Why We've Been Responding Wrong to the Google Manifesto

James Damore’s “Google Manifesto” has been taking the Internet by storm. Officially titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the memo spells out Damore’s position on gender inclusion in the workplace. The real reason more women aren’t in tech, Damore says, is that they are biologically different from men in ways that predispose them to struggle in highly competitive and analytical fields. The backlash from Damore’s treatise was swift -- Google fired him, and the Internet exploded with everything from gut reactions to carefully articulated responses. To combat Damore’s limited view of gender, many commentators emphasized that men and women are really not all that different.

But even though Damore’s argument perpetuates inequality, so does the opposite extreme. The idea that men and women are identical implies that all genders should be equally capable of succeeding without any intervention. Responses to Damore that depicted gender differences as largely arbitrary, like this one, run the risk of pressuring women to transform themselves (“With some practice playing the right sort of video game, women can boost their spatial reasoning skills to match those of boys.”) It’s an argument that ends up placing the responsibility on women to change their behavior, instead of indicting company culture.

While the article linked above isn’t wrong, it’s also not working to transform the tech world for women. By only telling part of the story, simplified arguments about how the genders are indistinguishable from one another might be taken to mean that culture change is unnecessary. As a result, women may be pressured to interrupt more, be more assertive, prioritize work over family … in short, to become more masculine. Emphasizing sameness begins in a well-intentioned effort to promote equality, but it eventually glorifies whatever culture already exists in the environment. In tech, that culture is overwhelmingly masculine.

Of course, Damore’s original argument also minimizes the importance of company change by placing the blame on biology. As many commentators have pointed out, his ideas about biologically gendered predispositions are flawed. Columbia University professor Adam Galinsky wrote that Google made the right call in firing Damore because “Biological explanations for sex differences create a clear and present danger to inclusion,” a danger that overrides Damore’s appeal to freedom of speech. 

On the scientific side of things, we don’t have good evidence that gender preferences are innate, but we have plenty of evidence that interests change when the environment shifts. In other words, a person’s surroundings have more power to drive their preferences than the gender they were assigned at birth. Northwestern University professor Alice Eagly pointed out that while early androgen exposure can foster some differences, “biology has multiple pathways by which its influence may be exerted on human psychology … There are many unknowns.” In this article on Damore’s manifesto, Wired argued that Damore’s evidence centers on evolutionary psychology, a problematic field that leverages the idea of evolutionary pressures to explain all sorts of “essential” gender differences. It’s too easy to use evolution as an excuse for lack of evidence, starting with an idea about gender roles and theorizing backwards until you hit something that sounds like science.

Gender differences are real. But instead of the simple biological affair Damore makes them out to be, they are a complex combination of nature and nurture. Our culture’s tendency to promote masculine traits and disadvantage feminine ones means that we have to acknowledge the current differences between men and women if we want to implement real change. Damore’s insistence that programs geared toward helping women succeed are “discriminatory” against men doesn’t bring us any closer to a solution. Neither does the idea that empowerment requires women to become more like men. Both of those positions let company culture off the hook and reinforce a strong preference for masculinity. Instead, we need to rebalance the tech environment so that all genders can be feminine, masculine, or any combination of the two without fear of negative repercussions.

Posted by Ella J. Lombard
Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

Is Technology to Blame for the Gender Pay Gap in Seattle?

According to a recent article by the National Partnership for Women and Families, Seattle has the biggest gender pay gap of any major city in the United States, with women earning 73 cents to every dollar men make. These statistics, based off 2012 census data, pointed to Seattle, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Detroit as the cities with the largest gender pay gaps. Though each city is approaching this issue in a different way, many fingers in Seattle are pointing at the gender disparity in IT for the answer.

In a debate article published in the Seattle times, Bruce Ramsay argues that female career and lifestyle choices have created the wage gap. Specifically, he maintains that women’s reluctance to pursue high paying STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers contributes to this problem: “I see tech people every day at lunch: most are men. That's not discrimination; it's that more men can do, and are willing to do, the sort of computer work for which Seattle's employers are willing to pay good money.” Similarly, in an article in the New York Times, Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that much of the gender pay gap is explained by differing jobs and college majors. She suggests that women who want money should choose different majors: “Talented young women who aspire to be rich and powerful would be advised to major in economics or electrical engineering rather than psychology or social work.”

Ramsay and Sommers have put the blame on women for not being interested in lucrative fields. However, our research at the Stereotypes, Identity, and Belonging Lab has shown repeatedly that small changes to the environment, role models, and media, can help women get interested in STEM fields like computer science. Women are deterred by the surrounding stereotypes of fields like computer science, rather than the content of the fields. 

In our recently published study, we established the role of the media in communicating stereotypes to women. Women who read an article which said that the stereotypes of computer science were changing reported more interest that women who didn’t read an article at all, or read an article saying the stereotypes were the same. Just by letting women know that they do not have to fit the nerdy, masculine stereotype of computer scientists to join the field, the media can help women express more interest in choosing a STEM field.

In a rebuttal to the argument that women are just choosing the wrong fields, Seattle’s Mayor Mike McGinn is right on track with the current research. According to McGinn, the role of socialization as well as lack of female role models cannot be ignored when it comes to career choices. “Women are socialized from childhood to believe they are better suited for jobs in traditionally “female friendly” industries.” McGinn commented on large topics we’ve published about here in the SIBL: “One of the biggest barriers to women entering the tech industry is lack of role models (not to mention institutionalized sexism and frequently unfriendly workplaces).” Our research on role models and work environments suggests that interactions with non-stereotypical rooms and people can bolster women’s numbers in computer science.

Both Mayor McGinn and President Obama are taking action to try to close the gender pay gap. President Obama was quoted saying ““I want every child to grow up knowing that a woman’s hard work is valued and rewarded just as much as any man’s,” and Mayor McGinn has brought together a task force to help the city understand the problem and recommend changes. This task force will focus on city employees, developing programs to help create equal gender representation in currently male dominated and high paying positions, as well as change employment and contracting procedures that may contribute to gender biased decisions.

So how can we reduce the gender pay gap in Seattle? Our research points to a few solutions: present more nonstereotypical representations of STEM in the media, increase the nonstereotypical role models available to women interested in STEM, and reduce the stereotypicality of classrooms and work environments to help women feel more welcome.

What sorts of solutions do you think will make a difference in the gender wage gap? How can we achieve gender equality in pay, not just in Seattle, but throughout the world?

-Posted by Amia

Patching up the Leaky Pipeline: Retention of Women in Computer Science

The UW Computer Science and Engineering department
celebrates their new PhD graduates

As the University of Washington celebrates the commencement of our students, we at SIBL want to congratulate our new doctors of computer science. This year almost 20% of the new PhDs from the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering department were women, a relatively large proportion considering the percentage of women studying computer science decreases as they get further into their education, a phenomenon called the “leaky pipeline”. The leaky pipeline is due in a large part to the additional barriers that women in computer science face throughout their schooling.

Anna North is an ex-computer science major at Stanford who shared her experiences in an article posted on Jezebel. Highly aware of being outnumbered, she struggled to feel at ease among her male peers. North remembers trying to rebel by wearing miniskirts to class to highlight her femininity. Despite her love of programming, North ultimately left the computer science major to pursue a degree in English. She explained that the common stereotype for women in computer science at her school was that “all the girls leave after their first year.” What could have been done differently to prevent North and other women like her from leaving the major?  

Stanford University, Anna’s alma mater, has struggled to retain females in their CS program, but, like many schools, they are trying to address this attrition. An article by TechCrunch noted that departmental dinners are held to encourage current computer science majors, faculty, and people in the industry to meet and mingle. Highly successful, these dinners occur twice a quarter. They foster a sense of community for women in computer science and provide undergraduates with an opportunity to interact with successful female role models in the field. This approach is congruent with findings from the Stereotypes, Identity, and Belonging Lab, which suggest that while both male and female role models can help recruit women into computer science, female role models may be especially important for retention. These role models can help combat the negative stereotypes that are often thrust upon female computer science students and communicate to potential female computer science majors that they do belong and they can succeed in the major.