On 17/10/2017 11:02, Shane Kerr wrote:

It looks like universities (well at least some universities) are addressing the gender imbalance in their enrollment. This should start to resolve the "pipeline problem" (if indeed there is such a problem).

Agreed.

If graduates start to look more diverse, do you think that the industry will automatically start to become more diverse?

That sounds like a plausible hypothesis.

While this is one possible outcome, it also seems likely that we have similar structures in industry to the ones that were favoring men in academia. While the solutions may not be identical, certainly we can consider them as possibilities?

Very well, but that will require us to look at these approaches and claims of bias critically, not simply to adopt those claims and approaches without analysis.

p.s. I note with interest that one of the solutions for increasing women's enrollment in computer science was to make the criteria MORE DIFFICULT for all applicants. Perhaps this can go some way to addressing the constant refrain that increasing diversity should not lower standards? :)

Are you referring to the following sentence from the article?

The school made it harder to become a computer science major — as always applicants had to be good at math and science but now they also had to show they had leadership qualities.

Characterising this as "raising standards" or even as "make the criteria MORE DIFFICULT" seems problematic. I cannot see how this change of selection criteria would cause any shift in the proportion of sexes (or any other characteristic) unless the leadership score is being privileged at the expense of the previously dominant math/science score. That's not a male/female thing nor any form of comment on whether females are good at STEM; it applies regardless of which characteristic "leadership skills" is attempting to proxy for (or, indeed, in the absence of any such intent, if "leadership" is promoted in its own right) Allow me to explain by example. Consider the following candidates, ranked in order of their STEM scores, also showing their leadership score. STEM LEAD TOTAL A: 9 2 11 B: 9 1 10 C: 8 3 11 D: 7 2 9 E: 6 3 9 F: 5 5 10 G: 2 6 8 (I wish to re-emphasise that *I* am not making any assertion about female capability in STEM or tech (or leadership); the above table is entirely sex and gender neutral) With a class size of 5, under the old rules candidates A,B,C,D, and E are selected and F is rejected; under the new rules F is selected instead of either D or E. G is not selected under either ruleset. What has occurred is simply that a candidate with lower capability in STEM has replaced one with a higher capability, because they have a higher capability in LEAD. In other words, the rule change increases the priority given to leadership scores compared with STEM. That is not to say that LEAD has been given absolute priority over STEM (G is not selected under either ruleset) but there has been a shift in priorities. It is therefore appropriate to ask, is it desirable to de-emphasise STEM skills as compared with leadership skills, as entry requirements for admission onto an undergraduate computer science course? When considering this question, it is impossible not to notice that the college President's intentions were avowedly motivated: she addressed this question not with the intention of sorting students into courses to which they were best suited or most likely to succeed, but simply with the intent of reducing the proportion of men on the course. This is the kind of thing that leads some people to consider the so-called diversity agenda simply divisive. My final observation is that STEM scores are readily susceptible to objective measurement, whereas leadership scores are not. That is not to deny that STEM score measurements might be somewhat affected by cultural biases in testing, or that at the extremes it will be possible to achieve a fairly high level of agreement about whether a candidate has exceptionally good or exceptionally poor leadership skills. But in the round, it is highly probable that there will be a materially higher level of objectivity in the measurement of STEM scores than of leadership. In consequence, adopting "leadership skills" as an additional admission criterion makes candidate selection a more subjective decision than previously. In combination with the College President's lack of reported interest in promoting leadership, and declared interest in promoting female participation, an outside observer might fairly wonder whether there was actually any sincere effort to broader the range of skills reflected in candidates, or whether the college was simply looking for an excuse to pick female candidates whose STEM scores wouldn't previously permit their selection, without genuine reference to other criteria. That does little to, as you put it "address[] the constant refrain that increasing diversity should not lower standards". I do not find it a particularly attractive example for us to learn from, except as a cautionary tale. Kind Regards, Malcolm. -- Malcolm Hutty | tel: +44 20 7645 3523 Head of Public Affairs | Read the LINX Public Affairs blog London Internet Exchange | http://publicaffairs.linx.net/ London Internet Exchange Ltd Monument Place, 24 Monument Street London EC3R 8AJ Company Registered in England No. 3137929 Trinity Court, Trinity Street, Peterborough PE1 1DA