Guest Post: The Real Problem Isn't Gender; It's the Modern Media

This guest post by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz was adapted from a comment he wrote on a Facebook post of mine sharing this essay.

While gender in tech is certainly an issue, a lot of the controversy over it is unnecessary. What recently happened with the Google memo is a classic case of Scott Alexander’s Toxoplasma of Rage, one of the most brilliant pieces I have ever read. Read his post. Then read it again.

The stories that go viral are those that maximize anger and foster the most disagreement.

Guy writes a memo with a lot of true statements but an aggressive tone bound to infuriate some people. Within two days, everybody is predictably furious.

My hypothesis is that an overwhelming majority of people actually agree on many of the points of contention--or would agree if they were phrased a little less aggressively, in a tone less likely to create controversy and less likely to go viral.

How many people, for example, agree with the following statement?

"We do not know why CS majors are 80% male. It is possible that, even though millions of women have a passion for computer science, there are, in aggregate, fewer women than men who have this passion. We don't know since computer science is kind of new. And also we don't really understand why female CS majors rose to 40% and then plummeted. Since it is possible that discrimination and stereotypes play a role, we should devote resources to making sure everybody with interest in these high-status jobs has ample opportunity to pursue them. Also, everybody should be judged based on their own interest and aptitude in a job, not how many people of their gender would want that job. Finally, the majority of women in tech--as well as many other high-powered fields--have said they have faced sexism, and we should work really hard to stop that."

This addresses many of the controversies that were raised by the James Damore memo and the responses to it, but is phrased in a way such that few people would find it objectionable. Perhaps we should stop falling for these traps that maximize rage and instead try sober analysis. We may find a surprising amount of consensus.

Lastly, no young person, man or woman, should actually be training for anything--driving cars, teaching kids, diagnosing diseases, or writing programs--because AI will soon do all that for us. ;)

For 352 pages of sober analysis on even more controversial topics, you can check out Seth’s book Everybody Lies.

Autoresponse: Striking: A Day Without a Woman

In front of the Federal Building, Pittsburgh.

Dear Message Sender,

  I am not responding to email on March 8, 2017 because I am observing A Day Without a Woman. In the afternoon, I will be joining students at CMU in a silent protest and attending a rally at the City-County building in downtown Pittsburgh.

  Despite the efforts and progress made towards gender equality, women do not have an equal voice, and we are not appreciated equally in society. For example:

• The gender wage gap persists, and two-thirds of minimum wage earners are women.
• The House and Senate are currently 19% women. This means an 81% male group is making decisions that affect women's health and lives.
• The United States still has not had a female president, even though many countries we'd like to think we are more progressive than have a woman currently in power. 
• Only 24 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Money is power, and women have less of it.

Some may say that women are simply less ambitious, or don't want to be in positions of power and influence as much as men do. Study after study--and I'm happy to talk in more detail--have shown that women who do have the ambition face far more obstacles than men do. Also, my statistics above focus on what people like to call "privileged" women, but the undervaluing of female labor (including domestic and emotional labor) make life even harder for those in less fortunate circumstances.

  There are many ways you can show support. The first is to attend local rallies, especially if you have an employment situation where you will have few consequences. Even if you are not a woman and/or not striking today, here are some things you can do:

• Listen to women, and call people out when women's voices are not heard.
• Question your own biases. (You can have biases even if you are a woman!)
• Vote for women. Champion women. Mentor women. (In that order.)
• Support people who are striking, and who are more actively fighting for women's rights and the appreciation of women's labor, both financially and by amplifying their voices.

Yours in solidarity,
Jean

What Professors Can Do About the Collaboration Problem

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about the "collaboration problem" that sparked a significant amount of discussion among my colleagues in academic computer science, in large part because many people had observed the same problem, without ideas for great solutions. Here are some emails I've exchanged with Ben Zhao, a professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, and my colleague Claire Le Goues in the School of Computer Science at CMU about how to address the problem in the courses we teach. (Ben recently posted this article on social media and had quite extensive discussion with many people in the field about how to address the problem.

I hope this will generate even more discussion that brings us closer to solutions.

--

from:		Ben Zhao
to:		Justine Sherry, Jean Yang
date:		Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 1:50 PM
subject:		looking for advice

hey Justine, Jean.

Random email out of nowhere, hope you’re both doing great, and happy holidays!! :)

So I’ve been thinking and reading a fair bit on group dynamics in CS classes, esp. w.r.t. female students, with a fair bit coming from you guys. There aren’t that many in my classes (I teach undergrad networking and OS, so they’re almost all juniors/seniors by the time they make it to my class). So I’d like to make sure that I’m not contributing any more to the gender imbalance.

I need help. As strong women in CS, would love your take on a couple of key questions (but also would love any general advice you want to share, period).  And I know you’re busy super busy, but hopefully this is something that won’t take too much time. Either way, your advice would immediately impact 10s of female students in the coming quarter...

Key questions on my mind right now are:
- How should I do group assignments for larger classes with moderate to heavy projects? About half of my networking class homeworks are in groups of 2, and nearly all of my OS class homeworks/projects are in groups of 2-3.
- From what I have thought about and seen in past classes, I think my past practice of letting students choose their own groups doesn’t work. I recall something like 1/2 of all groups with at least 1 female student experiencing some type of malfunction, either due to the male student(s) flaking out or just failing out.

Right now, I’m considering something like the following:
  - Beginning of quarter, I reach out individually to all female students in the class (maybe 10-15, 20 if I’m lucky), and I ask them to attend an open discussion with me on campus.
  - I ask them for their experiences and concerns in the class, and esp. for group projects
  - I lay out what I think are challenges that they could face
  - I give them the option to find partners within the group, before the overall group formation process starts.

What do you think? Would this work? Would female students react negatively to being singled out? What happens if they don’t care and don’t show up?

Thanks in advance, and again, I’d love to hear any thoughts on this or on any other topic..

thank you thank you!
Ben

--

from:		Jean Yang
to:		Ben Zhao
cc:		Justine Sherry, Claire Le Goues
date:		Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 12:16 PM

Hi Ben,

  Thanks for writing! These are great questions, I'm glad you're asking them. I'm looping in Claire Le Goues, another professor at CMU, because we've been talking about how we could address some of these collaboration issues with curricular changes, and about proposing an audit of the curriculum to make sure students are learning collaboration skills.

  Here are some things I learned from people after my blog post about the collaboration problem:

- It's important to keep in mind that all students have trouble with collaboration. It may disproportionately affect female and other minority students because 1) there are already so many factors that wear away at their desire to participate, and 2) students without strong social ties within Computer Science may not have access to as desirable of a partner pool. But an important take-away is that all students struggle with learning how to collaborate well, that we don't teach it in lower-level courses, and that in upper-level courses collaboration ability becomes important for academic success all of the sudden.

- There is strong evidence that self-selected groups are not as good as instructor-assigned groups.

- There are many resources out there for helping students work in teams more effectively. I was given this as a starting point:

http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/Oakley-paper(JSCL).pdf

- There are ways to get students to more actively work on their collaboration skills. Claire addresses this in the software engineering course she teaches. Some professors have reported having students assess how collaborations went, and docking points for students who didn't collaborate well.

- Several women, including myself, said that their best collaborations during undergraduate were with other women. I'm still not sure what to make of this in the context of other findings.

  Given this, I have the following thoughts about your proposed plan:

- I like the idea of talking to students about collaboration issues, but there are two main reasons I wouldn't do it only with the women. First, collaboration is an everyone problem, and not just a women's problem. It also affects people along lines of race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, etc. Second, even if the problem were only one of gender, it's a problem to be addressed by people of both genders. I've long believed that in order to solve the gender problem, we need to address the stereotypes associated with both femininity and masculinity. Only involving one of the genders in the conversation places all of the burden on that gender, and when it's the women, we are burdening an already burdened group. For these reasons I'd encourage a discussion about collaboration with the entire class, and then support to ensure collaborations are going as smoothly as possible throughout the semester.

- It doesn't hurt to check in with women and minority students, but without making them feel like they are being singled out, or because you are interested in them primarily because of the women in CS problem. My undergraduate professors paid a lot of attention to me, and I always assumed it was because I was a woman, and in fact this made me feel like I was less deserving of attention.

- I do like the idea of making it easier for minority students to find each other, but I don't know that it's your place to do it as the instructor. I don't know if there's a non-awkward way to bring this up during the whole-group discussion. Also, based on what people say it actually seems better to assign the partners as the instructor, and then it would not seem appropriate to assign people to work together based on their minority status. I'm still really not sure how to think of partner choice vs. partner assignment, and welcome discussion about this!

  Curious to hear your thoughts after your Facebook post about this topic blew up. :)

Best,

Jean

P.S. This discussion is interesting. What do you think about me posting this to my blog, maybe after Claire/Justine chime in?

--

from:		Ben Zhao
to:		Jean Yang
cc:		Justine Sherry, Claire Le Goues
date:		Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 1:27 PM

hey Jean.

Great thoughts.

I’ve been learning a lot from the various viewpoints on the FB post, but I’m slightly frustrated by the lack of consensus as to the right solution. First, I agree with all the viewpoints that the problem is broader (re: your point on everyone having collaboration issues and others’ points about male students sharing in the solution), and any effort to address it should be more inclusive. That I think is very doable: I can talk about the issue early on in the class with some of Sarita’s slides she shared on the FB post. Hopefully I can do it in a tactful way that doesn’t alienate any group.

By beyond that, I’m sort of torn. It’s clear that different personalities play into how different women reacted to my suggestions. Some, like my senior colleague Linda Petzold, reacted fairly negatively because (I think at least in part) she has a really strong personality, and perhaps had less of an issue handling those situations herself. Perhaps I’m generalizing too much based on a sample set of maybe 2-3, but I’m guessing there might be an inverse relationship between a student’s own ability to deal with these challenging situations and their sensitivity to being singled out. In other words, is it possible the women (or other minority groups) who are most vulnerable to the negative situations (because they’re less assertive or more introverted) would be less concerned about being singled out as a group?  I don’t want to downplay comments from you or Linda (and a couple others on the FB thread) about being singled out, but do you think that then sensitivity might be less of an issue for less assertive students? Given my slightly biased sample of strong female colleagues, I’m not quite sure how far off I am on this line of thinking.

My overarching concern is that a broader discussion, while very positive and definitely much better than nothing, is still not quite enough. I worry that individual students will find it difficult to reach out to me the professor to discuss group issues. This has been very much my experience in the past, that students don’t want to appear like they’re a hassle, and no matter how I try to make myself approachable and less intimidating, there’s always a high barrier to overcome (especially for those more shy/introverted students). So all those comments/suggestions that involve groups reaching out and giving me feedback about their own individual group dynamics, I think they’re somewhat naively optimistic.

So I will definitely do what I can for the broader class. But I worry that won’t be enough. Beyond that, I can do random group assignments. But there I foresee lots of complaints by students unable to work with their friends, and any personality conflicts will be blamed on me (which is ok). There I worry that the disruption to the class group formation as a whole will produce more issues, and I haven’t convinced myself that random assignment is a better solution in general.  The other option is more proactively reaching out to female students. There the question is do the ends justify the means: would the potential benefits of helping women students form self-selected groups outweigh the initial discomfort of being “singled out”?

Any/all thoughts welcome, and thanks for spending your time on this. I’m fine with whatever you want to post on your blog about the issue. I think more exposure can only help, as I’m pretty sure that most (if not all) of my male colleagues in the dept have no idea group dynamics is even an issue.

thanks,
Ben

--

from:		Claire Le Goues
to:		Ben Zhao
cc:		Jean Yang, Justine Sherry
date:		Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 5:46 PM

I don't think that the following response is by any means complete, but here are some offhand thoughts:

I also wouldn't single out female students. I do think you can signal that you are a supportive ally in various subtle and not-so-subtle ways, especially at the start of class.  For example, giving the students a survey wherein you ask for their names, preferred names/nicknames, and pronouns indicates that you are a person who understands that pronouns are a thing worth asking/caring about.  This can indicate to marginalized students that you are more likely to be educated/aware of gender dynamics overall and thus they may feel more comfortable approaching you with concerns.  

My take is: Many women or other members of underrepresented groups *know* that life can be challenging as a woman in homework groups.  Having someone tell me those challenges neither solves them, nor makes me feel much better.  On the other hand, having you publicly talk to everyone, men included, about challenges that groups face, covering elements like subconscious bias, diversity/groupthink, etc, and the ways those forces hinder effective teamwork, might frankly resonate more with the women than singling them out, and might actually get the guys to think about their lives/privilege/behavior a little bit.

What you might do, if you don't necessarily want to go the random route, is ask *all* the students at the beginning (as part of a start of semester survey) if they have someone they want to work with.  You can say something like "I haven't decided yet how to assign groups but I am willing to entertain suggestions, so let me know by filling out this form; I will not share your answers with anyone."  If all the women pick someone reasonable, and all pairs are matched (like I say Jean and Jean says me), then you let them pick their own.   That way you're neither saying "HEY WOMEN YOU ARE BEING SINGLED OUT" but you can still get at the information you want.

We do assign students to groups pseudo-randomly, which is honestly pretty consistent with the literature.  We ask for schedule availability (there's an online tool for this I can dig up) and use that to assign groups, looking to maximize times they can work together while honestly trying, when we can, to split up known cliques.

This is all made easier by the fact that I teach a class explicitly about software engineering, including teamwork and process, and so we can very easily and truthfully say: You will go work for a company and get assigned to work with a team of people you do not know, and so being able to do that effectively is one of the learning goals of this class.  The students are generally receptive to this argument, even though there are always a dysfunctional team or two.  Teaching a systems-y class lends itself to the same line of argumentation: either they're going to industry or academia, and regardless, they need to learn to work with people who are not their friends.

The literature is mixed on group composition.  There is some evidence that putting members of underrepresented groups together is good in early classes (100-200 level), and additional evidence that past that, it doesn't really matter (because if you haven't dropped out yet, group composition is unlikely to be the deciding factor?).

Other thoughts on what we do: 

(a) We provide opportunities for individual assignments/assessments, ideally with each group assignment or milestone (so the first part is group work, and a smaller component is to be done individually).  This lets us identify malfunction and ensures that we are actually assessing individual as well as group performance, 

(b) We do not do peer grading by default but reserve the right to start if teams report serious problems.   Peer grading skews incentives within groups in a way that interferes with our particular learning goals in an SE context. However, it might work in your context where the "learn to work in teams" is less explicitly a goal of the course. 

(c) (speaking to your concern about students being hesitant to surface or discuss issues with you) At various points in the semester we specifically survey the groups about how they think they're doing and aggregate the feedback from everyone to send it back to them (these are teams of 3--5, so it's easier to do anonymously than teams of 2).  The form we used is based on literature on assessing group performance; I can find it if you're interested.  We then reach out to students who are reporting problems.  We talk to them individually and then also reach out to the whole group as appropriate (if the individual student says they're OK with it).  We do encourage them to try to sort it out by talking about it amongst themselves, and regardless, we follow up with the individual students to see how they feel after a week or so.  We do not use those feedback forms for grading in any way (and we tell them so).  I have found that about half the time, the frustrated students just want to vent for a half hour and then say "yeah I feel better, no need to do anything else." ;-)  When we bring them in as groups, we try to make them do as much of the talking as possible.  Like "Hey everyone, how's it going?  What do you think you're doing that's working well?  What are you doing that's not working well?  How can you fix it?"

(d) We cover effective teamwork in class at the start of the semester; practices like "have specific roles that you rotate; document agreements and assignment of responsibilities" (also from the literature---I think the Oakley article Jean linked).  I'd emphasize both the explicit assignment as well as the "rotation" aspect of the roles---otherwise, the female students tend to get "scribe" duties all the time. We've debated ways to enforce those practices (like asking for documentation of who does what), but have never formally done so.  

Honestly, I've never heard anyone say that having the students pick their groups worked out particularly well, frankly.  There are profs who say "Oh, but they complain if we assign them randomly!" And perhaps I'm too cavalier, but my response is: so?  They also complain if the tests are hard and if we give them too much homework, and we do it anyway because it serves our pedagogical goals.  I feel the same way about assigned groups.

Assigned groups don't solve all sources of team dysfunction, of course, and so I think we should as a curricular point do more to mitigate the risks that groupwork poses particularly to marginalized students and to teach students how to work together.  They spend their childhoods being told they're not allowed to work with others, and then we throw them into teamwork situations with no training, and then are surprised when they're terrible at it.  I think covering those challenges and strategies to mitigate them and proactively paying attention to team dynamics over the course of the semester is important to help them learn, though I by no means think we have a complete answer on that.

-CLG

Why We Need to Talk About the Collaboration Problem

Today I spoke with a Computer Science professor who is finishing a semester of teaching a notoriously challenging advanced undergraduate course.

"I figured out the problem with my female students," he told me. "It's their partners."

All semester, this colleague--let's call him Albus Dumbledore--had been telling me about the strange phenomenon of drama with his female students and their project partners. The course has a significant project component, and successful completion of the project usually depended on both partners pulling their weight. Mediating partner disputes became the responsibility of the instructor. And what the instructor noticed was that an alarming fraction of the disputes seemed to happen when one of the partners was female.

After wondering all semester how bias might contribute to the drama of the female students' partners, Albus had a relevation. The female students complaining about their partners all seemed to have better overall grades than their partners. Not only did the partners have lower GPAs, but many of them were from outside of Computer Science. Albus surmised that these partners were, in fact, probably not pulling their weight, and that the students had every right to complain.

"But why would these strong students choose such bad partners?" he asked.

That female students had bad partners was, to me, not surprising. After all, nobody had asked me to work on any problem set until the second semester of my sophomore year, and a fellow student only asked me after obtaining an unprotected copy of course grades on our department servers and discovering I had the second-highest midterm score in one of our courses. I told Albus about how a friend once confessed to me that before she had gotten to know me, she had forbade her boyfriend from working with me. I told him about how problem set partners often preferred to solve problems for me rather than with me. My best collaboration in college had been with another woman, and she had been so initially skeptical of my abilities that it took me at least half of a semester to win her over with how fast and how correct my code was.

"So it's not by choice," Albus concluded. "What can we do about this?"

Important question. For my first few years of college, the collaboration problem had left me feeling so isolated and so much in doubt of my abilities that I often thought about switching away from Computer Science. If not for a chance encounter with a friend, one year behind me and facing similar problems, I might have left. What began as a quick hello as our paths intersected on the way back from class turned into a long discussion about the difficulties we both had in finding people who would collaborate with us. I had graded this woman's homework in multiple classes, so I knew the problem was not that she was not capable. This was when I began to realize that the problem may not be with me, but with the way people perceived me--and other women.

Years later, when I was starting Graduate Women at MIT, this conversation led me to put together a panel on collaboration--specifically, on collaborating as women in male-dominated fields. I felt so validated when the panelists--three women at various stages in their careers, each at the top of her field--said what I had observed for years, but had never dared to say out loud. It can be hard to collaborate with men, one panelist said: they often talk at you rather than to you because they are socialized to impress women. It can be harder to collaborate with two men, another panelist said: they will often talk only to each other while trying to impress you. (I don't like to make blanket statements about all people of a gender, just like I don't like to make blanket statements of all people from a culture, but these kinds of conversations can be helpful for recognizing patterns.) While much of this advice was unsurprising, and also depressing, it felt incredibly powerful to hear someone else say these statements out loud. Talking about this explicitly seemed like the first step towards solving the problem.

In the intervening years, I've collected much more evidence of the problem than I have solutions. It is undeniable that collaborations account for much of people's success in technical settings. Albus talked about how, in his class, the students with subpar partners struggled to complete their projects. A recent study I read* cited female academics' ability to travel for international collaboration as one of the biggest determinants of their success. Yet collaboration seems to remain a problem. At a recent lunch of Women@SCS in my department, I spoke about my experiences with Graduate Women at MIT, including about the collaboration panel, and the student kept returning to the issue of collaborating in a male-dominated field. Students asked about how to find collaborators who would take them seriously. Students asked about what to do in groups when people may not be listening to them. A student asked what to do if she has had so many negative collaboration experiences she is reluctant to collaborate anymore. A student said that she, too, felt like male collaborators were often trying to impress her rather than work with her, but she had thought it was in her head.

After the recent lunch, a student asked me about the benefit of talking explicitly about these issues. Wouldn't it be better, she asked, to not draw attention to gender and wait for the problems to go away? I, too, would love to live in a post-gender world where people can just be people. Unfortunately, it seems that collaboration is a topic we need to address explicitly. Not only do these cross-gender/culture problems not seem to be going away on their own, but they also seem to be increasing certain inequalities. Especially in Computer Science, smart people have done an excellent job of solving many other problems of gender equality. I have full confidence that once we recognize this as a problem, we can find good solutions. I would love to hear your ideas.

* In the process of looking for this citation... Let me know if you have it!

Women's Voices: A Reading List

While I have mixed feelings about celebrating the fact that women are often so underappreciated we need to set aside a day for honoring women, I'll use International Women's  Day as an excuse to put together a partial list of my favorite books with a strong female voice. This list contains a mix of memoir, manifesto, and fiction and is in alphabetical order by author.

• Kate Bolick, Spinster. Bolick examines the lives of several women, including herself, who put off the traditional path of marriage and children to pursue other interests. Many of these "spinsters" go on to marry and have more traditional lives, but most do it on their own terms, and not until they have gotten what they want out of their single years.
• Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (and the rest of the series). The novel My Brilliant Friend, translated from Italian, is the best depiction of a friendship--and the admiration and jealousy that comes with a close friendship--that I have ever read. I especially like that the book focuses on the friendship between the two main characters and their academic competition rather than a love story, as coming-of-age books about young women tend to do. The later books are beautiful portrayals of the ups and downs of navigating career success, romances, and relationships with family.
• Estelle Freedman, The Essential Feminist Reader. Fantastic collection of essays by authors from Mary Wollstonecraft to Audre Lorde.
• Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch. Possibly my favorite feminist classic. Greer writes powerfully about the repression that comes from the traditional nuclear family. From the forward of the 21st anniversary edition, by way of Wikipedia: "The freedom I pleaded for twenty years ago was freedom to be a person, with dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood. Freedom to run, shout, talk loudly and sit with your knees apart. Freedom to know and love the earth and all that swims, lies, and crawls upon it... most of the women in the world are still afraid, still hungry, still mute and loaded by religion with all kinds of fetters, masked, muzzled, mutilated and beaten."
• Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be. I love the way Heti experiments with different modes of writing to capture the existential angst, friendships, of being a twenty-something artistic person in what seems like a semi-autobiographical work
• Belle De Jour, Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Well written and surprisingly relatable, Secret Diary might change the way you view sex workers and sexual empowerment. Fun fact: during the period that this book describes, the author was concurrently pursuing a science PhD in the UK.
• Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me? I really like what comedienne Kaling has to say about her relationship with her work, how her work gives her confidence, and how she maintains this confidence while the rest of the world pays attention to things that should matter less than the quality of her work.
• Beryl Markham, West With the Night. Markham was not just a famous beauty who had love affairs with talented men (including Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), but also one of the first bush pilots in Africa and a fantastic writer. As she writes about her work flying in Kenya and her love of the land, she comes across as such a strong, resourceful, and brave woman.
• Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman. I love Moran's voice and wisdom as she talks about growing into a woman and navigating womanhood.
• Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things. Strayed opens up about her own struggles and triumphs through the "Dear Sugar" advice column she writes. Beautifully written and emotionally powerful.
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own. Woolf is one of my favorite writers in the English language and this short book makes some of the best arguments for gender equality that I have ever read or heard. One of my favorite lines, about why women need to be allowed to earn a comfortable income: "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes."

Would love to hear your recommendations!

Technical Privilege Reading List

People have been asking about the books I mentioned during last Friday's Challenging Technical Privilege Symposium at MIT. (The symposium was fantastic. So many people came and asked great questions. The video should be up soon!) Below I list the books I mentioned, along with some other books for people interested in the topic. Enjoy. (These are heavy topics, but these books are well-written, engaging, and provide actionable solutions.)

Essential Reading

• The Curse of the Good Girl (Rachel Simmons, 2010). About how we socialize girls to self-censor. An important read for parents and educators of girls, and also for everyone else to understand why women behave more conservatively than men. (The question of whether this is a "curse" is up for discussion, but it certainly holds women back in a man's world.)
• Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work (Deborah Tannen, 2001). Georgetown sociolinguist talks about the "cultural" differences between the way men and women speak and how this affects workplace dynamics--and evaluations. She observes, for instance, that men aim to achieve dominance in conversations, while women aim to prevent their conversation partner from being subordinate. Men assert facts; women give compliments. Because of these dynamics, observers will agree that men "win" workplace conversations.
• Unlocking the Clubhouse (Jane Margolis and Alan Fisher, 2003). Talks about the authors' research about why women tended to shy away from studying computer science and why women leave. They give concrete explanations for how women are socialized to have less interest: for instance, in families the computer will much more likely be in a son's room than a daughter's room. They also talk about phenomena such as how women cite poor performance as the reason they leave computer science, but in fact they are doing better than men who stay. (Curse of the Good Girl!)
• Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (Virginia Valian, 1999). I learned so much from this book! It is full of useful facts and explanations. Psychology professor Valian talks about studies that show there is bias against women: for instance, when people are shown resumes with women's names, the resumes need 1.5x the achievements to be assigned the same title. She talks about everything from work to clothing (how men have a uniform whereas all women are "marked") to physical traits (hypermasculinity is associated with competence, whereas hyperfemininity is associated with incompetence) to misconceptions about gender and emotional stability (people talk about women's monthly cycles, but men have both a daily and a yearly cycle). Understanding these gender biases and difference is an important first step towards improvement.

Other Reading

• Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest are Leaving the Workplace and How You Can Help them Stay (Freada Kapor Klein, 2007). Talks about the obstacles that minorities and socioeconomically disadvantaged people face in the workplace. A great read for allies and bystanders.
• Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls (Rachel Simmons, revised 2011). Simmons writes about how because girls are not allowed to exhibit aggression in the same way boys are, they silently censor each other. This can be emotionally damaging to women and also leads to self-censorship down the road. I found this to be a good read for understanding why women tend to be less bold than men.
• The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us (Robert H. Frank, 1996). An interesting explanation for the growing income equality in the United States. Good for thinking about things like institutional elitism.

A related thing I also mentioned is the Representation Project's movie The Mask You Live In, coming out in 2015, about American constructions of masculinity and how it's limiting to men. I highly recommend watching the trailer!

The Problem with "Mansplaining"

The "mansplaining" meme, which captures the phenomenon of men being patronizing to women in conversation, is trending on the internet. There is a Tumblr here; a Hillary Clinton meme there. While it is good that women are speaking out about sexism, there are some issues with using the term "mansplaining." Not only does it distract from the real problems, it also perpetuates behaviors that prevent progress. Allow me to mansplain.

The term "mansplaining" conflates two issues: that men tend to explain things in a manner that may be interpreted as patronizing and that people explain things to women with the assumption that they are ignorant. The first can largely be explained by conversational differences between men and women: in Talking from 9 to 5, Georgetown sociolinguist Deborah Tannen discusses how in conversations, (American) men tend to seek a dominant position, while women tend to prevent the other person from taking a subordinate position. Men also often use knowledge (for instance, statistics about sports teams) to establish this dominance. It is no wonder, then, that conversations between men and women often end up having the man explaining things in a condescending manner to women. Rather than mocking men, it is more productive to create awareness of these conversational differences. Men can use this awareness to be more careful when talking to women (or anyone else from a culture where establishing dominance is not the norm) and women can use this awareness to perceive the situation differently (for instance, be less offended or intimidated) when talking to men.

Because it brings in stereotypes about men vs. women, the "mansplaining" distracts from the real issue: that people are often condescending to women. In Why So Slow?, psychologist Virginia Valian explains that this often because of statistical bias. Using heuristics to make snap judgments is how we are able to effectively deal with overwhelming amounts of input. Using these same heuristics is often why people (men and women) assume women are less capable. Especially in technical fields, there are fewer capable women. Thus, given any specific woman, she is more likely to be ignorant than knowledgeable. Thus a reasonable snap judgment is to assume that a woman knows less than she does. Fortunately, we can second-guess our snap judgments. Awareness can again mitigate this problem: if we know we are likely to make a snap judgment that is wrong, we can be conscious of these situations and adjust our judgments accordingly. In overcoming snap judgments, it also helps to focus on specific attributes of a person instead of whether they are a man or a woman.

The term "mansplaining" perpetuates this gender-based statistical bias by focusing attention on the male gender rather than the behavior. The fact that this term exists makes it more likely that people will assume someone is "mansplaining" simply because he is a man. This is not productive for men who may be trying to overcome "mansplaining" tendencies. It increases the chances that the other person will dismiss what the "mansplainer" is saying outright, giving him less opportunity to practice having conversations with people who may not be accustomed to his dominance-seeking style of speaking. Also, the term "mansplaining" distracts from the fact that women can be sexist and condescending as well.

The "mansplaining" meme has been useful for raising awareness both about the tendency of men to come off as patronizing and the tendency of people to be condescending to women. But it distracts from the real problems and perpetuates gender-based bias. To work towards a solution for productive cross-gender conversation, we should focus on specific behaviors rather than gender stereotypes and on listening rather than on pointing fingers.

Why Do Women Want to "Have It All?"

Last week, former State Department director Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic piece "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" spurred a flurry of internet discussion: there was a nice response on why "having it all" is the wrong thing to be striving for (see the Salon response) amidst many other responses (see the NYT summary and Joanne Wilson's response).  This discussion brings up the valid point that the set of desires of "elite women*" may be unsatisfiable.  The main problem is that the outdated expectation for a woman to pair with a socially "stronger" man does not necessarily create professionally supportive relationships for ambitious women.

The assumption that the man needs to be professionally superior leads to situations in which the woman will spend more time thinking about the family.  A mentor once made the provocative statement that that if I did a startup, I would no longer be able to find a man who I respected.  When I asked why, he said that I am "biologically wired" to look for a "stronger man."  After a fair bit of self-reflection, reading about evolutionary biology, and talking to both men and women, I concluded that this "stronger man" business is based on societal constructs left over from a time when society did not allow women to provide for themselves.  I have encountered quite a few men whom I respect who have also said they are willing to make significant sacrifices towards having a family, including staying home if necessary.  I am not saying that ambitious women can only be with less ambitious men, but they should be aware of the topography of the choice space and the tradeoffs that different choices entail.

Professionally ambitious women must also make a choice about what they want to optimize: it is likely that women seeking both "power coupledom" and supportive relationship will be disappointed.  It seems that part of the desire to be part of a "power couple" is based on expectations from the days when a women did not work and a woman's success was based on how "well" she married.  In those days, ambitious men did not expect to find equally successful women: they looked for a supportive woman.  Women should be able (and allowed by society) to make this choice as well.  Women should realize that while it may be the ideal to find a successful man who is also has the bandwidth to be supportive (professionally, emotionally, etc.), this is unlikely as the selection pool can become quite small.  We can be quite happy, however, if we choose to optimize for one or the other with no illusions about what we are giving up.

It is important for a woman to realize that if she wants a "stronger" man, she should have expectations about the tradeoffs she is making.  This does not mean, however, that all women with careers must make these tradeoffs.  We have been given one view of what it means to "have it all" and it is our responsibility to question and redefine this for ourselves.

My friend Yao inspired this post with the following comment:"I wonder why women always think they must be the ones to give up their career for kids and not their husbands."

* I acknowledge that these discussions are highly heteronormative and have a relatively small target demographic.  Everything I say probably applies only to young, urban, highly-educated, heterosexual American women.

Ramping up the Graduate Women at MIT blog

Graduate Women at MIT now has a new blogging initiative. If you have been following my blog to hear about gender/women in science issues, please follow the GWAMIT blog as well!

From GWAMIT: Do women prefer the "mommy track?"

I have a post on the Grad Women at MIT blog expressing my disagreements with the conclusions of this article, "Why the Gender Gap Won't Go Away. Ever."

Implicit Bias and Affirmative Action

A few weeks ago, the MIT Tech ran an opinion piece "It's good to be king" ("Innate ability may explain gender gaps") raising questions about the "deeply suspicious" nature of the "subtle bias" used to justify measures taken to increase participation of women in the sciences at MIT. This well-written piece argued that the gender-dependence of intelligence variability may explain the gaps of women in the sciences. The Tech ran a subsequent counterpoint "Intelligence variability is not gender-dependent" that argues against the intelligence variability claim, pointing out that this is not true across cultures.

I am glad that The Tech is taking on this interesting question and would encourage them to dig a bit deeper into the literature of and issues surrounding gender inequity in the sciences. I wrote a Letter to the Editor that ran yesterday about how in the argument about affirmative action, it is important to consider the (often implicit) biases that the action is intended to counteract.

Grad Women @ MIT Empowerment Conference

I have been organizing the Graduate Women @ MIT Empowerment Conference, happening Wednesday-Friday this week. Events include a keynote by Cindy Gallop (who has branded herself as herself and gone on to change the world however she wants to), a Power Couples Panel, and a panel on the relevance of modern feminism (titled "I'm not a feminist, but..." to appeal to those who don't yet identify as feminists). There are also workshops on communications and online personal branding.

The conference website is here and there is a Facebook event here.

Articles about Women and the Workplace

One week away and I've collected so many articles about women in my inbox!

Women in Science

• Gender stop-gaps - a Nature article about the under-representation of women in academic science and the measures being taken/advised to address it, including growing the applicant pool, providing a more family-friendly environment, and increasing mentoring. This article also cites organizational changes as important: for instance, a researcher noticed that in smaller biotech startups with flat organization structures, women were as likely as men to hold a patent, while at universities and larger companies men patented significantly more.
  
• NCWIT Report Examines Women's Declining Participating in Tech - a blog post describing a report about the attrition of women in IT careers compared to the past and compared to the numbers of women who pursue tech-related fields in college. The report also describes barriers to participation and how to address them, recommending an "ecosystem of reform."
• Daring to Discuss Women's Potential in Science - a New York Times article about a proposed law that would require the White House science adviser to oversee workshops promoting gender equity. In this piece Tierney raises the question of whether bias exists. This point is not the most relevant to raise, as the existence of differences does not invalidate the need for equity. Rather, learning about differences can educate us about how to provide equal opportunities and make progress in a way that allows people with different cultural backgrounds and strengths to contribute. This Jezebel post makes some good criticisms of the article.

More general

• Dressed to Distract - New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd discusses the firing of Debrahlee Lorezana from Citigroup, for the reason that her looks and dress were "too distracting" for her male coworkers and supervisors. Dowd points out that while this is usually the other way around (beautiful people get what they want), women are often punished professionally for being too beautiful. Dowd writes, "A male friend once told me he was looking for an unattractive personal assistant so he wouldn’t be tempted. And when I was hiring a Grace Kelly blonde as a researcher a few years ago, a male colleague asked me not to because it would be 'too distracting' to him; two girlfriends cautioned me not to because it would be depressing... for me to work with someone so good looking."
• In Sweden, the Men Can Have It All - a New York Times pieces about gender equity in Sweden, where women have equal rights at work and men have equal rights at home--85% of Swedish men take parental leave. This is part of the women around the world series.
  
• A short history of "feminist" anti-feminists - a nice Slate piece about "the early sisters of Sarah Palin," women who claim to be feminists but organize in opposition to the feminist movement. And (yes!) the article cites Camille Paglia ("I'm not soft and silly like all the other women") as the "iconic leader" of a group of contemporary anti-feminists including Christina Hoff-Summers ("why can't a woman be more like a man?").

The gender gap in Silicon Valley

Thanks to Clarissa for sending this.

A recent NY Times article Why So Few Women in Silicon Valley discusses the (sometimes surprisingly overt) sexism and other factors that are responsible for women creating only 8% of venture-backed start-ups and being 6% of the chief executives at the top 100 tech companies.

Fryer-Levitt math gender gap study

Thanks to Jie Tang for sending this.

Economists Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt have a 2009 study, "An Empirical Analysis of the Gender Gap in Mathematics," in which they analyze the gender gap in the US, explore causes, and discuss cross-country data which shows that countries with same-sex schooling don't have this gap. Paper here; abstract excerpt below:

We document and analyze the emergence of a substantial gender gap in mathematics in the early years of schooling... in the United States. There are no mean differences between boys and girls upon entry to school, but girls lose more than two-tenths of a standard deviation relative to boys over the first six years of school... We explore a wide range of possible explanations in the U.S. data, including less investment by girls in math, low parental expectations, and biased tests, but find little support for any of these theories... The cross-country data reveal that girls do not lag boys in math in countries with same-sex schooling, raising an intriguing question as to whether this relationship is causal.

I am not surprised. Since traditional gender roles are so ingrained in our consciousness, it is natural that young men and women would look to them in determining acceptable behavior*. Having young women hold back in math causes a feedback loop that makes it increasingly difficult for young women to develop their mathematical ability: as fewer women become good at math, 1) people become less accustomed to seeing women who are good at math, making it difficult for women to proves themselves w.r.t. math and 2) women with mathematical talent are less likely to develop it, since they are not expecting to be good.

These findings corroborate the hypothesis that the US gender gap in math is largely due to cultural factors. (See my other link.) They also fit with my personal experiences: one of the biggest social challenges I faced in leaving my all-girls high school for a coed college environment was having people treat me like I shouldn't know what I'm doing when it comes to math. This was not only frustrating but also harmful to my self-confidence--it probably caused some amount of deadweight loss in my mathematical development.

Shifting current gender roles could go a long way in bridging the gender gap.

* I am curious to see studies analyzing how other traits associated with masculinity (physical strength, debate ability) fare under an analogous analysis.

Gender imbalance among Harvard's CS undergrads

I was recently interviewed for this Harvard Crimson article about the dearth of female undergraduates concentrating in computer science at Harvard. While the article misrepresents some details about me, it gets it right that a large factor in the skewed ratio is the male dominance in terms of both numbers and culture (which manifests in things like problem set groups).

Computer engineer Barbie

My friend Rishabh's dreams have come true. Computer engineer Barbie is here by popular vote. Mattel even worked with the Society of Women Engineers to make sure that she is wearing the appropriate "geek chic" attire. Bravo, Barbie.

Graduate Women at MIT gets some press

I have been involved in starting Graduate Women at MIT, an institute-wide women's group. We got some press in the MIT Tech today, which provides an exciting start to our kick-off spring.

Classy Asian Ladies

From Eugene.

If you are a single white man who loves Asian ladies, ClassyAsianLadies.com, an "Exclusive Upscale Online Dating Service," is what you need. The site boasts:

Our beautiful Asian ladies all live in the US already. They will not try to marry you to get a “green card” or to become financially dependent upon you.

In the "Why Asian Women" section, the site says:

It seems that in today’s society the average woman is becoming very competitive and even a bit more masculine than their counterparts in earlier generations. All the while it seems to be just the opposite is taking place for Asian women who tend to retain their sense of femininity and well-known cultural attitude of gentle and caring support.

On one hand, such a thing seems racist, sexist, and wrong. On the other hand, this may provide an efficient way for "classy Asian ladies" to find the "high quality, sincere gentlemen" they've been looking for*. Thea Lim has a nice Racialicious post makes a good argument for the former**: that this site perpetuates oppressive stereotypes of Asian women and encourages the sexual solipsism of white males seeking the ideal submissive mate.

* Like the controversial Ashley Madison, a dating site for married people--"have an affair, guaranteed!"
** I don't agree with Lim that homogenizing a race of people is bad a priori.

Misogynists are women, too

Being a woman and identifying as a feminist does not mean that I am not a misogynist. Ever since I read Rachel Simmons's Odd Girl out and Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs, I have been thinking the silent prevalence of female misogyny and about my own misogynistic tendencies. By misogyny, I mean judging women by harsher standards than those used for judging men.

While it is easy to identify blatant cases of misogyny, it is difficult to recognize misogyny that echoes society's views and/or reaffirms what people often want to think. More obvious cases of misogyny in society are public figures like Camille Paglia, a self-proclaimed feminist who has said things like "Women are forever softening, censoring, politicizing." There are also the women who adopt society's language for oppressing women, denouncing other women as "sluts" and "whores." Then there are the women who don't trust the abilities of other women before they prove themselves, who don't think women have the same baseline ability as men, who enjoy being "not like the other women," and who get annoyed with some women for being so bubbly and so... girly. (Don't they know they should act more like men?) I used to be this kind of woman.

There are many reasons why women have misogynistic tendencies. Many women in our society grow up internalizing misogynistic values, so it is to be expected that these values will be reflected in attitudes towards other women. There is also the element, which Rachel Simmons describes, of the oppressed oppressing based on the same criteria. It is also easier for women--or anyone--to believe that they are somehow different and special rather than accept society is unfair, and in particular unfair to people like them.

Like everyone, misogynists can change. The first step is to recognize misogynistic tendencies--the most pernicious behaviors are those that you don't know about. Before writing off a woman as a bitch or whore, it may be good to ask what factors influenced you to see the woman that way. When you meet a woman, be conscious of how you are judging her and recognize how much you are expecting her to prove herself. How does this compare to when you meet men? Do you dismiss women for being incompetent, a bitch, or a slut? Awareness can go a long way in changing behaviors.

Women need to recognize female misogyny so they can improve the way men see women and the way they see themselves. Men and women need to recognize that female misogyny occurs not because women are petty, irrational, or unworthy of respect, but because of much more complex factors. It is everyone's duty to call out misogyny whenever they can, even (and perhaps) especially when it is exhibited by women--even if it may be a sensitive subject.

* This issue has been addressed by works such as Rachel Simmons's 2003 book Odd Girl Out and the 2004 movie Mean Girls.