No matter how you dress it up though, it is still noxious.

A few days ago I quoted Edward Ellsberg to the effect that

“Experts” are people who know so much about how things have been done in the past that they are usually blind to how they can be done in the future.

That is brought to mind by this interview with Gender Intelligence experts Annis and Merron, Why The Tech Sector Struggles To Close The Gender Gap interview with Barbara Annis and Keith Merron.

I have commented frequently in the past about our tendency to generate cognitive pollution despite facts being relatively available. The cognitive pollution is usually manifested in not specifying objectives, not defining terms, not identifying critical assumptions, not testing those assumptions against available information, and not exploring counterfactuals and alternate explanations.

In this instance, much ado is being made about the fact that the tech industry does not reflect the face of America, i.e. its American workforce is different from what would be the case if everyone had equal talents, behaviors, knowledge and skills and everyone wished to work in the tech industry. As it is currently constituted, the tech industry employee base is disproportionately Asian and Whites, Blacks and Hispanics are significantly underrepresented. Females are only something like 30% of the workforce.

Those are measurable facts. The questions are manifold: Is it real? Does it matter? What would be the benefit of equal representation? Are there hidden forms of bias which are leading to these disparate representations or are they simply emergent order generated by disparate knowledge, skills, values, behaviors, experience, and desires on the part of individuals? Is it possible to ensure that there is equal representation on all attributes (race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, religion, class, etc.) in all industries?

Straight off the bat there is the problem as to whether this is a real problem. For example.

women account for less than a third of the workforce, and the tally for women in leadership and technical roles is worse.

About 15% of the leadership and technical roles in the tech industry are held by women. A rough proxy of qualifications for such a role would be having a degree in computer science or related field (ex. electrical engineering). The percentage of degrees in such fields is . . . 15%. So women may be underrepresented in the technical and leadership roles when comparing to the overall demographics of the nation, but they appear to be proportionately represented based on the number of women interested in the field.

Are women underrepresented? It appears not. But that doesn't stop the gender intelligence experts.

The interview is a lot of pablum but if you look closely you can see the unexamined and frightening assumptions of the experts. If you are a classical liberal, believing in natural rights, rule of law, equality of all people, etc. these unexamined assumptions are horrifying to discover in individuals who are undoubtedly bright and successful.

Annis and Merron acknowledge that there is no shortage of effort on the part of the tech companies to address gender issues.

I was meeting with the Chief Diversity Officer of a large, innovative technology company -- a great, smart woman -- and she said, “We’re doing great. We don’t have any issues. We’re out there recruiting women. And we have diversity teams.” They had created this enlightened denial, which is this idea that because you’re super smart, and because you’re super innovative, that equates to being gender intelligent. So I decided we should do some research on this. We looked at five tech companies and we discovered some interesting things: there was a massive focus on recruitment and there was a massive focus on initiatives.

But that's not enough.

There's a certain anti-intellectualism that is odd.

Most of the people who gravitate towards the tech sector are very smart and they tend to tackle problems from an engineering mindset. When you engineer something, you break down the problem into its component parts. You then look to solve those component parts with the belief that in so doing you solve the whole. So, what happens is you get a lot of people in leadership positions who are brilliant engineers, brilliant at technical solutions, and what they’ll see is a symptom: not enough women in X positions or women leaving. And then they’ll engineer a solution by attacking it with different strategies, none of which look at the fundamental issue, because the engineering mind can’t see itself as the problem.

So its not enough to be smart and well intentioned and actually trying many things to solve the problem.

Keith: This is one of the hardest things to help men see, which is that when you’re growing up as a boy in male culture, and a lot of the systems are designed to support men, it feels very natural to compete, to analyze, to break down problems into parts, to engineer solutions; that’s what’s often taught in schools. Collaboration and looking at things holistically and from different paradigms, is not taught well in schools.

Here you get in to the assumptions. What are the systems that are designed to support men. That's a neat abstraction to throw out there, but what are they? And in what education system have Annis and Merron been raised where they think that collaboration and holistic perspectives haven't been explicitly cultivated, at least in the US. And what are team sports if not a collaboration? This is mushy pablum.

Annis and Merron are enormously dismissive of the intelligence of these men whom they claim are "very smart" and seem extremely comfortable trading in all sorts of stereotypes.

It’s about who’s smarter and faster at articulating a very complex set of variables; who can parse through those and find a solution. Whoever wins the battle becomes the uber techie, and often becomes the manager, and then the manager of the manager becomes the uber techie at that level. And so you can see the favoring of the analytic, the favoring of breaking things down into their parts, the favoring of thought versus feeling, and women will tend to look at problems in a more holistic manner. They’ll look at not just the goal but the journey to get there. They’ll look at the feeling state and the experience of the work itself as being important variables. So women tend to be much better at creating a more healthy team condition, and they don’t necessarily want to battle it out on that mental battle field.

Here's the example of the problem of cognitive pollution when you fail to define your goal. From a company perspective, you do want to be able to articulate a complex set of variables and quickly find a solution. You are time and money constrained. Annis and Merron are making the argument that the fundamental issue is that women like to work slower and more comfortably and that they are underrepresented because of commercial reality. Well, yes, that is kind of a fundamental problem (if you accept their premises).

Despite all the smart and expensive efforts, tech CEO still haven't solved the under-representation problem. Annis and Merron claim that part of the issue is that despite being smart and well intentioned, executives just don't see equal gender representation as a problem because there are no economic consequences. Annis and Merron speculate that there could be a business imperative but they aren't able to articulate what it is or what its value might be. They simply assume that it exists and that all the profitable successful CEOs are blind to it.

You can be uber smart, but you’re not going to change the culture until you understand that the cultural norms aren’t working.You can be uber smart, but you’re not going to change the culture until you understand that the cultural norms aren’t working.

OK, we are no longer focusing on fixing a company's problem. Now we are focusing on fixing cultural problems. I would hope most people's alarm antennae would start tingling at that.

Here's the rub:

These are good people and they don’t want to create conditions where women are left out. They don’t want to create conditions that are unfair and in fact they pride themselves or believing that the organization is quite fair. They’ll say: “We have competencies, we measure people against those competencies, and we hire and promote people based on a fair set of criteria.” It’s hard for them to see that the system itself is unfair because it’s set up based on the assumption that men and women are the same, which does create an unfairness unintentionally.

Translated: They're good people, they are successful at what they do, they run their businesses so that everyone is treated equally and there's no demonstrable value to achieving the exact representation that I, Annis and Merron, would prefer. They should recognize that genders are different and they should therefore treat them differently.

Yikes! Now the alarm antennae should really be shaking. Preferential treatment based on some preferred marker (race, religion, ethnicity, orientation, etc.). That has obviously worked so well in so many countries over so many centuries.

I know these guys are just ginning up business for their expertise with this interview but really, it does feel unseamly. They have no value proposition, they cannot define the problem, they acknowledge that there are a lot intelligent things being pursued in a good-faith fashion, and they acknowledge that the problem resides not with the companies but with society at large.

All they have to do is change the rules to favor one group over another to achieve the goals preferred by Annis and Merron against the goals and desires of actual people making smart decisions about their own lives and their own values. I am sure they earn a lot of guilt money from companies with this pitch.