
Tech's Big Gender Diversity Push, One Year In - ohjeez
http://www.fastcompany.com/3052877/techs-big-gender-diversity-push-one-year-in
======
parennoob
For me, a non-white person from a country where some of the population
actually suffers from starvation, this is one of the paragraphs that
illustrates my problem with a lot of these diversity efforts.

> I ask Mason about this—would she do it? Would she consider a job with a
> bunch of white dudes? "No," she laughs, because the answer is obvious.
> "Maybe they’re screwed and it’s a problem they created. But if it were a
> great work environment, they’d be able to attract a diverse workforce."

I can't help but ask (and I hope this is a reasonable question), _why are
companies pushing so hard to attract these women_?

I am not white, but I have zero problems working in an environment with 100%
white dudes, 100% Asian women, or 100% any other group, so long as I am
treated with a decent amount of respect. If a person is attracting funding for
her initiatives (e.g. From the article – "Other companies, like Intel, have
commendably devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to diversity programs"),
but wouldn't even consider working at places just because they have a certain
ethnic or gender mix regardless of their actual behavior, it is not at all
clear to me that said initiative should be widely promoted or endorsed.

------
mdorazio
Honest question: is it morally fair to be creating big incentives for hiring
female workers in tech positions that aren't offered to men? I am 100% in
agreement that there is a huge problem, but am personally of the opinion that
we need to fix early-life biases to actually create more female engineers and
executives rather than trying to entice the few STEM-educated female graduates
into jobs they may or may not want. It just seems to me like tech companies
are creating an equivalent of college affirmative action, which could backfire
by creating animosity from male job applicants who get passed over because
they're not in the right gender bucket to meet quotas.

~~~
iokevins
Sounds like you prefer more equality and meritocracy, in hiring--is that
right? I'm glad to see we are in agreement about the existence and
significance of the problem. Opinions naturally will differ, on strategies to
pursue--one note the article mentioned was a perceived ding on the current
investment of resources in pursuing strategies. More resources, more
strategies, including early life and others?

~~~
mdorazio
Kevin, I prefer equal opportunity in as many parts of life as possible,
including hiring. Do you have any stats on strategies being actively pursued
by companies beyond "we need to hire more women"? The article made mention of
some, but didn't go into specifics on how seriously they were being taken. I
would personally like to see the bigger tech companies move toward training +
hiring programs for women who aren't already STEM educated (we obviously need
more engineers across the board, and the reliance on traditional CS/EE degrees
really frustrates me) and toward creating tools and training materials for
parents to use with their daughters in early life. A lot of the effort in the
latter area seems to be coming from parents themselves, sometimes with help
from Kickstarter (ex. Robot Turtles).

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emgoldstein
I'd love it if articles like this came with links to scientific evidence that
XX-chromosome humans have the same distribution of interests and aptitudes as
XY-chromosome humans. Alternatively, maybe HN readers have some such links?

At the very least, I'd hope reasonable people could agree that in a universe
where this scientific hypothesis isn't true, or turns out not to be true, this
situation looks very different from the way the article (which seems to assume
it _is_ true) presents it. Certainly, Occam's razor being a thing, any
falsification of this hypothesis would be a very parsimonious explanation for
the statistical disparities being observed.

~~~
mdorazio
No offense, but you seem to be fishing for a genetic justification for sexism
in the workplace, and I don't think you're going to find it. The only thing
genetics will tell you is if people have physical aptitude for one type of
work/activity, which may or may not make them more interested in a certain
vocation.

The scientific findings are muddy at best, with some studies [1] showing that
development factors are the leading cause of interest, and others [2] showing
some correlation for twins raised apart. And while yes, there are some small
differences in things like spatial reasoning between genders [3], you would be
hard pressed to show how this translates into some legitimate reason for women
not wanting to write code. It's far, far more likely that social pressures
account for most of the disparity in STEM careers. You don't even have to look
farther than the kids toys aisle at Walmart - girls are marketed barbies,
while boys are marketed RC cars.

[1] [http://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2013/05/14/18263340...](http://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2013/05/14/182633402/how-can-identical-twins-turn-out-so-different) [2]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=YqanMBTJbxwC&lpg=PA300&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=YqanMBTJbxwC&lpg=PA300&ots=seDOwcILro&dq=identical%20twins%20interests&pg=PA300#v=onepage&q&f=false)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#Gender_differences)

~~~
emgoldstein
No, I'm asking you to produce evidence for a hypothesis you seem to believe. I
don't have any hypothesis of my own.

If you tell me that the Sears Tower and the Empire State Building are the same
height (a hypothesis), you should show up with evidence that they are the same
height, or some other _a priori_ reason to believe that your hypothesis is
more likely to be true than untrue (for instance, if both buildings were the
product of the same prefab factory).

[1] is a rat study. How it relates to any hypothesis about XY versus XX humans
is beyond me.

If XX and XY humans have different interests/aptitudes, that's a very
parsimonious explanation for the toy aisle at Walmart, right?

But if your hypothesis is true, we need to search for other explanations. For
instance, Walmart and other toy stores might be controlled by a conspiracy of
conservative Christians who believe in different gender roles, and are willing
to sacrifice profits (from boys buying Barbies, girls buying cars, etc) to
support their goal of an unequal society. Is this the hypothesis you're
proposing? It also needs to apply to Target, etc, all of which have the same
boy/girl aisles.

~~~
mdorazio
The fact that you asked for "evidence that XX-chromosome humans have the same
distribution of interests and aptitudes as XY-chromosome human" shows that you
believe the opposite. Otherwise you wouldn't ask for the evidence in the first
place. And I just gave you some evidence, but you seem to think it's not good
enough. That's about as good as the research gets, which is itself a
commentary on how little the scientific community seems to think this line of
questioning is worthwhile. But fine, here's some more:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=xeYJAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA110&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=xeYJAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA110&ots=TXIS4qYk8x&dq=Lawrence%20Cohen%20inborn%20differences&pg=PA110#v=onepage&q&f=false)

I'm trying to figure out how you would even begin to do an objective study of
what you're looking for since by the time kids present meaningful interests,
they're already irrevocably influenced by society and their parents'
expectations.

And no, that's not a parsimonious explanation at all, it's one of many that
fits a particular narrative. Equally plausible is that toys today are a relic
of thousands of years of traditional gender role pressures that have no place
in today's knowledge economy. You can trace "dolls are for girls" back to
hunter-gatherer times where it made sense for boys to be given knives and
bows, and girls to be given baskets and dolls. The problem is those roles are
deeply ingrained in today's society even though they don't make much sense
anymore since today women are more likely to build robots than men are to hunt
their own food.

[1] Is a genetics study, the very thing you're asking for evidence of. That's
how you would test a hypothesis that genetics is key to occupational interest
-- look at two animals with identical genetics and see if they show the same
interests regardless of environmental factors. If they don't, then the entire
XX vs. XY distinction is a moot point. i.e. if two people with literally the
same DNA don't show the same interests (as is the case for many identical
twins), that's rather strong evidence that genetics doesn't mean much for
occupational choice at all. And if you're discounting the study merely because
it uses rats, you're going to have to throw out an awful lot of research from
the last 100 years on just about everything related to biology.

~~~
emgoldstein
Your evidence (of the absence of sexual dimorphism in the human brain) is that
rats with identical genes can be trained in different directions? (Your second
link is behind a paywall, for me anyway.)

> I'm trying to figure out how you would even begin to do an objective study
> of what you're looking for since by the time kids present meaningful
> interests, they're already irrevocably influenced by society and their
> parents' expectations.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability)

What you're saying is that your hypothesis (the absence of human sexual
dimorphism in brain neuroanatomy) can't be proved false by any practical
experiment. Nor can the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Imagine you lived in a world (perhaps the world of 100 years ago) in which
everyone believed in human sexual dimorphism in neuroanatomy. (BTW, here's the
top link I get when I google that:
[http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/6/490.short](http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/6/490.short)).
Lacking MRI scans, these uneducated people give as evidence the fact that
girls prefer dolls and boys prefer tin soldiers.

Your job is to convince them otherwise. You say: my theory is that it's
_possible_ that girls prefer dolls and boys prefer tin soldiers because of
thousands of years of cultural conditioning, etc. You've offered an
alternative hypothesis to explain facts that both of you observe.

You haven't even begun to explain why your hypothesis should be believed over
the existing null hypothesis. Your listeners ask: what evidence makes your
hypothesis more plausible than mine? That genetically identical rats can be
trained to do different things? What does this tell me about human sexual
dimorphism?

But actually, it's not as bleak as you think. Society today has enough parents
and scientists who believe in the absence of sexual dimorphism above the neck,
that this experiment has not gone unperformed. One example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money#Sex_reassignment_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money#Sex_reassignment_of_David_Reimer)

------
iokevins
The article uses the Anita Borg Institute’s "Grace Hopper Celebration of Women
In Computing" as a window, to assess industry challenges: gender numbers not
moving, transparency, awareness, hiring practices, leaky pipelines,
perceptions, and bias. It concludes with strategies a number of companies have
taken.

