Closer To The Ideal

There is a story in the Economist about the practice of sex-selection by parents having children. I find it interesting that India and China have felt the need to ban the practice, but Sweden has legalized it:

The use of sex-selective abortion was banned in India in 1994 and in China in 1995. It is illegal in most countries (though Sweden legalised the practice in 2009). But since it is almost impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection, the practice remains widespread. An ultrasound scan costs about $12, which is within the scope of many—perhaps most—Chinese and Indian families. In one hospital in Punjab, in northern India, the only girls born after a round of ultrasound scans had been mistakenly identified as boys, or else had a male twin.

The preference for boys is universal. Even in the United States, there remains a preference for boys – a couple that has 2 daughters is 15% more likely to get a divorce than a couple that has 2 sons. I would guess that some sub-cultures in America skew the results by having a preference that is stronger than that 15% indicates.

However, I think the practice should be legal everywhere. Why not allow parents take this to whatever extreme they want? If a society ends up with 3 boys for every girl, then perhaps the parents will begin to re-think their attitudes? Apparently some areas are close to having 3 boys for every girl:

If you take just second children, however, which are permitted in the province, the ratio leaps to 146 boys for every 100 girls. And for the relatively few of births where parents are permitted a third child, the sex ratio is 167. Even this startling ratio is not the outer limit. In Anhui province, among third children, there are 227 boys for every 100 girls, while in Beijing municipality (which also permits exceptions in rural areas), the sex ratio reaches a hard-to-credit 275. There are almost three baby boys for each baby girl.

Perhaps the value of women will rise, when they are scarce enough? Apparently this is already happening, in small ways:

Violence is not the only consequence. In parts of India, the cost of dowries is said to have fallen (see article). Where people pay a bride price (ie, the groom’s family gives money to the bride’s), that price has risen.

The thing is, this is clearly a trend that can not continue forever. At some point there will be so many boys and so few girls that a re-thinking of the value of the various genders becomes somewhat inevitable. This apparently happened in South Korea:

Yet the story of the destruction of baby girls does not end in deepest gloom. At least one country—South Korea—has reversed its cultural preference for sons and cut the distorted sex ratio (see chart 3).

I would guess that the men of this generation will grow up opposed to this practice. These are the men who will lose out the most – pure math indicates that a huge number of them will never be able to marry. By the time these men are 25, they will likely be committed to ending the practice. They will know how much harm it can do. As China’s one-child policy makes clear, the government can create distorted incentives when it intervenes in a couple’s decisions about what children to have. I think Sweden got this one right – the government should never be in the business of telling a couple what kind of children they can or can not have.

This is pretty funny, except, sadly, it is wrong:

Strictly speaking the complaint was phrased in terms of “diversity”. This is the peculiar diversity of the American academy, where a gay Jewish man in New York, an Englishman in London, a 4th generation zainichi kankokujin (ethnically Korean who was born in Japan), and an Irish Catholic dogmatist living in a rice field in Central Japan are so close they are practically brothers. True diversity, of course, is the 5-member iStockPhoto of attractive twenty-somethings sitting on the college quad who check different boxes on the demographic inventory and think alike in every way that matters.

That is a good joke about how diversity is often defined in the US, but my friends in the Academy are generally showing more nuance, especially these last 4 or 5 years. The true stereotype being attacked here is the one formulated mostly by marketing departments at corporations across the land. The iStockPhoto described sounds like something out of the Apple marketing division, no doubt used to promote iPhones.

This is a good question:

If demographic diversity is a proxy for diversity of thought, is there some reason we’re not measuring diversity of thought? Is it hard to measure somehow?

Yes, it is hard to measure, especially if you want to measure diversity of good ideas. It is impossible to measure diversity of good ideas when you are hiring, because only the passage of time will reveal if an idea was good or not. Starting with a diversity of staff is form of buying insurance – get diverse staff and hopefully you will get a diversity of thought.

Short term anecdotal evidence is bad:

I mean, I would be sympathetic to “We can’t build products for women if we don’t have more women in the room” if it weren’t so laughably false. (Context if you need it: 90% of my customers are ladies. They’re also older, better educated, less coastal, and more religious than would be anticipated of the customer base of most B2C startups. I’m pretty much your typical 27 year old male engineer… well, for certain quirky values of “typical”.)

Diversity of thought is useful in the same way diversity of genetic traits is useful – it is at its most useful in a crisis, when you face an inflection point. Therefore, it plays out mostly over the long term. You need 15 years of data before anecdotal data begins to carry weight. You need to survive a crisis.

My beef with the discourse of “diversity” in a nutshell: it screams “give us more women” and whispers “give us more women like us”. We want more women to be early stage startup employees working for equity and battling code until 2 AM in the morning.

Not sure who the word “us” refers to. I’ve read arguments that career trajectories should be reshaped to allow parents to both work and spend time with their family. But, to me, the question of “Why are there no women in tech” is less interesting than “Why are there less women in tech than 20 years ago?” One can’t argue “It’s biological” when one is comparing one group of women to another.

But my gut instinct has always been that people avoid joining startups because joining startups sucks. The question isn’t what are we doing that’s keeping ladies out of the Valley, gentlemen. The question should be why in God’s name are we still here.

A common rhetorical technique – Phillip Greenspun tried the same thing here. Also, pointless. As long as men are willing to do startups, it remains a valid issue to ask why are there so few women.

Your sales pitch as a startup is “Turn your back on all that! We’ll work you 100 hours a week, pay you nothing while requring you to live in a freakishly expensive area, give you social status one rung above the homeless, take two to three years of your life, ruin your relationships, and with better than 90% probability subject you to the most crushing defeat of your professional career with no lateral move except into doing the same thing over again.”

Maybe there is something in this. The bit about “100 hours” is nonsense – I’ve got 3 female friends who became doctors, all of them had to work an endless stretch of 70 to 90 hour weeks. Women are not afraid of working extremely long hours. Possibly the extreme riskiness of startups plays some role, though I’d be curious how that risk interacts with gender. My friends who became doctors at least knew that if they could make it through then the rest of their future would be relatively assured.

If we fix this, it will result in more ladies at the margin seeing startups as an attractive career choice. It might not change the percentages in the Valley. Heck, it might even make it more skewed towards the guys. I don’t profess to know and, honestly, I don’t really care that much either — it is worth doing regardless for the benefits to human welfare.

True, most of the advice is good in terms of human welfare. I suspect most of it is wholly irrelevant to gender issues.

I find the emphasis here strangely misplaced. Here is an article where someone seems to argue that porn is making men into bad lovers:

She’s up against a lot. She blames the “puritanical, double-standards culture, where people believe that a teen abstinence campaign will actually work, where parents are too embarrassed to have conversations about sex with their children, and where educational institutions are terrified of being politically incorrect if they pick up those conversations. So it’s not surprising that hardcore porn has become de facto sex education.”

But, she says in her talk, that her site is “absolutely not about judgment. This is not about good and bad. Sex is the area of human experience that embraces the vastest possible range of proclivities. It is also not a judgment of hardcore porn. I am a fan of hardcore pornography. I watch it regularly myself; although my overriding criteria when I select it is to choose something that does not overly resemble open-heart surgery. But because the porn industry is driven by men, funded by men, managed by men, directed by men and targeted at men, porn tends to represent one worldview. It tends to say this is how it is. And what I want to say is, ‘not necessarily.’”

Some kind of amnesia is clouding the conversation. I’ve had several female friends tell me about lovers who wanted to re-enact scenes from porn, so I do not doubt that is happening. But the underlying theme is “porn is making men bad lovers.” It’s as if the last 50 years of cultural debate is being forgotten. Women have been expressing discontent about the quality of their male lovers for a long time. Remember Fear of Flying by Erica Jong? What about Betty Dodson – why did she feel people needed to be educated about sex? What about all the many books that have been written about the element of coercion or manipulation that sometimes come up in sexual relationships? For instance, in the extreme, aginst our will by Susan Brown Miller? What about Robin Warshaw’s work on date rape? Doris Lessing said her first husband was a prude and a bad lover.

I could list a hundred other books here. There has been a conversation going on, for decades, about sexuality, and whether and where men are being good lovers to women. It takes a bad case of amnesia to argue “The Internet is making porn available to men and so suddenly they are not good as lovers any more.”

All the same, it sounds like a good cause. Cindy Gallop wants to educate people about sex. Great. Other than the odd absence of any sense of history, it doesn’t sound like a bad cause.

But it is worth remembering the history that should be shaping the conversation. And if we wanted to list all of the things that have sometimes created a terrible space between the genders, the list is long, and it goes back a long way. For instance, consider the story that Susie Bright has told of how the army de-humanized her boyfriend (back in the 1970s):

Bobbie went into the USAFA a civil rights activist, a self-identified feminist, a socialist. He dressed like a Black Panther in his senior yearbook photo— with a leather suit jacket and an afro that had to be 15″ in diameter! We met doing the UFW lettuce and grapes boycott. He was in the Red Tide, our high school underground newspaper.

Bobbie said he wanted to join to be the “spook who sat by the door,” to reform or subvert from within. His skeptical friends said he was naive, that he’d be the one who’d get “subverted”— but there was no talking him out of it. He was the eldest son of a military family, and named after his father, a decorated officer.

In addition to the group beatings, waterboarding, electric shock, sleep deprivation, sound/noise torture, starvation, dehydration, he was also forced to eat human feces and vomit, in accompaniment with the beatings. They had replicas of “tiger cages’ they kept him in. He wrote me that after awhile of knowing it was all a training, he couldn’t hold the frame anymore and it became nothing but his reality. His sense of time and self evaporated.

Mission accomplished.

Although his captors were supposed to be Vietcong, they were largely white kids who’d been instructed to scream everything in “fake” Oriental accents that would have been absurd if they weren’t so sadistic. They were supposed to target his vulnerabilities, which in his case, meant humiliating him for being African-American.

His father was Air Force— and I think even he was taken aback by the SERE training. Afterward, as far as I could tell, Bobbie had a psychological breakdown. He wasn’t the same guy. I was afraid of him.

They’d given him some very peculiar advice about women— it creeped me out. I was, like, “HEY, it’s me, remember?” But he didn’t. He hurt me when we made love, my back bled. He acted like we were supposed to play this out until I got “tougher” and could take it. It didn’t have anything to do with “kink” or fun.

After he came, that time I bled so much, I got out of the room and pretended I had some urgent phone from my dad, his mother, any distraction to get him out of the house. I felt cold as a crypt after he left, and I have never seen him again. I didn’t tell anybody. That was thirty-five years ago.

A very odd 1st Amendment case. The creepiest thing about this case is that the district attorney invented a “five-week re-education program of his own design, which included topics like ‘what it means to be a girl in today’s society‘”. I do not want to live in a society where district attorney’s have the discretion to invent their own re-education programs. Such programs need to be invented by the legislature, not the executive or judicial branch.

On January 15, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit heard arguments in Miller, et al. v. Skumanick, a child pornography case that, oddly, involves no child pornography. The case goes back to 2006, when two girls aged 12 were photographed by another friend on her digital camera. The two girls were depicted from the waist up, wearing bras. In a separate situation, our third client was photographed as she emerged from the shower, with a towel wrapped around her waist and the upper body exposed. Neither of the photos depicted genitalia or any sexual activity or context. In 2008 the girls’ school district learned that these and other photos were circulating, confiscated several students’ cell phones, and turned the photos in question over to the Wyoming County district attorney, George Skumanick, Jr.

Skumanick sent a letter to the girls and their parents, offering an ultimatum. They could attend a five-week re-education program of his own design, which included topics like “what it means to be a girl in today’s society” and “non-traditional societal and job roles.” They would also be placed on probation, subjected to random drug testing, and required to write essays explaining how their actions were wrong. If the girls refused the program, the letter explained, the girls would be charged with felony child pornography, a charge that carries a possible 10-year prison sentence.

A single, individual district attorney may have standards that diverge from that of the majority. The legislature is more likely to take into account the full balance of concerns that need to be addressed, from majority norms to the civil rights of those in minority. While miscarriages of justice can arise from any branch of government, they are more likely when a single individual government agent assumes they have the power to make up new programs unilaterally. In this case, it is clear the district attorney has views that violate both due process and also the norms that are probably held by reasonable people:

Interestingly, none of the classmates who distributed the photos received letters from Skumanick. Only the girls who appeared in the photos were threatened with child porn charges. If the DA did in fact regard these photos as pornographic, why not file distribution charges against the boys? A clue may be found in their argument before the 3rd Circuit. In narrating the case, their attorney explained how, after the girls were photographed, “high school boys did as high school boys will do, and traded the photos among themselves.”

Ultimately, that’s what this case comes down to: one man’s view on how a young woman should conduct herself. The boys who traded the photos bear no responsibility and require no re-education. Instead the girls are threatened with felony charges and life-long registration as sex offenders. To apply such a penalty, designed to protect minors against exploitation, is a grotesque misapplication — and that’s once again assuming that the photographs in question could possibly be construed as pornographic. In reality, there was no way such charges would ever stick, and the DA’s office had to know this. The child porn charges were merely a threat, to force the parents to subject their children to Skumanick’s moral view of the world, where any and all child nudity is illegal and bras and bikinis are pornographic.

Not sure what to make of supposed graduate students (in economics) supposedly bad-mouthing one of the winners of the Nobel Prize. Especially hard to understand are the attacks based mostly on gender. In 2010? The attacks suggesting that economics are better than political science are also worrisome – the events of the last 18 months have taught us that some in the economics profession are already frighteningly out of touch with reality. To have young economists closing their minds to what various disciplines can teach them would amount to a worrisome trend, if it turns out to be anything more than ranting on a website.

It got worse and a bit embarrassing when Steven Levitt noted that he too did not know who she was but thought that “the economics profession is going to hate the prize going to Ostrom even more than the Republicans hated the Peace Prize going to Obama”.

Unfortunately, as I found out Levitt was right. Nowhere was this more evident than when I went to the Economics Job Rumors website. The site is frequented by economics graduate students who are on the academic job market, and as such is a reasonable barometer of the ways in which such students in the field are thinking. What I found was really disturbing. There were over 200 responses to a thread called“NOBEL BULLSHIT” in which the undisguised ignorance, tribalism and vicious misogyny of the graduate student pool were starkly evident. Here are a choice few comments which are, I hate to say, not unrepresentative of most of the discussion there.

“This is the problem with Affirmative Action: last time a woman tried to go to the moon, the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after the launch. Now this is the end of Economics.”

“Economics is superior. Don’t let political science conteminate (sic) us”

“she’s not top 5% on ideas on any ranking!!”

“susan athey or nancy stokey if you want a woman. This girl seems to be a political scientist. I don’t think she has published original research in any major economics journal”

This is the average opinion among the pool of people in their late twenties and early thirties who are going to be the teachers of economics and the leaders of thinking about economics and society in the future. It is enough to make you want to quit the discipline in disgust. All right, yes, anonymous posts bring out the worst in people, but the absolute nastiness of these responses suggest a visceral set of reactions which lays bare some of the culture of economics as a discipline. These include a thoroughgoing disregard for other disciplines (even those we take our ideas from), an inherent inability to respect ideas which do not conform to the strictures of what is acceptable knowledge (top-tier peer reviewed journal articles) and a deep-seated sexism which allows a young brash student to call the 76 year old past president of the American Political Science Association ‘this girl’.

Clay Shirky wrote a stupid post suggesting women did not know how to promote themselves. Some of the reactions in the comments are very good:

Annalee says:

Obviously women need to speak up more. And men need to shut up more, especially when women are talking.

I’ve definitely taken the “act like a braggart” approach to my career, and honestly it’s not just a matter of speaking up. It’s a matter of speaking up over and over again, even when somebody is interrupting you or telling you that you have no right to speak in the first place.

I wish the problem were just training women to raise their hands more often, but of course it isn’t. It’s training men to notice when the women are raising their hands. And training the men NOT to raise their hands when they clearly do not have the answers.

This is also good:

Patty Zevallos says:

I get real tired of hearing other people telling me what is going on inside my head because I am female. I have no problem promoting myself. I have no problem jumping into something a bit tricky to get ahead. I have been highly successful at doing the work I want to do in media production (see http://www.pbzproductions.com/resume/) for 31 solid years, and don’t have any problem explaining how good I am in my field. I currently am getting calls and emails about high-end web design jobs because you, Clay Shirky, have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

The problem is that you are so completely out of touch with what is going on. You have no idea that the Green Living movement (www.pbzproductions.com/green/) is up and running and initiated mostly by women, that women are getting organized and helping each other, that women-owned businesses are growing and thriving.

Perhaps you should actually talk to people instead of ranting.

This is also good:

kim sbarcea says:

Frankly, I’m amazed that this “rant” even occurs in 2010. Having said this, I think you are barking up the wrong tree. The fact that organisations or senior management might actually allow men to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks (to use your words) is the problem. Not whether women can or cannot (or even should) act in the same manner.

Maybe it’s just Australia, but I have worked with many women who can be described as self-aggrandizing, prone to extreme exaggeration, arrogant, nasty, back-stabbing, overly self-confident and so on.

This is also good:

T.T. says:

You know that calling a badly argued essay a “rant” doesn’t make it less badly argued, right?

“…not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.”

This statement is a special case of “women are Z”. Women are Z. They just are. You know that. You can make categorical claims because your experience is universal. If only we could all be so special.

This last one hits the angle that I find most surprising, that Shirky would sink to the level of making categorical, universal claims about women. In 2010? Is this some kind joke? Surely it suggests mental laziness if anyone who starts a sentence with “All black people are…” or “All women are…”

I wrote my own thoughts about the essay in the post called The most disappointing essay Clay Shirky has ever written.

I usually like Clay Shirky a lot, though his most recent piece seems poorly reasoned. Shirky suggests that women are not aggressive enough in negotiations, but then he mentions how this hurts them in 2-sided markets, and he lists colleges as one such market. Did he miss the fact that the majority of all college graduates are now women? Nearly half of medical school students nationwide are now female. Young women are out-earning men in some areas and professions:

Women’s pay relative to men’s rose rapidly from 1980 to 1990 (from 60.2% to 71.6%), and less rapidly from 1990 to 2004 (from 71.6% to 76.5%), though young women have started to outearn young men in some large urban centers with young women earning up to 20% more than their male counterparts.

But women with children have less negotiating power:

However, other trends are decidedly negative: a study at Cornell University concluded in 2005 found that women with children were less likely to be hired and if hired would be paid a lower salary than male applicants

These 2 facts suggest that raising kids limits women’s negotiating power. Women don’t have an innate lack of negotiating skills, but the circumstances of raising children imposes some hard constraints, that fall disproportionately on women. Shirky is ranting about the wrong issue.

This is what Shirky says:

This worry isn’t about psychology; I’m not concerned that women don’t engage in enough building of self-confidence or self-esteem. I’m worried about something much simpler: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.

Remember David Hampton, the con artist immortalized in “Six Degrees of Separation”, who pretended he was Sydney Poitier’s son? He lied his way into restaurants and clubs, managed to borrow money, and crashed in celebrity guest rooms. He didn’t miss the fact that he was taking a risk, or that he might suffer. He just didn’t care.

It’s not that women will be better off being con artists; a lot of con artists aren’t better off being con artists either. It’s just that until women have role models who are willing to risk incarceration to get ahead, they’ll miss out on channelling smaller amounts of self-promoting con artistry to get what they want, and if they can’t do that, they’ll get less of what they want than they want.

…And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

Again, it is tough to reconcile the career success that young women are having with Shirky’s narrative of “They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists”.

This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read in any of Shirky’s essays:

Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more.

Maybe “we ask people to cross gender lines all the time” but usually the goal is to make the world a better place. For instance, “encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners” probably makes the world a better place, whereas encouraging women to be “anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards” does not. It is really disappointing to be reading stuff like this in an essay by Shirky.

However, even in an ideal future, self-promotion will be a skill that produces disproportionate rewards, and if skill at self-promotion remains disproportionately male, those rewards will as well. This isn’t because of oppression, it’s because of freedom.

If professional women in their 20s continue to pass by professional men in their 20s, then clearly women know how to promote themselves. If women with children continue to be handicapped in their careers, then we are dealing with oppression, not freedom. At the very least, we are dealing with work practices and family practices that are in need of innovation.

In these circumstances, people who don’t raise their hands don’t get called on, and people who raise their hands timidly get called on less.

…It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions.

Surely someone hacked into Shirky’s blog and is trying to discredit him by publishing an idiotic essay? Where is the nuance and subtlety of thought that gave us such classics as Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality? I feel like I’m reading a fundamentalist version of Shirky, a stripped down version of Shirky, lacking any of the careful qualifiers that grace his previous work.

My main problem with his essay is the broad-brush nature of his description of the problem. It is pointless to talk as if women are doing poorly in every profession, when nearly 50% of new doctors are female.

Since Shirky works in and around the tech industry, I suspect that a lot of his remarks were aimed at the tech industry. Had he explicitly said “What I’m saying here only applies to the tech industry” then he would have been on slightly safer ground. There are certainly some odd gender imbalances in the tech industry, which I just wrote about in my last post.

I feel like I know where Shirky is coming from. I’ve come close to writing a similar essay. I have seen talented women sabotage their own careers. For some reason, this happens more in the tech industry than anywhere else. I have felt a frustration similar to the one that I think Shirky was trying to express.

The title of this blog post is “The most disappointing essay Clay Shirky has ever written”. Why am I disappointed? Mostly because I have come to expect a great deal of emotional honesty from Shirky. In posts such as “The Failure of #amazonfail” he does a rare thing: he admits that he made mistakes of judgement due to being caught up in the emotion of the moment, and he also talks himself back to sanity, all the while being candid about the emotions he is experiencing. That kind of emotional transparency is missing from “A rant about women.” I understand the frustration of seeing talented women sabotage their own careers. On the one hand, I know it is damn tempting to rant about that frustration. On the other hand, I think it is important that I, and Shirky, keep ourselves from expressing that frustration in untruthful ways.

Shirky has been a supporter of many politically progressive causes. So have I. Most progressive activists occassionally suffer some moment of burn out, during which time, they may say some damn reactionary things. They lean on their reputation at such times. I’ve done it. Shirky is doing it here. His essay amounts to “I will say some unqualified, harsh things here, to vent my frustration, and surely people will cut me some slack, because my previous progressive efforts have surely earned me some good will.” There is some truth in that – no one will change their opinion of Shirky simply because he wrote one bad essay. But we will all feel disappointed.

Clay Shirky just wrote a stupid post that suggested that women are not aggressive enough in negotiations. The comment thread following that post are full of good reasons why the post should be ignored. I wrote my own post and pointed out that 20 something women are doing as well, economically, as men. For most industries, Shirky’s remarks should be dismissed as factually wrong.

Still, there is something odd going on in the tech industry, regarding gender. As I I wrote in The strange anomaly of gender issues in tech

Over the last 30 years women have made dramatic gains in field such as law, medicine, management and science. Almost 50% of new doctors are women, so that is a field that has achieved near perfect equality. But there is something wrong with the tech industry, and with computer programming in particular. The percent of computer scientists who are female and who are earning advanced degrees peaked in 1989 and has since retreated. What explains this retreat, when women are still advancing in almost all other professions?

And in Women and math:.

I’d been assuming that women’s retreat from computer science had to be mirrored by weakness in math, but if women are making huge strides in math, then the anomaly of their retreat from computer science is even more puzzling than before.

As near as I can tell, the trend is mostly confined to the US. I searched Google but was unable to find hard data on the trends in other countries. Still, in online tech forums, I see women take part in conversations about programming and where they have a public profile, I notice they are often from countries such as Israel and India.

I do not doubt that this issue is multi-faceted. I’ll comment on one small part of it.

In the US, one of the big trends of the last 20 years has been the relative decline of the Fortune 500. The largest companies now employ less people than they used to, both in absolute terms and in terms relative to the working population. Especially in the software industry, I’ve the sense that the small 10 person company is more common now than what prevailed in the 1980s. My guess is that this fact somehow relates to the gender issues effecting the tech industry. Why this should be so is hard to say, though I can make various guesses. Certainly, the small shops tend to make long hours seem normal, and long hours might interfere with the kind of family life some women may prefer. At web startups, working 60 hours a week seems normal.

Deborah Tannen, in her book, “You Just Don’t Understand” writes about a type of mis-communication among the genders that I think might have more impact at small firms than at large firms. Tannen says that women will often try to create emotional closeness, a friendship, by admitting vulnerability, and men generally do not do this, at least not at work. A single anecdote will have to stand in for my experiences here.

At one point I was working for a small startup and I was put in charge of hiring the next programmer. I interviewed several people and eventually decided on one who I thought would work out. She was 31 years old and had 8 years experience working on projects similar to what we wanted to do. She had, in fact, worked on projects far more complex than what we were considering. On her first day of working for us, we had a meeting: her, my boss, and myself. I recall this conversation:

Boss: We are excited to have you here.

New programmer: I am excited to be here.

Boss: Lawrence was very impressed with some of your previous work.

New programmer: Yeah?

Boss: Yes. The auto-sorting MP3 database, for instance.

New programmer: Oh, yeah, I guess. I really feel like I could do better than that.

Boss: Uh, you mean you’ve learned a lot since then?

New programmer: Yeah, I didn’t know what I was doing back then. And it was really buggy.

Boss: Oh? Lawrence seemed to think highly of it.

Me (now I have to defend my decision to hire her): I typed some adjectives describing music I liked, and the software was able to guess other kinds of music that I liked. It worked smoothly.

Boss: That does sound impressive.

New programmer: Really?

Boss: Uh, yes?

Me: We need someone with experience writing those kinds of sorting algorithms.

New programmer: well, I am really looking forward to working with you. I think it is really great that you are trying to do such interesting stuff.

Boss: Good. So, you think you could write something similar for videos, but this time match against both keywords and buying patterns?

New programmer: um, well, I sure look forward to trying. This is really ambitious, what you are trying to do.

Boss: but, uh, are you up for it?

New programmer: well, what kind of time frame are you thinking about?

Me: We can roll this out incrementally over the course of months. No one is expecting you to do all this in a week or two.

New programmer: Oh good! Yes, I think a few months would be perfect for this project! I was so scared when you first described it. It sounded overwhelming.

Boss: Oh?

Me: This project is actually less complicated than the system you built at your previous job. I imagine the database of multimedia that you did for them was enormous. I see their advertisements on television all the time. They are doing, what, $50 million a year in business? How long did you work on that system?

New programmer: from 1996 to 2002.

Me: So you’ve seen how simple projects evolve into complex ones, and how a software project needs to managed and maintained over several years?

New programmer: yes.

Me: Well, what you’ll be doing here is a lot simpler than that.

New programmer: I’m really excited to get going with it.

Me: Me too.

Boss: Me too.

Possibly someone like Shirky might read this as the woman lacking self-confidence, but, having read Tannen, I thought the new programmer was trying to create friendship by admitting vulnerability. Regardless, of what Shirky might think, I can say with great certainty that my boss was reading the woman as lacking self-confidence. My boss was one of the most arrogant and ego-driven people I’d ever met, he communicated with other people mostly by boasting, and he generally expected the same in return. He was clearly surprised that the woman would reveal even a trace of doubt on her first day on the job. The new programmer did not know him well and apparently missed the degree of surprise that he expressed. I had the sense that our meeting could have gone badly. I felt certain she would be good for the job, so I defended her. She turned out to be a very talented programmer, and I worked with her till I left the company, 18 months later.

Work is very personal at small firms – that is the joy and the pain of small firms. At larger firms, there are layers of bureaucracy. We often think of bureaucracy as a bad thing, but it does allow for some checks and balances to be put on people’s impulses and judgments. At small firms, a single bad encounter with an arrogant and ego-driven entrepreneur might be enough to curtail your involvement at the firm. At a larger firm, you’d get some 2nd chances. I could be wrong, and surely this is only one aspect of the issue, but I suspect the larger firms offered a more effective environment for women in tech.

Building a diverse team is important, but most of the advice that I see completely misses the point:

Ever notice that IT teams are kind of homogeneous? You’re not the only one. According to ComputerWorld, “Over the past few years, the number of women and underrepresented minorities in IT has been dropping steadily.” The article, “Recruiting for a More Diverse IT Staff,” offers 7 tips on how to do so:

• Adjust the language in your job description.

• Recruit at women’s and minority-serving institutions.

• Reach out through professional groups and attend job fairs for minorities and women in IT.

• Promote work/life balance and a flexible workplace.

• Focus on service delivery and IT’s role in the big picture.

• Make time for training and skills advancement during the workday.

• Set up mentoring programs, affinity groups, and communities for women and underrepresented minorities.

I’ll focus on the issue of gender. The above advice would make sense if the situation was something like “Women have never expressed interest in tech, so they must be encouraged.” But that is not the situation we face in the United States. Women earning advanced degrees in computer science peaked in 1989 and has since steadily declined. So the situation we face in the United States is “Women thought the tech industry was an attractive career path 20 years ago but they no longer see it that way”. The next question is, what changed? The above advice does not seem to address the fundamental issues.

It’s important to note that the tech industry is going against the current of history. In every other profession, women have made advances over the last 20 years. In the medical field, 50% of new doctors are female. Why is the tech industry the only industry where women are in retreat?

For the first time in history, women are expected to become 50% of the workforce in America during 2010. Partly this is because they are getting more jobs, partly this is because of men leaving the workforce.

The article downplays some of the obstacles that women still face, though it mentions:

Only 2% of the bosses of America’s largest companies and 5% of their peers in Britain are women. They are also paid significantly less than men on average.

The interesting flip side of women’s increasing participation in the workforce is the declining participation of men. Men have been leaving the workforce for decades – first slowly, then more quickly:

(Graph is from Brad Delong’s blog)

In the 1950s and 1960s men lost jobs when agriculture automated. A lot of these were black males and racist laws kept them from moving to other parts of the economy. At the time, Ralph Abernathy said “Black men face a race between the civil rights movement and the tractor.” He meant that black men needed to gain the right to go to college and get highly skilled jobs, before the last of the farm jobs disappeared. That the disappearance of the farm jobs lead to a permanent increase in black male unemployment suggests that America failed to adapt quickly enough.

Male participation in the workforce never dipped below 90% before 1973, but it will probably drop as low as 80% during 2010. In the past the decline in workforce participation may have largely been confined to racial minorities, but now it seems to be effecting everyone.

Economists are divided about where these men are going, or why they are leaving the workforce. This graph only shows men of working age – between the age of 25 and 54 – so the large number of men who are of retirement age would not effect this graph.

It probably says something important about how deindustrialization has effected certain areas, that the male participation rate never dipped below 90% before 1973 but it never again rises above 90% after 1979. The loss of low-skilled industrial jobs (for instance, the loss of the textile industry during the 1970s) seems to have lead to a permanent increase in male unemployment, though it is hard to say why these men didn’t simply get low-skilled jobs in the retail sector – which is what a lot of unskilled women seem to have done.

The end of the graph (the last 3 years) is really dramatic – male participation in the economy has fallen off a cliff.

The peak on this graph is in 1952. The decline has been going on for 58 years. I wonder when this trend will reverse?

Another look at the degree to which women are pulling ahead of men in regards to college education:

College admissions directors curious about the experience of touching a third rail can review what happened when the president of the University of Alberta suggested that Canadian males, including white males, needed a helping hand.

She got fried … by her own students.

Last month, President Indira Samarasekera pointed to the preponderance of women in higher education in Canada (three female undergraduates for every two males) and suggested that perhaps males could need some extra attention. “We’ll wake up in 20 years and we will not have the benefit of enough male talent,” said Samarasekera, a metallurgical engineer originally from Sri Lanka. “I’m going to be an advocate for young white men, because I can be,” she added, pointing to her Nixon-to-China status as a minority woman advocating for men.

A fair number of her students were not happy. Within 24 hours the campus was awash with posters poking fun at the notion of women taking over higher education. “Women are attacking campus,” read one. “Only white men can save our university! Stop the femimenace.”

Humorous, perhaps, but here’s why this is not funny to college officials in the United States: currently, the University of Alberta grants no admissions preferences to men – unlike scores, perhaps even hundreds, of colleges in the United States that for years have been turning down women for less qualified men.The preferences many colleges give to men are far less formal and less debated than those that help minority applicants, or women applying to some programs. But many, many admissions offices routinely look at male applicants’ test scores and grades with lower expectations than they have when viewing those of female applicants.

While I usually like anything that danah boyd writes, I am a bit surprised and disappointed by the way she framed this post about feminism, sexism, and the way society values nursing and teaching:

When my mother was entering the professional world, there were pretty much three options for women: teacher, nurse, secretary. Many women did not work and those who did were highly motivated, passionate, and underpaid. When barriers were eradicated, women left these professions to seek jobs in other fields that were better respected. Nurses were often just as knowledgeable about medicine as doctors and yet doctors were more greatly valued. Not surprisingly, as the years went by, many women who wanted to enter medicine chose to become doctors instead of nurses because the professional rewards were so much greater. When the sex barriers collapsed, women sought out “men’s jobs” because they were higher paying, higher prestige, and more flexible.

…The problem is what has happened since then. I certainly don’t want to go back to the dark ages where women had no choice. But while we’ve opened up doors for women, we haven’t addressed how sexism framed nursing and teaching in ways that are causing us tremendous headaches in society today. Teachers are underpaid and undervalued because we took women’s work for granted. When teaching stopped being women’s work, we didn’t rework our thinking about teaching. As a society, we still have little respect for teachers and nurses and we pay them abysmally. This is deeply rooted in the sexism of the past but the ripple effects today are costly.

Is the problem really “deeply rooted in the sexism of the past”? Isn’t it, clearly, deeply rooted in the sexism of the present?

I am even troubled by the title of the post:

teaching, nursing, and second wave feminism

Wouldn’t it be more accurate to title the post:

teaching, nursing, and sexism

I mean, the problem isn’t feminism, right? The problem is sexism?

This sentence set off a strong reaction in me:

I get uncomfortable thinking about the societal consequences of second wave feminism, especially since I’ve personally benefited from it so much.

I get uncomfortable with supposedly progressive people who lack confidence about the benefits of progressive reforms. Either you believe it is good to empower people with freedom, or you don’t. If you don’t, then your politics are not progressive. If you do, then you focus on the need to continue to fight against oppressive practices that continue to operate in the present era.

Also, I think there is a larger context here, which is the erosion of wages in America from 1973 to 1995, and then again from 2001 to the present. It would be easier for America to complete its social transformation if only the economy could recover the vigor it enjoyed 1945-1973, when wages were rising rapidly for both men and women. America’s social transformation is likely to remain partial, incomplete and broken till such time as the economy recovers its health. And by “health” I am not referring to the short-term crisis of the current recession, but to the long-term crisis that has seen the broad collapse of America’s once secure middle class.

Simon Willison is rightly upset at the scantily clad women hired to do sexy dances on stage at the Yahoo Hack Day in Taiwan:

I’ve heard arguments that this kind of thing is culturally acceptable in Taiwan—in fact it may even be expected for technology events, though I’d love to hear further confirmation. I don’t care. The technology industry has a serious, widely recognised problem attracting female talent. The ratio of male to female attendants at most conferences I attend is embarassing—An Event Apart last week in Chicago was a notable and commendable exception.

Our industry is still young. If we want an all-encompassing technology scene, we need to actively work to cultivate an inclusive environment. This means a zero tolerance approach to this kind of entertainment. Booth babes, tequila girls, and scantily clad gyrating women simply set the wrong tone, here or abroad. Heck, this isn’t just about offending women—many guy geeks I know would be mortified by this kind of thing.

I’ve written about this before. Over the last 30 years women have made dramatic gains in field such as law, medicine, management and science. Almost 50% of new doctors are women, so that is a field that has achieved near perfect equality. But there is something wrong with the tech industry, and with computer programming in particular. The percent of computer scientists who are female and who are earning advanced degrees peaked in 1989 and has since retreated. What explains this retreat, when women are still advancing in almost all other professions?

A month ago, Bruce Byfield wrote about sexism in the free software movement, and his post ignited a firestorm. Now Byfield reflects on the angry reactions that his discussion of sexism invoked:

That brings up another point I’ve learned: people who are not consciously sexist themselves tend to be unable to see institutionalized sexism around them. They are not aware of any prejudice against women in themselves, so how could there be any sexism involved? They seem unaware that institutions and customs can be sexist simply by what they value or how they operate, that even something like a discourse developed by men talking to men can institutionalize sexism. Nor do they understand that, by simply accepting such institutions or ways of acting, they become supporters of sexism.

For instance, I am currently part of an email conversation with a prominent FOSS community member who has been pilloried who is hurt and baffled that I (or anyone else) could apply the word “sexism” to them. Their reasoning? They did not intend to be sexist, so therefore they can’t possibly be. Therefore, labelling their behavior as unacceptable is unfair, they argue. The fact that, in context, their actions and remarks could not possibly be described in any other way honestly does not seem to have occurred to them. No matter what I say, they remain hurt and baffled — and, like so many, deeply in denial.
Cutting across existing lines

…I’m not sure, but I think that the logic here is that if you are already part of an idealistic movement, your actions must be above criticism in every other sense. From that assumption, perhaps it follows that anyone questioning any part of your actions must have the most Machiavellian of motives. The fact that some people who raise issues do seem to enjoy fault-finding because of past grievances only makes this assumption all the easier to hold.

With such painful lessons coming my way, this last month has been shocking, disappointing, and — above all else — exhausting. I’ve lost respect for some people I thought I knew, and gained respect for others. At times, I’ve been happy to escape into writing a purely technical article to take a brief holiday from the endless angst.

Mike Dover links to a study that says only 13% of Wikipedia’s contributors are female. Dover then quotes Phillip Greenspun offering a theory about why:

“A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Child Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job? …Young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group. [Yet] men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question “is this peer group worth impressing?”…

So it is with Wikipedia. Why invest your free time wrangling with a politicized Wikipedia bureaucracy of infighting editors and bitter story subjects, all for the honor of creating a free resource for other people and paying out of your own pocket to go to high-level meetings for the Wikimedia elite? If you’re a man, for the honor of being near the “top” of something, no matter how fruitless.

Greenspun is always a mix of insight and blind spots.

There is something appealing about such a pleasant story. In this version of the world, women do not face discrimination, instead, they avoid certain professions because they are wiser than men. That is a clever argument, though probably too clever. There is a whiff of a fairy tale hidden in that happy ending – women are wiser than men and no doubt end up happier than men because they avoid all that bothersome competition over nothing.

However, the premise is suspect. Are men stupid because they engage in petty crime? Does petty crime ever pay? If, for instance, you can make good money selling drugs, then crime might be a rational decision. Flying a home made helicopter may not be wise, unless is brings you publicity you can use. Then it becomes a rational decision.

I’ve read that young men tend to take more physical risks than women. That might be stupid. Or that might be rational. Some risks have high pay-offs. In a larger context, and in the context of career, the more you encourage someone to avoid big risks, the more you may also be encouraging them to avoid big pay offs. Whether or not that is rational depends on a hundred variables – it is never a simple judgement to make.

Despite my reservations, I can imagine some grain of truth in what Greenspun says. In her book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation Deborah Tannen says that men view themselves as belonging to a hierarchy whereas women view themselves as being embedded in a network. I’ve never been comfortable with that generalization, as it seems to imply that women are innocent regarding social rank. I can not imagine a human being who doesn’t understand social rank. I would be interested, though, if men and women tend measure themselves against hierarchies of different scales. Greenspun’s comment could be read as mocking men who compete for status in hierarchies of very small scales. Certainly I can recall instances where a man is excitedly, urgently explaining to a woman why some small success in some small sub-culture is actually of great importance, and the woman sitting there somewhat bemused, trying to understand why the man sees such importance in so small a triumph.

But this is something that women never do? If we are going to deal in anecdotes, it seems easy enough to find countervailing examples. For every man over-thrilled at his advance to a new rank in a chess tournament, there is a woman over-thrilled at the new pattern her knitting group has decided to work on.

The strategy of Greenspun’s comment is an ancient one. The overall gist is “Men are oppressed by strife and worry, competition and war; women are wiser than all that and remain blissfully happy by focusing on things that have real lasting value.” You can find variation of Greenspun’s comment in every country, in every century. Depending on the century, and the country, things that “have real lasting value” can be defined differently: children, god, honoring one’s ancestors, etc. But the end result of this reasoning, even when it is well-intentioned, is to provide justification for keeping women out of those professions that they might otherwise choose to pursue.

The tech industry has a problem. It is moving against the modern current. Almost all other major professions have opened their doors to women. Women now make up nearly 50% of all new doctors, and almost 40% of all new lawyers. Yet the number of women who receive advanced degrees in computer science peaked in 1989 and has since declined. Disparities of men versus women in any particular online pursuit needs to be closely examined, not cleverly made to seem unimportant.

I’m reading Ian Stewart’s book, Letters To A Young Mathematician. The book is written as a series of a letters to a fictional “Meg”, who I think is a fictional niece. As Stewart says:

The letters, addressed to “Meg”, follow her career in roughly chronological order, from high school through to a tenured position in a university. They discuss a variety of topics, ranging from basic career decisions to the working philosophy of professional mathematicians and the nature of their subject.

Some ideas were new to me, such as the fact that math can prove that something is unprovable. For instance, there is no reliable method to trisect an angle, and there never will be. Math is unique among the sciences in that is able to know which things are impossible.

This bit about gender in math was especially interesting to me:

Mathematicians are proud to trace their academic lineage through their thesis advisers. Brian was my mathematical father, and Phillip Hall my grandfather.

…Talent must be passed to succeeding generations. I’ve been a thesis adviser to 30 students so far, 20 men and 10 women. Since 1985, the proportions are 50% men and 50% women. I know women are just as good at math as men because I’ve watched both at close quarters. I am particularly proud of my mathematical daughters, most of whom hail from Portugal, where mathematics has long been viewed as a suitable activity for women. All of my Portuguese daughters have remained in mathematics. In fact, most of my graduate students have remained in mathematics, and every single one of them earned a PhD. However, one is now an accountant, several work in computing, and one owns an electronics company, or at least he did last time I heard from him.

The rest of the world is now following Portugals’s lead. In July 2005 the American Mathematical Society released the results of its 2004 Annual Survey Of The Mathematical Sciences. Since the early 1990s, women have been receiving around 45% of all first degrees in math. Women received almost one-third of all US doctorates in the mathematical sciences in the academic year 2003-2004, and one-quarter of those awarded in the top 48 math departments. In all, 333 women received math PhDs that year, the largest number ever recorded.

The percent of computer scientists who are female and who are earning advanced degrees peaked in 1989 and has since retreated. As math is foundational to computer science, this is revealing. Computer science is nearly alone among the professions in seeing women’s participation retreat during the last 20 years. Women have made huge strides in catching up to men in business, law and medicine. Almost 50% of all new doctors are female.

I’d been assuming that women’s retreat from computer science had to be mirrored by weakness in math, but if women are making huge strides in math, then the anomaly of their retreat from computer science is even more puzzling than before.

Whether we are talking about the evolution of finches  in the Galápagos Islands  or the evolution of the software projects that we work on, my sense is that diversity offers its greatest benefit during  a crisis. The worst thing about monoculture is the powerful reward it offers to pathogens. Or, as Wikipedia says:

The dependence on monoculture crops can lead to large scale failures when the single genetic variant or cultivar becomes susceptible to a pathogen or when a change in weather patterns occur.

Extending that as a metaphor for business, groupthink (a monoculture of thought) can lead to catastrophic failure when some foundational assumption of the group is proven wrong. A monoculture of thought offers a powerful reward to pathogenic behavior. Consider the meltdown at Enron, where top executives all agreed on the profitability of reckless energy trades, and they continued to agree with each other almost till the very moment company declared bankruptcy. Likewise, the top executives at AIG were certain that they had distributed risk in a such a way that the downside of that risk would never catch up with them. – people with dissident viewpoints were squeezed out of their jobs. Or consider the 40 year decline of the United States auto industry, an industry that has suffered more than most from groupthink and inaccurate assumptions. The executives of the 1970s and 1980s felt, despite the gathering evidence, that price was more important to Americans than quality, and that quality automatically meant expensive, and so they lost a generation of car buyers.

A corporate culture that values homogeneity is at grave risk of punishing non-conformists. A good manager is always on guard against the kinds of social bullying, however subtle, that can cause people to censor their opinions. This is a basic task of risk management: reduce risk by challenging core assumptions. Make sure divergent view points are heard.

I should add, if you are working at a new start-up, struggling to find its place in the world, you should treat every day as a crisis.

Genetic diversity allows a population multiple avenues to move forward when a radical change in the external environment dooms the existing species, in their current forms. Genetic diversity helps facilitate the transformation of sub-sections of those populations to evolve into new forms. Likewise, when a corporation faces a crisis, having a diverse range of opinions is healthy, and the more those differences of opinions reach down to core assumptions, the healthier. In boom times, such diversity of opinion could potentially be viewed as annoyingly disruptive of the good times, but in a crisis, what’s needed is the maximum of diversity: in viewpoint, in history, in current circumstances, in goals, in future expectations, etc.

In theory, a genius of a manager could possibly assemble a team made up solely of white males, which still had enough diversity of opinion to perform well in a crisis, but as a practical matter, the most reliable way to put together a diverse team is to recruit people from different backgrounds, different genders, different races and, where possible, different countries.

I regard the cultivation of diversity on a project as a fundamental survival technique, so I devote a lot of time to recruiting newcomers to the field of programming. And so, I read with interest Kirrily Robert’s discussion of recruiting women to work on an open source project (what follows is from Robert’s blog post):

———————————————–

I surveyed women on the Dreamwidth and AO3 projects and asked them about their experiences. You can read a fuller report of their responses on my earlier blog post, Dispatches from the revolution.

One of the first things I asked them was whether they had previously been involved in open source projects. They gave answers like:

I’d never contributed to an open source project before, or even considered that I could.

I didn’t feel like I was wanted.

I never got the impression that outsiders were welcome.

I considered getting involved in Debian, but the barriers to entry seemed high.

Those who got a little further along still found it hard to become productive on those projects:

It’s kind of like being handed a box full of random bicycle parts: it doesn’t help when you don’t know how they go together and just want to learn how to ride a bike.

People without a ton of experience get shunted off to side areas like docs and support, and those areas end up as the ladies’ auxiliary.

But on Dreamwidth and AO3…

What I like most is that there isn’t any attitude of “stand aside and leave the code to the grown-ups”. If there’s something that I’m able to contribute, however small, then the contribution is welcome.

And this one, which is my favourite:

Deep down, I had always assumed coding required this kind of special aptitude, something that I just didn’t have and never would. It lost its forbidding mystique when I learned that people I had assumed to be super-coders (surely born with keyboard attached!) had only started training a year ago. People without any prior experience! Women! Like me! Jesus! It’s like a barrier broke down in my mind.

So, what can we learn from this? Well, one thing I’ve learnt is that if anyone says, “Women just aren’t interested in technology” or “Women aren’t interested in open source,” it’s just not true. Women are interested, willing, able, and competent. They’re just not contributing to existing, dare I say “mainstream”, open source projects.

And this is great news! It’s great news for new projects. If you are starting up a new open source project, you have the opportunity to recruit these women.

Women in tech. Or rather, not really.

Jason Fried likes simple business transactions:

I called them. 10 minutes later the guy came by. He was down the street on another job. We walked out back. I told him what I needed done. He looked around for 20 seconds and said $300. I said “deal.”

That’s it. No proposal. No “I’ll get back to you tomorrow”. No “Let me see how much the materials will cost and I’ll drop an estimate in your mailbox next week.”

Just $300. Deal. When can you start? Wednesday. How long will it take? A few hours for a few guys.

He knows his business. I know what my time is worth. End of transaction. It was so damn refreshing.

I know everything can’t be done like this, but often it seems like we’ve slid down a path of formality with so many things that really don’t need it. Extensive contracts, delays, red tape, precise cost estimates based on precise amounts of materials, “let me think about it and I’ll get back to you,” etc. Essential? Sometimes yes, but most of the time probably not.

This does sound appealing, though as general business advice, I think one would have to modulate this strategy depending on the gender of one’s customers. I just got done re-reading You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation which mentions that one difference between the genders is the amount of social interaction they tend to think should be part of the transaction.

Sarah Lacy on gender and business:

As the gender blindness idea suggests, I never considered I couldn’t achieve things in business because I was woman, and that was probably part of my success. But at the same time I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being proud of the fact that I can hold my own in a male-dominated world. That I’ve been able to make it a non-issue.

I also think that in some unknown, unquantifiable way part of my success has been because I’m a woman. How could it not be? Being a reporter and a writer is an incredibly individualistic career. It’s like an episode of Survivor. You’re dropped into a jungle and you have to use whatever you’ve got to fight your way out. Not even a great editor can cover for you for long and whatever you’ve accomplished is in tangible black-and-white at the end of the day for everyone to see. I’ve long felt like weird personality traits of mine that were pretty annoying from a human point of view, actually wound up being hugely helpful as a reporter. It was as if I was designed to do what I do.

Because it’s so personal, I’d be naive to think none of that has to do with being a woman. Women connect with people in a different way, listen better than men on average, are non-threatening and are naturally nurturing.  A lot of people tell me things they don’t tell other people, and all of that is probably part of why. My gender is part of me, so why would I treat it as something I somehow have to subvert or ignore?

Susie Bright was invited to come speak at Blogher. The invitation pleased her, but the subject did not:

This time, however, I was surprised which panel I was asked to join; it was pitched to me as “how to make safer spaces online.”

My first reaction was like a child being asked to put on my seat belt for the 100th time: Ugh. “But I don’t want to be safe online, Mom!”

When I think of all my ambitions for my blog or my writing, I think of being influential, incendiary, funny, poignant— never “safe.”

Susie Bright recounts her own history as a women’s rights activist, and recalls the crippling effect that concerns over creating a safe space could have:

Pretty soon, certain organizations of the feminist left were ground to a halt, because at any moment, someone could pipe up in a meeting: “I feel unsafe when you say that, Mary!”

There was nowhere to turn. Debate had no recourse in the “safe zone,” and the “victim” won, smugly, by suppressive default.

It’s rather amazing that everyone put up with it, and never rejected its childishness. Can you imagine interrupting a legitimate argument to complain that it had to end because it gave you a stomachache?

As the left pissed its faltering assets down a PC drain, the right-wing embraced some of the same coddled language. Is America safe for children? Are video games safe for teenagers? Shouldn’t women stay inside and be safe instead of being subjected to god knows what in the brazen streets?

Of course, this wasn’t anything new — it’s centuries-old protectionism – but the pseudo-feminist sheen gave it new legs.

That centuries old protectionism has never been a friend of women’s rights. It arises from the kind of paternalism that argues that women are weak and need to be protected, and the “protection” tends to involve a loss of freedom. But a confluence of factors allowed arguments about safety to make headway in the courts:

The next group to pile onto the Safe-T Garbage Detail were the corporate litigators. This was a huge leap. You had institutions that were truly guilty – are truly guilty – of staggering sexism and discrimination. They would freeze out and exploit their female workers without a second thought. Get some more coffee while you’re up, dear!

When a few women tried to mount a legal campaign against the worst offenders, it turned out that one of the few things they could nail these fuckers to the wall for, was for cultivating an “unsafe” atmosphere.

To a large extent, Bright sees the issue of safety as a distraction from the underlying class issues:

Here’s a tip: Wanna stop the cycle of “safety panics” at your workplace? Give each person who works some privacy and dignity.

Then look at the pay scales of everyone in the company, and give all the secretaries, assistants, and janitorial staff a gigantic raise. Watch how suddenly, all the “unsafe” feelings disappear as if by magic!

I think she sums up the situation fairly well. I don’t think more pay equals more safety, but I do think both reflect a crucial underlying set of values. The organization that respects its workers and pays them well is going to have less harrassement than the organization that disrespects its workers and pays them low wages.

Not all harrassement comes from the leadership. In fact, studies show that the majority of sexual harrassement happens between workers who are nominally peers. However, how much harrassement will be tolerated is certainly indicated from the attitudes of those at the top. The leadership of any organization signals, through its policies and its pay scales, how much respect it has for the people working in that organization. Lower ranking staff are at all times aware of how much real respect the leadership has for the workers. And those who wish to harrass will be concious that they can get away with more when they are in an organization that has no respect for its workers.

Heather, at her blog The Needle’s Bewitching Eye, writes of her own experience with sexual harrassement:

However, by the time I left the job, not only had I realized I wasn’t even helping the company, but I had also become a victim of gender harassment myself many times over. I worked in one of the two organizations which was supposed to SET THE EXAMPLE for the rest of the company (the other being the Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action, or EEO/AA group); I had a B.A. and an M.S. in criminal justice; and I dealt with severe violations all day, every day; but I couldn’t even manage to protect myself from victimization because I worked in a dramatically male-dominated field.

In fact, I had reported my own situation to the EEO/AA group no less than five times — and WON the investigation every time. The problem, though, remained because, as the only female employee in my group, I was the only one complaining about gender harassment, and so it was rather a simple solution to just ignore me. I actually was told often, “Nobody else has a problem,” and after I heard it enough times, it did start to sound an awful lot like, “You are crazy.” Even the EEO/AA investigator (who was a male, by the way, and a very decent one, too) couldn’t help much with that, since he couldn’t be in my shoes all the time. I had to deal with reality, and I had to deal with it alone. It was as natural to my male bosses and coworkers to treat me as a second class citizen as it was for them to urinate while standing. It would never have occurred to them to analyze their own actions, and even when someone pointed out to them exactly how they were treating me differently from everyone else, they still had difficulty seeing it for themselves. More importantly, they refused to change their behavior. Or maybe more accurately, they didn’t think they SHOULD change their behavior because I was ONLY a woman and therefore not worth showing that much respect.

Heather’s experience points to how difficult it is to stop harrassement in an organization that has ingrained contempt for women. The law is a blunt instrument, it will often fail to reform an organization that does not want to reform.

What Susie Bright reminds of us is how a company can use old fashioned paternalism to create an illusion of safety – for instance, put a filter on web browsers so no one can look at porn. Such a policy doesn’t protect employees from sexual harrassement at work, but it does give the company something to point to if they are ever brought to court. They can say “See how much we care about our workers? We won’t let anyone look at dirty pictures.” Such paternalism as this takes for granted that women are weak and need to be protected. It’s questionable whether this form of protection is ever necessary in a firm with a genuine respect for all of its workers. To put this the other way round, I’ve never worked at a firm that filtered out porn, and there was never a need for such a filter because at the places I’ve worked the whole culture of the business has communicated that professional, respectful behavior is expected from everyone at all times.

I need to post something to inaugurate this blog, so I will start by reposting some comments I wrote over at Burningbird.

Shelley Powers suggests one of the things that leads to gender disparities in the tech world:

If Tim Bray wants to get a better idea of why there aren’t as many women seemingly interested in Ruby, Rails, or associated technologies such as Ajax, he needs look no further than sites like Ajaxian. In all of the time I’ve been reading the site, it covered women–our contributions, as writers, as techs, in any capacity–a grand total of three times. Which is why I decided to unsubscribe from the site today. It’s not for everyone interesting in Ajax–only the boys interested in Ajax.

Someone in the comments suggested:

I think part of it, at least in the RoR world, is that there’s just so much focus on who the hotshots are, and so so much cronyism.

My thoughts:

I don’t know if it’s useful to look at this issue on the micro level. Questions like “Does the RoR community have enough women?” miss the point. The problem is large scale. The number of women receiving advanced degress in computer science peaked in 1989 and has since been in steady decline. That number is, I think, a useful metric for measuring women’s participation in computer science. Whereas women have made dramatic gains in the legal profession, the medical profession, and in managing large enterprises, they have lost ground in the computer industry.

I’ve yet to hear a great explanation of what’s chased women away from the tech industry. The decline since 1989 is easy to measure, yet most of the explanations that I’ve heard are contradicted by the dramatic gains women have made in the law and medical industries.

Consider a few of the most simplistic explanations:

Women don’t like hard science? Nothing is tougher than organic chemistry, which tens of thousands of women have had to master on their way to becoming doctors or “nurse practitioners” (the highest level of nursing).

Women don’t like long, brutal hours? I’ve a friend who just went through the UVA medical school. During her last year of school her average work week was 90 hours. Sometimes it was longer. 90 was the average.

Women are no good at math? I could repeat my comment, above, about organic chemistry, which involves some tough math, but I’d also like to add that I’ve been doing programming in script languages for 12 years now, and I’ve never needed advanced math. Not all programming involves gyroscope stabalized frictionless vector navigation for NASA space craft.

Women require balanced lives, and are unwilling to spend time away from their families? Relative to law and medicine, the tech industry provides more flex time and more chances to work at home. Also, women do put in long hours in the fields of law, medicine, management and marketing. It’s just tech, in particular, where women have been driven out.

Women are drawn to the more artistic side of things, they don’t like technical stuff? Pure sexism, but even if it was true, it wouldn’t explain why graphic design for the web (the artistic side of web work) has become so male dominated, with stars like Eric Meyer and Dave Shea keynoting every design conference.

It’s clear that women have been chased away from the tech field since 1989. The numbers are clear about that, and match what anecdotal evidence most of us can offer. But why? I’ve yet to have a eureka moment, where someone offers an explanation so clear that I simply jump and go “That’s it! That explains it all!”