women are underrepresented in tech because of inherent psychological differences

[MineKraftCheese]

http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320

This is horrendous! I don't know where to start but I'm boiling with rage.

So many awful gender stereotypes and weird lies and biological "truths".

@AssassinatedBeauty So where did the author say that he discriminated or that he wanted to discriminate against women? Provide one single quote please.

You say he was "promoting this as an absolute fact". He was, in rational normal language, expressing his opinion. Or can you find the word "absolute" or phrase "absolute fact" in the piece?

@PricklyBall The link is to a blog post. I am no expert but is it common for any journal to peer-review blog posts? I have no idea whether this guy is being referenced in the piece - as I said it is his claim.

At the start of the thread the problem was that there was no science while now posts are saying that "I am sick to death of science being used to justify..."

Look at what he wrote. Nowhere does he say women are unable to become programmers or inferior or less capable or less deserving or that they should be discriminated against. There is plenty in what he did say to disagree with, to discuss and to try and change his mind about. Why invent things he didn't say?

And a question to all; you can patronise me or you could try and answer the questions I put - which do you think would better present your case?

It's starts from birth, carries on through girlhood and on through the school years.

Girls don't do that. They're not geeks. Get away and do something else.

Abused by the boys who do coding/maths/science/computer aided design/technology/engineering and not encouraged to carry on by parents, friends and careers advisors women are under represented in all forms of STEM careers.

"I'm generally done with arseholes wanting positions to be "up for debate" which are frankly fucking heinous, and I'm only slightly less done with the unthinking egotistical twats who say they don't agree with them but defend them "on principle""

This pretty much sums up what I think about this, @LilaoftheGreenwood.

Some opinions aren't for circulating in memo form round your employer and this is one of those. He should keep it to himself.
Similar to not telling a customer that they are really annoying, in your opinion; or telling gay people they are committing a sin in your opinion; or telling your boss he's a fuckwit in your opinion.
He needs to learn to keep his trap shut

You're under the mistaken impression I want to persuade you of anything, Mr. "I read something in Psychology Today".

I am a fifty-something career scientist who has spent five fucking decades fighting against this shit. I am so done with being polite to some random on the internet who's popped up from nowhere to come onto an established feminist board for the shitz 'n' gigglz to "educate" us poor wimmin. I don't give a shit what you think, I don't give a shit if you continue to think it (in fact I'm pretty sure you'd continue to believe in your ingrained superiority no matter whether I played nicey-nice with you or told you to fuck off - because you're not here for discussion, and any claims to the contrary are a pile of complete bullshit disingenuous wankery).

Normally I try to speak to the lurkers, but on this issue, frankly, either you're on the side of the angels or you've done a deal with the devil. I am not an inferior failed male who's almost okay at science despite my sex, I am a full and equal human being whose particular skill happens to be science. If you can't get your head round that, that's your problem, not mine.

I just want equal pay to my male colleagues, an equal chance of promotion on my merits. (Fortunately both of these seem to be getting a bit closer in my chosen bit of science - but clearly Silicon Valley is way behind the curve on this one).

Rant over. Ah, that felt better.

Quoting @PricklyBall "fucking" "shit" "shit" "shit" "fuck" "bullshit" "wankery"

A pity to see that while you did spend a lot of time and effort you did not choose to address the points made.

Because MeDick thinks women only deserve to be listened to when they're appropriately ladylike.

And he forgot to include "shitz".

Nice rant, PricklyBall

MeRIchard I know this is hard for you but no-one cares what you think of "their case". No-one cares about beating you in argument on the internet. We've been doing this for 10+ years. We know it's bullshit. We're onto you. Scary new world, huh.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether you're onto yourself. Maybe you fall into my "twat" category above as opposed to my "arsehole" category and maybe you could still turn it around. But if you can manage that you'll do it on your own, I'm sure.

This is a feminist board. For feminists, i.e. people who believe women are equal to men. Why are you wide-eyed with shock that no one is pandering to your bullshit about semantics.

round of applause for PricklyBall - excellent rant!

Comment from that drnerdlove post sums it up, 'we know that the arguments are invalid, the opinions shot, and yet still get forced/pressured to debate our own value/worth'.

I read the memo, it says 'Some men have big penises, my own penis is small. Who can I blame for that?'

The worst thing about this is the "but muh free speech" spiel. And the complete denial that most modern, large corporations (heck your local store can have it these days) have an ethical code, or "Values" that employees sign to adhere to (I have and I am pretty sure this memo broke them, though I haven't checked).

When you think free speech is just the freedom to be offensive and discriminatory, then you have some serious issues.

My point here has been that critics of this piece have projected onto it statements that simply aren’t contained in the text. You can justify sacking someone for what they say but not for what you wish they said, or falsely believe they said, or for what you thought they said. No-one in this thread so far has pointed to any actual statements from the article.

Yonatan Zunger, who was quoted in several posts above, bases the majority of his reply on “arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs”. Yet the original piece makes no such argument. It does argue that the Google programmes are not fit for purpose – and the author may be wrong on that point – but nowhere does he say it about any person or class of people.

So I will ask one last time; can anyone provide me with the sentence, sentences, paragraph or section which supports Yonatan’s allegation? Where the author states that his female colleagues are not able to do their jobs or are less good at their jobs?

Previous replies have contained swearing, insults, attempts to patronise and suggestions that I covertly patronise others. These techniques are not ones that I am able to use with any effectiveness myself so I don’t.

Google idiot says Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them.

He conflates leadership roles and tech roles and tries to apply reasons why women don't want leadership roles to why they are underrepresented in tech. It's just bizarre. We know why there aren't more women in tech roles and it's not to do with women being more neurotic or agreeable.

MeRichard please could you enlighten me as to why this man thought it was okay to send a memo outlining his opinions to his colleagues? If I sent a company-wide memo of 11 pages of personal manifesto on any subject, even if vaguely related to our area of work, I would be 1) severely censured; 2) ridiculed widely; 3) likely receive a written warning, because company email isn't for personal use it's for business use.
It seems alien to me to behave in this manner, his personal opinions aside.

Another joyous extract:

Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts.

What an idiot.

"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50 percent representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business."

You are right MeRichard - he said in part, so it's all good.

But just in case you don't understand what is written there: "Men and women have different traits. Some make you better at tech and leadership. Men have more of these traits. Hence more men are in tech and leadership".

"I'm a man and I assume my manly traits make me better at tech and leadership" seems to be what I've just read.

In case you still don't understand, consider if he had said white humans have better traits than black humans and maybe you can finally see what he wrote.

My experience in the tech industry is that (many) men esp the young ones are full of arrogance and bluster and smatterings of knowledge, whereas the women are precise, focused and produce excellent work. And get on with it without all the drama.

It got even worse when I worked in the middle east and had to technically review work from men from rather equality unenlightened countries such as Saudi and Pakistan. I was told I had no business being in an engineering job - it was a man's job. Needless to say they didn't like me correcting their technical errors, of which there were many. Also most tech men usually can't bloody write and I spent a lot of time rewriting their dodgy proposals for bids.

There were of course, some men who produced excellent work too,
It also has to be said that many men in tech have Asperger's and have poor communication skills

I run my own small business now. It's bliss

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.

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."

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.