The Google Memo

So some Google employee released an internal memo that leaked and people lost their minds. Then the employee lost his job. He wrote many interesting things that are great if you agree with them and offensive if you disagree with them. I'm less concerned with his conclusions than his methods. So I did some fact checking.

Gender Differences in Spending 

"Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employees sacrifices (e.g. more hours, stress, and danger), we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power."

Survey says: on average ... I guess so.
 "Women have been shown to be associated more so with money pathologies than are men: females are more prone to compulsive spending, for instance"

Gender Differences in Personality Traits 

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

Survey says: sure.*
"In college and adult samples, women score higher then men on the Five Factor Model (FFM) personality traits of Neuroticism and Agreeableness."
Although it's difficult to tell when the author is talking about women in leadership roles in the tech field or just the tech field. The data on these traits, if true of women in the entire population, might explain why they are disproportionately not choosing tech. However, if women already in tech are not represented in leadership roles it would be helpful to see if these traits match up within this specific sample.

In other words, do women already in the tech field still score high on neuroticisim? Or does this specific group share more traits with the average man and therefore are being discriminated against? We need more data.

Gender Differences in Leadership 

"We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life."

I disagree with the implication that leadership positions are unequivocally harder. The balance that comes with the "long, stressful hours" of leadership is the ability to make decisions and operate the way you think is best.

The Whitehall Studies showed that a secretary is more likely to die from heart disease than a CEO. It's not stress that causes heart problems, it's a lack of agency.

"The studies ... found a strong association between grade levels of civil servant employment and mortality rates from a range of causes: the lower the grade, the higher the mortality rate. Men in the lowest grade (messengers, doorkeepers, etc.) had a mortality rate three times higher than that of men in the highest grade (administrators). This effect has since been observed in other studies and named the "status syndrome." (Unfortunately, the study only observed men.)

While it's possible that women are more likely to avoid stressful jobs based on their personality traits, that doesn't necessarily preclude leadership positions. I think everyone wants more control over their own life, regardless of the status/stress conflict that "leadership" brings. I don't have the data, but I would guess the search for agency and self actualization is gender neutral.

I'm grading this: unfounded.

Gender Differences in Homelessness, Work-Related Deaths, Prisons, and Dropouts

"Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts."

Survey says: yes.
A bit of a strawman, but I get his point. If men are more likely to be homeless, suffer work related deaths, be in prison, and drop out of school, is discrimination the cause? Or is some other (biological/psychological/sociological?) factor at play?

First, is this gender representation true? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.  So if it's reasonable to assume these biases against men are not strictly due to discrimination, it's possible that women's under representation in tech is also more complicated.

Missing Data

What would bolster his argument about women avoiding (in the aggregate) leadership or tech positions is if there was data about the gender differences in those who apply for these positions. If the applicant pool is 50% men and 50% women but overwhelmingly men are hired, discrimination is more likely. The memo's author seems to suggest the applicant pool heavily favors men, but I can't seem to find any data on this, but it would tell us a lot.

(Update: I did find an article here that states: "Only 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees and 26 percent of computing jobs are held by women. It’s worse at the top of the corporate world — just 5 percent of leadership positions in the technology industry are held by women." Give a little perspective but I'd still like to know who is applying.) However, I did find two interesting studies that seem to contradict one another.

The UC Berkely gender bias study showed that men applying to their grad programs were more likely than women to be admitted. A deeper dive into the data revealed something else:
"But when examining the individual departments, it appeared that six out of 85 departments were significantly biased against men, whereas only four were significantly biased against women. In fact, the pooled and corrected data showed a 'small but statistically significant bias in favor of women.'

The research paper by Bickel et al.[15] concluded that women tended to apply to competitive departments with low rates of admission even among qualified applicants (such as in the English Department), whereas men tended to apply to less-competitive departments with high rates of admission among the qualified applicants (such as in engineering and chemistry)."

From the Hewlett Packard internal report: Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them.

These examples explain a bias against women that has nothing to do with discrimination, however seem to say different things about women. Do they apply to competitive college programs but not competitive jobs? The memo's author may be on to something but we need more data to confirm.

*Update: more thoughts on this. I actually can't imagine a more stressful job than being a classroom teacher, a career dominated by women. I don't buy the argument that women avoid stressful, high anxiety jobs. If we buy the author's argument that women tend to choose service jobs and men seek high status jobs, then people trade off job-related stress if it's worth it to them. Some will deal with stress if it means making a difference in a kids life. Some will deal with stress if it means a corner office and fat paycheck.