The Washington Post writes today about the decline of DEI initiatives in Silicon Valley:
Despite these initiatives, the tech industry’s demographics remain largely stagnant. In 2022, 26 percent of science, tech, engineering and math workers were women, an increase of one percentage point from the year 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
It's actually a lot worse than that. Here's the share of women specifically in computer related jobs:
Despite decades of DEI programs, the share of women in computer-related jobs has plummeted. The share getting bachelor's degrees in computer science has rebounded a bit over the past decade but is still well below its level in 1990.
Conservative attacks on DEI may have triggered the recent corporate surrender on these programs, but only because the timing was good. After years and years of trying every new thing and seeing only meager results, even a lot of liberals are in a mood to move on. It's one thing to put in the work and tolerate a certain amount of performative BS if you're making progress, but if you're not it's hard to justify. Eventually, after many years of being told "You're doing it wrong," there comes a time when the excuse wears thin.
This particular story is largely about women in IT, but I imagine things are pretty similar for other marginalized groups. We're not making much progress and everyone is running out of patience. If everything we've tried is doing it wrong, then what's right?
This does not seem the same as "other marginalized groups" in that there may be real genetic-based reasons why women may just not be as interested in going into the computer field as men. The brains of men and women are not the same. Maybe what is right is accepting that you give men and women fair opportunity to choose their career fields and understand that it will not turn out 50-50...
Maybe women don't go into IT (and Silicon Valley/tech in particular) because it's infested with red-pilled "men's rights" activists and other forms of misogyny, such as "men's and women's brains are so different that they will definitely have wildly different career desires that manifest in these wildly skewed demographics."
Uh huh.
For some reason women born in India and China don't seem to have any problem at all excelling at computer programming. I'm retired now but I used to do a lot of interviews and in 40 years I think I worked with one African American programmer and interviewed none. The reason DEI initiatives at the employment level don't work is that the diversity has been eliminated far up stream.
I am a woman, and I received a MS in Computer Science a few years ago, so I have some first hand knowledge of this issue. There was a surprisingly high percentage of woman in most of my CS classes (in many classes 50% ), but almost all of them were international students from China, India, and Iran. I went to Portland State, which is the closest university next to Intel, so lots of Intel spouses, which may be why the difference from the national average. There were very few women who were born in the US in my classes (of any race).
Follow the science. https://coas.missouri.edu/news/psychological-sciences-professor-completes-research-how-gender-influences-career-choices
Actually, the more sexual equality in a society, the large the difference in men's and women's career aspirations
Actually, you're a trolling idiot.
I guess you don't like where the science takes us.
I guess you prefer faith based policies?
You're actually a trolling idiot.
Everyone, please ignore the troll. He points to one ( 1 ) study from a deep red state's university and claims that "science" has now proven his thesis.
Ignore.
The data of the study doesn't actually show what he thinks it shows. The study separated jobs by things-jobs (blue collar), and people-jobs (white collar), not surprisingly, in more equal societies a higher proportion of women aspire to the white collar jobs since typically those are better paying.
That's not correct. Skilled tradespeople (blue collar) make more money than most white collar occupations.
Other than very small companies (say a family plumbing business, family restaurant, etc.), on every other one the highest paid(often by ridiculous high margins compared to the rank and file) and management positions are all white collar jobs.
Medicine, law, finance, again all of these are white collar jobs or people jobs.
"Actually, the more sexual equality in a society, the large the difference in men's and women's career aspirations"
Yes, because in a more sexual equality society women actually have a real shot at the good high paying white collar jobs that men normally get, so they can aspire to more than hands-on blue collar jobs that have a much higher proportion of men. In less equal society, lower wage, thing-jobs, as the study calls them, is the best they can hope for, so that is what they aspire to.
It would help if you trolling bigots actually read the stuff you link to.
That's not science.
With one person in every four in computer fields being female, it would seem unlikely that those fields remain festering pits of misogyny. There are, obviously, biological differences between men and women. I don't have any evidence that those biological differences result in differences in job preferences, so I will reject Tango's hypothesis as unsupported. However, there are also indisputable cultural differences between men and women. Too often, those cultural differences are oversimplified e.g. "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus", and the extremely intimate intermingling between men and women prevent the cultural differences from becoming large.
However, if misogyny and innate biological differences are ruled out as explanations for the skewed sex ratio in computer fields, those cultural differences would seem to be the only remaining plausible explanation.
I agree, there are well known/indisputable cultural differences between men and women that affect interests in various fields. And there are also indisputable brain structure and hormonal differences between men and women. I find it odd that you are willing to credit the first but are dismissive the second.
That said, unlike so many of the other commentators, you are not frothing at the mouth dismissive of even the concept, so you deserve some credit.
JFC, hormonal differences? What do you think is the effect hormonal differences have in determining what job a person might want?
I go where the evidence leads. There is no evidence that biological differences between men and women lead to a difference in job preferences. It is quite clear that cultural differences do lead to differences in job preferences.
My experience with women programmers, systems managers, and data-oriented project team leaders is that they were just as tech competent as the dudes I worked with, but were better organized, had better people skills, and were as good as or better than dudes at keeping projects on schedule. The dudes tended to be a bit oddball, the women very serious but more normie. It's possible that men are better than women at sitting in semi-darkness in arrays of cubicles in the windowless basements of buildings.
There's a weird split in my company, the hardcore IT folks are almost all men but the system design and integration team is almost all women (who are amazing). I'm sure there's some bro culture stuff out there that drives women off in certain companies, but any decent company doesn't allow that sh*t and finds the right niche for both the hard and soft skills a given person has.
My experience is that someone being able to do design/integration implies they can also do hardcore IT. Does someone being able to do hardcore IT imply they can also do design/integration? Um ... not so much really. IMHO. So if F has F both A- and B-type skills while M has only the B-type, is it any wonder that F's will be over-represented in the A-jobs while M's must make do with the B-job leftovers?
Yeah, these women totally know their stuff - I think they just prefer more complex work than figuring out why someone's laptop isn't getting updates or if the email flagged this morning is phishing.
Douche Bro strikes again! Tell me, I'm curious: what is it about women's brains that make them less likely to go into the 'computer field' than men. Verbal abilities high enough not to say 'computer field'? Or is it something else?
"This does not seem the same as "other marginalized groups" in that there may be real genetic-based reasons why women may just not be as interested in going into the computer field as men. The brains of men and women are not the same. ..."
This is a little strange. So you believe there are genetic differences between the sexes (but not between ethnic groups) that affect computer programming ability?
I was talking about INTEREST LEVEL, not ability, as this article was about people in the computer science field, which I would suspect heavily correlates to interest levels. And I strongly suspect that a large part of this difference is because men and womens' brains are different. The study cited above by MF is consistent with that.
I have no idea if there are any genetic-based differences in programming ability. And there are a lot of jobs in computer science that are not programming.
As for ethnic group differences, since Black, Asian, White, and other guys' brains are the same as each others., differences there are likely the result of bias and cultural factors. That is where DEI programs at various levels might have more effect.
"As for ethnic group differences, since Black, Asian, White, and other guys' brains are the same as each others., differences there are likely the result of bias and cultural factors. ..."
So you think there are no genetic differences in male intelligence even within ethnic groups because all male brains are the same?
Interest levels pertaining to what? This can't be left undefined for your argument to track with your lines of reasoning.
For instance: I agree with you.. women's interest level in being not subjected to gender based discrimination is a major contributing reason they don't go into CS fields.. Probably not where you were heading.
Also, I'm fascinated by your understanding that there are not significant genetic differences in different men's brains.
Do you think there are significant genetic differences in women's brains or no?
Seriously, you do not understand that what I am saying is that there are systematic differences between male and female brains but not between say Black and Asian male brains? Sounds like you are just being pointlessly contentious.
And I am not denying that women face some cultural barriers in the IT field. But even if there were zero differences in the way that they were treated, I think it's pretty damn obvious that women probably would not go into IT with the same frequency as men.
Do you actually believe that they would? You know, of course, that differences overall in men's and women's brains have long been documented scientifically and it is not sexist (except to the most ideological of individuals) to say that men and women may be interested in different career fields as a result.
Have you ever heard of social Darwinism? Or the belief that Africans are simple, childlike, and well suited to be slaves? Or that Asians are inscrutable and nefarious? These are "differences in brains" or interests or abilities or however you want to word it. They are also convenient fictions.
"I think it's pretty damn obvious that women probably would not go into IT with the same frequency as men."
Why do you think this is the case, and why would it be pretty damn obvious?
You keep trying to put lipstick on your piggish misogyny and it's not working pal.
I am not going to write a Master's thesis on why men's and women's brains have some differences and why that might lead to different career choices. If you reject that notion, you are clearly putting ideology ahead of science.
I'm not asking for a 300 page thesis. I'm asking for a sentence or two of why you think it is obvious that women wouldn't prefer an IT job.
Just saying "it's science" is not an actual answer.
I do struggle to interpret what you mean. I think there are sex differences as well.
You're making majority scientific arguments and lines of reasoning.
However, for whatever reason, you're not including hypotheses, or even reasons beyond sex differences in the first place, for your arguments.
So despite including terminology the scientific sounding arguments are fundamentally not scientific as argued because there's no testable hypothesis to examine(testable hypothesis being the absolute requirement of science and it's method), and is more an ideology based on assumption or other intuition.
That's why I was curious what you thought the interest levels were in. Because that's actually the meat of the argument. Not a broad inference from their just being sex differences to mean whatever our intuition thinks it does.
Which the world's knowledge is very intuition-based, let's be honest. It has to be a mix of the factors, there are probably more women who would be in IT if it didn't have such a history of discrimination that continues and there might always be more men.
Tango honey go into the kitchen and make me a sandwich.
Women are math wizes, did you watch the movie Hidden Figures? Did you know the original meaning of the word Computer? Did you know the profession was majority female?
Are you willfully blind to the nasty things men do to nudge and shove women out of those career paths? I've been nudged and shoved, I got discouraged and almost gave up but via supportive mentors, I'm well established as Oracle expert with decades of experience.
Please criticize or not what I actually said as opposed to conflating what I said with other stuff and criticizing me for that other stuff please.
What I was saying is that due to genetic differences, even if there was a level playing field, there almost certainly not be a 50-50 split in the IT field between men and women. Or are you maintaining that it would? HAHAHAHA!
And I understand that there has been discrimination in the IT field. That does not negate what I said in the least.
Discrimination absolutely negates what you said. Until you can show us the results of a level playing field, you are only telling yourself stories.
Thank you. Tango is wrong emphasizing so called genetics to hand wave away discrimination when clearly in prior eras women were seen as the math wizes and tasked with manual calculations now accomplished by computers.
And you are only telling yourselves stories as well, that without discrimination there would be roughly as many women as men in IT.
Your primary comment was about different genetic abilities and then said it wouldn't end up 50/50. Talk about gaslighting.
What in life is 50/50, exactly even turn out?
Your primary Statement was one of false bias and yes, she talked directly about what your point was. Don't try to weasel out of that.
You do know there's a difference between 'genetic' and 'morphological', don't you? I've been struck before by this so I'll say it explicitly: All things being equal, you don't seem to have the vocabulary of the typical woman, No wonder you have to hide away in a dark cave. No wonder that when you periodically emerge, you're behaviour tells us immediately where you dwell and why.
This is a weird chart to try to prove this point.
What is the denominator? Has it been going up because IT work, in general, has grown over time? The blue line is essentially useless without more information and I suspect that with that more information it would remain useless.
The orange line is actually useful but isn't really related to hiring and DEI.
While it might be possible to hire at rates in excess of degrees for a short time, (assuming there is a reservoir of still unhired graduates) that cannot be sustained.
Sure, but it doesn't tell us enough information to even begin to speak to hiring rates.
It's also just "computer science" - while not antiquated as a degree, tech (and IT) are so much more than just writing code. Computer science degree rate is not even a good proxy measurement.
The percentage of women in IT is declining - that blue line. Do we know if IT is growing or shrinking? No. But does that matter? If IT is growing, it is growing faster than the hiring of women. If it is holding steady or shrinking, women are leaving at a higher rate than entering. That women CS graduates as a percentage of the total is in decline tells us that whether CS enrollment is growing or shrinking, there are proportionally fewer women to hire.
Does any of that tell us "why?" Not at all.
If computer science degree rate is not a good proxy for the availability of women for IT, then by all means suggest a better one. The way you've worded things makes it seems like you consider a computer science degree as nothing more than programming training. Certainly it was more than that when I graduated(*). Admittedly that was when dinosaurs walked the Earth but I rather doubt that has changed.
* "Officially" I am an Applied Mathematician with a Concentration in Computer Science. That is only because at the time, the CS department where I went to school did not deign to convey undergraduate degrees in Computer Science. I and all my classmates considered ourselves CS majors.
The benefits of DEI have accrued not the the marginalized but to the hordes of consultants who push feel-good unworkable programs. Their gig is up.
Smart managers everywhere realize the value of having a diverse pool of talent. And they're hiring accordingly. Cultural changes like this take time, as the DoL numbers show.
Now, don't get me started on ESG. The only boondoggle for consultants that's proven more lucrative then DEI.
The first scientific principle—which is to science what bedrock is to a Manhattan skyscraper—is that science involves involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation.
Translation: Some people assume that men are better at IT than women, and because they don't bother subjecting that assumption to rigorous skepticism, it distort how they interpret their observations. And the women who are the victims of those distortions get fed up and find places to work where they're valued for who they are.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^. this
You could skip the first paragraph without any loss.
Broadly agree with the second paragraph, but there are other issues, for example currently society in general expects women to spend more time "home making", which means less time at work (and hence less productive).
I suspect that there's a dearth of women in IT because of a self-perpetuating doom loop of college women not seeing other women in IT and not majoring in CS because they assume that IT isn't "for" them. People tend to gravitate toward roles that they assume are for "people like them".
The highest profile people in tech - the famous entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk - are a bunch of white guys. That has an effect on whether people can "see themselves" in that world. College kids are not very mature and often make their choice of major in a way that's not fully rational.
On the rational side of the ledger, tech is known for long hours and a lack of work-life balance. Women who are mothers or want to be mothers tend to avoid careers that they don't expect to be compatible with family responsibilities.
I suspect that there's a dearth of women in IT because of a self-perpetuating doom loop of college women not seeing other women in IT
That could be part of it, sure, but why the seeming imperviousness of tech and not some other fields. Women have made huge strides in medicine and (especially) law.
Because IT seems to have higher proportion of the guys that never grew past the age of "girls have cooties" but yet fantasized about getting a harem of women when they grew up, since they could never get close to any in real life, so the mysogyny persists decades later.
Men in other fields usually did manage to befriend, date, or work with women as they matured, so even if not always fully accepting of women as equals, they did not become as openly hostile as in the IT field.
That'd be my guess. In one field they actually try to push them out, in the others even if not always fully welcomed they are not.
Well that, and then there's this: Most so-called 'IT jobs' ... really aren't that difficult. I noticed this back in the day when I did a summer course in HTML. By the end of the first week, most of the STEM people had blown through it and had finished a web page by the end of the second (this was back when style sheets were the next big thing). OTOH, the design people in our class truly did struggle with the material and it really did take them eight weeks to get through it all. But I'll tell you what, to a man -- heh heh -- the STEM people's pages looked GeoCities. The graphic arts people had web pages that looked, um, really nice. And there's no way most of us STEM thugs would ever produce pages that would look even half so good had we been at it for twenty years.
I dunno about that, tech tends to pay well and men with high incomes can usually get a girlfriend even with serious personality deficiencies. Still, it's true that people on the autism spectrum are massively overrepresented in tech, and men are more likely to have autism than women.
I agree, but what I meant by decades later is that once they actually land those high paying jobs, the misogynist cake is already baked in for many of them. So my point is that on the path to be in a position to be able to get a good paying job, they had little positive interactions with women.
In other words, the doctor will get the girlfriend while in med school, the lawyer in law school, so long before they earn the big bucks, while the tech guy is less likely until he lands the high paying job.
The chart says that roughly one in four computer related jobs are held by women. That's enough women that it would be difficult to not see "other women in IT".
Even though they are present, there's a visibility issue. When I saw Kevin's chart, I was surprised that it was that high - I'd previously heard that tech was overwhelmingly male-dominated, and the only high-profile woman in tech that I've heard of is Sheryl Sandberg. That matters for what people choose to major in.
"If everything we've tried is doing it wrong, then what's right?"
Are there crowds of women with tech degress who are having trouble getting hired? If there's not an unhired pool of excess talent, then the tech companies are fighting over an inadequate pool of women to fill jobs. Luring them from one company to another won't change the overall makeup of the work force.
Are schools turning out women with degrees in tech fields? If they're granting more degrees to men than women, the imbalance in the work force isn't going to go away.
To morph/appropriate a saying, gender in, gender out.
Leaving the gender dialectic aside, how does one interpret the data in the chart? Other than one or both data series being inconsistent over time (or not comparable or of poor quality in some other way), would this seem to be most likely explanation: since 1990, women have moved to other majors in college and, therefore, later careers that they find more attractive than IT. As a result, the pipeline of women in IT has been drying up and employment has fallen over a 30 year period. If this is true, what are the opportunities that attract women away from IT? How is it that there is a sufficient supply of men to fill the jobs?
If it is not the above, then what? DEI at the employer level might be too late to influence still-forming careers and so be ineffective, but could it possibly drive women away from those careers? That seems unlikely.
Regardless of how SV treats DEI, broadly speaking, Corporate America ditched DEI as soon as it became politically complicated. That tells America just how little American corporations think of diversity, equity, and inclusion -- as soon as the going gets tough, give up.
That thing you're worried about (big corporations abandoning even the pretext of equal-opportunity employment)? It's not a big deal to Kevin Drum, in fact he's annoyed that things went on as long as they did and is pretty sure he speaks for everyone on this matter, right?
Two things: first, for Kevin asking about issues with the site, I check the site at least once a day and this posting is new for me this morning (8/21) on mobile despite posting two days ago.
Second, it's an odd conclusion that "despite decades of DEI programs, the share of women in computer-related jobs has plummeted." As compared to what? Was the share of women in computer-related jobs initially high and then dropped once DEI initiatives started? Or did they initially increase the share of women in IT jobs but not sustain that increase? Have all DEI programs across the past few decades operated in precisely the same way and done precisely the same things that we can conclude "DEI programs" don't work? Maybe it'd be better to identify the companies that did diversify effectively and ask what they did that other companies didn't?
But setting all that aside: Kevin assumes that the purpose of decades of DEI programs being implemented in Silicon Valley was to diversity the workforce. Whereas in point of fact, many of these programs were implemented not to bring actual change, but to make a statement about a company's culture ("hey, we see we have problems, we want to address them"), which is a different thing entirely. A functioning HR department is in theory meant to protect both employees and the company, but often their job is to ensure that the company and its employees are protected legally. That doesn't have to be at odds with protecting employees, but it can lead to HR protecting the company at the cost of the employees.
One doesn't have to go too far to find examples of large corporations where HR protected the CEO from accusations of sexual harassment, instead of protecting employees from harassment by the CEO.
So I'll ask anyone who wants to say "DEI doesn't work" the question: in the companies you'd point to as proof, what power and authority did the DEI people who were brought in actually have? Hiring and firing authority? Were they running periodic workshops on harassment and microaggressions, or were they firing employees for harassment and microaggressions? What role did they have in the hiring process? Was a member of the DEI department on every single hiring committee? Did they have a single workshop for the hiring committee? (My favorite is the "we've listed a DEI person on the membership of this hiring committee but the same person is listed on every hire and they can't possibly attend meetings.")
If the people in charge of a Silicon Valley corporation wanted to hire more women, they would: you can't tell me that Apple or Alphabet can't get the top available candidates in the field if they didn't want to, so the candidate pool doesn't much matter for this. Hiring DEI people might signal a strong commitment to a diverse hiring strategy, but it might also signal a recognition that your corporation looks better if you have a DEI coordinator and hiring one gives you a convenient person to blame when your refusal to make any real changes in corporate culture or hiring processes translates into no improvement in the diversity of your workforce.
And once paying lip service to that end no longer helps, why not eliminate the programs: conservatives threaten to boycott over DEI, while liberals recognize you never actually meant it, and moderates stopped caring at some point. Elon Musk isn't going to convince anyone he isn't a misogynist or a racist by expanding his corporate DEI offices, and he certainly doesn't want to change how he does things, so what's the point?
If you blame DEI experts who were never allowed to implement strong DEI policies for the failure of DEI, then CEOs like Musk are getting what they wanted out of the whole affair: "I support diversity; it just doesn't work."