Women are fully capable of being engineers with as much innate ability as men. They deserve respect and a workplace free of harassment or intimidation. It’s in the best interest of companies and the country as a whole to encourage female presence in STEM fields.
There are some things that need to be said about the recently leaked memo from a Google employee. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read it here. The first thing that people need to confront is that the memo is not, as Gizmodo called it, an “anti-diversity screed.” It covers some trends about how women fall along the “Big Five” personality traits and similar metrics. Some of these smell a bit sexist, and most people are reading without the benefit of the citations that Gizmodo so helpfully stripped out. A lot of it really would have been better to just leave out. It’s only tangentially related to the memo’s final recommendations. The fact remains, the memo doesn’t say what people have accused it of saying. The author makes copious declarations that it is not valid to use these statistics to justify discrimination. The way the memo does use these statistics is to justify specific measures to attract and retain more women.
The memo is clearly a failure at persuasive writing, but I can say that people are reacting to imaginary strawmen instead of what’s actually there. If you are claiming the statistics presented justify discrimination against women, that is your idea. You own it. If you use that idea to argue against the memo, you are promulgating the idea that statistics justify discrimination. You cannot pin that on the memo; it says the opposite.
What the memo does say: Numerically, fewer than 50% of people who want to be in STEM fields are women; therefore, it’s not an aberration for representation to be below 50%.
What the memo does not say, but people have imagined it does: there are no women who want to be engineers, women are innately bad at engineering, women must work harder to prove themselves, sexism isn’t real, diversity is a threat, women are overemotional, women don’t deserve the jobs they have, and women are not people.
Hyperbolic much?
The memo talks about women’s preferences, and people have chosen to hear instead something about women’s ability or their right to be in tech. I can’t be clear enough about this: the memo does not say that women are biologically unsuited to technology. It does not advance a single idea that would justify pushing women out of the industry. It’s simply not there. People are asking, well how are women supposed to feel about this? How can they still work at Google after this? There’s no cause to feel anything about it. For women who are in tech, the memo is categorically not about them. It’s about the women that Google tries and fails to recruit because those women are not studying STEM fields in the first place. Women in tech wouldn’t deny that many other women are bored or intimidated by the same subject matter they find energizing. They likely have ideas of their own about effective outreach to them. Everyone needs to give careful consideration to the possibility that the memo author is closer than they think to sharing similar values. If you want to talk about creating a hostile work environment, the memo’s author is the only person whom I’ve heard suggested ought to be beaten to death.
Rapprochement looks hard to do at first, because the memo freely bandies about so many claims about differences between men and women. Even with the citations in place, the way they are presented confuses and distracts readers that don’t take evolutionary psychology for granted. Google’s CEO apparently didn’t grok the contents, given the way his response puts peculiar emphasis on the use of non-perjorative psychological terms-of-art like “neuroticism”.
The memo writer is clearly used to an environment where accurate information is its own justification. The shocked reactions are coming from men and women who not only don’t see these kinds of studies on a regular basis; they also don’t see these kinds of claims as being independent of the identity of the speaker. Most hostile reactions barely make reference to whether any of the claims are true; they don’t find it acceptable for a man to say them regardless. That’s basically the stance of what has probably been the most linked reaction to the memo— basically, “I know nothing about this, I don’t want to learn about it, but I am still sure its all wrong.” (I’ve provided links to scholarship at the bottom of this essay, but I’ll skip discussing them on the assumption that you, the reader, also don’t care.) The assumption is that, true or not, no one has a reason to say these things except for being a sexist.
If I convince you of nothing else, I hope I can convince you that facts in general matter. It’s not for the sake of a (formerly) anonymous engineer that I’m sticking my neck out. As a father of two girls, I have a particularly vested interest in trying to impart a passion for the hard sciences to the next generation. It’s a mixed bag so far. At that age, if you had a book about space or dinosaurs you’d have to beat me off with a stick. My daughters usually need something a bit more interactive or gamified to reel them in. Baking soda volcanoes were a hit; the telescope was a flop. Bubbles elicit unlimited enthusiasm. When I wax ecstatic about rockets, they mostly just humor me. Who can say how much is gender, how much is electronics competing for attention, and how much is just that they are independent people. I can’t just dictate what they should be interested in. In reference to the Google affair, some people have circulated the statistic that computer science students in India are 46% female. That sounds pretty good, on the face of it. Polling about this phenomenon turns up that among the leading reasons students cite is that it’s what their father wanted them to major in. Another big factor is it’s less dangerous than careers working outdoors in India. Huh. That doesn’t seem like a blueprint for improving representation in the West. If my girls cite me as a reason for their major, I hope they would cite me as an inspiration only.
As a matter of fact, there’s a fairly consistent anti-correlation across countries between women’s freedom to choose their life’s course and their STEM participation. Women are choosing not to go into these fields in developed countries, and it’s a puzzle to crack. Women’s approximately 20% CS representation stretches all the way from the workforce back to middle school. I don’t see how anyone can say this is not a pipeline problem. Many seductively simple explanations have been offered for why representation crashed in the 1980’s, but none of these theories survive contact with the data. So if you want to know why someone would possibly know and care about research in this area — if not to shill for the status quo — it’s to change it for the better. Women have much higher representation in scientific and medical fields that involve animals or babies. The evidence towards it being an innate preference is beside the point. If a cuter LOGO turtle might hack some psychological backdoor to transfer this appeal to CS, I’m not above trying that. Emphasizing pro-social applications of technology might be the key to capturing other girls’ interest. Understanding how women — biology and all — relate to STEM in the workplace is critical to evangelizing for it. Lacking information about a problem can only hinder you from solving it. How much more so if you deliberately cut yourself off from valid science?
Some of you are out there thinking evidence is well and good, but women have lived experiences. I don’t want to go too far on a tangent here, but giving primacy to lived experience is destructive. Even taking for granted the dubious proposition that it’s impossible to distill an experience into words other people can process, in the end it’s no different from any other kind of fallacious appeal to authority. I could even link to some women with PhD’s and blue checkmarks who say the memo is totally right and innocuous. I won’t, because it shouldn’t sway you. There’s no substitute for data, and no one is born knowing it. That’s not even the half of it though. Not only can you not assume any given woman is more factually accurate than a man, you can’t assume that a position a woman takes is the side most supportive of women. Consider the interactions of alcohol with campus rape. Some women stress the fact that alcohol consumption is a risk factor for rape. Other women consider it victim blaming to discuss that at all. I won’t tell you what to believe, but I think a woman can simultaneously have agency to reduce their risk and still not deserve any blame for being victimized. What I can tell you to believe, on account of the data, is that seminars to educate college students about binge drinking are the only kind of educational intervention that demonstrably reduces the incidence of rape.[1][2][3] That puts the opponents of that kind of seminar in a very difficult position. I haven’t heard any of them explicitly say it’s better for women to be actually raped than to tolerate an outrage to their sensibilities, so I won’t put those words in their mouth. This is however a true dichotomy: accept an offensive idea or else enable rape. There are real women, who have lived experiences, who take a stance actively harmful to women. Hopefully no more needs to be said about lived experiences, except to treat them as one type of data.
The stakes in the Google fiasco don’t seem to be as high, but it remains the case that personal subjective knowledge is not enough to go on. It’s possible that a program that’s supposed to improve diversity just doesn’t work. I have separately heard from girls and women spanning the age spectrum, from STEM summer camps to professional networking conferences, that they feel like single-gender programs sometimes perpetuate the very same gender stratification they’re supposed to be solving. Can any single woman say this is right? Can any single woman say this is wrong? No, it takes talking to a lot of different people and measuring concrete outcomes. The Google memo suggests de-incentivizing overtime at Google would exert a gender-differential improvement in retention. Is anyone willing to go on record saying that’s a ridiculous expectation? It’s not an attack on the basic goal of diversity to say we should explore new ideas and shouldn’t double down on ideas that don’t work. Let’s accept that men and women can both be right and wrong sometimes about issues affecting women. The memo’s core thesis is that intolerance of ideas is an obstacle standing in the way of a more just and inclusive future. Take care that you do not make yourself the embodiment of that obstacle and an agent of a less equitable future.
There’s one other take on this topic I’d encourage you to read, from the ever-insightful Scott Alexander.
Edit: I also endorse this one, which makes good points while incidentally having been written by a female engineer.
Some worthwhile citations for your perusal:
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115057
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0095960
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153857
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883140
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.23249/abstract
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691616659391?journalCode=ppsa
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691612463704
