Melinda Gates Declares War On Men

All the old feminist malarkey about chimerical wage gaps and the absence of women on corporate boards, in STEM fields, etc. The Harvard Business Review story on the subject is both depressing and predictable, hitting on the “we’re not showing enough women in STEM and positions of power in Hollywood” nonsense, raising the obvious rebuttal of many people believe gender inequalities in professional advancement are a reflection of women’s own choices” while failing to seriously grapple with the real arguments behind it — the usual feminist hand-wave that accompanies such facile, boilerplate dogma.

Then there’s the business of eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace. Here’s their big idea:

That’s why it’s so important that companies, philanthropists, and activists follow the lead of organizations such as TIME’S UP and the Collaborative for Women’s Safety and Dignity, both of which are committed to fighting for equity foreverywoman in the workforce. TIME’S UP is partnering with major organizations like the National Women’s Law Center and the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team to promote an unprecedented policy and advocacy agenda to expand rights and protections for women, whether they work in the C-suite or on the factory floor. The Collaborative for Women’s Safety and Dignity is focused on ensuring that survivors of sexual harassment — and women of color in particular — have a central role in creating solutions to end gender-based violence in the workplace. The Collaborative’s early ideas include building an evidence-based communications hub to help drive more-effective messaging, and seeding and scaling data-driven programs that develop leadership capacity among survivor-led movements.

This is all boilerplate, dogma that assumes “survivor” first, as though every lame effort at a pass were the same thing as violent rape. And we can’t have a whole paragraph without kneeling before the intersectionalists (“women of color”)! She then stumps for mandatory paid time off for caregiving, never mind Sweden’s outcomes there. She observes that women are underrepresented in Congress versus their overall numbers in the population, and opines that “When you look at the data, though, you see that the problem isn’t that women don’t win; it’s that they are less likely to run.” So ... she’s going to force women to run for elected office? Randomly boot male candidates for office?

The muddle-headedness continues ever on. Why do women leave the field? They gamely try to answer:

The Kapor Center, an organization dedicated to diversity in tech, commissioned the Tech Leavers study in 2017, a “first of its kind national study examining why people voluntarily left their jobs in tech.” The study found that workplace culture plays a significant role in driving turnover — especially for women and underrepresented minorities. Nearly two-thirds of the 2,000 respondents indicated that they would have stayed in their jobs had their employers fixed their culture. The study also found that culture problems are expensive — costing the industry more than $16 billion each year.

If you actually dig down to the Kapor Center/Pew survey of people who left the tech field (PDF), on page 24 you will notice a chart of all the reasons why people experienced unfairness; many of them are similar across the board (more white/Asian women were likely to complain about bad management [47%] than any other group, but it was the most popular single complaint of all surveyed), and many are similar across sexes. Particularly striking is the fact that 10% of white/Asian women surveyed had experienced unwanted sexual attention — in contrast with 7% of white/Asian men! If the big problem is inept management, it's hard to see how diversity voodoo would fix that.

The eyelids start to droop. We have read this all before, the tendentious assumption of guilt, the painful, earnest, and venal belief that shamans could right these non-problems. At last, she gets to the real point: she’s going to harangue and pressure companies to make stupid decisions based on whether they have “enough” women (emboldening mine):

Those of us eager to increase women’s power and influence can’t rely on other people’s sense of ethics or self-interest. We need to amplify the pressure they’re feeling. Three constituencies — shareholders, consumers, and employees — hold disproportionate influence over institutions. By mobilizing they can translate that influence into targeted pressure.

Translating back to English: there is no upside to companies for any of this insane program because we have nothing to offer them but pain. There is no quid pro quo for hiring more women — and frankly, there never will be, because people who think as she does operate based on a victimhood ideology that blames men for every disparate outcome, divorcing women from volition, agency, and responsibility. As John Barry writes in Quillette,

A world that has been told—falsely—for decades that gender is merely a social construct, is a world in which a well-intentioned multi-billionaire can throw a huge amount of money at gender equality, despite admitting that this is “only a small fraction of what’s necessary.” But what if the reality is not so much a leaky pipeline as an unstoppable tidal [wave] of women’s choices? What if money can’t make mother nature go away?

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.

The Empty Postmodern Cant Of “Engineering Education”

It is possible, I suppose, for a graduate program to have less value than the one Donna Riley heads, yet it is hard to imagine. Engineering and Engineering Education are two different things, with different needs, and yet here she is, earning an “NSF CAREER award on implementing and assessing pedagogies of liberation in engineering classrooms.“ I have no idea what that might mean in practice, but as Campus Reform informs us, she has gone full-out for duckspeak in the academic peer-reviewed publications:

The leader of Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education recently declared that academic “rigor” reinforces “white male heterosexual privilege.”

Donna Riley, who previously taught engineering at Smith College for 13 years, published an article in the most recent issue of the journal Engineering Education, arguing that academic rigor is a “dirty deed” that upholds “white male heterosexual privilege.”

“One of rigor’s purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality,” she writes, explaining that rigor “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.”

Is “Engineering Education” now a sinkhole into which any idiot may fall? If Ms. Riley is any indicator, it seems like a sort of bug light for those who glean that engineering is somehow important to society, yet lack a certain felicity with numbers, analytical capacity, and rational habits of mind, her Chem E. degree from Princeton notwithstanding. Being so long ago, she seems to have either forgotten all of it, or held a grudge that they made her work so hard. The dean of Purdue’s engineering school, Mung Chiang, has an anodyne web page which makes no mention of her or her bogus accomplishments. The postmodern barbarians are at the gate, but they have not yet acquired the real keys to power.

Update: What a staggering bibliography she developed for her NSF CAREER award; one day I'm sure the Mech. E. department will gaze in wonder at "Power/Knowledge: Using Foucault to promote critical understandings of content and pedagogy in engineering thermodynamics", and the even more wonderfully named, ""You're All a bunch of fucking feminists": Addressing the perceived conflict between gender and professional identities using the Montreal Massacre". Presumably, "other ways of knowing" will involve unicorns or manticores, although I do not recommend flying aboard any aircraft designed using such a regimen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Pink Lacquer

I came across the absurdity of Jewelbots, a friendship bracelet currently in the Kickstarter stage that supposedly will get pre-teen girls interested in programming. To which, why is it that this is even a Thing? Isn't this condescending, the idea that STEM subjects need a special pink lacquer or girls won't take interest in them? There seemingly is no end to gimmicks in this area, and yet, as Pittsburgh's Carnegie Science Center discovered, use the wrong language and the outrage machine kicks in. No matter that "Science With A Sparkle" was the choice of focus-group girls in the same age range, and no matter that it was the result of an earnest (if perhaps tone-deaf) attempt to increase girls' interest in science:

Regarding Girl Scout-specific programming, we have struggled when it comes to enrollments for our Girl Scout programs. In the past, we have offered engineering, chemistry, and robotics programming for Girl Scouts. We created programming to go along with the new Journeys that Girl Scouts use. Unfortunately, no troops signed up for these. The programs that consistently get enrollments are "Science with a Sparkle" and our Sleepovers at the museum.

 Such are the brick walls upon which the cult of Ada Lovelace dash themselves head first. So is there hope here? It's not clear, but one sign might be Harvey Mudd's approach, which college president Maria Klawe says has quadrupled their female computer science graduates, to 40 percent of the total:

At Harvey Mudd we’ve focused on changing four things about learning CS: make it fun, make it relevant, make it not scary and make it clear that lots of kinds of people have careers involving CS. We changed the context of the intro course to “creative problem-solving in science and engineering using computational approaches with Python” instead of “learn to program in Java” and made sure that the homework assignments were a lot of fun. We did not reduce the level of rigor or challenge, and we increased the amount of programming.

We reduced the “scary factor” by separating our first year students into three sections: CS 5 gold for students with little or no programming experience, CS 5 black for students with a fair amount of programming experience, and CS 42 for students with a lot of experience (CS 42 covers the first two courses in the sequence, 5 and 60). Our instructors had private conversations with students who were using up a disproportionate amount of air time in class talking about arcane details and asked them to have those conversations with the instructors in private because other students found their level of knowledge intimidating.

This would seem to remove the people who really love the subject (and have been coding for years prior to college) out of the intro-level classes, where they can dominate professorial mindshare. I'm not entirely sold on this, but if it does indeed work, it's a far sight better — but harder — than bedazzling.

More On Gender Imbalances In STEM: The Hidden (And Real) Good News

I made the mistake of looking at (and actually commenting on) Megan Geuss' silly Ars Technica opinion piece of the Ellen Pao verdict; there's nothing you haven't already seen in TechCrunch or Verge, i.e. It's Important We Have A Conversation About Sexual Bias In Tech (Now Stop Looking At What An Obvious Grifter Our Poster Girl Was). But that got me thinking about a post I happened upon a few days ago at Randal S. Olson's data visualization blog, showing the actual percentage of women graduating with bachelor degrees in STEM fields over time:

With the exception of engineering and computer science, women increasingly near parity with men in mathematics and the hard science fields, and have surpassed them in biology and the social sciences. Further, the so-called "pipeline problem" appears to be mostly a myth, according to a large-scale research study from Cornell, U. Texas, and Northwestern. Women are no more likely to "leak" (i.e. exit) from the "PhD pipeline" than men, something that will no doubt come as a disappointment to TechCrunch and anyone else invested in the idea that brogrammers and other modern bridge trolls are somehow chasing women out of these fields.

"There’s been a lot of focus on this idea of women in particular leaving academic science at far higher rates than men," says Miller, an advanced doctoral student in psychology at Northwestern and lead author of the study. "But in some cases … there’s been scant evidence of some of those gender gaps in persistence, and evidence that those gaps in persistence don’t exist at other time points."

That's not to say, however, that women and men are equally represented in pSTEM academia. Men still outnumber women about 3 to 1, Miller says. But the differences are not explained by gender bias in the pipeline – the percentage of women earning pSTEM degrees is now higher at the doctoral level than at the bachelor's degree level, the researchers found.

"We need to start reframing the conversation from instead of just trying to plug leaks, we need to get more students interested in the first place," Miller says.

Which, basically, is what I've been saying all along. Math instruction, particularly, is almost uniformly horrible at the K-12 level, even in fairly well-off districts. This is personal experience talking; if not for one particularly good instructor in college, I would not have ended up taking the major I did. But that is not the kind of thing feminist advocates wish to emphasize, because it means women might have some responsibility for learning math and how to write solid code (e.g.) instead of mewling pitiously that they are owed a high-status job despite inexperience.

Is Shanley Kane The Feminist Alex Jones?

I don't know the answer to that, but she does seem to have checked off the "paranoid lunatic" box:

We need an extensively funded trained security group to handle threats against women in tech.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

Hey, um, interesting. I wonder who would staff such an outfit? Ninja women? Well, we know who she wants to pay for it:

And the fucking venture capitalists need to pay for it.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

Shanley's approach for dinner tabs must be a hoot!

Look: bullshit apps that provide no value to humanity are getting tens of millions. where is the funding to protect our lives?
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

We are dealing with a group of people who want women in tech to actually fucking die and where the FUCK are the people w/ money & power.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

Probably driving their Ferraris and ignoring squeakers like you!

Oh that's right because the people running silicon valley don't give a FLYING FUCK if we die.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

Meanwhile, habeas corpus?

Men are like WHAT CAN WE DO. RTing us is not fucking going to save our lives. actual action and organization needs to happen.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

Hmm...

The big prize remains ahead:

I DO NOT WANT THE VCS to "invest". i want them to hand over millions of dollars with no strings attached, no ownership and no influence.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

i want no strings money from VC because they have profited from marginalizing us for YEARS and that is how they have their wealth.
— Shanley (@shanley) February 6, 2015

A deranged mind is a terrible thing to waste! Maybe I was wrong likening her to Alex Jones: this is more like the ravings of a trustafarian.

Strip Mining Shanley Kane's Model View Culture For Comedy Gold

Discussing my last post with a friend on Facebook, it occurred to me that any group blog that would run such an obviously self-indulgent and lachrymose whinefest would clearly have other ore to strip mine. And I was not disappointed! Forthwith, a few of the lower-hanging fruit:

• They apparently are new to the idea that renting is not the same thing as buying, and so people can be kicked out of their apartments in favor of new tenants when rents go up. (The editors subscribe to the naive belief that "responsible" renters will check to see whether a prior tenant has been evicted to make room for them. Good luck with that!)
• Stop Swinging Your Dicks, C Programmers! It may come as a surprise to Jean Yang that men engage in mostly pointless trash talking about programming languages, but the reason this must stop now is predictably hilarious:

There is also a gendered perception of language hierarchy with the most “manly” at the top. One Slashdot commenter writes, “Bah, Python is for girls anyways. Everybody knows that PERL is the language of true men.” Someone else responds, “Actually, C is the language of true men…” Such views suggest that women might disproportionately use certain languages, but Ari and Leo found in their programmer surveys that knowledge of programming languages is largely equivalent between genders. Women are slightly more likely to know Excel and men are slightly more likely to know C, C#, and Ruby, but not enough to establish any gendered hierarchy.

A major reason to eradicate these false stereotypes is that they perpetuate biases against women.

It's always all about the women. We esteem Linux kernel contributors over PHP slingers because of the rigor needed for each discipline. If you want to write kernel code, do that, but be prepared for the wrath of Linus along the way. And sorry, ladies, it's not about you. Like, at all. Sisyphus, please pick up the white courtesy phone...

• Interviews Are Too Stressful, So We Shouldn't Have Them, And No Men Because They Skeer Me. No, seriously, this was a thing Anonymous wrote (emboldening mine):
  

  Before each interview, I was overwhelmed by one thought: They’re going to figure out that I’m a fraud. I was afraid that, if I couldn’t understand the problem or arrive at a solution, the interviewer would realize that I don’t have what it takes to be a software engineer.
  Logically, that doesn’t add up. I have a degree in computer science. Internship experience.  A good GPA. I know about data structures and algorithms. I did tech-related extracurriculars. I work on coding projects in my free time. I’m not a fraud.
  
  Yet in interview situations, my anxiety would get the better of me and I’d start to believe that I was wasting the interviewer’s time by simply being there, regardless of how well I performed.  Being a woman writing out code in front of a male interviewer (because let’s face it, it’s almost always a man), or worse, a panel of male interviewers, creates an intimidating power imbalance that shouldn’t exist in a real work environment, much less the hiring process for it.

  Um, hello, I thought you actually wanted a job programming? No? And what happens when you have to explain your ideas to male peers, and male bosses, and ... oh, never mind. What planet do these special snowflakes think they're going to get a job on? (Incidentally, I actually agree with the author that technical interviews are a poor means of grading potential hires, but it beats what came before it, i.e. the silly résumé dance that does nothing to assure the employer that the candidate has even a slight clue.)
• MOAR WIMMENZ IN HARDWARE! At least this rant makes the point that hardware defines the software environment, which is true if trivial; but then, MOAR WIMMENZ, which benefit to the corporation and its customers is left, as ever, unexplored. Something, something, diversity, something, something.
• Look, If You're Gonna Diss The 10X Superstar Programmer Idea, Maybe You Should Provide Better Data? Betsy Haibel's post purporting to debunk the high productivity of superstar coders rightly questions Sackman, Erikson, and Grant's methodology, which used the notoriously flawed "lines of code" metric, long-ago abandoned by anyone seriously studying the subject. But then having claimed to slay the dragon, she suspiciously eschews any actual better data of her own, declaring such creatures an unequivocal "myth". (A fine rebuttal that, indeed, the 10X programmer is alive and well may be had here.) She later whips out what seems to be a running trend in these pieces, that of the horrible "imposter syndrome" monster. Is this a uniquely female problem? I would argue that it's certainly a very common one, for reasons elucidated by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their May, 2014 Atlantic article, "The Confidence Gap". But your lack of confidence does not a crisis for a potential employer make. If anything, it makes you sound like a problem employee waiting to happen.

Shanley Kane, the progenitor of Model View Culture, seems to be something of a fragile flower, having only recently restored her Twitter account to public visibility. Model has her precious stamp all over it. The risible fear of men and of conflict, the refusal to act like a grownup, the asinine insistence on special treatment because, somehow, diversity is better. When do they ever think of the value they're supposed to deliver to an employer?