They can’t see what they can’t see
I wrote a post on Facebook a bit ago:
You know what I’m sick of? I’ll tell you what I’m sick of. I’m sick of men writing think pieces explaining why women should be perfectly happy to see men writing think pieces about how women just happen not to be suited to all those careers in which they’re a minority, because it’s their temperament to be too nurturing and cuddly to be suited for [desirable job X].
I’m sick of seeing those men never pause for one second to take into account the fact that being seen as unsuited for [desirable job X] IS ITSELF AN OBSTACLE and that they themselves are adding to the obstacle by lecturing us on why we shouldn’t be “offended” by such claims but just smile acceptingly and take it all on board.
That’s what I’m sick of.
Then I decided to talk about it here including saying what the source irritant was. It was a pair of articles, by Russell Blackford and then by Jerry Coyne linking to Russell, on the Damore memo and how reasonable it was and how mistaken it is to think otherwise.
Russell first:
In August 2017, James Damore, a Google software engineer, was fired for writing an internal memo that offered views about sex-related differences in interests and emotions.
Damore had suggested that part of the over-representation of men in software engineering at Google might be due to psychological differences between women and men: not intellectual differences, but differences in what activities the sexes find attractive and enjoyable. He argued that Google should focus on equality of opportunity for individuals, without necessarily expecting equality of outcomes across its workforce.
Damore’s firing from Google was an example of an increasing intolerance of inconvenient or controversial ideas within democratic societies. Here, then, is one great moral challenge of our time. Once an issue becomes politically toxic, we may reject inconvenient viewpoints out of hand. We may reject opponents – viewing them as ill-disposed people – without listening to them, and we may even try to punish them for their views.
But this wasn’t a disinterested discussion at a think tank. It was a non-supervisory male employee writing up his unsolicited opinions on why there are fewer women than men in jobs like the ones at Google – in other words a contribution to a hostile work environment. It’s not just a matter of “oh my god this man’s valuable academic opinion on a completely random abstract subject has been suppressed!!” – it’s also a matter of person from favored group explaining to disfavored group that it’s disfavored because of its own psychological quirks, in the workplace. If one put it in racial or ethnic terms it would probably be more obvious how grotesque and discriminatory that is – “Oh you see it’s just that Indians are mystical and contemplative so they don’t want coding jobs, it’s quite natural” – but when it’s women, the dudes just don’t see it.
Damore explained that these are statistical differences, discernible at the level of populations, and that there is a large overlap in the distribution curves for the respective sexes. For example, many individual men might be more oriented to feelings and people than most women. Thus, he emphasised, these findings should not be used to stereotype or prejudge individuals.
No indeed, they should simply be used to explain why there are so few women at Google and there’s no need to do anything about it, especially not telling dudes to quit telling women why they won’t like working at Google.
Now Coyne’s:
As a scientist, I’m appalled when certain ideas that may be true, but offend some group or other, are considered off limits, even when those ideas—like global warming—must be accepted and discussed if we’re to save the planet. Psychological differences between men and women aren’t as dangerous to the welfare of Earth as a whole, but if we’re to figure out the reasons for sex disparity in professions, we have to take them seriously and figure out what effect, if any, they have on gender parity.
But the point isn’t that the ideas “offend”; the point is that they can contribute to an environment perceived as hostile. They certainly don’t have to; research and inquiry into the reasons for sex disparity in professions can obviously be a feminist and a feminist-compatible project; but random coder guy putting out a memo explaining it’s because women would rather stay home with the babies is not that inquiry. Yes, that’s hyperbole; I find the refusal to see this extremely annoying. The point is that Damore is not a researcher or scholar in evo psych or the reasons for sex disparity in professions, and there are sound and compelling reasons to ask why he thought he needed to put out a memo on the subject the upshot of which was “it’s because they don’t want to, not because we don’t let them, so there’s no need to do anything about it.”
Again: I think this would be blindingly obvious to them if it were about race, and I find it infuriating that they can’t see it when it’s about women.
I get frustrated with the way this debate gets framed. It’s not that the “ideas” that Damore and his ilk promote are “off limits,” as Coyne would have it. It’s that they are such inferior ideas when it comes to explaining our present reality.
I have no quarrel with the abstract notion that women and men may differ, whether biologically or for culture-driven reasons that we don’t wish to change, in ways that mean that not every profession will end up with a 50/50 split of men and women even when we have achieved complete and utter Gender Equality Utopia. Call this the Gender Differences Hypothesis.
What I do quarrel with is the claim (sometimes explicit, sometimes implied) that all observable deviations from a 50/50 split can be explained by the GDH, and therefore we can declare that discrimination is trivial or non-existent and that we are already in Gender Equality Utopia. Not when virtually all of those deviations from a 50/50 split seem, curiously, to fall in such a way that men are disproportionately represented in those professions that are most powerful, well-compensated, and respected. Not when we have all sorts of scientifically rigorous, peer-reviewed research that show that (e.g.) the same behavior that is perceived as strong leadership from a man is seen as bitchy and pushy from a woman, that women somehow got hired more often for symphonies when auditions were made gender-blind, that women professors are discriminated against on student evaluations.
You know — the sort of hard scientific evidence that critical thinking scientists claim to value over feelings and anecdotes and folk legends. Unless those folk legends involve speculation about how women like pink because their evolutionary forebears handled the berry-picking.
Back when the United States passed Title IX and required that colleges receiving federal funds provide equal access to athletic programs for women, there were many who declared that this was absurd because women just weren’t as interested in sports as men, it was obvious, and trying to force it to be otherwise was an exercise in “social engineering.” Well, it turns out that women and girls were a lot more interested in sports than they were generally given credit for. Once those opportunities were provided, college women were interested. And younger girls, given something to aspire to, got interested, too.
Twenty years ago, if asked about these things, I probably would have agreed with the Damores and Blackfords and Coynes of the world. The reason I changed my mind isn’t because I decided to put feelings or abstract utopian goals ahead of cold hard facts; it was that I looked at the cold hard facts and realized that some of my assumptions were wrong.
To circle back to the original point (finally!): the GDH isn’t “off limits” any more than “God did it” is “off limits” as an explanation of the creation and diversity of life forms on this planet. It just comes up short as an explanation.
They can’t see it because they don’t want to see it. Their entire life comforts rely on them not seeing it. The moment they admit that the only reason that their lives are as comfortable as they are is that women have been systematically deprived of opportunities they’ve taken for granted, and instead steered into doing support work for men, they’d have to acknowledge their own part in patriarchy, their own place in Omelas.
[…] a comment by Screechy Monkey on They can’t see what they can’t […]
For me this isn’t just annoying, it’d disheartening and depressing.
I’ve been in IT since the ’80’s, when the ratio was closing in on 1 in 5, women to men. For awhile it looked like that gap was going to close further, but that trend stopped, then reversed. What happened? I’m not sure, but I blame IT bubbles in part. Last hired-first fired cleared out many of the women and non-Asian minorities. Then there came outsourcing, off-shoring and high-tech work visas. Pretty soon the landscape looked whiter and more male than it ever was in the past.
And then, I believe, people, mostly male people, began with the just-so-stories to explain the phenomenon of the ‘disappearing women’, and maybe to feel a little bit better about laying off, or outsourcing, or off-shoring, or hiring that guy on a H-1B visa.
I wish I had the energy to rant about this. This creeping, ever increasing feeling that there’s a semi-subconscious attitude that I just don’t belong. I wish I could spin a more coherent narrative about my experiences in IT, but it is just too depressing. I love my job. I love the work. The guys I work with are as supportive as they can be, but I swear it’s in their brains too, so much so that I literally have to remind them every so often that I am not, never was, never was trained as and don’t wanna be an Admin Assistant, even though I’ve been in IT longer than any of them.
I was, in fact, a math major, who dreamed of teaching calculus some day, but then realized that wouldn’t pay as much as this new computer gig, and that programing and systems engineering were probably more fun anyway.
There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t think about what other career path I might have chosen. Not because this doesn’t pay well, or it’s too hard, or boring, or anything besides the ever increasing feeling that I just don’t belong.
I’m not alone, btw. I hung on to ‘girl friends in IT’ from the very beginning. We old gals are out there, but fewer and fewer younger women are entering the field, and it’s no wonder.
It’s hard to even know where to start. Of course there are physical and chemical differences between brains that behave differently since brains are physical objects that run by chemistry and electricity. But it’s exceptionally disingenuous to ignore the fact that environments, both physical and social, make a significant contribution to how brains develop. One commenter at Coyne’s dismissed the idea that children as young as 1 or 2 years old could have had any opportunity for having their toy preference influenced by social factors. But various experiments on babies as young as 3-6 *months* old have demonstrated both men and women reacting significantly differently to the same baby depending on whether they thought it was a girl or a boy – choosing different toys, spending more time cuddling and talking to the “girls”, encouraging more independence from the “boys”, etc. And now, for the past few years, there has developed a custom of “gender reveal” parties for fetuses, so the parents, friends and relatives can make sure to have all the “right” colours, toys, decorations, clothes etc. (And Richard Sapolsky in his recent book Behave points out how curious it is that young children in schools are referred to (and often sorted as) “boys and girls”, asking why we consider this so much more relevant than “kids who have/have not lost a tooth”.)
And by the way, I know lots of other people have pointed this out over the past few months, but if Damore is correct, and women are, in general, somewhat better at communications and interpersonal relationships, that would mean that there ought to be *more* women as team leaders and managers, using their superior social skills to run the companies. (Not to mention the fact that even at the lowest levels of tech work these days, a vanishing small amount of it is done by individual coders – the team is the thing.)
Of course, a related phenomenon is one that I see regularly – men seeing women in positions at their work, their school, and inflating in their mind the number of women that are present. So young men can see a couple of women come on, and suddenly it’s like “oh, my god, it’s all women now, affirmative action has cleared men out of the workplace”, and they can’t even see that the ratio of men:women is still 5:1.
All of this is part of the same thing that Blackford and Coyne are experiencing – the world they grew up in is assumed to be normal, and changes are deviations, not adjustments. The movement of women from support for men to people in their own right looks like “tinkering” or “social engineering”, because they learned a different world, a “normal” world, and never questioned whether it was natural. It just was. Sort of like when I watched a documentary on E.O. Wilson in which it appeared that he never once encountered any women except cheerleaders in his entire life, because that was the women in the documentary. Not even mothers or wives; just sex symbols. But the show didn’t even have many of those. It was a world full of males, males, and more males, with females just missing. He talked about how he had a totally normal life of doing things (which he described) so of course he grew up to love science. It didn’t look like a normal life judged by my life, it looked like a utopia of a kid just wandering around exploring a world without having to worry about anything. Something – or someone – was taking care of everything, and this was normal, and everybody had that sort of life. Except most of us didn’t. More people don’t have that life than do, so how in the hell could it be normal? I would have killed for the sort of opportunities he had, but he has to present them as though they weren’t opportunities, they were just normal kid stuff, so that his growing up to be famous and celebrated is all his doing, and not the fact that the other people around him bolstered up his opportunity.
And for someone growing up in Alabama in the 30s, there were a lot more disadvantaged he had to overlook than just women…
Meanwhile I was busy cleaning up after and cooking for my brothers at the age he was dabbling in ponds and chasing bugs, but I suppose that was just because I preferred to clean up after my lazy ass brothers and to cook for them while they (or at least one of them) beat the shit out of me. Such a normal, natural life for a young girl, and the one that any young girl would seek, right? Because berries, or something like that.
Funny how so many women used to do computer programming back in the day, before it became lucrative.
I guess we’ve evolved further away from that boring code stuff since the 1950s, huh boys? It’s the only rational explanation.
And in the process, Lady M, demonstrated a new phenomenon to science – that individuals can evolve, since some of the women who used to do computer stuff are now doing something else. It’s a scientific revolution!
Let us not give the Coynes and the Blackfords of this world too much benefit of the doubt!
The world in which both Coyne (b 1949) and Blackford (b 1954) grew up was one in which women were calculating the trajectories which took American heroes into space and eventually to the moon and Grace Hopper (b 1906, just for the record) was doing all sorts of innovative work with computers including the development of COBOL.
Much as I respect my fellow commenters here, I’m going to put a good deal more of this down to selective memory and the comforting reassurances of the locker room than they do.
Single data point: I encountered exactly this at a meeting of a large engineering science collaboration. Of the abut 25 group leaders, one was a woman, of about 50 Ph.D students, about 6 or 8 were, and when the discussion came to affirmative action, one of the group leaders said that he was against these kind of things because “Nowadays, if you are a man, you don’t even need to apply”.
‘But the point isn’t that the ideas “offend”; the point is that they can contribute to an environment perceived as hostile.’ This is very well said. One thing that has struck me by about certain men who have spent all their lives in the academy is how extraordinarily naive they are. They seem to assume that all discourse is on the level of a polite debate in a university common room or in a university hall before a well-educated and thoughtful audience who are all sufficiently well-educated and thoughtful and nice to follow the arguments made on either side and to unerringly plump for those arguments that not only seem to make the better case but are nicer. And so, proudly crusading in the name of ‘free speech’, they can object to Jamaica’s banning a well-known American homophobe who has called for gay people to be stoned to death and who remarked after the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando that there were “fifty fewer paedophiles in the world” — and are seemingly oblivious of the fact that Jamaica is notorious for violence, often lethal, against gay people, and that Steven Anderson was certainly not intending to go to Jamaica to engage in some innocuous academic debate but to stir a stinking pot. There seems to be no awareness, even after the election of Trump (for whatever one may think about Hillary Clinton, her arguments in those ‘debates’ were far superior to Trump’s) of the fact that human discourse generally takes place not in some supposedly safe and equalising academic setting (I say ‘supposedly’ because bullying and disingenuousness occurs in such settings as well), but in a recalcitrant world of inequalities, of power and powerlessness, and of terrible prejudice — prejudice that has now, under Trump and various right-wing European governments (e.g.those of Poland, Hungary, and to a less degree that of bitter little Brexit Britain), been given permission to show itself openly. These mostly male academics, one notices, seem to have very little understanding of history or politics, and very little respect for those who study these subjects.
@cazz,
I’m glad to hear you’ve got colleagues who at least try to be supportive. Nevertheless, “it” is undoubtedly there; at least, it certainly is for me.
For the record, I am 100% convinced that there are no innate / biological differences between the brains of women and men (or girls and boys) that accord any statistically-significant difference in STEM-based capabilities. But that conviction lives entirely in my “academic/intellectual brain” (the part of my brain that rigorously gauges the viability of propositions based on the quantity and quality of evidence for or against them).
The conviction has not permeated into the “social-ape” part of my brain (the part of my brain that was sculpted by exposure to sexist attitudes from my family, peers, and society over the 10-20 most formative years of my life). That part of my brain just now (literally: I paused before writing this sentence to take the test) flunked the applicable “Gender-Science” Harvard Implicit Association Test
For those not familiar: IATs measure which of two “opposite” word-association tasks people can perform more rapidly and accurately. The two word-association tasks of the Gender-Science IAT are
(1) associating feminine referents (woman, girl, aunt, mother) with Liberal Arts courses (Literature, Art, Philosophy, etc.); while associating masculine referents (man, boy, uncle, father, etc) with STEM courses (Math, Chemistry, Engineering, etc)
(2) the opposite/reverse associations (i.e. feminine referents with STEM; masculine referents with Liberal Arts)
IAT results range from having “no preference” between association sets (1) and (2), to having a “slight”, “moderate” or “strong” preference for (1) or (2). For the Gender-Science IAT, “no preference” would indicate that, at a subconscious level, my brain found it just as easy to conceptualize a woman with an Engineering degree and a man with a Liberal Arts degree as it was to conceptualize a woman with a Liberal Arts degree and a man with an Engineering degree.
My actual result:
Well, shit… I’m an asshole.
:-)
Okay… there’s a more constructive take-away of “flunked” IATs like this one. I should use the results to force myself to recognize that any subconscious, passing, informal, or “gut-feel” evaluation I make of the computer-programming capabilities of my colleagues will be unfairly biased against the women I work with. There is a lot of evidence that simple conscious awareness of this kind of bias can be very effective in overcoming it. The real trick, I think, is to keep this self-awareness to the forefront of my mind perpetually (or at least frequently enough that it becomes habitual).
I’ve been working particularly hard at this over the last 5-10 years (largely as my passion for contemplating and debating social justice issues has utterly eclipsed my passion for, e.g., debating Young Earth Creationists over the existence of transition fossils). That said, I’m still far from perfect… My biggest struggle is not so much failing to recognize the talents of my “super-star” female-colleagues, but in resisting the strong pull of confirmation bias that inclines me to judge many “meets-expectations-level” female-colleagues more than their male counterparts.
This entire spiel was really triggered by the second half of Cazz’s quote:
Speaking for myself: it would be SOOOO helpful if women I worked with felt comfortable giving me gentle “check-your-bias” reminders (or not-so-gentle, if called for). I imagine that for every time I catch myself slipping into gender-based prejudicial thought patterns, there could be dozens of times I’ve been utterly oblivious to it.
I understand that in many contexts, giving this type of feedback is probably not easy. More often than not, it’s probably met with strong negative reinforcements (inviting all flavors of defensiveness, gas-lighting, man-splaining, etc). To that end, I’m honestly considering reaching out (privately) to the women I work with most frequently to let them know: for me at least, it’d be criticism that I 100% appreciate receiving.
I do feel compelled to note: The prejudicial short-comings I have worked to address are purely along the “informal” lines of improving workplace culture. I have never held a supervisory role (never given any raise or promotion-influencing review of *any* colleagues). Though related, I consider the need to enforce strict objectivity in the context of formal performance-reviews to be a different can of worms.
I can just see these guys pontificating about how the Negro hand evolved for cotton-picking. And then whining that their Bold Hypothesis wasn’t getting the respect it deserved.
For an atheistic/skeptical ‘community,’ the concern should be whether any of the gender-glurge that’s plastered all over the social ‘sciences’ is actually TRUE. These ‘everyone observes,’ and ‘it is well knowns’ are beyond caricature, and so obviously parallel to the most blatant racist and reactionary memes.
Well, not entirely; that’s my point. Truth isn’t the only criterion for, to pick one example, whether one should circulate a memo at work. It’s laughably easy to say something true that is at the same time a threat or an attempt to exclude or intimidate or belittle, and then there are questions about [true universally and always] or [true contingently], and similar. It could be True that women tend to prefer the helping professions and at the same time that that’s because they’ve been socially conditioned to do so and that men have been socially conditioned not to and that guys like Damore constantly saying it simply adds to the conditioning and that bystanders like Blackford and Coyne have the same effect and so on ad infinitum.
“Damore’s firing from Google was an example of an increasing intolerance of inconvenient or controversial ideas within democratic societies.”
A small point maybe, but Google, like all corporations I know of, aren’t democratic societies.
I confess to being amused — well, not merely amused — by this: ‘As a scientist, I’m appalled when certain ideas that may be true…’ Why not, ‘As a human being, I am appalled…’ or ‘As a thinking person, I am appalled….” Why this wrapping oneself in the mantle of one’s professional authority? And ideas that ‘may be true’ may also not be true at all, or only half true, or true only with a great many qualifications… Whatever their degree of truth or falsity, ideas, and what may be suggested by ideas, can do great damage in certain circumstances and the more plausible they seem to certain groups of people, the more damage they may well do. There is also the proud, near heroic adherence to ‘principle’ whatever the circumstances. There’s a wonderful paragraph in Derek Parfit’s preface to his great work of moral philosophy, ‘On What Matters’, about Kant, who also made a bit of a fetish of principle: “… consider Kant’s claim that, if we tell some lie ‘even to achieve some really good end’, we ‘violate the dignity of humanity in our own person’ and ‘make ourselves ‘a mere deceptive appearance of a human being’, who has even less worth than if he were a mere thing’…. On the very next page Kant suggests that, if we are asked by an author whether we like his work, we may be permitted to say what he expects.”
Heh, good point. Especially the juxtaposition of “As a scientist” and “some group or other.”
Also, now that I mention it – notice the casual dismissal of half of humanity as “some group or other.” Men, of course, are not some group or other, because men are just Normal – but those other creepy deviant weirdos who failed to be men, they are “some group or other.” That’s quite a tell.
God I get sick of this shit.
Also: great comments here; thank you all.
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