Have you read the manifesto published internally at Google, that has thrown many people into a tizzy? It’s amazingly stupid. Yet another blinkered male engineer babbling about his biases as if they are factual.
On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:
- They’re universal across human cultures
- They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
- Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males
- The underlying traits are highly heritable
- They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective
Yes, there are real biological differences. But what are they?
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Name these universal differences. Which ones are relevant to working as an engineer at Google? Do you realize that engineering, Google, and even working are socially constructed concepts? I rather doubt that we evolved sex differences in being able to code in Java or Python.
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Which of these differences have clear biological causes linked to prenatal testosterone? I can think of a few: gonadal differentiation and formation of the external genitalia. Unless you’re banging out code with your testicles these are not relevant to working as an engineer at Google. The factors that do affect competence at engineering do not have clear biological causes.
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“Biological” (I am learning to hate that modifier in these contexts) males that were not castrated at birth may still identify and act like females, whatever that means. What does it mean to act like a male or female? Do you realize that those terms are largely socially constructed?
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Which traits are highly heritable? Producing sperm? Excessive body hair? Liking to watch football? Are these relevant to working as an engineer at Google, and what makes you think they’re exclusive to “biological” males?
- Since the whole point of evolutionary psychology is to make up evidence to justify the status quo, that is a true statement, since EP predicts everything after the fact. It’s just not much of an endorsement to cite quack science in favor of your claims.
I agree that sex differences aren’t just socially constructed. If you’re born with a penis (a biological property), you will experience a different social environment than if you’re born with a vagina, or if you’re born intersex. You will then experience a cascade of influences that shape how you think about the world, including how you think about sex, and sometimes you’re born with, or acquire responses to gender that do not match narrow preconceptions about how men and women should be. It is flatly absurd to try and reduce the factors that make up a human being to “biological” or “social”. Biology modifies culture, and culture modifies biology. Neither stand alone.
He then builds on this weird misunderstood picture of biology to argue for encouraging more conservative thinking. I don’t get the connection. Does he think political ideology is heritable, and that it is linked to sex?
Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.
Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is require for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.
Oh, pity the poor oppressed conservative male! They only hold a majority in tech companies, especially at the executive level, and have most of the political and economic power in our country.
But I have to ask again about the relevance. Are there no conservative women? If Google oppresses conservatives so much, how did he gain the confidence to publish his 10 page screed?
Also, why, when a company takes on initiatives to reduce race or gender discrimination, do these people suddenly feel that conservativism is being threatened? If conservatives automatically identify with misogyny and racism, I think the problem is how badly conservatives have branded themselves. I can imagine — barely, because its current implementation is so saturated with it — a conservative political point of view that isn’t anti-science, anti-woman, anti-diversity, but it’s becoming harder and harder in the era of Trump to do so.
And then there’s this lovely recommendation to Google management.
De-emphasize empathy.
I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.
I don’t need to address this one, because a former Google engineer has shredded it.
Engineering is not the art of building devices; it’s the art of fixing problems. Devices are a means, not an end. Fixing problems means first of all understanding them — and since the whole purpose of the things we do is to fix problems in the outside world, problems involving people, that means that understanding people, and the ways in which they will interact with your system, is fundamental to every step of building a system. (This is so key that we have a bunch of entire job ladders — PM’s and UX’ers and so on — who have done nothing but specialize in those problems. But the presence of specialists doesn’t mean engineers are off the hook; far from it. Engineering leaders absolutely need to understand product deeply; it’s a core job requirement.)
And once you’ve understood the system, and worked out what has to be built, do you retreat to a cave and start writing code? If you’re a hobbyist, yes. If you’re a professional, especially one working on systems that can use terms like “planet-scale” and “carrier-class” without the slightest exaggeration, then you’ll quickly find that the large bulk of your job is about coordinating and cooperating with other groups. It’s about making sure you’re all building one system, instead of twenty different ones; about making sure that dependencies and risks are managed, about designing the right modularity boundaries that make it easy to continue to innovate in the future, about preemptively managing the sorts of dangers that teams like SRE, Security, Privacy, and Abuse are the experts in catching before they turn your project into rubble.
Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers. If someone told you that engineering was a field where you could get away with not dealing with people or feelings, then I’m very sorry to tell you that you have been lied to. Solitary work is something that only happens at the most junior levels, and even then it’s only possible because someone senior to you — most likely your manager — has been putting in long hours to build up the social structures in your group that let you focus on code.
Brilliant. This guy has, in a few paragraphs, single-handedly raised my opinion of engineering (not that I had a low opinion beforehand). That’s so right, and it’s also true of science — I keep trying to tell my students that cooperation is key to succeeding in science, and that you don’t get to retire to your lab bench and revolutionize our understanding of biology all by yourself. But apparently some people just don’t get it.
I blame Ayn Rand.
Yonatan Zunger also tears into the nameless Google engineer for being a bad engineer and being a deplorable influence on his colleagues.
You talked about a need for discussion about ideas; you need to learn the difference between “I think we should adopt Go as our primary language” and “I think one-third of my colleagues are either biologically unsuited to do their jobs, or if not are exceptions and should be suspected of such until they can prove otherwise to each and every person’s satisfaction.” Not all ideas are the same, and not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy.
Yes!
I studied engineering prior to med school, and I still remember how rampant misogyny and homophobia were in the school at that time (a large, well known engineering university). I refused to join the engineering fraternity after meeting some of the members because I (perhaps stupidly) had assumed it would be different from the prototypical fraternity – it was immediately apparent that it wasn’t any different at all. Same for engineering “clubs;” when between 25 and 50% of your class is women and NONE of them join your club, there’s a problem, and it’s not them.
How about I de-emphasize my empathy for conservatives? Oops, forgot it was already at zero.
There’s a mechanical engineer on YouTube who thinks the shoulder blades and arms of T. rex attached to its lower jaw; maybe engineers could use a refresher on anatomy and physiology? (there’s my most naive thought of the day)
Also, the phrase “Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity” is a laugh coming from someone whose viewpoint appears to be that diversity is bad. Gotta love conservatives resorting to concepts they’ve tried to discredit for the last few decades.
Update 7:25pm ET: Google’s new Vice President of Diversity, Integrity & Governance, Danielle Brown, issued the following statement in response to the internal employee memo:
Googlers,
I’m Danielle, Google’s brand new VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance. I started just a couple of weeks ago, and I had hoped to take another week or so to get the lay of the land before introducing myself to you all. But given the heated debate we’ve seen over the past few days, I feel compelled to say a few words.
Many of you have read an internal document shared by someone in our engineering organization, expressing views on the natural abilities and characteristics of different genders, as well as whether one can speak freely of these things at Google. And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.
Diversity and inclusion are a fundamental part of our values and the culture we continue to cultivate. We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company, and we’ll continue to stand for that and be committed to it for the long haul. As Ari Balogh said in his internal G+ post, “Building an open, inclusive environment is core to who we are, and the right thing to do. ‘Nuff said. “
Google has taken a strong stand on this issue, by releasing its demographic data and creating a company wide OKR on diversity and inclusion. Strong stands elicit strong reactions. Changing a culture is hard, and it’s often uncomfortable. But I firmly believe Google is doing the right thing, and that’s why I took this job.
Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.
I’ve been in the industry for a long time, and I can tell you that I’ve never worked at a company that has so many platforms for employees to express themselves—TGIF, Memegen, internal G+, thousands of discussion groups. I know this conversation doesn’t end with my email today. I look forward to continuing to hear your thoughts as I settle in and meet with Googlers across the company.
Thanks,
Danielle
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley also to blame, with her lone “scientist” retreating to an, inherited, isolated, castle to conduct experiments on human flesh, with devastating consequences. Maybe the first instance of the “mad scientist”&”lone wolf” trope, that has infested our infosphere.
Don’t give Ayn ANY credit X-( , she championed individualism, maybe extrapolating from the “Frank-y” book I alluded to previously.
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[just between you and me:] I do like to cherry-pick Ayn’s “philosophy” for the bits I agree with and see denigrated in general.
As a whole, her “philosophy” doesn’t hold together.
*quizzical head tilt, scan through the archives*
An engineering degree confers omniscience the way a crystal ball confers clairvoyance.
Salem hypothesis, anyone?
As a woman engineer who graduated from college n 1980, I see not much has changed.
Though, in the 1980s when I had to explain some basic concepts to male colleagues I would mutter under my breath why I got so much flack for daring to study engineering, or anything related to math. I did lots of eye rolling.
“Maybe the first instance of the “mad scientist”&”lone wolf” trope, that has infested our infosphere.”
I am sure there were others. It was not an uncommon trope since many “gentleman natural philosophers” were common in the 18th and 19th century. Some of whom hung around folks like Shelley. A good read on it would be The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.
It is nonsense in modern times as things get more complicated, that one thinks they can be a lone researcher. Even when research and development required more collaborative efforts, those writers unfamiliar with the details of progress continued to the trope. Writers like H.G. Well, Jules Verne, and many science fiction script writers (“Back to the Future” comes to mind).
40+ year software engineer here. These idiots drive me nuts. I’ve been at this a long time. I’ve known guys who couldn’t carry my water and women who could kick my ass. It’s all people! I don’t know why we have to decide a priory who is going to be good at something. Let them do what they want to do and succeed or fail. This just smells like a wannabe trying to limit the competition.
As a woman software engineer, often the only one, I have found the biggest problem is in getting access to information. Since pretty much everyone else is male, they control all of the information. Ironically, it is their tendency to communicate differently and more freely with their male coworkers means they may fail to share with everyone on the team. For example, learning that someone renamed one of the servers — I didn’t find out for a week after “the guys.” I can see how, if you have the worldview of the sexist memo-writer, it would be easy to create a self-fulfilling prophesy of women not doing as well, simply by excluding them. Similar to other issues PZ has discussed, unless these men go out of their way to make sure the small percent of women on their teams are equal participants in knowledge-sharing, we will continue to see women leaving the field (which has been the trend).
Lord almighty, don’t you love when conservatives appropriate liberal arguments they clearly don’t believe in? The most important thing is diversity of views, they say, the kind of diversity that includes conformist, trite conservatism, but none of those dark, queer, or feminine people. And does anyone think for a moment these people would be stressing the importance of having liberals in their company if their conservative asses were in charge?
Also, *why* is diversity of views actually important, in engineering of all things? If most of the crew believes that 2+2=4, do you really need someone who believes that it’s 5? You don’t need the kind of diversity that includes the willfully ignorant and miseducated, which is all that conservatism has regressed to. You need a diversity of *perspectives*, people with different life experiences who bring new ideas and new ways of looking at problems, which is the exact kind of diversity this asshat wants to get rid of.
The views expressed by the Google engineer reminded me of what we used to call a “mainframe attitude” of indifference to the user. I was surprised to find this at Google, at Microsoft I would have expected it. That a former Google engineer shredded the guy is encouraging, except I wonder why he/she is “former” while the current engineer has a mainframe attitude.
Back in the 1990s when PCs began replacing mainframes, I was volunteering with an organization helping professionals find employment. I had a conversation with a computer science professor about the numerous mainframe programmers who were unemployed. I said it seemed to me they could easily transition to PC programming and he laughed saying “They can never overcome their mainframe attitude.” He said many were getting jobs in university computer science departments and I’ve often wondered what would occur as computer science students graduated into a PC environment having been taught by someone with a mainframe attitude.
I suspect if you read this memo by the Google engineer with that background in mind, you can see that his real problem comes from having a mainframe attitude and seeing people, including women, with a more PC attitude succeeding and treating him as a dinosaur. I think it is ironic that “PC” meaning the way Personal Computers demanded intuitive user interfaces now means Politically Correct, or that we should consider the users experience as preeminent.
These are very similar concepts but becoming layman terms rather than what we used to use solely in programming.
This is a somewhat picky and trivial point, but:
(Emphasis mine.) If that typo is in the original, that is a delightful self-own.
Cause it’s not like we have whole media organizations, uncountable numbers of think-tanks and advocacy groups yammering conservative viewpoints.
He started off with a bunch of statements as though they were factual like “Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males”. I immediately wondered just what the sample size was for the study he was citing. He did provide references, right? (Or did he do the castrating and raising himself?)
“He did provide references, right? (Or did he do the castrating and raising himself?)”
I remember seeing a documentary of an infant being castrated, and then being raised as a girl. It did not end well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
I was under the impression that American conservatives tend to value individual initiative very highly. If so, why is this guy whining about the groups that his fellow engineers might identify with? Shouldn’t he be assessing their abilities as individuals — and not making idiotic blanket statements about women, people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, or, for all we know, fans of different NFL teams?
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. – Albert Einstein.
By that definition, it seems this guy had more common sense than many.
I had a lot of friends who majored in engineering. I never understood: why do you need to study for four years to learn how to drive a train?
Fortunately, I see this kind of cluelessly sexist attitude changing in my high school students. I coach our First Robotics Team, more than half of which is young women, and they interact with their male teammates on a very equal footing. The team captain, lead programmer, lead electrician and lead mechanic are all female, and the young men work for (and with) them in the kind of cooperative effort that we all hope to see from science students. It’s something that FRC stresses: everyone makes a contribution, it’s all about cooperative effort and “gracious professionalism”, both within the team and with other teams. I absolutely love watching these young people ignore things like gender in pursuit of their shared goal. It gives me hope that things like the idiocy of this Google engineer will finally be set aside by those who will replace them in years to come.
TIL: Yonatan is an ex-googler. Their loss (and I’m sure they’re very aware of it).
I disagree it’s a mainframe vs PC thing. Far too few profs are former professional programmers for any sub-discipline to have much impact on the philosophy of computer science.
Well, the story made it to the Guardian: Google staffer’s hostility to affirmative action sparks furious backlash. Exposure should be good, although I’m loathe to be optimistic.
As a scientist engineer I have to agree that Ayn Rand has a lot to answer for. There was nothing more infuriating than the depiction of Howard Roark and his stupid magic steel that he apparently pulled out of his ass all by hisself. Everything in science and engineering derives from what has been learned before. The worship of the wealthy comes only if you don’t understand that what made Rockefeller rich wasn’t new oil technology but bribing the railroads to form an oil transportation cartel. Both the railroads and high tech happened because the government paid for it, the first in land grants and the second through the space program. Gates profited from IBM’s fear of antitrust law. Apple built on the work at Xerox park.
My own company tries to be supportive but you still see things like a female engineer will try to introduce a good idea multiple times until finally a male (say me) who’s been listening repeats it. The next step is the project manager starts talking about my good idea. Female invisibility is as much a problem as outright rudeness.
So empowering viewpoint diversity is the regressives’ “Teach the Controversy”?
@23 bcwebb
“…Howard Roark and his stupid magic steel that he apparently pulled out of his ass all by hisself.”
If that’s truly where the magic steel came from, it would go a long way towards explaining Roark’s bad attitude. I’d be grumpy, too.
bcwebb @23: You may have gotten your pathologically unrealistic Ayn Rand screeds-in-novel-format mixed up. Howard Roark, the alleged hero of The Fountainhead, was purportedly an architect, and had more to do with using construction materials than creating them. I suspect you may be thinking of Hank Rearden, nigh-miraculous solo creator of the nigh-miraculous Rearden Steel, in Atlas Shrugged?
I think my favourite part is that is ideas of what constitutes “viewpoint diversity” seem to be restricted to the range of mainstream American political thought over the last 15-20 years… Somebody should blow this guy’s mind by introducing him to non-mainstream ideas, or other cultures, or even (gasp!) history.
On a related point, I have some pretty serious doubts about his ideas about what traits are “universal across human cultures”…
I’ve been an engineer for 32 years now, at many companies and several different industries. In my experience the distribution of geniuses and idiots (full disclosure, I am neither) is completely uncorrelated with one’s complement of chromosomes.
A question for #8 Chris and #10 Sonja, it’s true that women have been suppressed in engineering in past decades. I have a daughter starting a career in aerospace engineering. Do women in engineering today feel that the tide is changing at all, or is it still an uphill battle against dick-swingin’ fatheads?
@kenbakermn
Thanks for your question. The mid-to-late-1990s was the wild west for web developers and there were so many jobs and opportunities. It seemed like there was much more inclusion at that time. So, if anything, it has gotten worse. I’ve done fine — I make a great salary and get fantastic job reviews (I’ve been told better than my colleagues). So it’s not all bad — I want more girls to go into this field because we need the numbers. I can ditto what bcwebb said — I’ve heard my ideas repeated by male coworkers as though they were the originator (and they probably think they were). I’ve seen my ideas written on white boards of meeting rooms where I was excluded. It’s a lot of little things like that.
“I have a daughter starting a career in aerospace engineering.”
That depends on so many factors. Unfortunately I have been out of the game for a while (giving birth to a child with multiple medical issues changes one’s focus, like I am more of an expert on health insurance and disability services than Fourier transforms now). While I was subjected to horribly sexist “jokes” in college and at work, I did not take it lightly (not shouty, but firmly… mostly).
My first boss was a annoying git, and I gave him enough grief that he transferred me away to another group. That boss was a bit gruff, but we worked well together.
I transferred from mechanical engineering to aerospace engineering because I disliked the rote memorization of math formulas in the former, and that the latter got more into how the math was done. It is not a coincidence that the applied math program was in the same building as the aerospance department. I was more of an applied mathematician with vibration analysis, so my sub-specialty set me apart from the basic structures engineers.
I belonged to the Society of Women Engineers, when many of those who had started working in engineering during World War II were still working, and were some of the earliest members when it started in the 1950s. Those women had lots of interesting stories. Some of them were outlined in the Henniker Conference, which can be downloaded at:
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED127523
Sorry it is such a terrible scan. When I local our local chapter archives, I scanned a better version and sent to the SWE Archives years ago. It does include a section about Mildred Dresselhaus, who was featured on this past week’s Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.
So does the evidence indicate that the differences in male and female behaviour are all because of social constructs? I’m an engineer myself and some of the best engineers I’ve worked with/for over the years have been female. I didnt think it was a controversial opinion though that the biological differences would, on average, result in differences in interests/behaviour. Is that not the case?
Silicon Valley’s weapon of choice against women: shoddy science: “Support for the anonymous Google ‘manifesto’ on gender difference is reminiscent of the thinking behind the eugenics era”.
….wait what?
The bare notion that there are biologically innate, sex-linked differences in brain structure/function isn’t stoopid on its face. Because there are sex-linked differences in body systems like muscles and so forth, and is there any good reason to think that neural development would be completely exempt from the processes which create those differences?
Of course, Neural Plasticity is a thing. So whatever biologically innate, sex-linked differences actually do exist in a person at time T = (birth), said differences are gonna be strongly influenced/obscured by whatever experiences that person, um, experiences in their later life. Personally, I just don’t see how you can untangle the threads enough to determine which putative sex-linked differences in neural function genuinely are biologically innate, as opposed to being the result of responses to the environment (social environment in particular).
As per usual, bigots can claim ‘scientific’ support for their prejudices only by highly selective cherry-picking of the actual findings.
@cubist. We’re talking about Ayn Rand. facts are irrelevant in that world.
OMG, this means I must have read two Rand books. What was I thinking?
It must have been the incredibly realistic and erotic sex scenes and terse poetic dialog that drew me in.
I’m just going to have to go Galt on you.
How many engineers do you actually know, PZ? My initial response to that question was “none.”
Azkyroth: “….wait what?”
That was my experience forty years ago, especially for structures. This was when we carried our computer programs in boxes, plus we still had to learn how to program analog computers. It may have changed, and it depends on the department. Actually, I know the mechanical engineering dept. has changed, since I took a graduate level advanced engineering math class there few years ago (Mathematica was the computational tool of choice).
Plus, as someone who spent almost half her youth outside of the USA, I could not abide the use of the “gravity constant” (also known as “gravitational conversion constant”), which was used then in ME courses. It is described here:
http://www.mne.psu.edu/cimbala/Learning/General/units.htm
Fortunately the author of that page shares my opinion:
Me: “Plus, as someone who spent almost half her youth outside of the USA,…”
I am comfy with metric units, which is why I got to be loaned to a project for a European project. Though I was very unhappy with their use of the a kilogram-force, since obviously Newtons were not good enough!
Hubby’s dad was from the Netherlands, but moved to Canada. He studied engineering at Univ. of British Columbia in the 1950s. When he did calculations he would convert the English units to Metric, do the math. Then he would convert the answer back to English.
I taught at an engineering university. Nothing that has been said about sexism in the both the university and later industry, where I also worked with engineers, is out of line. Some engineers are horribly misogynistic. They won’t change. Those who are more progressive must simple allow the bigots to die and take their place in the hierarchy where they work. The bigots are incapable of listening, and can’t/won’t change.
Nit: PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). It’s still going, says WikiP, and has dropped the “Xerox” from the name.
As an engineer for almost three decades, I will simply say that the dude at Google who thinks women are naturally not inclined to be engineers is displaying an amazing lack of logic to be working for such a prominent software engineering firm. I have never yet met a female developer who was not highly competent, but I have met many male developers whose work I would not rely upon. The notion that there is anything fundamental different about women from an intellectual sense is both repugnant and evidence of magical thinking. Calls into question his ability to code clearly, frankly.
I’m hoping this does not signal a toxic culture at Google, a company I admire and whose open source work has clearly improved engineering for the entire industry.
The manifesto writer has been fired.
“The manifesto writer has been fired.”
Yay. Link to news story, please?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40859004
Google reportedly fires author of anti-diversity memo:
Thanks!