The tech industry norms have ended up favouring a very specific type of individual, and that is the fundamental problem that we need to address in order to get the genuinely diverse workforce that I believe we need. What usually frustrates me about the "sexism" debate is that it studiously avoids addressing these issues, and drowns out most attempts to focus on them.
Poor industry retention seems to be a problem across the board.
I'm in my mid-40s and could retire today if I wanted to. I don't because I really enjoy the challenge and stimulation of my work, but I could.
To the extent that's the root cause of low industry retention, I'd consider it a feature not a bug.
There are a lot of problems, they have varying magnitudes, and some people choose to focus on a particular problem. That's okay. It's frustrating how often it seems like feminists are expected to solve every problem in the world simultaneously to legitimize their attempts to solve one problem.
If we came together as people, regardless of gender, and demanded more rights in the work place (family leave instead of just focusing on maternity leave for example), we would have a LOT more standing to accomplish our goals.
By fragmenting the population, telling the middle class white guy it's his fault the middle class white woman doesn't have maternity leave because the boss happens to be a white male (though upperclass), you are only hurting your cause.
A discriminatory bias cannot be measured by simple proportions, like how many women work at Company X out of the total, and therefore it cannot be eliminated by something naive like a hiring quota or similar. Such a program necessarily involves making decisions based on gender, and so on and so doesn't avoid being bad.
The concept of "workforce diversity" is basically rooted in poor understanding of statistics, together with a willingness to apply a corrective discrimination. Even if half the software developers in a country are women, and there is no bias anywhere, it can still so happen that men constitute, say, 80% of the developers in some organization. Such an event has a certain nonzero probability which allows it to happen.
I have to take issue with this. Work/life balance is indeed a common problem in tech, with long working hours expected in many places when they make up unreasonable schedules.
However, I've never heard of traveling or commuting being big problems in tech at all. In my years as a software engineer, I only traveled a lot for a telecommute job where I had to meet with customers and also travel to the home office; outside of that I've barely traveled at all (and a good chunk of that was at a job during the dot-com boom when they were really liberal with travel funds and sent people to a lot of overpriced conferences and trade shows). For programmers, travel just isn't a big part of the job, unless you have a rare job where you need to meet with customers a lot (which is usually more of an applications engineering or sales support role).
As for commuting, that's entirely based on where you choose to live. It's probably a problem in the Bay Area, but in most other places it's no more a problem for tech workers than everyone else. Every metro area has problems with commuting: people frequently live not that close to work, due either to housing prices or because they already had a house and happened to get a job on the other side of the city or something. This isn't unique to tech jobs, except maybe the Bay Area thing because that metro area is dominated by tech jobs.
The problem with work/life balance in tech is working hours, and that's it. Tech workers are frequently expected to work too much, young males with no social lives are too often willing or able to dedicate too many hours to their jobs (thus making those who don't look bad), and as a result, people who value their free time (like, oh, women who tend to get pregnant and have children) don't do so well and get forced out.
Honestly, I'm not sure what the answer here is. Flexible working hours aren't going to help a working mother much if she's still expected to put in 12 hour days. The only answer I see is eliminating the "exempt" status for tech workers and having them be paid hourly like factory workers. This of course has its own set of problems. But it's exactly what they do for, say, nurses, who are also professional workers who are usually college educated.
Being able to live in that bubble is probably dependent on class, status, confidence and certain personality traits; but it is possible and that's great!
It is really important though to realize that it is a bubble and to be mindful of where it ends and what happens when you hit the edges of the bubble.
Source: Being LGBT in Amsterdam and having lived in a similar bubble for a long time but eventually having it burst.
You've never had a pathological arsehole for a boss?
You'll meet more obstacles set up by people with institutional power over you at school and university than you ever will in the "real world".
(alternatively, "you're only 15, you don't have a rep yet")
So, no more "ladies first" and gentleman treatment for women?
There is a strong argument to say the golden rule is really saying "treat others the way society tells you to" and some contend it should simply be "treat others the way they want to be treated".
Of course at that point you've lost the simplicity of the original phrase and the primary teaching implement of self interest.
Not to mention, at some point there are limits to the extent I am going to pander to someones wishes in how they want to be treated. I respect your right to self-identify as an attack helicopter, but I'm not going to bow my head as I approach to avoid your rotor blades.
If you speak to a female colleague, is it something you can say to your own mother and be taken as appropriate? Same for if it were a male colleague, are the words appropriate to say to your own father?
If the answer is "No" then don't say it, I wish more companies would enforce this in their culture.
I've run into childish inappropriateness more than anything, phrases not indented to harass, but are extremely disrespectful, not funny, and easily taken the wrong way.
An example: 5 of us, one of them a female, were chatting in a breakroom when a male colleague joked about using a "fleshlight" to relieve stress (I am leaving out details to keep this short). He was straight out of college and didn't have much professional experience. The female in the group became visibly uncomfortable and left. Since the conversation was more about to know our colleague's hobbies outside of work, it was an incredibly awkward turn to the conversation. "Pfff, what's with HER?" the offending person asks as the female walks off, not knowing what he did, so another male in the group asked him if he talks to his mom "like that" about his fleshlight habit, it wasn't until then that he realized he was being inappropriate and he then apologized to everyone. He also sought out the female who left the conversation to apologize to her directly. He learned his lesson, but I've seen examples on BOTH sides of inappropriate talk that can alienate a person who's gender is in the minority of the group.
* I talk to my coworkers like they are my mother
and your colleague's
* I talk to my coworkers like they are my friends
The fact that the statement was non-sexist hints at the problem being the second mindset; as for me, I make sure not to say sexist (and racist and so on) things to anyone but I am okay with talking about sex and other personal-jovial matters with my actual friends.
The "mother" analogy still has some flaws, though -- for instance, you can talk to your mother about financial, health-related and personal troubles, whereas your coworkers will feel uneasy with such information. Another thing is politics -- I try to politely argue against my mother's political views (say anti-immigration), but I think doing so in the workplace is a very bad idea.
Politics is a bit of a gray area. It's very easy to make people uncomfortable without realizing it, it's just a shitstorm waiting to happen. I try to avoid it unless I'm speaking in private with a colleague who I know extremely well.
One thing to consider is that "Tech" encompasses a number of organization types. Organizations vary in both how large and bureaucratic they are as well as how ruthlessly competitive they are. Working at Intel years ago, I saw an organization committed to equality in the work place but with a brutal demand that everyone produce.
The worst offenders for sexism seem to be small organizations with a brutally competitive environments but not having bureaucratic restraints on bad behavior - Zillow, etc[1].
Honestly, the answer seems to be that you need more regulation and especially regulation that will hit small bad actor companies hard. The rules hardly have to be "special", just a basic demand for proper behavior and an understanding there will be serious consequences for violation.
[1] http://fortune.com/2014/12/05/zillow-discrimination-lawsuit/
That's my feeling as well. My sister has worked in tech since 1981, but it's not Silicon Valley tech. It's large company tech like IBM and Citigroup. I asked if she's ever felt discriminated against and she said never. The closest she's come is working for a company that had a bit of a military culture because most of the senior leadership were ex-military. But even there she never felt discriminated against for being a woman per se.
As someone whose listened to actual women with Math, CS, and EE degrees (and women who are working in technical roles without degrees in those fields, as both women and men in the field do), I disagree. You'll hear a mix of stories from those women, some positive, some as bad (or worse) than those from women "tangentially involved" in tech.
OTOH, I don't think that sexism in the tech industry would fail to be a problem if it only victimized women in non- (or less-)technical roles within the industry.
> Technology companies are generally considered to be some of the most sought-after employers in the world. We have an inherent “home field advantage” when it comes to recruiting the largest and richest talent pools of our most critical position: software engineers. However, despite this advantage, our data indicates that software engineering teams in tech have proportionally fewer women than several non-tech industries; namely healthcare, retail, government, education, and nonprofits. For example, a typical software engineering team in a healthcare company is likely to be 32% women, compared to 20% in technology. While these non-tech industries employ significantly fewer software engineers versus technology, their teams tend to exhibit greater gender parity.
You don't end up with 50% women in other industries with basically the same role without some sort of reason.
That conclusion cannot reasonably be inferred from the post you are responding to.
From my perspective as a software engineer, we work in a male-dominated field, and we've made the work culture and norms what we want them to be [1]. The few women who do end up on engineering tracks often leave, and in a lot of cases they move into engineering support roles (dev evangelist, marketing, etc.).
I think Adria Richards is a loud, exceptional example that doesn't tell the story here. The reality is, this is a very quiet, insidious problem; women are walking away from our field, or just not showing up.
I don't believe that half of the best of the best talent pool just doesn't want to do engineering like the other half. There's a reason they're disinclined, and I accept that I'm part of it -- I'd like to see it change, and I think we have a responsibility to do better. I believe that as an industry, our future suffers for it.
http://www.usnews.com/news/stem-index/articles/2015/06/29/ge... [1]
In 2013, only 26% of computing professionals were female — down considerably from 35% in 1990 and virtually the same as in 1960. While the percentage of women in engineering has risen since 1990, the progress is modest –rising from 9% in 1990 to 12% in 2013.
http://fortune.com/2015/03/26/report-the-number-of-women-ent... [2]
People make this argument about female dominated fields (particularly education and nursing, which are, or have been, areas of perceived shortages) all the time; they probably don't make it as often in tech industry focused discussion fora, for reasons of lack of relevance to the venue.
http://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Registered_Nurse_(RN...
The average yearly income of a nurse in my country is between $3k less, and $10k more than the average salary of a software developer in my country, depending on the source.
Although the stresses are perhaps not comparable, it's important to note that a nurse working the same hours as a typical software developer could expect to earn around twice as much.
Mind you, educational requirements may be more expensive than for software developers. I'm not familiar enough to speak to that.
http://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Employer=Toronto_Distric...
An average elementary school teacher in a nearby city makes about $3k less than an average software developer, with around 7 weeks paid leave. At least one female respondent in another nearby municipality recorded having 10 weeks of paid leave and full benefits. With that, I think that total compensation must be at least on-par.
http://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Social_Worker/Salary...
Average salary of a social worker is around $15k less than that of software developers in my country. I don't know as much about social work. I suspect it's good, hard work. I hear that it's risky. Benefits packages are mostly ubiquitous though.
Of the small sample on this site, all respondents said that they were extremely satisfied with their employment as a Social worker.
http://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Clinical_Psychologis...
Average clinical psychologist salaries are about $25k higher than average software developer salaries in my country. Likely owing to higher typical educational requirements.
Of the small sample on this site, all respondents said that they were extremely satisfied with their employment as a Clinical Psychologist.
Teachers in the US make on average $58k or so, varying from state to state quite a lot. It's about $30k less than the average software developer in the US, and if you're not very senior as a teacher you might get fired every year and rehired in fall. It's not a very secure job in many places, actually, even if you can teach math or science.
Nurses in the US make a lot more money, on par with developers, but much more physically and emotionally demanding.
Your comment has little to do with the comment you are responding to.
The sexism debate has indeed painted a bleak picture, people so often try to show a different side of the picture but end up using the wrong words or simply adding ambiguity to the discussion, most of the time only making the matter more complicated, and worst of all, pulling us even further from a potential solution. This one showed us not only a potential solution, but also proved it's effectiveness.
Lea Verou (the author of the article) perfectly explains that even though there is undoubtedly a problem, a problem whose degree is not/can not be calculated (she also indirectly, simply by not giving it more article-time, makes us understand that the lack of statistics doesn't mean this problem doesn't exist or should not be resolved), this problem can and has already been solved, not by company policies or special rules, but simply by people treating others (women included) nicely, or as my first grade teacher taught me, by following the golden rule, treat others the way you want to be treated, and amazingly across all mindsets and ways of thinking this rule means, for anyone beginning from the wee age that they understand what those words mean, that one should be treated in a way that is free of bias, fair and rational.
I will read this article again, and I will recommend it to friends and acquaintances and family, because sexism is a problem beyond tech too (in certain industries it might be an even bigger problem). I think this article and hopefully ones like it that either exist already that I do not know of, or ones that will be written afterwards, are a great way to make us realise that all people should be treated the way that we want to be treated, and I truly believe that will be enough to fix the problem of "women in tech".