Why There Are No Women on Twitter’s Board, and So Few in Technology

Just positing that these things _might_ be true and should be investigated was a key factor in Larry Summers getting drummed out of his position as President of Harvard.

The world at large isn't ready to hear these statistics, and overall that is probably a good thing. We shouldn't accept these disparities as driven by natural forces until we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the differences in line.

Over the course of history, far more bad has been wrought by assuming differences were innate than assuming they were the result of bias. Given that, we should assume and act as though differences are due to bias long after the differences are well proven to be natural. It is a case where being wrong in one direction is not very costly, but being wrong in the other direction (and thus institutionalizing bias) is disastrous.

Tldr: we should err on the side of caution.

There's one really, incredibly glaring flaw in this argument right near the start. He argues that it takes men to come up with sites like Twitter and Facebook because most venture-capital-backed startups are created by men. Except, of course, venture capitalists openly admit they choose startups to back not just on their merits, but "pattern matching" the founders to what they expect a startup founder to look like - and everyone expects startup founders to be male. Even if women were just as good at founding successful startups, we'd expect them to be less common than male founders simply because VCs go with what they're used to.

He is essentially arguing that women are inherently worse at founding tech companies because they're under-represented in an area where people discriminate against them based on the belief they're inherently worse at founding tech companies.

The problem with his argument is not the statistics, which are sound, but the fact that he begs the question and also ignores some obvious implications of the very data he presents.

First, let's talk about mathematical ability. It's widely known that men outnumber women in the upper percentiles of mathematical ability. However, that's an explanation for why there are so few female Fields Medalists (in fact, there are none), not why there are so few female engineers.

Among people who score a perfect 800 on the Math SAT (top 1% starts at 770), men outnumber women only 2:1. Even if mathematical ability is totally determinative, and being a programmer required top 0.3-0.5% of mathematical ability, we would expect to see ratios of maybe 65/35 in the programming world, not 90/10 or 95/5. Due to the shapes of the bell curves in question, the disparity between men and women gets quite large when you get into the 0.1% or 0.01% of mathematical ability. But, by and large, Silicon Valley isn't made up of those people. They're more run of the mill smart people (Stanford's SAT Math inter-quartiles are 93rd-99th percentile).

With regards to the points about competitiveness versus cooperation and risk-taking and caring about people, they all beg the question. Why is competitiveness a good thing for the business of writing software? Don't you think cooperation would be better for such a deeply team-oriented discipline? Why isn't caring about people a positive strength, when much of Silicon Valley 2.0 is fluffy social stuff? Finally, while more risk-aversion might explain why there are fewer female founders, it doesn't seem to be the case that females are less represented in startups than in technology companies in general. What's risky about going to work at Microsoft or Google?

The refrain of "these statistics are things nobody is willing to talk about!" is a cop-out. Most people will not pillory you for pointing out that women are more risk-averse or do things differently. Indeed, it's something women themselves often talk about. My wife was recently at a social gathering for women attorneys. She recounted a discussion of how women tend to disclose when they haven't done something before, while men tend to say "sure I can do that." It's not 1990 and people are quite willing to discuss how men and women approach work differently. But the statistics only support conclusions as strong as the scope of the evidence. And in this article, the author wanders far beyond what the statistics support into blatant conjecture and rationalization.

The history of standardized testing and the history of statistics 'proving' that minorities are innately different in some way are inextricably linked. The original intelligence tests 'proved' to the American populace that Italian and Irish immigrants were intellectually inferior to Anglo Saxons because of their lower IQ scores. Magically, as those populations integrated, their IQ scores normalized. Oops.

This article reads like those (thankfully) classic evolutionary biology texts. Statistics bookend arguments that draw wild inferences. I feel sorry for the numbers, they're crying out, "Wait a second, I'm just a standardized test score, I can't tell you that it's because men always fashioned weapons! Weapons didn't even factor into my study!" How does it follow that standardized test scores can prove anything about nature vs. nurture, especially when they have a history of not doing so?

It's a hallmark of that area of modern evolutionary biology to say, "I'm saying what everyone else is afraid to." Well, people are afraid to say it because they're afraid to say wrong things! One should not ignore statistics that show differences between populations, but one should certainly not use them to confirm one's own essentialist beliefs.

Especially in this environment. The burden of proof should be squarely and severely on the one arguing that differences are innate, not on those arguing that differences are malleable/cultural. Why? Because once society has concluded that differences are innate, then glass ceilings turn into concrete ceilings, and discrimination becomes institutionalized.

This sounds like it was written for a 12th grade research assignment and makes several incorrect inferences without a basis of fact, i.e. the male hunting equating to math reasoning.

I tend to think of it as the same reason minorities are not prevalent in these places either, probably because society held them as "lower class" until recently and they are just now making gains which are long overdue.

All in all, women are catching up fast to men in mathematics as well. They account for the fastest growing percentage of graduate degrees in the sciences and I, personally, work in a high-tech field dominated still by male developers, but also women managers who supervise them and do a fantastic job at it.

It's not biological, it's history. Until recently those spatial learning and building toys for children were all male-focused, but that is changing.

I firmly believe that women will easily overtake men in technology in the future because attitudes have changed for the better.

Most of your research is from 20 years ago. Cultural norms play a huge part in this and norms have been changing (compare what you'd read about the roles of women in the 1950's vs today).

My mother built one business after another even though my grandfather was forcing her to be a math teacher. She started 4+ businesses and each one carried the name of a guy in my family (even my brother, as soon as he turned 18) because businesses weren't supposed to be led by women.

I am female. At 8 I was hit on as the only girl hanging out in a robotics lab. At 13 I was mocked for writing code. At 15 I was asked to quit school to work at a tech firm, but instead I kept working on my own freelance business in parallel. At 18 I ranked second among peers in my country. I moved to the US, kept working, and continue to grow my skills and tech startup in the valley today. There are many more like me. Wait 10 more years and see what happens to the statistics and attitudes. In the mean time, my job is to keep proving those that bet against me and other female hacker-founders wrong through the product of my work.

I invited three women to be on the board of my corporation. All of them turned me down. All of the men I invited onto my board accepted.

As commented:

This post could only come from someone sitting comfortably in a position of considerable privilege and unawareness.

If you’re going to completely ignore issues of societal pressures, open misogyny in technology industries and a thousand other subtle (and not so subtle) ways that a fundamentally patriarchal society maintains the status quo, then you gain no insight at all. A thousand studies will tell you the outcome of this system of oppression – but you’ll interpret is “gender differences” because you are blind to oppression that you have never been subject too.

The sad thing is that you’ve now added another nail, unaware of the damage that you do to the humans around you. Congratulations, you’ve helped to solidify your position on top of the heap.

I wonder why nobody has brought up the fact when most women are starting to climb the corporate ladder, or just come into their career, they start having babies, starting their families and are less interested in ruling the corporate world as they are being with their families and raising their kids.

And who can blame them really?

This is pretty lazy thinking. It's hard to even call it a rationalization when it makes no sense:

"Males around the world on average tend to be better at doing [math] than females; likely due to the need to fashion weapons and objects for warfare, hunting, and competing throughout evolutionary history."

This is a pretty shallow article - especially irritating because it's referenced with a bunch of things that have no relevance. I love in particular:

There are a lot of stupid guys out there. And when you mix stupidity and risky behavior, you often get death. In the United States, men make up about 92% of workplace deaths

Exercise for the reader to think about why that might be the case…

And another:

A study of attrition of women in engineering and science programs found that frequently cited barriers were isolation, lack of self-confidence, and lack of interest in the subject matter (Brainard & Carlin, 1998). That’s hardly the stuff of societal discrimination.

That is exactly the stuff of societal (and social) discrimination. Not because people are saying "You're a woman, and you'll be rubbish at this," but because the extant lack of gender balance in these fields perpetuates itself; if women don't want to be scientists and engineers, it becomes harder for those women who do. There's a tipping point.

From a statistical point of view, there are ultimately psychological differences between men and women. That fact has as near as possible no relevance to this discussion - obviously so, because it's patently obvious that men are not - what, ten times better at running tech businesses? Twenty times better? And we can conclude from this that there is an obvious bias in terms of the people who end up running them.

Mika points out that there has been decades of work put into encouraging girls into STEM. That's true, kind of, but this is something which does take decades to achieve. Kids' career preferences can often start at a very early age, and the only way to improve the proportion of women in tech is by making the field open and accessible to young girls, and to promote that option to them.

Hamfisted "women are just different and we shouldn't worry about it" articles are probably not helping.

Let me posit another question, why are there no visible minorities on Twitter's board?

And why aren't people getting up and arms over that?

One consequence is that many people don't understand just how hateful the WWW is for some other people.

Sure, anyone can be the victim of really unpleasant attacks from others on the Internet, and it's been going on for years. But try creating different online characters. Give one a male name, give the other a female name. And make that the only difference. Now see the different ways people interact with you.

Having more diverse workforce can help you understand the problems of not having good blocking tools or reporting tools or privacy controls.

But then again, Google has a ton of women working for them and they've fucked up real names and G+ integration. So maybe I'm wrong.

>It turns out that being in technology demands a very masculine set of mental qualities.

I stopped reading right there. Should I change from a dress to some pants? Cut my hair short? Watch football? Didn't we have this argument about doctors and lawyers 80 years ago?

Many valid points, which are often either ignored, or deflected with the argument that "men might be better at X, or women better at Y, but that's only because the way society educates little boys vs little girls".

However, I think the real reason there are fewer women in tech is simply that it can be a boring, solitary, highly detail-oriented and even a socially confrontational job, ideal for "loners" perhaps.

People seem attracted to and revere other people who demonstrate leadership, charisma, social grace, and so on, and actual tech jobs aren't a place where those qualities are most highly valued or the best environment to nurture them.

Aside from the exciting and highly social "Startup, VC, Marketing" side of the industry, and of course the good salaries currently enjoyed by engineers, tech has a fairly low social status.

I say this as a programmer myself, but I acknowledge it's still considered (and in some ways, is) a job for unsociable loners. For whatever reason, women seem to be more socially inclined, or at least very much more attuned to the sociability aspect of social status, and tech is therefore not generally an attractive proposition.

Girls worse at math? In US yes, in Sweden no.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-learning-brain/20121...

If you think the cause of girls being bad at math is biological you must conclude that swedish girls are more biologically different from US girls than from boys.

Hardly a definitive proof that it's all just biology.

I'd scale it back, and draw the conclusions more conservatively. Along the lines of 'employment statistics don't necessarily imply discrimination'. Just because twitter's board is mostly male, doesn't necessarily mean that being male was a requirement. No one would argue that truck drivers are mostly men due to hiring policies.

I'm sure black people just aren't genetically apt for STEM either?

Just because there's evidence for a correlation between gender and math scores doesn't mean there's a genetic reason for the disparity.

"If you look at the profiles of Twitter’s board members, you'll notice that all of them either have educational backgrounds in Computer Science and/or have spent decades in the Silicon Valley tech trenches, clearly developing a deep understanding of technology."

I looked at all of the board members, and only 1 out of 7 has a CS background. 4 out of 7 have B.As/MBAs from elite schools, and immediately stepped into executive positions. I guess that's called "the trenches" these days. Their background literally screams "Old Boy's network." Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey have no education information mentioned and I don't think they did much coding on their way up.

So whatever the merits of this article, I don't see how the argument that the cause of this is in any way that not enough women go into STEM fields is a valid one.

One other reason(apart from gender stereo typing) is the women who could go into traditionally male stem fields look at the poor pay and status and rationally decide that whist probably still facing a glass ceiling and sexism at lest they get paid better as Dr, Lawyer or Banker.

What truth there is in this article amounts to a (significantly outdated) survey of the state of women in society. All it presents is correlations. It's a mathematical fact that you can know nothing of causal effects between correlated results based solely on such statistics.

In other words, what this article is saying is:

1. Women are demonstrably less represented in STEM fields.

2. Women do demonstrably less well in certain metrics we associate with STEM fields.

3. This is because women are biologically less interested/able/adept at STEM.

Every bit of evidence in the article supports 1 and 2 (at least as of 20 years ago). The only support 3 gets is repeated statements that 2 is the natural, inevitable order of things.

There is no reason to believe a word of it.

Maybe the construct of a "management board" isn't appealing to the mentality of women (huge generalization admittedly). Imagine a history of humanity dominated by females as much as our human history was dominated by males to this point. Would the female dominated society create something like a management board? Would they create something different?

This is utter baloney. For you who think systematic oppression of groups of people isn't a real thing, think again. Take, for instance, the poor literacy rate in the middle east. averaging 17%, now, are we to say "People of Arab decent obviously have a biological disadvantage when it comes to reading and writing, statistically it's clear!" um... no. How about Africans? Do we say "They had a biological tendency to become slaves and not slave owners, because, like 95% of slaves are from Africa, it's obvious"?

You can keep going back in history. How about those lowborn people during the dark ages? they must have been real dunces.

The advancement of people has been a long slow march that builds achievement upon achievement, with each achievement advancement can accelerate, but set-backs can and do happen.

Don't fool yourself into thinking you'd have anywhere near the mental ability you do today if it wasn't for all the work people did before you and the society you were raised in and given encouragement, opportunities and protections to pursue your goals. There are millions of techniques you use and benefit from that other people worked out before you. If you didn't have them, you'd be groveling in the dirt or likely gravely suffering or dead.

Women, it hasn't even been a hundred years since they've had the right to vote in the U.S. Religious and cultural attitudes have kept them oppressed and discouraged. Christian men(among others) have been encouraged to keep their wives in line with physical abuse and the women pressured to accept it.

As a society, we've figured out ways to encourage and protect things to let them advance and grow, things that wouldn't have gotten there without it and we know it. Let's call it systematic freedom. People have fought and died and worked their asses off for it. We do this. Let us(Society(men, women and institutions)) do this for women. protect, defend, encourage. We are all humans.

I don't understand the competition argument. Technology is competitive? Somehow I've missed that throughout my career.

I'm also not sure about the maths argument. Anyone got the stats for accountants? There are more women, I think?

When I started in this industry, almost all the IT specialists had come straight from the accounting department. And the sexes were split 50/50. But even then it was very obvious that the next, university trained, generation were predominantly male.

This post has failed to convince me that the issue is anything other than cultural - from the earliest age. By the time we're thinking about careers, there are so many barriers against women that the effect seen is inevitable.

These studies just show that there is a difference. It doesn't say it's mainly caused by innate biological differences between the sexes. These differences could for all we know be the effect of the different social conditioning that we all get from birth. In reality it's probably somewhere in-between - both social conditioning and innate biological differences play a role but if I was to guess I'd say that the social conditioning is the largest factor of the two. But neither has been shown in these studies.

Just because the author cites studies doesn't mean those studies are not biased, or that their limited scope is not distorting our ideas of people's motivations or actions in the real world. Psychological and sociological studies try to put people in situations that are meant to be "representative" of how they react on a large scale in the real world, but the situations themselves are small-scale, simple, and usually involved test subjects who are educated, middle-to-upper class, white college students.

The entire section about men being competitive and how boys act on the playground just demonstrates how little the author understands about social dynamics between women. Women try to do pro-social actions because egotistical actions get them ostracized very, very quickly. If a woman was so transparently cocky, she would have absolutely no friends and an endless gossip mill from jealous and/or insecure peers. We're also in a society where women who are 20 years old or older have still grown up in a society where-- as much as they were told they could do any job a man could-- they still mostly wanted to marry a guy who made more money than them, and knew that their success was not as critical to their social status as their beauty, kindness, or ability to do traditionally female activities well. Personally, as much as I have loved math all of my life and programming for the past few years, I have also been keenly aware that having a good sense of style, being able to cook, being good at dance and art, and being friendly and outgoing have been extremely helpful in my socialization as a female. Could I have neglected all of those things to be even better at math and programming? Of course. Would I have as much social status or friends? Definitely not. Additionally, male success attracts attractive women, while female success does not do the same. You have to be in a city or career or educational environment with "the right kinds of guys" in order for them to respect you MORE because of your intellect and accomplishments, not less. But for a man, being successful will aid him in attracting women who he finds "up to par" even if he is not in an environment full of other smart & accomplished people. The easiest way to see an example of this is by comparing the romantic and sexual experiences of smart males vs. smart females in high school. The boys have gone on more dates and had more sexual experiences, while many girls-- even pretty ones-- have not had such experiences.

Girls are fine interacting with machines, but please take a look at all the bazillions of articles written about Goldie Blox, and that great comic- http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883#comic -you can't just say "well there are toys for kids made to be unisex" because most things that are unisex (ask a woman how awkward and uncomfortable "unisex" t-shirts are) are really just made for guys. I loved design as a kid. I thought it was arts & crafts, because that's what everyone calls it when you're a young girl, but it was really design. If I had toys that encouraged me to design webpages and programs, there's no doubt in my mind that I would have loved them, but boys toys involved rudimentary programming and engineering, while girl's toys were all about playing house, hosting tea parties, and dressing up dolls. The most mechanical they got were dolls who peed or said stupid phrases.

Business is very people-oriented! You are making products for PEOPLE. There is no way the author can argue that business in general, and tech businesses in particular, do not have aspects that appeal to both kinds of stereotypical interests from each gender. Tech businesses are creative and involve selling and designing things. Would this sexist author say that talking to a lot of people and designing something beautiful are traditionally male functions?

Isolation and lack of self-confidence are EXTREMELY societal. How can isolation be the fault of an individual? I DO feel very uncomfortable when I'm the only woman in a room full of men. Who wouldn't feel uncomfortable walking into a room and being the "only" of anything, especially anything REALLY obvious-- like gender or race, which you display on your body and can't hide.

These caveman arguments are also stupid. Who is to say that the women who would have to keep track of complex timing schedules for feeding their children, who had to ensure that they had enough food to feed everyone in their family or community, who counted and kept track of the objects stored at home, etc. did not also develop mathematical skills in an evolutionary manner? The author's reasoning is stupid.

Ever think those "sex" differences in spatial and mechanical thinking are because boys are building little cars and rockets or tossing around a football as a toddler, but girls are drawing and imagining and telling stories? Even if kids gravitate towards those and it's not entirely the fault of toy companies and clueless parents/educators, surely these years of practice can not be discounted or called "natural".

In conclusion, I went into this with a semi-open mind because I'm always waiting for an argument I will actually respect. But I was disappointed yet again. http://xkcd.com/385/

fact: there are less red heads with black eyes as ceo than women. or blacks. or asians. or native americans.

non aryan gingers are the true minority!

I enjoyed this rebuttal.

http://ulobw.tumblr.com/

whilst this may be accurate i advocate the safer approach, but equally valid argument that women don't want to enter technology.

this is easily backed by data which shows that the level womens rights in a country has a strong inverse correlation to the number of women in STEM fields. this way, even before we consider the merits of the sexes we have a simple explanation which avoids the classic battle of the sexes arguments... and actually i'm sure women know this themselves - after all they are the ones who regularly decide that they would prefer to enter a non STEM field.

having few women in STEM fields is ironically an indicator of having a free and liberal society with strong rights for women.

Wow, this a perfect example of the dangerous thinking, the "facts", that got us to this point in the first place.

Mandatory related non-xkcd comic: www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883

Weak shit.

There might be very slight natural differences in variance of ability, which would explain why more men come out at the top and bottom. I don't think there's value into coming in to that argument on either side. At any rate, the evidence seems to indicate that the gender disparity (at the relevant IQ level) is at most 2:1.

Going 100 steps further and justifying the good-ole-boy network that has taken over VC and Silicon Valley is another matter entirely.

Hahahaha

http://thumbs.newschoolers.com/index.php?src=http://media.ne...