Re the Atlantic article - very interesting. Things have got worse for women since the early gains in the 70s /80s. I think the problem lies in leaving diversity to the education sector. It has never protected or encouraged women- unless women only schools. In the 70s and 80s the big computer companies recruited grads from any discipline and cross trained the technical knowledge. That stopped with the rise of PCs.
Unless financial incentives and consequences are applied, there will be no change. Unless of course we get a whole raft of TIMs recruited under the women's quota. The financial incentives have always been the motivation for diversity, like it or not and as soon as the incentives stop, so does diversity - no matter how much people point it out - as the article says, highlighting it seems to cement it as "normal":
A 2010 study, “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations,” found that in cultures that espouse meritocracy, managers may in fact “show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women.” In a series of three experiments, the researchers presented participants with profiles of similarly performing individuals of both genders, and asked them to award bonuses. The researchers found that telling participants that their company valued merit-based decisions only increased the likelihood of their giving higher bonuses to the men.
The study authors considered several alternative explanations for the low numbers of women in those fields—including that women might not want to work long hours and that there might be more men at the high end of the aptitude spectrum, an idea notoriously put forward in 2005 by then–Harvard President Larry Summers.
But the data did not support these other theories.
“The more a field valued giftedness, the fewer the female PhDs,” the study found, pointing out that the same pattern held for African Americans. Because both groups still tend to be “stereotyped as lacking innate intellectual talent,” the study concluded, “the extent to which practitioners of a discipline believe that success depends on sheer brilliance is a strong predictor of women’s and African Americans’ representation.”
…Indeed. At Google, the initial tally showed that just 17 percent of its technical employees were women. The female technical force was 10 percent at Twitter, 15 percent at Facebook, and 20 percent at Apple. Granted, women currently make up just 18 percent of computer-science majors, but these companies are so well funded and attractive that they should be able to get a disproportionate percentage of the pipeline. The firms resolved to do better, and began looking for new ways to attract and retain women. Their approaches include measures like recruiting from a broader array of colleges and creating more internships. But the flashiest—and most copied—approach is something called unconscious-bias training.
But there’s a problem. Unconscious-bias training may not work. Some think it could even backfire. Though the approach is much more congenial than the “sensitivity training” popular in the 1980s and ’90s—in which white men were usually cast as villains—it suffers from the same problem: People resent being made to sit in a chair and listen to somebody telling them how to act. Forcing them to do so can provoke the fundamental human urge to reply: No thanks, I’ll do the opposite.
They may even become more biased. A 2015 study by Michelle M. Duguid of Cornell University and Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt of the University of Virginia demonstrates the peril of normalizing bad behavior. Stigmatizing certain behaviors, such as littering and alcohol abuse, makes people realize they are acting outside the norm and has proved to be a powerful way of changing these behaviors. Conversely, messages presenting good behavior as a social norm—“the majority of guests reuse their towels”—can make people embrace this behaviour.
So what happens when you say that bias is natural and dwells within all of us? Duguid and Thomas-Hunt found that telling participants that many people hold stereotypes made them more likely to exhibit bias—in the case of the study, against women, overweight people, or the elderly. The researchers also suggest, provocatively, that even just talking too much about gender inequities can serve to normalize them: When you say over and over that women come up against a glass ceiling, people begin to accept that, yes, women come up against a glass ceiling—and that’s just the way it is.
“You would think all things are equal,” she said, “but these backdoor conversations are happening in settings that women are not invited to. The whole boys’-club thing still applies. If you party with the right people at Burning Man, you’re going to be part of this boys’ club.” As for calling people out in meetings, it sounds like a good idea, she said, but she never saw anyone do it. “It’s just—are you really going to be that person?”
Diversity consultants and advocacy groups say they remain frustrated by tech companies’ unwillingness to change core parts of their culture. It is, for example, a hallowed tradition that in job interviews, engineers are expected to stand up and code on whiteboards, a high-pressure situation that works to the disadvantage of those who feel out of place. Indeed, whiteboard sessions are rife with opportunities for biased judgment. At Stanford, Shelley Correll works with a graduate student who, for his dissertation, sat in on a whiteboarding session in which a problem had an error in it; when one female job candidate sensed this and kept asking questions, evaluators felt that all her questions suggested she wasn’t competent.
Now, it’s true that lots of companies have hiring goals. But to make its goals a little more, well, quota-like, Intel introduced money into the equation. In Intel’s annual performance-bonus plan, success in meeting diversity goals factors into whether the company gives employees an across-the-board bonus. (The amounts vary widely but can be substantial.) If diversity efforts succeed, everybody at the company gets a little bit richer.
Intel has also introduced efforts to improve retention, including a “warm line” employees can use to report a problem—feeling stuck in their career, or a conflict with a manager—and have someone look into it. A new initiative will take data from the warm line and from employee exit interviews to give managers customized playbooks. If a group is losing lots of women, for instance, the manager will get data on why they’re leaving and how to address the issue.