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".

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.

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?

Oh and that was an inspired rant Prickly

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

Totes correct noble. Totes.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read this one feeling increasingly depressed.

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).

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.

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!

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!

@PricklyBall
This article is good on why that emphasis on making sure developers are fully aware of the context is so important: www.linkedin.com/pulse/hard-thing-software-development-jesse-watson?__s=jkq4kstvqughqpxfwasu
But even in a team where such an expert is in daily and close communication with the software developers, the people writing code must still make an order of magnitude more micro-decisions as they will ever have time to communicate and verify with anyone else.

@noblegiraffe Yeah, that is kinda how I felt. I mean it's true that inclusive teams are more productive, but what a shitty reason eh? Though I am interested in this book:
twitter.com/histoftech/status/894780403571056640
"Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing" because it shows how this isn't new.

That's a good point about micro decisions. I remember going to an excellent "software carpentry" course, where one (of many) really useful tips was to think of it not as "top level spec, then down to the detail and stay there", but "keep popping your head back up to look around at the big picture."

It seems to me that as well as diversity as a tool for helping to get balance in those micro decisions, various techniques can be used - like coding in pairs, frequent code review as an ongoing process (I just did a preliminary code review of a colleague's stuff for this project, and it was good to do it part way through rather than at the end, because he's now gone away to take on board a lot of the stuff I raised and write the next chunk of code in the light of the review - I think it's really changed how he's thought about it, introducing the idea of thinking about it from the point of view of the end-user coming to the completed code and accessing it at any random point in the suite of programs rather than the coder writing it sequentially. Conversely - because I'm a scientist, rather than a coder - I've learned a lot about better techniques for the nuts-and-bolts of coding from doing the review, so hopefully I'll write better code).

I agree it's disappointing that we have to appeal to people's mercenary, goal-oriented side to get equality taken seriously, rather than them seeing the inherent unfairness and wanting to tackle it just out of a sense of what's right - but if the end result is a win, I'll take it!

Guess who Google Memo guy chose to give his first media interviews to. Go on, you'll never guess.

Some alt-right anti-feminist youtubers. Who'd have thought that such a reasonable-sounding person would turn out to be an MRA? It's like there were no hints at all.

uk.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-james-damore-major-interviews-right-wing-2017-8?r=US&IR=T