Passion, finding yourself, and techbro misogyny

Erica Stephan
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

While I haven’t bothered to check, I’d bet a significant sum of money that the recently shitcanned Googler James Damore would describe himself as a rationalist. And yet, the assumptions underlying his argument are profoundly Romantic in nature — the 19th Century literary movement that’s the direct ancestor of “follow your passion” career advice.

From the Romantics, we get the notion that nature matters far more than nurture, and that the business of life is to rediscover one’s inner nature after it has been profaned by society — “finding yourself,” as the hippies would later say. This idea shaped books like What Color is Your Parachute?, attempting to show people how to follow their bliss to a career that aligned perfectly with their talents/interests/Meyers-Briggs profile/etc. Generations of Americans, myself included, grew up with this rather anxiety-producing notion that career choice was akin to a religious vocation. If you knew yourself well enough, one day, you’d just know

Other countries don’t share this romantic view. You choose a job based on its ability to provide for your family. Thus in India, 42% of undergraduate computer science majors are women, and in some Muslim countries, up to 50%. I still remember visiting Russia in the late 90s and being blown away by the female scientists and engineers I met who were also ultra-femme, rocking high heels and makeup. While Russia was and is sexist in many ways, the notion that one’s research abilities correlated with gender identity or fashion choices simply didn’t cross anyone’s mind.

Since we’re so obsessed with our identities, relative strengths emerge as more important than absolute ones. On average, girls’ language skills develop earlier than boys’, while math abilities emerge at about the same rate for both. This early gender difference doesn’t mean boys never catch up — men and women are represented about equally in journalism, for instance.

It does mean that at a time in their lives when girls are trying to establish their identities, they are disproportionately praised for their language skills, since that is their relative academic advantage. In absolute terms, a girl might get equally good grades in math and writing — but in English, she’s outpacing more than half the class, while in math, she’s right in the middle. It’s logical for her to conclude that writing is where her strengths lie, and that she’s a “artistic person.” Yet she has exactly the same math ability as her brother, who — again, in relative terms — finds himself stronger in math and labels himself a “math person.” The fact that the sciences pay better than the world of the arts is not factored into the equation. Stressing absolute abilities rather than relative ones could make a big difference in bringing girls into STEM.

Are there people who have true passions, who’ve known since the age of six that they want to be a [dancer, engineer, writer] and never wavered from this focus? Sure, and we all know and envy them. But they’re rare. Most of us haven’t a clue, and are desperately casting about for clues to our ‘true passion’.

Damone’s essay makes much of the fact that men dominate “risky” professions such as coal mining, garbage pickup and firefighting, but I’d double down on my previous substantial bet that the upper-middle-class Damone was never once encouraged to pursue sanitation engineering as a career. The military, too, is now far more segregated by class than gender. Looking back, I regret not training as a wind turbine technician or electrician — I love the outdoors, have minimal fear of heights, and could have used the support of a union — but it never crossed my mind. I was going to college, because that’s what people of my class did. My image of a programmer was a solitary prodigy with awkward social skills. Clearly not the mirror of my innermost soul. I did keep quietly getting As in math, but that had nothing to do with finding myself — right?

What if our careers weren’t manifestations of our inner talents and character (aka: the options you perceive based on the subset of society you live in) but rather, a set of skills you choose to acquire so you can get paid? What if we recognized that software engineering isn’t a matter of identifying with your inner prodigy or being obsessed with ‘geek culture’, but simply carrying out a series of tasks that anyone can learn to do? I suspect a more pragmatic Zeitgeist would produce more women in tech.

Erica Stephan

Written by

Climate hawk, cyclist, policy wonk.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade