Google Is Right to Focus on Gender Bias

We’re having the wrong conversation about women in tech. We need to decouple two very different issues that have arisen amid the commotion about diversity at Google: biological differences between genders, and bias against females working in tech and more generally in well-paid, prestigious jobs.

Let’s start with the biology. Studies on how babies or very young children interact with the world tend to find differences on average between what girls and boys pay attention to or care about. They focus on babies because of the deep interaction between inherent traits and acquired behavior: By the age of 4, children are deeply socialized, so it’s hard to know what’s driving what they say or do (although sometimes it’s obviously just socialization).