Part of me hates reading these articles because they depress me, and they make me think men are dicks (when of course, they are very definitely not). But at the same time, it makes a lot of sense, and it’s good to be wise to the games of our world…
According to Women Who Almost Were
It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s about loneliness,
competition and deeply rooted barriers.
I agree with a fair bit of that article, @coxford_lou . It’d be an easy thing to dismiss the opening paragraph as US-centric, especially when you consider the fact we’ve had two Prime Ministers that were female. However, I’d argue that neither of them have been representative of women in society. They both had to act like to blokes to an extent.
I’d add some more, having worked in some fairly large organisations a lot. A lot of the time, the glass ceiling is there purely because one executive has decided to appoint mates he’s worked with in the past. Immediately, that’s a lot of places taken.
There are also internal politics to consider. The board gets to pick the heads of divisions, and they can be transformative choices, but internal to those divisions, mediocrity often breeds mediocrity. There are some decent bosses that like high performers working for them. There are others at the executive level, that may be a bit crap themselves, that are absolutely terrified at that prospect, especially when they’ve inherited enough people that they can’t sack that have already cottoned on.
You see, there you go… days into your 51st year and you’re already distancing yourself from something you’re so irrevokeably part of…The Older Generation.
Don’t fight it Dan, you can’t beat it, put your feet up on the handle-bars, feel the wind in your hair (…oh) and cruise downhill into old age. 
Billy Bragg, good union man tis Billy.
Oh ffs!
As if men’s beer wasn’t shit enough.
? From a blokes perspective? Simple. Don’t be a creep ad do anything pervy. Follow up with the full force of the law if not
So, what do we all think of the Google guy who wrote an essay arguing that women are less likely to become engineers because of predisposed personality traits, rather than sexism? And that Google is surpressing this debate because of a political orientation bias?
Personality differences
Women, on average, have more:
Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).
These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics. Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.
This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support. Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).
This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
Men’s higher drive for status
We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life. Status is the primary metric that men are judged on4, pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.
Perfectly reasonable comments by the former google employee. Travesty he was fired.
His comments help to explain why women’s football is shit too.
We should definately have a more equal work place, therefore we need to kill more women at work.
Interesting article. Thing is when I worked for The Guardian and the CPS the majority of people in the senior jobs were women. You can also break down men (and women) into differing groups quite easily. I know plenty of women who work long hours and plenty of men who bugger off at the stroke of 5pm. A friend of mine is a furniture restorer and his wife works with him and loves carpentry (as well as rasing her family). It is a hang over from the last century. Barriers have been coming down for some time now and whilst there is still a level of dinosaur thinking going on, I would like to think it is mainly from the minority nowdays.
I assume you’re being ironic.
As I understand it, the discussion around gender differences in terms of psychology and brain function are highly contested. Given that, according to Professor Robin Murray, the brain is the most complex thing in the universe, I guess we’ll never really fully understand the differences between men’s and women’s cognition.
However, even if you accept that there are neurological differences leading to differences in behaviour, separating this from human culture and organizational hegemonies is virtually impossible. Culture prescribes roles and activities for women who are then expected to fulfil those roles. This is ingrained from preschool age in most children - so perhaps the behaviours of women are simply a self-fulfilling prophecy. Similarly, most organizational structures and the associated expectations in the workplace are the design of men. Is it any surprise, then, that women end up in positions that they find themselves in - again, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Another problem the chap makes in his analysis (or, maybe, that we make in interpreting his analysis) is generalising to the particular. Perhaps most women do have certain propensities as he describes but that doesn’t mean all women have those propensities.
I feel that Google sacking the chap and, therefore, avoiding debate is a mistake. On the contrary, I feel these things should be given free rein to be discussed openly. As long as no one is being abusive in the debate and discussion, then it is far better to discuss openly than to quell the discussion.
When I started working in the CS in 1967 men and women were paid the same rates. Pay equality existed in the CS over 50 years ago.
I worked in offices that were about 60% men 40% women. As the “old guard” with their predudices retired a meritocracy took over. We even had our first woman Director General…only took 210 years. 
My wife is good at “Fiendish Soduku”…I can’t be arsed.
Yeah, that’s an interesting one, @coxford_lou .
I happen to believe that he is correct in suggesting that some IT roles are more suited to people that have a predisposition to systemising and that most of those people with such a predisposition are male.
Here’s my logic.
He cites the tension between systemising and empathising brain types. This refers to how we each process information that is presented to us.
Systemising? Do we first look at the detail of the information and, before reacting to it, first attempt to understand its smallest details, its structure and then catalogue and compare it to what we already know of the world, or do we look at the information holistically and first try to understand it in the context of what we already know of world?
Empathising? Do we naturally understand what others are thinking and respond with the socially typical reaction?
This came out of research by Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, his brother) as part of his work with autism spectrum disorder.
Baron-Cohen argues that autism presents itself as extreme systemising at the expense of the ability to empathise. It’s also critically important to understand that the brains of those that present with autistic spectrum disorders are physically wired differently. i.e. this is a nature issue and not one of nurture.
A classic diagram that is used to illustrate how systemising in ASD and non-ASD brains differs in information processing is here:
It’s believed that those on the spectrum are more likely see an H with other H’s arranged in an interesting pattern before (potentially but not always) seeing the shape of the letter A; the opposite being true of those at the other end of the spectrum.
But remember, here that we’re talking about a spectrum disorder.
Not every ASD sufferer is an autistic savant like Rainman (Kim Peek) or DanielTammet and not every ASD sufferer is a non-verbal adult with infant-like communication strategies.
Many of us have some of the characteristics of autistim and manage to never be called up for presenting as autistic. Others clearly have ‘atypical’ abilities in terms of focus, concentration, memory or cataloguing the world (systemising) but otherwise, have managed to develop just enough social skills to be suffered in the ‘typical’ world (empathising).
Why is this important to the James Damore’s argument? For a few reasons I believe.
Because in some IT roles the ability to systemise is far more important than the abilty to empathise. This means that those that present with the extreme abilities to systemise the information they receive (i.e. those that present with more characteristics of the autistic spectrum) will naturally perform better in those roles.
Because not all coding jobs are equal. Working for a small accounting software house in the UK will not necessarily require the same level of systemising ability as coding for some parts of Google. I’d argue that Google will attract, and will look to attract, those coders that have exceptional skills. i.e. for some tasks, Google should look to recruit the absolute pinnacle of those with abilities to systemise information.
Statistically, for every female diagnosed as an ASD sufferer, four males are diagnosed. Put another way, only 20% of the world’s population that present with extreme systemising abilities is female. Remember here that when this ability presents as part of the autistic spectrum, it will be down to a physical wiring difference in the brain.
So there is a 20% / 80% split between male and females on the autistic spectrum. But let’s not assume that extreme abilities to systemise only come as a result of being on the autistic spectrum. That’s not the case. So the 20/80 split is likely too extreme. But I’d suggest that other, non-autistic traits that might present in the female population of the world will not be likely to drag back the innate ability to systemise to a 50/50 split.
Does any of this mean that women can’t be coders?
No, absolutely not.
And I don’t think Damore was making that point.
His point (or at least the narrow part of his argument that I’m exploring) was that if Google is expecting to get a 50/50 split between males and females in some of its coding roles, then they will, by virtue of the average hard-wiring of the male and female brains, employ people who are less able to carry out some of the exceptionally complex tasks that Google tackles.
I have to say that as unpopular and un-PC as it might be, I follow his logic.
Disclosuree: Baron-Cohen’s work hasn’t got universal approval and some dispute some of his conclusions.
Thanks Bletch - interesting response. Like Bathsaint, I don’t think the guy should have been sacked - I think this is a conversation still in relatively early development, so to sack a 20 something year old, for a viewpoint which is probably the norm at the moment, is not helpful.
I think the comparism to autism is an interesting one. Although there is a more complex story surrounding the autism spectrum, and the male/female split. For example, many women go undiagnosed long into adulthood, because they are better at hiding the condition - faking the social world they aren’t built to dechipher. This is a good example of why stats can be misleading.
There is difference between male and female brains - but as researchers have noted - the difference isn’t as strong as sterotypes make it out to be. And there lies the issue. We like simple answers, and building more and more evidence aroud simple answers to make our lives make more sense. A narrative around women not having brains suited to engineering or coding, will undeniably put women off those careers - directly or indirectly, and there you have the self fulfilling prophecy.
The thing I found interesting about the story, and the google guy’s essay, was his confidence to state a strong viewpoint on something he has no experience of, or attempted to understand beyond the basics. Oh the arrogance of male youth! That’s nurture not nature!
He argues that women are more predisposed to do well in the arts or care sectors, yet when you look at the arts, or health sectors, those senior positions are still held by men.
He says men are more predisposed to be leaders - but alternatively you could look at the failings of world male leadership and argue the opposite.
A male view on the world is always an interesting one, but his arguments are poor because they lack nuance, and build evidence to prove the status quo. There are enough stories in tech sector of sexism and discrimition to be concerned that women who actively choose this profession, will struggle as long as men are defending that status quo, and building arguments than women are just not as good.
Sorry if my argument is a bit eratic - I’m dashing out the door!
Ah, but he didn’t say that men, naturally, make good leaders he is just saying they are more driven to be leaders.
Now if only we had more “nurturing” leaders.
BTW I’ve worked with some hard nosed ladies for bosses and they have made some of the male bosses I have had look like nurturers.
I always knew I was different, I saw the H’s first, in the shape of a rocket would you believe?
