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After thinking about this some more, part of the reason I'm having trouble with the point on IP waivers being made in this post is that it assumes that one thing will be done (in this case, IP waivers), and that everything else will remain the same. But that's not usually how things work out. Every change we make has follow-on effects, which also have follow-on effects, and so on. If IP waivers cause biotech companies to not be incentivized to create vaccines, but if there is a huge need for vaccines, public funding will take the place of IP incentives. This could end up being a huge improvement over the current incentives, which prioritize the most profitable investments, rather than the most needed ones.
Since black people are about five times as likely to be stopped by the police (and thus probably more likely to have close contact with police officers), and since there seems to be more vaccine hesitancy among black people than white people, it is indeed likely that this will affect black people more than it will affect white people.
I also think that, even assuming that the US was unilaterally "confiscating" these companies' IP, it's not clear what the actual impact on future innovation would be, since:
- This is clearly a unique situation. It's unlikely that these corporations would make the assumption that all future IP would also be "confiscated"
- Even if they made that assumption, what are they supposed to do? Stop investing in future developments, and slowly go out of business? A much better option would be to just not get any IP protections at all, but instead rely on trade secrets to protect investments. This would probably end in a more competitive market; since the consensus among economists who specifically do research on this topic seems to be that IP laws hurt more than they help.
It should also be noted that these corporations profit from voided IP protections, since they all also produce generic medicinal products.
I guess it's difficult to ascertain exactly what the author is saying. The exact quote is:
I don't agree that the reason there aren't many women in tech is because of toxicity
Let's get rid of the "I don't agree" portion of the sentence, since it is redundant: the author is clearly stating his position. So the sentence actually says
The reason there aren't many women in tech is not toxicity.
This could be interpreted in multiple different ways, the two primary ones being:
- Toxicity does not factor into the number of women in tech at all
- Toxicity is a reason why there aren't many women in tech, but it is either completely irrelevant, or only marginally relevant, compared to other reasons
The sentence literally says 1., but I do agree that it is likely that the author intended to say 2. However, I also think that 2. is false, since in my experience, women's actual experience in the tech sector is the most prominent reason they state for leaving the tech sector, when they leave the tech sector. Additionally, again, in my experience, women are much more likely to leave the tech sector than men.
Furthermore, the actual reason the author gives for the small number of women in the tech sector (women land in a different spot on the people-things dimension) does not seem particularly compelling to me, since software engineering is a highly social undertaking, so should, by the author's logic, skew towards women. What's more, historically, there have been much more women in software engineering. It seems that the gender distribution only started to shift towards men once software engineering started to become a lucrative career.
I will say these two things:
- There are some very vocal women who have had extremely bad experiences in the tech field. These experiences clearly do not represent all women's experiences.
- I don't think that toxictiy is the primary reason for the current gender distribution in the tech sector. When I started studying comp sci, the gender distribution was already heavily skewed towards men; the toxicity these women experienced did make the situation much worse, though.
"I don't agree that the reason there aren't many women in tech is because of toxicity"
When I studied comp sci not that long ago, I shared most classes with a female friend. One of her professors literally told her that women had no place in tech. This was a woman who did my machine learning course homework for me, implementing a reinforced learning algorithm from scratch for me because I was too dumb to get it, so yeah, she definitely had a place in tech.
This was not an isolated incident. FIrst semester, there were about 20% women in my class, about 40 women in total. By the end, four women graduated, and about 100 men. This wasn't because these women weren't interested, or weren't qualified. It's because they were treated terribly.
I've just last month had to fire a software engineer who flat-out refused to work for a female tech lead, and aggressively attacked her leadership and technical skills in a very personal, gendered manner (think: "I will not work for an emotional woman, she will not tell me what to do!"). This is a guy who has worked in tech for over a decade, and still thought this was okay. He was genuinely surprised when I fired him, instead of promoting him to this woman's position. Apparently, this is the first time this approach had not worked for him. In every other company he worked before this one, his behavior was accepted, and, apparently, rewarded.
These topics are obviously complex, and there are many different reasons why there are so few women in tech. But the claim that toxicity against women isn't one of these reasons is false.
"I've simply never met anyone who says they didn't work in tech because of its culture"
I know about a dozen women who have left tech because of how they were treated. I think one thing to do here is to just reflect on why you've never met anyone who told you that this happened to them.
"Constantly going on about how tech is toxic, and refusing to let people say that their experiences were actually quite positive seems like a sure-fire way to discourage women from working there."
Sure. But that's an odd argument. If there is a problem, it won't be solved unless people talk about that problem. Given that toxicity against women is a problem that actual women actually experience every day, the logical conclusion from your point would be that we should lie to women in order to get more women into tech, which doesn't seem like a sound approach.
"Only a minority of companies have toxic cultures"
How do you know that? It's kind of difficult to even ascertain that, because there is no clear definition for what a "toxic culture" is, but in my experience, once companies reach a certain size, they inevitably end up with a rule-driven, dehumanizing culture, and before they reach that size, company culture often depends on a single person's whims. So there is probably at least one measure of toxicity by which a majority of companies qualify.