> Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
> It’s true that women and men, on average, have been found in some studies to differ in empathizing/agreeableness, systematizing, gregariousness versus assertiveness; and neuroticism.
> I have to say, as an INTJ female, this biology crap is ridiculous.
That's an interesting way to put it. The estimates I've seen (e.g. [1], [2]) have the frequency of INTJs among men significantly higher than the frequency of INTJs among women. If INTJs are more likely to become engineers, then those frequencies predict that there will be more male engineers than female engineers.
As far as I can see, those statistics are from the US. Which means there might be more to this INTJ-engineer relationship beyond sex. Such as cultural expectations that an engineer is an introvert, which may not be true.
I don't remember the study, but apparently in former communist countries, while gender roles are very strong, women were expected to work in factories along side men for a very long time.
Which is probably why you have a relatively more balanced tech workforce there today vs the West.
However, if you read the document, the author basis the premise of his perception of faulty and "good intentions gone wrong" programs to correct for gender pay gap disparity as due to the "underlying biologicial differences" between men and women.
Women are far less likely to be INTJs, but most female Engineers I know are not INTJs, and furthermore, if you are using the idea that INTJ is an indicator of someone being more likely to be an engineer or STEM I guess we can say in this case, and that somehow there is a biologicial difference (plausible, were not advanced enough in biology and sciences, psychology and neurobiology to be able to atribute personality genres to unique biologicial differences that can correctly an consistently identify a Meyers Brigg personality type, maybe its possible in the future, maybe not, maybe thats not the underlying relationship, who knows yet), then the entire premise of the author is debunked.
If my personality type whether as a male or female, is going to kick me in a direction more likely to end up in STEM (interest in math and sciences) then youre statement reconcludes there is no "underlying biological differences" that exist for all women that never occur with men.
The idea that personality traits contribute to biological nuances that can occur in men and women, then the author loses his point.
I'm also not aware of any Meyers Briggs personality type that comes with the term "neurotic" but according to the author, all women are, and this is not even up for debate.
I'm also leaving out the entire obvious consideration that I would assume is a given in all these conversations, but seem not to be addressed in any way whatsoever by the authors 10 page document, that even if we could attribute say INTJ or similiar MBriggs personality types to highly correlating with females in STEM, and then showing less women are likely to have those personality types, we still don't know what causes personality types, or have biologicial blueprints for them, so we can not assume "underlying biological differences between sexes" especially considering MBs are not sexually based.
Furthermore, we are leaving out the fact that humans are an evolving species and we experience a microcosm of our own societal influences that influence how people think, act, perceive, spend, procreate, educate, eat etc based on our socioeconomic construct. To throw aside the mere idea that being surrounded by men who actually write off most of your actions as neurotic and believe this as truth, could not have some lng term damaging effect on your ability to be taken seriously or perceived as successful or result in an imposed biased with a positive feedback loop on how the gender who is not in an economic majority of empowerment may be held back, is just about as childish and ignorant as missing the point of a first science experiment where you failed miserably because you didn't have controls for your experiment, or consider that different contributing factors could result in different outcomes and calibrate for them.
No, from this authors perspective, women are neurotic. This is a fact:
"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."
Right: it's clear that there's no sharp divide between men's and women's aptitude for STEM jobs. There are many excellent women engineers, and many men who have no aptitude for engineering.
It's also true that there seem to be population-level differences that are connected to aptitude for engineering. If we're trying to answer the question "to what extent is sexism excluding women from engineering?" then these differences become important. If there are no population-level differences then any deviation from a 50/50 sex ratio among engineers is probably due to some kind of sex discrimination. But if there are real population-level differences then it would be a mistake to insist on a 50/50 sex ratio, and a mistake to assume that sexism is the problem if the ratio is not 50/50. (Of course, there might still be sexism, even if there are also population-level differences.)
The problem comes when people try to apply population-level sex differences at an individual level. Even if fewer women have an aptitude for engineering, that says nothing at all about any individual female engineer. The right way to assess an the ability of an engineer, whether male or female, is by looking at the information about what they've done -- they've achieved X qualification, won Y award, built Z product etc. -- not by assuming gender differences that can only be observed at the population level. Unfortunately, both negative and positive discrimination muddy the waters here, making these signals less useful.
> Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
Evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin (quora answer linked here):
> It’s true that women and men, on average, have been found in some studies to differ in empathizing/agreeableness, systematizing, gregariousness versus assertiveness; and neuroticism.