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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640 Likes: 1
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There's some basis to the idea of environmental messaging around female STEM activity (the kind which makes "female" its primary objective, STEM secondary) being potentially damaging to female performance in those subjects. A quote from Virginia Wolf in "A Room of One's Own" summarizes the notion of stereotype threat (assessment of individual ability/performance as based on stereotypes for the group to which the individual belongs) as a contributory factor to female self-efficacy and performance in math. "There was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work. There would always have been that assertion—you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that—to protest against, to overcome."We haven't come far since the 19th century. Research by the Unviersity of Waterloo and Stanford ( https://nuovoeutile.it/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Stereotype-threat-Spencer-1999.pdf) finds that: [quote]"...lowered expectations in response to continued stereotype threat in a domain, and the demotivation this causes, may be critical precursors to disidentifying with the domain—that is, to dropping the domain as an identification and as a basis of self-evaluation." A meta-analysis found that stereotype threat is not hurting the performance of girls in stereotyped domains: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25636259J Sch Psychol. 2015 Feb;53(1):25-44. doi: 10.1016/j.jsp.2014.10.002. Epub 2014 Nov 13. Does stereotype threat influence performance of girls in stereotyped domains? A meta-analysis. Flore PC1, Wicherts JM2. Author information Abstract Although the effect of stereotype threat concerning women and mathematics has been subject to various systematic reviews, none of them have been performed on the sub-population of children and adolescents. In this meta-analysis we estimated the effects of stereotype threat on performance of girls on math, science and spatial skills (MSSS) tests. Moreover, we studied publication bias and four moderators: test difficulty, presence of boys, gender equality within countries, and the type of control group that was used in the studies. We selected study samples when the study included girls, samples had a mean age below 18years, the design was (quasi-)experimental, the stereotype threat manipulation was administered between-subjects, and the dependent variable was a MSSS test related to a gender stereotype favoring boys. To analyze the 47 effect sizes, we used random effects and mixed effects models. The estimated mean effect size equaled -0.22 and significantly differed from 0. None of the moderator variables was significant; however, there were several signs for the presence of publication bias. We conclude that publication bias might seriously distort the literature on the effects of stereotype threat among schoolgirls. We propose a large replication study to provide a less biased effect size estimate. KEYWORDS: Gender gap; Math/science test performance; Meta-analysis; Publication bias; Stereotype threat; Test anxiety
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Joined: Nov 2012
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A meta-analysis found that stereotype threat is not hurting the performance of girls in stereotyped domains: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25636259J Sch Psychol. 2015 Feb;53(1):25-44. doi: 10.1016/j.jsp.2014.10.002. Epub 2014 Nov 13. Does stereotype threat influence performance of girls in stereotyped domains? A meta-analysis. Flore PC1, Wicherts JM2. Author information Abstract Although the effect of stereotype threat concerning women and mathematics has been subject to various systematic reviews, none of them have been performed on the sub-population of children and adolescents. In this meta-analysis we estimated the effects of stereotype threat on performance of girls on math, science and spatial skills (MSSS) tests. Moreover, we studied publication bias and four moderators: test difficulty, presence of boys, gender equality within countries, and the type of control group that was used in the studies. We selected study samples when the study included girls, samples had a mean age below 18years, the design was (quasi-)experimental, the stereotype threat manipulation was administered between-subjects, and the dependent variable was a MSSS test related to a gender stereotype favoring boys. To analyze the 47 effect sizes, we used random effects and mixed effects models. The estimated mean effect size equaled -0.22 and significantly differed from 0. None of the moderator variables was significant; however, there were several signs for the presence of publication bias. We conclude that publication bias might seriously distort the literature on the effects of stereotype threat among schoolgirls. We propose a large replication study to provide a less biased effect size estimate. KEYWORDS: Gender gap; Math/science test performance; Meta-analysis; Publication bias; Stereotype threat; Test anxiety Suggest reading the inputs into the study cited, as well as the study itself for an understanding of the inputs to these numbers. One of the feeds into it (linked below) identified instrumental variables--including ubiquity of stereotype threat--that weren't captured in the methodological design of your linked article. It is important to note that it's not properly understood whether stereotype threat in this context is global (within a domain) or local (specific to an event), and within which range of critical values. This matters enormously in model specification and conclusions reached. Omnipresent stereotype threat is much more difficult to empirically isolate to generate significance, as it makes modelling collinearity a beast; but absence of evidence of an effect in a poorly specified model is not evidence of absence. See, particularly, the bolded. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23356523Stereotype threat has been proposed as 1 potential explanation for the gender difference in standardized mathematics test performance among high-performing students. At present, it is not entirely clear how susceptibility to stereotype threat develops, as empirical evidence for stereotype threat effects across the school years is inconsistent. In a series of 3 studies, with a total sample of 931 students, we investigated stereotype threat effects during childhood and adolescence. Three activation methods were used, ranging from implicit to explicit. Across studies, we found no evidence that the mathematics performance of school-age girls was impacted by stereotype threat. In 2 of the studies, there were gender differences on the mathematics assessment regardless of whether stereotype threat was activated. Potential reasons for these findings are discussed, including the possibility that stereotype threat effects only occur in very specific circumstances or that they are in fact occurring all the time. We also address the possibility that the literature regarding stereotype threat in children is subject to publication bias.
What is to give light must endure burning.
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Joined: Feb 2011
Posts: 1,432
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I think we can separate this into two distinct things:
1) Encouraging girls to participate. 2) Creating exclusive girls-only clubs for them to participate in.
And I get the sense that your issue is solely for the second thing.
My personal take is that I believe exclusive clubs exist for the same reason single-gendered schools exist. There's a school of thought out there that boys tend to be quite dominating, and this suppresses the ability of girls to get the most out of them in coed activities.
As an example, DD's STEM lab group included a boy and one other girl. DD treated me to daily anecdotes of the boy trying to take over everything, and doing it all wrong. Supported by the other girl who saw eye-to-eye with DD, she repeatedly had to shout him down, and then the girls had to waste time and materials fixing everything he'd done. Their group returned the top results.
Whether a girls-only activity is necessary probably varies based on the personality of the girls, but it would certainly seem to be necessary in many cases - see madeinuk's post on girl confidence. I don't have a problem with 1) and actually don't often have a problem with 2) either. I think overly "dominating" boys may be worse in middle than in high school. Stereotypes exist for a reason, but interestingly my kids probably had more experiences with overly "dominating" girls than boys during the elementary and middle school years. DD is quiet and soft-spoken and has often been a magnet for overly "dominating" girls but by late middle school found effective ways to insulate (with lots of friends) herself most of the time. Actually, my greater issue (at least recently) is the sometimes overwhelming "encouragement" of STEM for everyone. I get that we need STEM workers to maintain competitiveness and that STEM careers have great financial potential but we also need humanities people - artists, musicians, and writers.
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Joined: Oct 2011
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Dude, my kid would say those problems are problems. Social acceptance is important. When your coworkers resent you and believe you were "given" what they are working hard to achieve, they resent you. I thought we were talking about men. This kind of tantrum-throwing victim-playing is not masculinity as I know it. Suck it up, buttercups. Besides, we're not talking about giving away jobs. We're talking about giving women the proper opportunities to earn them, and giving them the respect they deserve when they do. If a man is unfit to do the second thing, that is most definitely his problem, and his organization should ensure that this is so. ]For those girls who dropped out, would they have anyway? Or would they have found their true passion in STEM if given gender support earlier? Seeing a female role model, seeing peers who like STEM? Being respected by teachers and boys as capable? All good questions. Your experience with your DD does indicate that at least one more would have dropped out and never made it to differentials if not for special intervention. Are all girl groups the answer? I don't think so, but they may be a step for tentative girls who are struggling with their identity to find that they can be a true girl who does STEM. Agreed. Side note - I recently asked my DD what she would do if she began those engineering classes and found herself as the only girl in the room. Her response was that she would recruit her friend, whom she knows to have strong STEM interests, into the class. Peer pressure to force the counter-culture outcome? You lead, girl!
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Joined: Apr 2014
Posts: 4,051 Likes: 1
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...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640 Likes: 1
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Dude, my kid would say those problems are problems. Social acceptance is important. When your coworkers resent you and believe you were "given" what they are working hard to achieve, they resent you. I thought we were talking about men. This kind of tantrum-throwing victim-playing is not masculinity as I know it. Suck it up, buttercups. Besides, we're not talking about giving away jobs. We're talking about giving women the proper opportunities to earn them, and giving them the respect they deserve when they do. If a man is unfit to do the second thing, that is most definitely his problem, and his organization should ensure that this is so. If a tech company that has a programmer workforce that is 10% female announces (perhaps due to pressure by the government or activists) that 50% of new programming hires will be female, even though the fraction of new female CS graduates is far less than 50%, people will inevitably wonder if standards were lowered to fulfill a quota. If the allegations in the lawsuit below are true, some Google hires were the beneficiaries of a policy that excluded men, whites, and Asians. Ex-recruiter accuses Google of hiring discrimination against white, Asian menThe lawsuit alleges that for several quarters Google would not make employment offers for technical positions to applicants “who were not ‘diverse.’" NBC News by Chris Fuchs / Mar.05.2018 / 1:26 PM ET A former recruiter for Google is suing the tech company alleging it used discriminatory hiring practices that put whites and Asians at a disadvantage to other groups — and that it fired him after he complained about it.
Arne Wilberg, who filed the lawsuit in late January in California Superior Court in San Mateo County, claims that Google carried out policies for the past several years “reflected in multiple bulletins, memorandum, charts and other documents” that favored Hispanic, African-American and female job applicants and were against white and Asian men, according to his lawsuit.
Wilberg, who recruited candidates for engineering and technology positions for YouTube and parent company Google, also alleges in the suit that for several quarters Google would not make employment offers for technical positions to applicants “who were not ‘diverse,’" which the lawsuit alleges Google defined as women, black and Latino.
The lawsuit said Wilberg complained about this to his managers and HR. He was fired in November for, among other things, “not meeting goals” and “talking too much in meetings,” reasons that the lawsuit called “pretextual.”
“Plaintiff was an exemplary employee and received positive performance evaluations until he began opposing illegal hiring and recruiting practices at Google,” the complaint asserts.
In an email, a Google spokesperson said the company will vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit.
“We have a clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity,” the spokesperson said. “At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.”
The lawsuit asserts that Google carefully tracked each applicant’s race and gender in its technology workforce, allegedly using this information to decide whom to extend offers of employment to and whom to reject.
In one instance in April 2017, Google’s Technology Staffing Management team was allegedly told to immediately cancel all interviews for software engineering applicants with zero to five years of experience who were not female, black or Hispanic, court records said.
The team was also allegedly instructed to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline,” a request with which Wilberg said in his lawsuit he did not comply.
Before that in January 2016, Wilberg said he had reached out via instant message to the staffing director, asking for a meeting about YouTube hiring practices, according to his lawsuit.
The suit said he told the staffing director that many employees on the hiring team felt uncomfortable with YouTube’s “Diversity Hiring Practices,” believing that they were discriminatory.
“Wilberg described another recruiter’s feedback around this ‘diversity’ hiring program where the other recruiter told other recruiters that she felt the way the team talked about black people in team meetings was like we were talking about black slaves as slave traders on a ship,” the lawsuit asserts.
Wilberg’s suit alleges discrimination in violation of California government code and failure to take reasonable steps to prevent discrimination and retaliation. It also claims he was terminated and treated differently because of his race.
The suit asks, among other things, for unspecified punitive and compensatory damages, as well as a temporary and permanent injunction “prohibiting Defendants from implementing, using, distributing, and training its employees to use their discriminatory profiling.”
Wilberg’s lawsuit follows another one filed in early January in California state court by a former engineer who wrote a sexist manifesto disparaging Google’s efforts to close the gender gap and who was subsequently fired.
In it, James Damore and another former Google engineer, David Gudeman, argued that Google has an "open hostility for conservative thought."
At the time the suit was filed, a Google spokesperson said, "We look forward to defending against Mr. Damore's lawsuit in court."
Google also faces a lawsuit, filed in September, that accuses it of gender-based pay discrimination against women. At the time that suit was filed, a company spokesperson told The Associated Press that they will review the suit, but "we disagree with the central allegations." A hearing in that case is scheduled for the end of March.
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Joined: Oct 2011
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Chalk up another win for selection bias, because you found one person who believes Google discriminates against men and whites, while copious industry surveys, independent studies, and now the federal Department of Labor have found otherwise. Widespread sexism, racism, and bullying is driving people out of the tech sector, in a survey of 2000 people who left Silicon Valley jobs in the last three years. To which I would add, this is not a phenomenon that begins in the workplace. Specifically at Google, that bullying took the form of a sophomoric anti-female screed by a male employee that was distributed to 40,000 coworkers. The US Department of Labor has found what it calls an " extreme gender pay gap" specifically at Google, who is refusing to cooperate with the investigation amid cries of being too poor to spend $100k to extract data (the very thing it was founded to do). Reached for comment Friday afternoon, Janet Herold, regional solicitor for the DoL, said: “The investigation is not complete, but at this point the department has received compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters.”
Herold added: “The government’s analysis at this point indicates that discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry.” But for counterpoint, here's an op-ed from a woman who worked in a tech role at Google with hiring power, is dedicated to diversity, and yet only 3% of her hires were women, for some of the same reasons you're concerned about. And yet, if you read it to the end, you find that the reason is because there aren't enough women in the pipeline, because systemic bullying and harassment in college: I’ve worked with many young women in high school and college, encouraging them towards pursuing computer science and getting a tech degree. Many of them have opened up about the hostile environments they face even in progressive schools such as UC Berkeley and have thanked me for the support and encouragement. Now that is where we must bring change. And the only way in which I would disagree with her is in that I find it obvious that the bullying begins well before college.
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Joined: Feb 2010
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Specifically at Google, that bullying took the form of a sophomoric anti-female screed by a male employee that was distributed to 40,000 coworkers. Here is the Wikipedia summary of James Damore's Google's Ideological Echo Chamber memo: James Damore has said that he became motivated to write a memo after attending an unrecorded Google diversity program, whose rhetoric he described as largely "shaming and 'no, you can't say that, that's sexist'".[7] The memo was written on a flight to China.[8][9]
Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo says that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to hold that all disparities are due to oppression, and that it is "authoritarian" to correct for this with reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that the gender disparity can be partially explained by biological differences between women and men.[1][10] According to Damore, those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, that women tend to be more social, more artistic, and more prone to neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).[11] The memorandum also lists multiple suggestions on ways to use those differences in order to increase women's representation in tech without resorting to discrimination.[1][10]
The memo is dated July 2017 and was originally shared on an internal mailing list.[12][13]
...
Responses from scientists who study gender and psychology reflected the controversial nature of the science Damore cited.[49]
Some commentators in the academic community expressed broad support, saying he had gotten the science right, such as Debra Soh, a sexual neuroscientist at York University in Toronto;[50][51] J. Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto;[7][52] Lee Jussim, a professor of social psychology at Rutgers University;[53][54][55] and Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychology professor at University of New Mexico.[54] David P. Schmitt, former professor of psychology at Bradley University;[54][56] said that the memo was right about average group differences, but one could not use it to judge individuals.
Others said that he had got the science wrong and relied on data that was suspect, outdated, irrelevant, or otherwise flawed; these included Gina Rippon, chair of cognitive brain imaging at Aston University;[57] Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania;[58] evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin;[35][59][60] Rosalind Barnett, a psychologist at Brandeis University, and Caryl Rivers, a professor of journalism at Boston University.[61] I read the memo and don't consider it bullying. If we are going to discuss why a sex or race is under-represented in a certain occupation and what (if anything) should be done about it, all explanations for the under-representation with data behind them should be considered.
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I read the memo and don't consider it bullying. No, you wouldn't. That's not a problem with my interpretation of the memo, though, nor of the interpretations of the overwhelming majority of commenters from within his own organization as well as without. It really just says a lot about you. Best Googler response (underlines added for emphasis): A Google executive, Yonatan Zunger, who left the company for unrelated issues after 14 years, commented on the memo publicly too. He says that the idea that engineering is not a cooperative, people-driven field is false.
"All of these traits which the manifesto described as 'female' are the core traits which make someone successful at engineering," Zunger says in a Medium post. "All of which is why the conclusions of this manifesto are precisely backwards. It's true that women are socialized to be better at paying attention to people's emotional needs and so on — this is something that makes them better engineers, not worse ones."
Zunger also says that the comments hurt Google. They damage the reputation of Google and also create an environment where women question their ability. "I am no longer even at the company and I've had to spend half of the past day talking to people and cleaning up the mess you've made. I can't even imagine how much time and emotional energy has been sunk into this, not to mention reputational harm more broadly," he says.
"You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment."
In his previous role at Google, had the author been in his reporting chain, Zunger says, he would have called a meeting with the author of the memo to inform him that his behavior was not acceptable. That meeting "would have ended with you being escorted from the building by security and told that your personal items will be mailed to you."
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Joined: Sep 2007
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I read the memo and don't consider it bullying. If we are going to discuss why a sex or race is under-represented in a certain occupation and what (if anything) should be done about it, all explanations for the under-representation with data behind them should be considered. But the problem is that any explanation put forward needs to be true. Examples of pure garbage in his memo: On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:
● Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males Okay, he needs to cite the study where boys were castrated at birth, raised as girls, and then identified as males later. Problem: it doesn't exist. Can you imagine the consent form? "Parent agrees to castration of male infant for the purposes of assessing gender identification later." He most likely read about David Reimer and generalized from there, so he gets an F for that piece of "data" analysis. Given his job, he would have known better. He was making stuff up. Irrelevant stuff. Or, take this: This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support I note that Google is facing more than one lawsuit over pay discrimination, extending all the way to its childcare workers. They're refusing to release their data on the subject, which is not a good sign. But...Damore says that women tend to have a negotiating problem and therefore it is awful that men are left without support. He wants it both ways: Google has a left-wing PC monoculture regarding women. But pity the poor fellow who can't negotiate as well as his brothers while the women get something called "Stretch." Well, I don't know what that is, but it hasn't helped much. And if Google knows there's a problem, Google should be dealing with it, not every single woman acting on her own. These are only 2 examples. Overall, the memo is sloppy and doesn't cite a single source supporting its claims (or a summary of why study results often contradict each other). IMO, it's a juvenile and self-serving distortion of facts at best and is essentially a tantrum. Again --- back to the college tuition thread --- when you want to push a given idea, you can make up any kind of alternative fact. But others have to stick to the narrow path where the actual facts are, which makes the job of someone like Damore, an anti-vaxxer, or a tuition-debt-serfdom-denier that much easier.
Last edited by Val; 04/09/18 03:11 PM. Reason: Irrelevant stuff.
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