Real causes versus imaginary causes

There was an interesting article in the New York Times last week, A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled by Jodi Kantor. Kantor looks at the career outcomes for a very favored cohort, the Stanford graduating class of 1994. Favored because they were at an excellent school, among excellent fellow students, located at the epicenter of Silicon Valley and just at the threshold of the internet boom.

The article is well written and interesting but like so much in the MSM, there is always an angle or an agenda. In this instance, the author is emphasizing that there are career differentials between the men and women of the graduating class of 1994. It is the classic Gramscian meme/obsession that disparate outcomes must be both the result of: systemic intention (there being no acknowledgment of emergent order) and culture (denial of individual agency and personal choices). The author does not hide that this privileged cohort have been anything but successful. She is pointing out that there is differential impact and subtly implying that it is the consequence of something other than chance and personal choices and priorities. She makes the implication without making the argument, presumably because there is so little to support the argument that there is meaningful discrimination.

In some fields, the women of the class went on to equal or outshine the men, including an Olympic gold medalist and the class’s best-known celebrity. Nearly half the 1,700-person class were women, and plenty were adventurous and inventive, tinkerers and computer camp veterans who competed fiercely in engineering contests; one won mention in the school paper for creating a taco-eating machine.

Yet instead of narrowing gender gaps, the technology industry created vast new ones, according to interviews with dozens of members of the class and a broad array of Silicon Valley and Stanford figures. “We were sitting on an oil boom, and the fact is that the women played a support role instead of walking away with billion-dollar businesses,” said Kamy Wicoff, who founded a website for female writers.

It was largely the men of the class who became the true creators, founding companies that changed behavior around the world and using the proceeds to fund new projects that extended their influence. Some of the women did well in technology, working at Google or Apple or hopping from one start-up adventure to the next. Few of them described experiencing the kinds of workplace abuses that have regularly cropped up among women in Silicon Valley.

But even the most successful women could not match some of their male classmates’ achievements. Some female computer science majors had dropped out of the field, and few black or Hispanic women ever worked in technology at all. The only woman to ascend through the ranks of venture capital was shunted aside by her firm. Another appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine as a great hope for gender in Silicon Valley — just before unexpectedly leaving the company she had co-founded.

Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests. If the wealth among alumni traveled across gender lines, it was mostly because so many had wed one another. When Jessica DiLullo Herrin, a cheerleader turned economics whiz, arrived at the tailgate party, her classmates quietly stared: She had founded two successful start-ups, a living exception to the rule.

What is unsaid is often as interesting as what is claimed. What explains success in the tech industry? No one really knows but there are lots of useful correlates. The outstanding achievers tend to have STEM backgrounds, tend to be risk takers, tend to be monomaniacal in pursuit of achievement, etc. It is a correlation not an established causation. There are lots of exceptions.

But if a STEM background is one of the predictive variables, then how many of the women in the Stanford graduating class of 1994 were STEM graduates? Kantor doesn't say and I don't know. But if Stanford parallels the education industry at large, then only about 20% of the STEM graduates were women. As other universities have seen, Kantor acknowledges that there is a higher attrition rate among female STEM graduates than among males: "Some female computer science majors had dropped out of the field, and few black or Hispanic women ever worked in technology at all."

Right off the bat then, one would expect there to be disparate levels of achievement in Silicon Valley if women are already underrepresented in STEM and even those who are STEM graduates, leave the field.

The other thing unstated is that the overwhelming majority of men in the graduating class of '94 had very similar outcomes as those of the women. The men, like the women, went on to successful lives as doctors and lawyers and artists and engineers and entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and so on. Only a few became runaway successes in the field of technology and the very few among the 1,700 graduates who did, did so from a series of path dependent decisions and choices.

The article goes on and on filled with lots of great anecdotal examples. Kantor seems to want the evidence to indicate that there is some systemic obstacle to female success but the facts just don't seem to support her, "Few of them (women in the tech industry) described experiencing the kinds of workplace abuses that have regularly cropped up among women in Silicon Valley." Kantor seems in the article to be arriving at the same place as Anne-Marie Slaughter and Claudia Goldin - acknowledging that individual choices determine the disparate outcomes and frustrated that more women are not making the types of choices that position a person, male or female, for success.

Seek the truth in data and experience and eventually, and usually at some cost, you get close to it. Seek to bend experience and data to your convictions and "all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries."

The arrogance of an imposed but unstated worldview is captured in the headline to this article as it appeared on the front page of the Times.

Brevity sometimes forces transparency. To be fair, Kantor would not have been the one to have chosen the headline to the article she wrote but I think it is revealing of the habits of mind of the New York Times (and to which they are substantially blind).

Let's look at the headline: "A Future Unrealized for Stanford Class of '94 Women". How was the future unrealized? As the article indicates, the class of '94 women by-and-large all went on to successful lives as doctors and lawyers and artists and engineers and entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and so on. The future that was unrealized was that the women would make exactly the same trade-off decisions as the rare number of men who became outstanding business and financial successes. The women, like most of the other men, made different decisions based on different priorities and therefore garnered different benefits. We would all like to be technology industry billionaires but we are not all equally willing to postpone marriage and family, work the punishing hours to the exclusion of social and family commitments, take financial make-or-break risks, etc.

The subheading is equally revealing: "How an industry devoted to overturning barriers let a gender gap stand unchallenged." I don't think it is too pedantic to see a lot of unstated and misguided assumptions buried in those thirteen words. The technology industry is not devoted to overturning barriers. That is a motive assumed by the NYT headline writer. The industry is devoted to making money. It just so happens that that often means overturning barriers but the motive force is pursuit of profit, overturning barriers is simply a common means. In addition, as the article makes clear, the technology industry is agnostic as to what the talent looks like, it simply wants plentiful, cheap, productive talent.

The frenzy had an unlikely effect on some members of the Stanford Review group: They were becoming cheerleaders for women in technology, not for ideological reasons, but for market-based ones. “Conservatives must acknowledge their role to expand the free labor market and kindle social progress by championing female technologists,” wrote Joe Lonsdale, another former Stanford Review editor and the co-founder of Palantir, a data analysis company, in The Review a week before the reunion. Like many others, he was finding that the biggest obstacle to starting new companies was a dearth of technical talent so severe they worried it would hinder innovation.

“Everybody here has a huge incentive to get all the talented people we can, and that includes 50 percent of the population,” said Mr. Sacks, who a few weeks later joined and invested in a fast-growing start-up whose employees were 40 percent female, high by industry standards.

Why believe that disparate outcomes are the result of some hidden malevolent societal process when it seems like there is little or no evidence to support that interpretation and when there is overwhelming evidence to support that disparate outcomes are a function of disparate choices, behaviors, abilities, and decisions? As long as we are chasing the will-o'-wisp of imagined discrimination, we fail to focus on helping people understand the impact of their own choices and how to make better such choices.

UPDATE: Letters to the New York Times editors echoing my assessment.