Richard Stallman Stays On As "Chief GNUsance"

Richard Stallman refused to resign his position as head of the GNU project, per Slashdot. His personal website says

I continue to be the Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project.

I do not intend to stop any time soon.

His disturbing politics otherwise, I am heartened to see he is refusing to let the bullies go after him in his technical capacities.

An Attempt To Bridge The Feminist Rhetorical Gap

Stuart Reges' brave jeremiad opposing the modern feminist orthodoxy in STEM fields (computer science particularly) comes from someone whose work in mentoring young women in the field is, apparently, unimpeachable. Having spent his life as an academic teaching computer science, first at Stanford, and later at U. Washington, he describes himself as "a champion of using undergraduate TAs in introductory programming classes" who has "helped hundreds of women to learn to love computer science". He writes that he is a "a strong advocate of many aspects of the diversity agenda."

He digs in:

When I tried to discuss [fired Google employee James] Damore at my school, I found it almost impossible. As a thought experiment, I asked how we could make someone like Damore feel welcome in our community. The pushback was intense. My question was labeled an “inflammatory example” and my comments were described as “hurtful” to women. When I mentioned that perhaps we could invite Damore to speak at UW, a faculty member responded, “If he comes here, we’ll hurt him.” She was joking, but the sentiment was clear.

One faculty member gave a particularly cogent response. She said, “Is it our job to make someone with those opinions feel welcome? I’m not sure whether academic freedom dictates that.” She argued that because we know that women have traditionally been discriminated against, perhaps it is more important to support them because the environment will not be sufficiently inclusive if they have to deal with someone like Damore. She said it “is up to us” to decide, but that, “choosing to hold a viewpoint does not necessarily give you the right to feel comfortable.”

Which is to say, the faculty doesn't understand the whole point of academic freedom, and its relationship to tenure. Reges then covers the same ground Damore did, and with similar reactions to Damore's. The official response was, more or less, hang the science, we have a diversity agenda to promote. Luckily, being a tenured professor, he has somewhat greater protection than Damore did, and so continues to pull a paycheck.

So now Gideon Scopes peers into the abyss. Can we talk the diversity mavens off the ledge? He observes, rightly, that people like Milo Yiannopoulos inflame and degrade the standard of discourse. But is a more neutral tone enough? What of Damore's well-researched paper that got him fired? (Emboldening mine.)

[D]espite its scientific validity, the document in its present form was unlikely to persuade anyone who wasn’t already at the very least skeptical of the politically correct narrative.  Given the degree to which emotions ran high around this issue, simply presenting the factual evidence could be perceived as hostile.

This has been going on for some while. Scopes cites the appalling misrepresentation of Larry Summers' 2005 remarks on the subject:

When the story broke that that Dr. Summers had attributed the STEM gender gap to a lack of aptitude on the part of women, I was puzzled.  What was he thinking?  Wasn’t he accusing certain people of being incapable of doing something that they had been doing for decades?  It wasn’t until two years later than I finally read his speech in full and came to understand that what he had actually said was far different from what I had believed he had said.

What he said was radically different from the funhouse mirror version that made the press headlines; using Scopes' paraphrase, "he was saying that the small percentage of the population with the highest levels of aptitude in science might contain more men than women."

But will it move the opposition? I doubt it. The Upton Sinclair axiom applies: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" The commercial feminists have strong reason to downplay actual research, as much as the DEA has reason to ignore and impede drug research. They will need to be fought to ground over this, and more.

The War On Objective Competence

Campus Reform brings to us a masterpiece of feminist criticism of engineering and the hard sciences. And by "masterpiece", I mean a perfect example:

The professors are especially concerned with how engineering courses tend to be “depoliticized” compared to classes in other fields, which they contend is due in part to engineering culture’s emphasis on meritocracy and individualism.

“Socialization into the ideologies of meritocracy and individualism, coupled with a valorization of ‘technical’ prowess at the expense of ‘socially focused’ work processes, depoliticizes the gendered structure of the profession,” they write.

The professors add that this can be problematic because “students learn that raising concerns about marginalization—of themselves or others—is tangential or even distracting to what counts as the ‘real’ practical and objective work of engineering.”

The authors' credentials are all impeccable: none of them teach engineering classes, and only one drifted away from that discipline:

• Carroll Seron has a post at the Criminology, Law and Society department of UC Irvine's School of Social Ecology.
• Susan S. Silbey works at MIT's Sloan School of Management as a Professor of Behavioral and Policy Sciences.
• Erin A. Cech is an assistant professor in the sociology department at U. Michigan after obtaining an engineering degree at Montana State.
• Brian Rubineau teaches at McGill University as an Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour.

As usual, none of these people have anything directly to do with their institutions' engineering or science schools. But it does qualify as yet another salvo in the ongoing war by idiot mandarins who do nothing upon objective measures of competence in fields where its exercise is of obvious import to society.

Women In STEM's Dog That Didn't Bark

Pew Research has lately published a wide-ranging poll on people's opinions about STEM, which are mostly not worth knowing, save for the questions they ask of people not in those fields.

The survey asked those non-STEM workers why they did not end up pursuing this interest. The most commonly cited reason for not pursuing a STEM career was cost and time barriers (27%), such as high expenses required for education or a lack of access to resources and opportunities. One-in-five (20%) say the reason they did not pursue a STEM career is they found another interest, while 14% say they found STEM classes were too hard or they lost interest.

More interesting was the question about sexism as a cause chasing women out of the field:

One of the bigger issues I have had with most of the "women aren't in STEM careers because of rampant sexism" is that no one has ever bothered to ask people not in such careers why they hadn't considered STEM careers. The overwhelming answer is that hardly anyone cited that as a cause, and so the Sisters of Perpetual Grievance must needs look elsewhere for their sustenance.

Late Friday Links

• Traditional Male Roles Are Awful, Except If You Want To Date Me Dep't: Nonscientific poll of OKCupid users shows a significant minority (45%) wants to be pursued in dating. 75% of female members responding identified as feminists, opposite 23% of women in a 2013 poll.
•  Finally, SciAm gives some editorial space to rational views on sexism in science.
• Pussy hats are so 2017.
• Kamala Harris Is A Monster, Part 3236: her fake feminism problem.
• Sorry, Conor, Moira Donegan Is An Amoral Monster. Sully explains:
  

  The essay is, to my mind, eloquent, beautifully written, even moving at times, but baffling. I read it waiting for the moment when she took responsibility for what she did, or apologized to the innocent people she concedes may have been slandered. But it never came. It’s worth recalling here exactly what she and others did. They created an online forum in which anonymous people could make accusations about men whose careers and reputations would potentially be destroyed as a consequence. There was absolutely no attempt to separate out what was true or untrue, what was substantiated and what was not. “Please never name an accuser” she advised upfront in the document. And then: “[P]lease don’t remove highlights or names.” No second thoughts allowed. The doc openly concedes its grave claims should be “taken with a grain of salt.” In her essay, Donegan actually cites this as exonerating evidence, as if reckless disregard for the truth were a positive virtue for a journalist, and not actually a definition of libel.

  It's garbage, the ultimate confession from an apparent proponent of "believe the victim" ideology that assumes the presence of a vagina makes the speaker somehow immune to self-deception, narcissism, or vanity.
• Defund The Women's Studies Departments, #3,645 in a series.

Mean Girls Who Code: Marlene Jaeckel's Blackballing

I have not seen anything else on this subject, so Marlene Jaeckel's account of her banishment from Google's Women Techmakers group must necessarily be tempered by the caveat that there are two sides (at least) to every story. Nonetheless, in the current environment it is all too believable, a tale of politics overtaking technical prowess, and individuals secretly banning her from Google-related groups. Alicia Carr, the central figure (as far as I can tell) on the other side of this exchange, blanched when Jaeckel refused to teach a gender-segregated coding class ("I need everybody and anybody to help my Women and I’m sorry there is a gender issues [sic] but right now it [sic] about my ladies"). Hostilities escalated after a September, 2016 incident in which Carr "became loud and disruptive during [an Atlanta iOS Developer's group] meeting". In January, 2017, "[w]ithin hours of signing up" as a mentor for RailsBridge and RailsGirls conference, "both organizations banned me from their groups and events" and "declined to provide me with a formal explanation and refused to explain why or how I had allegedly violated their codes of conduct".

Jaeckel supported James Damore after his firing in August, 2017, a move that drew further ire on the part of Carr and a new figure, Maggie Kane, also apparently purged her from further Google-focused programming groups and sessions (an Atlanta Google Women Techmakers’ event “Idea Jam Session”). Jaeckel has since hired an attorney to launch a cease-and-desist and anti-defamation suit, the merits of which (and likely success of) I cannot ascertain at this distance. The whole thing smells like eighth-grade mean girls posturing. I wish Jaeckel all the success in the world, though I'm not sure of the viability of such a campaign. And, if she wins, of what value is reacquiring the company of such bluestockings?

Update: Really amazing what a lightweight Carr is on her LinkedIn page. One lousy app and she's parading herself as a developer? Okay, great, whatever, and that video? What skills are you selling? Being able to be dressed "fine as hell"?

Update 13:12: It took her a year and a half to learn Objective C? Okay, I guess... A quick look at her blog reveals a disturbing absence of technical articles, and a lot of self-puffery and lifestyle chatter (look at me in my granddaughter's Tesla!). Ditto Maggie Kane's LinkedIn profile, which is long on things other than coding skills. Opposite the Polyglot Programming blog, which features wall-to-wall coverage of various tech articles. The people opposing Jaeckel are pretty clearly posers.

Old Pink In New Bottles: Caroline McCarthy's Failed Bromides

Caroline McCarthy's Medium piece rings every klaxon almost immediately. Her complaint that Damore doesn't use collaborative work as an attraction to women is possibly reasonable, but the underlying justifying link to the National Coalition of Girls' Schools is so full of cant and repeatedly failed approaches, it's impossible to take seriously. "Seeing women’s historic contributions inspires today’s girls", we are told, yet does no one remember the beatification of Ada Lovelace? Of Grace Hopper? And yet, since the mid-1980s, the overall fraction of women in CS has been in decline. She accuses Damore of using research that "was perhaps informed by the agenda-driven pseudoscience that permeates the deepest dregs of Reddit and 4chan "; if you can't attack the man's footnotes, why not manufacture a fantasy list of enemies he's in bed with? (She does correctly mention his bizarre tweets about the KKK, but they weren't on the scene here.)

She states, without any justification, "There’s no question that we need more female computer scientists." As ever, my reaction to this is, why? Why should we have to tailor entire curricula to the needs of people who have no apparent interest in the subject? She cites Stuart Country Day high school as an all-girls' program that has tailored their approach to women in computer science, but what is their track record there? That is, have they had any actual success getting girls who otherwise are not interested in computer programming into the field? Or did they end up like the author, who found it "so un-engaging and isolating and boring that I dropped it before it could bring down my GPA"?

Eventually, she confesses that "there was merit to quite a few of the points James Damore raised, and discrediting the research he cites (rather than simply disagreeing with his conclusions) will hurt rather than help women’s advancement in computer science." Coming late as it does, this seems like so much belated and minimal acknowledgment of the obvious; it recalls Cordelia Fine's sleazy tactics in Testosterone Rex. The lure and futility of pink lacquer continues.

Update 2017-09-26: I didn't spend a lot of time digging through her links, but I want to focus on her cite of the National Council of Girls' Schools in reference to this passage:

The world is desperately seeking to plug the leaky STEM pipeline from its shortage of women, and girls’ schools are playing a critical role. Girls’ schools lead the way in graduating women who become our nation’s scientists, doctors, engineers, designers, and inventors. Girls’ school graduates are six times more likely to consider majoring in math, science, and technology and three times more likely to consider engineering careers compared to girls who attend coed schools. Why? Because girls’ schools support collaboration and all-girl classrooms foster female confidence and aspirations.

The underlying link about considering engineering careers (see p. 38) says that "Engineering also produces the largest single-sex/coeducational differential when it comes to career choice, where 4.4 percent of women from single-sex independent schools aspire to become engineers, relative to 1.4 percent from coeducational schools." In other words, whatever boost such education may yield, it comes nowhere close to reversing the 20% female matriculation rate in CS and engineering disciplines, or the ten times figure needed to surmount female frustrations in the university and subsequent job search process (assuming we take interviewing.io results as representative, which they may not be). And as McCarthy observes, this solution does not scale, for the simple reason that Freddie deBoer raised: terrific outcomes in education almost invariably stem from selection bias. In this case, the kinds of girls who can afford to go to all-girls schools have families with means to afford tuition.

But ultimately, it seems to me that the most salient test of Damore's thesis is and remains the fact that the work is compelling unto itself for men, but not for women. If, as McCarthy suggests, she's only ten years away from her collegiate days, why not have a go at it again? The world isn't lacking for outlets for talented coders; yet she stays out of the business. Why? The answer seems obvious: either the work is its own reward, or it is not. For McCarthy, and many women, it is not.

The second thing at the NCGS website is a discussion of "growth mindset", a topic that has had a rather difficult and muddled empirical and philosophical history; one recent (n=624) study even shows

Children’s own mindsets showed no relationship to IQ, school grades, or change in grades across the school year, with the only significant result being in the reverse direction to prediction (better performance in children holding a fixed mindset). Fixed beliefs about basic ability appear to be unrelated to ability, and we found no support for mindset-effects on cognitive ability, response to challenge, or educational progress.

 From the outside, "growth mindset" looks like a smoke and mirrors foundation upon which to build such dubious concepts as "stereotype threat", which itself has had problems with reproduction. In the end, these have little explanatory power next to the simple story McCarthy herself tells: disinterest.

Vox Ladysplains The #GoogleMemo, And Other Related Stuff

I want to start with Cynthia Lee's "ladysplain"-ing of the #GoogleMemo in Vox, not because it is good but because it serves as an exemplar of how the blank slatists insist on misreading James Damore's essay on the futility of Google's approach to coder "diversity". She opens by writing that "It’s important to appreciate the background of endless skepticism that every woman in tech faces, and the resulting exhaustion we feel as the legitimacy of our presence is constantly questioned." This recalls work by Roy Baumeister in which he observes that putdowns are endemic to male culture, a constant reminder that respect is earned and in limited supply:



Lee's reaction to this shows exactly how right Baumeister was when he wrote

This, incidentally, has probably been a major source of friction as women have moved into the workplace, and organizations have had to shift toward policies that everyone is entitled to respect. The men hadn’t originally built them to respect everybody.

 Her next complaint is against the "sleight-of-hand" of averages she claims Damore uses that she claims turns women "against their own gender." However, Damore is very careful to note that, "Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. This doesn't matter; Lee has no interest in the real, measured preferences of populations, and as we see in the next section, this has catastrophic consequences for her argument (emboldening mine):

If, as the manifesto’s defenders claim, the population averages do not have anything to say about individual Googlers, who are all exceptional, then why is Google the subject of the manifesto’s arguments at all? What do averages have to do with hiring practices at a company that famously hires fewer than one percent of applicants? In the name of the rational empiricism and quantitative rigor that the manifesto holds so dear, shouldn’t we insist that it only cite studies that specifically speak to the tails of the distribution — to the actual pool of women Google draws from?

Funny you should ask. That, actually, is the exact problem, and the fact that Lee misses it is unsurprising. Implicit in her argument here is the idea that men and women, taken as populations, will be interested in exactly the same thing, so that by the time you get to that narrow tail, you will have exactly the same number of individuals. This is categorically false; Damore cited evidence that, on average, women have more interest in working with people rather than things. The narrow tail of people interested in thing-work is where Google is hiring. She addresses this aspect of the population not at all. This is the crucial part of his argument, and indeed is what we see in practice, as her very next example demonstrates!

For example, we could look to the percentage of women majoring in computer science at highly selective colleges and universities. Women currently make up about 30 percent of the computer science majors at Stanford University, one key source of Google’s elite workforce. Harvey Mudd College, another elite program, has seen its numbers grow steadily for many years, and is currently at about 50 percent women in their computer science department.

Yet as Scott Alexander showed, MIT and Harvey Mudd get their female graduation rates by stuffing the pipeline with more women than most institutions that don't discriminate:

...MIT admitting 2x more women than men matches nicely with their computer science department being 40% women (= 2x the national average of 20%). Harvey Mudd admitted 2.5x more women than men matches nicely with their computer science being 55% women (just a hair over 2.5x the national average of 20%). Plus everyone in this discussion agrees that a bunch of colleges are desperately trying to admit as many women as they can to get even close to parity in CS.t

(While I don't have figures for Stanford, it would certainly be interesting to learn the percentage of female applicants accepted into their program. I would not be shocked at all if they did the same as Harvey Mudd, and indeed recent figures make it appear that is the case.) The reality is that computer science, and engineering more broadly, has been stuck at about 20% female (or less) for decades, regardless of gimmicks. Using two cherry-picked institutions that in turn cherry-pick their candidates is a perfect example of Damore's argument: they haven't magically found a way to get girls to like coding so much as they've found more girls who do (at the expense of other institutions' admissions). The strong argument would be explaining away why the female CS/engineering population is what it is at, say, Iowa State, or at a random sample of universities. Lee does not attempt it. (I also note in passing she does not wrestle with something Alexander observed, and that is that CS/engineering gender parity is best in nations such as Zimbabwe and Thailand, countries "not exactly famous for [their] deep commitment to gender equality.") In so doing, she cedes her entire argument.

---

Other linky goodness before (hopefully) closing this chapter:

• David Brooks thinks Sundar Pichai should resign as Google CEO.
• Conservatives are lining up to protest Damore's firing, via The Hill:
  

  Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec and a coalition of free speech groups are organizing marches against Google next week to protest Damore’s firing.
  
  “We are going to raise awareness about Google’s one-sided bias and campaign against dissenting opinions and voices,” Posobiec told The Mercury News on Thursday.

• Also at The Federalist Bre Payton finds the media broadly insists on misreading Damore's memo, as one would expect.
• Robert Tracinski writes in The Federalist about "the Google inquisition":
  

  A Wired profile digging into Damore’s personal history (this is politics now, so we do opposition research) gives us this description: “Damore’s fellow students at Harvard remember him as very smart but awkward around people.” Gosh, it would be a real shame if people like that were allowed to be hired in Silicon Valley.
  
  I’m joking, of course, because this is precisely the kind of personality that built Silicon Valley. But maybe not any more. Yet that’s not the biggest, most dangerous part of this story for Google and the other tech giants. The most dangerous part is that they are now beginning to be seen by the public (or revealed, depending on how you look at it) as politicized entities. Politicized entities to whom we are giving enormous amounts of data on our lives, thoughts, and interests.

  Surveying this landscape, it's easy to imagine how the politics will align going forward. Having collected Damore's scalp on the basis of merely acknowledging that men and women have divergent interests (as populations), what else could the diversity mavens accomplish with sufficient dudgeon behind them? I have previously noted Anita Sarkeesian's censorious tendencies. It does not seem even a slight stretch, given the Euros have introduced a "right to be forgotten", that Google is or will soon be on the list of targets. That is, at some future date, they will demand wrongthink such as Damore's be banished to PageRank purgatory. No pinnacle in modern content distribution is higher, and for that reason we must fight this at all costs.

Update 2017-08-15:
Damore got an op-ed into the Wall Street Journal defending himself. Excerpt:

Everything changed when the document went viral within the company and the wider tech world. Those most zealously committed to the diversity creed—that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and all people are inherently the same—could not let this public offense go unpunished. They sent angry emails to Google’s human-resources department and everyone up my management chain, demanding censorship, retaliation and atonement.

Upper management tried to placate this surge of outrage by shaming me and misrepresenting my document, but they couldn’t really do otherwise: The mob would have set upon anyone who openly agreed with me or even tolerated my views. When the whole episode finally became a giant media controversy, thanks to external leaks, Google had to solve the problem caused by my supposedly sexist, anti-diversity manifesto, and the whole company came under heated and sometimes threatening scrutiny.

The Google Heretic

The news arrived a couple days ago that Google's engineering ranks include someone with unorthodox opinions on the subject of "diversity" as practiced in Silicon Valley, the actual text (minus graphs and hyperlinks) leaking out in the pages of Gizmodo Saturday. The essay itself senselessly adopts some of the worst flaws of modern political discourse from the left, particularly "psychological safety", a fatally damaged concept that has no place in grownup discussion. He (I assume the author is male) also mislabels as "authoritarian" the idiotic and badly misguided private efforts toward an inflexible and unachievable "diversity" goal; I note the author is free to leave Google, and work elsewhere. He also adopts the whiny language, itself extracted from Marxism's leaden skeins, that makes so much feminist writing unbearable: what does "swaths of men without support" even mean?

But those criticisms aside, the author is right about biological origins of a number of disparities between the sexes, particularly in mathematics, which are of long-standing and universal at the higher end of achievement. That is to say, from a population standpoint, women are more uniform in ability than men, and thus you end up with fewer geniuses — and fewer morons. (There are nations where female averages are actually higher than male averages [PDF, see page 10], but male-female average math score gaps exist for the majority of OECD countries save Iceland, where it is reversed, with some less significant than others.) Unfortunately, he does not provide substantiation for his claims, unless of course Gizmodo's editorial decision to strip the jeremiad of hyperlinks was an act of deep political cowardice.

However, why did he feel it necessary to pen such a document? To know that, it is necessary to ask, how is it that Google has a Vice President of Diversity, whose job presumably is to root out and destroy a would-be modern T.J. Rodgers accidentally joining the Googleplex ranks? Google, simply, has become a huge visible success, to the extent that it can afford to operate many companies with dubious or nonexistent paths to profitability. Throwing some bones to the commercial feminists is a no-brainer, for now; if you can lose a billion dollars in a quarter, you're doing something right. But as with Microsoft and its seemingly invincible computing platform that took a dive once they made (wholly necessary) forays into mobile, nothing is guaranteed, and today's juggernaut could easily be tomorrow's roadkill. Advanced parasitism of that kind will have no place in a smaller company, either devourer or devoured. Asking "why are there so few women coders?" is as pointless as asking "Why are there so many Jews in Hollywood/banking/diamond cutting?" The answer is, and should always be, who cares?

Update, 2017-08-08: Google yesterday fired author James Damore on the ground that he was  "perpetuating gender stereotypes", thus essentially proving he was right about the company acting as an echo chamber. (I would observe that companies set up thusly are also liable to fall apart in other ways.) As usual, Scott Alexander has a terrific followup:

Galpin investigated the percent of women in computer classes all around the world. Her number of 26% for the US is slightly higher than I usually hear, probably because it’s older (the percent women in computing has actually gone down over time!). The least sexist countries I can think of – Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, etc – all have somewhere around the same number (30%, 20%, and 24%, respectively). The most sexist countries do extremely well on this metric! The highest numbers on the chart are all from non-Western, non-First-World countries that do middling-to-poor on the Gender Development Index: Thailand with 55%, Guyana with 54%, Malaysia with 51%, Iran with 41%, Zimbabwe with 41%, and Mexico with 39%. Needless to say, Zimbabwe is not exactly famous for its deep commitment to gender equality.

As usual, the whole damned thing is worth reading.Also, this:

I didn't want to have to rant about the reaction to the #GoogleManifesto, but I figure that I should put my two cents into the discussion.

— M_Methuselah (@M_Methuselah) August 7, 2017

There's the issue where the main point of the document concerning ideological homogeneity was proven self evident by the reaction itself.

— M_Methuselah (@M_Methuselah) August 7, 2017

I'm going to acknowledge that and mostly skip over it, only saying that it's the reason why discussion of the next issue is so messed up.

— M_Methuselah (@M_Methuselah) August 7, 2017

As an evolutionary biologist, my concern is the negative reaction to the assertions that the document made about average group differences.

— M_Methuselah (@M_Methuselah) August 7, 2017

There is a plethora of evidence to support the fact that humans have sexual dimorphism, and that this extends to the brain and cognition.

— M_Methuselah (@M_Methuselah) August 7, 2017

Different behaviors and abilities have a male character and a female character, based on population level analysis of people.

— M_Methuselah (@M_Methuselah) August 7, 2017

For further reading about how interesting and complicated this is, I suggest starting here: https://t.co/96cLlzJhSs

— M_Methuselah (@M_Methuselah) August 7, 2017

And, this:

There are plenty of reviews @gogreen18 https://t.co/HMtOZAYA3Lhttps://t.co/quwcsc4qFkhttps://t.co/bYskHyPSwbhttps://t.co/VcAbSUoE1K

— Yeyo (@YeyoZa) August 8, 2017

Update 2017-08-08 9:31: Also a good read at In A Crowded Theater:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged that these topics are “fair to debate.”   He claimed that Googlers are free to discuss these topics so long as they do not advance “harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”  But by firing Damore, Pichai belied any commitment to real discussion.  A true debate about these issues requires grappling with all of the thorny premises.

 The good news is that now a woman can be hired to replace Mr. Damore, thus ensuring Google's comittment to diversity. Also, they will make sure she has the right opinions before hiring, and the Vice President of Truth Diversity to make sure she keeps them with the party line.

Update 2017-08-08 9:58: Also Inez Feltcher at The Federalist:

Damore is guilty of nothing more than gently stating the obvious truth, backed by a laundry list of scientific studies: on average, men and women have divergent talents, interests, and skills. Because of these differences, men and women make different career decisions in the aggregate. Damore’s great offense was recognizing that maybe, just maybe, the imbalance between men and women in software engineering has more to do with freedom of choice than being the six-figure salary counterparts to the handmaids in Gilead.

Instead of fighting these “gaps” as the result of discriminatory systems and attempting to force men and women to be the same, we should consider the possibility that their divergent choices are the result of our true diversity.

Also useful in that Federalist piece is a link to the essay, links intact. As I expected above, the stripped links point at buttressing evidence for his thesis, which Gizmodo made the political decision to shamefully omit in their rebroadcasting.

Update 2017-08-09: Before passing on this subject, it's worth quoting this passage from the Scott Alexander post upthread:

We know that interests are highly malleable. Female students become significantly more interested in science careers after having a teacher who discusses the problem of underrepresentation. And at Harvey Mudd College, computer science majors were around 10% women a decade ago. Today they’re 55%.

I highly recommend Freddie deBoer’s Why Selection Bias Is The Most Powerful Force In Education. If an educational program shows amazing results, and there’s any possible way it’s selection bias – then it’s selection bias.

I looked into Harvey Mudd’s STEM admission numbers, and, sure enough, they admit women at 2.5x the rate as men. So, yeah, it’s selection bias.

I don’t blame them. All they have to do is cultivate a reputation as a place to go if you’re a woman interested in computer science, attract lots of female CS applicants, then make sure to admit all the CS-interested female applicants they get. In exchange, they get constant glowing praise from every newspaper in the country (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, etc, etc, etc).

Now, we don't know if female CS candidates are admitted at 2.5 times vs. men — the rate could be higher or lower in that specialty — but this definitely points to at least a potential problem for their headline story about women in CS: it's not so much that they support women as they throw enough women at the problem that eventually some of them will get through.

Look! More stupid!

• This ex-Google guy at Medium is here to tell us all about how Damore is wrong, because, reasons and we have lots of research (that he won't show us) but let's not talk about Damore's full paper that he links to via the bowdlerized Gizmodo version.
•  Science is a tool of the patriarchy, shrieks another Gizmodo author, who makes the bizarre claim that research on an evolutionary basis for rape is the same thing as justifying or excusing it. It's raining out there.

Virtual Reality + Porn = Overload

This does not bode well for SH//FT's future operations: a Japanese virtual reality firm apologized because their porn offering was too popular, resulting in the shutdown of the festival (really?). (Via Slashdot.)

How Not To Handle Failure

Firebrand attention whore Milo Yiannopoulos has hit on some pretty interesting work at interviewing.io, in which the company attempted to counter interviewer sex bias by using voice masking technology. The results (emboldening, for once, is original equipment):

interviewing.io is a platform where people can practice technical interviewing anonymously and, in the process, find jobs based on their interview performance rather than their resumes. Since we started, we’ve amassed data from thousands of technical interviews, and in this blog, we routinely share some of the surprising stuff we’ve learned. In this post, I’ll talk about what happened when we built real-time voice masking to investigate the magnitude of bias against women in technical interviews. In short, we made men sound like women and women sound like men and looked at how that affected their interview performance. We also looked at what happened when women did poorly in interviews, how drastically that differed from men’s behavior, and why that difference matters for the thorny issue of the gender gap in tech.

One of the big motivators to think about voice masking was the increasingly uncomfortable disparity in interview performance on the platform between men and women¹. At that time, we had amassed over a thousand interviews with enough data to do some comparisons and were surprised to discover that women really were doing worse. Specifically, men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women. Interviewee technical score wasn’t faring that well either — men on the platform had an average technical score of 3 out of 4, as compared to a 2.5 out of 4 for women.

Despite these numbers, it was really difficult for me to believe that women were just somehow worse at computers, so when some of our customers asked us to build voice masking to see if that would make a difference in the conversion rates of female candidates, we didn’t need much convincing.

They ran this experiment on 234 interviews, of which roughly two-thirds were male. Et voilà:

After running the experiment, we ended up with some rather surprising results. Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data. 

Women were leaving interviewing.io at a rate seven times that of men after a poor performance, and an overall retention curve that looks like this (blue is male, red is female):

 Which is to say, women get frustrated easier and quit earlier. What does this mean overall for women in STEM fields?

Now, as I said, this is pretty speculative, but it really got me thinking about what these curves might mean in the broader context of women in computer science. How many “attrition events” does one encounter between primary and secondary education and entering a collegiate program in CS and then starting to embark on a career? So, I don’t know, let’s say there are 8 of these events between getting into programming and looking around for a job. If that’s true, then we need 3 times as many women studying computer science than men to get to the same number in our pipelines. Note that that’s 3 times more than men, not 3 times more than there are now. If we think about how many there are now, which, depending on your source, is between 1/3 and a 1/4 of the number of men, to get to pipeline parity, we actually have to increase the number of women studying computer science by an entire order of magnitude.

That's... kind of daunting. So, recapping, not only do women not interview as well as men, they also give up quicker, and thus to make up for the lack of women capable of these feats,  we need ten times as many women as men at the front of the STEM pipeline to meet parity. "When I told the interviewing.io team about the disparity in attrition between genders," she continues, "the resounding response was along the lines of, 'Well, yeah. Just think about dating from a man’s perspective.'" The ideas that women should never have to perform under stress, should be hired for jobs regardless of qualification or experience, idiotic theories that Star Wars posters keep girls away from STEM fields — all these and many more amount to so much post hoc-ery evading the unfortunate reality that, as a population, women lack male resilience. It does appear there are steps available for those wishing to improve this state of affairs, e.g. girls engaged in team sports develop more confidence in themselves subsequently. But even there, the confidence gap cuts off a lot of girls at the knees (emboldening this time mine):

Studies evaluating the impact of the 1972 Title IX legislation, which made it illegal for public schools to spend more on boys’ athletics than on girls’, have found that girls who play team sports are more likely to graduate from college, find a job, and be employed in male-dominated industries. There’s even a direct link between playing sports in high school and earning a bigger salary as an adult. Learning to own victory and survive defeat in sports is apparently good training for owning triumphs and surviving setbacks at work. And yet, despite Title IX, fewer girls than boys participate in athletics, and many who do quit early. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, girls are still six times as likely as boys to drop off sports teams, with the steepest decline in participation coming during adolescence. This is probably because girls suffer a larger decrease in self-esteem during that time than do boys.

 All of which is to say, I don't see a potential solution at the scale needed to move the needle significantly overall, successes at Harvey Mudd notwithstanding; these results suggest women will just move from one institution to another, rather than expanding the overall pool.

Eric S. Raymond: SJW Hordes Attack Meritocracy, Civilization Itself

I have known of Eric S. Raymond for many years, and appreciated his many contributions to open source software; yet dearer to my heart is his maintenance of the Jargon File, a dictionary of hacker terms that eventually saw print in The New Hacker's Dictionary. I recently encountered an essay on his blog from late last year detailing a rumor (one he felt delivered by someone "both well-informed and completely trustworthy in the past") that various "women in tech" organizations had set repeated traps to accuse ranking figures in open source software of sexual assault, in order to bring such people (and the movement they represent) to heel.

“They have made multiple runs at [Linus Torvalds].” Just let the implications of that sink in for a bit. If my source is to be believed (and I have found him both well-informed and completely trustworthy in the past) this was not a series of misunderstandings, it was a deliberately planned and persistent campaign to frame Linus and feed him to an outrage mob.

This activity is a natural outgrowth of commercial feminism. It serves no other purpose than eliminating meritocracy, as defined by people actually writing code and making it work in the real world, and replacing it with credentialism and endless political infighting.

We dare not give less than our best. If we fall away from meritocracy – if we allow the SJWs to remake us as they wish, into a hell-pit of competitive grievance-mongering and political favoritism for the designated victim group of the week – we will betray not only what is best in our own traditions but the entire civilization that we serve.

The SJWs behind this madness must be fought as Charles Martel fought the Umayyads at Tours, or else that civilization will collapse. This is no small threat: "What’s there", Raymond continues, "is totalitarianism in miniature: ideology is everything, merit counts for nothing against the suppression of thoughtcrime, and politics is conducted by naked intimidation against any who refuse to conform." With open source software backing everything from servers to supercomputers to routers to phones, the stakes are enormous. The collateral damage, sadly, will be women seeking to gain counsel in open source circles from high-ranking men, a perverse incentive created by people who do not understand second-order effects.

Those behind this can go to hell.

"Diversity", The New Century's "Buy American"

Matt Schlicht, whom I had never previously encountered, has produced an essay so tendentious, dumb, and shot through with clickbait-y culture war victimhood, I just about couldn't help myself. Apparently some girls got together to girl power their way into the virtual reality world with an apparently retronymed organization called SH//FT (Shaping Holistic Inclusion in Future Technology).

Anyone following along with the noisome row that is Gamergate should anticipate what's coming, and that is an immediate hoisting of the victim flag. Schlicht does not surprise in that regard, starting with his title, "She Posted Online And Immediately Men Everywhere Told Her To Shut Up". Cherry-picking a few quotes from obvious jackasses, the author spends a great deal of time bypassing other Facebook comments such as...

 ... and ...

 

... and ...

And this is among just the top handful on the Facebook thread. This leaves the impression that the author's subtext is to silence any criticism of this fairly naked attempt to shame virtual reality companies into creating diversity bureaucracies that have nothing to do with the creation of good games, i.e. it is yet another spear tip for "commercial feminism".

Along the way we learn that a go-go dancer at a Microsoft company party must go (only one!), and that even mentioning sexual uses for VR is the same thing as saying women are only good for one thing:

Schlicht's Victorian reaction to Virtanen's comment is actually pretty sad, because porn has had a great deal to say about the rise of the commercial Internet (sorry, AP, I'm not giving up my capital-I). By rejecting such applications, they're putting themselves at a significant disadvantage.

In the end, the customers — some of whom, presumably, include the commenters above — are concerned about one question and one question only: is this an interesting, fun game? But Schlicht, Helen Situ, Jenn Duong, Julie Young, and all their other numerous minions and henchwomen are more concerned with who makes games, rather than the games themselves. This represents the reverse of everything the civil rights revolution of the 1960's fought for, demanding equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity. It also hearkens back to a 1970's slogan from the bad, old era when "planned obsolescence" hit its peak: "buy American". That is, we were supposed to care as much about who built cars (Americans) as how well they fit our needs. In the end, people will buy things they like, identity of the team be damned. A market with real choices will ultimately crush a credentialist Silicon Valley 2.0.

STEM And Competence Vs. Credentialism

Scott Alexander wrote and then disappeared a great, long, rambling rant about various matters, in part related to credentials vs. competence. This sparked a spirited conversation in the comments, which is all we have of it now. (I suspect he plans eventually on trimming it down to fighting weight, and republishing it then.) I wanted to focus here on this snippet (quoted parts are from Alexander's original):

The Blue Tribe protects its own and wants to impoverish anyone who doesn’t kowtow to their institutions. For the same reason, we get bizarre occupational licensing restrictions like needing two years of training to braid people’s hair, which have been proven time and time again not to work or improve quality.

The opposite of credentialism is meritocracy—the belief that the best person should get the job whether or not they’ve given $200,000 to Yale. In my crazy conspiracy theory, social justice is the attack arm of the educated/urban/sophisticated/academic Blue Tribe, which works by constantly insisting all competing tribes are racist and sexist and therefore need to be dismantled/taken over/put under Blue Tribe supervision for their own good. So we get told that meritocracy is racist and sexist. Colleges have pronounced talking about meritocracy to be a microaggression, and the media has declared that supporting meritocracy is inherently racist. Likewise, we are all told that standardized tests and especially IQ are racist and hurt minorities, even though in reality this testing helps advance minorities better than the current system.

As we saw when Asians rose up to block Democratic efforts to reinstate affirmative action at the University of California,  the winners and losers in such efforts are not always readily discernible. But when that same UC pronounces meritocracy as microaggression, you know which direction the system's overlords intend to take the discussion: toward more credentials, and less actual aptitude. Popehat collective blogger @ClarkHat* suggested why progressives have a love/hate relationship with STEM disciplines:

This is why progs hate / love STEM: it's a juicy target that hasn't yet fallen to credentialism that privileges them https://t.co/nwyYtlKn20

— Grim Dark Future Hat (@ClarkHat) February 19, 2016

I seem to recall Alexander mentioning a "Silicon Valley 2.0" as a place taken over by credentialists, which would be a field day for people like the censorious Anita Sarkeesian (who lately seems to have snuck into Twitter's censorship board) and naked lunatics like Shanley Kane, whose editorial stance is that competence is the new sexism. I would hope it goes without saying that these people must be resisted with every tool at our disposal.

---

* I've since been informed that ClarkHat no longer writes for Popehat.

Scott Alexander Unpacks The Latest "Sexism In Tech" Study

I hadn't been over to Scott Alexander's blog, Star Slate Codex, in quite some while, but Cathy Young pointed me at his latest, an essay about sexism in tech that starts with a study done on GitHub change submitters.

They find that women get more (!) requests accepted than men for all of the top ten programming languages. They check some possible confounders – whether women make smaller changes (easier to get accepted) or whether their changes are more likely to serve an immediate project need (again, easier to get accepted) and in fact find the opposite – women’s changes are larger and less likely to serve project needs. That makes their better performance extra impressive.

So the big question is whether this changes based on obviousness of gender. The paper doesn’t give a lot of the analyses I want to see, and doesn’t make its data public, so we’ll have to go with the limited information they provide. They do not provide an analysis of the population as a whole (!) but they do give us a subgroup analysis by “insider status”, ie whether the person has contributed to that project before.

The bias comes in — and the media, of course, has latched onto — the part where outsider women get their changes accepted at a lower rate than outsider men. Yet, as Alexander further notes, nobody in the study bothered to control for approver gender (emboldening mine):

A commenter on the paper’s pre-print asked for a breakdown by approver gender, and the authors mentioned that “Our analysis (not in this paper — we’ve cut a lot out to keep it crisp) shows that women are harder on other women than they are on men. Men are harder on other men than they are on women.”

Depending on what this means – since it was cut out of the paper to “keep it crisp”, we can’t be sure – it sounds like the effect is mainly from women rejecting other women’s contributions, and men being pretty accepting of them. Given the way the media predictably spun this paper, it is hard for me to conceive of a level of crispness which justifies not providing this information.

 Indeed. The conspiracy theory of patriarchy doesn't have a lot of substance behind it, but keeping it well inflated is a full-time job, one that requires a great deal of artful dodging.

The New York Times' Really Stupid, Really Predictable Essay On Tech Diversity

I expect it would shock absolutely no one to learn that the New York Times is in the bag with the rest of the tech industry press in pearl-clutching about the lack of women in STEM careers, while stumping for the same old dogmatic causes. This stuff is going to be with us a long while, I expect, so might as well get used to "What Really Keeps Women Out Of Tech": you see, it's just too darn male:

Over and over, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues have found that female students are more interested in enrolling in a computer class if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines.

It's all the movies' fault:

The percentage of women studying computer science actually has fallen since the 1980s. Dr. Cheryan theorizes that this decline might be partly attributable to the rise of pop-culture portrayals of scientists as white or Asian male geeks in movies and TV shows like “Revenge of the Nerds” and “The Big Bang Theory.” The media’s intense focus on start-up culture and male geniuses such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates might also have inspired more young men than women to enter the field.

It's almost as if just being around nerdy men is enough to frighten these delicate flowers away from the field!

... I wonder how many young men would choose to major in computer science if they suspected they might need to carry out their coding while sitting in a pink cubicle decorated with posters of “Sex and the City,” with copies of Vogue and Cosmo scattered around the lunchroom. In fact, Dr. Cheryan’s research shows that young men tend not to major in English for the same reasons women don’t pick computer science: They compare their notions of who they are to their stereotypes of English majors and decide they won’t fit in.

Since I can't find Dr. Cheryan's supporting paper on the subject, it's hard to know how good it is, i.e. do they actually ask men why they chose the major they did? A more realistic version of events, one that covers virtually every good coder I know, is that

1. They actually like the work itself (the act of writing software, e.g., is an intrinsic reward), and
2. The pay is pretty good compared to other jobs. (Which, by the way, chicks dig men with a stable job and good pay. Just so's you know.)

What I do not get, time and time again, is why so many people have such determination to force people who show no inclination or ability into fields where they will ultimately be uncomfortable at best. I have no problem at all with women being in STEM fields, and know many. But to look at the relative paucity of women and declare this is a problem is utter nonsense. This is something we should probably expect from a professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, one who apparently has a chip on her shoulder for her career not turning out the way she wanted it to. Her book on the subject, The Only Woman In The Room, is "frankly personal and ... reflects on women’s experiences in a way that simple data can’t" — i.e., like all feminist screeds, it is anti-empirical. That is a deeply wrong approach for someone claiming to be a scientist.

The Male Putdown Style Bags A Coder

Via Slashdot, a fairly prominent example of something I was writing about the other day in a more general context, the centrality of the male putdown as a way to remind everyone that respect is in limited supply. One of its freer users is Linus Torvalds, whose kernel development lists are widely known as flamefests. Developer Sarah Sharp recently announced she would step down in a blog post, citing a toxic communication style as the fundamental reason:

I have the utmost respect for the technical efforts of the Linux kernel community. They have scaled and grown a project that is focused on maintaining some of the highest coding standards out there. The focus on technical excellence, in combination with overloaded maintainers, and people with different cultural and social norms, means that Linux kernel maintainers are often blunt, rude, or brutal to get their job done. Top Linux kernel developers often yell at each other in order to correct each other’s behavior.

That’s not a communication style that works for me. I need communication that is technically brutal but personally respectful. I need people to correct my behavior when I’m doing something wrong (either technically or socially) without tearing me down as a person. We are human. We make mistakes, and we correct them. We get frustrated with someone, we over-react, and then we apologize and try to work together towards a solution.

Sharp tried and failed to get a policy of greater civility instituted on the kernel mailing list. Torvalds, of course, rejected it vociferously (as he does), citing a need for clarity by electronic communications as the justification:

The fact is, people need to know what my position on things are. And I can't just say "please don't do that", because people won't listen. I say "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle", and I mean it.

And I definitely am not willing to string people along, either. I've had that happen too - not telling people clearly enough that I don't like their approach, they go on to re-architect something, and get really upset when I am then not willing to take their work.

I'm generally a fan of civility; it's unfortunate that Sharp quit over this, but in a volunteer project, nobody makes you work. Given it's Linus' name on the project, he gets to call the shots.

Randal Olson Takes A Close Look At The Wage Gap

Randal Olson, whose work I have previously admired, is back today (h/t Christina Hoff Sommers) with a look at the wage gap between the sexes, and in particular, how this is affected by college majors. Starting with a FiveThirtyEight post about remuneration for college majors, he then proceeds to dig through major-specific data (for a change, emboldening is all his):

The trend that’s immediately apparent from this chart is that female-dominated majors make less on average than male-dominated majors. Some interesting exceptions to the trend are Nursing (90% women; $48k median earnings) and Transportation Science (12% women; $35k median earnings), where Nursing especially stands out as a relatively lucrative major despite being primarily women.

 Unsurprisingly, after controlling for un- and under-employment, he looks at quantitative SAT scores and finds a strong correlation between that and earnings, i.e. the kinds of jobs that require analytical skills and compensation to match. His takeaways:

• Female-dominated majors tend to earn less than male-dominated majors
• This correlation isn’t explained by the employability of the majors
• It seems plausible that male-dominated majors are usually paid more because they are more quantitative in nature, which large companies tend to value highly

At least when dealing with the opposite sex, men have a strong incentive to find gainful, and in particular, remunerative employment: 78% of women in a recent Pew poll said they want a man with "a steady job", which was more than any other aspect desired in a potential mate by either sex. If feminism has shaped a new model woman exactly like men in every way, she has not manifested herself in the broad population as yet.

Shanley Kane, The Backstory

My fascination with Shanley Kane as a manifestation of feminist psychosis got a doubling or tripling down today in the wake of a tweet from Milo Yiannopoulos, who resurrected three old columns of his. There's a lot of linked material therein, but I wanted to hit the highlights.

• In which Andrew Auernheimer makes the mistake of sleeping with the former racist, which probably amounts to birds of a feather. Auernheimer, in case you forgot, is "a convicted hacker, a prolific internet troll, a self-confessed anti-semite and, as we reported in October, a white nationalist—though he prefers the term 'pan-European supremacist.'" So he has his reasons to misrepresent Kane's positions, now or then. But her untethered loathing for men — "She does, however, legitimately hate men with an undying rage" — is by now incontestable. Must-read: Meredith L. Patterson's Medium essay outlining her own experiences, and rejection of Kane's entitled self-absorption:
  

  I have since been made painfully aware that my experience is atypical. Every time, it has been a woman who has done so. Every time, it has been a lesson in how the woman I am talking with expects the tech world to relate to her and other people like her.

  After proposing and implementing a feature to an open-source project, she subsequently learned that the developer's list had a brief discussion of her proposal.
  

  There had been interest, but one of the committers had dismissed the idea out of hand because a woman had proposed it. It was the funniest thing I’d heard in months — I literally doubled over laughing at how nonplussed he must have been to see it not only implemented, but implemented to rousing success.

  Whether he intended this as a snub or not, she didn't take it as one at the time. This, from Kane's perspective, turned out to be a huge mistake, because "talking about my overwhelmingly positive relationship with the tech community is nothing more than a callous announcement of 'fuck you, got mine.'" That is, she was too busy doing to worry about the possible social implications of some guy's offhand comment.
• If there's a one-piece takedown of Kane that warrants deep reading, "The Madness of Queen Shanley" appears to be it, providing as it does a significant backgrounder in Kane's dysfunctional, psychopathic behavior. I could spend an entire afternoon reading the links there. Must-read: Elizabeth Spears' Medium interview with Kane, in which Kane even takes softball questions as raging insults, and her editor Bobbie Johnson's followup outlining Kane's lunatic, paranoid response ("harassment", "coerced" among other things) to interview requests from what should have been a friendly reporter.
• Kane confesses racism and mental illness; the obvious must-read is Amelia Greenhall's essay on what it was like to be in close quarters with someone so obviously insane. I don't think she's learned much — the end of the piece appears to be an affirmation of the sorts of things that are explicitly problematic about Kane's totalitarian brand of feminism — but it's interesting to see how very brittle the supposed sisterhood is once there's bragging rights to be established.

Kathryn Finney, A Less Entertaining, Black Shanley Kane

I've previously bagged on Internet hysteric Shanley Kane for her raging paranoia and entitlement, her forays into self-parody, and her editorial rejection of the very notion of competence,  but a new customer recently arrived to add to the list of individuals who believe Everything Is Discrimination, to wit, Kathryn Finney. Finney penned her tale of woe at the aptly-named Medium, as in the Ernie Kovacs sense of neither rare nor well done. Normally, I would let such stuff pass, save for the fact that she lays a broadside at a libertarianism she neither understands nor has interest in; it apparently underpins all her failures, though, and so we are left to contend with her flabby self-absorption:

The idea of forced inclusion is one that goes against the very Libertarian foundations of tech. The freedom to run your life/company as you wish without outside interference is a sacred right in this community. There are venture capitalists, who pride themselves on being free range and not monitoring their investments.

The idea that an outside group, and for the most part women, Latinos, Blacks are outsiders in tech, would exert power, even force, technologists to be more inclusive, is an idea that sends tremors down the objectivist spines of the greater tech community.

The concept of Objectivism  — the focus on individual rights, laissez-faire capitalism, and “facts” — is one that is often hard for outsiders to understand. I didn’t fully understand the philosophy and it’s impact on tech, until I read folks like Ayn Rand and David Boaz.

(Duly noted: the whiny rel="nofollow" in the anchor tag to freaking Wikipedia articles about Objectivism and Ayn Rand, as if she couldn't stand having anyone even learn about these icky things because her linking to them might increase their Google ranking. I excised it in the quoted text above, but it was present in the original. SRSLY.)

Tech is being asked to use their resources to help the runner in back get to the starting line. To be honest, most people in tech are ok with helping as long as they’re allowed to choose when/how/who to help. I’m okay with this, as long as you didn’t use public resources (roads, fire departments, or the internet itself) or take money from a VC firm that has a pension fund as a limited partner, to build you [sic] company.

So, let's decode this nonsense.

• "Tech" = anyone with a company I feel like telling how it should be run, regardless of the fact that I have no investment of any kind whatsoever in it.
• "Runner" = anyone who claims to have certain skills, regardless of applicability or actual competence.

 She quickly pulls out the old MUH ROADS canard —

which is pretty much a validation of the "you didn't build that" nonsense that got Obama into so much trouble back in the 2012 election cycle (though mainly with people who weren't going to vote for him anyway). The thinking seems to go, if you live in a society with roads and police, I get to tell you how to run your company. This couldn't be funnier, more ironic, or more deeply indicative of how These People Think; after all, she confesses how she was "DONE. WITH. TECH." in March of this year, thus putting to an end her own entrepreneurial efforts. It's not at all clear what her company digitalundivided does. Aside from begging for money from like-minded busybodies, providing value to customers does not appear to be one of those things. It seems a common failing, one which hyperbolic firebrand Nero Yiannanopoulos recently bagged on:

4. There Is No Evidence That ‘Diversity’ Improves Company Performance
Seriously: I am calling for someone to do a large-scale study of the diversity efforts of companies who have fallen for this nonsense so that someone, somewhere can show me citable evidence that this does anything for a company other than provide good PR.

Maybe there are some serious figures out there. I’m sure someone with blue armpit hair is brandishing them as we speak. But until a serious, nationwide study emerges that has gone through the (look away now, feminists) peer review process, this fundamental assumption of the women in tech movement remains questionable at best.

Sorry to be blunt. But a company’s obligations are to its shareholders, not Jezebel bloggers’ feelings. So it’s worth finding out what difference a woman’s presence in the workplace actually makes.

Is there some value in having mascots? That's roughly the argument Finney and her cohorts make. Yet despite the fact that there are encouraging signs regarding getting more women involved in programming and STEM fields more broadly, for many of the hard sciences (physics, math and statistics) women asymptotically approach parity with men yet never quite reach it — which suggests women are not intrinsically drawn to these subjects. Until Finney can come up with some benefit for the companies she harangues, she's yowping into the wind.

Afterword: It's probably worth mentioning that Finney's company appears to be about flogging Social Justice and not actually writing code, i.e. there is no mention of appropriate skill sets, delivered applications or websites, etc. It's all about her ego.