Google male engineeer saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers
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Anonymous
It's not one study, this is one of the few areas there there are non-trivial differences in intelligence between men and women (there are many potential causes for this, but no consensus). This is not controversial. What may be controversial is whether or not spatial intelligence leads to success in STEM, though there are a number of studies that show a strong correlation. Men and women have approximately average general intelligence (with men tending to be slightly higher) but the distributions are not the same (see link below to a graph). This difference makes a huge difference among outliers when looking at differences in standard deviations. There more dumb men than dumb women. There are more smart men than smart women. A greater number of women's IQs are within one standard deviation of average than for men. In other words, highly intelligent women (among women) are even more of an outlier than highly intelligent men. (among men) due to paucity of numbers. These aren't huge amounts of people like you allege, but a relatively small part of the population. The reason I bring this up is that you have a very limited pool of people to recruit from because relatively few people in our population have the potential to complete the educational requirements for employment in the tech industry (for example someone on the left side of the bell curve can not comprehend differential equations and will never graduate with a BS in engineering). This makes it more difficult to reach parity in certain fields because the talent pool is smaller. This leads to a problem for HR staff when trying to meet diversity goals. https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-16b03344e557c02d559cc5fac9724be3 I would allege that I understand more about the concepts of averages and outliers than you do, but HR is not my field of expertise. I'm an electrical engineer, I can certainly apply concepts I learned in modeling analysis and uncertainty (basically statistical analysis for engineers) to read a graph. |
Anonymous
I would tend to agree, which is all the more reason to get sponsored for a clearance if you live in this area and don't want to code for the financial industry (unless you have talent when it comes to algorithms). |
Anonymous
But none of what you said boils down to how women would actually function as engineers in the workplace, if discrimination were removed. Women are not discriminated against based on the fact that some studies show relatively small differences in IQ distributions. They're discriminated against because of much broader stereotypes that women are neurotic, don't want to work hard, and are bad at math. And also, there's no evidence that for the run-of-the-mill coder, recruiting based purely on IQ is legitimate. If IQ-based recruiting resulted in a significant disparity in gender or race, then the employer would have to show that having the highest IQ possible is a bona fide employment requirement. They are not going to be able to show that, because there are just so many other qualities and characteristics that determine workplace success. While it's certainly true that coders probably need a certain level of IQ, there's not going to be evidence that IQ is the only relevant criteria. |
Anonymous
I am a mathematician with a minor in Economics and Statistic. I was also a programmer. I also work in management and hiring. So yes, I understand the math, the analysis and how you are misinterpreting it. I also understand HR and "diversity goals", we have none where I work and we have a plethora of female programmers. You should read up on the the law of diminishing returns when it comes to IQ. You may be suffering from that, or from your own admission most the people that suffer from that are men. You should also read about the research done by Google on hiring programmers from state schools vs. Ivy league schools. It's good to know I am an "outlier"  since my spacial reasoning scored off the charts.  But I suspect I just liked to play with puzzles instead of dolls as a child and I played football instead of cheered.
Nurture vs. nature. The study can not correct for that. Oh, and the education system is a culling system... I don't care if you got a perfect SAT, can you program. I have a ton of drop outs programming because they can learn it from a video or a book, in the comfort of their home and their computer. Take the human interaction of terrible teachers and the calculus/history requirement out of the equation and we would have tons of good programmers, men and women. You don't need a BS in engineering to program. Maybe to architect a system but not to program. |
Anonymous
| Ten pages and very little discussion on the Left leaning managers at Google. Let's focus on the gender issue, geez! |
Anonymous
I certainly agree that you do not need a degree to program. Certainly when I was in school most of the "good" programmers did it for fun prior to going to college, and more than a few dropped out during the dotcom era. Google is doing things that are more than just enterprise programming. The more interesting things, which is much of what google is more involved in, are algorithms behind their products in the areas of search, AI and the like. Oh I agree too when it comes to IQ and diminishing returns, but would appreciate an explanation of how you are looking at the datasets differently than me. |
Anonymous
I think the person who titled this post misrepresents the GoogleGuys screed. Here is a portion reproduced below where he discusses what things can be done to help achieve parity without discrimination.
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Anonymous
There are many false assumptions here. That's the problem PP. These aren't solutions but rather what men think are the problems with women.
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Anonymous
Women don't seek more work-life balance than men? Women don't take more responsibility for child and eldercare? Its not like female MDs don't work fewer hours than men, or are less likely to go into surgical specialties or anything. Men aren't judged for status? (Of course women don't prefer to marry up than marry down!) Its not like there's been an uptick in assorative mating patterns or anything! ' Women's gender roles haven't changed? Why of course not, its the same as 100 years ago! Women aren't allowed to work outside of the home! In fact, men have even more flexibility than women in the workplace when it comes to expectations of child and eldercare! Women are highly independent and are socialized to prefer solo work to group work. Women certainly are less subject to social pressures than men! After all there's no mean girls in the office! False assumptions? |
Anonymous
You are looking at one data point and it is a data point that has been proven to not be correlated with competency at work. You have to look at things as a system, how does the system work. What competencies are needed to make the system work and what skills are needed. Those skills and competency are not something that can be measured by 1 data point. |
Anonymous
Here's a false assumption--you can have cooperation OR competition. Or you can have work-life balance OR status. Here's another one--leadership is stressful. I also enjoy the statement to the effect that competitive people are disadvantaged in education. Made by the Harvard PhD. His supporters say Google proves his point--you can't talk about certain topics. I would say he's proving Google's point--they need to make an affirmative effort to diversify their workforce. Sending this man to diversity training once or twice a year isn't going to help him overcome the biases he's built up over a lifetime. Daily exposure to a variety of different types of people is what helps people start to think about others as individuals and not "averages," so that over time a person might start to question his assumptions, broaden his perspective, and hopefully start to see commonalities as well as differences. |
Anonymous
It's called "unconscious bias".. we act on the world based on what we believe not what we see (or hear). "Women on average" means you only act on what you believe to be true, not what is true for your specific employee. You unconsciously discriminate against some women based on your bias on how you see the world. Orchestras use to have no women in them or as little as <5%, because women "play differently" ... it sounds different when a woman plays. So they started blind auditions in the 70's and 80's and all of a sudden women sound the same. |
Anonymous
This. He is making broad stereotypes and cherry-picking conclusions. To pick one example: It matters why women are more prone to anxiety. The reasons could be 1) hostility in workplaces makes women more anxious (conclusion, stop treating them as if they are less good), 2) women feel more comfortable seeking treatment for mental health issues and so get diagnosed with anxiety more often (conclusion, maybe women are actually mentally healthier than men because they get treatment for their anxiety instead of taking it out on coworkers and subordinates), 3) women are just more anxious biologically (conclusion, anything from don't hire them to make workplaces less stressful). He pays lip service to the latter, but couches it in language about making sure Google doesn't become less competitive. He seems to think the only way a workplace can be competitive is to have it be stressful. As a former coxswain who coxed men's and women's boat, I beg to disagree. Women can be brutally competitive, but they respond to really different forms of encouragement. In very general terms, the men's teams preferred to be told they weren't good enough/need to work harder, and women worked harder and became more competitive when they were told they were already doing well. It was amazing to me to see the difference so starkly...and the women were anything but soft or anxious. The same kind of breakdown could be done to all his points, but it doesn't really matter. These ideas aren't legitimately provocative or new. They've been bandied about for decades to explain the lack of women and other URMs in STEM. And none of these screeds seems willing to grapple with the notion that all of this is just speculation until you get rid of the actual biases in the workplace. If they are supposedly such great scientists and engineers, why do they fail to understand that the easiest way to test a hypothesis is to get rid of the confounding factors? So let's first get rid of institutionalized sexism, and then talk about inherent capabilities and interests. Ultimately, the lack of objective reasoning in these kinds of "manifestos" is why this is not about shutting down diverse viewpoints but rather about shutting down thinly-veiled bigotry. It's not provocative to suggest Obama might have been born in Kenya, it's deliberately undermining. Similarly, in 2017 it's not provocative to suggest that women are just not that interested or capable of succeeding in tech, it's undermining and also a way to disregard the ongoing bias against them. |
Anonymous
those old studies are irrelevant. everything that could have been squeezed out of discrimination has been squeezed out. women are now getting significantly more college degrees and even phds. |
Anonymous
for a mathematician, you sound quite dumb. is that stereotyping? |