Originally Posted by
The Guardian
While the biological hypothesis seems to appeal to some tech workers, the notion that Silicon Valley’s gender gap can be explained away by such factors is questionable. Prof Dame Wendy Hall, a director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton, points to the wide variation in gender ratios in computing internationally, which she argues would not be seen if there were a universal biological difference in ability between the sexes. While only 16% of computer science undergraduates in the UK – and a similar proportion in the US – are female, the balance is different in India, Malaysia and Nigeria.
“I walk into a classroom in India and it’s more than 50% girls, the same in Malaysia,” says Hall. “They are so passionate about coding, Lots of women love coding. There just aren’t these gender differences there.”
In fact, in the west, female participation in computer science has plunged since the mid-80s, while female participation in medicine and other scientific fields has increased steadily.
Over the past decade, even with a number of initiatives being set up to boost girls’ participation in coding and computer science, the proportion of female computer science undergraduates has continued to fall – 10 years ago, the proportion was 19% of the UK total.
Hall believes that the gender gap and the “male computer geek” stereotype can be dated back to the advent of the home computer in the early 80s, when the machines were marketed heavily as gaming systems for men. She suspects this might be more culpable for women’s low participation than men having evolved a mindset better suited to writing lines of code.
“Women were turned off computing in the 80s,” she says. “Computers were sold as toys for the boys. Somehow that cultural stigma has stuck in the west in a way that we can’t get rid of and it’s just getting worse. The skills gap is going to get huge.”
Jane Margolis, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, agrees. Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students in the 90s at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programmes in the country at the time.
“Many of the women at Carnegie Mellon talked about computers being in [their brother’s] bedroom and there were a lot of father-son internships around the computer that weren’t happening with the girls,” she says. “There was a cultural assumption that the norms of being in computer science were that you would do it 24/7, were obsessed with it, wanted nothing in your life but computers – and that was very much associated with male adolescents,” she added. “It was very much based around a male norm. Females were made to think that, if they didn’t dream in code and if it wasn’t their full obsession, they didn’t belong or were not capable of being in the field.”
Former Tinder vice-president Whitney Wolfe
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Former Tinder vice-president Whitney Wolfe, who sued the company over ‘atrocious’ misogyny in 2014. Photograph: Jeff Wilson for the Observer
Prof Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist at Aston University in Birmingham, has studied extensively cognitive differences between men and women. She says that, while Damore pointed to scientific evidence for men and women having different aptitudes and personality traits, he “seemed to miss the point that, even if there were well-established sex differences at any level, they’re always very tiny. Certainly not enough to explain the gender ratios of Google programmers – even if you didn’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of arguing about the science.”
Rippon’s work suggests that, in many cases, the differences between male and female performance, if present, are very small, can disappear with training and are not consistent across cultures.
In one study, Rippon found that British men performed significantly better on a spatial rotation task than women. However, when the experiment was repeated with Chinese participants, there was no difference between the male and female participants. Other similar studies have found that gender differences in spatial rotation tasks disappeared when the researchers controlled for video game experience. Rippon points to another study, which showed that differences in personality traits between men and women varied wildly across countries, depending on the status of women in that society.
So, Damore’s suggestion that women are “more prone to anxiety” does not imply that this difference is a function of hormones or hardwiring of the brain. Plus, there is compelling evidence that unconscious biases have a powerful effect on what people expect themselves to be good at and how they perform. For instance, girls tend to score worse on a test if they are told their maths skills are being assessed than when they are told they are taking part in a study investigating how people solve problems.
Even assuming that there are fundamental differences between male and female cognition and personality, there is no clear, logical line between such findings in a laboratory setting and performance in the workplace.
Priya Guha, the UK lead of tech incubator RocketSpace and a former UK consul general in San Francisco, argues that, even by its own arguments, Damore’s memo missed the point. “The description of an engineer as somebody who has their head down, focused on developing the next line of code, is the sort of engineer that won’t be adding value,” she says. “We need engineers out there who are both very strong developers, but also people who understand the world around them and are comfortable interacting with society. So, by that description, women would be better engineers even by the stereotypes he proposes.”
Google’s sexist memo has provided the alt-right with a new martyr | Owen Jones
Read more
Unfortunately, many such multiskilled people are likely to be deterred by the perception of hostility engendered by claims like Damore’s. “We have a historical challenge to encourage girls, let alone women, into careers such as engineering, which then creates an imbalance in the people who enter tech industries overall,” says Guha. “Tech has a particular problem in this area. Wherever there are instances of people creating a hostile environment, companies need to stamp that out quickly. His dismissal sends a really powerful message: the environment in these companies needs to be thought about to ensure that it improves day by day.”
Recent Blue Posts
Hotfixes: April 16, 2024
Season of Discovery Hotfixes - 16 April
Dragonflight Season 4 - Healer Adjustments
Rank the Dragonflight Dungeons (beyond knee-jerk reactions)
MMO-Champion
Recent Forum Posts
