[usmeteora]

This is interesting. I'm a female Electrical Engineer in the United States. Females are obviously a minority in the Engineering teams, but interestingly enough, there are a few older female Engineers I know who came from Eastern Europe after spending 10-15 years doing Engineering there, and said they never had an issue with sexism until they came to the U.S.

I'm not sure whether an elaboration by them would indicate that they experience more sexism by men, or that overall its more of a topic brought up by women, but they did say there were more issues with men here.

I think alot of the issues with women in the U.S. vs Europe are due to the fact that Europe is more urbanized and concentrated. Women and men live and work in closer quarters with more socialized economics where women are overall more educated, urbanized, financially independent, and the sexual and in general culture is more liberally progressive.

In the U.S., we are way behind when it comes to womens socioeconomic equality, and education quality in general. Concurrently, there are large number of men live suburban lives, with housewives who are to some degree financially dependent on them, and the idea of an a women who doesn't fit the housewife/trophy wife/soccer mom/etc etc whateve that American culture props up as a way of life for women to idolize, causes more cultural friction and results in more emotional isolation for women working in male dominated work forces.

Not all of it is intentional. Most guys I work with are fine, but older than me, married. I'm 27 single and don't intend to settle down anytime soon, maybe travel more if anything. So every company I've worked for, is filled with men who golf together or do other things. I'm not explicitly excluded anymore than I'm not interested in doing those things and they know that. If I was invited, I wouldnt go.

This is overall pretty a pretty trivial example, but I am trying to emphasize how the undercurrent of culture in America is a large contributer to this, and not necessarily any one persons fault or a mans conscious decision to come across as exclusionary.

Regardless, the document this article refers to goes far beyond that, and I have to say, as an INTJ female, this biology crap is ridiculous. I am introvert and would prefer any day to stay inside and read, code, play video games than go out and "socialize".

In my experience, as an educated female introvert, I am demonized for NOT being a social butterfly, I have been called a bitch for not smiling when I say something in a meeting, because there is a subconscious expectation that girls are supposed to be adorably cute in everything that they do, or ease poltiical or social tension and are viewed as "out of line" for being the source of it, and men are rewarded for agressive aberrhant behavior and lauded as the leader of the group for equally outlier behavior. If a man is confident in his capabilities, I've found him to be considered respected, but if a women is confident in her opinion in a meeting or her belief in her own capabilities, I've often been told I'm a know it all, and am reminded immediately why I need to be "knocked" down a peg to be reminded how I'm not as great as I think I am. It can be a little confusing to work in male dominated environment and be punished for the same behavior that men are rewarded for. This does not happen to me as much at my current job, or on my team or my department, but you have to wonder how much day to day life in the long term impacts what paths women take in their lives and careers based on the rewards and punishments they receive and their economic incentive to act and perform like a man, which is all subject to current socioeconomics and politics, moreso than a woman's "biology"

This document serves one purpose and on purpose only, to perpetuate stereotypes that many women do not meet, and recategorize all actions and behaviors they have that women DO meet the "White male" stereotype and according to this document I mean "objectively qualified software engineer with an open mind and idealogical diversity" as non lady like.

Furthermore, the fact that this document is even being considered as potentially accurate to some degree by any "intelligent" software engineer is more of a testament to how they probably should supplement some of their tech education with history.

The last time I checked:

The very first compiler: Grace Hopper

Nuclear Power: Lise Mitner

Code that got us to the moon: Margaret Hamilton

Spread Spectrum Technology/Wireless Communication: Hedy Lamar

Inventor of Acorn Computer and ARM Processor: Sophie Wilson

Current CEO of AMD: Lisa Su

Those are just off the top of my head and by the top of my head I mean

Nuclear power, which is the most abundant clean energy source on the planet right now,

First flight to the moon, the precedents for Wifi

etc etc, I'm probably missing some awesome women, there is no proof whatsoever that a females biology makes her less capable of being an equally qualified software engineer.

This general argument has been used for thousands of years in various flavors to justify a lack of womens rights or capabilities and they have never in retrospect sounded anything less than ridiculous, with their conclusions implying nothing less than the ONE thing ANY software engineer, and anyone who listened to day 1 of Intro to Science in the 5th grade should know, and that is correlation is not causation.

Women used to suck at math before they were allowed to go to school.

In the same way, technology is a new industry, and women are already a minority status in so many other industries its bound to reflect here as well, but the existence of a gap is a correlation to biology, as well as the many contributing factors to the cultural differences that influence the mass aggregation of how far women go when it comes to being socioeconomically independent individuals with advanced careers.

less than 50 years ago it was argued women shouldnt have careers because how can we procreate our species if women are working passed when the can have kids.

Well now we have technology and better healthcare to enable women to be healthier live longer and have kids much later in life.

Every excuse about biology as an objectively and permanently limiting factor to womens capabilities is a blatant lie that has shown itself to be one time and time again throughout history .

And to answer your last question, I personally really don't care about the diversity of my team if they are all good people who can work well, but I WOULD care if a coworker propogated a document saying I'm inferior to them because of my biology as a female.

On a very similiar note, to further this argument with studies and words that are not mine, by some of the mst lauded Economists of our time, I recommend the book "Why Nations Fail" which goes through many countries and places in history showing that the socioeconomic advancement of a people or a country, despite many arguments about certain countries or ethnicities being "less evolved over time" which was and in some places still is an argument and justification to why so many countries and millions of people persist in poverty, and actually that the ability for a country and a people to advocate for themselves is very much a result of the soecioeconomic system they live in, supplementing studies of groups of people an entire cities with the same biology and ethnic evolution and history who live in prosperous countries or not, entirely based on the political structure of that country incentivizing venues for massive growth in healthcare, education, human rights etc.

I would argue the existence of highly educated competitive female software engineers is just like most of history and people in the world upon objective studies, based on a complex structure of what incentivizes people and how much their culture allows/encourages/or punishes the advancement of womens education and independence, and this is a snapshot in time of which it would be irresponsible for us to make permanent conclusions about the mental capabilities of women due to their "biology" without efforts to extracate and analyze nature vs nurture in mass.

[koonsolo]

> but I WOULD care if a coworker propogated a document saying I'm inferior to them because of my biology as a female.

You wouldn't if you were working in Europe.

If this would happen here, all colleagues would have a great laugh out of this document, sharing it with others to show "What crazy John has done this time, making a whole document about his retarded idea."

If this guy is the asocial hunchback working in his office all day, avoiding others, but none the less doing great work, the company probably would keep him. Because everyone already knows what kind of a nutcase he is.

If he is working with other colleagues, this is probably a reason to fire him. First of all because this is not professional whatsoever, and because this obviously shows that he is not able to work with other people.

It this is a manager or HR person, he would be fired on the spot. Everyone would agree with that. If not what would raise some eyebrows too.

I fully understand that in US, you would care, but this is also the reason why the whole situation in US so surreal to me. I read that some coworkers even agree with them. And that makes it a problem indeed. It is just strange that US and EU cultures are so alike, but still have such a big difference in how female colleagues are treated at the workplace.

[throwaway417164]

> I have to say, as an INTJ female, this biology crap is ridiculous.

That's an interesting way to put it. The estimates I've seen (e.g. [1], [2]) have the frequency of INTJs among men significantly higher than the frequency of INTJs among women. If INTJs are more likely to become engineers, then those frequencies predict that there will be more male engineers than female engineers.

[1] https://www.capt.org/mbti-assessment/estimated-frequencies.h...

[2] https://mypersonality.info/personality-types/population-gend...

[vilmosi]

As far as I can see, those statistics are from the US. Which means there might be more to this INTJ-engineer relationship beyond sex. Such as cultural expectations that an engineer is an introvert, which may not be true.

I don't remember the study, but apparently in former communist countries, while gender roles are very strong, women were expected to work in factories along side men for a very long time.

Which is probably why you have a relatively more balanced tech workforce there today vs the West.

[usmeteora]

Yes this is true.

However, if you read the document, the author basis the premise of his perception of faulty and "good intentions gone wrong" programs to correct for gender pay gap disparity as due to the "underlying biologicial differences" between men and women.

Women are far less likely to be INTJs, but most female Engineers I know are not INTJs, and furthermore, if you are using the idea that INTJ is an indicator of someone being more likely to be an engineer or STEM I guess we can say in this case, and that somehow there is a biologicial difference (plausible, were not advanced enough in biology and sciences, psychology and neurobiology to be able to atribute personality genres to unique biologicial differences that can correctly an consistently identify a Meyers Brigg personality type, maybe its possible in the future, maybe not, maybe thats not the underlying relationship, who knows yet), then the entire premise of the author is debunked.

If my personality type whether as a male or female, is going to kick me in a direction more likely to end up in STEM (interest in math and sciences) then youre statement reconcludes there is no "underlying biological differences" that exist for all women that never occur with men.

The idea that personality traits contribute to biological nuances that can occur in men and women, then the author loses his point.

I'm also not aware of any Meyers Briggs personality type that comes with the term "neurotic" but according to the author, all women are, and this is not even up for debate.

I'm also leaving out the entire obvious consideration that I would assume is a given in all these conversations, but seem not to be addressed in any way whatsoever by the authors 10 page document, that even if we could attribute say INTJ or similiar MBriggs personality types to highly correlating with females in STEM, and then showing less women are likely to have those personality types, we still don't know what causes personality types, or have biologicial blueprints for them, so we can not assume "underlying biological differences between sexes" especially considering MBs are not sexually based.

Furthermore, we are leaving out the fact that humans are an evolving species and we experience a microcosm of our own societal influences that influence how people think, act, perceive, spend, procreate, educate, eat etc based on our socioeconomic construct. To throw aside the mere idea that being surrounded by men who actually write off most of your actions as neurotic and believe this as truth, could not have some lng term damaging effect on your ability to be taken seriously or perceived as successful or result in an imposed biased with a positive feedback loop on how the gender who is not in an economic majority of empowerment may be held back, is just about as childish and ignorant as missing the point of a first science experiment where you failed miserably because you didn't have controls for your experiment, or consider that different contributing factors could result in different outcomes and calibrate for them.

No, from this authors perspective, women are neurotic. This is a fact:

"Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."

https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...

[denzil_correa]

> Females are obviously a minority in the Engineering teams, but interestingly enough, there are a few older female Engineers I know who came from Eastern Europe after spending 10-15 years doing Engineering there, and said they never had an issue with sexism until they came to the U.S.

Re: Eastern Europe.

You can thank communist regimes for more female workers in technology.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/women-in-tech-why-bulgaria-and-...

[thinkingemote]

A great comment. I'm wondering have you access to the document and have read it? It seems as if there's no copies around for us to look at and see what it's actually saying, compared to what it's reported as saying. I'd agree with most here in saying that it sounds really bad, bad enough to elicit strong responses but I'd like to make my own mind up if possible.

[grey-area]

One of the best comments here. I wish this was a top level comment so it could end up at the head of the page where it belongs.