GrahamH wrote:

Warren Dew wrote:

Sendraks wrote:Are the different interests inherent to women or a product of their upbringing and environment?

Unless you can clearly separate these two things out, you've still got a problem created by society which needs to be addressed.

Only if we think it's a problem. Do we really think it's a problem if more doctors and most math teachers are women, and most coders are men?

Yes, that seems like a problem. It seems better to not exclude a large proportion of the population from any profession.
To the extent that there are gender differences diversity adds something. Why would it be a good thing to have most maths teachers be women when men can do a good the job just as well?

Warren Dew wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

Warren Dew wrote:

Sendraks wrote:Are the different interests inherent to women or a product of their upbringing and environment?

Unless you can clearly separate these two things out, you've still got a problem created by society which needs to be addressed.

Only if we think it's a problem. Do we really think it's a problem if more doctors and most math teachers are women, and most coders are men?

Yes, that seems like a problem. It seems better to not exclude a large proportion of the population from any profession.
To the extent that there are gender differences diversity adds something. Why would it be a good thing to have most maths teachers be women when men can do a good the job just as well?

Because it's better to let people do jobs they want, rather than forcing them into jobs they don't want.

How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
Blame messy history for the gender imbalance bedeviling Silicon Valley.
By Stephen Mihm
Why aren’t there more female software developers in Silicon Valley? James Damore, the Google engineer fired for criticizing the company's diversity program, believes that it’s all about “innate dispositional differences” that leave women trailing men.

He’s wrong. In fact, at the dawn of the computing revolution women, not men, dominated software programming. The story of how software became reconstructed as a guy’s job makes clear that the scarcity of female programmers today has nothing at all to do with biology.
August 19, 2017, 10:00 AM EDT

Macdoc wrote:

How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
Blame messy history for the gender imbalance bedeviling Silicon Valley.
By Stephen Mihm
Why aren’t there more female software developers in Silicon Valley? James Damore, the Google engineer fired for criticizing the company's diversity program, believes that it’s all about “innate dispositional differences” that leave women trailing men.

He’s wrong. In fact, at the dawn of the computing revolution women, not men, dominated software programming. The story of how software became reconstructed as a guy’s job makes clear that the scarcity of female programmers today has nothing at all to do with biology.
August 19, 2017, 10:00 AM EDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... revolution

Cito di Pense wrote:

Warren Dew wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

Warren Dew wrote:
Only if we think it's a problem. Do we really think it's a problem if more doctors and most math teachers are women, and most coders are men?

Yes, that seems like a problem. It seems better to not exclude a large proportion of the population from any profession.
To the extent that there are gender differences diversity adds something. Why would it be a good thing to have most maths teachers be women when men can do a good the job just as well?

Because it's better to let people do jobs they want, rather than forcing them into jobs they don't want.

How would you go about discovering if the demographic disparities are due to discrimination or individual preferences?

What if individual preferences are partly affected by individual perceptions of bias, but are also affected by other factors? Would you give up trying to establish a position on this question due to anything other than political motivations?

People of both genders and in large numbers of each gender already get themselves into careers they end up not liking simply due to deficiencies in the information available to them during the years they are making significant choices in the matter. Career change is difficult but not impossible, and we hear human interest stories about it all the time, and we even hear feel-good stories about people who change careers to become coders, usually to start their own projects rather than joining some large-cap tech firm. We also hear feel-bad stories about how long it takes to change the work force via the education system and about how, by the time universities re-tool, the needs of industry have changed and there is a glut of people nobody needs who have re-trained in vain.

He’s wrong. In fact, at the dawn of the computing revolution women, not men, dominated software programming.

Warren Dew wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:
What question do you think we're trying to establish a position on? Whether people should be forced into jobs they don't like in the interests of egalitarian quotas? The answer to that is no.

Thommo wrote:

He’s wrong. In fact, at the dawn of the computing revolution women, not men, dominated software programming.

I'd love to know if this is true and how it would be measured and established.

GrahamH wrote:

Thommo wrote:

He’s wrong. In fact, at the dawn of the computing revolution women, not men, dominated software programming.

I'd love to know if this is true and how it would be measured and established.

I too would be interested to see a source for that claim.

There are many notable software pioneers who were female listed here, but no indication that women "dominated software programming".

Thommo wrote:I think it's a real shame that so many in the media want to say that Damore is wrong but haven't provided the legwork to actually show how.

Warren Dew wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:How would you go about discovering if the demographic disparities are due to discrimination or individual preferences?

There's plenty of research in the area, much of which has been cited in this thread. Do you think this question is so unique we need something other than traditional scientific research methods to discover the answer to what are, after all, questions of fact?

Cito di Pense wrote:What if individual preferences are partly affected by individual perceptions of bias, but are also affected by other factors? Would you give up trying to establish a position on this question due to anything other than political motivations?

What question do you think we're trying to establish a position on? Whether people should be forced into jobs they don't like in the interests of egalitarian quotas? The answer to that is no.

purplerat wrote:

Nicko wrote:

mingthething wrote:https://www.economist.com/news/international/21726276-last-week-paper-said-alphabets-boss-should-write-detailed-ringing-rebuttal

Browse in incognito . This is a good read.

Yet another person who bravely refutes the assertion that women are less able to work in tech than men, oblivious to the fact that Damore's argument was that women prefer tech less than men.

For what seems like the millionth time: it's got nothing to do with ability. There are probably a fuckton of women currently employed as math teachers in the US who would have made awesome coders.

They just didn't want to do that.

Well that's simply not true.

I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.

https://firedfortruth.com/

Nicko wrote:
Yet every difference he actually expands on concerns preferences (personality traits) rather than raw ability (ie. IQ).

At no point does he make the argument that women can't code.

GrahamH wrote:

Nicko wrote:
Yet every difference he actually expands on concerns preferences (personality traits) rather than raw ability (ie. IQ).

At no point does he make the argument that women can't code.

No he doesn't, and of course women can code. But he makes the suggestion that women are biologically unsuited to working conditions that some coders live with. And that's where hi case fals apart because those conditions, that work-life balance is not inherent to the job. It has the potential to be one of the most flexible forms of work with irregular hours, from almost any location.

James Damore wrote:Allowing and truly endorsing part time work though can keep more women in tech.

GrahamH wrote:If men are prepared to work 60 hour weeks and women aren't that is not just how the biology is. It's a choice the employer had made and if they made a different choice they could benefit from those women who can code. Most of the men would feel the benefit of that as well.

Nicko wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

Nicko wrote:
Yet every difference he actually expands on concerns preferences (personality traits) rather than raw ability (ie. IQ).

At no point does he make the argument that women can't code.

No he doesn't, and of course women can code. But he makes the suggestion that women are biologically unsuited to working conditions that some coders live with. And that's where hi case fals apart because those conditions, that work-life balance is not inherent to the job. It has the potential to be one of the most flexible forms of work with irregular hours, from almost any location.

Ahem.

James Damore wrote:Allowing and truly endorsing part time work though can keep more women in tech.

GrahamH wrote:If men are prepared to work 60 hour weeks and women aren't that is not just how the biology is. It's a choice the employer had made and if they made a different choice they could benefit from those women who can code. Most of the men would feel the benefit of that as well.

I'm not too sure what you are saying here.

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.

GrahamH wrote:

Nicko wrote:

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.

Structure the jobs differently for better balance and you will recruit more women and have happier men. Disregard it as some inevitable consequence of biology and that's a gender bias you are choosing to accept and could chose to address.