Reply to Google male engineeer saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I refuse to read the whole thing, because I've heard enough of it and people who make selectively-informed arguments like that don't deserve that much of my time. But I will point out a few things:

1) Arguments like this assume that the only benefit of "diversity" are to the under-represented groups. Companies have an interest in having their workforce reflect the demographics of their users, because those perspectives might make their products more interesting, usable, and valuable to their users. I worked in the engine division of an auto-maker in the '90s, and engineers were openly making the argument that we needed more women because women made the majority of vehicle purchase decisions. This isn't a profound or new idea, but it's interesting how such a basic economic concept seems to elude these supposedly logical and rational male engineers.

2) These arguments typically hinge on cherry-picked data showing differences between women and men, but they don't explicitly draw the line to why that means women (or blacks or hispanics) should be software developers at Google. One common argument I've seen is that women are more interested in outcomes than in technical details. For example, a woman is more interested in the fact that dishwashers clean dishes than in how they work. This may or may not be true, but it's also irrelevant. Being interested in what something can do doesn't mean that you can't build the thing. In fact, the move to user-centered design and customer-oriented agile development methods in SW means that industry is shifting to a more outcome-based methodology. My completely anecdotal observation is that women 'grok' this change more intuitively, and are much better at aligning their work to producing actually useful results whereas men will waste weeks on end developing something they think is cool but is ultimately useless. They also view usability as a waste-of-time, meaning that development teams often end up with tons of half-finished features. These arguments completely miss all the ways in which the qualities that are supposed to define women could be an asset to engineering teams.

3) All of these arguments are basically irrelevant, because as the recent Uber revelations made abundantly clear blatant sexism remains. So who knows if the "right" percentage of women in tech would be 20% or 60% if the playing field were truly level? We know explicitly that it's not level today. The overwhelming experience of women bears this out, and most decent men who spend long enough in their careers (and especially if they are married to technical women) end up coming to this realization. Women are constantly having to prove their worth in technical sectors, and any single slip up will be given a lot more weight than decades of success. Google is no different in this regard. I was at a Google conference earlier this year, where they paid a lot of lip service to diversity. At some point during a break I was chatting with a google engineer, whom I had prefaced my conversation with the fact that I lead a team as part of a large development effort in a mid-sized company. Clearly this never registered with him since it seemed so implausible, so he proceeded to talk to me (and even give me specific advice) in a way that would have only been appropriate for a clueless, fresh-out-of-school person who had no idea what they were doing or the market they were playing in. This infantalizing of technical women is quite common, and something I've at times been able to use to my advantage...but it's generally pretty offensive.

So if you want to know what I think about this, there it is. And BTW, there is nothing brave about posting an anonymous "opinion" and pretending that tired old arguments about "why girls are bad at math" are somehow profound.[/quote]

As a fellow woman in tech, this really resonated with my - especially your description of the infantalization of technical women.

My DH is also an engineer, and now in a position to do a lot of hiring.  He's been absolutely aghast at some of the comments he gets from people after interviews.  His coworkers literally saying "she's smart and can do the job, but we're really technical in this group, so I don't think she'd want to"
WTF.[/quote]

Agree with you both. I also wish I knew you in real life!! There are days I feel like I am beating my head against a brick wall.[/quote]

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