The Times
reports
on a study (press release
here) by the Center for Work Life Policy on women in science and
technology fields. The study isn't available yet, but the press release
and the NYT article seem to confuse a number of issues:
The 147-page report (which was sponsored by Alcoa, Johnson & Johnson,
Microsoft, Pfizer and Cisco) is filled with tales of sexual harassment
(63 percent of women say they experienced harassment on the job); and
dismissive attitudes of male colleagues (53 percent said in order to
succeed in their careers they had to ?act like a man?); and a lack of
mentors (51 percent of engineers say they lack one); and hours that
suit men with wives at home but not working mothers (41 percent of
technology workers says they need to be available ?24/7?).
...
The result, she said has been a work environment that dismisses
women. Female employees come up against "the kind of culture that
evolves when women are in the extreme minority," she said. (Think
"Lord of the Flies.") The ideal worker in this realm is "the hacker
who goes into his cubicle and doesn't emerge for a week, having not
showered or eaten anything but pizza. Those people exist and they are
seen as heroes."
So, there are five complaints here:
- Sexual harassment
- Dismissive attitudes
- Lack of mentors
- Long hours and inflexible schedules
- A culture that rewards lone work
When evaluating these complaints, we need to examine two axes: the
pragmatic question of what would benefit companies, and the fairness
issue of how companies ought to behave. In many cases, these are
aligned. For instance, it's clearly unfair to subject women to sexual
harassment and it's doubtful that it's somehow favorable to the
company either, since at minimum it demoralizes a significant fraction
of your workforce.
On the other hand, in some cases these forces may
be in tension. To take one example: if engineers willing to work 80
hours a week are a lot more productive than engineers who can only
afford to work 40 hours week (I'm not saying this is so; I suspect the
relationship is a lot more complicated than this), then expecting your
engineers to be willing to work long hours might well benefit the company;
it's a tradeoff between the additional effort you get out of your
existing staff and the reduced population you're able to draw
from (assuming that some people simply can't work those hours).
Similarly, it could be true that lone hackers slaving away in their cubicles
is the best way to produce software (it's far from clear that that's
true, but I've certainly seen plenty of high quality software produced
that way), in which case again it may be in the company's best interest
to rely on such people, even if they're harder to find than the average
programmer.
Now, obviously one could say "yes, it's true that practice X would
be more efficient, but it's so difficult for a large segment
of the population that it's unfair to engage in it".
It's not
clear to me that this argument has anywhere near the moral
force that (for instance) an argument against practices that
aren't beneficial to the company are, since you're asking
the company to do something that's against their interest.
Ignoring the question
of male vs. female, if I'm the kind of worker who would like
to put in my 40 hours and then go play PS/2, I'm going to be at
a disadvantage compared to my co-worker who is prepared to spend
70 hours a week at work. It's not clear to me that when he gets
promoted and I don't that that's inherently unfair.
Let's try turning this
around and look at a job where most of the employees are women:
day care workers and day care. Now, I haven't done a scientific
study, but it seems to me pretty likely that the reason that
most of these workers are women is that women like working
with kids a lot more. Yet, I don't think it would be reasonable
to say that this was an anti-male environment and that employers
should find some way to remove the aspects of the environment
that make it less congenial to men (i.e., the kids).
That would obviate the whole point of the job!
So, at minimum we've got some kind of spectrum of practices
that are preferential to some types of employees:
- Practices which are actually detrimental to job performance
(these absolutely exist)
- Practices which are neutral.
- Practices which improve job performance.
- Practices which are essential to job performance.
So, I think we can all agree that we should move away from
practices that disadvantage women and that are also bad for job performance
and we can probably agree that practices which are neutral should be
changed as well. This leaves us with how to handle practices
which are beneficial to the organization but preferential to
some types of employees. [I should note at this point that it
can be hard to assess which category any given practice falls into.
The people in charge of the organization will generally defend
any existing practice, no matter how stupid.]
The general social consensus seems to be that organizations
should have to make accomodations as long as the hit
to their productivity isn't too large. But of course, this
leaves us in the uncomfortable position where the organization
which is faced with making a change which would probably reduce
productivity somewhat is incentivized to claim that it would result
in a huge productivity reduction while activists for whoever is
on the disadvantaged end of the practice (in this case, women),
have an incentive to claim that there wouldn't be any impact on
productivity, with neither side being much interested in the truth.
