8 ms·

The problem with Damore's theory he posited (that the difference in traits and abilities between men and women is why you see a certain imbalance in tech) ignor

The problem with Damore's theory he posited (that the difference in traits and abilities between men and women is why you see a certain imbalance in tech) ignores the history of computer science, where in the early days of CS you had a large amount of women entering into software followed by a sharp dropoff in the 80s [1]. The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed on a biological level between 1984 and today. I also take umbrage with his civil suit against Google because it amounts to no more than a document meant to doxx google employees by revealing their names and political positions ranging from benign to the more 'punch nazis' level of discourse. There was selective censorship applied such that people he agreed with were protected, while people he disagreed with were brought out in front of the crowd. I have seen pictures floating around designed to make it easy to effectively target said employees facebook, twitter etc accounts. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

rayiner 9y ago
It's not just the history of computer science. Damore's essay was based on time-tested pseudo-scientific reasoning, the sort that has been invoked to exclude women in many different fields. When law firms offered Sandra Day O'Connor a secretarial job after she graduated third in her class at Stanford, do you think they said "we just don't like women?" Of course not. They couched their bias in appeals to the differences between men and women, and how those differences supposedly were relevant to the practice of law. Damore is more of the same. Take, for example, his invocation of studies showing that women are more prone to be "neurotic." Aside from the fact that "neurotic" covers an immense range of personality traits--Damore leaves it as an exercise for the reader why that would be a bad thing. Among other things, "neurotic" encompasses "obsessive compulsive" or "anxious." Why isn't that a good trait in a programmer--someone who needs to be constantly on the lookout for the errant buffer overflow? He also invokes the idea that women are less able to handle "stressful" situations. Which explains why nurses--who are literally dealing with life and death every day--are mostly women? It's not that there isn't evidence of differences in personality traits between men and women, it's that all the inferences after "infant boys prefer trucks" is complete handwaving. Back in the day, people would, with the pretense of science, invoke differences in cranial measurements to explain the economic plight of African Americans. Damore's is just the latest in a long line of pseudo-scientific gibberish. And it blows my mind that so many in the tech community are falling for it. You actually have to be bad at logical reasoning to find Damore's points compelling.
- reader5000 9y ago
  There are more male programmers than female. Please explain how invoking genetic differences explanations is pseudo scientific, whereas invoking systematic discrimination explanations is not pseudo-scientific. Consider: There are more male rapists than female rapists. Is this because female rapists are systematically discriminated against? Does our society shamefully teach children that raping is only for boys? Or are males simply genetically more predisposed to rape relative to females? If males are genetically more likely to rape, should we lock them all up at birth? I guess not?
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Tangent, but men and women are heterosexually assaulted at similar rates, it's just that men on average are better able to resist due to strength advantages,and have more of a stigma against reporting. And not as much in the workplace since on average men have more positions of power in workplaces
    - reader5000 9y ago
      I'm not sure about that, for instance the below link claims 91% of victims of sexual assault are female. https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc...
  - rayiner 9y ago
    The difference is that we have a theory of causation and evidence that the causal factors exist. We can point to studies showing that identical resumes with female names are half as likely to get called back, and we have a workable theory of how things like that affect gender ratio. These theories are backed by a real-world social experiment: when we eliminated many explicit forms of discrimination that existed in past decades, we saw the proportion of women rise rapidly in many formerly male dominated professions. That gives us a rich source of empirical evidence to draw from. (E.g. we saw in law and medicine that affirmative action led to self-perpetuating long term changes in gender ratio; once going into a law career wasn’t signing up for a life of being an extreme minority, womens’ representation shot way up). With the biological explanation, we have evidence of certain gender differences, and we have evidence of disparities in representation, but we have no theory of how the two are causally linked. That’s the hallmark of pseudo-science. Say we know that women are more cooperative than men. What does that mean for programming? Is programming inherently less cooperative than fields like accounting where there are more women than men? What is the sensitivity of programming choice to differences in “cooperativeness?” The biggest confounder is that while we have scientfic studies associating genders with traits, we have nothing linking traits with professions. That’s where Damore’s memo goes off the rails into handwaving and begging the question: he repeatedly assumes that because men are over represented in programming, that programming is necessarily characterized by male traits. (E.g. thing oriented versus people oriented: why does Goldman Sachs have more women creating abstract financial instruments than many tech companies have creating social apps?)
reader5000 9y ago
>The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed on a biological level between 1984 and today. Alternatively, that the nature of software work changed.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  In a way that aligns well with some nebulous personality difference between men and women? That's quite a claim. It seems to me like the nature of the work hasn't even dramatically changed in the first place.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    As long as we're just literally making stuff up, isn't there a strong argument that software has become more "feminine" since the 1950s? Back then it was all about business calculations and the like. Now it's all "social" and "design" and "user-centric."
- jjeaff 9y ago
  Just because initially, women worked on computers doesn't indicate to me whether they were more or less suited to the job. People just thought of it as women's work. They were the typists and human "computers"
gdix 9y ago
I'm skeptical of the "early days of CS" narrative. Could it be that there were lots of women working with computers because it was seen as "secretarial" work. In other words, was it just bosses placing their female employees in computer-related roles as companies added those positions? If so, could it be that that "dropoff" in the 80s could be just reflective of the demographics of people who were choosing that profession. i.e. Once "computers" became a career that you could pursue, as opposed to being placed in, it attracted more men than women, possibly because men are more attracted to that type of work.
- jjeaff 9y ago
  I know that initially, part of the reason was that only women knew how to type. In fact, it was almost embarrassing for a man if he knew how to type since that was women's work. So I'm sure that played a role once keyboard came into the picture. Before that, when it was mostly punchcards, women were manual "computers" that did the calculations. So it seems reasonable that computers were considered women's work and thus that drive the trend. Whether women were more or less suited to the job wouldn't seem to be relevant at the time.
  - gdix 9y ago
    > more or less suited I would say "more or less preferred" is a more relevant and less acerbic metric to consider. I think James Damore's main thesis (or one of his main theses) was that men had more of a natural and biologically driven preference to work with things/machines. So if women were placed in these positions, it detracts from the narrative that "something mysterious happened in the 80s that caused women to flee the computer industry".
- ianamartin 9y ago
  My mother's college roommate went to work for NASA and worked on the Apollo projects starting in the 50s. Programming at that time was all women, and it was definitely seen as menial work. The literal astrophysicists and computer scientists were doing the "real" work, and the women were "just punching cards." That wasn't the reality of it, of course. Those women were doing massive amounts of the work around the logic of the systems. But there was a hierarchy, and everyone knew it. Wasn't until the 70s and 80s that things turned into a man's world. Once people figured out that there were hard problems to solve and plenty of opportunities to yell, "Yeah! We Really Fucked that problem in the ass!" Yeah, right about that time, the women started leaving. My mom's roommate didn't quit NASA until she retired quite nicely in 1995. And by that time it was a very different place. You can laugh and mock someone who started with punch cards all you want, and maybe even think she's a dinosaur who didn't keep up. But this woman taught me assembly, C, Lisp, C++, SQL, and Python. Not too shabby for a punchcard programmer from the 50s. I'd say she kept up just fine. But boy, did she want out of that environment. She was not a happy camper by the time the 90s rolled around. The thing you aren't getting is that it's the people on the ground who did a lot of the work to make programming languages not suck.
cma 9y ago
He says: >that these differences may [emphasis added] explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership And he says one of the differences is a higher drive for status. That is one way it could change without the 80's thing being counter-evidence, if the status of practitioners and/or leadership in the field changed for some reason (maybe Bill Gates becoming the richest man in the world). I'm not saying that I agree with him, or that the status drive difference is true, or that it would actually be an explanation for the difference from the 80s to now (Bill Gates might have lowered the status of the field for being socially awkward). I'm only saying that your counter argument may not work because he couched his statement in "may" and he talks about meta-level factors around the field.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  This is well researched in the feminist sociology literature. When a "women's job" (like teaching or nursing) becomes more respected, pay goes up, and... The industry gets an influx of men working in it.
  - gaius 9y ago
    pay goes up, and... The industry gets an influx of men working in it. But isn’t the opposite true as well? I mean, it wasn't that long ago that the IT department was at the bottom of the organisational pecking order, sometimes literally at the bottom in a dingy, windowless basement, and jokes about nerds and geeks and personal hygiene and poor fashion choices and so on were totally mainstream and acceptable. In those days, no-one said it was problematic that these losers and social lepers tended to skew male. Obviously, everyone should be free to do any work that they want to and show an aptitude for. But you posit a one-way traffic that just isn't true.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - kingofhdds 9y ago
    I'm not sure it's supported by a really wide research. Scandinavian countries boast high equality ratings, and feminism being a part of political mainstream, AND social/tax system, which significantly reduces gap between high-, and low-salaried positions as well as competition between employees. And still tech is essentially a male field, and nursing - female-dominated.
rishav_sharan 9y ago
Are we sure that stenographers and typists were not counted as programmers in the 80?
imron 9y ago
> The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed on a biological level between 1984 and today. This article has an alternative explanation as for why: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... Without implying there was any biological change at all - rather that other fields that were shut off to women (medicine, law etc) become more open. It's a long read, but provides some interesting food for thought.
- fzeroracer 9y ago
  It's a somewhat interesting read, but one that I cannot agree with the conclusions as the author seems to have not bothered to read up on the data with regards to gender ratio in other careers. For example the following claim made by the author: >Women are less likely to be interested in programming than men. But if you ban the smart women from every other occupation – well, they’ll take it. Once you unban them, they’ll go to other things they like more, like being veterinarians (80% women) and forensic scientists (74% women). My guess is in 1980, neither of those careers had many women in them. Where did all those super-smart women who now dominate the fields come from? Probably places like schoolteaching and programming! Can have doubt immediately cast on it by examining the percentage of women graduates by all degree types [1]. If we presume this to be true, then in the 80s we should see a large tick up in other degrees followed by a large tick down in computer science. And well, the data doesn't exactly support that. In fact, Computer Science is one of the few that bucks the trend of the other degrees. His entire argument essentially boils down to 'women are interested in these degrees, and men are interested in these degrees' which is a soft-argument saying that genetic or gender-related differences is why we see such large disparities between various careers. He handwaves away the statistic relating to the drop in the 80s, which makes me have trouble taking him seriously. [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...
fjsolwmv 9y ago
Damore was the first Doxxing victim here. He didn't publish the memo publicly.
techservative 9y ago
This explanation in the NPR piece is so thin, so poorly researched and so speculative I simply am not able to accept it. The entire narrative stinks, we need a better one backed by actual data. Look at the graph, women in STEM falls closer to 1986, when Reagan passed the immigration reform act. Doesn’t it seem suspicious that Reagan immigration reform landed right on top of this decline? I do agree that the standard explanation of “men are mean and took women’s jobs” is correct, but I don’t think people are willing to take it one step further and say: “Why did men suddenly become mean when they were egalitarian before?” With Reagan immigration reform: Chinese, South American and Indian immigrants, especially eldest sons who are expected to support their entire extended families back home, were more free to enter the county and picked high paying engineering fields and pushed out competition (Americans) not willing to spend 18 hours per day studying math and science. This remains true to this day where 80% of masters degrees go to immigrants. These immigrants would mostly be men because these cultures are male dominated, at least at the time. The explanation that men suddenly became “mean” in the 1980s and drove women out fails for the same reason that your argument about women’s biology couldn’t have changed either. An influx of meaner men would explain what happened perfectly. If you open the flood gates to people with different cultural values (especially male dominance), women are going to get pushed out. My frustration is Liberals in general will refuse to see this part of the argument and instead go with: “white men became mean in the 80’s.”
- halflings 9y ago
  > If you open the flood gates to people with different cultural values (especially male dominance), women are going to get pushed out. Talk about speculative and poorly researched theories :) You took an anecdote (immigration law happening that year) and spread it so thin. What does "different cultural values" have to do with any of this? If your theory is correct, those immigrants would have just entered the United States... how can they "push women out" because of their culture? They're certainly not the ones (not) hiring them.
- eevilspock 9y ago
  Looks like the "white" in "white men" decided to come to the rescue of the "men" in this sad debate. Sigh.
pokemongoaway 9y ago
You're on the wrong side of this thing - it is insanely silly to imply someone should be fired from a tech company for a "theory he posited" (your words). How about some references for your second paragraph. I've seen statistics floating around proving you wrong...
kingofhdds 9y ago
As we all know correlation-causation link us not that easy. In 80s programming was a very much different thing - I know it, because both of my parents were programmers (though not in US), and also it was a very small pool at that time, so direct comparison may not be so valid as you seem to believe.
stillkicking 9y ago
There was no sharp drop-off in the 80s. What happened is that interest from men soared while the proportion of women choosing to study it remained relatively constant in comparison, only dropping by a little in terms of the actual percentage of the female student body choosing it over other subjects. Looking only at the ratio is completely misleading. There was only a short exception around the PC boom and the dotcom boom, when the proportion of women choosing to study it actually increased, and then fell down again once the boom was gone. This is similar to what the Scandinavian countries found in trying to encourage women to go into engineering: when they stop the campaigns, women's participation drops back to baseline. But rather than look at the complete picture, only the gender ratio graph is ever shown, because that's the one that confirms the preconception that women are being victimized. This "drop", by the way, only exists at the bachelor level, and vanishes at the masters and PhD level, which suggests there is nothing driving committed and talented women out of the field at all. But even if you didn't think all of the above is valid, it is preposterous to posit that the biological differences argument implies women must've somehow changed in the mid 80s. There is a much simpler explanation: computer science itself changed, and how it relates to industry. With the birth of PCs and especially SaaS, the amount of hard CS skills required to make computers do useful things dropped pretty much to zero. Only people with a particular theorical and abstract interest need to go into it. At the same time, software development pioneered many of the async and remote working styles that are common place in open source, and which allow for individualistic collaboration rather than the always-on social setting that women prefer. You see this in engineering too. Women gravitate towards engineering subjects that feature more team work, field work and lab work, and which involve working with people. The increased appeal of the field for men could be due to the fact that a segment of people previously tortured by social styles could now excel in a more solitary setting. None of this is a taboo when it is used to imply that women's communication and empathy skills are innately superior, a common refrain in diversity circles. But try to make the same argument about men and their abstraction skills, at a population level, and suddenly you're blaspheming against the church of intersectionality. The double standards and shoddy science are obvious, and the NLRB should be ashamed for rendering a judgment that declares reality to be sexist because some people's feelings were hurt. The only person who got actually victimized was Damore himself, for the crime of taking diversity advocates at their word, and actually offering them the feedback they claim to want, but clearly are incapable of processing.
Udik 9y ago
> The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed on a biological level between 1984 and today. Or that computer science, and programming, started to change around 1984, which is not at all implausible. Also, in the article you linked there is a good observation: > The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers. Which coincides with the time in which programming became a hobby you take up in childhood because you enjoy doing it, rather than a profession like any other. In other words, this could hint to a self-selection into a computer science career based on pure enjoyment of the activity as a child. (The article instead suggests computers were marketed mainly as toys for boys- which is also not implausible, but doesn't explain why tech companies would have willingly cut themselves off half of the possible revenues of their product- I bet a 100% increase in sales would beat any prejudice).

rayiner 9y ago

It's not just the history of computer science. Damore's essay was based on time-tested pseudo-scientific reasoning, the sort that has been invoked to exclude women in many different fields. When law firms offered Sandra Day O'Connor a secretarial job after she graduated third in her class at Stanford, do you think they said "we just don't like women?" Of course not. They couched their bias in appeals to the differences between men and women, and how those differences supposedly were relevant to the practice of law. Damore is more of the same. Take, for example, his invocation of studies showing that women are more prone to be "neurotic." Aside from the fact that "neurotic" covers an immense range of personality traits--Damore leaves it as an exercise for the reader why that would be a bad thing. Among other things, "neurotic" encompasses "obsessive compulsive" or "anxious." Why isn't that a good trait in a programmer--someone who needs to be constantly on the lookout for the errant buffer overflow? He also invokes the idea that women are less able to handle "stressful" situations. Which explains why nurses--who are literally dealing with life and death every day--are mostly women? It's not that there isn't evidence of differences in personality traits between men and women, it's that all the inferences after "infant boys prefer trucks" is complete handwaving. Back in the day, people would, with the pretense of science, invoke differences in cranial measurements to explain the economic plight of African Americans. Damore's is just the latest in a long line of pseudo-scientific gibberish. And it blows my mind that so many in the tech community are falling for it. You actually have to be bad at logical reasoning to find Damore's points compelling.

reader5000 9y ago
There are more male programmers than female. Please explain how invoking genetic differences explanations is pseudo scientific, whereas invoking systematic discrimination explanations is not pseudo-scientific. Consider: There are more male rapists than female rapists. Is this because female rapists are systematically discriminated against? Does our society shamefully teach children that raping is only for boys? Or are males simply genetically more predisposed to rape relative to females? If males are genetically more likely to rape, should we lock them all up at birth? I guess not?
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Tangent, but men and women are heterosexually assaulted at similar rates, it's just that men on average are better able to resist due to strength advantages,and have more of a stigma against reporting. And not as much in the workplace since on average men have more positions of power in workplaces
  - reader5000 9y ago
    I'm not sure about that, for instance the below link claims 91% of victims of sexual assault are female. https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc...
- rayiner 9y ago
  The difference is that we have a theory of causation and evidence that the causal factors exist. We can point to studies showing that identical resumes with female names are half as likely to get called back, and we have a workable theory of how things like that affect gender ratio. These theories are backed by a real-world social experiment: when we eliminated many explicit forms of discrimination that existed in past decades, we saw the proportion of women rise rapidly in many formerly male dominated professions. That gives us a rich source of empirical evidence to draw from. (E.g. we saw in law and medicine that affirmative action led to self-perpetuating long term changes in gender ratio; once going into a law career wasn’t signing up for a life of being an extreme minority, womens’ representation shot way up). With the biological explanation, we have evidence of certain gender differences, and we have evidence of disparities in representation, but we have no theory of how the two are causally linked. That’s the hallmark of pseudo-science. Say we know that women are more cooperative than men. What does that mean for programming? Is programming inherently less cooperative than fields like accounting where there are more women than men? What is the sensitivity of programming choice to differences in “cooperativeness?” The biggest confounder is that while we have scientfic studies associating genders with traits, we have nothing linking traits with professions. That’s where Damore’s memo goes off the rails into handwaving and begging the question: he repeatedly assumes that because men are over represented in programming, that programming is necessarily characterized by male traits. (E.g. thing oriented versus people oriented: why does Goldman Sachs have more women creating abstract financial instruments than many tech companies have creating social apps?)

reader5000 9y ago

>The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed on a biological level between 1984 and today. Alternatively, that the nature of software work changed.

UncleMeat 9y ago
In a way that aligns well with some nebulous personality difference between men and women? That's quite a claim. It seems to me like the nature of the work hasn't even dramatically changed in the first place.
- rayiner 9y ago
  As long as we're just literally making stuff up, isn't there a strong argument that software has become more "feminine" since the 1950s? Back then it was all about business calculations and the like. Now it's all "social" and "design" and "user-centric."
jjeaff 9y ago
Just because initially, women worked on computers doesn't indicate to me whether they were more or less suited to the job. People just thought of it as women's work. They were the typists and human "computers"

gdix 9y ago

I'm skeptical of the "early days of CS" narrative. Could it be that there were lots of women working with computers because it was seen as "secretarial" work. In other words, was it just bosses placing their female employees in computer-related roles as companies added those positions? If so, could it be that that "dropoff" in the 80s could be just reflective of the demographics of people who were choosing that profession. i.e. Once "computers" became a career that you could pursue, as opposed to being placed in, it attracted more men than women, possibly because men are more attracted to that type of work.

jjeaff 9y ago
I know that initially, part of the reason was that only women knew how to type. In fact, it was almost embarrassing for a man if he knew how to type since that was women's work. So I'm sure that played a role once keyboard came into the picture. Before that, when it was mostly punchcards, women were manual "computers" that did the calculations. So it seems reasonable that computers were considered women's work and thus that drive the trend. Whether women were more or less suited to the job wouldn't seem to be relevant at the time.
- gdix 9y ago
  > more or less suited I would say "more or less preferred" is a more relevant and less acerbic metric to consider. I think James Damore's main thesis (or one of his main theses) was that men had more of a natural and biologically driven preference to work with things/machines. So if women were placed in these positions, it detracts from the narrative that "something mysterious happened in the 80s that caused women to flee the computer industry".
ianamartin 9y ago
My mother's college roommate went to work for NASA and worked on the Apollo projects starting in the 50s. Programming at that time was all women, and it was definitely seen as menial work. The literal astrophysicists and computer scientists were doing the "real" work, and the women were "just punching cards." That wasn't the reality of it, of course. Those women were doing massive amounts of the work around the logic of the systems. But there was a hierarchy, and everyone knew it. Wasn't until the 70s and 80s that things turned into a man's world. Once people figured out that there were hard problems to solve and plenty of opportunities to yell, "Yeah! We Really Fucked that problem in the ass!" Yeah, right about that time, the women started leaving. My mom's roommate didn't quit NASA until she retired quite nicely in 1995. And by that time it was a very different place. You can laugh and mock someone who started with punch cards all you want, and maybe even think she's a dinosaur who didn't keep up. But this woman taught me assembly, C, Lisp, C++, SQL, and Python. Not too shabby for a punchcard programmer from the 50s. I'd say she kept up just fine. But boy, did she want out of that environment. She was not a happy camper by the time the 90s rolled around. The thing you aren't getting is that it's the people on the ground who did a lot of the work to make programming languages not suck.

cma 9y ago

He says: >that these differences may [emphasis added] explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership And he says one of the differences is a higher drive for status. That is one way it could change without the 80's thing being counter-evidence, if the status of practitioners and/or leadership in the field changed for some reason (maybe Bill Gates becoming the richest man in the world). I'm not saying that I agree with him, or that the status drive difference is true, or that it would actually be an explanation for the difference from the 80s to now (Bill Gates might have lowered the status of the field for being socially awkward). I'm only saying that your counter argument may not work because he couched his statement in "may" and he talks about meta-level factors around the field.

fjsolwmv 9y ago
This is well researched in the feminist sociology literature. When a "women's job" (like teaching or nursing) becomes more respected, pay goes up, and... The industry gets an influx of men working in it.
- gaius 9y ago
  pay goes up, and... The industry gets an influx of men working in it. But isn’t the opposite true as well? I mean, it wasn't that long ago that the IT department was at the bottom of the organisational pecking order, sometimes literally at the bottom in a dingy, windowless basement, and jokes about nerds and geeks and personal hygiene and poor fashion choices and so on were totally mainstream and acceptable. In those days, no-one said it was problematic that these losers and social lepers tended to skew male. Obviously, everyone should be free to do any work that they want to and show an aptitude for. But you posit a one-way traffic that just isn't true.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- kingofhdds 9y ago
  I'm not sure it's supported by a really wide research. Scandinavian countries boast high equality ratings, and feminism being a part of political mainstream, AND social/tax system, which significantly reduces gap between high-, and low-salaried positions as well as competition between employees. And still tech is essentially a male field, and nursing - female-dominated.

rishav_sharan 9y ago

Are we sure that stenographers and typists were not counted as programmers in the 80?

imron 9y ago

> The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed on a biological level between 1984 and today. This article has an alternative explanation as for why: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... Without implying there was any biological change at all - rather that other fields that were shut off to women (medicine, law etc) become more open. It's a long read, but provides some interesting food for thought.

fzeroracer 9y ago
It's a somewhat interesting read, but one that I cannot agree with the conclusions as the author seems to have not bothered to read up on the data with regards to gender ratio in other careers. For example the following claim made by the author: >Women are less likely to be interested in programming than men. But if you ban the smart women from every other occupation – well, they’ll take it. Once you unban them, they’ll go to other things they like more, like being veterinarians (80% women) and forensic scientists (74% women). My guess is in 1980, neither of those careers had many women in them. Where did all those super-smart women who now dominate the fields come from? Probably places like schoolteaching and programming! Can have doubt immediately cast on it by examining the percentage of women graduates by all degree types [1]. If we presume this to be true, then in the 80s we should see a large tick up in other degrees followed by a large tick down in computer science. And well, the data doesn't exactly support that. In fact, Computer Science is one of the few that bucks the trend of the other degrees. His entire argument essentially boils down to 'women are interested in these degrees, and men are interested in these degrees' which is a soft-argument saying that genetic or gender-related differences is why we see such large disparities between various careers. He handwaves away the statistic relating to the drop in the 80s, which makes me have trouble taking him seriously. [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...

fjsolwmv 9y ago

Damore was the first Doxxing victim here. He didn't publish the memo publicly.

techservative 9y ago

This explanation in the NPR piece is so thin, so poorly researched and so speculative I simply am not able to accept it. The entire narrative stinks, we need a better one backed by actual data. Look at the graph, women in STEM falls closer to 1986, when Reagan passed the immigration reform act. Doesn’t it seem suspicious that Reagan immigration reform landed right on top of this decline? I do agree that the standard explanation of “men are mean and took women’s jobs” is correct, but I don’t think people are willing to take it one step further and say: “Why did men suddenly become mean when they were egalitarian before?” With Reagan immigration reform: Chinese, South American and Indian immigrants, especially eldest sons who are expected to support their entire extended families back home, were more free to enter the county and picked high paying engineering fields and pushed out competition (Americans) not willing to spend 18 hours per day studying math and science. This remains true to this day where 80% of masters degrees go to immigrants. These immigrants would mostly be men because these cultures are male dominated, at least at the time. The explanation that men suddenly became “mean” in the 1980s and drove women out fails for the same reason that your argument about women’s biology couldn’t have changed either. An influx of meaner men would explain what happened perfectly. If you open the flood gates to people with different cultural values (especially male dominance), women are going to get pushed out. My frustration is Liberals in general will refuse to see this part of the argument and instead go with: “white men became mean in the 80’s.”

halflings 9y ago
> If you open the flood gates to people with different cultural values (especially male dominance), women are going to get pushed out. Talk about speculative and poorly researched theories :) You took an anecdote (immigration law happening that year) and spread it so thin. What does "different cultural values" have to do with any of this? If your theory is correct, those immigrants would have just entered the United States... how can they "push women out" because of their culture? They're certainly not the ones (not) hiring them.
eevilspock 9y ago
Looks like the "white" in "white men" decided to come to the rescue of the "men" in this sad debate. Sigh.

pokemongoaway 9y ago

You're on the wrong side of this thing - it is insanely silly to imply someone should be fired from a tech company for a "theory he posited" (your words). How about some references for your second paragraph. I've seen statistics floating around proving you wrong...

kingofhdds 9y ago

As we all know correlation-causation link us not that easy. In 80s programming was a very much different thing - I know it, because both of my parents were programmers (though not in US), and also it was a very small pool at that time, so direct comparison may not be so valid as you seem to believe.

stillkicking 9y ago

There was no sharp drop-off in the 80s. What happened is that interest from men soared while the proportion of women choosing to study it remained relatively constant in comparison, only dropping by a little in terms of the actual percentage of the female student body choosing it over other subjects. Looking only at the ratio is completely misleading. There was only a short exception around the PC boom and the dotcom boom, when the proportion of women choosing to study it actually increased, and then fell down again once the boom was gone. This is similar to what the Scandinavian countries found in trying to encourage women to go into engineering: when they stop the campaigns, women's participation drops back to baseline. But rather than look at the complete picture, only the gender ratio graph is ever shown, because that's the one that confirms the preconception that women are being victimized. This "drop", by the way, only exists at the bachelor level, and vanishes at the masters and PhD level, which suggests there is nothing driving committed and talented women out of the field at all. But even if you didn't think all of the above is valid, it is preposterous to posit that the biological differences argument implies women must've somehow changed in the mid 80s. There is a much simpler explanation: computer science itself changed, and how it relates to industry. With the birth of PCs and especially SaaS, the amount of hard CS skills required to make computers do useful things dropped pretty much to zero. Only people with a particular theorical and abstract interest need to go into it. At the same time, software development pioneered many of the async and remote working styles that are common place in open source, and which allow for individualistic collaboration rather than the always-on social setting that women prefer. You see this in engineering too. Women gravitate towards engineering subjects that feature more team work, field work and lab work, and which involve working with people. The increased appeal of the field for men could be due to the fact that a segment of people previously tortured by social styles could now excel in a more solitary setting. None of this is a taboo when it is used to imply that women's communication and empathy skills are innately superior, a common refrain in diversity circles. But try to make the same argument about men and their abstraction skills, at a population level, and suddenly you're blaspheming against the church of intersectionality. The double standards and shoddy science are obvious, and the NLRB should be ashamed for rendering a judgment that declares reality to be sexist because some people's feelings were hurt. The only person who got actually victimized was Damore himself, for the crime of taking diversity advocates at their word, and actually offering them the feedback they claim to want, but clearly are incapable of processing.

Udik 9y ago

> The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed on a biological level between 1984 and today. Or that computer science, and programming, started to change around 1984, which is not at all implausible. Also, in the article you linked there is a good observation: > The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers. Which coincides with the time in which programming became a hobby you take up in childhood because you enjoy doing it, rather than a profession like any other. In other words, this could hint to a self-selection into a computer science career based on pure enjoyment of the activity as a child. (The article instead suggests computers were marketed mainly as toys for boys- which is also not implausible, but doesn't explain why tech companies would have willingly cut themselves off half of the possible revenues of their product- I bet a 100% increase in sales would beat any prejudice).