As late as 1970, the top five orchestras in the U.S. had fewer than 5% women. It wasn’t until 1980 that any of these top orchestras had 10% female musicians. But by 1997, they were up to 25% and today some of them are well into the 30s.
In the 1970s and 1980s, orchestras began using blind auditions. Candidates are situated on a stage behind a screen to play for a jury that cannot see them. In some orchestras, blind auditions are used just for the preliminary selection while others use it all the way to the end, until a hiring decision is made.
Even when the screen is only used for the preliminary round, it has a powerful impact; researchers have determined that this step alone makes it 50% more likely that a woman will advance to the finals. And, indeed, the screen has also been demonstrated to be the source of a surge in the number of women being offered positions.
So there is another field like CS where this approach actually helped a significant amount.
http://curt-rice.com/2013/10/01/what-the-worlds-best-orchest...
Steps that make the profession as a whole less biased against women, might also help to encourage more women to major in CS.
I find it insufficient to answer the question of whether sexism is the problem. Computer programming used to have a lot more women -- why did that change? If it was changing interest, what is the source of the gender imbalance in the change in interest? Certainly, the perception that there was gender bias in the field arose while the rate at which women were participating was dropping from its high -- was gender bias in the field part of the cause of disinterest?
The graph[1] that is usually shown is highly misleading, because it compares CS with "physical sciences", and law, but does not include engineering. If you add engineering, it all makes a bit more sense[2].
Also, you seem to be approaching this from the angle of "can we prove that it isn't sexism" (which is the common approach). It seems that the correct approach is for those who claim that it is sexism to make the case, which after looking at the evidence I think they absolutely have not. (I used to think it was, but that was because I bought the narrative without looking at the evidence).
And the narrative is strong. For example, the link to the percentage of women decreasing with the discipline becoming more engineering like is known. However, the explanation then shifts to "the men in CS got together and decided to make the discipline more engineering-like expressly in order to keep the women out". Seriously??
[1] https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/10/21/womencoding_wide...
[2] https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/06b/02d/33fe648.jpg
How so? I feel exactly opposite is true. I'm successful developer with over 10 years of commercial exp with masters degree from technical university and in wildest dreams I wouldn't call myself engineer without laughing even though I have it written among other things on my diploma. I feel more like artist, craftsman or repirman.
I have yet to see a valid study showing this. Instead, I've seen numerous studies that have not mentioned that a 'computer programmer' included employees whose job consisted of transferring punch cards and tapes. Obviously these jobs are no longer required.
The only statistics that show even a tiny bit of proof for your argument come from Soviet based nations that did have a higher percent of women in actual programming positions
Very long ago, computer programming was seen as being like typing and/or secretarial work. It was seen as being unmanly. Compare with nursing and kindergarten teaching.
A woman might get assigned to invent COBOL instead of being in charge of an aircraft carrier.
Well, we got rid of the sexism. Happy now? Hmmm, guess not.
Anyway, in the 17 years I've been doing this on and off, I have met precisely 1 female boilermaker. And nobody cares.
What I don't follow is why is gender imbalance in other industries seen as a problem but we never see any serious attempt to get more women in to the construction industry.
Why does anyone care there are differences in numbers of men and women in various industries? Things change over time, fashions change. I think approaching these issues from the "we must correct this imbalance" is incorrect reasoning.
And, lastly, if we do manage to level the playing field, what will gender identity become?
A quote form the film Trainspotting: One thousand years from now, there will be no guys and no girls, just wankers.
I'm willing to posit that strong gender roll identity is crucial for a healthy and resilient culture.
Software is eating the world, there's so much work to do, and a thought that anyone that could be a programmer isn't for some silly reason, is very unpleasent.
"Women aren't interested in programming, so none of them go into programming professionally.
Why don't women go into programming professionally? Because they aren't interested."
Separate out whether women are interested from whether women are being forced out for other reasons (harassment, gender imbalance in the field, etc).
IF women aren't interested in programming, THEN none of them go into programming professionally.
IF women don't go into programming professionally, THEN they aren't interested."
I have 2 better questions to ask:
1) If fewer women than "the ideal" are interested in STEM, then why is that?
2) Why do we think a perfect 50/50 ratio across all fields is "the ideal," when "nature" might not deem it so? (note: this is NOT an "argument to nature")
Positive (for males) gender prejudice in a wide array of higher-status, better-compensated jobs drawing men disproportionately elsewhere. Which is kind of a mix of both of your options.
Come on.
Opportunities were limited for women. Don't assume that computing was the first choice career for those women.
Even had the Navy not had gender-restricted roles, the only reason Dr. Hopper got an exemption from physical requirements she did not meet was her strong background in math and physics that qualified her to fill the need for the computation project.
Gender bias aside, she would never have gotten to command an aircraft carrier.
High stakes testing, unrealistic workloads, research professors who don't grok humans and incredibly cliquey ethnic divisions exaggerated by lots of foreign students.
We don't get to blame supply until those numbers match.
This alone might account for the difference in percentages there, assuming there's some hidden "adversity event" that caused the attrition.
Perhaps (speculating here), men handle rejection from jobs better because they handle rejection from the opposite sex better (due to years of honed experience) :O
It sounds sexist to say "grow a pair," but perhaps we need to teach women more confidence somehow.
I personally find this fascinating--a biological basis carries with it a possibility of pharmacological treatment for those wanting it, and perhaps the design and validation of nonpharmacological approaches for those who don't or third parties seeking to reduce bias.
IIRC, there are a couple experiments in rat models along the lines of: put a male or a female rat in the same cage as an aggressive, territorial rat. The male rats are back to normal within hours-days. The female rats take days-weeks. IIRC some sort of neuronal transcription factor or something is thought involved.
Can track down a review if anyone's interested.
When a person decide to take up a job that is not typical for their gender and goes against ones gender identity, that decision might not bring the same confidence that someone taking a job where 80% of the people around are of the same gender as the person. That lower confidence get then translated into higher drop rates.
That is nowhere near what I encountered in my large engineering school. CS101 was probably 33% women, but after a month, we were down to about 15%. By the 4th year, maybe 10% at best.
From what I can see based on many of the millenials I now interview, there is a huge difference in degrees based on school, much more than before. It seems like many low tier schools are pumping out degrees in any field as long as they've paid the inflated tuition. I don't consider a CS degree that didn't require a few semesters of calculus, algorithms, learning C and assembly to be valid. But it appears this is now common for these 'CS lite' degrees.
By your logic, I should hire 2 men, because dividing that candidate pool in half leaves the women at "less than half of a person". Equivalently, I should leave it up to a coin flip, which has an expected value of E(two men).
But why? Since we have already established that the candidates are in all other respects equal, why shouldn't I choose the candidates that I think will do my company the most good: bring in the most diverse perspectives, life experiences, and skill sets?
Of course it is a simplified example. And maybe you think that expressing an interest in diversity in this fashion is "reverse sexism". But I think it is a clear win for my company, a clear win for women everywhere, and I don't care if it isn't a clear win for men -- we win often enough anyway.
No we haven't. We've established that the candidates are all people you want to hire. That doesn't mean you have no preference between them. It would be really weird if ten candidates all seemed equally competent.
And if you can rank them, ~2% of the time there'll be two women at the top, ~36% of the time there'll be a man and a woman, and the rest of the time there'll be two men.
> men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women. Interviewee technical score wasn’t faring that well either — men on the platform had an average technical score of 3 out of 4, as compared to a 2.5 out of 4 for women.
Primarily: the youngest person auditioning for a top orchestra in 1970 was a teenager in the late 50's, when the female role model was the stay-at-home mother. A person first auditioning ten years later was a teenager in the late '60s, when the female role model was going through a revolution.
Moreover, the idea that anatomy and physiology don't condition preferences or behaviors flies in the face of everything we know about human biology and (embodied) cognition. Let's recognize gender/feminist theory for what they are: a sociological theories, not scientific ones.
Equality, in the sense of gender or racial equality, does not mean we're all the same de naturae. It means we should be treated the same de jure.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...
Please stop blaming the pipeline for the difference. Interested, qualified women are being pushed away from the field by bias and attrition, and that's a problem we should be trying to solve.
My impression is there are a lot of programming jobs where having a terrible work/life balance is expected. I'm a man and I would avoid such jobs. Perhaps women, including those who earn CS degrees, are statistically more likely than men to feel the way I do about work/life balance. The result would be fewer women working in the field without the environment being sexist or discriminatory.
How about "pulled away"? Maybe it isn't politically correct to desire being a stay-at-home mom, but it happens rather often. Sometimes this is an unexpected turn of events, with changing life priorities. Sometimes it is the goal right from the start.
I met a woman in college who literally said she was getting her MRS degree. That is, she went to college to meet a suitable husband and become a "Mrs.", as in "Mrs. Doe". It happens. This is real.
It's not a problem to be solved unless you have a negative attitude toward homemakers. People choose their own path in life. This might not meet your standard, but your standard might not maximize life satisfaction for everybody.
Was she taking computer science?
If we're going to talk anecdotes here, every computer science major I've ever met has done it either for the sunny career prospects or because they were genuinely interested in the subject matter - and usually both. I do not buy your premise that students are graduating from computer science in order to not have a career in it.
My wife: was capable in computer science, got through 3 years of a degree before kids interfered, was mildly interested in career prospects but very relieved to realize that I could fully support her, was mildly interested in the subject matter
Had my wife taken another year to become pregnant, she'd have graduated. That would put her in your statistic as a woman who graduated but didn't end up in the field. As it is, she's in the "women who drop out of computer science" group, usually assumed to have been pushed out somehow.
Actually graduating and having a career was kind of a "Plan B" thing, although my wife wasn't quite as deliberate as that other woman.
I met another woman who dropped the career about a year after graduating in computer science from a near-top school. She went on leave to have a baby, then simply stayed home. She didn't need the money, so why be away from the adorable little baby?
These women don't have the values that you evidently have. They aren't being pushed out. They are being pulled away by things that they value more. They don't have to comply with your value system.
There are structural problems that make the available talent pool unequal per-capita anyway (women being socially pressured out of software engineering, resulting in a lack of role models, etc. I'm sure there are plenty of other factors).
Part of changing the dynamic will take decades because _currently_ a smaller percentage of all women in the world are software engineers vs men. No one wants to hire incompetent women engineers just to fulfill a quota and all the people I've talked to about this seem to recognize and understand it. Mostly what seems to piss people off (and rightly so) is when people try to claim there isn't any bias, there isn't any problem, and everything is just fine as-is.
If all else were equal, what total percentage of women would want to be software engineers and would be good at it? I have no idea, but it does seem clear that we are far away from that number. As long as we can all agree that the structural problems should be addressed then I think we also understand that it isn't going to be 50/50 overnight and it might never be 50/50. But 90/10 is clearly unbalanced in a way that is not correlated with women's aptitude or ability to write software.
I think we should be a welcoming community and make reasonable efforts to make anyone who wants to join it feel comfortable. I don't understand the constant desire to rules-lawyer or dismiss such a simple and straightforward idea: don't be an asshole, be considerate of others, encourage those who are interested to learn.
In the end I have to think it is partially driven by fear and self-doubt, like maybe if we let black people or more women into the club it will all be over. Global demand for software engineering talent outstrips the supply and software is eating the world. My talents have never been in higher demand. My life is not diminished by nursing mother facilities, unisex bathrooms, coding events in black neighborhoods, attempts to reduce bias in interviews, et al.
"Gender gap" is a fancy way of saying "not 50%". More to the point, assumptions are often unstated, as I'm sure you know.
I agree with you insofar as the mechanisms you point out are likely contributers to this so-called gap. Rather, I'm highlighting that -- unpopular though this notion may be in certain circles -- part of this effect is likely to be driven by bottom-up biological factors.
How big is this part? I haven't got a clue.
I'm copying my "tl;dr" from the above comment because it applies here as well: if we're going to have an honest debate, we have to entertain the notion that at least part of the gender gap is the result of "nature", rather than "nurture".
Addressing disparity in the pipeline is a separate issue.
No. Gender gap is underrepresentation relative to the qualified labor market. Right now the gender ratio in entry-level software engineering jobs does not represent the segment that would be interested in and qualified for them (CS grads).
The 10% difference between grads and junior developers is on us to fix.
You say elsewhere that while 20 percent (the actual number is around 18) of CS grads are women, only 10 percent of junior devs are in fact female. Others have mentioned that maybe the women went on to graduate school or are working some CS related job that doesn't fit the definition of "junior dev".
The latter points seem reasonable to me but you keep bringing it up though so here's my question, where do you think 50 percent of female grads are ending up? The unemployment line? That would seem like a very large number of people, such a large number that it would have been recorded somewhere. Do you have any actual statistical data beyond the raw numbers you keep bringing up?
But that's not the point. A supply of women with both the qualifications and the interest exists. We ought to be seeing a representative sample of that supply, and we should do what we can to avert bias within our organizations.
According to your source, the unemployment rate for women in Computer and mathematical occupations in May was 2.6 vs 1.8 percent for men. That's actually a 31 percent higher amount. Still high but not 50 as you claimed in your previous post. It also says the rate for May of 2015 was exactly the same for both genders at 1.5 percent. This issue has gotten a lot of press in the last 12 months so it is very unlikely that suddenly the numbers are disparate as a result of discrimination after they were the same a year ago.
And in other sectors on your chart like in Management, professional, and related occupations, the unemployment figures are the opposite. Women unemployment went from higher to lower than the men's rate. I mean, in Architecture and engineering occupations, the unemployment rate of men is literally 100 percent higher than women at 2.2 vs 1.1 percent. It just looks like natural statistical gyrations of numbers and not conclusive or even particularly indicative of anything.
And the point is, if you are saying that huge numbers of women are graduating with these degrees and then being shut out of the job market, you can't just stop there, you have to back that up. Even ignoring the fact that just because someone has a degree doesn't mean they're qualified, quoting the percent of females in entry level dev jobs doesn't say anything about where the other women went or what they are doing. I'm pointing out that if they're out there looking for these jobs then the unemployment statistics should reflect that and via your source, they don't. Other posters have suggested graduate school and other jobs not described as entry level dev and so far that explanation seems more plausible. Ask yourself, what are CS graduates qualified to do besides be junior devs and you may be surprised with how many answers there are.
I think where your confusion lies is in order for there to be discrimination, there has to actually be discrimination. Point out the discrimination, who's doing it, which companies, what policy allows this, and we can all rally and do something about it. But just throwing out cherry picked employment numbers and claiming bias is somehow self evident which is what your argument implies isn't good enough. It actually comes across as a kind of weird p-hacking[0]. Even worse is when you introduce a credibility problem by conflating different employment sectors and inflating your numbers like you have here.
What if some percent of those women simply went into a slightly different career?
From the study you linked to:
"As suggested by previous literature and the present study, interests stabilize at an early age. Given the essential role of family and other environmental influences in the socialization process of children and their interest development, it may be important for parents, educators, and counselors to be involved early on, when interests seem more malleable."
i.e. the study accepts the theory that environment, family and in general socialization, contribute to a child's interests. This is the exact opposite of what you claim in your comment
"It is important to note that group differences do not speak for every individual within a group,and it is not the purpose of the present study to reify the stereo-types that men and women are interested in their “traditional”areas."
The study is talking about d < 1 effect sizes. That means that there is a still a significant part of the group that is more interested in a subject than a significant part of the other group. Think of two mostly overlapping normal curves.
"it is beyond the scope of the present study to provide a detailed exploration of the environmental, social, and biological factors that have contributed to the development of these sex differences"
The study makes no claim as to the cause of these sex differences. They only point out that there is a difference and suggest "environmental, social, and biological factors" as the cause. Again, the opposite of what you claim.
What a strange comment (you don't paraphrase; you caricature)! I'm not saying any of this! Where did you get the impression that I was?
I agree with all your points, btw. The existence of these differences doesn't enlighten us as to their causes, proximal or distal.
Rather, we have much evidence showing that anatomy and physiology influence cognition. Does this explain the gender gap completely? That's unlikely, but it's equally unlikely that the gender gap would disappear if only the "mean old white men stopped being jerks".
tl;dr: if we're going to have an honest debate, we have to entertain the notion that at least part of the gender gap is the result of "nature".
I think we agree that the assumption that "removing interviewer/managerial bias will result in a gender ratio of 50%" is false. The variability of sex differences in vocational interests probably accounts for more of the gap than bias in the hiring process, i.e. "mean old white men". I can also accept that physiology influences cognition, although where we disagree is how much of a factor that is in the gender gap, or how relevant it is to any sort of policy decision.
Removing bias in the hiring process wont solve the gender gap entirely, but it will help it.
Telling girls that they can do and be whatever they want wont solve the gender gap entirely, but it will help it.
Changing the masculine and sexist culture in STEM wont completely solve the issue either.
There is basically nothing that can remove the hypothetical physiological factors contributing to gender disparity in STEM fields. So why are we even talking about it? It derails the conversation. There are things that can be done, and we should do them. Until we reach the limit of what is possible according to your hypothetical physiological explanation, why bother even bringing it up?
If you have a manager who thinks women can't code, and you institute a blind hiring process, you're just going to put that newly-hired woman under a manager who thinks women can't code? What then?
It really feels like the end solution to this is going to be "(white) men are not allowed to be hiring managers because they can't be trusted to follow our agenda"
Yes. The problem is that the manager thinks women can't code, and the best way to solve that is to prove him wrong.
Haven't we just reinforced his bias further, now cemented by hard fact (and faulty reasoning)?
edit: missed a word
This narrative that women are somehow grossly discriminated against in tech doesn't hold water anywhere I see. Every tech company is desperate to hire more women engineers to increase their diversity quotient. The trouble is that most applicants, by a 95%-to-5% margin, are men. It only makes sense that 95% of the hires are men. If we want more women engineering talent in the office, we simply need more women applicants. Focusing on the interview stage is the wrong part of the pipeline to start at.
That would be illegal, at least in the US.
I'm going to assert something first; you may chose to disagree, but my statement requires this lemma: We are (as a society/science/etc) absolutely _shit_ at most things psychology. Next to "food science" it's the field I give some of the least credence to findings in unless they are so massively replicated and built in an unrealistically airtight way. The very nature of these fields, the number of convoluting variables and our inability to even observe outcomes accurately makes the process of study extremely difficult, and "p-hacking" (as another comment elsewhere referenced in a very appropriate noun choice) becomes very feasible and less detectable. (As a "data-engineer/scientist/whatever we're called these days" I see this effect daily; it's a common topic in my office that often the desire from management is not to find a result, but for us to find the result that says what they want, and that's in often FAR more measurable and empirical spaces)
From this, my core question; if it is illegal to hire based on gender ratios, what about the process of adjusting your hiring practice, adjusting which findings you chose to perscribe to, such that you achieve the end ratio you desire?
To illustrate this I'll give an absurd example to demonstrate "feasibility": Let's say I'm actively racist and don't want to hire white people. I start by putting my hiring centers around inner city low cost residences; I preferentially hire lower income candidates "as a social program", and I hire with a bias based on referrals of existing candidates. I argue that my motive is achieved through a layer of "legal" "massage-able" legitimate decisions.
So the questions I'd leave with:
First, when do these stop being "reasonable choices" in isolation and start becoming a discriminatory strategy
Second, and regardless of my above, can you see why I might find the cut and dry statement of "hiring based on a desired gender ratios is illegal" VERY hypocritical in the current environment of EXTREMELY STRONG DESIRE to hire based on gender ratio, even if it's a "rectification"? (To this topic, I'm also curious tangentially in how affirmative action fit into this framework in the past, I understand the purpose and don't want to turn this into an argument of it's merits, but it seems like a prime example where the courts pulled off making discrimination legal, so the black and white statement of "IS ILLEGAL" seems like it's been dealt with in the past)
Finally, do you see the parallels I'm trying to draw, or can you find a flaw in the correlation?
In fact, that will happen — still hiring more men than women — for lots of systemic reasons, but at least you'll have eliminated one vector of bias. Seems better to end up imbalanced in a more impartial way.
I'm not making a normative statement here, I'm simply stating the fact that no one will come after you if you do this. Companies and colleges say all the time that they're looking for a specific ratio of races and genders and nothing happens to them.
As far as University enrollment, women have led the numbers for years so that isn't really at the heart of it. More so the subjects they choose as a major/minor being the issue.
Marketing STEM majors to minorities and women has been a priority for a short amount of time, so we will see how it pans out in the next decade.
We're all ok with the idea that men don't really want to be early childhood educators (Pre-k through grade 2). It's a big deal when a guy applies for those jobs, according to teachers I know. Then, of course, come the endless jokes about the pedophile trying to get a job with kids, how he is going to need a female escort when dealing with the kids, etc.
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/01/479795967/asian-american-group...
[0]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/03/bbc-criticised-by...
This was specifically found unconstitutional in Bakke (1979)[1] and had very real consequences for UC Davis. While I don't know about the internals of any state university admission programs, I find it highly unlikely any state schools would publicly acknowledge that they seek specific racial quotas as that puts them in immediate and grave legal jeopardy.
That's because that's not illegal.
Hiring only X (gender/race/etc.) to achieve the ratio you want, OTOH, is among the many means to realize such targets that are illegal.
They'll come up with some bullshit like "since women aren't the majority of hiring managers, this doesn't count as discrimination" or something. Like they have with racism (where black people in America literally can't be racist).
Yes, but what many people stereotype "affirmative action" as being, or at least including -- notably, including the upthread suggestion characterized as "let's just hire only women for a while to balance out the numbers" -- is not only not required even in that context, it is quite illegal (and would be equally illegal if, say, "blacks" replaced "women" in the description.)
It's possible, but also the converse is possible. Shall we find out?
I think the idea is that the company can then say: but we used a gender-mask, so you can't blame us. A form of plausible deniability.
Why don't we have similar outrage over the fact that most teachers and nurses are women? Why is STEM and IT in particular receiving all this attention? There are already more women than men attending college, the consequences of that alone will push the needle beyond where it would "normally" be (whatever that is, an incalculable value currently)
Any field that appears lucrative and is not represented by 50% woman becomes a target for 3rd wave feminists to pull the gender card. It's quite obvious to anyone paying attention - there is not a peep from this group when it's pointed out that there are all sorts of professions with variations in gender ratios.
Not a word is mentioned when it's stated that the most dangerous and often least desirable jobs are nearly 100% men. No issue when the vast majority of job losses in 2008 were in industries typically worked by men. And when woman have the upper hand in professions, especially those funded publicly (teachers, bureaucrats, administers, etc.), it's not something to be discussed. It looks like women under 30 now actually make more than men in the exact same jobs.
If and when the CS field is finally gutted enough by continuing offshoring, H1b body shops, and the next bubble collapse, and wages get pulled back down towards the median, it will be interesting to watch all concern for this 'issue' evaporate as the movement sets its sights on the next hot industry that doesn't have a woman majority. See the legal profession for a good example.
Let's pretend someone invents the perfect "gender bias-free" system: no names, no faces, voices are flawlessly transcribed on-the-fly so you can't pick up on speech patterns. What if it works perfectly and you still end up hiring more men than women? I think exercises like this may end up giving people answers they don't want to hear.
So, stop wasting time with stuff like this. If you're bothered by the fact that there's more men in your company than women just hire more women until you get your desired ratio. You've already made your minds up ("there's too many men here, clearly we're biased against women during the hiring process") and I doubt anything will make you think differently, so just go ahead and fix the imbalance.