There's no question that women and men face different barriers in startups and tech. The null hypothesis is thus
(a) differences in reactions to a competitive environment are partially due to differences in how women and men are treated.
There's also no question that women and men differ biologically. The null hypothesis is thus
(b) differences in reactions to a competitive environment are partially biological in origin.
We thus have joint null hypotheses. Most commentators focus on a for obvious political reasons. Most contrarians focus on b, partially because a receives most of the attention, thus perhaps discounting a unfairly. But both a and b deserve consideration, and the burden of proof is on those asserting either ¬a or ¬b.
By stating that women are "victimized by the perception that their gender prevents them from being competitive", you've implicitly asserted that women are not in fact less competitive because of their gender, but rather are merely perceived to be so. You have thus placed the burden of proof on those who claim otherwise. In other words, by asserting a while discounting b, you have implicitly asserted ¬b as the null hypothesis.
You're in good company, of course: virtually the entire mainstream treats ¬b as the null hypothesis. Indeed, publicly supporting anything other than ¬b in the workplace is not only socially unacceptable, it is probably illegal. Unfortunately, it is also fallacious. The burden of proof is on those who assert that women's biology doesn't make them less competitive in startups and tech.
So, what evidence is there that women and men are equally well-suited to highly competitive environments? Bear in mind that nearly every highly competitive field (not just startups and tech) is now, and has historically been, dominated by men—including in far-flung locations without significant cultural contact. Contra the mainstream, ¬b is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.
Your hypothesis regarding harassment or being made to feel unwelcome is reasonable and always needs to be explored. But it is not the only hypothesis, and other factors are probably also in play. I disagree that there "is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry" and I suppose the argument would then hang on the word "obvious".. are the other hypotheses obvious? Perhaps not to people who don't study evolutionary psychology.
There is evidence that more freedom and equality for everyone to be in any job they want leads to even less women choosing STEM careers (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...) That might be because of social issues you mention (harassment, under valued, talked over, underpaid, stalked, etc). It might also be a result of natural selection causing women and men to differentiate in useful ways wherein women were more attracted to nurturing roles, and men more attracted to technical challenges.
I don't think it's useful to pick one reasonable hypothesis and ignore other reasonable hypotheses. Let's explore all the useful ideas and recognize how little we actually know for sure.
This is an extremely bold and unsupported assertion:
"[Men] were the one who decided what products failed and what products succeeded. That's why companies like Asus tweet ridiculous, sexist stuff. That's one reason why less than 10 percent of venture capital-backed companies have female founders and there is a massive gender gap in tech."
There are plenty of industries where there is a huge discrepancy between the gender ratios of consumers and entrepreneurs. Fashion and cosmetics companies for example are far more less female-dominated than one might presume from the extreme over-representation of females in their customer bases. The author hasn't given any reason to suspect that male dominance in tech is caused by gender-linked consumer trends influencing employer demand rather than more mundane explanations like gender differences in employee preference for developing programming skills.
You have given me a mechanic that accounts for a minor discrepancy in behavioral patterns, not a large one.
No evidence of women not getting involved in tech because they felt inadequate as women? This is something that people have been screaming about for a while.
A lot, if not the majority, of women are brought up surrounded by the assumption that they aren't good at math, or that they won't be doing much of anything but be housewives, as a lot of men are brought up surrounded by the assumption that they will be providers, and will chase tail. These are, obviously, simplifications.
A lifetime of being discouraged from "not your gender" activities is going to make an individual less likely to do said activities, regardless of their natural propensity for said activities.
The 7 women who did get in would be women who either realized that they were capable of it, decided they didn't care about the social pressures, or weren't surrounded by the social pressures to begin with. They could also be females that are closer to the average male in the ways that count for joining a startup. There's a lot of possibilities.
I dont think that Y Combinator has been discriminating against women. I do think that the cultural perception of gender roles in the US makes it less likely for women who would otherwise be applying to even get to the point where they'd have something to put on an application.
Less than a hundred years ago, women didn't have the right to vote. There's still a large percentage of the population that thinks that the place for a woman is in the kitchen, making babies. Do you really think that theses attitudes have no effect on the amount of women doing things like joining startups? You and I may not have attitudes like that, but if you think that those attitudes are rare, you are mistaken.
The same thing happens with men with different activities.
The studies you showed, while they did show differences between males and females with regards to risk-taking, did not show a huge difference between males and females. If we were talking about 11 female founders out of 30, it would be one thing. That is not the case. There is a large difference, and I find the "well men are more prone to risk taking" argument quite unconvincing when the data shows that men are more prone to taking risks -- but not nearly to the same degree as the discrepancy.
Furthermore, many of the social risk-taking activities studied may not be motivated out of anything that is intrinsic to being a man or a woman. A man may take risks as a form of mating dance. A man may also take risks because "that's what a man does".
This is not a simple issue, and I doubt it can be reduced to purely biological differences, other than in the very literal level that all differences between individuals can.
If you're going to assert that tech companies, by and large, discriminate against women you should try and back up such a claim with evidence. If anything, the evidence indicates the opposite: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
Nearly 900k applications analyzed, with the conclusion of preference in favor of women.
This is the kind of "science journalism" that I strongly dislike (and is promulgated by both sides in politically tinged debates like this one). Basically the author has a point of view, and sees in the study some numbers that support said point of view.
That aside, I think the biggest problem is not understanding where (the obvious) disparity in tech comes from. It's not discrimination, and least conscious discrimination. And I don't even think it's unconscious discrimination or side effects of so called "privilege".
It's simply that when tech startups are small, for various reasons (I'll get to this), they have a lot more males than females.* If the startup does well, early hires rise in rank by virtue of being there longer. If/when the reach the size where they are recognized by name, it's too late, most of the top roles (both engineering and management) are filled by males. Even if there was zero discrimination (or feelings of isolation), you would get the topsy turvy industry we see now.
Most studies focus on income but the far bigger disparity is wealth (both in this case and generally). The earlier employees in successful startups are phenomenally more wealthy than latecomers. These people are the ones who go on to start and fund more startups, and the cycle continues.
This is why PG's now infamous remarks about there being few female hackers (as opposed to CS students/engineers) are really insightful. Having Sheryl Sandberg or Marissa Mayer as visible leaders in large companies won't really change much (or anything when it comes to tiny startups). When these large companies hire, it's quite likely they do so scrupulously fairly. But even though the disparity is much better when it comes to new hires, the females amongst them (just as the males) start at the bottom.
Having more female founders is a start, perhaps, but it doesn't really solve the problem of too few female hackers. What you need are more female technical founders. I'm not saying that the non-technical founder role is less important (in fact it can often be a lot more important). But the technical founders are responsible for building the technical team from the ground up. Males tend to have more male friends, just as women tend to have more female friends. And the first people you try to hire are friends.
But even more than just technical founders, if you want to reduce the disparity at the source, there need to be more female "Mark Zuckerbergs" who come up with the idea and hack version 0 when everyone else is out partying (and, importantly, before fundraising is even a thought). This is when a founder has most leverage: when he/she has built the kernel of something that people want and everybody else wants in. Think of the scene from The Social Network (admittedly a hollywood movie) where Zuckerberg assigns roles and equity to his co-founders and basically brushes of the girls' offers to help.
This is a very difficult problem to have, if you want to increase the presence of women in this industry. It's difficult because there's nothing you can do to future "Mark Zuckerbergs" to force him to pick a more diverse set of co-founders. There can be no law, because this is almost like choosing your friends or significant others. A not insignificant percentage of startups with female founders in fact have their significant others as co-founders. This could be great for the startup (I know many great teams like this, obviously pg/jessica being one), but it again points to how difficult it is for females to find co-founders the way males do.
The only thing that would really work is for "these girls" to have been hacking since they were children and think that this is the coolest thing they could be doing. And there needs to be a critical mass of them so they can make friends with each other, because if you think that telling adult male developers to "play nice" is hard, try forcing 10 year old boys to invite 10 year old girls into their crew, (cooties and all).
* It would be cool if there was data to track the ratio of male engineers to female engineers as a successful startup grows. My hunch is the ratio improves steadily along with company size.
I have found it to agree with my experience and explain eg why there are so few women in tech and women entrepreneurs. (Hint: it has to do with desire for risktaking, long hours, and long periods of silent work with abstractions)
You may well have a point that people too readily make scathing assessments of 'men' as a group.
Bad Thing A doesn't justify Bad Thing B though, does it.
As for the high burden of proof, I invite you to suggest a model that estimates the effect size we should observe in gender representation in tech companies based on Damore's 'biological' differences
The overall conclusion, which I seem to recall Damore taking great pains to clarify, is that individual women who happen to be competitive, driven, and resilient to stress can and do thrive in the tech industry, while individual men who lack those traits can and do struggle, but the differing distribution of those traits across the entire population will affect population-level statistics even absent overt discrimination.
Rounding that off to "women are less suited to work in tech" is completely dishonest, because there was never any claim that each and every woman is less suited for the tech industry than a man. A more accurate summary would be, "fewer women are suited to work in tech".
That is a very interesting point you make about assumptions being applied to "both" genders. In particular, that advertising competition is considered to be a way to attract manly men to a tech startup. Is this really the best approach? Sure, the high school football player is interested in bashing in the head of his competition and causing them pain. Advertising for those competitive traits are undoubtedly an excellent approach to attracting the most sociopathic used car salesmen and wall street traders for who the customer is an enemy to be bilked.
But is that criteria what best motivates inventors and designers as well?
Myself, I design things because I like to make cool stuff for people to use and I am really good at it. I spend a lot of time thinking about and experimenting with usability. I have found that an interest in making cool useful things is something that brilliant talented designers share with me. I have yet to meet any brilliant designers who are motivated primarily by wanting to destroy their rivals.
Your explanation requires significant mental gymnastics to make your claim fit the data. If anything the data implies the opposite conclusion. If women were discriminated against in tech they would not be promoted at twice the rate.
Wouldn't you also blame discrimination had this study revealed women were promoted at half the rate of men?
I think you've made some incorrect assumptions about who I am and what I think about these issues. Maybe I'm wrong but I'll leave a few points so we're on the same page:
I have been involved in the hiring process at more than one tech company and it was apparent that there were far, far fewer women in the pipeline than men. Even if we hired every single person who applied the balance would still lean very heavily toward men. Again, this is just in my personal experience.
I don't believe it is the job tech companies to do extra work to hire more of any underrepresented group in the industry until the problem in the pipeline is addressed.
I think the argument that there is something biological about women that makes them less interested in tech comes from what amounts to pseudoscience at best and that argument shouldn't be validated because it gets in the way of solving the problem with the pipeline.
I have never (and would never) advocated for any group of people to be given "extra marks to pass" in a situation where their ability to do a job is important.
I don't think the author of that memo at Google should have been fired. Though I do understand how from a corporate standpoint they felt that they had to.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the "person interested in equal opportunity would not do..." I didn't do those things. I'm not blind to anything and I think all I did in my comment was ask a pretty simple question that you didn't even attempt to answer.
That's one explanation that fits a narrative. (and ignores the fact there are far fewer women who even attempt to enter the tech industry).
The gender gap in tech starts with children, is seen in STEM enrollment rates and continues in the job market where a multitude of diversity initiatives exist to promote underrepresented groups in tech.
So, an alternative speculation for the abnormally high promotion rate for women is there are fewer women interested in IT in the first place and companies are scrambling to compete for women because it makes them look better (via diversity initiatives).
There is a great documentary examining actual science on the subject and interviewing both scientific researchers and social scientists on opposite sides of the issue:
Should we attempt to combat the gender gap in the nursing industry with the same vigor that we are focused on tech? How about the gender gap we see with garbage workers or psychology?
I'm skeptical that there is a significant part of the industry that considers women less capable than men; I'm also skeptical that women have fewer opportunities than men. I believe there are a few bad apple companies, but mostly I see companies tripping over themselves to hire and retain as many women as they can. I simply haven't seen any compelling evidence, and I know that there is a large group of powerful people spreading misinformation about discrimination against women (e.g., wage gap myth). Lastly, the different-interests hypothesis seems to better explain the various gender/tech gaps and it fits pretty perfectly with my experiences. I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise, however.
But you misinterpret the author's thesis by an important mark. "Women in tech are underrepresented in tech because of sexual differences" is not the author's thesis, it's a fundamentally different statement. The author's stance is really the following:
"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."
There is a huge difference between "because of" and "may in part explain". It comes back to an earlier point others have made, that many of the author's critics grossly misinterpret the author's arguments.
>none of the works [are on] post childhood development or aptitudes
I don't think you looked at the studies. The CAH studies are performed on adults. And on aptitudes, you neglect the the author's other references which do support the claim that "On average, men and women biologically differ". For example, he referenced multiple studies cited here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...
Sure, I'll accept the basic logic that the lack of women in tech does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that tech discriminates against women.
But you're also ignoring evidence that suggests tech actually does discriminate against women. Just to scratch the surface, we've just seen some high profile cases like the scandal at Uber and Google's court case on its wage gap.
There is enough evidence to be suggestive. Much of it comes not directly from tech - for example, there were studies done with identical resumes, as you suggest, which showed bias, but not in tech. Still, there is enough of that, as well as enough anecdotal data, to debate about. However, there is nowhere enough data to arrive at a solid conclusion either way.
Regardless, all this is offtopic for this article. This was a lawsuit between two parties, not an attempt to prove sexism exists or does not exist among VC firms (much less tech in general).
Hypothesis one: Women are a majority of the population; Their absence is more surprising, and the number of people interested in changing it is higher.
Hypothesis two: There is a perception that the absence of women in tech is more a function of tech culture than broader socioeconomic issues (e.g. There's no racial equivalent of "Code Like a Pornstar")
Hypothesis Three: It's possible that the female gap is bigger than that of other groups.
I saw that you said women might also be stronger in tech, but I know that you don't actually think that we are, because you also think that men are predominant in tech fields for biological reasons. Unless you think that women are stronger in tech and biologically predisposed against it, the only possibility is that you think women are weaker in tech. Further, if you didn't believe that it was women who are weaker in tech, it wouldn't be contextually relevant to bring up the possibility of a skill difference in a discussion about the prevalence of women in tech. Finally when confronted about this, you don't explicitly deny thinking that women are inferior in tech, you just point out that your comment didn't technically exclude the logical possibility that you thought otherwise. People reading your comments aren't stupid and aren't robots: the "I'm not touching you" game doesn't fool anyone.
The chance that the natural gender distribution across a profession would be exactly 50/50 would be quite low, in the same way that any particular hand in a card game is unlikely. However, the chance that the natural percentage of women would be 50±n could be quite reasonable for low values of n. By contrast, the chance that we would get the actual distribution of men vs. women in (say) software engineering we see in the real word by chance alone is incredibly low.
Every adult who isn't mentally disabled understands what an average is. However, saying "women are inferior" does not become less offensive when you add "on average" to then end. And yes, I only have specific information saying that you think women are inferior in tech, but every argument you've made could just as easily be applied to business, politics, or pretty much any area of life that has an important impact on the world.
(a) differences in reactions to a competitive environment are partially due to differences in how women and men are treated.
There's also no question that women and men differ biologically. The null hypothesis is thus
(b) differences in reactions to a competitive environment are partially biological in origin.
We thus have joint null hypotheses. Most commentators focus on a for obvious political reasons. Most contrarians focus on b, partially because a receives most of the attention, thus perhaps discounting a unfairly. But both a and b deserve consideration, and the burden of proof is on those asserting either ¬a or ¬b.
By stating that women are "victimized by the perception that their gender prevents them from being competitive", you've implicitly asserted that women are not in fact less competitive because of their gender, but rather are merely perceived to be so. You have thus placed the burden of proof on those who claim otherwise. In other words, by asserting a while discounting b, you have implicitly asserted ¬b as the null hypothesis.
You're in good company, of course: virtually the entire mainstream treats ¬b as the null hypothesis. Indeed, publicly supporting anything other than ¬b in the workplace is not only socially unacceptable, it is probably illegal. Unfortunately, it is also fallacious. The burden of proof is on those who assert that women's biology doesn't make them less competitive in startups and tech.
So, what evidence is there that women and men are equally well-suited to highly competitive environments? Bear in mind that nearly every highly competitive field (not just startups and tech) is now, and has historically been, dominated by men—including in far-flung locations without significant cultural contact. Contra the mainstream, ¬b is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.
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