[SGVLUG] OT: Why aren't there more women in tech?

[Dustin Laurence]

I'm going to try to just ignore what I suspect the "hurt feelings" 
thread is going to end up as and instead go in a different direction, 
one where I learned that sometimes knowing gender tendencies 
*matters*--even as a matter of physical safety.  This may not actually 
be of any interest to anyone, but now that I've thought about it again 
I'm happy to have a chance to organize my thoughts on it.

I'm sure I've mentioned any number of times that I used to teach kids to 
sail big wooden boats--schooners and square-riggers.  The important 
feature of those boats was that they were large machines with, 
sometimes, enormous mechanical power in rigs that were designed for 
seamen, not amateurs.  They can hurt or even kill you if you're 
determined to do something really, really stupid.  It made me think a 
lot about safety and how to teach it before something happened.

If my kids stuck around long enough, and had the aptitude, I wanted them 
to go through the whole progression of learning to handle lines on 
command under supervision, to being able to do it without supervision, 
to learning to anticipate the commands, and finally to be able to give 
them.  I had three kids that, at least in reasonable conditions, could 
give the commands to carry out the captain's orders without any help 
from the "real" mate.  Two were boys, and one was a girl, and I had 
another girl who was close and would have gotten if she'd had more time 
and if we hadn't lost the use of the smaller schooner that had been an 
easier first step.

The funny thing is, for both lubbers and seamen, I had to handle them a 
bit differently by gender--on average(*).  Usually it was a matter of 
optimizing efficiency, but at a few points it was a matter of safety. 
For those who were still learning the basics, the following would be 
correct around, oh, maybe 70% of the time:

[[* We're clear about ensemble averages vs. individual elements, right? 
  So in the rest of this I may or may not include statistical caveats on 
obvious generalizations, because we all know how that works.  I hope.]]

#1.  As a matter of teaching efficiency, the girls needed to be pushed a 
bit outside their comfort zone, because they would tend to avoid 
tackling something they weren't sure of, and thereby would cheat 
themselves of the experience of working it out the hard way for 
themselves.  You can't do that carelessly, because sometimes they didn't 
want to do something for the very good reason that they didn't know how 
to do it safely--as #2 points out below, my girls had better 
self-knowledge of their limits than the boys.  But they tended to 
underestimate what they could tackle.  Therefore, for probably the 
majority of girls, they would not learn at their potential unless I 
asked them to stretch themselves in the right way.  Of course, the 
usefulness of the (very informal) statistical tendencies was only useful 
until I got to know them, and knew which girls did not have this trait 
and which boys did.

For #1, the consequences of not recognizing the gender tendencies were 
not terrible--it simply meant that I wasn't guessing right until I 
figured out what was actually in their heads.  Basically, we lost some 
useful training time, and as we only went once a month I was kind of 
protective of that.  But for the girls and the fewer number of boys in 
this category, they'd be safe.

More difficult was learning *how* to push people in the way that 
benefited them most, and I frankly don't think I ever was terribly good 
at it.  I could see gender tendencies there too, but part of not being 
as good at it is not being able to characterize the differences as well 
and so I don't break that out into a separate number.  Besides, as time 
goes on you should know your kids and be teaching directly to who they 
really are, not to the characteristics of some ensemble of kids they may 
happen to belong to.  If you aren't doing that eventually, well, frankly 
as a teacher you suck.

#2.  As a matter of safety, the boys would tend to go outside their 
safety zone, and needed to be watched so that they did not tackle 
something they did not understand and get themselves or someone else 
hurt.  This was, I think, the strongest effect--in ten years I very 
rarely had this problem with a girl, but I could count on one or two in 
any group of boys to be ready to do something they simply could not do 
safely.  On the other hand, if kept from hurting themselves, this helped 
them learn faster.

For #2, the consequences of not recognizing the gender difference were a 
statistical loss of safety--I was less likely to be watching the right 
newcomers at the right time to avoid a problem.  This was, to me, a 
serious problem, and to this day if anyone teaching seamanship under me 
who had a problem with acting on that gender difference would probably 
get thrown off my boat.  My sailors don't get hurt for reasons I can 
prevent, not for *nobody's* ideology.

#2b.  Closely related to #2, and also a matter of safety--you can rely 
on the girls to listen better and follow directions better than the 
boys.  This difference persists throughout life, BTW, because you find 
the same thing teaching, e.g. firearms safety.  Women are much better 
students, because they listen.  The boys who don't fit this tendency are 
usually the boys who do the best, of course.  (The most extreme case of 
this was one and only one boy who I trusted to handle a dock line (dock 
lines are the most dangerous lines on the boat, with potentially a few 
tons of tension) on his first sail--the only kid I ever trusted to do 
that.  Why?  He was an unusual case.  He came with a group of kids all 
in identical sweatsuits and escorted by armed sheriff's deputies.  The 
juvenile justice system had already taught him to listen to orders and 
carry them out exactly, and he *wanted* to sail.  I'd have taken that 
kid on a voyage around the world.)

The consequences of failing to understand #2b are usually just boys who 
don't learn what they need to learn, but learning some things are vital 
to safety.  It pays to learn as fast as you can which boys actually 
listen, who will learn to listen, and who never will.

#3.  So much for the apprentices.  For the senior sailors, I saw 
slightly different, and usually weaker, manifestations of the same 
tendencies (moderated by a lot of experience, which makes almost 
anything better).  And of course, at this level you know your kids 
pretty well, so I never needed statistical rules to guess when I already 
knew who they were.  But one case was pretty extreme.  Rachel, one of my 
three kids who could function as mate, was nearly everything I wanted a 
seaman to be--bright, alert, and totally reliable.  She had only one 
real flaw, and that was giving orders without having a useful command 
voice, usually phrased as a question ("would you like to harden up the 
jib?"), and it showed in how the kids responded to her orders.  I used 
to tell her not to ask questions whose answers were not of interest 
("why no, madame mate, I really don't feel like hardening up the jib 
right now, maybe after I have a soda"), or that "the first mate may be 
all woman, but she's no lady" (which of course was a slander on what 
real-life ladies were like, all of whom were bred to run the castle 
staff with an iron hand--but she knew what I meant).  On the other hand, 
Rachel usually sailed with her best friend Carolyn, who naturally gave 
reasonable orders in a reasonable voice (Carolyn is the one I always 
regretted not being able to train quite all the way up to function as 
the mate).  Carolyn, as an individual, didn't really follow the tendency 
even though her friend did.  But I suppose she didn't learn quite as 
fast as Rachel.

It sometimes bothered me a bit doing that, because with Rachel in 
particular it was simply who she was--she was polite, well mannered, and 
kind, and it wasn't natural to give firm orders in the imperative.  In 
the grand scheme of things, wasn't it her *positive* qualities that I 
was trying to moderate?  It bothered me until I thought through what the 
real issue was, and that was having options.  I used to tell her it was 
really just learning a skill--she never had to like it, but in real life 
outside of sailing she should know how to give orders in a voice that 
invited obedience when she needed it.  After that, it was up to her how 
she used that option.  She eventually became a teacher, and I like to 
think running the deck on a boat was helpful when she first had to run a 
classroom on her own.

In any event, the real point was that while gender-based statistical 
predictions were irrelevant for *me* because I was dealing with one 
individual, it seemed useful for *Rachel* so that learning to give 
commands did not seem to make her someone she didn't want to be.  She 
needed to recognize that (1) it's OK for her to be as ladylike as she 
pleases, (2) it's useful for her to be able to have a rather unladylike 
command manner when she is wearing the mate's hat, and (3) there is no 
contradiction, because it's just a (metaphorical) hat that she could put 
on and take off whenever she pleased.  I wasn't asking her to change who 
she was--I was asking her to learn a voluntary skill and, perhaps, play 
a role that she didn't identify with.

An observation at this point-- with one exception, gender rules really 
don't work with professional tall-ship sailors *at all*, which, 
interestingly, run not far from 50% women in my experience.  I think the 
reason is simply that those who choose to do it for a living combine 
extreme initial self-selection bias, the effects of training, and 
perhaps also some selection against people who really aren't cut out for 
it.  I've sailed with quite a few female mates, and I don't recall any 
of them having problems giving direct commands in proper seamanlike 
fashion.  Rachel sailed with some of them too, and it was those mates I 
was reminding her of when I made my little joke about the mate being a 
woman but not a lady.

(Oh, the exception.  It is this: if you want the heads (marine toilets) 
to be clean, make it clear to the men that the women have the last word 
on when the job has been done right.  The odds are about ten to one 
against you if you trust the men to do quality control themselves.  Lazy 
buggers.  The consequences of failing to understand this point are, 
well, icky and smelly.)

Huh, I forgot another point, which I guess is a gender difference of a 
different kind: most of the girls had less weight to put behind a line, 
and so the best ones learned better technique than anyone else as 
compensation.  I used to tell everyone to watch the lighter experienced 
women sweat a line and do it exactly as they did--the big beefy guys 
were no good as an example because they just didn't have to be good to 
move a lot of weight.

The point is--well, really the point is that I'll take any excuse to 
talk about boats, but theoretically the points were that (1) the 
universe doesn't care about our little ideologies, and if we insist on 
sufficiently unreal things it will punish us, and (2) because it is 
statistical knowledge knowing gender differences is mostly only useful 
when dealing with groups of people you don't know, but also (3) 
sometimes, as I believe in Rachel's case, simply acknowledging a 
tendency may make it easier to train against it.  I think it was true, 
less dramatically, of others: I eventually learned to just tell new 
sailors from the outset what the tendencies were, that it might or might 
not apply to them, and that if it did it simply meant that they would 
know what they needed to work on in order to be the safest and most 
effective sailor.  I mostly did that to tell the boys in advance that 
they needed to slow down more than they thought they did, but also to 
tell the girls *why* someone might push them outside their comfort zone 
so that they were prepared--or ideally, so we wouldn't need to in the 
first place.

Knowledge, perhaps, really is power, and perhaps self-knowledge is power 
over self--even if the self-knowledge is statistical and the self is 
not.  Perhaps that's merely something of a mental trick, but so are 
placebos and yet they can be useful.

Dustin