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Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

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Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#11

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

evangelista wrote: post #4

This is going to be somewhat long and heartbreaking but I promise it will converge on an intelligent point at the end. Every time I visit San Francisco, the heart of America's tech economy, I walk down Market Street and view dozens of adult human beings, many with traumatic brain injuries and psychological problems, living like animals, sleeping in tents, defecating directly on the ground and begging for help. In the…

Having women code has the potential to increase the tech worker labor pool significantly. I believe it's a PR move intended to lower IT costs and help make the upper 0.5% of the world even richer.

Most of the homeless aren't intelligent enough to code. Since no profit can be made from them, it's not a priority.

This is what happens when capitalism goes unchecked. Profit is the largest priority in the world.

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#12

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

nippples wrote: post #5

> The anti-science bias in this explanation has two faces, both well-meaning but both untrue. First, the science of gender difference is not gender stereotyping but, in fact, real, as the sources above will prove to any executive or person who studies them. Second, even if someone felt like that gender trait difference constituted untrue gender stereotypes, there is no hostility in the science. Hostility is, by its v…

I may be missing something in that quote. What are the white lies in that paragraph?

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#13

Post by mpweiher »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #12
nippples wrote: post #5

> The anti-science bias in this explanation has two faces, both well-meaning but both untrue. First, the science of gender difference is not gender stereotyping but, in fact, real, as the sources above will prove to any executive or person who studies them. Second, even if someone felt like that gender trait difference constituted untrue gender stereotypes, there is no hostility in the science. Hostility is, by its v…

I may be missing something in that quote. What are the white lies in that paragraph?

"both well-meaning but both untrue"

The way I understood it is that the paragraph talks about white lies, not that the paragraph itself tells white lies.

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#14

Post by yk »

The fundamental problem is, that hard science fundamentally can not do that job. A policy document is a normative document, science produces descriptive accounts. Even if we assume for a moment that we had a full scientific theory of gender, then we would still need to know what to do with that. Should we then optimize for worker satisfaction, worker of female sex productivity, welcoming to female gendered customers, inspiring the next generation of engineers averaged on the likelihood of them joining the company? This is just an instance of the well studied is/ought problem [0], that you can not deduce from a list statements about how the world looks, how the world should look. (And looking through the objections on wiki and sep, they all seem to rely at least on the assumption of a full theory of gender above.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#15

Post by pkaye »

evangelista wrote: post #4

This is going to be somewhat long and heartbreaking but I promise it will converge on an intelligent point at the end. Every time I visit San Francisco, the heart of America's tech economy, I walk down Market Street and view dozens of adult human beings, many with traumatic brain injuries and psychological problems, living like animals, sleeping in tents, defecating directly on the ground and begging for help. In the…

Multiple things can be worked on at the same time. Different people have different priorities. Why don't you spend some time helping a homeless shelter and see what you can do? Or if not that, send some money to well run charities. Also the homeless problem existed in SF long before the tech scene and the high cost of living.

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#16

Post by toomchsauce »

The number of women studying computer science rose dramatically during the tech bubble and dropped off after the crash. I think we're going through a similar cycle.

When programming is lucrative and viewed as high status, it becomes a target for feminists and they push for more female coders. When it's not high status anymore (when the funding environment contracts again), girls will stop enrolling in CS as much and feminists will stop targeting it as a powerful job that needs more women.

It's my opinion that most women probably don't want to be programmers/ICs deep down, but in a bubble environment many women will gravitate towards CS because it's where the action is in the economy, and affirmative action makes it an artificially attractive choice for them.

We're depicting programming and software as the way of the future in business in order to hype startups, so if most women don't really enjoy coding, that's very problematic for feminists. So there is huge resistance to the idea that most women aren't that into coding.

It's like James mentions in his memo, from a logical perspective it's completely arbitrary to want to move women into software because it's mostly men, just like it would be arbitrary to advocate for more female miners or waste managers. The key to understanding the reaction to his memo is to acknowledge that it's born out of a feminist anxiety that if software is run by men, and the future of business is software, the future of business is still going to be dominated by men. So in context, his memo is really challenging the idea that women prefer economic equality.

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#17

Post by mc32 »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #11
evangelista wrote: post #4

This is going to be somewhat long and heartbreaking but I promise it will converge on an intelligent point at the end. Every time I visit San Francisco, the heart of America's tech economy, I walk down Market Street and view dozens of adult human beings, many with traumatic brain injuries and psychological problems, living like animals, sleeping in tents, defecating directly on the ground and begging for help. In the…

Having women code has the potential to increase the tech worker labor pool significantly. I believe it's a PR move intended to lower IT costs and help make the upper 0.5% of the world even richer. Most of the homeless aren't intelligent enough to code. Since no profit can be made from them, it's not a priority. This is what happens when capitalism goes unchecked. Profit is the largest priority in the world.

If these companies want to get serious about women in the workforce, they need to get serious about getting women in the pipeline --from childhood.

Not by making it seem special or different and accommodating.

Make it cool --make young girls as excited about working in STEM as they are about working in TV or Hollywood, being a Pharmacist or Lawyer.

Trying to fix things after that is not as productive and is more interventionist.

While saying that, don't dissuade boys from it. Just keep on trying to persuade girls more. Offer more classes to accommodate everyone interested.

I mean, if the soviets could mobilize their women to be top notch scientists by creating a pipeline from elementary school on, so can we.

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#18

Post by pkaye »

droidist2 wrote: post #10
neilwilson wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Instead of focusing on solving the clear, heart rending, abject poverty around them" That requires ensuring everybody that wants a job has one unless exempted by age or infirmity. Having more jobs than people means that the workers have the upper hand in wage negotiations. They always have another option. And if there is one thing business hates, it's having to compete - particularly for workers. A society that cann…

> Having more jobs than people means that the workers have the upper hand in wage negotiations. They always have another option. Businesses would never let this happen though, they would just lobby the government to let them bring in more workers from other countries until they have the upper hand again. The third world has virtually an endless supply.

Businesses are run by people. Someone right here could choose to start a business and give the workers whatever they want in their wage negotiations. The question is can you do it sustainably.

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#19

Post by idlewords »

inconvtruths wrote: post #3

If Google were a sports team, they'd be an elite NBA basketball team that decided to go co-ed, only to find it hard to recruit enough female players over six feet six inches tall. Meanwhile, the women they did recruit grew frustrated and insecure as they had to prove themselves all the time to the men. The player who attempted to explain it all was fired. Note that "advancing women" is a goal itself based on stereoty…

What we hear repeatedly from women in tech is not "I'm insecure because I worry I don't measure up," but "this industry is horrible to us," with example after example from their lived experience.

For your analogy to hold, the differences in height would have to be on the order of millimeters (if they exist at all), because those are the only kinds of cognitive differences that find any support in the data for human cognition. I also think you know this, and are using the specious metaphor on purpose.

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#20

Post by caseysoftware »

ktRolster wrote: post #2

Harvey Mudd had some good success getting their enrollment up: https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bia...

Less than one year after that article, Harvey Mudd's President says the last year was the school's worst ever resulting in a suicide, nearly 10% of the students on suicide watch, and having to simplify the curriculum from hard STEM with more electives.

As someone who nearly went there (accepted but opted for one of their rivals), it's disappointing to see.

Ref: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/08/02/540603927/a-colleg...

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