Tech Memo 3-7: Fill & Download for Free

Well, I know plenty of women who have left the technology field because it was hostile to them. Tech is a pretty shitty place to be if you’re a woman, and you’re quite likely to encounter men who treat you abominably. And all along the pipeline of education to working in tech, women encounter a lot of the same thing. I mean, look at the crap that’s been happening at Uber. Look at the memo at Google. Women have to put up with this shit, and many get tired of it and leave.There’s no telling how many women would be in the tech field if there weren’t bias and if women were treated better, but what we do know is that the percentage of computer programmers who are women[1]is way lower than it was in the 1980s[2]. I mean, women developed the first computer algorithm[3], the first computer program[4], the first assembly language[5], the first compiler[6], the first optimizing compiler[7]. And women didn’t suddenly get less capable, the field got more hostile.So yes, as long as women are chased out of tech due to a hostile environment, it matters. I tell you what, why don’t we worry about fixing that and then when we’re done we can talk about whether there’s still a structural difference in numbers of women vs. men that we can attribute to basic gender differences.Footnotes[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2016-10-20/study-computer-science-gender-gap-widens-despite-increase-in-jobs[2] When Women Stopped Coding[3] Ada Lovelace: The First Computer Programmer[4] http://www.witi.com/center/witimuseum/halloffame/298369/ENIAC-Programmers-Kathleen-McNulty,-Mauchly-Antonelli,-Jean-Jennings-Bartik,-Frances-Synder-Holber-Marlyn-Wescoff-Meltzer,-Frances-Bilas-Spence-and-Ruth-Lichterman-Teitelbaum/[5] Assembly language - Wikipedia[6] History of compiler construction - Wikipedia[7] History of compiler construction - Wikipedia

So many Google answers. What about WeWork and Snap?WeWork isn’t a tech company, but people thought it was. It was so hot 3 years ago. People thought WeWork would revolutionize how WeLive and how WePlay, and how WeThink. People gave a real estate company software company valuations. I’m still befuddled.Last year, WeWork lost nearly $1B. People are still working in WeWork’s but it’s hardly the ‘revolution’ I think people were expecting. Startup funding is also drying up. If that goes, won’t it just be an expensive Regus?[1]Snap has proven to be, as I predicted, a massive swindle for mainstreet investors so far. I’m pissed.You lost 66% of your money if you heard of Snapchat from your grandkids and invested money in it…10/7/18 Edit: Snapchat’s turnaround plan is not inspiring either: 9 highlights from Snapchat CEO’s 6,000-word leaked memo on survival.Edit 9/27/2019: WeWork’s has IPO failed laughably. The CEO has been fired. And there have been tons of posts about its business model (or lack thereof). Snap has doubled, but still down from its IPO.Footnotes[1] As WeWork Works To Take On Expensive Debt, A Fresh Look At Its Financial Performance

As a moderate conservative my biggest problem with the whole issue is that Damore’s claim of a cultural progressive bias embedded within Google is much more worth investigating than his shaky claims of biological reasons to explain a gender gap in technology fields.The media has labeled this memo with the clickbait worthy “anti-diversity,” but it is more about affirmative action practices by Google with a strong subpoint that Google promotes a culture that celebrates ethnic and gender diversity but yet simultaneously silences political diversity. Damore’s point is that by promoting an ideology of diversity over merit, these efforts result in furthering greater friction between groups and fosters unintended consequences.The problem: Damore offers little empirical evidence for some of his bold biological claims to explain gender disparity in tech and by focusing on his reasons for gender disparity as biological in nature he undermines the rest of his arguments.Damore’s memo is a messy and deeply flawed document which makes some downright repugnant claims about women and never fully proves how diversity of representation is bad for business, or bad for group outcomes - including especially men. That merit is perhaps not the sole metric to Google employment or operations is also completely within the rights of the Google corporation but this also never discussed.I see three issues at play here with the James Damore memo:How the media frames the memo.The contents within the memo.The fallout and reaction to the memo.MEDIA FRAMING:If you only read the media headlines, plus the one or two sentence Twitter social media reaction blurbs regarding the memo, your conclusion might be that the sole focus of Damore’s document is the claim that biology is to blame for tech’s gender gap.But this is not the full extent of what the 10 page Damore memo says and although the document has been shrilly labeled some kind of “anti-diversity” diatribe it would be more appropriate to label it a “gender gap/affirmative action” document.The media controlled the narrative of the events by labeling the Damore document as “anti-diversity” thereby prejudicing the way the document is perceived before anyone even reads it. The real meat of the Damore document is to question Google’s workplace programs which spend a good deal of time focusing on bias, and gaining diversity. Damore is then also asking Google to examine if as a company entity it might in fact hold it’s own embedded biases.CONTENTS:If Damore had stuck with probing the idea that Google has spent much effort to address uncovering conscious and unconscious bias relating to race and gender yet fails to address embedded political or ideological bias within it’s own organization, he would have perhaps struck a deep and resonate chord especially with conservatives in Silicon Valley who perhaps feel shamed or even silenced about their political orientation.Instead Damore flounders with the idea that the gender gap in tech - and specifically software engineering - has a mostly biological basis.He makes unsupported statements such as male/female biological diffences are “universal across human cultures,” ( page 3) and that “humans are generally biased towards protecting females,” (page 7) yet makes no effort to back up such bold declarations with an ounce of empirical evidence. Social science and anthropological research shows that differences in the sexes do not present themselves “universal across human cultures “ (and what Damore means by that statement is never made clear) plus many centuries of written history of rape, sexual slavery, and unequal social status especially legally in many countries today and in current events shows clearly that humans are not culturally or biologically predisposed to protect women or treat women more highly compared to men.Several articles have been written addressing Damore’s point by point claims which do not hold up with scientific data. Business Insider did a nice concise job: A Google employee was fired after blaming biology for tech’s gender gap — but the science shows he's wrongPerhaps most damaging to his own argument is in his first chart addressing traits of women versus men he significantly states:“Populations have significant overlap. Reducing people to their group identify and summing the average as representative ignores this overlap (this is bad and I don’t endorse that).”Yet for the rest of his memo Damore goes about doing exactly that -reducing women to stereotypes.Damore takes a myriad of gender trait stereotypes of males and females and then goes about applying them as a core reason why women are not more highly represented in software engineering.The result is that he loses any traction he might have in examining:The idea of lack of political diversity at Google.That affirmative action efforts might have unintended consequences.Instead by hammering on gender differences and the very nebulously labled “personality” differences as perhaps the biological reason behind a gender gap Damore loses out on developing a fully nuanced open-ended discussion on gender gap in tech. A deeper discussion would include an examination of any embedded environmental, school, social cues, and familial upbringing in regard to preparing, pre-sorting and funneling - or not funneling - women into tech jobs. Social scientists would include in any investigation the 18 plus years of continual development which leads up to a young person choosing their career. Environment and social structures as well as genetics and biology is crucial to examine any topic about social status, roles and outcomes.To fully examine this issue of a gender gap, you need to look at “nature plus nurture” in action, yet no where does Damore address the nurture or environmental aspects.Damore really goes off the rails in his closing suggestions portion at the end of his document when he makes such head scratching statements such as, “Demoralize diversity,” and “Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representations in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prison and school dropouts.”Hmmm, but no. To make the slippery slope argument of equivalence that affirmative action efforts in the workplace is just like wanting equal representation in prison, deaths and school dropouts totally undermines any real interesting or thought provoking talking points Damore started out his memo addressing such as unintended consequences of workplace affirmative action/diversity programs.As a more moderate to liberal minded conservative, I do not have an issue with efforts to promote greater diversity. Plus Google as a corporation can make any number of corporate decisions and decide what is good for business. However, in discussions with my more right-leaning conservative friends, many other conservatives do take issue with affirmative action efforts and would prefer to advocate for meritocracy as a basis for employment practices. I tend to differ from them.FALLOUT:So what will be the fallout from the James Damore memo?Conversation will continue on about his ideas, about gender, about gender representation differences in technology fields, and about the reasons for this lack of representation of women in technology.Huge media coverage aided likely by the resulting Google firing has now given Damore a much larger platform and attracted a much larger audience than perhaps he ever intended.For conservatives they will take Damore’s firing as evidence that one of Damore’s premises is true: That Silicon Valley powerfully promotes a very specific set of progressive politics and squelches open discussion with those who disagree.Whether you agree or not with Damore’s arguments put forth, Google perhaps can still come out ahead of criticism by using this as an opportunity for open discussion, as a springboard to examine some important issues. They can use this as an opportunity to daylight concepts, perhaps mining this as a public relations coup by hosting a real debate style open media event. Let controversial, distasteful or even repugnant ideas be subjected to the cold hard light of day and dissected. At the end of a rational analysis, all will be revealed. The first attempt at this has been thwarted, but maybe it will take place in the near future: Google CEO cancels town hall due to leaksFor many conservatives the biggest takeaway for them is by firing Damore, Google has essentially proven his point that within the company there exists an embedded left-leaning political bias and not only are certain topics verboten but those holding views divergent from the majority progressive viewpoint will be silenced.