[lmm]

So these two things don't seem to fit together. The linked article seems to provide pretty solid evidence that women are just as successful as men when you control by numerical SAT score. But some[1] women do indeed report hostile working conditions.

How can this be? Is it:

* Working conditions are hostile to women, but this doesn't actually affect anything in terms of income, number of women in the industry and so on?

* More cynical variation: any woman who makes it to graduation in a STEM field has already taken a lot of hostility; those who hostility can affect are driven out earlier?

* Women and men actually experience equal amounts of hostility, and simply interpret it differently?

* Women are better at their jobs (or somehow have it easier) in a way that doesn't show up in numerical SAT scores, and this effect is exactly equal and opposite to that of a hostile work environment?

* Something else I haven't thought of?

[1] though by no means all, I remember lorettahe's post here a year or so ago

[belorn]

It seems that any work environment with a homogeneous group over 90% has reports of hostile working conditions for minorities. Reading reports about women entering a workplace dominated by men, men entering a a work place dominated by women, or blacks entering a predominated white work place, I constantly hear the same kind of abuse.

"By being the only Y in the work place, people expect me to represent the whole Y group just because I am Y."

"Because I am Y, everyone assume {common fear about group Y} about me".

"People think something is wrong with me because I applied to a X dominated work place and not one of the Y dominated ones."

It seems to me that the hostile working environment is the result of human nature when confronted with a minority. When the number of women in the industry increases, then the hostile working conditions will likely go away as quickly it initial started.

[pron]

Probably, but I'd like to point out that this subject has been studied for the past forty years or so, so we can do better than conjecture. While it is true that minorities often feel left out in homogenous groups, there is a big difference between cases where that minority is simply a numeric difference and those where that minority has less power[1] in society. We now know that the discussion of sexism and racism is not about numbers and differences but about certain groups having more power than others, and that causes some very specific behaviors.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)

[pron]

I don't think you can combine different statistics of such high dimensionality like that. Unless women math GRE scores are in decline since the eighties -- and they don't correlate with success in science or medicine -- they don't explain the decline in participation in this industry alone. Also, the correlation of women participation and GRE math scores can remain just as strong regardless of the actual participation rates: the high correlation does not explain sex differences (as in this illustration http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Heritabil...)

There is also a danger in looking at statistics about human behavior that only take a snapshot in time, because the data itself changes all the time. For example, it is very possible that ever since women participation started to decline, there have been few role models for women, less desire to participate, and therefore less desire to excel in math.

It is as impossible to study social dynamics from a statistical snapshot as it is to study planetary motion from a still photograph of the sky.

[lmm]

> the correlation of women participation and GRE math scores can remain just as strong regardless of the actual participation rates: the high correlation does not explain sex differences (as in this illustration http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Heritabil...)

I don't understand what you're claiming. The differences in numeric GRE scores absolutely do explain the post-graduation sex differences. Are you claiming that low numeric GRE scores and low workplace success might have some common cause? Sure, but that cause would necessarily be pre-graduation, meaning that's the place to tackle it, and efforts to e.g. make workplaces less hostile aren't going to make any difference.

[pron]

I am saying two things. One, that the differences highlighted in the article do not predict the observed women participation rates in SV startups (i.e. the correlation of GRE scores could stay the same, but the participation baseline still increase 10%). In fact, the numeric difference he mentions (19% men, 6% women passing the cutoff) is a 3x difference, while the participation difference is more than 6x. So at best, it can explain less than half the effect.

Two, and this is the more important point, I absolutely claim that low numeric GRE scores and low workplace success might have some common cause, as I explained in my description of the feedback. That cause is not pre-graduation -- its effect is. Low participation in the industry causes fewer women to be drawn to the field, to be less interested in math etc.

I just want to point out what it is that I don't claim: I don't say that there is no significant innate difference in math abilities between men and women. Maybe there is and maybe there isn't. But its existence -- if it exists -- cannot nearly account for the huge gender gap we see in SV, doubly so because participation rates have been dropping since the eighties.

[lmm]

> That cause is not pre-graduation -- its effect is. Low participation in the industry causes fewer women to be drawn to the field, to be less interested in math etc.

If it's just that kind of feedback loop, how would the fall have started? Mathematics was once almost exclusively a men's game and early computer science fell in with that; the kids of the '80s would have had more female role models in the computer industry (and certainly as you say more in biology or physics) than those of the '70s or '60s, so why would they have been less interested in numerate fields?

I'm not saying that the feedback loop you describe can't amplify things, but I think the underlying cause has to lie outside it.

I've been thinking more about your decline-since-the-80s point. The narrative I've heard most often is that '90s compsci classes contained women with lower GRE-type scores than men (either through explicit positive discrimination/affirmative action, or because there were plenty of applicants who passed the admission criteria and a roughly-even split were accepted), who went on to do less well in industry (in line with their GRE-type scores), and the crash of the early '00s prompted an adjustment to more natural levels. But that leaves a lot of unexplained questions.

Maybe Yvain's page is right about academia, but those results don't extend to SV where there is more outright discrimination? Maybe it's about men being more able or willing than women to move to SV? Maybe SV's standards are stricter than the GRE cutoff and the difference at the end of the bell curve is even starker?

I still feel like we must be missing something. The simplistic explanation of "it's all innate ability" doesn't fit, but neither does "it's all discrimination/hostility", nor even "it's a 50/50 split between the two". Something remains to be explained here.

[pron]

> If it's just that kind of feedback loop, how would the fall have started?

That's a good question. So these guys[1] have one theory. Another is that changes in SV ethos have made companies less hospitable to women. It's probably a combination of many different effects.

> I still feel like we must be missing something.

Probably lots of things. What troubles me is the pervasive lack of curiosity and lack of empathy. You see people here on HN drool over sci-fi notions of cryonics or believe all sorts of scientific "findings" of dubious nature about nutrition, but dismiss all attempts to really understand this issue. You also see people here express such decisive opinions about pretty much anything, but when a woman tells of a negative experience at a SV company, the responses turn into, "wait, we have to wait and hear the other side first".

If we realize this is important -- and I have more to say about this point -- and investigate this in depth, then I think we will have benefitted already. In the meantime, we should take it to heart that employees in our industry feel distressed by the working environment we create.

Now, why is it so important? Many people confuse sexism and racism with mere discrimination between sexes/races, or unequal representation in various professions. But that women are underrepresented in the waste-disposal industry does not make anyone lose sleep. The reason is that sexism and racism are all about power[2] (the academic shorthand for racism/sexism is "discrimination + power". It is a very serious problem when groups of the population are absent or underrepresented in seats of power, and when that happens, it requires investigation (the assumption being that no group would freely yield power -- over itself -- to others). Because the tech industry, and Silicon Valley in particular, pack so much power these days, and since we share this power and can influence its future, we should be very concerned to learn that we're distributing this power unfairly.

[1]: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)

[lmm]

I am curious about good solutions. But I feel like "first, do no harm" is vital here - the reason we're happy to speculate about cryonics is that the worst case is you're still dead, whereas SV is astonishingly productive to the point where we don't want to look at it funny in case it stops working.

And there are specific worries. I've worked at a place that appeared to make a point of hiring equal numbers of men and women - and implemented this by hiring a number of women who simply weren't capable of performing their jobs (whether this was a question of talent or training I don't know). It was bad for me, as in programming incompetent colleagues are not just dead weight but actively harmful. It was bad for those women, who had a frustrating time at a job where they knew they weren't contributing. And it was even worse for the highly-skilled women on the team, as others who hadn't worked closely with them would - understandably, and probably unconsciously - make the calculation that they were probably in the incompetent group, and act accordingly. So naturally, avoiding that particular failure mode is a matter that's close to my heart, and I get defensive when I hear people saying things that I think might lead to that.