You’ve heard all the excuses to wave away the wage gap between men and women: it’s because men work harder, work longer, don’t get pregnant, and choose to work in more prestigious, higher paying fields. The people who make these arguments seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that the values that define the worth of kinds of work are entirely socially constructed (they deny the worth of the concept of social construction, for one thing). I just like to point out that if these claims were valid, and there was an objectively earned reward for hard work and time, then my father, who worked two jobs and came home exhausted with the grime of manual labor ground into his hands, should have been a billionaire.

But another point they evade is that there is an instant devaluation of a profession as soon as women begin to populate it. It’s useful to take a historical perspective and see how work is demeaned when it’s percieved as “women’s work”, as in this criticism of James Damore’s memo.

Damore seems to have bought into the conclusions of the worst kinds of evolutionary psychology. As a discipline, “evopsych” too often depends on inventing biological explanations for observed reality, rather than considering influences from culture and society. In the memo, Damore argues that “science” shows men are evolved to be more suited to computer programing. Science, of course, shows nothing of the sort. People who actually study the neuroscience of gender disagree with Damore’s conclusions. Moreover, as many folks quickly pointed out, women were the first coders. Programming was initially regarded as an extension of secretarial work, but men took over when the profession’s status (and pay) began to rise. “Computer girls” were replaced by “computer geeks” thanks to social factors, not biological ones. So much for Damore’s ideas.

There are other examples I did not know about! When men took over brewing (or when brewing became more profitable), the value of the work shifted.

Take brewing. In 14th-century England, women did most of the brewing, as Bennett first explores in a 1986 article on the village alewife. These brewsters made ale, which spoiled quickly after the cask was broached, so they would keep some for their family and sell the rest. Often, the small profits from these sales would enable them to buy ale, in turn, from other women while they waited to make a new batch. But then beer arrived in England from the Low Countries. Thanks to the preservative power of hops, it could be brewed and sold at commercial scale. The village alewife was gradually replaced by larger and larger brewing enterprises, requiring access to capital. Although there were exceptions, men had much easier access to capital than women. By the end of the 15th century, men dominated medieval English brewing.

And then there’s weaving.

One could tell a similar story about weaving, only in reverse. In the 14th century, weaving was a high-status, high-profit trade. Most weavers were men. Industrialization turned weavers into a lower-status occupation, so early-modern textile weavers in factories were generally women. It would be a mistake, as Bennett argues in her book History Matters, to merely observe the change in occupation—women become weavers—and thereby argue that women’s material or cultural status had improved. Change in occupation, she writes, does not mean transformation of status.

What I find odd is how often critics of these facts are painfully naive and ignorant about the complexity of the field they’re denying. See, for instance, this debate between Kristi Winters and Sargon of Akkad: right out of the gate, he claims the wage gap doesn’t exist at all (he also denies that campus rape is a problem…or rather, because rates are higher elsewhere, it’s a waste of time to work against it), and most significantly, just flat out rejects all of the social sciences. Which is weird, since his arguments against feminist ideas require distorting social science evidence while simultaneously claiming all social science is bogus. How does anyone know anything if you think all the disciplines that study a particular phenomenon are completely invalid?

But then, everything sounds lovelier in French. I’m told the refrain translates as “angel dust got into you, you’d make a wonderful mom, but just not right now”.

It takes a while to assemble a comprehensive rebuttal to pseudoscientific claims — everyone who has dealt seriously with creationists knows that, absurd and ignorant as their arguments are, it takes hard work and diligence to assemble a coherent, evidence-based criticism, something I wish a lot of people who think debating creationists is easy would realize. It’s the same story with that James Damore memo. It’s easy to see that it’s garbage, but much harder to assemble the details of a rebuttal.

Fortunately, the well-research criticisms are steadily emerging now. For instance, Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett can declare that “We can say flatly that there is no evidence that women’s biology makes them incapable of performing at the highest levels in any STEM fields”, and back it up with citations.

Many reputable scientific authorities have weighed in on this question, including a major paper in the journal Science debunking the idea that the brains of males and females are so different that they should be educated in single-sex classrooms. The paper was written by eight prominent neuroscientists, headed by professor Diane Halpern of Claremont McKenna College, past president of the American Psychological Association. They argue that “There is no well-designed research showing that single-sex education improves students’ academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.”

They add, “Neuroscientists have found few sex differences in children’s brains beyond the larger volume of boys’ brains and the earlier completion of girls’ brain growth, neither of which is known to relate to learning.”

Several major books have debunked the idea of important brain differences between the sexes. Lise Eliot, associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School, did an exhaustive review of the scientific literature on human brains from birth to adolescence. She concluded, in her book “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,” that there is “surprisingly little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains.”

Rebecca Jordan-Young, a sociomedical scientist and professor at Barnard College, also rejects the notion that there are pink and blue brains, and that the differing organization of female and male brains is the key to behavior. In her book “Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences,” she says that this narrative misunderstands the complexities of biology and the dynamic nature of brain development.

And happily, the widely held belief that boys are naturally better than girls at math and science is unraveling among serious scientists. Evidence is mounting that girls are every bit as competent as boys in these areas. Psychology professor Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin–Madison has strong U.S. data showing no meaningful differences in math performance among more than seven million boys and girls in grades 2 through 12.

I also like this article by Erin Giglio, a Ph.D. student in evolutionary biology, who discusses the complexity of sexual development and evolution, something avoided by the reductionist generalizations of privileged dabblers like Damore (‘there are only two genders!’ is their rallying cry). But she also makes a significant criticism of the whole evolutionary psychology approach.

Curiously, however, these disciplines do not include evolutionary psychologists: I have never met an evolutionary psychology student taking any course, presenting at any evolutionary biology seminar, or interacting in any way with the evolutionary biology students in my own department, and I have never seen a behavior-focused Ecology, Evolution and Behavior student from my own department mention spending time learning from evolutionary psychologists. This is particularly odd because my university, which is the University of Texas at Austin, happens to host an extremely prominent evolutionary psychologist in the form of Dr. David Buss…and also several prominent and well respected behavioral ecologists in my department, most of whom are specifically prominent in the field of sexual selection and courtship behavior itself. This is also a topic that evolutionary psychologists have a well documented and particularly strong interest in, and this includes Dr. Buss. So why the lack of collaboration?

The answer boils down to the fact that evolutionary biologists and behavioral ecologists — which is, again, the term usually used to describe people studying the evolution of animal behavior in a naturalistic context — are typically some of the most vocal critics of evolutionary psychology. Indeed, several prominent behavioral ecologists have written popular science books that criticize evolutionary psychology openly.

Why might this be the case?

One huge issue is the question of adaptationist hypotheses. Evolutionary biology had a large intradisciplinary discussion back in the late 1970s and early 1980s about adaptationist thinking, largely kicked off by Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin’s classic paper The Spandrels of San Marcos. The central argument of this paper is that evolutionary biologists should not assume that the null expectation for any observable biological trait is that the trait is in some way an adaptation for survival. Indeed, some traits arise as accidents of pleiotropy — genes with multiple effects — and some merely develop over time by chance. Gould and Lewontin argued that in order to describe a trait as a known evolutionary adaptation, evolutionary biologists first needed to identify some evidence that the trait was both adaptive to survival and also that it had sufficient heritability for selection to be capable of acting on it.

While this paper was controversial at the time it was published, it has largely become accepted among evolutionary biologists that it is generally correct. In fact, I have most often seen evolutionary biologists use the term ‘adaptationist thinking’ amongst themselves as a slur, implying that another scientist’s research paradigm is insufficiently critically rigorous; it’s a term right up there with ‘telling Just-So stories’ within the field. It doesn’t mean that you can’t hypothesize that a trait evolved because of positive selection — it just means that adaptationist hypotheses must be tested against a null, neutral hypothesis.

By contrast, evolutionary psychologists openly argue that adaptationist assumptions are essential to the field and are simply good science, and that starting with adaptationist hypotheses just makes sense. This is further confounded by the methodology generally chosen in the field of evolutionary psychology (see below), which is typically limited to surveys confirming that the behavior in question does in fact exist — something even acknowledged by defenders of the field’s capabilities of falsification. Occasionally fMRI studies are also used.

Yeah, I’ve seen this behavior myself — Evo psych people react to the name Gould like you’ve just summoned Satan. While guilty of some hyperbolic overreach, Gould’s views have largely been accepted: you can’t simply say a trait exists, and therefore it has an adaptive purpose. That completely undermines the Evo Psych ‘research program’.

If you’re one of those people who read Damore’s memo and thought it sounded reasonable, brace yourself. You’re like the buffoon who read about Flood geology and thought that sounded like a good alternative hypothesis, who is about to get crushed by the deluge of real scholars of geology and paleontology and biology who will be pointing out how stupid the argument is. The people who actually understand the fields Damore was abusing are rising up now.

Don’t panic too much, though. Just as the creationists keep churning out excuses and exercises in motivated reasoning to defend their nonsense, you’ll still have ranks of evolutionary psychologists shoveling crap to keep you happy.

Man, I thought Catholic fanatics were bad, but they’ve got nothin’ on anti-feminists.

great article about the google diversity

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He seems nice.

I’ve been getting two kinds of arguments from the people who support the Google Manifesto creep.

I keep getting told that James Damore loves diversity. It’s the first thing he says in his manifesto.

I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes.

Did you know that Ken Ham loves science?

Answers in Genesis (like other creationist groups) affirms and supports the teaching and use of scientific methodology, and we believe this supports the biblical account of origins.

So does Kent Hovind.

I, for one, love science and the thousands of advancements it has brought us.

I wonder if these people who keep trying to present Damore as some kind of champion of honest assessment of equality and diversity ever bother to think beyond the superficial claim that he makes as an opening gambit to consider what he actually writes? These are the kinds of people who read Lolita and think Humbert Humbert is the hero.

The other line of argumentation is that it is Science. Science is used as the magic incantation; you can’t argue with Science! Unfortunately for them, yes, you can, and in fact argument is central to science — there is not a miraculous science machine that plops out unquestionable Facts somewhere that are then Done and allow no further discussion. Everything in science is a hard-earned interpretation that was built by constant questioning and evaluation by swarms of disagreeable people.

And often science gets it wrong. It’s remarkable how often science has been used as a rationalizing engine for social biases. We have centuries of bad science used to justify slavery, the inferiority of women, the greediness of Jews, the laziness of Africans, the devious cunning of the wicked Oriental, and the shiftless, heritable criminality of the Poor. We have moved on from claiming scientific ‘proof’ of those stereotypes (I wish), but we didn’t get there by deciding that because Galton published something, it must be true.

I actually had someone state that because Debra Soh cited the scientific literature in her awful article, she must be right. It’s hopelessly naive: here’s a contentious subject with a lot of conflicting results in the literature, and mentioning one or a few articles that back up her position means that she “wins”. Never mind that anyone with a broader perspective on the volume of papers knows that, by the testimony of the range of contradictions and special cases, consensus has not been reached on any one detail, and that any difference is likely to be subtle and weak. Do I even need to mention that publishing, especially in fields like psychology, is hopelessly poisoned by the need to find a p value that shows a statistical difference, and that papers that find no significant difference are difficult to publish? Just the fact that differences are so elusive despite all that bias tells you something.

Simply put, Damore’s conclusions are not backed up by the scientific consensus.

Throughout his memo, Damore linked to many Wikipedia pages as justification for his claims – but neither news media organisations nor scientists accept Wikipedia as a credible source of information, especially when used in policy recommendations.

To back up the “people over things” hypothesis, Damore cited a study published in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass in 2010; however, that work never suggests that the gender differences it lists have a proven biological basis.

In fact, the study says the opposite: “Although most biologic scientists accept that sexual selection has led to sex differences in physical traits such as height, musculature, and fat distributions, many social scientists are sceptical about the role of sexual selection in generating psychological gender differences.”

A 2000 review of 10 studies related to gender differences in empathy also suggests men and women don’t have innate differences in this area. The researchers found that such distinctions were only present in situations where the subjects were “aware that they are being evaluated on an empathy-relevant dimension” or in which “empathy-relevant gender-role expectations or obligations are made salient.”

Rather than citing Wikipedia, though, talk to an actual evolutionary biologist, who will tell you that his arguments are “despicable trash” Suzanne Sadedin dissects his manifesto, and summarizes the deep flaws.

Yes, men and women are biologically different — which doesn’t mean what the author thinks it does. The article perniciously misrepresents the nature and significance of known sex differences to advance what appears to be a covert alt-right agenda. More specifically, it:

• argues for biologically determined sex differences in personality based on extremely weak evidence
• completely fails to understand the current state of research on sex differences, which is based in neuroscience, epigenetics and developmental biology
• argues that cognitive sex differences influence performance in software engineering, but presents no supporting evidence. Available evidence does not support the claim.
• fails to acknowledge ways in which sex differences violate the narrative of female inferiority; this shows intellectual dishonesty
• assumes effective meritocracy in its argument, ignoring both a mountain of conflicting scientific literature and its own caveats (which I can only assume were introduced to placate readers, since their incompatibility with the core thesis is never resolved)
• makes repugnant attacks on compassion and empathy
• distorts and misuses moral foundations theory for rhetorical purposes
• contains hints of racism
• paradoxically insists that authoritarianism be treated as a valid moral dimension, whilst firmly rejecting any diversity-motivated strategy that might remotely approach it.
• ultimately advocates rejecting all morality insofar as it might compromise the interests of a group.

There is a lot of good stuff in that article. Honestly, any time anyone brings up the nature/nurture dichotomy as an implicit part of their thesis, you know it’s trash.

His implicit model is that cognitive traits must be either biological (i.e. innate, natural, and unchangeable) or non-biological (i.e., learned by a blank slate). This nature versus nurture dichotomy is completely outdated and nobody in the field takes it seriously. Rather, modern research is based on the much more biologically reasonable view that neurological traits develop over time under the simultaneous influence of epigenetic, genetic and environmental influences. Everything about humans involves both nature and nurture.

I also endorse this criticism and plan.

As mentioned before, this likely evolved because males are biologically disposable and because women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men.

Talking about males being biologically disposable is nonsense. The mean fitness of males and females is equal; every individual has a father and a mother. What you might mean is that low-status men have historically been used for cannon fodder and other dangerous roles because powerful men regard them as disposable. That’s about sociopolitical structures, not evolution. There’s no reason to think we can’t correct it culturally — our ancestors maintained egalitarian societies in most places for countless millennia, until the invention of farming allowed them to concentrate resources across generations and thus reinvent chimp-like hierarchies. In fact, this correction is a project I think feminism should adopt; I call it destroying the patriarchy.

We shouldn’t even have to make these arguments anymore. Damore has already destroyed his credibility with some ghastly stupid choices after his firing.

Who’s the first person he ran to for an interview? Stefan Fucking Molyneux. Who’s the second? Jordan Goddamn Peterson. It’s an admission that he can only find support among MRAs, racists, and demented ideologues. Weak, dude.

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?

• 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.

• 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.

• “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?

• 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!

No, we did not. But the shit just keeps pouring out. Now Eric Bolling has been accused of harassing women, both guests and employees, and of sending un-asked-for pictures of his penis to women (someday, I’d like to talk to the kind of guy who does that, just to figure out what he thinks he’s accomplishing). One of his targets, Caroline Heldman, has come forward with a specific set of accusations on Facebook. Here’s part of it.

Fox News just suspended Eric Bolling pending allegations that he sent photos of his genitalia to female colleagues. My only surprise is that it took this long for people to come forward about Bolling’s behavior, which has been wildly inappropriate for years.

I did hundreds of appearances on Fox and Fox Business from 2008 – 2011, and had multiple experiences with Bolling that caused grave concern to my friends and family. Bolling referred to me as “Dr. McHottie” on air on four different occasions, and called me “smart, beautiful, and wrong” on air twice. I pushed back with “Mr. McSexist,” but I shouldn’t have had to. This on-air behavior was perfectly acceptable to Fox executives at the time.

Bolling would also contact me via phone and text after shows, sometimes to apologize for his behavior (and then do it again), and sometimes just to talk. He said he wanted to fly me out to New York for in-studio hits and to have “fun.” He asked me to have meals with him on several occasions, but I found excuses not to go. Once, he took me up to his office in New York, showed me his baseball jerseys, and in the brief time I was there, let me know that his office was his favorite place to have sex. I know other women have had similar experiences with Bolling, which means that lots of folks at Fox knew about his behavior well before 2017.

This has all become terribly familiar. One interesting phenomenon is how Fox News supporters rush pell-mell to demonstrate exactly how pervasive the problem is. Heldman cunningly allowed them to hang themselves with their own words. Apparently some of the right-wing web sites have linked to her post, and as of this morning, she has 204 comments there. They’re staying up.

Tonight I am breaking the rules of the page by allowing all of the awful, sexist posts from knuckle-draggers to stay up. It’s important to show what happens when people come forward about sexual harassment. It’s important to see why so many stay silent.

If you can stomach it, read the comments. They demonstrate the problem. I’ve included a few of them below.

[Read more…]

After the announced departure of Christian Ott from CalTech, the latest story comes from my alma mater, the University of Washington — Michael Katze, who misappropriated grant money, harassed employees, and apparently was using university funds to buy sexual favors, has finally been fired. A tenured professor who brought in millions in grant money, fired? Unpossible. That just tells you how egregious his excesses had become.