The Endless Struggle
In the summer of 2016 I turned down a software engineering job I was offered in Portland. I ended up refusing the job, after much deliberation, for a handful of reasons. When I went in for an interview I found myself among about a dozen men, being led by a couple of men in executive positions, in a small basement office across the Willamette from the city's core metropolis center. They took me out to lunch for slices of New York style pizza a couple of blocks away, and conversation centered primarily on sports and video games, with an only occasional diversion into a trite point about the craft of software.
I came away from the encounter with a couple of distinct impressions about the place. I seemed like poor cultural fit, since I've never been able to focus my longer-than-average attention span on any manner of sports for more than a few minutes, and while I have tried several times in my life to get into video games, by purchasing a console and some popular titles, I have failed miserably on all but one fleetingly short occasion in college. I also had the distinct impression that management was trying just a little too hard to recruit me, with an anxiousness tinged with the kind of desperation that gives you the impression you could do much better somewhere else if you hold out. Also not lost on me was the fact that this small startup operation was completely dominated entirely by males, both inside engineering and out.
I reflected on all of this, and came to the conclusion that much of what turned me off about the job was going to be common just about everywhere else I looked. The field of engineering is dominated by males (something about which much overly politically correct fuss has been made as of late), and if you get more than 3 of them into a room, at least 2 of them are likely to be aficianados of some stripe of esports.
I realized a couple of things from this. First, I needed to find a job where my passion for the work itself would greatly outweigh my distaste for being surrounded by conversations about video games, or at the very least where the individuals I was working with would be capable of balancing these discussions with more weighty topics. It is this first point that led me to the idea that I should find an organization committed to the forward march of science that required engineering help and apply my skills there, which guided me almost directly to the job I now hold.
Second, as I had just come off of a haitus of not working for several months during which I had consumed several books on women's studies, I had the distinct impression that I wanted to work in a company where there was healthy representation of the fairer sex. If not in the engineering department, then at least of the upper management determining the strategy and direction of the company I was working for. Again, this was a major selling point for me about the company I currently serve; when I applied, on the company's leadership page on their website, fully 7 out of 14 of the C-level executives and VPs listed were women. While this is odd enough for Silicon Valley, it also has the rare distinction of being a highly successful company that was founded, and has been led since its inception, by a woman.
I don't turn down my ears at the objections raised by those opposed to something like affirmative action, which espouses the virtue of explicitly importing certain kinds of people to create a diverse environment, ostenisibly for the sake of correcting a historical wrong. When you instill these kinds of policies, it can breed resentment in the culture towards the presence of minorities, who others squint at in an effort to figure out if they are there because of the merits of their efforts or because the bar was lowered to let them in. To be clear, I'm not opposed to the idea of rectification; I only question the manner in which it is sometimes implemented.
But getting away from questions of efficacy, is this actually a worthwhile pursuit? Should we be pushing for making organizational cohorts more diverse, simply for the sake of making them more diverse? At the risk of overgeneralizing, I would insist that you're better off hiring 12 highly skilled engineers who are all male instead of hiring, say, 9 highly skilled males and 3 poorly equipped female ones, where competence levels are even roughly equal, you're better off making the effort to bring in female perspectives.
The reason for this is simple: diverse groups will make better decisions, and reach those decisions quicker, than heterogenous ones.
Granted, even in a group of 12 men, you're going to have some diversity. Even if all 12 of them attended the same college, majored in the same subject, and were in the same graduating class, sooner or later there's going to be dissent in the ranks. This still strikes me as being a hazard since, in a group where all the members identify with each other and share a common existential experience, each individual is probably less likely to share their unique perspective when it goes against the grain. Diversity of opinion confers no advantage if most of the people are remiss to openly share their contrary perspectives.
My point here is not to expound on the endlessly complicated topic of how to fix the gender problem in the software industy, but only to share some thoughts to lead into the larger discussion I'd like to have: am I, as a male, even allowed to express an opinion about this, or to start such a conversation?
Who would propose such a question? I've had three separate conversations with women who have told me that, as a man, I shouldn't presume to comment on the matter. The first of these was a few years ago, shortly after I took an interest in feminist literature. While helping a friend of mine move out of her parent's house, I learned that she has a graduate degree in women's studies and, anxious to get her perspective, I asked a few questions. The conversation ended rather quickly when she told me that any discussion of the subject with me would be a waste of time.
I assumed that she might have been burnt out on the subject, since she had gone to graduate school for it relatively recently, but when I asked her if this was the case, she denied it and simply said that feminism was about action, not discussion. She shared with me a story about a mutual acquaintance of ours who had organized an engineering competition at a local university. When all the entrants ended up being men, he went out and hunted down some women engineers on the campus and recruited them into the competition so there would be better representation of women. "That's feminism," she told me bluntly.
I agree with her in principle on this point. It's all too easy for a man to adopt the label of "feminist" and to believe that this, on its own, is somehow campaigning for social justice. In the television series "Bojack Horseman" the eponymous title character becomes a feminist in one episode and proclaims, "I'm a male feminist. Your welcome, society." This is not feminism so much as it is moral posturing, and a man who does such a thing deserves to be suspected of trying to sleeze his way into women's good graces. But what was odd to me was that my friend flat out refused to engage me in any kind of dialectic about the issue. Any action should be informed by intelligent conversation and debate; action that is uninformed has the potential to do more harm than good.
The next two women were ones with whom I was romantically intertwined for a short duration. They both halted the conversation with the same objection: that because I'm a man, I shouldn't comment on feminism because I'm incapable of understanding a woman's struggle. Again, I don't disagree with this point in its entirety. At the end of the aforementioned episode, Bojack Horseman is rebuked by his female friend for playing up his feminist position to put the media spotlight on himself because he's not a woman, and so speaks from limited understanding. It's one thing to intellectually appreciate the challenges that others must face; it is quite another to have to live them day in and day out, without any chance of escape.
Still, to insist on all men's silence on the matter is more heavy-handed than I can understand. In a country where men refuse to allow women to voice their opinions (today, in the Western world, this country is mostly hypothetical, but I suspect that 150 years ago it wasn't), then it would have to be men who surface the idea of feminism to the world. The term "feminism" was coined by a male French philosopher. One of the earliest written philosophical polemics on the subject was written by John Stuart Mill. And one of the women I'm talking about freely discussed issues of intersectionality between race and gender, which, by her own logic, she should not have been doing because she was white.
The human condition, where it involves Sartre's hell of other people, is largely a struggle for control. Mamet's "Oleanna" is a controversial play about a female university student who accuses her male professor of sexual misconduct, and while it can't be described as feminist, its overarching theme is about the subtle power that human beings invariably attempt to exert over one another. All women I have ever dated have approached the relationship the way they would a new puppy: you're excited by the puppy, but you also need to housetrain it, and teach it which kind of behavior is acceptable and which kind is not. Perhaps it's a terrible turn-off to hear the man you are dating suck up to you by talking about how progressive they are about feminism and it calls for a jarring jolt of the shock collar.
Defenders of religion would probably suggest that I should stop writing about the subject of religion on this blog, simply because they are incapable of refuting any of the points I've made on here, so they turn to the next best recourse and simply insist that I shut up. Women might tell me I'm out of line in expressing myself and that I should be silent on the issue. This is an incredibly lazy way of having a conversation: by simply asking the other person to muffle themselves entirely and listen to you. It's convenient, if you can make it work. But I'm not this agreeable, and while I do listen more than talk on this subject, I don't believe anyone is allowed to dictate the terms of who can participate in a conversation simply based on some abstract notion of "privilege".
So where do I stand on feminism now? I don't call myself a feminist anymore, since (as previously noted) this smacks of self-emasculating chest-puffing that men invoke to curry favor with women. I don't have data, but would guess that this approach fails with intelligent and self-respecting women much more often than it succeeds. I do, however, think of myself as a feminist, and hold viewpoints that would traditionally be held by people in this philosophical corner.
The primary point I espouse is that men and women ought to be equal under the law. The one tome I would recommend on this is a book called Equal Means Equal: Why the Time for an Equal Rights Amendment is Now by Jessica Neuwirth. It's a slim volume that talks about a long-standing amendment that would give women equal protection under federal law. It has been ratified by a majority of states, and came close to passing during the Carter administration, but has yet to fully plunge itself through the marathon tape. The book discusses sections of the law that women currently use in civil disputes, like the 14th amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, both of which guarantee equality of citizens, but neither of which explicitly denote gender in their criteria. So the issue is only indirectly addressed by current legislation, all of which too often falls short in practice when women file lawsuits seeking a remedy for gender discrimination.
For about 100 years now, Turkey has been a largely secular nation, ever since the wake of the first World War when Mustafa Atatürk recognized that a theocratic caliphate had been a detriment to its citizens. The current president of Turkey, Erdoğan, is megalomanically trying to reverse history's course and is committing terrible atrocities in an effort to make himself sultan of a restored Ottoman empire. Even he has stated publicly that he thinks women ought to be equal to men under the law. So I can't really claim that my own position is all that progressive.
There are theories of feminist juriprudence that suggest that, since the United States and its legal system were founded when men were in charge of everything political, that much of the system should be overhauled in order to guarantee equality. I'm not familiar with these viewpoints, but on the surface this seems akin to using a cannon to amputate a gangrene finger.
The law is one thing; private enterprise is entirely another, and is a much more difficult problem to solve. I'll conclude with a meager point: the objection has been raised about Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In that it does not so much as encourage the software industry as a whole to change itself to be less toxic to women, but encourages women to play what is largely a man's game on men's terms in order to get ahead. It's a bit of an oversimplication, and there is something to be said for how women should adapt to the world before it adopts a more enlightened view on gender politics. While it is, of course, sexist to say that because men and women are biologically different, either physically or developmentally, that they should be treated differently in terms of the freedoms or rights they enjoy in our society, it is equally sexist to suggest that women need to be identical to men in order to be worthy of equal treatment.
I came away from the encounter with a couple of distinct impressions about the place. I seemed like poor cultural fit, since I've never been able to focus my longer-than-average attention span on any manner of sports for more than a few minutes, and while I have tried several times in my life to get into video games, by purchasing a console and some popular titles, I have failed miserably on all but one fleetingly short occasion in college. I also had the distinct impression that management was trying just a little too hard to recruit me, with an anxiousness tinged with the kind of desperation that gives you the impression you could do much better somewhere else if you hold out. Also not lost on me was the fact that this small startup operation was completely dominated entirely by males, both inside engineering and out.
I reflected on all of this, and came to the conclusion that much of what turned me off about the job was going to be common just about everywhere else I looked. The field of engineering is dominated by males (something about which much overly politically correct fuss has been made as of late), and if you get more than 3 of them into a room, at least 2 of them are likely to be aficianados of some stripe of esports.
I realized a couple of things from this. First, I needed to find a job where my passion for the work itself would greatly outweigh my distaste for being surrounded by conversations about video games, or at the very least where the individuals I was working with would be capable of balancing these discussions with more weighty topics. It is this first point that led me to the idea that I should find an organization committed to the forward march of science that required engineering help and apply my skills there, which guided me almost directly to the job I now hold.
Second, as I had just come off of a haitus of not working for several months during which I had consumed several books on women's studies, I had the distinct impression that I wanted to work in a company where there was healthy representation of the fairer sex. If not in the engineering department, then at least of the upper management determining the strategy and direction of the company I was working for. Again, this was a major selling point for me about the company I currently serve; when I applied, on the company's leadership page on their website, fully 7 out of 14 of the C-level executives and VPs listed were women. While this is odd enough for Silicon Valley, it also has the rare distinction of being a highly successful company that was founded, and has been led since its inception, by a woman.
I don't turn down my ears at the objections raised by those opposed to something like affirmative action, which espouses the virtue of explicitly importing certain kinds of people to create a diverse environment, ostenisibly for the sake of correcting a historical wrong. When you instill these kinds of policies, it can breed resentment in the culture towards the presence of minorities, who others squint at in an effort to figure out if they are there because of the merits of their efforts or because the bar was lowered to let them in. To be clear, I'm not opposed to the idea of rectification; I only question the manner in which it is sometimes implemented.
But getting away from questions of efficacy, is this actually a worthwhile pursuit? Should we be pushing for making organizational cohorts more diverse, simply for the sake of making them more diverse? At the risk of overgeneralizing, I would insist that you're better off hiring 12 highly skilled engineers who are all male instead of hiring, say, 9 highly skilled males and 3 poorly equipped female ones, where competence levels are even roughly equal, you're better off making the effort to bring in female perspectives.
The reason for this is simple: diverse groups will make better decisions, and reach those decisions quicker, than heterogenous ones.
Granted, even in a group of 12 men, you're going to have some diversity. Even if all 12 of them attended the same college, majored in the same subject, and were in the same graduating class, sooner or later there's going to be dissent in the ranks. This still strikes me as being a hazard since, in a group where all the members identify with each other and share a common existential experience, each individual is probably less likely to share their unique perspective when it goes against the grain. Diversity of opinion confers no advantage if most of the people are remiss to openly share their contrary perspectives.
My point here is not to expound on the endlessly complicated topic of how to fix the gender problem in the software industy, but only to share some thoughts to lead into the larger discussion I'd like to have: am I, as a male, even allowed to express an opinion about this, or to start such a conversation?
Who would propose such a question? I've had three separate conversations with women who have told me that, as a man, I shouldn't presume to comment on the matter. The first of these was a few years ago, shortly after I took an interest in feminist literature. While helping a friend of mine move out of her parent's house, I learned that she has a graduate degree in women's studies and, anxious to get her perspective, I asked a few questions. The conversation ended rather quickly when she told me that any discussion of the subject with me would be a waste of time.
I assumed that she might have been burnt out on the subject, since she had gone to graduate school for it relatively recently, but when I asked her if this was the case, she denied it and simply said that feminism was about action, not discussion. She shared with me a story about a mutual acquaintance of ours who had organized an engineering competition at a local university. When all the entrants ended up being men, he went out and hunted down some women engineers on the campus and recruited them into the competition so there would be better representation of women. "That's feminism," she told me bluntly.
I agree with her in principle on this point. It's all too easy for a man to adopt the label of "feminist" and to believe that this, on its own, is somehow campaigning for social justice. In the television series "Bojack Horseman" the eponymous title character becomes a feminist in one episode and proclaims, "I'm a male feminist. Your welcome, society." This is not feminism so much as it is moral posturing, and a man who does such a thing deserves to be suspected of trying to sleeze his way into women's good graces. But what was odd to me was that my friend flat out refused to engage me in any kind of dialectic about the issue. Any action should be informed by intelligent conversation and debate; action that is uninformed has the potential to do more harm than good.
The next two women were ones with whom I was romantically intertwined for a short duration. They both halted the conversation with the same objection: that because I'm a man, I shouldn't comment on feminism because I'm incapable of understanding a woman's struggle. Again, I don't disagree with this point in its entirety. At the end of the aforementioned episode, Bojack Horseman is rebuked by his female friend for playing up his feminist position to put the media spotlight on himself because he's not a woman, and so speaks from limited understanding. It's one thing to intellectually appreciate the challenges that others must face; it is quite another to have to live them day in and day out, without any chance of escape.
Still, to insist on all men's silence on the matter is more heavy-handed than I can understand. In a country where men refuse to allow women to voice their opinions (today, in the Western world, this country is mostly hypothetical, but I suspect that 150 years ago it wasn't), then it would have to be men who surface the idea of feminism to the world. The term "feminism" was coined by a male French philosopher. One of the earliest written philosophical polemics on the subject was written by John Stuart Mill. And one of the women I'm talking about freely discussed issues of intersectionality between race and gender, which, by her own logic, she should not have been doing because she was white.
The human condition, where it involves Sartre's hell of other people, is largely a struggle for control. Mamet's "Oleanna" is a controversial play about a female university student who accuses her male professor of sexual misconduct, and while it can't be described as feminist, its overarching theme is about the subtle power that human beings invariably attempt to exert over one another. All women I have ever dated have approached the relationship the way they would a new puppy: you're excited by the puppy, but you also need to housetrain it, and teach it which kind of behavior is acceptable and which kind is not. Perhaps it's a terrible turn-off to hear the man you are dating suck up to you by talking about how progressive they are about feminism and it calls for a jarring jolt of the shock collar.
Defenders of religion would probably suggest that I should stop writing about the subject of religion on this blog, simply because they are incapable of refuting any of the points I've made on here, so they turn to the next best recourse and simply insist that I shut up. Women might tell me I'm out of line in expressing myself and that I should be silent on the issue. This is an incredibly lazy way of having a conversation: by simply asking the other person to muffle themselves entirely and listen to you. It's convenient, if you can make it work. But I'm not this agreeable, and while I do listen more than talk on this subject, I don't believe anyone is allowed to dictate the terms of who can participate in a conversation simply based on some abstract notion of "privilege".
So where do I stand on feminism now? I don't call myself a feminist anymore, since (as previously noted) this smacks of self-emasculating chest-puffing that men invoke to curry favor with women. I don't have data, but would guess that this approach fails with intelligent and self-respecting women much more often than it succeeds. I do, however, think of myself as a feminist, and hold viewpoints that would traditionally be held by people in this philosophical corner.
The primary point I espouse is that men and women ought to be equal under the law. The one tome I would recommend on this is a book called Equal Means Equal: Why the Time for an Equal Rights Amendment is Now by Jessica Neuwirth. It's a slim volume that talks about a long-standing amendment that would give women equal protection under federal law. It has been ratified by a majority of states, and came close to passing during the Carter administration, but has yet to fully plunge itself through the marathon tape. The book discusses sections of the law that women currently use in civil disputes, like the 14th amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, both of which guarantee equality of citizens, but neither of which explicitly denote gender in their criteria. So the issue is only indirectly addressed by current legislation, all of which too often falls short in practice when women file lawsuits seeking a remedy for gender discrimination.
For about 100 years now, Turkey has been a largely secular nation, ever since the wake of the first World War when Mustafa Atatürk recognized that a theocratic caliphate had been a detriment to its citizens. The current president of Turkey, Erdoğan, is megalomanically trying to reverse history's course and is committing terrible atrocities in an effort to make himself sultan of a restored Ottoman empire. Even he has stated publicly that he thinks women ought to be equal to men under the law. So I can't really claim that my own position is all that progressive.
There are theories of feminist juriprudence that suggest that, since the United States and its legal system were founded when men were in charge of everything political, that much of the system should be overhauled in order to guarantee equality. I'm not familiar with these viewpoints, but on the surface this seems akin to using a cannon to amputate a gangrene finger.
The law is one thing; private enterprise is entirely another, and is a much more difficult problem to solve. I'll conclude with a meager point: the objection has been raised about Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In that it does not so much as encourage the software industry as a whole to change itself to be less toxic to women, but encourages women to play what is largely a man's game on men's terms in order to get ahead. It's a bit of an oversimplication, and there is something to be said for how women should adapt to the world before it adopts a more enlightened view on gender politics. While it is, of course, sexist to say that because men and women are biologically different, either physically or developmentally, that they should be treated differently in terms of the freedoms or rights they enjoy in our society, it is equally sexist to suggest that women need to be identical to men in order to be worthy of equal treatment.