What the fuck use is "free speech" or rights at all, if citizens can demand actions of institutions outside of the legal system?

Like, this is a bit fanciful, but if Richard Spencer ever goes in for some surgery (say, for a broken bone, something not especially dangerous) and people start demanding that public hospitals not treat him? What the fuck is a "right" if it the mob can do whatever they want and the government won't protect someone who, again, hasn't actually violated any laws.

You mean people make different choices? SHOCKING!! Maybe we should force more women to become coders. Nothing says freedom like mandating what career you chose based on the genitalia between your legs. It's just like the Soviet Union.

Reactions like this to someone wanting to have a conversation about the "isms" is why i think Trump will be reelected in two years and we will not see a blue wave this year. The left eats its own over thought politics and social issues that only matter to the left. Even the notion of wanting to discuss that maybe just maybe we are not all equal on every level is grounds to be shunned from the left and called a sexist/racist/fascist/nazi etc etc. All we are doing is moving the left farther away from the middle, which like it or not is necessary to be if you want to have any governmental control in the US.

This quack is just trying to back-door patently false, sexist beliefs by soft-pedaling his words: women are not innately inferior (soft-peddle), THEY CHOOSE TO BE (back hand slap)!

I have worked in programming nearly 20 years. Women are under-represented in this field. But every female programmer I have met has been just as competent as any male, and often has a more robust skill-set developed due to the sexist push-back that comes her way.

One of the most talented programmers I know is a mother from India for whom English is her 5th language. None of the brogrammers even speak English very well, or at least in a manner that is tolerable.

This "women don't code" chant is a fallacy that low-status males like to believe in order to salvage their manhoods from their ineptitude.

@5 WOW everyone picks their own education if women don't take the classes its not because a male is standing in their way.

You could, Katie, if you came to a belated realization that 98% of people are literally mentally retarded and you’re going to have to do shit for them your whole life if you don’t get with it.

You would then have to spend a few years putting in eighteen hour days warping your mind. The gap between your knowledge of language that keeps going forever and theirs has to become exponentially greater than the one separating their failed comprehension of a single human language and yours.

Or you could get a degree in underwater basket weaving and provide emotional support to guys playing WOW with things shoved up their assholes into their 40s.

There are a few, but I guarantee you this is the general gist of things.

Back against the wall and all.

@6 that's true and something that the hard left won't admit to. When I went to college there wasn't a single major that said "males only need apply". The best you can do is encourage more women to pursue other fields of study that are male dominated but after that, that's it. Personal choice still exists. Unless the left is going to push the Soviet Style "we tell you want to study".

its like damore was saying, it's not that the women who code cant code, it's just talking about the potential reasons why en masse the numbers in the field aren't 50-50 gender balanced. you could write similarly about why many men don't go into nursing or early childhood or k-12 teaching, despite the presence of a minority of very competent males in their ranks. oppression and exclusion have happened, and can and may happen again, but this idea that everything is oppression is fucking simplistic and self-righteous. yeah you'd be rich if it wasn't for all the meanies and their oppression!! coding, like medicine is hella hard, and the training is long and has many opportunities to quit or fail out, so one has to really want to be doing it - and there are some that do, apparently not enough to your eye. sorry to ruin your photo op.

You can read Andrew Sullivan for a more literate view of how gay men believe they understand women better than women do

Excellent article. Both the piece by the Google engineer and the piece by the professor are more nuanced than I first assumed. But that was because I set the bar really low for the Google engineer. He did have arguments to support his case, but it was riddled with obvious flaws and stereotypes. It is unlikely it would ever be accepted as a graduate thesis, for example. While the article written by the UW professor was more subtle in its statements and conclusions, it really wasn't saying much. Keep in mind, neither or social scientists. They are both theorizing about things they know little about. Like the Google engineer, the UW professor couldn't get his masters based on that paper.

If anything, the professor seems to be arguing that it isn't the university's fault if the numbers are so bad. In other words -- we can't do anything about the problem. To me, that just sounds like a cop-out. It is quite reasonable to say that the problem is not primarily caused by the universities, or even that the universities are not a major part of the problem, but it is ridiculous to say that they can't be part of the solution, which is what he implies.

Katie has nailed one of the key arguments for affirmative action in the section she put in parenthesis. That is why they call it affirmative action. It wasn't designed to fix the problems caused by racism (or in this case sexism) just at that location. It was designed to overcome racism or sexism within society as a whole. To put another way, it isn't enough to just say "women are not choosing computer science" -- we should ask why. The answer is complex, but we can't dismiss a feeling of exclusion, as well as outright hostility towards women in the field, even if that is rare on campus.

Are pretending this article and evidence doesn't exist: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding
Some facts:
Women computer science majors were increasing until home computers got marketed as "toys for boys".
Computer programming was considered secretarial work and was dominated by women in the early years (Google image search "Bell Labs Terminal Room" for graphic proof).

There is an inherent flaw in the argument that women don't "want" to program - they were doing something like it in large numbers until the culture changed. A UW person should know this, in the punch card days the terminals were run by "little old ladies in tennis shoes": http://www.washington.edu/news/2009/03/12/from-punch-cards-to-laptops-uw-tech-employees-remember-40-years-with-the-university/

Is it coincidence that pay for programming went up as women were nudged out of the field? Is code monkeying really that different than the "secretarial" programming that was dominated by woman? Any work women do we devalue, and remunerative work is seen as naturally belonging to men, that is the fundamental problem.

@13 Is it coincidence that pay for programming went up as women were nudged out of the field? Yes - Pay went up because you know, the internet and cell phones and tech corporations have trillions of dollars to throw around. I'm sure there are a fair share of women programmers here on work visa from other countries because they know the pay is really good. All American students know that coding, law, medicine is good money some just want a different path in life.

Buuurrrrrn the witch! Buuuurrrrrn the heretic!

@13 Reges addresses that Planet Money episode in his article. You should read it.

Reges stated in his piece that female intelligence scope is much broader than males. If anything males should be offended by his appeal to data, and reasoning.

Males, and females are very much alike. That said the differences are huge. And there's nothing wrong with that.

He's aging, making him less relevant, so he needed something to draw attention to himself. Mission accomplished. (Any ageism in that sentence is totally unintentional. Old people can certainly write code.)

The red flag in Reges' argument, to me, is that he only goes back 40 years in examining the rates of male and female employment in the field.

There were 20 more years of booming private-sector programming before that. And the field was dominated by women for those 20 years (though their job titles were clerical-- they were called "computer operators" instead of "programmers").

The argument that men displaced women in the field (as salaries rose, perhaps not coincidentally) is an argument drawn from well-known demographic facts about that first era of mainframe-and-punchcard programming.

Cutting off your examination of the issue at 40 years is deeply suspect; it's hard to imagine a scholar in the field who is unaware of its early history.

@14

The largest shift in salaries (and in job titles) took place in the '70s, not the '90s.

@20 you shut up

maybe this article is a good example of why men shouldn't be teaching college classes; they just aren't suited for it, the poor dears. They will be happier in a career where they don't have to interact with people.

@20 is spot on. 40 years ago is basically 1980. the internet was invented in 1967 and IBM stood for "I've Been Moved" even in the 60s. I think what is very hard in these discussions to get people to understand is that their own experience is a very partial slice of a much broader picture, which has been beset and disturbed by discrimination and dominance. in some ways to understand, to understand social phenomena, one has to forget who one is. as for free speech, academics, even those who are not tenured, have significantly more protection than anyone in the corporate world. this is why you never hear about Spencer disrupting an Amazon employee meeting. it's one aspect of the whole, do campuses believe in free speech anymore discussion that is never mentioned. of course no one expects this right at the behest of a corporation, but is that the way the world should be .,.

If you look at the graph for male and female majors (https://i1.wp.com/d24fkeqntp1r7r.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/18002114/Screen-Shot-2018-06-18-at-01.20.05.png) it is hard to argue that the problem is due more to nature, rather than nurture. Not only is there near equity in medical science, but in physical sciences as well. It is one thing to argue that women are attracted to the social sciences and law because they are more social, or because (as the professor claimed) women have more options, and can choose a field that involves more writing. But the physical sciences? Why would someone adept at physics or chemistry turn down an opportunity in computer science? I can only assume that there are cultural reasons.

It is possible that many of those social reasons occurred early on. Until recently, it was common for boys to play video games at a much higher rate than girls. This could be a factor, since the tasks are similar. With a computer game, you are asked to solve a puzzle. It isn't social, you can't discuss the problem you are trying to solve, you just interact with the computer until you are done. The same is true in a computer science class in college. It actually isn't the case in real life (as a professional programmer) but in college, you can't tell the professor that you think there might be a better way to deal with the situation -- you are asked to program, and that's that. It would be normal, then, for a lot of kids who are brought up playing video games to gravitate towards computer science. It isn't that hard, it has the same sort of satisfaction, and the results aren't messy, the way that medical or social sciences are.

But that is just a theory. It may be just as Ms. Herzog said. Too many women see a room full of dudes all coding, and say "no thanks", but they see a chemist, and say "why not?".

But again, I think the professor is letting his colleagues (and himself) off the hook when he just throws up his hands and says "well, what can you do?". You are at a major, fucking university. It is your job to change society, and enlighten the sheltered kids of the country (and increasingly, the world). If that means making up for stupid assumptions made in the past, so be it. A university should do more than try and cherry pick the best students, but should aim towards creating a more just and equitable society -- one that not only provides the opportunity for students to achieve, but the kind of environment where all feel welcome.

Having spent almost forty years in the software field (first as student, then employee) I can tell you that it varies quite a bit, company to company. Some of places had plenty of women, others didn't. Most talked a good game about inclusion, but several didn't do shit to encourage it, or minimally dealt with the frat-boy atmosphere that many women can deal with just fine, but are never appropriate. A woman or an African American coder can certainly blaze the trail, and be comfortable being the only woman or black man in the room. But why should they? What if you just want to show up, do your job, be judged for your contributions, and not feel like you are somehow representing your race or gender? For far too many people, this really isn't an option, and you can't let the universities off the hook for that problem, even if they didn't create it.

As a woman in tech, I see two key problems. 1) viewing the industry as the driver for career, which ignores the social nature of work. And 2) the weird idea that coding isn't deeply rooted in working with people. Long past are the days when coding was not a social activity. Now you need social skills to code well too. The best coders a good communicators in text and in person.

Hilarious- a gay, pot smoking liberal is accused of telling the truth. From a personal anecdotal observation and someone who has worked with developers, they are not a very social - but unique bunch. Everyone works in their own cube writing their code to be added to the system which is then tested. There really isn't much “socializing” beyond lunch and the occasional happy hour (when they feel inclined to even do that). Men tend to stick to their individual cubes and computers focusing on the minutiae of the code and work to identify any potential “bugs” before the version is put to market The women tend to stick to themselves as groups, complain about not having hand sanitizer every 10 feet in any given radius, and have cried and left for a day when they cannot meet deliverables as opposed to asking for help. This is the second time the point has been made publicly. This time by a pot-carrying, gay man and liberal children still get offended because someone who is supposed to fit into the liberal narrative isnt onboard with the group-think. Hilarious.

I thank Ms Herzog for the additional evidence that the LBT+ really do want to kick out the G if they could prevent us from taking anything with us.

Katie Herzog, please, please go read Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender. It has never been proven that there are any inherent brain differences between male and female people. There are observable brain differences, certainly, but again, it has never been proven that those are inherent and not caused by unequal treatment. And if they're not inherent, they can be eliminated by eliminating the unequal treatment. This is desirable. Don't assume that what is is the same as what should be.

Uh dude so in like real science brains have chemicals in them which totally makes drugs awesome but voodoo still isn’t real.

I know I could teach someone who didn’t make me want to beat them how to produce like 100+ “coders” and I totally despise the woman who has her four year old boy in a dress because she hit her limit of two and didn’t get a girl but just because you did or did not like to go play with bugs doesn’t make you grand wizard of reality.

Tom.Boy.

Mostly women doing the legit scaling of mountains, btw.

Just one comment, this is better reporting than what the ST put out.

Women who write code tend to be interesting conversationalists. Men who write code tend to be creepy. I suspect this has to do with choices more than anything else.

@33

There are a lot of extra words you could add, but yes, that is the short version.

"Creepy" could be expanded on, and a fair bit of history would be warranted since it wasn't always this way, and we might have a look at the industry's labor practices* to help us see why the men who end up in the trade are more likely to be creepy than men in other kinds of jobs.

But you've definitely got the essence of it there.

(Hire very young men, and lots of them, who don't know the basics of professionalism or understand the need for it, deliberately put them in competition with each other, and work them 60 hours a week or more until they either burn out in 2-5 years or turn into ghouls. Repeat.)

I see this as being similar to the lobster guy’s schtick[1]; say some stuff that isn’t outright false, wrap it with some known/accepted good ideas, maximize incendiary (but not incorrect statements) and then wallow about being victimized for merely bringing something to the “marketplace of ideas.”

He has some points, he articulates them well, etc, but his effect is to belittle a disempowered group and rally a mob of “free thinkers” (who are almost entirely white dudes) around the cause of free speech.

For all the posturing (eg: “stand up straight”) coming from the libertarian / PUA / MGTOW crew; y’all really seem quick to play the victim card if anyone calls you out on your privilege or questions your wholistic effect. Like; he says “women don’t want tech jobs”, and fine, maybe he #knowsWhatWomenWant - but step back and it kind of looks like attention trolling from a position of power at the expense of an underrepresented group. When this is called out and people inevitably take offense (which IMO was his motive for writing), he cries “free speech!”

This is exactly what the lobster guy did to launch himself into the spotlight[2]. He started attacking trans pronouns, victimized himself (although no one was actually doing anything to prevent him from mislabeling genders), and used the ensuing MGTOW[3] bromentum to rise to fame.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/06/04/jordan-peterson-needs-to-reconsider-the-lobster/
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37875695
[3] http://www.marriedtothesea.com/index.php?date=031618

So an academic decides to publish outside his specialty but clearly fails to even look at most of the research in the field? Look, he has a right to free speech, but as an academic, he needs to know how to do research. Firing someone for being bad at their job isn't protected.

And also, wait, are libertarians suggesting we force businesses (even if they are a state sponsored nonprofit, UW has to make ends meet) to hold on to employees? Or is this just knee jerk need for a certain group of commenters to defend their privilage? Maybe The Stranger could start putting enlargement ads below their login screen and lock out anyone who clicks, because seriously, we don't all need to know how small it is every time you think you need to step up and yell about how stupid liberals are, much less any of the groups you clearly feel personally very threatened by. Your conclusions don't even logically follow your perported philosophy half the time. You want fewer regulations, but if an academic is demonstrably unaware of how research or teaching work, then suddenly the liberals are out to get that person for expressing his views.

Sure. Sounds like the problem isn't liberals, it's libido (or lack thereof). I bet it helps you get to the comments section first though!

I recall an article that looked at high school performance by gender and subject in several western countries. They found two interesting things.

There were as many girls as boys who were excellent in science and math.
For the boys who were excellent in science and math, those subjects tended to be the things the boys were best at. For the girls who were excellent in science and math, science and math tended to not be their best subjects. They were even better in other subjects.

People generally have a preference for going into what they are best at, and if that holds for those high school students it would mean we would expect to see more boys going into science and math fields.

Anyway, if you want to answer the question "why aren't there more women in STEM?", you really need to first answer the question "where are the women who have the ability to do well in STEM going instead of STEM?". Without answering that first, you cannot have a good idea of the extent of the problem, or even if there is a problem.

M? S @38 - How did the article avoid coming off as just pro-girl propaganda? It's very hard to see how boys could be viewed as anywhere close to being equally intelligent unless the proportion of those who excelled in sciences/maths happened to be very low, or girls' weak subjects hit lower lows than boys' to bring the overall closer to level.

Or perhaps it fits into the MRA claim that education tends to prefer girls.

“: Is there room for someone like me in tech? I hope so.”

Funny he asks this question because I’m sure many women have as well. UW’s CSE department has worked very hard to find and nurture women and minorities ( and their stats show that).

But it doesn’t help for some white guy, using just his experience, to screw that up.

@25 yes, and thus shows that even a bit of research demolishes the "preference" argument. which is what a writer without a particular ax to grind would have done. at least there are some good corrections supplied here.

37% of incoming CS students are women. Nationally 15% of cs graduates are women. What percentage of UW CS graduates are women.

“Reges does not say that women are any less capable of working in tech, but he does argue that while women have historically been excluded from some workplaces, the days of systemic oppression determining what women can or cannot do are long over. ”

What are his qualifications that he can make such a claim? What evidence does he present to back it up? Why do we keep listening to the opinions of men for whom sexism is not their area of expertise? Also, seriously, that question of whether or not there is room for his type of person in tech? 😂😂😂 I’m left wondering how someone achieved such success with such Michael Scott-levels of self-awareness.

It's astounding, how simplistic the “nature versus nurture” debate can get. “Women don’t want to code” becomes the same as “women's interests are innately different, and those interests are biological, independent of culture, society, and structures of power.” If women looked around and saw women-dominated engineering schools and other STEM programs, companies run and populated by women, women coders getting glamorized in the media--and not just for being female coders--if institutions and companies had coding cultures that perhaps appealed to the “fact” that women “prefer” working with people rather than things—you bet women would be flocking to coding. Hell, even I might be coding—and it’s true, coding has always sounded deathly boring; in part because of the stereotype that only fat, misogynistic geeks with penises code, while they sit inert, eat pizza and belch and troll feminists. If I'd seen a bunch of badass women coding and having a great time and making lots of money when I was choosing a career, I would have joined right in.