A day without a James Damore-related post is like a day without sunshine…
“I’m An Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader And I’m Sick Of Our Approach To Diversity!” is way more hostile to Google’s diversity crusade than James Damore ever was. The author, Vidya Narayanan, shades into infidel territory rather than being merely a heretic:
I can tell you that our obsession with diversity and attempts to solve it are only fucking it up for the actual women in tech out there!
- What do I mean by this?
- We get upset about the state of gender diversity in tech
- We make a pact to hire more women
- The pool has (a lot) more men than women
- After some rounds of low to no success, we start to compromise and hire women just because we have to
- These women show up at work and perform not as great as we want them to
- It reinforces to the male population that was already peeved by the diversity push that women aren’t that good at tech after all
- They generalize that observation on the entire women in tech community
- Sooner or later, some such opinions get out there
- The feminists amongst us go crazy
- The diversity advocates are caught in a frenzy and make a pact to hire more women (again)
- This loops. Infinitely.
In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech.
[I.e., the female ex-Googler says the thing that Damore was wrongly accused of saying: “women on the tech job at Google actually are inferior because they were hired to fill quotas.” Yet nobody is outraged by Ms. Narayanan’s statement.]
The topic of today’s post is part of Ms. Narayanan’s conclusion: “Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech.”
My comment:
But why should they? Why is a career as a software engineer better than a career in health care or finance or law or something else? Why is selling undergraduates, regardless of Gender ID, on programming doing them a favor? Wouldn’t young people be more likely to find careers that suit them if we provide neutral information?
Personally I love to program in SQL and Lisp, but this weekend when my friend’s daughter said that she wanted to be a screenwriter I set her up with some friends and cousins who work in Hollywood. It didn’t occur to me to try to sell her on the beauty of E.F. Codd’s relational model or lambda calculus. I also love helicopters, but I didn’t say “Instead of screenwriting, you could be a Robinson R44 instructor and then move up to medevac AStar pilot. Let’s spend the next two hours talking about helicopter aerodynamics because everyone should know about angle of attack, retreating blade stall, and dissymmetry of lift.”
What’s the definition of boorish behavior at a cocktail party? Someone comes up to you and starts talking about what is interesting to them without first checking to see if it is interesting to you. How is it good manners to wade into a sea of college students studying premed and talk at them about the wonders of software engineering?
Narayanan responded reasonably:
The reason to go out and talk to students (all the way from middle school to college) about tech is to dispel the myths that it is a tough field for girls/women. That there is no such thing as tech is for boys/men. All the way from long haired pretty princesses, the image is all messed up for girls! And it takes a lot to correct it really.
Legitimately, after showing the possibilities that tech can bring, if someone makes a choice it’s not for them, that’s totally fine. The point is not that tech is superior to any other field — it’s just that there isn’t enough talk about tech for girls and women to even form an opinion about it.
Is she correct? On the one hand, being an engineer or computer nerd is so common (1.1 million software developers alone, according to BLS, plus a range of related subcategories within nerdism and then millions of workers within engineering per se) that women within the fields are commonplace even if they are a minority of nerds. On the other hand, there is a constant drumbeat of material from do-gooders in politics and the media highlighting that women and nerdism are not compatible. “Until I came to the U.S. and started reading the New York Times,” said one female immigrant, “it never occurred to me that women were intellectually inferior when it came to math and science. But all of the articles saying ‘women aren’t inferior’ have made me doubt myself.”
Readers: What do you think? Can we consider ourselves to have helped young people by telling them about why they should abandon their current dreams and embrace C++? And do we have an obligation also to point out that we have colleagues who haven’t been to find work after age 50 or who haven’t enjoyed their lives in tech? Would it be more reasonable to tweak ““Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech.” to “Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about what it is like to have a career in tech“?
Related 1: An MIT graduate in the mid-1990s couldn’t figure out what to do with herself so she got a job at the MIT Admissions Office. One of her responsibilities was traveling around to talk to high school students about how to apply to MIT and what the school was looking for. She was given a standard response to questions about race discrimination in admissions. MIT definitely did not have quotas or different standards for white versus black applicants. In the spring, however, she sat at the big table with stacks of folders, one for each applicant. A collaborative process terminated with about 1,500 folders in an “Admit” pile. The director of admissions asked “How many black students did we admit?” She didn’t like the answer and said “Pull 50 black students from the Reject pile and add them to Admit.” Our young friend later asked “Doesn’t this mean we’re using a quota?” The answer turned out to be “no.”
Related 2: A programmer friend in Silicon Valley said “Lawyers always come up as some of the least happy workers [Forbes], but programming is an even worse job. It’s just that programmers can get into the field faster and quit once they realize how bad it is. Lawyers, on the other hand, get trapped by three years of law school. It is too late for them to quit by the time they find out what working as a lawyer is like.”
Pull 50 textureless Asian students out of the Admit pile first and then replace with 50 black students.
I wanted to ask why do you think programming is an even worse job when compared to law? This is a pattern I have been seeing in your blog post and essays that programming is not a good career choice. Can elaborate more?
Do mind that I am writing this comment as an immigrant asian male who had liked programming all his life.
Jay: Remember that I was quoting a friend, not offering that opinion myself. I haven’t thought about this too much.
Some top-of-the-head thoughts… For the typical person, working in health care is probably a better career than either. If we must consider coding v. suing… I think programming in the early years is probably a better job than law firm associate. As a long-term career, it gets tougher to say. The 60-year-old attorney is valued for her experience. I don’t think one can say the same for the typical 60-year-old programmer!
60-year old attorney would better be a partner in law firm. I do not think that 60 year old attorneys have unlimited employment options. Otherwise I would suggest 50-year old programmers who are out of a job to go to law school.
I have a friend who is a lawyer that was trained as an aerospace engineer. When aviation went bust in the ’70s (“will the last one to leave Seattle turn out the lights”) he went back to law school and became a real estate lawyer.
Relatively few women (in the US) are interested in becoming programmers nowadays. Back in the old mainframe days when most programmers worked for the government or a few big corporations it was a nice 9 to 5 job but now programmers are expected to put in ungodly hours, often without much human interaction. This works well for ‘spergy men but most women would rather have a job with better hours and more human interaction. Even if they start out as programmers, they soon migrate to management or HR or somewhere that fits their social nature better.
I don’t know why there is this push to put women in these jobs (or why there is no push to, for example, have more male pre-school teachers). There are other male dominated jobs (logging, truck driving, garbage collection, etc.) that SJWs seem to have no interest in and seem to be content to leave to men. I suppose because the tech industry is one of the few remaining high paying fields where women have not caught up with men and on its face it appears to be the “clean” kind of job that women should like and be able to do.
A programmer friend in Silicon Valley said “Lawyers always come up as some of the least happy workers [Forbes], but programming is an even worse job. It’s just that programmers can get into the field faster and quit once they realize how bad it is. Lawyers, on the other hand, get trapped by three years of law school. It is too late for them to quit by the time they find out what working as a lawyer is like.”
This guy should tell his tale of woe to the cashier the next time that he’s at a supermarket.
The reason to go out and talk to students (all the way from middle school to college) about tech is to dispel the myths that it is a tough field for girls/women. That there is no such thing as tech is for boys/men.
I’ve been hearing this false, tired argument since I started my BSCS in 1981.
Vince,
So if casher is such a terrible occupation why would not they all go to law school or take Oracle courses or emigrate to countries with abundant manufacturing jobs, for example China or Taiwan? Do programmers, lawyers and engineers prevent them from doing so? The only career cashier I have known were very content people who liked their job, the rest of them who I had brief conversations with at check-out were HS and college students in temp positions.
So if casher is such a terrible occupation why would not they all go to law school or take Oracle courses or emigrate to countries with abundant manufacturing jobs, for example China or Taiwan?
This is a fascinating question. Hours could be spent answering it. Maybe you haven’t heard, but law schools aren’t cheap. Moving to China, or another country, would not their standard of living.
More importantly, it’s irrelevant to my point. Programmers and lawyers in America have good jobs in a country where most jobs are not good jobs. In fact, quite a few layers and programmers have very good jobs. It’s not possible for everyone to work at such good jobs. If no one worked in supermarkets and restaurants and on farms and other jobs in the food business, the rest of us would starve to death.
Aren’t individualist solutions to large scale social ills (in this case presumably deep-seated sexism keeping women out of tech) generally ineffective? If we want to combat antisemitism, we don’t say “Jews need to each go out and talk to a few antisemites and convince them Jews are really nice people.That’s the best way to stop antisemitism.” We don’t expect global warming to be solved by hectoring one’s neighbors into recycling more(maybe in New England people do think this?) Why would we expect major demographic changes in the tech industry from a few programmers taking a couple freshmen girls aside and telling them “Tech is great!”
What’s a non-individualist solution to this kind of problem (if you see it as a problem)? Well, affirmative action, but that seems to be a dud. Phil has talked about paying women software engineers more, which sounds like a great idea to me. How about full ride scholarships for women and minorities who major in comp sci ? Cash prizes for minorities and women who score a 5 on the AP Computer science test? Google gives a free car to any female college student who can solve all its interview problems? Stuff like that would probably be a far better lure to tech than a boring sermon from an older software developer.
” If no one worked in supermarkets and restaurants and on farms and other jobs in the food business, the rest of us would starve to death.”
This may be true, but it does not follow (except in communist logic) that therefore these people should make just as much $ as lawyers and programmers. If fewer people were willing to or had the skills to work in the food business then wages would go up due to supply vs. demand, but in fact the barriers to most food work are minimal – it takes 7 years of higher ed to be a lawyer (and not everyone has the brains to do it) but most people can learn to be a cashier in a matter of days or weeks. Of course some highly skilled food workers (chefs) may be well compensated but most food workers don’t have rare skills.
(if you see it as a problem)…
That’s the rub. Why is this a “problem” at all? Why just this industry and not garbage collection or pre-school teaching, etc. where large disparities between the # of female and male employees seem to be tolerated without much objection. If we take away all the legal barriers to equal employment and the distribution of say NFL or NBA athletes dictated by market forces and individual choice does not precisely match the distribution of race and gender in the general population, why should anyone concern themselves with this at all? I feel that Sikhs are overrepresented in the business of owning gas stations and motels and underrepresented as major league baseball players, but no one seems to care about either one. And why the focus on certain disparities but not on others? Could it be that certain employers (large corporations) are seen by certain rent seekers as fertile targets for extortion while others aren’t?
This may be true, but it does not follow (except in communist logic) that therefore these people should make just as much $ as lawyers and programmers.
No one said that they should. The point was that’s absurd for lawyers and programmers to complain that they have crappy jobs when they’re actually better than most jobs in the economy.
On the other hand, all supermarket cashiers do useful work, when much of the work done by lawyers is useless or destructive. Maybe cashiers should be paid more than lawyers.
I can’t comment on computer programmers, but I can on lawyers. Lawyers are generally unhappy for a lot of reasons, one in particular is that there is a direct trade off between time (your life) and money. The incentives are to waste time (your life) in order to earn a nice living. Once lawyers figure out that that is what the business is basically about they become unhappy but see themselves trapped by the money and the lifestyle it brings. Sixty year old lawyers have very few opportunities unless they have a lot of lucrative clients– and that generally declines with age as your peers who give you the business retire. A sixty year old lawyer is not going to have the stamina to bill what a 30 year old can and typically loses interest in spending his life in the office so the firm does not really want him unless he brings in a lot of business. I am pretty dubious that it is an easy question whether a high paid lawyer is happier than a low paid cashier.
dean: “60-year old attorney would better be a partner in law firm. I do not think that 60 year old attorneys have unlimited employment options. Otherwise I would suggest 50-year old programmers who are out of a job to go to law school.”
I didn’t mean to suggest that someone fresh out of law school at age 53 would be valued for his or her experience (i.e., none). Just that a 60-year-old lawyer who started at 25 would be valued for his or her experience more so than a similar age coder with a similar number of years of work experience.
I think Karen J has the right idea. Money talks louder than well intentioned programmers.
When I started college I was a Chemistry major. I quickly realized that employment opportunities and salaries were much better for engineers so I switched to Chemical Engineering during my second semester. I had no idea what an engineer did or even if I would be good at it. I just knew that were the money was.
I am pretty dubious that it is an easy question whether a high paid lawyer is happier than a low paid cashier.
If this is the case, comment #8 applies much more than the situation that that commenter applied it to. It’s got to be a thousand times easier for a lawyer to give up lawyering and become a cashier than the other way around. I’ve never of any lawyer doing any such thing.
Regarding this statement:
Lawyers are generally unhappy for a lot of reasons, one in particular is that there is a direct trade off between time (your life) and money.
That’s the nature of work in general. There are some people who love their jobs that they prefer working to leisure activities, but such people and such jobs are very rare.
Jackie,
Why would feminists clamor for more female engineers and politicians but not more female coal miners? While some feminists might see gender equity in all fields as a great end goal, I think they also see current society as profoundly unequal, with men occupying most of the powerful, high income jobs politician, CEO, mid level software engineer(?)) and women generally working in lower income, less powerful arenas (nurse, preschool teacher, secretary). In order to correct this societal inequality (men having more wealth and power, on the whole, than women) feminists aren’t going to waste energy pushing women into low status jobs dominated by men, but try instead to channel talented women into the jobs currently dominated by men that do involve power and some degree of wealth.
Anybody who has read an unfiltered stack of job applications for any occupation despairs.
Vince,
Farming is a great occupation, much better than programming. Being occasional farming hand, just out of fun, I can certify to that. There are profitable programmer – farmers, they exist, because they like both professions.
Karen J – so you are saying that feminists are seeking money and power? This doesn’t seem very noble to me, just normal human greed and rent seeking. I’m fine with that, but I don’t see why the rest of society should endorse their will to power as a holy cause.
Vince, if ‘no one worked in supermarkets’ and these opportunity were in demand then they would be paying a lot more! An automated, which has been already occurring to a large degree, at least in my fly-over country. There are a bunch of cashiers and a bunch of self-scan counters in my area supermarkets
Karen J – registered nurse is a well paid position with lots of benefits that usually requires MSc degree or BSc and decade of experience. LPN too is pretty well paid considering it requires only 9 month of education and minimal skill set.
@Vince “The point was that’s absurd for lawyers and programmers to complain that they have crappy jobs when they’re actually better than most jobs in the economy.” Everything has it’s pros and cons. Does the cashier’s work follow them home? Does the cashier have to check their emails constantly and on the weekends? One of the benefits of being low-skilled labor is that the work stays behind.
“Can we consider ourselves to have helped young people by telling them about why they should abandon their current dreams and embrace C++?”
Possibly they do not have current dreams. If they do, they may not yet be locked into a career track. Exposure to many possibilities, and dispelling notions of limitations can’t hurt. Programming, aeronautics, plumbing, whatever. It is all a positive conversation to have.
” It’s got to be a thousand times easier for a lawyer to give up lawyering and become a cashier than the other way around.”
Not so if you have a wife and/or kids who expect continued high-level income with courts to back them.