After a blow-up in my town a few months ago, I tried to encourage a few notable female tech proponents that negativity was not the way to win the fight. I was publicly lambasted, called denigrating names, had false information spread as far as cities 3000 miles away, and even had a meme made about me (containing incorrect info, imagine that). Negativity breeds nothing but negativity. I often fall into the trap myself, so it was pretty disheartening to see others fall into it so hard when I tried to warn them away. To be fair, I didn't handle the situation perfectly, but at least I know that and am willing to change. Effective communication starts with introspection. Tolstoy said it this way, "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
Sadly, appeals to reason are not usually well received by an angry mob. Every time this subject comes up I remind myself of pg's "What You Can't Say" essay and then I keep my mouth shut.
Sorry, but I can't help but remember encountering people who told stories much like yours, only to find on closer examination that they were incredibly, deeply in the wrong.
Since you don't go into any actual details about what set the situation off, it makes it really hard for me to take your anecdote too seriously.
I'd like to think my comment was an invitation to provide details if possible. Asking specific questions is hard when the situation described is so vague. :)
Honestly, I'm not interested in providing details. The parties involved have already kissed and made up (for the most part), and it serves nothing for me to prove myself on HN. Suffice to say, I took, and still take, the position that we each have a finite amount of political capital and goodwill that we can spend, and that it is more advantageous for everyone to spend it on building instead of destroying. There will always be differences of opinion on what is building vs. destroying, though, and there will always be room for poor communication to confuse the matter for all parties involved. Especially in the tech community, as I'm sure you can imagine :)
> I'd like to think my comment was an invitation to provide details if possible.
Hmmmm, it seems to me that asking a question would be an invitation to provide details. Making a statement about how other individuals in similar situations have been deeply wrong comes across, to me, as an invitation to defensiveness and conflict.
Why not ask simply, "Can you provide more details?"
Sorry, but I can't help but remember encountering people who made comments much like yours, only to find on closer examination that they were incredibly, deeply in the wrong.
Since you don't go into any actual details about the basis of your comment, it makes it really hard for me to take your remembrances too seriously.
Negativity is never the way to win [anything]. We didn't go to the moon with negativity and as people, we can't get over things with negativity. I recently got in a position similar to yours (oh well, no meme though) and I heartily agree: Negativity only begets more negativity.
I would love to write paragraph upon paragraph about how negativity can change you and how "doers do" and other pretty zen philosophical quotes, but I have none under the hand and that would just be repeating myself. So I'll just say it straight: Be positive :)
I believe in building, because, despite all those who would destroy and tear things asunder, we builders continue to make progress. Bit by it, piece by piece, the world is becoming a better place.
Read the article. (Or better yet, just its headline.) It doesn't focus on men. It focusses on how bitter angry women are holding females back. An article men can upvote!
We know the power of the Dark Side, and warn you from it. For your own good, naturally. The best advice comes from people who don't take it themselves.
Be a team player. We men never complain. (Except for this one subject.) Can you imagine Larry Ellison complaining? Steve Jobs? Bill Gates? No, of course not. This trait they shared with Jesus, who famously also never complained.
(Now, you may google that and ask, "What about the Pharisees? And a fig tree he cursed to wither and die, because for some reason it didn't give him fruit out of season? Plus, wasn't he always complaining about his Apostles?" The answer is that was the historical brown Jesus, and you know how uppity Middle Easterners are. I'm talking about White Jesus with the soft eyes. Who's all about turning the other cheek and taking it.)
I would like to note that the STEM gender gap is much lower among new immigrants students (particularly from Asia and Eastern Europe) than their US-born counterparts, at least anecdotally. And I think this biases me towards the non-negativity approach argued for in the article. Much of the data about lower STEM performance from females in the U.S. comes from 1970's and 1980's data, when females also took fewer courses advanced courses. By 2000, female high school students were taking calculus at the same rate as males, though still lagged behind in physics. [1]
Perceptions are generally not nuanced and often lag 10-15 years behind. If you take the interaction of gender and ethnicity into account, you actually see an interesting reversal at the 99th percentile for Asian Americans where there are where there are 1.37 F for every 1.25 M. There is another study that shows Asian females score higher on STEM subject exams when they had to write a short essay about being Asian prior to the exam, but scored lower when they had to write about being female. (I'll try to add the citation later when I find it.)
Overall, I think the macro strategy of making female role models more visible is an effective one, and may well pay off in the next decade or so. Another reasonable strategy may well involve immigration reform with a special eye towards people who have focused on STEM subjects. Perhaps extra H1B slots for techie females? (I haven't thought this one through yet, but it may be worth exploring.)
Side note: It is also interesting to note that there are a substantially higher percentage of female Iranian mathematicians, and some of those mathematicians have noted that some of this is due to the cultural perception that highly theoretical pursuits (including theoretical computer science and theoretical physics) are not "too masculine" and are less likely to be dissuaded from pursuing the field.
The goal of getting women into tech should be to equalize the gender ratio of the people who actually are in tech to that of the people who want to be in tech.
That's the real balance that we need to reach for -- and unlike what many people seem to think, this ratio is not necessarily 50%.
Why do you think this ratio is currently around 25%? Do you think it's because women are inherently much less interested in tech? Or do you think it's because our society imposes stereotypes and values on women, and gives very "macho" impressions (often based in reality) about what work in tech is like, which leads women who would otherwise want to study and work in tech not want to?
Fixing the culture of tech and the role of gender in our society more broadly is a major part of what's needed to deal with these issues. And part of that is helping some women--and mean--realize that they want to be in tech despite false impressions they have about their abilities and what working in tech means.
As an industry it is a really important issue that men are not going into teaching.
Disqualifying half the population will reduce the quality of the selection you can make.
The quality of teachers is of critical importance to the effectiveness of education. The effectiveness of education is critical to equality, social cohesion and economic growth.
Actual evidence of sexism in hiring is more persuasive of the presence of sexism, than the ratio of people employed. A standard way to study this is to send out a bunch or resumes in which only the gender changes.
I think there are sexist social pressures on men which reduce their desire to become nurses.
Teaching and nursing are both fields where you need a degree to start participating. And if you look at the discussions in those fields, there's certainly strong concern about lack of males in teaching and mild concern about lack of males in nursing.
Tech doesn't require a degree - it's a field anyone with a free evening can pick up. It also bears a significantly broader scope than nursing or teaching.
The pool of participants is much narrower in scope - people that have specifically spent years training to be that profession. Not people who started out doing it as a hobby or a quiet thing on the side.
I think the OP was asking how requiring a degree is relevant to the number of men in those professions. When compared to women, men generally have equal or better access to higher education, so it would seem that the dearth of men in nursing and teaching wouldn't be related to those professions requiring a degree.
> Why do you think this ratio is currently around 25%?
I don't know, I can only guess. You can see my guess below.
> Do you think it's because women are inherently much less interested in tech? Or do you think it's because our society imposes stereotypes and values on women, and gives very "macho" impressions?
It's probably a combination of both, I'm not ruling out either case (or even getting close to ruling out either case).
I feel like too many people are ruling out the former entirely (or just not realizing it's a possibility altogether) which doesn't make sense.
You have to keep both in mind, and realize that your goal isn't an absolute 50%, it's the natural ratio, which may of course change over time.
That also suggests there is a natural ratio, something I for one don't believe. I do agree with part of what you are saying though - the work done in colleges and in the hiring space needs to reflect some sort of existing ratio of people who are qualified and interested at that point. However, I believe there is also significant work to be done to investigate any such natural ratio and fight against it if it comes from any sort of societal assumptions, as I believe it does.
It's quite likely and the conclusion of this Norwegian documentary (well worth watching if only to see Sacha Baron Cohen smarter brother (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask)
You can think of it in terms of Maslow's Pyramid.
Societies at the top of the pyramid are filled with individuals that no longer need to take the highest paying jobs, but can now take jobs that uniquely fulfill their interests and desires. And it could very well be that taken as two bell curves, the interests of women are different from the interests of men, two overlapping bell curves, but with different means, and different variances. Concluding that try as hard as you might, it just may be that women do not want to work in tech and preferentially prefer different sorts of occupation.
There's a story about boxing in America, and that is as various poor immigrant groups came to America, they each in their time rose to the tops of boxing. The Irish, the Jews, the Italians, & the African Americans. These groups saw boxing as a way to rise above their income levels. And as the various groups either assimilated or as a group rose above their resources, their interest in boxing waned.
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, boxing has been a sport dominated by men of meager means and questionable sanity. Who in their right mind would choose to pursue an occupation in which you expose yourself to habitual beatings? Such a calling speaks to men who possess an overabundance of rage, and a dearth of opportunities. Historically, ghettoes are the environment most likely to produce such men. These are neighborhoods where too many people compete for too few resources, and the inhabitants face daily frustrations more profound than those known by more prosperous men.
Something similar could be happening in tech as women in general might prefer occupations that are more female friendly, more family friendly, more human centric, more social, etc., like medicine, or law.
I am explaining this theory, I am not necessarily supporting it. I have no idea why their is a dearth of women in programming. I know in the places I have worked, as a whole there are many women who are often lead developers and managers.
50% is an easy first order approximation. Better approximations are great, but I see not obvious winner for a better approximation whose error bounds do not include 50% and has or is likely to gain significant mindshare.
> The goal of getting women into tech should be to equalize the gender ratio of the people who actually _are_ in tech to that of the people who _want_ to be in tech.
That's a bad idea -- it would stigmatize those who entered the field by such a program that they were given their positions, rather then earning them. The same problem exists in race relations, where equality by law conceals equality by merit.
Women are fully qualified to take their place in science and tech -- that's well-understood -- but to force equal numbers would obscure the fact that women can easily earn their place in science and tech.
> I don't think the OP meant to achieve this goal with law.
Read the quote: "The goal of getting women into tech should be to equalize the gender ratio of the people who actually _are_ in tech to that of the people who _want_ to be in tech."
How would that be achieved without a law? If a law weren't required, it would already have happened, since, logically and without obstacles, those who want to be in tech would be in tech.
The goal is really to remove obstacles that unfairly exclude some people from the field. I don't think that will happen all by itself. If if could, it would.
> The goal is really to remove obstacles that unfairly exclude some people from the field. I don't think that will happen all by itself. If if could, it would.
While legally provable gender discrimination is an issue, I think the bigger issue is changing people's attitudes. I agree that can't happen all by itself, but I do think it can happen without laws. Call me optimistic, but I think all these discussions on Hacker News (and other places) are part of what will change things - that is, people arguing with each other, hashing stuff out, and moving forward. It's a slow, painful process, but, in my opinion, it is the permanent solution.
Here's the reason a law would be required to get every woman into tech who wants to be in tech. There will always be people -- men and women -- who want to be in tech, but who won't get into tech simply because they're unqualified to be there.
Therefore, for any particular exclusion, someone would have to decide whether the exclusion arose from a person being unqualified for technical work, or it being a case of unfair discrimination. In other words, for someone who isn't qualified, just changing attitudes wouldn't achieve the stated goal, to wit: every woman who wants to be in tech, getting into tech.
The bottom line is that many people -- men and women -- would jump at the chance to be in tech, but aren't qualified to be there.
Therefore the only way to achieve the stated goal would be to have a law that forced employers to overlook everything except that a person wants to be in tech.
Not "also". My point was that the OP's statement disregards the issue of qualification by saying that everyone who wants a position should get one. I emphasized the issue of qualifications, and not "also" but alone.
My use of the word "unfairly" moves the standard to qualified people, which contrasts with that of the OP.
Here's the reason a law would be required to get every woman into tech who wants to be in tech. There will always be people -- men and women -- who want to be in tech, but who won't get into tech simply because they're unqualified to be there.
Therefore, for any particular exclusion, someone would have to decide whether the exclusion arose from a person being unqualified for technical work, or it being a case of unfair discrimination. In other words, for someone who isn't qualified, just changing attitudes wouldn't achieve the stated goal, to wit: every woman who wants to be in tech, getting into tech.
The bottom line is that many people -- men and women -- would jump at the chance to be in tech, but aren't qualified to be there.
Therefore the only way to achieve the stated goal would be to have a law that forced employers to overlook everything except that a person wants to be in tech.
I thought being qualified was rather obvious, the fact that I didn't mention it doesn't mean I thought we should ignore whether or not people are qualified.
> I thought being qualified was rather obvious ...
People can only reply to what you say, not what you might have meant or believed to be self-evident. Here's what you said:
"The goal of getting women into tech should be to equalize the gender ratio of the people who actually are in tech to that of the people who want to be in tech."
Seems pretty clear to me. The above would require a law, a compelling factor. Attitude adjustments wouldn't be enough.
So maybe you just took it too literally at face value?
I wasn't writing a computer program, I was writing English, so let's try to understand what I was saying instead of attempting to interpret it like a computer.
My entire point was that "equal" isn't necessarily the correct ratio, so if you got that point you got my entire point; if not then you missed it.
> So maybe you just took it too literally at face value?
That's called being respectful of the views of others, and not presuming to interpret their words in any way one chooses.
> I wasn't writing a computer program, I was writing English, so let's try to understand what I was saying instead of attempting to interpret it like a computer.
I have a better idea -- say exactly what you mean. Don't assume other people will understand things you don't bother to say.
The problem with leaving interpretation of your words to others, is they will interpret your words in ways you didn't intend.
> Don't assume other people will understand things you don't bother to say.
I never assumed; I simply hoped it would be the case. Feel free to believe whatever you think I really meant, I already made my point so if you end up missing it that's perfectly fine with me.
> Feel free to believe whatever you think I really meant ...
Want to communicate? Communicate. Use words that have universally accepted meanings. Stop assuming that others will or must fill in your blanks for you.
So far, you've tried and failed to argue that incoherence is a virtue and your communications breakdowns are the fault of others. Sorry -- no sale.
> I already made my point ...
The only point you've made is that you haven't made your point -- instead, you assign to others the responsibility for decoding the things you didn't say.
> The goal is really to remove obstacles that unfairly exclude some people from the field. I don't think that will happen all by itself. If if could, it would.
Doesn't your use of the phrase "unfairly exclude" imply a narrowing of the scope down from "all people who want tech jobs" to "all qualified people who want tech jobs", since excluding unqualified people is fair? I don't understand why now you are arguing that you didn't understand the OP's implied assumption. This statement implies that you did.
Why did I post? To emphasize that the OP is encouraging a no-standard standard. My reply adds the requirement that the people be qualified, as opposed to the idea that, as in the OP's original post, everyone who wants a tech position should get one.
My posts emphasize the opposite of what you claim.
> Am I missing something?
Yes, you are. Here is the original content:
"The goal of getting women into tech should be to equalize the gender ratio of the people who actually are in tech to that of the people who want to be in tech.
That's the real balance that we need to reach for -- and unlike what many people seem to think, this ratio is not necessarily 50%."
No mention of the qualifications of the candidates, only their number, their gender, and their wish to be in tech. It's a competence-blind standard. So I objected. Now I hear that I should have used my psychic abilities to divine the OP's real meaning.
> you didn't understand the OP's implied assumption.
The OP's "implied assumption" is not my responsibility, but that of the originator.
Effective communication starts with ... wait for it ... saying what you mean, and leaving nothing to the imagination. If a reader can reply and say, "Wait ... did you actually mean ...", then something is wrong.
Here's the key phrase:
" ... equalize the gender ratio of the people who actually are in tech to that of the people who want to be in tech ..."
If the OP really meant to specify qualified people, she should have said " ... correct the gender ratio of the people who actually are in tech by including people qualified to be in tech but unfairly excluded..." or other similar wording.
To assume rather than to specify is to make the classic error of assuming everyone has the same values and attitudes. If that were true, there would be no need to try to communicate ideas.
Despite this, the author (Peter Seibel) begins his introduction by mentioning Ada Lovelace in the very first sentence. In the next sentence, he talks about the six women - Kay Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum - who were called to be the first programmers of ENIAC.
I don't know if this was explicitly intentional on Seibel's part, a sort of gender-balancing of the book given its one female interviewee, but it was a nice reminder of how, at one point in time, it wasn't strange at all that women were among the forefront of computer pioneers. Today, the numbers have receded to the point that some people just think that women are inherently not "built" for programming. Well, some clearly were...this isn't like arguing whether the Navy SEALs should let in a real life "G.I. Jane"...given the history of women in programming, it's still a strong possibility that the gender disparity is heavily influenced by social trends and stigma and is something that we can mitigate.
(note: I'm not accusing Seibel of not having enough diversity in his book...it's very likely Fran Allen was the only woman available for his book and who played as interesting a part in history as Robert Knuth, Peter Norvig, and the other big names that Seibel interviews)
Edit: Also, the Fran Allen interview is really interesting. I jumped to it to see her thoughts on the gender disparity, but most of the interview is on her thoughts about early programming, teaching scientists to code, and how C ruined the art of compilers
Some of the depictions in the 1960s, interestingly, played up programming as a stereotypically "women's" occupation, complete with pop-psychology explanations of why women were particularly suited for it: http://blog.fogcreek.com/girls-go-geek-again/
The mother of a friend of my sister's was a programmer in the '60s (for some large company, IBM or the like), and to hear her tell it, the stereotypical programmer back then was more like traditional stereotypes of newspaper reporters than anything else: hard-drinking, chain-smoking, wise-cracking, cynical, etc.
It was pretty funny imagining her—a petite artsy (actually she was a full-time artist at that point) grandmother type when I talked to her—knocking back shots of whisky with the boys but apparently that's what they all did...
> I'm not accusing Seibel of not having enough diversity in his book...it's very likely Fran Allen was the only woman available for his book and who played as interesting a part in history as Robert Knuth, Peter Norvig, and the other big names that Seibel interviews
Adele Goldberg would have been an excellent interview subject. Not up to the level of interest of Knuth, but certainly up to the level of some of the others.
I try not to jump to conclusions with these things. There's no telling who returned Seibel's calls and who didn't.
At Watson, my office was on the same floor as
Fran's, and we talked a few times. She had
a heck of a nice smile. She played a role in
a math subroutine library that could take
special advantage of several processors, and
I asked her about some of that. I mentioned
that it was easy enough just to start some
tasks. She explained, as I recall, how her work also did
careful things about data alignment in interleaved
memory or some such, etc.! That was really getting into the
details!
She was one of the very few women I ever saw in
a STEM subject and good at it.
Her husband was Jack Schwartz of the fundamental
'Linear Operators' with Nelson Dunford, as I
recall, at Yale. Schwartz was long at Courant
and did a programming language SETL, 'set language',
for allowing programming via essentially set
theory notation.
> who were called to be the first programmers of ENIAC.
Interestingly, Ada Lovelace, also a woman, is considered the first programmer. She wrote a program to compute the calculate "a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with [Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine]." [1]
To my understanding, women's involvement in early computers was largely as operators and for data entry. In other words, menial labor. It would be easy to retrospectively recolor this reality, if one wanted, as our understanding of what it means to "program" a computer has changed. Today a programmer writes code, back then a programmer manually entered code written by someone else. Recall the term, "PROM programmer" (burner). A PROM programmer certainly did not architect code.
The idea that coding algorithms into something executable is "menial" labor is pretty insulting to all of us currently coders, but even given that women invented multiplication routines, using human-readable commands and the IDE. That originally all of what we now consider "programming" was assumed to be menial labor is beside the point; they were doing what we're now paid good money for.
I think you misunderstand. What I am saying is that there used to be a role similar to a scribe- someone who toggles switches according to a paper someone else wrote. Someone who feeds into the machine, punch cards someone else wrote. This is the "menial labor" I speak of.
I think two things after reading this. First, I wonder, do men generally experience more positive reinforcement for the acquisition of skills, particularly ones requiring high intelligence, all their lives?
Second, I have never been asked to participate on a panel. Taken further, I've never felt welcome at any conference in this industry. For the most part, I assumed this was unique to me, especially since I wouldn't really enjoy this activity.
Oh, and another thing: I am lesser than no one. I've always believed that. It galls me to be treated this way, but I haven't the slightest idea what I'm supposed to do when it happens.
The goals of this post are noble, and I almost agree with the conclusion. How the post gets there seems to be based out of a very negative conflation.
How is the lack of women in the tech industry, and the offensive notion that women fair poorly in STEM subjects for no other reason than they're women uttered in the same breath? They shouldn't be for the very same reasons as this post extolls.
> Being told that female students fair poorly in STEM subjects, or that the tech industry is lacking in female programmers, for instance, can reinforce those beliefs within women’s minds, leading them to confirm those stereotypes themselves.
Anyone who believes that women inherently do worse in STEM subjects needs to be called out, in the most negative of terms. No one should say it, period.
However, the lack of women in tech is not a stereotype or a belief. It's a fact. I'm not reinforcing a stereotype by mentioning it, I'm pointing out something that needs to be called out at every step, to root out anyone continuing the above mentioned offensive discrimination against women.
Gender-based discrimination being called out and gender based discrimination being committed must be considered different things.
>>Anyone who believes that women inherently do worse in STEM subjects needs to be called out, in the most negative of terms. No one should say it, period.
I don't think the point is that they inherently do worse, but rather that, currently and on average, they do worse.
>Anyone who believes that women inherently do worse in STEM subjects needs to be called out, in the most negative of terms. No one should say it, period.
Outside of a university context, I would agree with you. Statements like this are the reason tenure is still needed in a university setting. No axiom should be sacred if we genuinely care about understanding the world and making the world a better place for everyone.
That depends on the problem that is being solved. For instance, if your goal is to explain away what is obviously the case, then ignoring or hiding the truth is the ONLY solution. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
Instead of supporting feminist policies that help privileged women at the expense of underprivileged men, why not push for underprivileged people to join the tech field?
I've often wondered if our "divide and conquer" approach to dealing with various inequalities is missing the point, and in pursuing specific, targeted policies, we're simply exacerbating the problem
Here is the challenge. If you don't make men aware of the ways that we as an industry fail to be fair, there is no hope of changing it. But if we rub the unfairness of the industry in women's faces, we are creating barriers to fix the problems.
The solution, put in positive terms, is that if you want things to be better, you need to encourage women to look on the positive side.
In that light, I think that if http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/26/software-for-underserved... gets taken to heart by people in the startup community, that will do more to address this issue than any 10 heartfelt rants about the inequity of the present situation. (For those who don't follow the link, it is patio11 pointing out that if you want to create a successful consumer business, the odds are very good that your primary customers will be women.)
> Recent posts on the problems of gender inequality in the tech and science fields have continued to reinforce the idea that women are subordinate to men.
This seems to be one of the main points of this post, but I do not agree. By and large women are subordinate to men in the business world and women do encounter personal and institutionally oriented sexism in tech. Acknowledging and talking about living and dealing with that reality do not reinforce that sexism, that sexism already exists and is a prevalent force and women already know this because they live the experience. On that:
> The sad thing is the effect of repeating these issues on those people who are already affected by the issues themselves, i.e. women who are struggling for equality in the tech and science industries. Hearing that this is a problem, that their field isn’t fair, that men are not including them in the industry the way they should… these negative sentiments are being drilled into the minds of people who could actually change this for the better.
Isn't part of the problem that women are undermined in their attempts to make their working industry and business lives better? What efforts are taken and how they are hampered is directly linked to the current state of how people are treated in business and tech. Sharing that experience is one of the few ways that women can begin form the basis of action that changes communities for the better or creates communities for themselves.
I totally agree with the OP's points of action. However, there are limitations that are externally imposed by women who entered in tech and they have a right to know that. Others have a right to criticize and call out others for sexist rhetoric. On this the OP says:
> No more ‘calling people out’ for making mistakes unless we’re offering to help them fix it.
Someone who is receiving unfair treatment has absolutely no obligation to the person treating them unfairly to be nice to them, so I do not believe this can every be helpful advice where there is a power imbalance. For folks who are peers or part of the same peer group, calling out sexism is an important part of not letting that sexism perpetuate.
>What sane woman would get into tech, when being a lawyer or MBA is so much more lucrative?
I would assume that a rational woman would go into tech for the same reason a man would; because those jobs depend on social skills in a way the tech jobs do not.
I mean, this is changing, some; there are a lot of unemployed lawyers right now, but yeah; the set of people who could be both a good programmer and a good MBA? yeah... uh, that's a small (and very well-paid) set of people. (I mean, sure, most good businesspeople can and probably should learn a little bit of programming... just like most programmers should learn a little business. But for most of us? we can only be really good at one or the other.)
Most of us? we're lopsided. We were born with traits that make it easier to succeed in one are than the other and/or we've been putting effort into one area rather than the other for most of our lives.
This is true of most of the nerds I know, male and female. If you are good at everything? yeah, you get to write your own very expensive ticket. But most of us? well, we chose to focus on one or the other, or we don't and we end up being well-rounded but mediocre.
The thing about this? we make this decision before we are old enough to understand the implications. If you are in college before you decide you want to work with computers, well, I've already spent half my life up to that time practicing. I mean, if you are that much better than me (and really hard working) you can catch up, but I've got a hell of a lead.
This is my personal pet theory to explain the difference in interest; from an early age, boys are taught that they will be valued, mostly, based on what they can do; what they can make happen. I knew that if I could make myself useful, there would be a place for me, society would value me, even if nobody really liked me very much on a personal level, even if I was ugly or unpleasant to be around. Now, I wasn't a girl, so I don't know, but my impression is that this isn't what little girls are taught.
(Now, obviously, I have limited perspective here. This is just what I observe in myself, and what I observe in my peers of both genders. Most nerds seem socially... a little bit broken. It seems to get better with age, but man, the socially optimized have a hell of a head start. I'm sure there are many other factors, but this is how I personally rationalized the decision to become a nerd.)
"[Company] is looking to grow our team with energetic software engineers ready to take on the hardest challenges of their career. Day-to-day responsibilities include challenging and interesting work on algorithms, databases, web technologies, human-computer interaction, scalability and systems architecture."
This position sounds stimulating. Perhaps some ladies are also motivated to pursue careers more for passion than profit?
I offer a learning program called Protocademy (http://protocademy.com). The focus is to learn by building things from the start. Rather than endless reading about syntax, or simple hello world programs. In the current group, there are two young ladies who are doing very well. Their feedback has been very encouraging. But the best thing they told me was the following:
"What we like is that there is no one here judging us for our gender. There is no pressure from men. Some of them feel very threatened when a woman is more skilled or even better at computers."
That is quite the statement, and sadly, true. During all of my years as a programmer, I have come to suffer from such attitude. If you can't code a binary tree with your eyes closed while singing the Start Spangled Banner, then you suck. There is too much ego. Too much macho "I am better than you" stuff going on. Even in interviews, where you get technical leads showing off their knowledge, rather than allowing you to show off yours (isn't that the point?).
I met one of the women in Protocademy while buying a MacBook. She saw my nerdy glases, saw the computer, and asked me about OSX. From there, we started talking about computers and then to video games. Turns out, she is a college student doing a major in IT. Her dream had always been to program, but could never come up with enough guts to do so at college. She is doing quite well these days. Python is like second nature. A good programmer. All she needed was some space to grow.
The lack on women in tech is much like the lack of women in gaming. Guys have pissing matches and are crude to each other. When they do that with women to it is not acceptable workplace behvior. It isn't acceptable when it is just men either, but legal gets involved when you treat a woman with the same level of disrespect.
This is not mirrored in female dominated professions. There is a shortage of male teachers and nurses, but it isn't because the women are so disrespectful of the men.
Being told that female students fair poorly in STEM subjects, or that the tech industry is lacking in female programmers, for instance, can reinforce those beliefs within women’s minds, leading them to confirm those stereotypes themselves.
Beliefs? Stereotypes? Those are facts, dude. As things currently stand, women do perform more poorly than men in STEM, and their numbers are lacking in tech. And what are we supposed to do? Not tell women that, once they join the tech field, they will be viewed as anomalies, treated as sex objects and feel very lonely? Are we supposed to con women into joining tech?
In order to improve the status quo, we first need to acknowledge it, openly and fearlessly. There's no way around that. Facts won't go anywhere just by refraining from stating them.
For instance, this quote from Upstart:
“Stereotypes remain a huge limiting factor for women, who are often seen as ”too aggressive“ when they succeed, Sandberg said. ”As men get powerful and successful, everyone likes them better.”
But when women achieve success, “everyone likes them worse,”
Huh, I thought we were trying to avoid generalizations and stereotypes here...
It turns out that which facts you focus on affects your performance. Reminding women of all of the negatives makes them less likely to succeed. That's worth remembering.
Speaking of which facts you focus on, did you notice that the article was not written by a dude?
I only have anecdotal experience, but I know I see more suggestive images with ladies as the subject in videogames and "hipster" tech companies than say... in AT&T.
Assuming the industry is 80% men and 20% women, and that the kind of genitalia you have doesn't affect your intelligence or proficiency in CS, and that the best, most proficient people should be speakers on panels... doesn't that mean that panels should be, on average, about 80% men and 20% women?
Anything more than that is over representation of women. This is just misandry I'm reading here.
As someone who studied psychology before coming to tech, this phenomenon is fairly well documented. If you want, you can have a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat
I think it matches up well with what was discussed in this blog post.
There are only two ways the percentage of women in tech can get higher: 1) more women could enter tech. Safe for getting a sex change, men can't do much about that. 2) less men could enter tech, men already in tech could leave tech.
I only skimmed the article, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the article mistake correlation for causation big time? Students were asked to choose a topic, what if students who choose to write about values just don't care about other people's opinion, and thus perform better at it?
What evidence is there to point to a causal relationship?
The students were assigned to one of two groups. Each group was given the same list of values. One group was asked to write about the one most important to them. The other group (the control group) was asked to write about the least important one to them and why someone else might find it important.
What a poorly researched article. The author takes one study on test scores and extrapolates it out to the whole career field. And her whole solution is "be positive, don't be negative". Well, isn't that common sense?
I'm going to take a huge leap here and assume Project Manager.
A pretty common abbreviation in tech, the context should have tipped you off.
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edit: One startup I worked for that focused on improving federal regulation compliance in the banking sector had a team of 5 project managers, 1 was male. Our product management team was entirely female.
Rebecca J. Rosen’s suggestion that men take a pledge to appear only on panels that include at least one female speaker again reinforced the idea that women are underrepresented in this area. In fact, in pointing out that it’s unlikely no women are qualified for these panels, and yet there are still no women appearing on them, Rebecca is reinforcing the idea that this is an unfair and unexplainable issue for women to fight against
The idea that no women on a conference panel implies the conference organizers believe no women are even "qualified" (whatever that means) to be on the panel and, ipso facto, sexism must be at play is on its face so stupid and devoid of meaning that it reads like a paragraph from a contrived newspaper used as a prop in a bad movie.
The only practical, field-tested way to get more women into tech is to lower tech's prestige. Once that happens, men will flee to other careers, thereby creating vacancies that can be filled by women. Problem solved.
