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The Diversity Pipeline


zelticgar

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8 hours ago, Lew Theobald said:

Okay, go that way.  That's just part of the general malevolence.  

If they disagree with you (and don't have an argument) they will imply you hate women and girls, and if you deny it, they will imply you are a pedophile.

LOL, all I was doing was pointing out the comedic effect of your phrasing - as well as poking fun at your apparent reference to yourself in the third person.  I haven't really followed your argument, and have no interest in participating in it.

4 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

My suggestions would be:

(1) Find a way to have yourself and/or some senior colleagues observe the class to be able to evaluate performance and offer constructive feedback.  Repeat this every month or so to gauge improvement.  I can't believe you threw an inexperienced colleague into that situation for two semesters -- where is your obligation to the students, the institution and to the junior colleague?   It absolutely should not be her choice whether the class is observed, it should be a standard program for any new teacher and even used occasionally on experienced teachers to help encourage high standards across the faculty. 

First, it's not me throwing her into the situation, it's the program.  And this is about as low-pressure as you can get - working as a TA and running recitation sections on Friday - which is designed as such for phd candidates to gain some experience.  Second, I believe the supervising professor is supposed to observe the TA, albeit only once during the semester (and I think this policy is laxly observed, especially if there's no problems reported; I only TA'd for one semester but the guy I worked for did not observe.  Then again, I also had a lot of teaching experience beforehand).  She did have the cohort I mentioned observe her once last year, but like I said she has resisted my offers to observe.  I agree that this is important, but I can't and won't force it on her.

5 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

(2) Before a new teacher, or any kind of presenter, starts that role they should have a program of preparation, including review of their planned content, mock presentations to senior colleagues, self-awareness of their delivery (video record each of the mock presentations for the individual to view -- as painful as that is), and basic coaching on public speaking techniques. 

Public speaking is difficult for most but is absolutely a learned skill.  But you need to give people the tools to be aware of their performance and improve.

The university I'm at does require all TAs to go to a day-long training session.  And to be fair to my program, they've set up multiple sessions and mentors (which I'm trying to be here) for the TAs to prepare and receive advice.  (Plus you also have to take an entire course to be eligible to teach your own class.) But again, I think you're right that we could do more, and I found the "workshops" during that training day vapid and a waste of my time.

Anyway, my query here wasn't so much about this colleague's difficulties in public speaking as it was that she feels she is not being afforded the respect she needs in the classroom due to her gender (and, to a lesser extent, her age).  This clearly seems to be the main reason she has yet to gain the necessary confidence.  That's why I posted it here, because I believe there's some posters that may be able to speak to this far better than I can.  That being said, thanks for your suggestions @Iskaral Pust, it's much appreciated!

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12 hours ago, Lew Theobald said:

Okay, go that way.  That's just part of the general malevolence.  

If they disagree with you (and don't have an argument) they will imply you hate women and girls, and if you deny it, they will imply you are a pedophile.

But if you want to see what I meant, just google Kasparov and Polgar, and scroll down.  How many of the articles and videos are about the one time Polgar beat Kasparov?  How long will you have to search before you find a single mention of even one of the 8 times Kasparov beat Polgar?  

Nobody is telling girls they cannot play chess.  Nobody is making them unwelcome in the chess world.  A disparity simply exists.  And it seems the major reason is that if you're just not interested in a game, you are unlikely to develop any skill at it.

I wasn't implying that you hate women or you're a pedophile. It's the referring to yourself in the 3rd person thing. Kinda weird, IMHO. Outside of a comic device, anyway.

 

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6 hours ago, Kalbear said:

He did; telling me, a programmer for 20 years, how weird programming and tech are is certainly is coming across that way. I'd ask you to not tell others what I feel. Thanks.

To be fair, it is extremely alien to someone who is not math minded. A technology so advanced as to appear to be magic to the uninitiated.

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1 hour ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

To be fair, it is extremely alien to someone who is not math minded. A technology so advanced as to appear to be magic to the uninitiated.

I disagree totally. Computer science and understanding the algorithms might be, but using the languages and concepts? It's the difference between being a mechanical engineer working on making car engines and an auto mechanic knowing how to fix things.  

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37 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I disagree totally. Computer science and understanding the algorithms might be, but using the languages and concepts? It's the difference between being a mechanical engineer working on making car engines and an auto mechanic knowing how to fix things.  

Both of sides of your analogy are truly alien to me. I can't get my head around mechanics. My off the cuff Lego projects could be improved upon by an Elementary School student. You disagree because your wiring and mine could not be more different, at least among two members of the same species.

 

/I couldn't fix a car if my life depended on it. Not without competent, patient supervision. Hell, not if my children's lives depended on it.

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11 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

Two points

1.

Here is another interesting detail where we seem to be completely at odds.

I have no opinion on whether differences are “innately biological”. (I don’t even think that phrase makes sense.)

But in particular, I don’t think biological differences are better. This is a difference between the moral intuitions of you and me. In fact, there are plenty of phenomena that are entirely biological but which I find abhorrent and which must be fought tooth and claw. 

Assume gender differences in attitude or aptitude are entirely biological. This, to me, implies no policy difference. Assume they are entirely social, or something in the water. This, to me, implies no policy difference. I find the entire question about biological differences a distraction. It corrupts the conversation, and even if we magically solved all scientific questions about human nature and arrived at a definite conclusion, we would be no wiser.

(A clumsy way of explaining this: Assume we established that the root causes for the male dominance in violence were biological. That would not make male violence right. )

No moral imperatives follows from an understanding of root causes. Most of the things that are good and decent about modern society are deliberate suppressions of biological realities. We should be happy about that.

Again, to put it clumsy: gender differences in behaviour may very well be entirely social. Then it would still be true that women ought to be encouraged to pursue careers that they find interesting. 

2.

Your are sloppy in your representation of the other side’s argument. I think I’m very careful in repeatedly explaining that men don’t like programming. (They don’t. Just as they don’t like chess.) The normal state of most humans is to dislike this kind of activity. Humans find these activities boring. They are probably correct in that.

Men, in general, find programming boring and difficult. So do women. Same with chess. Also, men suck at math. So do women.

There are just somewhat more men that behave differently than their gender norm, and somewhat fewer women that behave differently than their gender norm. You may think this is a terrible problem in need of fixing. I am less sure. In particular, I have spent most of my life trying to make humans enthusiastic about programming, chess, and math. I have often failed in that. But I have never seen an interesting difference between the sexes as to why I’ve failed.

Men and women seem to agree in the reasons for their rejection of being “like me”. They are probably right.

But he assertion is, and not without good reason and evidence, that it's not merely benign social factors influencing women's choices. Get the malign social factors eliminated and then we can let benign social factors and biology play out without any need for policy interference.

The whole start of this thing was an assertion that the lack of women in tech is entirely explicable through biology and normal and acceptable social factors, so there's nothing to see here and no problem to solve. That's naive at best and dangerous at worst.

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4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

But he assertion is, and not without good reason and evidence, that it's not merely benign social factors influencing women's choices. Get the malign social factors eliminated and then we can let benign social factors and biology play out without any need for policy interference.

But aren’t you making my point for me now? It’s not about biology. It’s about malice.

The biology/social angle is a distraction; no conclusion can be drawn from us finally determining if a trait “is biological” (a phrasing that, to me, doesn’t even make sense.)

There are plenty of malicious factors influencing women’s choices.  

My honest concern is that convincing a cohort of girls that they’d enjoy a career in tech might very well be malicious.

(I don’t trade in anecdotes. Trust me, I speak to many people about this, including many women. I’ve seen a lot of broken hearts from women who made stereotypically male career choices to placate their parents, only to find out later in life that they really want to do something else. Like teaching or fashion or nursing. I could insert anger and frustration in these narratives, which some of you seem to find convincing. It’s just against my rhetoric stance.) 

How do I address that concern? One way is by not viewing women (or anybody else) as helpless non-agents. Instead, I think women (as everybody else) are self-moving souls, individuals, authors, etc.

(Caveat: Of course, this is a political, philosophical choice, consistent with the values of the Enlightenment, etc., and at variance with the politics of identity and postmodernism. So the epistemological divide exists even in this question. I am cognisant of that.)

Now, even with post-modernist eyes: If we assume that the feminist project was a success, and that some societies (such as Sweden) were able to provide women with the utopia I describe above at least to some degree, then we must assume that Swedish women are more self-moving souls than other women. And all other social indicators support that. But Swedish women avoid tech like the plague.

More importantly, my activities in attracting women to tech now becomes a malicious social force. This worries me. I am really and honestly worried about lying to women about how super interesting, creative, fulfilling, personally satisfying, and social software engineering is. I (and my field, department, uni) would benefit from it. But would the recipient of my dishonesty also benefit? Or have I just become the malicious social force that we all despise, just to improve my own situation?

Instead of this conundrum, I can just assume that women have agency. They make good life choices. They are not mistaken about what they like doing. And they eagerly enter workplaces of extreme frustration, sexual harassment, unbalanced gender dynamics that have become a Romance genre, and verbal abuse (namely, nursing). Then everything fits the evidence in a parsimonious way.

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13 hours ago, Kalbear said:

And here's the thing, @Happy Ent - people are telling you this straight up. Women are telling you straight up their own personal experiences in tech and in law and in teaching and you are ignoring them and telling them that they're wrong. My challenge to you is this: find a woman who hasn't experienced it. 

I do? I’m not aware of that.

Very interesting.

As I said, I talk to a lot of people. This includes women who are happily in tech, who unhappily dropped out of it. And women who were driven into it, and are unhappy. And many who are indifferent. An men who are happily in tech, as well as men who unhappily dropped out of it. There are many different stories. I assume they are all somewhat true and all somewhat false, just like the rest of the entire glorious mess of humanity. I know school teachers and nurses who are deeply unhappy. And programmers and chemical engineers who are extremely happy. And vice versa, of all sexes. I don’t have the feeling that I am ignoring any of them; if they’re unhappy they mostly break my heart.

But for me, this is not an empathy exercise.

Instead,

1. I really want to understand what is going on. I am intellectually curious about human nature, and about social sciences, and about teaching, and about knowledge, and particularly about teaching CS (the latter part is my life.) I find this insanely interesting, more than (say) quantum mechanics or linguistics. It’s on the short list of scientific questions I obsess about. Dispassionately.

2. I am strongly motivated to increase the number of women in tech. For entirely professional reasons (but there are some political or ideological ones as well. Also, my workplace would just be better, so there may be entirely egotistical motives – I am aesthetically appalled by the social environments created by unwashed geeks on the autism spectrum.

None of 1 or 2 benefits from murky thinking. In particular, personal anecdotes are worthless and decrease in epistemic value proportionally with the agitation with which they are told. For instance, when somebody is upset, or personally invested, I tend to disbelieve them more. Because I would disbelieve myself more.

Instead, I am confident that most progress in this field is done by dispassionate evaluation of the evidence. It does not look as if the skewed representation of women in tech is a mystery, nor has much to do with harassment or discrimination. (It does have to do with gender stereotyping.) Trivially, “fixing harassment and discrimination” is a good thing to do, for entirely principled reasons, and no matter who is the recipient of discrimination or harassment.

My claim is that it won’t solve issues 1 and 2. Discrimination and harassment shall be fought for other reasons than solving 1 and 2.

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Here is a well-written personal anecdote that is somewhat related to our topic and contradicts my own intuitions in an interesting way. It is written by Irit Dinur, one of the superstars in my discipline. (For every 100 or 1000 of me, there is one Irit.)

It was invited to celebrate the centenary of Alan Turing, father of computer science, and Irit relates her own sense of belonging to the field. (Which is not entirely the same as “tech,” but is very close, even to the extent of people moving freely between a Silicon Valley job and a Theoretical CS position.):

Quote

The fact is, that being gay in the TCS community is so easy and natural that I usually just don’t think about it. Sure, it would have been nice if there were a few more lesbians around; it would have been nice to not be the only one (that I know) in any workshop/conference/TCS event I’d ever been to. Even among the “gay colleagues” that Luca mentioned, being a woman makes me a minority within a minority. But I can’t really pin that on the TCS community. Our community has always felt like a very liberal and accepting place. Perhaps because many of us grew up as geeks, there’s a strong sense of resisting the exclusion of minorities in general.

In fact, my biggest sense of “coming-home” was not when I first started to go to gay parties or events, but when I first started undergrad as a math and CS major. That’s when I felt this amazing sense of being in the right place, and having lots of “my type” of friends. In that sense I align first with the TCS community and only then am I gay.

 

This story leaves me quite helpless. “My type of friends” are exactly the much-maligned tech community (read xkcd, quote GRRM before it was cool, played magic/chess/Warhammer obsessively, tolerant towards societal norms of personal hygiene, happy to learn LaTeX or git over the weekend, awkward with social interactions, makes no eye contact) that seems to have many women leaving in droves. But some people are actually attracted to that.

https://lucatrevisan.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/turing-centennial-post-1-irit-dinur/

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6 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

The whole start of this thing was an assertion that the lack of women in tech is entirely explicable through biology and normal and acceptable social factors, so there's nothing to see here and no problem to solve. That's naive at best and dangerous at worst.

That’s a great formulation.

As far as I can tell, the lack of women is tech is entirely explicable through biology and normal and acceptable social factors. (*)

But this does not mean that this explanation is true.

(The lack of women among the clergy was probably also explainable in a similar fashion. Instead, it turned out to not be a good explanation; ovaries did not make it impossible to fake belief in God. Repeat for law or playing in a symphony orchestra or being chancellor of Germany.)

However, currently we must face (and be honest about) that the lack of women in tech is well explained. (There is more to be said, and a careful phrasing of this would take a thousand pages. Interpret it charitably.) Any attempt to ignore that epistemological status is a benevolent lie. Of course, the lie may be politically opportune, well-intended, and perfectly valid. But people like me (“principled contrarians”) have difficulty handling benevolent untruths. 

Yet even when the status quo is entirely explicable, it does not follow that there is “nothing to see here and no problem to solve.” I am probably the person in this thread most motivated to “solve the problem.”

But it is psychologically impossible for me to accept a benevolent untruth just to motivate benevolent action. And strategically, it does never work, at least in the long run, to base policy (or teaching) on falsehoods. 

(Nasty rant, just to show that the ability for personal insults does not rest with one side of the debate: In fact, I suspect that many people don’t give a flying fuck about solving the problem. For them, it’s more important to signal in-group loyalty by maintaining the benevolent untruth. In fact, the more epistemologically absurd their position becomes, the stronger is the social capital gained. The more you lie, the better you lead your group. If the problem were ever solved, the group would dissipate. Funny thing, tribalism.)

 

(*) Edit: Reading this through, I can’t stand by this general claim. But since I’m basing this post on Anti-Targ’s (only slightly uncharitable) formulation, I will let it stand for rhetorical effect, even tough I find it somewhat brutal. Insert “largely” or some similar weasel word somewhere. My point, clearer below, is that even if Anti-Targ’s satire were true, it wouldn’t play a role. Not to got Popper on all of you, but explanations can be perfect but false. We should exactly look for counterexamples to the explanation, and we aren’t good at that.

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. In particular, personal anecdotes are worthless and decrease in epistemic value proportionally with the agitation with which they are told.

No. This is wrong. Personal anecdotes have problems, just like any other kind of data, but they are not worthless. Qualitative methods have their own pitfalls and their own merits compared to quantitative ones, but they are definitely not worthless. Nor does the does a claim lose in credibility because it is expressed in an emotionally agitated way. 

 

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On 9/26/2017 at 0:17 PM, Iskaral Pust said:

Perhaps this post belongs in the career thread instead.  Regardless of age or gender, lots of people lack confidence and ability when new to public speaking roles, and most are self-conscious in some fashion or other.  I've spent many years developing junior consultants who often struggle to transition from quantitative expert to making presentations to clients.  I had to make that transition myself. 

My suggestions would be:

(1) Find a way to have yourself and/or some senior colleagues observe the class to be able to evaluate performance and offer constructive feedback.  Repeat this every month or so to gauge improvement.  I can't believe you threw an inexperienced colleague into that situation for two semesters -- where is your obligation to the students, the institution and to the junior colleague?   It absolutely should not be her choice whether the class is observed, it should be a standard program for any new teacher and even used occasionally on experienced teachers to help encourage high standards across the faculty. 

(2) Before a new teacher, or any kind of presenter, starts that role they should have a program of preparation, including review of their planned content, mock presentations to senior colleagues, self-awareness of their delivery (video record each of the mock presentations for the individual to view -- as painful as that is), and basic coaching on public speaking techniques. 

Public speaking is difficult for most but is absolutely a learned skill.  But you need to give people the tools to be aware of their performance and improve.

 

Heard and interesting talk from Frances Frei (yes, that Frances Frei) last year on this topic.  Apparently they found that they could improve performance of women in the classroom by videotaping and NOT showing them videotaping, but rather having a mentor view it and then describe what was good and what could be improved.  Apparently men didn't do as well with this particular technique - was better to show them the tape and discuss while running.  Anyhow, a thought.

20 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Or the parents do, and they say 'let's not encourage going into that field, let's push them for lawyer camp instead'. 

The reality is that in general women face harassment constantly regardless of what job they have; the difference is that some jobs don't have it as a minute-to-minute piece of work.

And here's the thing, @Happy Ent - people are telling you this straight up. Women are telling you straight up their own personal experiences in tech and in law and in teaching and you are ignoring them and telling them that they're wrong. My challenge to you is this: find a woman who hasn't experienced it. 

(Yeah, and you get to law and you find out that it ain't no kind of utopia....)  Anyhow, it isn't just the harassment.  It's some of what Nora is saying above, as well.  You just have to be BETTER than everyone else. You aren't just you, you are the representative of what [under-represented group] could do.  There are only a few of you so what you do stands out.  And there are so very few peers in your [group] and you are asked/expected/demanded to be friends with/mentor/like/behave in certain ways towards them because you look the same.  It's incredibly psychically wearing. 

1 hour ago, Galactus said:

 

 

No. This is wrong. Personal anecdotes have problems, just like any other kind of data, but they are not worthless. Qualitative methods have their own pitfalls and their own merits compared to quantitative ones, but they are definitely not worthless. Nor does the does a claim lose in credibility because it is expressed in an emotionally agitated way. 

 

Thank you.  

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8 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

But aren’t you making my point for me now? It’s not about biology. It’s about malice.

The biology/social angle is a distraction; no conclusion can be drawn from us finally determining if a trait “is biological” (a phrasing that, to me, doesn’t even make sense.)

There are plenty of malicious factors influencing women’s choices.  

Well, given that the entire thread started on the idea that the reason that women aren't in tech is biological, it's odd that you'd bring up that point. 

8 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

My honest concern is that convincing a cohort of girls that they’d enjoy a career in tech might very well be malicious.

So I've been thinking a lot this morning about your well-written rant. Kudos to that. It challenged me in a way I hadn't thought about, and that's got to be a good thing. I appreciate it, truly. 

I think what I've finally determined is that this sentence is the part where there is most frisson between us, and here's why. I am not trying to convince women only that they could be good at tech, or a career could be enjoyable, because I recognize that as things stand right now for a great many women this is simply not true. It's also not true for a whole lot of men, but it's a separate fact that for most people their career is simply not going to be enjoyable, period). 

But where you lose me is the notion that we should do nothing about it. Right now one of the biggest workforce deficits is in programming, and the reason salaries are so high is because there are so few people able to and willing to do it remotely competently. (we can talk separately about whether or not we should encourage more people in general to go into tech, but my position is that we should for a number of pragmatic reasons). Cutting out half the population right off the bat is obviously a losing proposition for making this better. Therefore, if women are making an honest choice to not go into tech and programming, the big question has to be 'how can we make the profession more attractive to women?'

This requires no lying whatsoever to women. This requires no misleading them into bad choices they don't want to do. This requires determining what women don't like about the profession and then determining what can be done to help these things. And this is where I have a real problem with your argument - because as far as I can tell you are completely uninterested in examining this in any way. You appear to simply give up here, say that women have made their choice and then move on. 

The only reason that I can see for this is that you believe that programming is such a horrible thing to do for anyone that only the truly broken individuals would do it, and you want to minimize that suffering. While you clearly love programming (or at least computer science; I have no idea if you actually do programming regularly or are mostly into theoretical stuff), you believe that somehow this is some incredibly specialized snowflake thing and that no one could possibly like it.

Now, I'm certainly willing to be wrong here. Perhaps there's some other reason for your inability to examine what in the software engineering industry can be changed to make it more attractive to women. But I can also state that programming isn't this incredibly small niche thing that people can't do unless they love it. That is almost certainly true about things like getting a Doctorate in it, or teaching it at the university level, but the sheer amount of completely incompetent people working in tech and doing a shit job while getting paid handsomely is very, very high.

And it's very hard for me to believe that there aren't a whole lot of waitresses or customer service reps who would rather do that at minimum wage vs working at a tech company making salary and getting medical coverage.

 

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8 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

I do? I’m not aware of that.

Very interesting.

...

None of 1 or 2 benefits from murky thinking. In particular, personal anecdotes are worthless and decrease in epistemic value proportionally with the agitation with which they are told. For instance, when somebody is upset, or personally invested, I tend to disbelieve them more. Because I would disbelieve myself more.

This would be a good example of you ignoring people telling you these things and why you're doing that, in case you were interested.

 

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13 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

There are plenty of malicious factors influencing women’s choices.  

My honest concern is that convincing a cohort of girls that they’d enjoy a career in tech might very well be malicious.

(I don’t trade in anecdotes. Trust me, I speak to many people about this, including many women. I’ve seen a lot of broken hearts from women who made stereotypically male career choices to placate their parents, only to find out later in life that they really want to do something else. Like teaching or fashion or nursing. I could insert anger and frustration in these narratives, which some of you seem to find convincing. It’s just against my rhetoric stance.) 

 

But how is that categorically different than any other profession, be it law, medicine, accounting, music, acting, etc.? In any given profession, there will be a sizeable portion of participants who are unhappy and stressed about their career choice. This happens to quite possibly any career where someone might aspire to become a part of. 

 

Is convincing men to become doctors the same level of malice, then? 

 

Or is there something uniquely intersectional about female and technology/IT/Computer field that marks it as a unique interaction? 

 

If the argument is that women will not enjoy a career in IT because of the stress factors against women in that field, then wouldn't the solution be to remove those stress factors specific to that professional field, rather than abandoning encouraging higher participation rate? Not to mention, part of the problem inherent in traditionally male-dominated professions for women is the fact that there are so few women in these fields to begin with. So if we don't recruit more and increase participation rate, the situation may be even harder to remedy. 

 

Further, I find this line of thinking rather distressing in how it frames exclusion as a form of protection, as in, here, we are not taking steps to remove the barriers against women in this field because if you're in it you're likely to have a bad experience, ergo, it's for your own good. It's paternalistic concern-trolling. I'm sure that black soldiers who were racially integrated into white units experienced some horrendous treatment, but I don't think we'd argue that we shouldn't have taken steps to integrate our armed forces as a way to protect black soldiers, right? 

 

More importantly, my activities in attracting women to tech now becomes a malicious social force. This worries me. I am really and honestly worried about lying to women about how super interesting, creative, fulfilling, personally satisfying, and social software engineering is. I (and my field, department, uni) would benefit from it. But would the recipient of my dishonesty also benefit? Or have I just become the malicious social force that we all despise, just to improve my own situation?

Instead of this conundrum, I can just assume that women have agency. They make good life choices. They are not mistaken about what they like doing. And they eagerly enter workplaces of extreme frustration, sexual harassment, unbalanced gender dynamics that have become a Romance genre, and verbal abuse (namely, nursing). Then everything fits the evidence in a parsimonious way.

 

But why do you think it's necessary to sell a career in computer engineering as creative, fulfilling, personally satisfying, etc.? Like any other career, fulfillment is developed by each individual. There's no need to make a positive claim about the inherent value of computer science as a fulfilling career - it is as fulfilling as you can make it to be, just like any other career. I've had students who switched majors, and I wished them happiness, telling them that they would be much happier in a career that they feel strongly about. That doesn't mean that business administration or hospitality management are more fulfilling, creative, and personally satisfying in general, though. Those careers are better for those students, just like science and tech are better for others. 

 

I recruit female and under-represented groups to science careers as much as I can. I don't tell them what a wonderful career it is. I tell them that they have the intellectual fit to really excel in these careers, and they should seriously consider these career paths. I don't promise that they will find fulfillment and sense of accomplishment. I also tell them the brutal truth of what it's like to be a minority in the field, and I teach them defense mechanisms to fight off the worst of these assaults so they can defend themselves. That's what a mentor should do, in my view. I am not sales rep for my profession; I am an advocate of my students. My goal isn't to make my profession popular. My goal is to help my students find career paths that they are suited for and to excel in those choices. 

 

I also think it's under-handed to frame your choices as ones that celebrate the agency of women, because this implies that those who take a different, or opposite, approach are undermining women's agency. I think your view lacks the consideration that interests and aptitudes are not ex-nihilo manufactured, but developed and nourished over time. The role of mentors, teachers, guides, and colleagues play extremely important roles in shaping each person's interest in a particular field. Given the empirical data of gender-based biases in math classrooms and other science classrooms at the grade school levels, it is blindingly self-serving to say that women, as a group, could make correct decisions. The flaw isn't in the faculty nor reasoning capacity of women, but in the fact that as a group, they are often not given the full access to experience that can nourish their interests, or sometimes even allowed to imagine that they could be in those careers. 

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1 hour ago, Lew Theobald said:

The difference would seem to be that, instead of letting the chips fall where they may, when individual people choose their own paths, a greater effort is being made, or at least contemplated, to push potential square pegs into round holes.

This idea that we should let "chips fall where they might" is utterly unsatisfying to anyone who sees the status quo as less than optimal. If you don't agree that a more diverse workforce is a better workforce, and/or that women who aptitude for certain professions shouldn't be deterred by external factors that can be mitigated, then of course the exertion needed to change professional cultures will seem unjustified. If indeed we were trying to push square pegs into round holes (and it's mighty easy to do so if you just make the hole a little wider in diameter), then it's because we think it's better for all of us that the peg does fit through. But if you don't accept that first principle, then you're not going to be convinced that the proposals to change professional cultures have merits. 

 

1 hour ago, Lew Theobald said:

Sounds like the tail wagging the dog.  If we allow people to choose the path in life that best suits them, without herding them in any specific direction, then we will spare ourselves the (possibly counterproductive) trouble of trying to alter the field to suit the people we have tried to herd into that field.

Einstein would say that there's no difference between tail wagging the dog or the dog wagging the tail - it's just a difference in reference frame. 

Nevertheless, I disagree that this is a fruitless endeavor (see above), because we already know that people's interest develop over time, and that their aspirations can be altered, nourished, and promoted by direct actions. We do this all the time to young people, without suffering this navel-gazing crisis of wondering if we're doing them harm by getting them interested in one profession or another.

 

Take, for instance, law enforcement. It's a dangerous profession by all accounts, stressful and challenging. Yet we don't seem to mind much in promoting the healthy image of police officers or first responders to our grade schoolers. Are we concerned that we're trying to forcing "square pegs into round holes" when we make general promotion of these civic-oriented professions? If not, then why should promoting careers for women in fields they're under-represented in be any different?

 

The argument isn't that we're not allowing people to chose their paths - quite the contrary, our argument is that we want to make that choice equitable and comparable to other professions, in terms of external barriers that we can work to mitigate. In other words, if a woman hesitates to choose engineering because there's a hostile environment in that profession, then her choice to go into psychology instead isn't a good choice where the competing options are weighed on their respective merits. It'd be similar to someone choosing to eat raw cabbage instead of a baked potato on account that the baked potato is full of mold. It's not really a meaningful choice at that point. If we present a non-moldy baked potato and plate of raw cabbage, then the choice would be more meaningful. 

 

You're framing the proposal to remove systemic barriers that prohibit or dissuade participation as "herding." I understand why you'd frame it that way, but I think that's inaccurate. It's no more a form of "herding" than it is to promote charitable donation by offering tax deductions.

 

2 hours ago, Lew Theobald said:

Is it really self-evident that another social engineering project will cause fewer problems than just leaving people alone, as long as they don't break any laws?

 

"Just leaving people alone" is an endorsement of the status quo. You're begging the question here that the status quo is good and without flaws. 

 

2 hours ago, Lew Theobald said:

The analogy seems poor.  Laws against gender discrimination are in place, and nobody is arguing they should not be enforced.

Not every problem should be, or can be, solved by the force of law. 

Take wages as an example - it'd be bad to set a law to mandate salaries. Yet, we know from a study that for lab technicians, identical resumés with female names receive lower initial wage offer than when given a male name. So what should we do? "Let the chips fall where they might" where women cannot choose careers in stem because they'd just be earning less? "Leave people alone" to continue to offer uneven compensation along gender lines? What's your response to that situation? 

(link to study: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.short )

 

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14 hours ago, TerraPrime said:

But how is that categorically different than any other profession, be it law, medicine, accounting, music, acting, etc.? In any given profession, there will be a sizeable portion of participants who are unhappy and stressed about their career choice. This happens to quite possibly any career where someone might aspire to become a part of. 

You’re making my point for me.

The idea that (A) the underrepresentation of women in tech is explained by (B) issues such as harassment, stress, discrimination, under-appreciation, etc. is just plain dumb. B does not cause A, as far as I can tell.

B exists and is very real. In tech. And in teaching, in law, in nursing. (Arguable, more so.) B is disgusting and terrible and an offence to human decency. We should, and do, take active steps to prevent B.

However, I want to change (or at least understand) A. This does not make me a better person. I claim no moral high ground based on my earnest desire to change (or at least understand) A. It is not a value-laden endeavour, but one inspired by intellectual curiosity and professional incentives. There is nothing inherently good about addressing A. (In fact, it might be evil.) On the other hand, there is something good about addressing B.

But I care about A. This thread claims to, too. Which is why I’m here.

If changing A could be done by being even better at B: great. That would address two important issues. However, I see only weak evidence for the implication B => A. Help me change my mind about it. But note that my belief in “B => A” is not changed by updating my model about how believable B is, or how good it would be to change A.

The intellectually corrupting demon of tribalism makes the following (false) inference:

People who deny “B => A” must support B.

This is a false inference. Yet we have plenty of evidence that our brains work exactly like that: to hear “B does not take place,” or even “I support B” whenever somebody says “B does not imply A”. And since people who support B are clearly evil, the brains of very tribal (but decent) people like Kalbear come to a wrong conclusion about people like me (principled contrarians, problem solvers, sociopaths.) This is toxic to discourse.

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13 hours ago, Lew Theobald said:

The difference would seem to be that, instead of letting the chips fall where they may, when individual people choose their own paths, a greater effort is being made, or at least contemplated, to push potential square pegs into round holes.

Lew, I think a better way of looking at this is we need to do a better job at finding more round pegs. If the cost of doing that is we push some square pegs into the box then I think I am okay with that. I believe the skills learned by pushing them into the wrong box can be much more easily translated into an area they may find passion in later in life. 

One aspect of the gender CS discussion that I find really interesting is the disparity between Undergad and Graduate students in US Universities.  There are almost an equal number of females in both cohorts (around 10k) yet the number of overall Undergrads is almost double that of Graduates. At the University level we are finding a significantly higher percentage of female students in Graduate programs than in Undergraduate. The main channel for Grad students is foreign nationals so something is happening in other countries that is encouraging more female participation. Not sure what your take on why that would occur but it does seem to provide some evidence that you can effect growth through cultural approaches. 

 

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8 minutes ago, zelticgar said:

The main channel for Grad students is foreign nationals so something is happening in other countries that is encouraging more female participation. Not sure what your take on why that would occur but it does seem to provide some evidence that you can effect growth through cultural approaches. 


These foreign nationals are typically not Swedes. 

Look, there is no doubt that one can affect growth through cultural approaches.

Women who do better in tech than US women are typically from cultures that place value on survival. In contrast, women from cultures that place value on self-expression are less motivated to stay in tech.

And in the end: are “cultural approaches” justified just by being cultural? Whence comes the desire to change people, to change societies? Have we not, in the US or in Sweden, built the best societies that mankind has ever seen exactly because we rejected the idea of viewing individuals foremost as representatives of the group they belong to? 

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