women are underrepresented in tech because of inherent psychological differences

I've been talking about this a bit at work and am astounded at just the sheer lack of awareness men have about why this is offensive. Women are human and we shouldn't have to justify why we should be in the workplace. Huh.
prickly you are awesome!

I dunno, it says a lot of things that Athena Swan say about positive work environments, and is clearly an opinion, body of knowledge, piece with an internal coherency. . You might not agree with it, or like it strategically, but thats what this kind of essay is about, raising an argument within a very current debate.
The PR damage was done by whoever characterised it, and released it. Google among all organisations should know that almost no angle on the debate isn't already out there. Why they didn't. 'meh' it into obscurity is beyond me!

It seems the way to convince men to shuffle up on the Senior Exec bench is to tell them it will make them more money. Awesome.

That's an interesting article, slightlyglittermaned. It ties up with Priya Guha's comment in the Guardian article I linked to up thread.

I know it's something we're trying to take seriously in the big software/data delivery project I'm involved in at the moment, which has to be all things to all people, from the comms person who wants a snappy graph to illustrate a soundbite through to the engineer who wants access to the underlying data for heavy-duty number-crunching. We have to have an interface that allows everyone, whatever their background, to get at and use the information in the way they need to. That means talking to and listening to the people who're going to be using it, not getting buried in the minutiae of the code (though of course that has to be done too, and done well).

akfpartners.com/growth-blog/what-google-got-right-and-wrong-with-firing-james-damore

Read this one feeling increasingly depressed.

Women used to be raped a lot, so they are used to it by now

women used to pick berries, thats why they like to play snooker

I suspect the equadorian embassy is extremely careful not to leave their cupboard dwelling bad smell alone with any women ever.

Fox I love that quote, very well-phrased, concise summary of the phenomenon.

I'm so glad I don't work at the Equadorian embassy.

I read this morning that Julian Assange has offered this douche a job?

How perfect

(don't really believe that Assange is in a position to offer anything much from inside his cupboard at the embassy, but still).

Helen Lewis has done a good piece on the memo:

there is a certain strand of Rational Internet Thinker (let's be honest, mostly men) who solemnly tells everyone that we Must Stick To The Facts while advancing deeply ideological stances, which only happen to look "natural" because they are so embedded in our culture

Women used to pick berries, that's why they see footling little details and are manually dextrous at those fiddly little tasks.

Men were the hunters so that's how they see the bigger, more important picture.

As hunting took much more energy than gathering, men need more food.

Totes correct noble. Totes.

(Except the male monkeys bit, which has confounding factors galore)

It's true, noble giraffe. All of it.

Women used to pick berries and that's why they prefer pink. Men used to scan the horizon for wild animals, that's why they like blue.

And male monkeys like playing with wheels, that's why there are more men in tech.

Also, it might be nice if men who use evolutionary psychology to splain why men are just better at all these highly paid things, had a bloody handle on psychology.

Anyone who says "this is how hunter-gatherers behaved" doesn't have a clue about prehistory, isn't even aware that there is anything to have a clue about. They really do believe "hunter-gatherers" were some sort of homogenous ur-group. It is a term that covers human activity over millions of years and (eventually) most of the earth's land surface, with all the cultural, social and behavioural variation that implies. Invoking it as the basis for essentially a political view is the functional equivalent of a Just So story.

Mind you I don't blame the idiots directly for it, I think prehistory should be taught at least to some extent in schools!

Very good post Prickly. I am not in tech myself but in my industry, too, there are far more men and similarly, I had a lot of contact with Latin America recently, and surprise surprise, the majority of people I came into contact with were women. Sounds a bit like your Malaysia/India example.

Oh and the idea that these techie fuckers were also the hunter-gatherers of old is fucking ludicrous. In my experience many of them can hardly function outside ordering pizza. In my husband's (large international IT) company, memos are frequently sent reminding the techs not to wipe shit on the toilet walls and HR are known for providing deodorant and reminding them to wash their clothes.

Oh and that was an inspired rant Prickly

I think any employer would be right to be concerned about an employee who distributes a 10 page manifesto. What did he think would happen? Did he really believe he spoke for a silent majority?

There is a crowdfunder on the go for him and twitter is a bloodbath with many clamouring to agree with him, including Jordan Peterson. I just don't understand how he is so rampantly biologically essentialist.

Here is what was said.
"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."

Note the use of the words preferences and abilities

Biological differences, he claims, are universal across all cultures. A brief bit of googling (hah) would have shown him immediately that women being underrepresented in tech isn't universal across all cultures and his argument falls down at the first hurdle.

Thanks slightlyglitterymaned for the link to Yonatan Zunger's medium article. I think the point made in his first footnote is very interesting with respect to this issue but also to many of the issues more widely discussed on this board. Inflexible male gender roles are a huge problem for both men and women.

"One very important true statement which this manifesto makes is that male gender roles remain highly inflexible, and that this is a bug, not a feature. In fact, I suspect that this is the core bug which prompted everything else within this manifesto to be written. But the rest of the manifesto is basically about optimizing around the existence of this bug! Don’t optimize your bugs; fix them."

Good article in the Guardian

The main points - the science of cognitive differences suggests that insofar as they can be measured at all, they are tiny. There are however, huge cultural barriers in the UK and America in particular. Those cultural barriers appear not to be there elsewhere - e.g. India, Malaysia, where numbers of women in tech are near or surpass 50% - which rather suggests the differences can't be biological. And the model of "supergeek" isn't a good one for engineering in any case. I particularly liked this quote:

Priya Guha, the UK lead of tech incubator RocketSpace and a former UK consul general in San Francisco, argues that, even by its own arguments, Damore’s memo missed the point. “The description of an engineer as somebody who has their head down, focused on developing the next line of code, is the sort of engineer that won’t be adding value,” she says. “We need engineers out there who are both very strong developers, but also people who understand the world around them and are comfortable interacting with society. So, by that description, women would be better engineers even by the stereotypes he proposes.”

Having had my rant up thread I'm gonna ignore the tag-team "but, but, but women are just a bit thick and can't do tech, init?" going to ignore posts I don't think bring anything to the thread and discuss with my fellow women tech/science workers who do actually understand the issues.