Free To Choose What She Wants To Do

Google and other technology companies have stated they are committed to more diversity in their engineering ranks. Most have major initiatives in place to hire more women in particular.

General Electric is another company that has made this a high profile issue. It has stated that its goal is to have 20,000 women in STEM roles and have 50:50 representation for all technical entry level jobs by 2020. This will require that 5,000 females be hired with STEM backgrounds in a just over a year.

Google has been publishing an annual diversity report since 2014 on their workforce composition in furtherance of its goal of hiring more females, blacks and latinos.

Here are the most recent numbers for tech hires in 2017 at Google.

Google does not separately break out its diversity percentages for the entire tech workforce. They only do this for new hires. Therefore, you can be sure that the overall numbers are much worse.

There was a lot of media attention last year when a Google employee claimed that the company was using a quota system in new hiring to increase its diversity numbers. The employee was fired after he wrote a memo stating that Google's liberal political bias led the company to believe that bias and oppression was the reason that minorities were underrepresented in the workforce. It therefore followed that quotas were necessary to correct the inequity.

The employee, James Damore, sealed his fate when he also questioned whether the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women were partially due to biological causes and that these differences may partially explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech jobs and at Google.

That was a total career-ender.

I wrote a blog post at the time that addressed the neuroscience research that supported what Damore suggested could be a cause.

I also pointed out that it is hard to ignore the underlying numbers in all of this. Why is it that more American students do not major in the STEM disciplines? Why is it that women in particular do not select this course of study?

Why are 47% of Google tech hires Asian and only 24.5% female? Asians are in the STEM majors and women are not.

Why were only 2% of Google's tech hires Black and 3% Hispanic? The pool of qualified candidates is small. For further evidence look at this additional chart from the Google Diversity Report on attrition.

Why do many more Blacks and Hispanics leave Google than other races/ethnicities? Google says they are working hard to better understand it. Could it be a question of supply and demand? All of the tech companies want to increase their diversity numbers. There is a limited supply of qualified employees to recruit from. The offers to leave Google are simply more attractive to Blacks and Hispanics than for others.

Let's look at some broader numbers on this subject.

Only 1 in 6 American students are majoring in the STEM subjects. On the other hand, 1 in 3 foreign students in American universities are majoring in STEM.

Women only comprise 14% of engineering majors and 17% of computer science majors in our universities. What are they more likely to major in? Anthropology, Archaeology, Art History, Communications, Philosophy and Gender Studies.

Why is this? Is it a cultural bias? Is it because of gender inequality?

General Electric attributes the low numbers in part to a “vicious cycle of expectations and lack of role models.”

I am sure there is truth to that but is that the real reason?

I came across an interesting study that seems to show that it has nothing to do with gender equality.
In fact, the research indicates that in countries with the greatest gender equity you actually have the lowest percentage of female STEM graduates.

It seems that the greater the gender equity, and the higher the economic security for women, the more freedom females seem to believe they have the freedom to major in what they really want to do.

Don't expect to find many female STEM graduates in Finland, Norway, Netherlands or Belgium.

On the other hand, Algeria, Turkey, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates you will find lots of them. All of these are Muslim countries.

If GE and Google are to reach their goals they may have to focus their recruiting in those countries. Of course, what then happens to the young men with those STEM degrees in the United States of America who do not get hired as a result?

Another chart I came across recently suggests that college students are no longer as interested in studying the Humanities as they were a decade ago. The combination of the high cost of student debt and the Great Recession must have caused many student to reassess their career interests.

Perhaps these students (which have historically had a higher percentage of female majors) have heard that Google and General Electric are good places to work and they they are not looking for Philosophy majors.

Anything that encourages more students (men or women) to consider STEM careers is a positive. I wrote about this need in the early days of my blog back in 2011.  However, we should not be sacrificing quality for quotas and we should not surrender to the nonsense that here are no innate differences between men and women to begin with.

Postscript:

Right after I finished this blog post I came across this article from The Times in London by Science Editor Tom Whipple who cites research that indicates there are greater differences in the sexes in societies that have more gender equality. In other words, the more gender equality, the greater the difference in the way men and women think.

This confirms the research in the study cited above on females in STEM degree programs by country.

For example, one study found that in China, which ranks low in gender parity, the personality overlap between men and women is 84%. In the Netherlands, which is considered at the top of gender equality, the overlap was only 61%.

"It seems that as gender equality increases, as countries become more progressive, men and women gravitate to towards traditional gender norms."

"There is too much evidence of this to be a fluke. It's not just personality. The same counter-intuitive pattern has been found in many other areas, including attachment styles, choice of academic specialty, choice of occupation, crying frequency, depression, happiness and interest in casual sex." 

"An explanation could be that those living in wealthier and more gender-equal societies had greater freedom to pursue their own interests and behave more individually, so magnifying natural differences."  

So much for feminist theory that argues that all differences between the sexes are due to cultural training and social roles. In fact, this research suggests that the differences become greater the more we treat them the same and they become more the same when we treat them differently.

Note to Google and GE. Perhaps the reason you have trouble in filling STEM positions with females is that a lot of them just are not that interested in the work...due to their own freedom of choice.