I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
Been there.  Done that.  Got the T-shirt, scars, bruises, etc.  Believing that stuff was by far the worst mistake of my life.  Strong advice:  Don&#x27;t do that.  For all the attempts at <i>gender diversity</i> in STEM fields, f&#x27;get about it or, except in very rare cases as in the OP, suffer from pain to the agonies of the damned to serious harm to your life (I did) and worse, maybe death, literally,  for the associated female.<p>I&#x27;ll give details below, but, bluntly, bottom line, as essentially parents with any insight and objectivity at all with children of both genders learn quickly, in short, right from the crib, with rare exceptions, the girls are interested in people and the boys, in things.  Sorry, that&#x27;s just the way it is.  They are BORN that way, and the difference does NOT go away with time.  There is a small fraction of exceptions in both genders, but otherwise that&#x27;s the fact, Jack.  Sorry &#x27;bout that.   A really simple argument shows that the difference has held strongly for at least 40,000 years.  Gads, from some recent research,  the difference even holds for Rhesus monkeys which shows that it has held for some millions of years.<p>I tried that:  As a college sophomore she told me &quot;Women don&#x27;t just have to be cared for.  Women can do things, too.  I want a career.&quot;  Well, since she had been Valedictorian of her high school class, a year earlier in the freshman trigonometry course I was teaching, had been the best student in the class, with twice as many test points as the next best student, and was well on her way to <i>Summa Cum Laude</i>, PBK, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and NSF Fellow, all of which she got, I believed her.  Wrong.  Dumb.<p>Later I was on the team that did IBM&#x27;s artificial intelligence language KnowledgeTool.  Well I understood the language, and on our team we had some very bright and aggressive guys, young men, who had written some early sample programs.  KnowledgeTool was a pre-processor to IBM&#x27;s PL&#x2F;I, a huge language.<p>From one of the world&#x27;s best research universities, she got her Ph.D. in mathematical sociology, with lots of multi-variate statistics, with matrix theory, analysis of variance and experimental design, hypothesis testing, SPSS usage, etc.  All of that was easy for her.<p>So, I showed her how to use our home PC to logon to my office VM&#x2F;CMS account, use the editor XEDIT, use the scripting language Rexx, and right away she wrote a nice, useful Rexx program to report on disk space usage.  Then I gave her a one hour tutorial in KnowledgeTool.  A week later she had a nice, first sample program running.  It did what she wanted.  I gave her a 30 minute lecture explaining the intended role of rules as <i>knowledge representation</i>, and two weeks later she had fully in line with the idea of rules and knowledge representation by far the best early KnowledgeTool program I ever saw.<p>She was genuinely brilliant.  She beat me like a rented mule in Scrabble.  I kept asking her to play so that I could get better, and I did, but she got better faster than I did until the difference was absurd.  The OP mentions GRE scores of 800 -- that&#x27;s exactly the score I got on the Math GRE.  So, I was bright enough, but she was brilliant, plenty good in math, and much better than me in verbal and essentially every other non-STEM subject.<p>She was brilliant and was a super fast, brilliant student at KnowledgeTool with essentially no instruction at all, no text, no notes, just did it.<p>A STEM field diversity success?  Heck no.  She hated the STEM fields, including computing.  Her view of the STEM fields was &quot;I&#x27;m not that kind of person.&quot;.  What she wanted was &quot;A career that helps people.&quot;, and that mostly meant volunteer work.  The idea of working for money was an anathema to her -- so she had no future in business.<p>To get a job, she kept trying the STEM fields, e.g., with IBM.   She was miserable, desperately miserable.  In a training class, she made the highest score in the class, but she was miserable.  She went into a depression and clinical depression, was trying to recover with her mother at her family farm, and soon her body was found floating in a lake.<p>Diversity?  A grand failure.<p>To believe her &quot;women can do things, too&quot; for anything like the world of work, business, technology, computing, or the STEM fields, she could do it, best in class, for a while but HATED it and too soon found it fatal.   Instead she desperately wanted a career that &quot;helped people&quot;.<p>Bluntly, she was interested in people and not in things, technology, applied math, etc.<p>Are we learning yet?<p>Can some small fraction of women, as in the OP, do well in the STEM fields?  Yup.  Did I mention a &quot;small fraction&quot;?<p>Generally for &quot;diversity&quot;, do everyone, men, women, universities, companies, society, a huge favor -- f&#x27;get about it.  Certainly don&#x27;t push it, encourage it, urge women to get into fields with <i>things</i> instead of <i>people</i>.  Don&#x27;t do that.  To do that is dumb de dumb dumb, dumb, harmful, and sometimes fatal.<p>Instead?  Let women pick their own directions.  Stop pushing women to be like a dog that walks on only two legs --  usually they can do it, but they nearly never do it well.<p>For this diversity stuff, to borrow from an Indiana Jones movie character
 Marcus Brody “You are meddling with
 forces you cannot possibly
 comprehend.”.<p>I tried, HARD.  Biggest mistake of my life.  Diversity good?  Don&#x27;t believe that stuff, not for your sisters, girlfriends, wife, or daughters.  DON&#x27;T  do that.  The author of the OP?  She&#x27;s one of the rare exceptions.  Leave it at that.