh… Yeah. So what happens when we look at populations of women and men NOT seeking psychotherapy? We see that there are very few differences between the two. In fact, some psychologists (like the one quoted below) believe that studies on self-esteem are actually biased measures. They aren’t measuring self-esteem, but rather specific correlates of it. What does that mean? Self-esteem is your overall sum of how you feel about yourself. It is made up of many things, including how you feel about your looks, your competency at work, your competency as a parent or partner, how you feel about your moral standards ect. However, many self esteem measures look either at how you feel about your competency at work or how you feel about your looks, measures which women feel worse about. However, the other measures women tend to feel better about. So it is possible that a decent chunk of the research done here is biased.

“As psychologist Jean Twenge concludes, the widespread belief that girls and women have low self-esteem and flawed self-concepts can set up negative expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies. When things go wrong — they aren’t doing well at school or work, their relationships are going sour, or they are distressed and don’t know why — they may conclude that it’s because there is something wrong with their self-concept and personality rather than that there is something wrong in their environment.”

But what about anxiety? It is a well known fact that women are more likely to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, so that means they have more anxiety right? I mean that is the evidence Mr. Memo provides… But is it free of bias? As we’ve previously discussed, women are more likely to discuss their emotions. That means that when women feel anxious about something, they’re more likely to tell you. Does that mean men don’t have those anxieties or does it mean men feel that it will be an insult to their masculinity to tell you about it? Additionally, men are less likely to go to the doctor, and this effect is compounded by how masculine that particular man thinks he is. By avoiding the doctor, men are less likely to be diagnosed with any problem, but also an anxiety disorder. Beyond that, men are 7x more likely to commit suicide than women. 70% of those who attempt suicide have an anxiety disorder. This seems to indicate that there is a decent amount of health care that men need in relation to anxiety but are not getting and is not being recognized by psychologists. 62% of men say they are extremely stressed out, but won’t say they are “anxious”. This ties in to the fact that while 80% of men say they are in excellent health, 75% don’t exercise and 50% are overweight. Men have a tendency to minimize all health issues, mental or otherwise.

Note that contrary to what a social constructionist would argue, research suggests that “greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits.” Because as “society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality becomes wider.” We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.

Mr. Memo is trying to imply that as nations become more developed, we actually become more different. However, just from reading the abstract, we can see that “Changes in men’s personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures.” So this whole memo has been intent on showing why men are better at these highly technical jobs because of a biological predisposition to a specific personality type that women don’t have. Now he points out a study that PROVES that across cultures men have a varying personality type? So in all 55 of the countries surveyed, men are more economically prosperous, own more property, and more represented in their government, yet they don’t have a common personality? While I have many concerns about this paper, my biggest is that it flies in the face of everything Mr. Memo has argued. If personality is biologically programmed into men, then why does the personality of men change as women become equal in society?

But maybe we should look at what the authors think, “Although evolutionary explanations can readily account for the existence of culturally pervasive differences between men and women, such explanations may seem less adept at explaining the variability in the size of sex differences across cultures… psychological mismatch between contemporary environments and those in which early humans evolved is not always a linear function of sociohistorical time. For example, according to the curvilinear hypothesis of cultural variation… modern nation-states may be psychologically closer to hunter-gatherer cultures than are less-developed agricultural or pastoral cultures.” Researchers also suggested that it was possible the entire study was presenting an artifact (i.e. a finding that is because of study design rather than real world differences). Since the study asked people to rank themselves on traits, it is possible that different cultures value different things, so the study is impacted by a willingness to reveal a socially undesirable trait. Additionally, the frames of reference are different. A woman in the US when asked about agreeableness may compare herself to her male and female coworkers, thus revealing true sex difference, while a woman elsewhere may compare herself to agreeable women she knows, thus providing a between group variance. Finally, they note that “cross-cultural studies have observed that average Cronbach’s alpha across all personality traits tends to be higher in prosperous and well-educated countries than in countries where access to knowledge and education is more constrained.” The paper itself says that effect sizes in general were rather small.

So while this study is interesting and needs further research, it certainly does not support the idea of a mostly biological personality based on gender that predisposes one to certain jobs.

Men’s higher drive for status

We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.

Speaking of balance, did you know that even when women are the breadwinner they still do more at home than their male partners? In fact, even when men are unemployed, they do 37%-50% of the house work. So when we talk about why women don’t have the long hours to put in for these jobs, let's remember why they don’t have them: men still aren’t doing their fair share of domestic work. We expect women to take over in the boardrooms with gender equality without men taking over some of the kitchen. Then we call women working full time and doing double the housework “seeking balance”. Yeah, let me tell you about all of the women who feel so balanced by sweeping the floor.

And what about this men wanting long hours and women wanting balanced lives? It is simply not true. No proof is provided of the idea, but here is some that men do seek a balanced life.

Status is the primary metric that men are judged on [4- heterosexual men are judged on status, women on beauty], pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.

In a twisted way, Mr. Memo is somewhat right. When it comes to applying for jobs, men are unlikely to be judged on anything other than their qualifications while women are likely to be judged on appearance and “niceness” as well. Oh wait, that wasn’t what you meant was it? Did you mean how women are more likely to be socially penalized for a variety of things than men are? Oh wait that isn’t what you meant either.

The five biggest stressors men face are: finances, family and relationship balance, job stability, fast pace of life, and health. So basically, men tend to worry about having enough money and finding that work life balance just like women do. Notably, prestige is not one of the biggest stressors in men’s life like Mr. Memo claims.

So in conclusion, the basic science behind Mr. Memo’s memo is just not there. People are not biologically determined to have a certain personality. People are not biologically suited to have certain jobs.

But if you’re curious what programmers say you need in order to be good at your job:

  • One study found that the most important trait software engineers have is intelligence. Luckily, men and women score equally well on that. Following intelligence, you need openness and conscientiousness.
  • And the top 10 traits of a programmer

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