I'm so glad I discovered this substack! I am a female software engineer so I feel especially qualified to comment on the Damore Memo. Like you, I've had a long journey from woke to post-woke, but for me it actually began in part with the Damore Memo. I initially believed all the media takes and assumed he was some kind of alt-right loser who had said that women were biologically inferior to men. It was only after going through the shock and horror of discovering that one of my male work friends—a kind, decent, funny and intelligent man with a loving wife and an adorable baby—was not only a Damore sympathizer but a Trump voter! At first I felt sick just thinking about it but speaking honestly with him helped the first cracks start to form in my worldview. A few weeks later I went back and read the full memo and my experience was similar to yours - I totally agree with you here:
"It does not seem controversial or even negative to me to say that on average, most women just don’t get all that excited about machinery for machinery’s sake. I know LOTS of women who are brilliant and would make wonderful engineers, but you couldn’t pay them enough to do it—it just sounds painfully boring to them. They don’t feel any discrimination or exclusion about it—they’re just like, hmmmmm, pass. And that’s okay!"
This totally matches my experience. I have so many brilliant female friends who could not possibly have less interest in my field, and that includes STEM-inclined women in fields like medicine. Of course this is all anecdotal but I meet random dudes who think my job is the coolest thing ever ALL. THE. TIME! I am literally friends with a famous musician who thinks my job is cooler than I think his is, which is insane to me. I've met guys at bars and ended up hanging out with them later to give them coding lessons. I have never, not even ONCE, had this experience with another woman. Women nod politely when I tell them what I do for a living and then we move on with the conversation. Sometimes they tell me about that time they started a python course on Codeacademy but then gave up because it was boring.
I have a hard time understanding how anyone who has ever met both men and women can possibly think that men and women don't have, on average, different inclinations. I went to the Super Bowl once and the line for the men's room at half time was 30 minutes long while I waltzed right into the ladies. I mean, hello! How did we get to a place where we let ideology blind us to basic common sense observations about humanity?
Even more importantly, why do we jump to the conclusion that any acknowledgement of the differences between men and women is a value judgment? To me that impulse reveals more misogyny than the reverse because it implies that one set of interests, inclinations, career choices, etc is more desirable than the other, with the subtext being that whatever appeals to men is more valuable. Those careers do often pay better, but then why is the conversation always about how to force more women into fields they might not even want to be in, rather than about why nursing and teaching pay so poorly relative to their importance? Why do we willfully ignore the data on how countries with the most equitable material conditions for men and women end up with the least gender-balanced workforce, while countries with some of the least equitable conditions (e.g. India) are the polar opposite?
re-reading the piece I am struck by this paragraph, which illustrates some of the challenges of this conversation.
"The initial goal was to eliminate barriers to entry and success, to break down stereotypes about engineers and make sure girls knew it was an option for them. Damore (and I) took it a step further and said, how can we rethink the field itself to make it even more attractive to women while also increasing the impact of a company’s workforce? The truth is, after decades of fighting sexism, it’s possible we actually made progress! It’s possible that discrimination is not the dominant factor in the remaining disparities. That leaves us to find other creative ways to improve the field, but it also challenges us to answer “what does ‘good enough’ look like?” If the answer is 50/50, we will have to engage in some massive social engineering at all ages. ..."
I think all of those are reasonable questions, and ones that can absolutely be asked in good faith. But the tricky thing is figuring out what should the burden of proof be for a statement like, "It’s possible that discrimination is not the dominant factor in the remaining disparities." It's entirely possible, and it's also unlikely that we can find conclusive evidence one way or another (in part because that might be true for one company but not another).
So what counts as sufficient evidence to act on? Are, "creative ways to improve the field" the best way forward, or are they a way to signal interest in change while avoiding self-reflection?
[I'm not accusing you of avoiding self-reflection; I'm pointing out that one of the easiest ways to stall something is to say, "shouldn't we gather more evidence before doing anything?" Sometimes, yes, we should gather more information, but not always, and I don't know of any way to resolve the question without the possibility of hurt feelings.]
Hey Nick- Yeah, I hesitated a bit in drafting this, wondering if I was somehow suggesting that I doubted discrimination was still happening in the industry. Just because I don't think I've experienced it doesn't mean anything for others; it doesn't even mean I haven't. But I do maintain that it shouldn't be verboten to discuss *other* potential contributing factors *in addition* to discrimination. The impression I've gotten in the past is that discussion of any other factors amounts to a denial or minimization of discrimination, and it becomes a conversation stopper. Seems counter-productive.
Absolutely, as I said, I thought the questions were sincere and worth asking.
It seems likely that there are many contributing factors few or none of which have simple solutions.
So what to do? I do think some of the anti-racism initiatives fall into the trap of, "we have to do something ... this is something." -- which is to say loudly proclaiming new initiatives without having a good sense of whether they will solve the problem.
At the same time, the variety of possible causes shouldn't be a reason for inaction.
I think your generous reading of the Damore memo sees it as calling for a bit of a "both-and" approach; take discrimination seriously, and try to address it, while also being conscious of overreach.
That sounds good, but that doesn't make the problem of, "what should we do next" any easier. Not that I expect you to lay out a blueprint for solving discrimination in a substack post but, as I say, it's worth thinking about the question of where the burden of proof should fall.
In summary, National Geographic made a big public announcement that it wanted to acknowledge it's past history of racism and do better in the future.
Interviewing staffers the author finds that (a) it has made improvements but, (b) they are slight and there is still criticism both of the journalism and the way it treats staff of color and, (c) that staffers of color feel like the process has demanded more effort and emotional energy from them, and (d) there are various individual who specifically feel badly treated and aren't sure how race played into that.
From that you could argue any of, "progress is difficult; it's good that they are making improvements but they still have a long way to go." or "is this worth the effort? It's not clear that they have an commitment to real change and any change that's happened so far has been painful." or "you could write stories about disgruntled employees at any workplace, it's not clear what the actual criticism of National Geographic entails, and what specific changes critics are looking for."
I have some sympathy will also of those perspectives -- the article is limited in the amount of detail it can provide, and it's a little hard to tell without more information.
But I don't think that means that the effort to change is misguided (nor do I expect you would think that).
Damore lost me completely when he asserted (rather than argued) that diversity is not a moral issue. He seems to think that political views derive from moral views (true to some extent) and that moral views are merely preferences. That's incorrect. You can form, assess, and change your moral views based on reasonable criteria. I'm deliberately avoiding the term "rational" here because it's so loaded. You can ask if a particular action maximizes utility. You can ask if a particular action is what one would choose from behind the veil of ignorance. You can ask if an action conforms to Kant's Categorical Imperative. There are a variety of ways to approach moral assessments that include reasonable criteria far above and beyond "this is my personal preference."
Thanks for guiding me back to this memo and topic! I can't say I'm as convinced as you are that Damore is an innocent victim of the woke police.
This could be a place where I gave him too much benefit of the doubt. I assumed by that line, he meant in the Haidt-ian sense of morals setting taboos and making it difficult to hold open, constructive conversation with someone who sees things differently. I agree with you that there are undoubtably moral aspects to this discussion. Treating everyone with respect and dignity seems awfully close to a universal moral truth in the 21st century; I don't have much patience for "different perspectives" on that. One person may think that aggressive diversity metrics are the moral thing to do, and someone else might find them immoral. I took his statement to mean that people who have strong opinions about D&I should be open to discussing them and not hold them as sacred, and not get easily offended when someone disagrees.
For the record, I wasn't really thinking of Damore as an innocent victim, but I may have portrayed him that way, unfortunately. I just don't think he was a monster, and I think he had something constructive to add to the conversation. He may have been just an all-around jerk at work and Google might have been better off without him. The memo surely doesn't paint the whole picture.
I have to admit I winced a few times reading his memo. It could've been more diplomatically put at times, but I essentially agree with him. I think this is where he talks about avoiding seeing diversity as a moral issue:
As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of
costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly
punish those we see as villains to protect the “victims.”
I think you are using a formal, philosophical definition of morality, and he's using a more colloquial term. In your example above, one could ask the question as to whether there is a "moral" reason to promote diversity. One could examine the question from various ethical frameworks and have a reasonable discussion. He is, instead, using the term "moral" in the almost religious, dogmatic sense, where there is an a priori, unquestionable principle that is sacrosanct and cannot be questioned. And I do agree that this causes problems.
1st- you’re absolutely right that organizations and communities like to see themselves Awc”good guys” and thus are resistant to anything or anyone suggesting otherwise. The only way I can think to counter this is for leaders to make a determined effort to broaden horizons, there own and those of underlings.
2nd The people’s commissar style of diversity initiative seems designed to prompt anyone audience to put up its defenses without leaving much of an opening for new ideas.
3rd. Surely there’s someway to consider the issues you raise in a less high stakes way.
4th Last, my late father put it well: that which an organization does well is likely to be something it shows it consistently cares about
A really great article. I remember the Damore affair myself, and wondering who keeps leaking this stuff to the press. Recode did a really great podcast piece on how Google's culture is changing, people are becoming more secretive and management is more closed off from employees. I wonder if anyone thinks about how much of that is driven by disgruntled employees leaking internal communications (like Damore's letter) to the press, and what responsibility the media has in turn for driving this change in culture.
I'm also intrigued by your idea that women tend to be more interested in a career that focuses on helping others. I work in marketing myself, and I find this field to be more than 50% women, yet it is a pretty big stretch to say that the marketing profession is one where you help people (more than any other profession).
Howard, you might find the study of middle school girls interesting. They split the survey respondents into girls who like STEM (75%) and those who don’t. They asked the girls how important like 20 different aspects of a future job would be. The only one that was more important to “non-STEM” girls was the opportunity to be creative. Maybe those are your colleagues! Seriously though, it would definitely be unfair to say girls’ ideas in 4th grade stick with them forever. I do agree with Elana’s generalization about being more people-oriented on average.
Another amazing post, Marie. This is a topic I've thought a lot about in past years. I don't think Marie's point was just that women want to help others. I think a better analysis is that women prefer to work in professions that are more collaborative, social and people-oriented rather than working solo and object-oriented. There is data from child development that show girls are more likely to make eye-contact, acquire language earlier and boys are more interested in things/objects and to walk earlier.
Now -- natural experiment -- let's look at what field women choose after med school. A lot are in primary care. (I'll admit this is somewhat of an impression. I went looking for data on whether there are more women than men in primary care and couldn't find a breakdown.) But I did find the fact that radiology residencies are about 27% women. What could be the reason for this? It's not family/lifestyle. Radiology offers the ability to work part-time, odd hours and even from home now. It pays quite well. My guess is that it doesn't appeal to women as much as men b/c it's solitary and object-focused. (When I did a radiology rotation in med school, I couldn't wait for it to be over. I found it tiring and depressing sitting in a dark room all day looking at a screen.)
And it's interesting b/c that's how I picture engineering. I guess I think of it like a computer engineer -- sitting in a cubicle coding. Yuck. Boys/men seem to be drawn to that kind of work though. When my son was in middle school, he discovered chess and was absolutely obsessed. We both were struck by how male-dominated the chess clubs and tournaments were. Why? Is it society? Role models? What their peers are doing? Or is it different brains: not that the girls weren't capable of chess, just that they weren't as interested? Maybe a combo? Why are boys (in general) more drawn to chess, video games and computer programming? Why don't men (in general) join book clubs?
So I'll finish with a couple of thoughts. 1) It should be ok to ask these questions and point to these differences w/o being accused of male chauvinism or propagating negative gender-based stereotypes. 2) If there are differences in the male/female brain, that doesn't mean that one is better than the other. Just different. 3) If that leads to a gender imbalance in certain fields, do we even need to try to solve or balance that? If the workplace is outright *hostile* to the other gender --absolutely. But if there is a simply a natural preference, is it really incumbent on society (or a company) to override that? Maybe... I'm open to that possibility, but the question should be asked. 4) If we do want to override that natural inclination (encourage more women to be computer programmers or go into radiology), what is the most effective, just and least totalitarian way to do that?
I was wondering the same thing with that more recent case where the high-profile AI researcher resigned/was fired from Google. I remember reading that the key sticking point between her and Google was that she wanted the names of everyone who wanted her paper not to be published, and as soon as I read that I thought "oh man, if she got those names they would either be released on Twitter or leaked to someone at the NYT." I wonder if that fear of leaking is what ended up causing Google management another controversy.
From the outside, I really wondered what was up with the Timnit story. The truth is, with both her and Damore, I have no idea what kind of colleague or employee they were, having not worked at Google myself! They could have been insufferable, or they could have been reasonable people harassed to the point of indignation. Your input and the Reddit takes are interesting. I wouldn't be shocked if she did face higher than average skepticism from her co-workers as a black woman. The thing is, if she generally did not, and she was generally respected and treated as an equal, then lashing out like she allegedly did would certainly elicit the blowback she got. This is what equality would look like, as it's certainly what would happen to a white male who started raging inconsolably about a perceived slight. Very tough for me to judge from here though. Just saying: would it necessarily clear once you are finally being treated equally?
Great article, I have many thoughts . . . (apologies for a long comment, but I think this gets into a bunch of interesting areas).
1) I also didn't follow the Damore affair closely, but I think it's important to recognize that there's a difference between saying, "he made some good points" and "google handled the situation badly" (you are focusing on the first; so I don't think you're conflating them, but some people do). Both of those statements could be true of false, but they are independent of each other.
Internal politics are going to have their own flash points and its quite possible that he could be making a number of basically anodyne statements and also that the non-anodyne statements step into a giant hornets nest in terms of the internal debates happening at google at the time.
2) I agree completely with your comment about increasing the bar for everybody and taking a broader perspective on what makes for good team-building. That's not something which is easy to turn into policy, but is crucially important.
3) When you say, "why should engineering be more prestigious than teaching or nursing" there's the huge issue of money. Engineering is more prestigious because it pays more, and a lot of the debate over "big tech" these days has some element of, "with great power comes great responsibility." People look at both the amount of power the tech companies like google have, and the salaries of their employees and think, "if you're getting that much you should do more to contribute to the broader civic community." That's somewhat unfair, but also completely understandable.
5) I've been curious, reading your substack, where I would disagree with you. Since I agree with almost everything you write, but am not sure how to interpret the "post-woke" description. Reading this, I suspect we do agree on most issues around diversity (& equity & inclusion), but we are in slightly different contexts and have slightly different senses of which concerns are most pressing and which ideas need more emphasis.
I'm interested to find out what are the cases in which that ends up pulling us in different directions, but I appreciated this summary.
I'm so glad I discovered this substack! I am a female software engineer so I feel especially qualified to comment on the Damore Memo. Like you, I've had a long journey from woke to post-woke, but for me it actually began in part with the Damore Memo. I initially believed all the media takes and assumed he was some kind of alt-right loser who had said that women were biologically inferior to men. It was only after going through the shock and horror of discovering that one of my male work friends—a kind, decent, funny and intelligent man with a loving wife and an adorable baby—was not only a Damore sympathizer but a Trump voter! At first I felt sick just thinking about it but speaking honestly with him helped the first cracks start to form in my worldview. A few weeks later I went back and read the full memo and my experience was similar to yours - I totally agree with you here:
"It does not seem controversial or even negative to me to say that on average, most women just don’t get all that excited about machinery for machinery’s sake. I know LOTS of women who are brilliant and would make wonderful engineers, but you couldn’t pay them enough to do it—it just sounds painfully boring to them. They don’t feel any discrimination or exclusion about it—they’re just like, hmmmmm, pass. And that’s okay!"
This totally matches my experience. I have so many brilliant female friends who could not possibly have less interest in my field, and that includes STEM-inclined women in fields like medicine. Of course this is all anecdotal but I meet random dudes who think my job is the coolest thing ever ALL. THE. TIME! I am literally friends with a famous musician who thinks my job is cooler than I think his is, which is insane to me. I've met guys at bars and ended up hanging out with them later to give them coding lessons. I have never, not even ONCE, had this experience with another woman. Women nod politely when I tell them what I do for a living and then we move on with the conversation. Sometimes they tell me about that time they started a python course on Codeacademy but then gave up because it was boring.
I have a hard time understanding how anyone who has ever met both men and women can possibly think that men and women don't have, on average, different inclinations. I went to the Super Bowl once and the line for the men's room at half time was 30 minutes long while I waltzed right into the ladies. I mean, hello! How did we get to a place where we let ideology blind us to basic common sense observations about humanity?
Even more importantly, why do we jump to the conclusion that any acknowledgement of the differences between men and women is a value judgment? To me that impulse reveals more misogyny than the reverse because it implies that one set of interests, inclinations, career choices, etc is more desirable than the other, with the subtext being that whatever appeals to men is more valuable. Those careers do often pay better, but then why is the conversation always about how to force more women into fields they might not even want to be in, rather than about why nursing and teaching pay so poorly relative to their importance? Why do we willfully ignore the data on how countries with the most equitable material conditions for men and women end up with the least gender-balanced workforce, while countries with some of the least equitable conditions (e.g. India) are the polar opposite?
re-reading the piece I am struck by this paragraph, which illustrates some of the challenges of this conversation.
"The initial goal was to eliminate barriers to entry and success, to break down stereotypes about engineers and make sure girls knew it was an option for them. Damore (and I) took it a step further and said, how can we rethink the field itself to make it even more attractive to women while also increasing the impact of a company’s workforce? The truth is, after decades of fighting sexism, it’s possible we actually made progress! It’s possible that discrimination is not the dominant factor in the remaining disparities. That leaves us to find other creative ways to improve the field, but it also challenges us to answer “what does ‘good enough’ look like?” If the answer is 50/50, we will have to engage in some massive social engineering at all ages. ..."
I think all of those are reasonable questions, and ones that can absolutely be asked in good faith. But the tricky thing is figuring out what should the burden of proof be for a statement like, "It’s possible that discrimination is not the dominant factor in the remaining disparities." It's entirely possible, and it's also unlikely that we can find conclusive evidence one way or another (in part because that might be true for one company but not another).
So what counts as sufficient evidence to act on? Are, "creative ways to improve the field" the best way forward, or are they a way to signal interest in change while avoiding self-reflection?
[I'm not accusing you of avoiding self-reflection; I'm pointing out that one of the easiest ways to stall something is to say, "shouldn't we gather more evidence before doing anything?" Sometimes, yes, we should gather more information, but not always, and I don't know of any way to resolve the question without the possibility of hurt feelings.]
Hey Nick- Yeah, I hesitated a bit in drafting this, wondering if I was somehow suggesting that I doubted discrimination was still happening in the industry. Just because I don't think I've experienced it doesn't mean anything for others; it doesn't even mean I haven't. But I do maintain that it shouldn't be verboten to discuss *other* potential contributing factors *in addition* to discrimination. The impression I've gotten in the past is that discussion of any other factors amounts to a denial or minimization of discrimination, and it becomes a conversation stopper. Seems counter-productive.
Absolutely, as I said, I thought the questions were sincere and worth asking.
It seems likely that there are many contributing factors few or none of which have simple solutions.
So what to do? I do think some of the anti-racism initiatives fall into the trap of, "we have to do something ... this is something." -- which is to say loudly proclaiming new initiatives without having a good sense of whether they will solve the problem.
At the same time, the variety of possible causes shouldn't be a reason for inaction.
I think your generous reading of the Damore memo sees it as calling for a bit of a "both-and" approach; take discrimination seriously, and try to address it, while also being conscious of overreach.
That sounds good, but that doesn't make the problem of, "what should we do next" any easier. Not that I expect you to lay out a blueprint for solving discrimination in a substack post but, as I say, it's worth thinking about the question of where the burden of proof should fall.
Incidentally, this Vox story about National Geographic is an interesting case study in that you could read it to support most pre-existing beliefs: https://www.vox.com/22417191/national-geographic-racial-reckoning
In summary, National Geographic made a big public announcement that it wanted to acknowledge it's past history of racism and do better in the future.
Interviewing staffers the author finds that (a) it has made improvements but, (b) they are slight and there is still criticism both of the journalism and the way it treats staff of color and, (c) that staffers of color feel like the process has demanded more effort and emotional energy from them, and (d) there are various individual who specifically feel badly treated and aren't sure how race played into that.
From that you could argue any of, "progress is difficult; it's good that they are making improvements but they still have a long way to go." or "is this worth the effort? It's not clear that they have an commitment to real change and any change that's happened so far has been painful." or "you could write stories about disgruntled employees at any workplace, it's not clear what the actual criticism of National Geographic entails, and what specific changes critics are looking for."
I have some sympathy will also of those perspectives -- the article is limited in the amount of detail it can provide, and it's a little hard to tell without more information.
But I don't think that means that the effort to change is misguided (nor do I expect you would think that).
Damore lost me completely when he asserted (rather than argued) that diversity is not a moral issue. He seems to think that political views derive from moral views (true to some extent) and that moral views are merely preferences. That's incorrect. You can form, assess, and change your moral views based on reasonable criteria. I'm deliberately avoiding the term "rational" here because it's so loaded. You can ask if a particular action maximizes utility. You can ask if a particular action is what one would choose from behind the veil of ignorance. You can ask if an action conforms to Kant's Categorical Imperative. There are a variety of ways to approach moral assessments that include reasonable criteria far above and beyond "this is my personal preference."
Thanks for guiding me back to this memo and topic! I can't say I'm as convinced as you are that Damore is an innocent victim of the woke police.
This could be a place where I gave him too much benefit of the doubt. I assumed by that line, he meant in the Haidt-ian sense of morals setting taboos and making it difficult to hold open, constructive conversation with someone who sees things differently. I agree with you that there are undoubtably moral aspects to this discussion. Treating everyone with respect and dignity seems awfully close to a universal moral truth in the 21st century; I don't have much patience for "different perspectives" on that. One person may think that aggressive diversity metrics are the moral thing to do, and someone else might find them immoral. I took his statement to mean that people who have strong opinions about D&I should be open to discussing them and not hold them as sacred, and not get easily offended when someone disagrees.
For the record, I wasn't really thinking of Damore as an innocent victim, but I may have portrayed him that way, unfortunately. I just don't think he was a monster, and I think he had something constructive to add to the conversation. He may have been just an all-around jerk at work and Google might have been better off without him. The memo surely doesn't paint the whole picture.
I have to admit I winced a few times reading his memo. It could've been more diplomatically put at times, but I essentially agree with him. I think this is where he talks about avoiding seeing diversity as a moral issue:
As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of
costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly
punish those we see as villains to protect the “victims.”
I think you are using a formal, philosophical definition of morality, and he's using a more colloquial term. In your example above, one could ask the question as to whether there is a "moral" reason to promote diversity. One could examine the question from various ethical frameworks and have a reasonable discussion. He is, instead, using the term "moral" in the almost religious, dogmatic sense, where there is an a priori, unquestionable principle that is sacrosanct and cannot be questioned. And I do agree that this causes problems.
A few random thoughts.
1st- you’re absolutely right that organizations and communities like to see themselves Awc”good guys” and thus are resistant to anything or anyone suggesting otherwise. The only way I can think to counter this is for leaders to make a determined effort to broaden horizons, there own and those of underlings.
2nd The people’s commissar style of diversity initiative seems designed to prompt anyone audience to put up its defenses without leaving much of an opening for new ideas.
3rd. Surely there’s someway to consider the issues you raise in a less high stakes way.
4th Last, my late father put it well: that which an organization does well is likely to be something it shows it consistently cares about
A really great article. I remember the Damore affair myself, and wondering who keeps leaking this stuff to the press. Recode did a really great podcast piece on how Google's culture is changing, people are becoming more secretive and management is more closed off from employees. I wonder if anyone thinks about how much of that is driven by disgruntled employees leaking internal communications (like Damore's letter) to the press, and what responsibility the media has in turn for driving this change in culture.
I'm also intrigued by your idea that women tend to be more interested in a career that focuses on helping others. I work in marketing myself, and I find this field to be more than 50% women, yet it is a pretty big stretch to say that the marketing profession is one where you help people (more than any other profession).
Howard, you might find the study of middle school girls interesting. They split the survey respondents into girls who like STEM (75%) and those who don’t. They asked the girls how important like 20 different aspects of a future job would be. The only one that was more important to “non-STEM” girls was the opportunity to be creative. Maybe those are your colleagues! Seriously though, it would definitely be unfair to say girls’ ideas in 4th grade stick with them forever. I do agree with Elana’s generalization about being more people-oriented on average.
That is interesting, and I agree that does a lot to explain the prevalence of women in marketing.
Another amazing post, Marie. This is a topic I've thought a lot about in past years. I don't think Marie's point was just that women want to help others. I think a better analysis is that women prefer to work in professions that are more collaborative, social and people-oriented rather than working solo and object-oriented. There is data from child development that show girls are more likely to make eye-contact, acquire language earlier and boys are more interested in things/objects and to walk earlier.
Let's take my field: medicine. Data now show that slightly more women are entering med school than men now: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/women-are-now-a-majority-of-entering-medical-students-nationwide/2018/01/22/b2eb00e8-f22e-11e7-b3bf-ab90a706e175_story.html
Now -- natural experiment -- let's look at what field women choose after med school. A lot are in primary care. (I'll admit this is somewhat of an impression. I went looking for data on whether there are more women than men in primary care and couldn't find a breakdown.) But I did find the fact that radiology residencies are about 27% women. What could be the reason for this? It's not family/lifestyle. Radiology offers the ability to work part-time, odd hours and even from home now. It pays quite well. My guess is that it doesn't appeal to women as much as men b/c it's solitary and object-focused. (When I did a radiology rotation in med school, I couldn't wait for it to be over. I found it tiring and depressing sitting in a dark room all day looking at a screen.)
And it's interesting b/c that's how I picture engineering. I guess I think of it like a computer engineer -- sitting in a cubicle coding. Yuck. Boys/men seem to be drawn to that kind of work though. When my son was in middle school, he discovered chess and was absolutely obsessed. We both were struck by how male-dominated the chess clubs and tournaments were. Why? Is it society? Role models? What their peers are doing? Or is it different brains: not that the girls weren't capable of chess, just that they weren't as interested? Maybe a combo? Why are boys (in general) more drawn to chess, video games and computer programming? Why don't men (in general) join book clubs?
So I'll finish with a couple of thoughts. 1) It should be ok to ask these questions and point to these differences w/o being accused of male chauvinism or propagating negative gender-based stereotypes. 2) If there are differences in the male/female brain, that doesn't mean that one is better than the other. Just different. 3) If that leads to a gender imbalance in certain fields, do we even need to try to solve or balance that? If the workplace is outright *hostile* to the other gender --absolutely. But if there is a simply a natural preference, is it really incumbent on society (or a company) to override that? Maybe... I'm open to that possibility, but the question should be asked. 4) If we do want to override that natural inclination (encourage more women to be computer programmers or go into radiology), what is the most effective, just and least totalitarian way to do that?
I was wondering the same thing with that more recent case where the high-profile AI researcher resigned/was fired from Google. I remember reading that the key sticking point between her and Google was that she wanted the names of everyone who wanted her paper not to be published, and as soon as I read that I thought "oh man, if she got those names they would either be released on Twitter or leaked to someone at the NYT." I wonder if that fear of leaking is what ended up causing Google management another controversy.
From the outside, I really wondered what was up with the Timnit story. The truth is, with both her and Damore, I have no idea what kind of colleague or employee they were, having not worked at Google myself! They could have been insufferable, or they could have been reasonable people harassed to the point of indignation. Your input and the Reddit takes are interesting. I wouldn't be shocked if she did face higher than average skepticism from her co-workers as a black woman. The thing is, if she generally did not, and she was generally respected and treated as an equal, then lashing out like she allegedly did would certainly elicit the blowback she got. This is what equality would look like, as it's certainly what would happen to a white male who started raging inconsolably about a perceived slight. Very tough for me to judge from here though. Just saying: would it necessarily clear once you are finally being treated equally?
Wow, thanks for sharing that!
Great article, I have many thoughts . . . (apologies for a long comment, but I think this gets into a bunch of interesting areas).
1) I also didn't follow the Damore affair closely, but I think it's important to recognize that there's a difference between saying, "he made some good points" and "google handled the situation badly" (you are focusing on the first; so I don't think you're conflating them, but some people do). Both of those statements could be true of false, but they are independent of each other.
Internal politics are going to have their own flash points and its quite possible that he could be making a number of basically anodyne statements and also that the non-anodyne statements step into a giant hornets nest in terms of the internal debates happening at google at the time.
2) I agree completely with your comment about increasing the bar for everybody and taking a broader perspective on what makes for good team-building. That's not something which is easy to turn into policy, but is crucially important.
3) When you say, "why should engineering be more prestigious than teaching or nursing" there's the huge issue of money. Engineering is more prestigious because it pays more, and a lot of the debate over "big tech" these days has some element of, "with great power comes great responsibility." People look at both the amount of power the tech companies like google have, and the salaries of their employees and think, "if you're getting that much you should do more to contribute to the broader civic community." That's somewhat unfair, but also completely understandable.
4) The mention of, "psychological safety" reminds me of this story (which I haven't followed, beyond this one article but which is an interesting description of a company trying to study itself -- even if it almost certainly puts a rosy spin on the results): https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html
5) I've been curious, reading your substack, where I would disagree with you. Since I agree with almost everything you write, but am not sure how to interpret the "post-woke" description. Reading this, I suspect we do agree on most issues around diversity (& equity & inclusion), but we are in slightly different contexts and have slightly different senses of which concerns are most pressing and which ideas need more emphasis.
I'm interested to find out what are the cases in which that ends up pulling us in different directions, but I appreciated this summary.