Saturday, August 12, 2017

Diversity in Tech

Google's firing of James Damore due to his memo claiming that the lack of gender diversity in tech is due to biological differences has generated quite a lot of media.

My take:

Mr. Damore is correct in that there are biological difference between men and women. Just like there are biological differences between people with brown hair and black hair, black skin and white skin, short people and tall people and so forth. In fact, there are biological differences between any two given humans. We are all unique. What Damore fails to understand is the significance of those differences. His mistake is jumping to an unwarranted conclusion.

Because women are underrepresented in tech, he believes the reason is due to biological differences. There is zero scientific evidence for this. It would like saying that because male politicians tend to be taller than average, there is a biological reason that tall men succeed in politics.  The reason it helps to be tall in politics or a man in tech is not due to biology but due to culture. In our society, tall men tend to be stronger and looked up to so they get more opportunity to lead. Likewise men tend to be encouraged more in sciences related to the tech industry.

But the nice thing about culture is that it can change. Nearly 50% of medical school graduates are now women (and doctors have just as much hard science as people in the tech industry) and the majorly of law school graduates are women. Not too long ago that would have been unthinkable. No doubt there were many James Damores claiming that women just weren't biologically fitted to be doctors or lawyers.

Many years ago Spring argued with me about a woman being president. She claimed it would be wrong and I said that was ridiculous. She got steaming mad. Such was my surreal marriage.

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