The New York Times on the Push for Gender Equality in Tech
The New York Times recently published this story:
Which would be great if I could trust its veracity. Because it has at least two instances of either poor research, or narrative-building:
“But those who privately thought things had gone too far were given a voice by James Damore, 28, a soft-spoken Google engineer. Mr. Damore, frustrated after another diversity training, wrote a memo that he posted to an internal Google message board. In it, he argued that maybe women were not equally represented in tech because they were biologically less capable of engineering. Google fired him last month.
After months of apologizing by Silicon Valley for bad behavior, here was a young man whom some in tech’s leadership could potentially get behind”
This is factually inaccurate. Regardless of your personal position on Damore’s stance, if you read the actual memo, Damore makes no such claim. His claim is simply this: women are less enticed or inclined to get involved in STEM.
There are many reasons why this is the case, but one of the fundamentals is that during their teenage years, women are more focused on the social consequences of their actions, and ensuring that they remain a part of their groups. Men, on the other hand, when ostracized for doing something nerdy, just go ahead and plow on.
Don’t believe me? Here, have a paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3160171/
A Review of Sex Differences in Peer Relationship Processes: Potential Trade-offs for the Emotional and Behavioral Development of Girls and Boys
Amanda J. Rose and Karen D. Rudolph[…]
Other research in the peer domain indicates a predominance of connection-oriented goals among girls. Compared to adolescent boys, adolescent girls scored higher on a composite goal score that represented the degree to which they valued social goals (e.g., having friends, helping others) more than nonsocial goals (e.g., getting good grades, making money; Ford, 1982). In middle childhood, studies indicate that girls also are more likely than boys to endorse goals that involve mutual participation (Strough & Berg, 2000), friendliness (Murphy & Eisenberg, 2002), and supportiveness (Rose & Asher, 2004). One study of early adolescents indicated that girls were more likely than boys to endorse intimacy and nurturance goals (Jarvinen & Nicholls, 1996). These studies yielded medium to large effects. Although the effects were smaller and not always statistically significant, there also is some evidence suggesting that girls in middle childhood are more likely than boys to adopt relationship maintaining goals (Chung & Asher, 1996; Rose & Asher, 1999) and goals of resolving peer problems (Rose & Asher, 2004). Because the research on specific social goals focuses primarily on youth in middle childhood, there is little information regarding the developmental progression of these goals for girls and boys.
Notably, girls focus on relationships may contribute to worries about social approval, abandonment, and the status of their friendships. For example, studies of adolescents reveal medium to large effects indicating that girls are more likely than boys to desire closeness and dependency, and to worry about abandonment, loneliness, hurting others, and loss of relationships as a result of expressing anger (Blatt et al., 1993; Henrich, Blatt, Kuperminc, Zohar, & Leadbeater, 2001; Kuperminc, Blatt, & Leadbeater, 1997). In addition, compared to boys, studies yield small to medium significant effects indicating that girls in middle childhood and adolescence exhibit greater concerns about peer evaluation (LaGreca, Dandes, Wick, Shaw, & Stone, 1988; LaGreca & Lopez, 1998; LaGreca & Stone, 1993; Liu & Kaplan, 1999; Rudolph & Conley, 2005; Storch et al., 2003; Storch, Zelman, Sweeney, Danner, & Dove, 2002). No clear developmental pattern is apparent in the strength of these effects. Recent research with late childhood and early adolescent youth also examines whether girls feel more jealousy than boys over their friends’ relationships with others. The findings are not completely consistent, with sex differences emerging in some cases but not others (Parker, Low, Walker, & Gamm, 2005; Roth & Parker, 2001). However, the effect sizes tend to favor girls, and may be especially large when classmates’ reports are used as compared to when self report or friend reports are used (Parker et al., 2005).
[. . .]
Taken together, these studies indicate that girls’ relational orientation style is characterized by stronger interpersonal engagement than that of boys. Specifically, girls tend to care more about dyadic friendships, to more strongly adopt connection-oriented goals in peer contexts, and to feel more empathy for others, whereas boys focus more on agentic goals, including their own dominance in the peer group. Perhaps as a consequence of their interpersonal engagement, girls demonstrate heightened concerns about the status of relationships and about peer evaluations. Unfortunately, the developmental progression of sex differences in these constructs is challenging to evaluate because studies focus either primarily on middle childhood youth (i.e., studies of goal orientation) or adolescents (i.e., studies of interpersonal vulnerabilities such as dependency and worries about abandonment) or because there are few studies on a particular construct (i.e., studies of friendship jealousy). Nevertheless, developmental differences were found for the one construct for which they could be evaluated. Specifically, self-reports of empathy did indicate stronger differences among older than younger youth. Additional research is needed to test whether there is a similar divergence between the sexes with age for the other aspects of social-cognitive style.
In other words, women are more susceptible to negative peer pressure from other women for being geeks — particularly in their high school years, which are the foundation for higher learning and careers. There’s nothing that gets a primate to take corrective action faster than the risk of exile — and so they stop engaging in those pursuits.
Thanks, other women. Golf clap. Maybe stop being dicks to the nerds for being themselves, and fifteen years later you won’t believe that the sky is falling because of the “patriarchy”. Look in the mirror, because a big part of that patriarchy? It’s actually a matriarchy. Try a little self-awareness.
This is fixable, but it requires STEM subjects to become more social. Unfortunately, at its base, STEM is an anti-social pursuit — no matter how you slice it, some large part of it requires sitting in front of a screen by yourself, typing at a keyboard, alone. That’s unlikely to change.
It’s the same underlying reason there are fewer female novelists. That part of Damore’s argument is solid — and misrepresented here by the New York Times, who make the straw-man argument that he’s saying women are biologically incapable.
Which is an outright lie.
When did we start accepting lies as an accepted and allowed part of society? When did we stop caring about facts, and the truth, as long as it furthered a narrative or an agenda?
They don’t stop there.
Mr. Weinstein said there was a “sea of brilliant women” and that more needed to be done to “figure out how to more fully empower them.”
… which Weinstein himself disagrees with. Here’s what he actually said:
“There is a sea of brilliant women interested in STEM, and a Trillion-
dollar prize to be gained by anyone male, female or otherwise who can
figure out how to more fully empower them. Many of those women who
have encountered actual structural barriers, sexual harassment, and
undermining “dog-whistles” have finally had enough, which is
necessary but insufficient by itself to bring about the needed change.
A second requirement beyond wielding the awesome power of the law,
is learning how not to use it to terrify men who are precisely interested
in increasing our understanding of the true scientific basis of diversity
as a pre-requisite to fully integrating the modern workplace.”
This is a much different sentiment. It’s a shame that the NY Times appears to have discarded their journalist integrity enough to no longer perform basic fact-checking on their articles.
Everything is a narrative now, and the truth is hard to find.
We deserve exactly the society we get as a result.
