Alice H. Eagly, Northwestern University

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Alice H. Eagly, Northwestern University

(THE CONVERSATION) Its no secret that Silicon Valley employs many more men than womenin tech jobs. Whats much harder to agree on is why.

The recent anti-diversity memo by a now former Google engineer has pushed this topic into the spotlight. The writer argued there are ways to explain the gender gap in tech that dont rely on bias and discrimination specifically, biological sex differences. Setting aside how this assertion would affect questions about how to move toward greater equity in tech fields, how well does his wrap-up represent what researchers know about the science of sex and gender?

As a social scientist whos been conducting psychological research about sex and gender for almost 50 years, I agree that biological differences between the sexes likely are part of the reason we see fewer women than men in the ranks of Silicon Valleys tech workers. But the road between biology and employment is long and bumpy, and any causal connection does not rule out the relevance of nonbiological causes. Heres what the research actually says.

There is no direct causal evidence that biology causes the lack of women in tech jobs. But many, if not most, psychologists do give credence to the general idea that prenatal and early postnatal exposure to hormones such as testosterone and other androgens affect human psychology. In humans, testosterone is ordinarily elevated in males from about weeks eight to 24 of gestation and also during early postnatal development.

Ethical restraints obviously preclude experimenting on human fetuses and babies to understand the effects of this greater exposure of males to testosterone. Instead, researchers have studied individuals exposed to hormonal environments that are abnormal because of unusual genetic conditions or hormonally active drugs prescribed to pregnant women. Such studies have suggested that early androgen exposure does have masculinizing effects on girls juvenile play preferences and behavior, aggression, sexual orientation and gender identity and possibly on spatial ability and responsiveness to cues that certain behaviors are culturally female-appropriate.

Early hormonal exposure is only one part of a complex of biological processes that contribute to sexual differentiation. Driven by both direct and roundabout messages from the X and Y chromosomes, the effects of these processes on human psychology are largely unknown, given the early stage of the relevant science.

Other studies inform the nature-nurture question by comparing the behaviors of boys and girls who are so young that socialization has not exerted its full influence.

Early sex differences emerge mainly on broad dimensions of temperament. One such dimension is what psychologists call surgency; its greater in boys and manifests in motor activity, impulsivity and experiencing pleasure from high-intensity activities. The other dimension is in what we term effortful control; its greater in girls and emerges in the self-regulatory skills of greater attention span, ability to focus and shift attention and inhibitory control. This aspect of temperament also includes greater perceptual sensitivity and experience of pleasure from low-intensity activities.

This research on temperament does suggest that nature instills some psychological sex differences. But scientists dont fully understand the pathways from these aspects of child temperament to adult personality and abilities.

Another approach to the women-in-tech question involves comparing the sexes on traits thought most relevant to participation in tech. In this case, it doesnt matter whether these traits follow from nature or nurture. The usual suspects include mathematical and spatial abilities.

The sex difference in average mathematical ability that once favored males has disappeared in the general U.S. population. There is also a decline in the preponderance of males among the very top scorers on demanding math tests. Yet, males tend to score higher on most tests of spatial abilities, especially tests of mentally rotating three-dimensional objects, and these skills appear to be helpful in STEM fields.

Of course people choose occupations based on their interests as well as their abilities. So the robust and large sex difference on measures of people-oriented versus thing-oriented interests deserves consideration.

Research shows that, in general, women are more interested in people compared with men, who are more interested in things. To the extent that tech occupations are concerned more with things than people, men would on average be more attracted to them. For example, positions such as computer systems engineer and network and database architect require extensive knowledge of electronics, mathematics, engineering principles and telecommunication systems. Success in such work is not as dependent on qualities such as social sensitivity and emotional intelligence as are positions in, for instance, early childhood education and retail sales.

Women and men also differ in their life goals, with women placing a higher priority than men on working with and helping people. Jobs in STEM are in general not viewed as providing much opportunity to satisfy these life goals. But technology does offer specializations that prioritize social and community goals (such as designing healthcare systems) or reward social skills (for instance, optimizing the interaction of people with machines and information). Such positions may, on average, be relatively appealing to women. More generally, womens overall superiority on readingand writing as well as social skillswould advantage them in many occupations.

Virtually all sex differences consist of overlapping distributions of women and men. For example, despite the quite large sex difference in average height, some women are taller than most men and some men are shorter than most women. Although psychological sex differences are statistically smaller than this height difference, some of the differences most relevant to tech are substantial, particularly interest in people versus things and spatial ability in mental rotations.

Given the absence of clear-cut evidence that tech-relevant abilities and interests flow mainly from biology, theres plenty of room to consider socialization and gender stereotyping.

Because humans are born undeveloped, parents and others provide extensive socialization, generally intended to promote personality traits and skills they think will help offspring in their future adult roles. To the extent that women and men have different adult lives, caregivers tend to promote sex-typical activities and interests in children dolls for girls, toy trucks for boys. Conventional socialization can set children on the route to conventional career choices.

Even very young children form gender stereotypes as they observe women and men enacting their societys division of labor. They automatically learn about gender from what they see adults doing in the home and at work. Eventually, to explain the differences they see in what men and women do and how they do it, children draw the conclusion that the sexes to some extent have different underlying traits. Divided labor thus conveys the message that males and females have different attributes.

These gender stereotypes usually include beliefs that women excel in qualities such as warmth and concern for others, which psychologists label as communal. Stereotypes also suggest men have higher levels of qualities such as assertiveness and dominance, which psychologists label as agentic. These stereotypes are shared in cultures and shape individuals gender identities as well as societal norms about appropriate female and male behaviors.

Gender stereotypes set the stage for prejudice and discrimination directed toward those who deviate from gender norms. If, for example, people accept the stereotype that women are warm and emotional but not tough and rational, gatekeepers may close out women from many engineering and tech jobs, even those women who are atypical of their sex. In addition, women talented in tech may falter if they themselves internalize societal stereotypes about womens inferiority in tech-relevant attributes. Also, womens anxiety that they may confirm these negative stereotypes can lower their actual performance.

Its therefore not surprising that research provides evidence that women generally have to meet a higher standard to attain jobs and recognition in fields that are culturally masculine and dominated by men. However, there is some recent evidence of preferential hiring of women in STEM at U.S. research-intensive institutions. Qualified women who apply for such positions have a better chance of being interviewed and receiving offers than do male job candidates. Experimental simulation of hiring of STEM faculty yielded similar findings.

Many pundits make the mistake of assuming that scientific evidence favoring sociocultural causes for the dearth of women in tech invalidates biological causes, or vice versa. These assumptions are far too simplistic because most complex human behaviors reflect some mix of nature and nurture.

And the discourse is further compromised as the debate becomesmore politicized. Arguing for sociocultural causes seems the more progressive and politically correct stance today. Arguing for biological causes seems the more conservative and reactionary position. Fighting ideological wars distracts from figuring out what changes in organizational practices and cultures would foster the inclusion of women in tech and in the scientific workforce in general.

Politicizing such debates threatens scientific progress and doesnt help unravel what a fair and diverse organization is and how to create one. Unfortunately, well-meaning efforts of organizations to promote diversity and inclusion can be ineffective, often because they are too coercive and restrictive of managers autonomy. The outrage in James Damores manifesto suggests that Google might want to take a close look at its diversity initiatives.

At any rate, neither nature-oriented nor nurture-oriented science can fully account for the underrepresentation of women in tech jobs. A coherent and open-minded stance acknowledges the possibility of both biological and social influences on career interests and competencies.

Regardless of whether nature or nurture is more powerful for explaining the lack of women in tech careers, people should guard against acting on the assumption of a gender binary. It makes more sense to treat individuals of both sexes as located somewhere on a continuum of masculine and feminine interests and abilities. Treating people as individuals rather than merely stereotyping them as male or female is difficult, given how quickly our automatic stereotypes kick in. But working toward this goal would foster equity and diversity in tech and other sectors of the economy.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here: http://theconversation.com/does-biology-explain-why-men-outnumber-women-in-tech-82479.

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Does biology explain why men outnumber women in tech? - San Francisco Chronicle

The seven helium-filled white globes that hover, swarm, and form kaleidoscopic patterns above visitors to Londons Roundhouse are neither friend nor foetheyre inanimate drones programmed by an algorithm to move, and to respond in turn to the various movements of people below them. And yet their behavior is familiarly, unsettlingly alive. They seem curious at some points, breaking away from their pack to investigate individuals on the ground. Theyre menacing at others, gliding gracefully into imposing structures overhead. Theyre sometimes clumsy, colliding with each other and veering awkwardly upward. And theyre mesmerizing, evoking entities as disparate as birds and bacteria in the ways they gently dance and dip under the Roundhouses domed ceiling.

The balloon-drones are Zoological, a flock of autonomous, flying spheres created for the installation +/- Human by the studio Random International, the artists best known for Rain Room. That work, which debuted at Londons Barbican in 2012, helped usher in a new age of Instagram-friendly immersive artworks, attracting day-long lines when it moved to New Yorks Museum of Modern Art prior to a 15-month stint at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But where Rain Room allowed visitors to feel omnipotent, walking freely through a room of falling water without getting wet, Zoological encourages a sense of vulnerability. The ever-shifting constellations overhead are beautiful and unsettling: They catalog and respond to human behavior. This is an artwork that you observe while aware that its observing you right back.

Art for Instagrams Sake

+/- Human includes dance performances choreographed by Wayne McGregor, devised to provoke and create new patterns of movement as the dancers and the spheres interact. During the day, visitors can simply enter the Roundhouses space and move around underneath Zoological, which is accompanied by original music composed by Warp Recordss Mark Pritchard. The score is pivotal, offering ethereal layers of electronic harmonies, and then jarring, discordant sounds of exaggerated humming or screeching. At times the room feels like a scene from Denis Villeneuves Arrival; at others like a particularly traumatic episode of Black Mirror. The drones are benign, staying out of arms reach, but their behaviorboth pre-programmed and responsiveis impossible to predict.

Zoological, as a work, seems intended to play on subconscious anxieties about everything from driverless cars to alien invasions to mutating pathogens. The ways in which the spheres rise and fall around each other mimic the ways birds fly, and bugs swarm, and computers generate graphics that move to music. Its eerily familiar, but inhuman. Random International describes the work as an amplified and physical manifestation of our lived experience in a world increasingly run by algorithms, and its rendering of our uncertain, symbiotic, increasingly dependent relationship with machines and code captures the flux of an era in which technology is evolving faster than our ability to devise ethical frameworks for it. The spheres in Zoological are harmless, but for how long?

Its perhaps less instantly gratifying and joyful than Rain Room, but much more thought-provoking. Its also of a piece with other recent works of art and entertainment that try to wrestle with how drones are changing the nature of warfare or how technology will ruin humanity if were not perpetually vigilant. Its a theme Random International has considered over and over, in a series of Swarm Studies that examine and mimic collective behavior, and in works that reflect the human form in motion as pinpricks of light. Zoological, fascinating and occasionally alarming, encourages engagement, but the underlying note is one of caution.

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The Follow-Up to Rain Room Is Brilliant and Unsettling - The Atlantic

While Donald Trumps mighty guns of August are locked and loaded, this piece will try to revive the protracted duel between reason and emotion.

Its a debate that never dies: What defines and animates humanity? Is it calculating reason that invented the tools and amenities of civilization, or what the painter Vincent van Gogh called the terrible passions that drove us to where we are now?

If we survey the events of history all the way to that fateful day a wily serpent tempted an innocent Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, it is undoubtedly the passions that largely rule our behavior. Rationalists may declare with certitude the unstoppable, onward march of reason to the omega of human evolution, but immortal myths and facts on the ground tell a more convincing story of an untamable animal spirit that drives human thought and action: the lust for adventure, the inordinate appetite for fighting, hurting, and dominating others in short, the desire for mate, love, revenge, power and glory.

Think of the wars, great and small, that have been fought because of matters of emotional fury. Think of the mythical thousand ships launched by the Greeks to bring back the beautiful Helen from the arms of Paris in Troy; think of the mesmerizing beauty of the Taj Mahal built by the grieving emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz; recall the hundreds of millions of people who lost their lives in numberless killing fields throughout the world; and more recently, dance to the irresistible beat of Despacito which briefly united us in over four billion views. Finally, think of the staying power of the great religions of humankind, and you get some insights into human passions in all their mystery, splendor and savagery.

Sadly, the marvels of science and cybertechnologies that have reduced Earth to a small village of competing tribes have not freed humanity from its Neanderthal moorings. As in the past, its swords, guns and bombs, not plowshares and classrooms, that make the difference.

And so, unsurprisingly, we find lunatic nations like North Korea, enamored of their newfound nuclear toys, and great powers like China and America, playing out their existential imperatives on the world stage, while a fearful humanity holds its breath, knowing that any miscalculation could lead to nuclear war and global catastrophe.

Is reason really impotent when besieged by the passions? If there is one big lesson to be learned from human frailty, its that we have not learned from history. Barbara Tuchman inferred in her classic The March of Folly that governments throughout millennia have never learned how to tame the passions. Thus, since governments advent in 2000 B.C., there has been no marked improvement in it as an instrument for the rational and just management of human society. And if we cannot learn from our mistakes (follies), we are certainly doomed to repeat them.

Serious students of human behavior conclude that while the sciences have progressed by leaps and bounds, government has been at a standstill no better conducted now than 4,000 years ago.

David Hume believes that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. Translation: Passions, not the cold logic of reason, motivate human action. Thus, in our world of dizzying technological developments, beware of the many disguises of the passions used by those in power to make their lies appear palatable and reasonable.

In the Philippine context, that could mean that propaganda its arsenal of alternative facts, half-truths, and post-truth that flood social media actually speaks the language of reason even when its aim is to fool people because its authors know that their real target is the passions. Thats what makes it so dangerous to a gullible, undiscerning public.

If there is a moral to this piece, it is that we must realize we live in a maddening world where real truth is often stranger than fiction; that in a larger sense, the conflict between the passions and reason has barely begun. The passions and reason are what make us uniquely human. They are inseparable and need each other, for good or ill.

* * *

Narciso Reyes Jr. (ngreyes1640@hotmail.com) is an international book author and former diplomat. He lived in Beijing in 1978-81 as bureau chief of the Philippine News Agency.

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Taming 'the terrible passions' - Inquirer.net

With the spectacular success of Hamilton, musical theater has moved from a niche market to the national stage in recent years. And for good reason the impact of Hamilton has has reached far beyond the entertainment world, spanning culture in general, rap, education and even Congress. Among other things, it has shown that musical theater can offer a fresh, exciting way to learn about history and culture, and it can offer much more than that even to those who dont aspire to perform on Broadway.

Indeed, musical theater is a powerful art form that can transform the lives of those who take part, but its power is often overlooked. Now is the time to pull the curtain back.

Reams of statistics show that learning a musical instrument can lead to a whole host of benefits, from improved discipline, perseverance and collaboration to enhanced cognitive skills and positive neurological effects. While these benefits are beyond dispute, its worth considering that musical theater mostly left out of conversations like this expand upon them.

Among other life lessons and traits, musical theater can teach and foster these important skills:

1) A deeper understanding of human behavior and psychology: Researchers have argued that psychologists can look to how actors create emotions to understand human nature in a new way. Thats because a performer must understand others actions and the meanings behind them to convincingly portray another character, environment and tone on stage. In doing this, they conversely learn to identify their own innate biases and practice empathy when interacting with the people around them.

2) A sense of ownership and independence: In a theater production, theres no sitting on the sidelines! Theres only one person for each role and a small margin for error, so performers must learn to work independently and arrive prepared. They are expected to pull their own weight and sometimes even more -- to produce the best show possible.

3) Creative thinking and problem-solving skills: Anyone partaking in a production is involved in the business of creation whether its building scenery, a script, a costume, props, and so on. On stage, performers create characters, moods and settings. They must also use problem-solving skills to decide how a character will react, what decisions they will make, and how their actions will help tell the story.

4) How to give and take feedback effectively: Giving and receiving constructive feedback is a regular part of any form of theater. Performers understand that feedback is a useful part of the learning process and how to channel it into success. At the same time, they are also challenged to give feedback to their peers that is respectful and useful. Critical thinking and listening are just as an important piece of the puzzle as performing on stage.

5) The importance of teamwork and the unique value that every individual brings: Musical theater is arguably the most collaborative form of creative expression. It takes a range of people writers, actors, designers, directors, choreographers, and more to put together a successful performance. Performers cant get on stage without the help of the off-stage crew; what happens behind the scenes is just as important as what happens when the curtain rises. Theater demands that anyone working on a project is an important part of the show the final product can never be completed unless every team member is working toward the same goal.

As executive director of Kaufman Music Center in New York City, Ive seen this first-hand at the organizations annual Summer Theater Musical Workshop, where young people of all backgrounds and interests learn to shine on stage. The workshop is primarily for kids with various interests, not just for those who want to spend their lives professionally on stage. For those who may already be instrumentalists, musical theater takes them further, allowing them to express their musical talent through their own body. It helps the shy or quiet child come out of his/her shell and boost confidence, and has been known to turn the class clown into a real star. For many people, theres something about singing with a group, working with others to pull off a number and flexing many different talents singing, dancing, acting, writing thats stimulating, moving, motivational, fun and inspirational. At the same time, it leads to a mastery of stage presence a boon for any musician, attorney, physician, teacher and the list goes on!

For an experience that will have a long-lasting and potentially life-changing impact, everyone and anyone should take part in musical theater. You might be surprised at the result, and have a lot of fun as well.

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Kids & Musical Theater: The Off-Stage Impact - HuffPost