For example, my partner and I disagree on the value of things like "Girls who Code" or "Women in Computer Science" groups. I (male) tend to think "can't hurt seems like a decent idea, I'm sure there are unique challenges faced by people with two X-chromosomes in computer science that I'm not aware of, I'll take people's claims that it's valuable on face value - if smart people are doing it in reasonably large numbers, and I can't see obvious harm, then I'm certainly not going to go out of my way to disparage it."
She, on the other hand, despises those groups. She hates being singled out for her sex, and thinks sex shouldn't even be on the table for discussion. She just wants to work and be respected as an engineer, has never had any problem being respected as an engineer by her peers, and feels insulted every time she's invited to do something "on behalf of people with vaginas," (her words).
Interestingly, she also despises overtly feminine genderization and tends to think people who call themselves "girls" and dress/perform in an overtly feminine way are stupid (and acknowledges that this is unfair)... so I don't know. Is the whole thing targeted at the gendering of engineering rather than the physical sex of programmers? I don't really know. I don't think the people participating in it have a very clear view of that either, judging from the conversations I have with people.
At the end of the day I just try to take encourage everyone to blind themselves as much as possible when evaluating applications, reviewing code (impossible, generally), or assigning grades.
edit:
after thinking about this a little more I should specify that we're both pretty standard-issue silver-spoon white Midwestern liberals, and acknowledge that our personal views/experience on sex in computer science might miss a whole chunk of the spectrum of women's experience in communities where gender and sex are a bigger deal. My community expects women to be good at math and science every bit as much as men; that's not everyone's situation.
Response to parent's edit:
> we're both pretty standard-issue silver-spoon white Midwestern liberals
I can see why you would draw that conclusion, but your assumption is pretty wide of the mark in my case. I grew up very poor in the deep South.
[1] edit: oi, changed "understood" to "understand". The former implied that I immediately understood what you were saying. I was trying to say that I didn't initially understand, but do now after the correction... sorry if that caused more confusion.
Put another way, why have I seen many very good female programmers trapped in lower paying positions like QA and X-Analyst (but doing legit programming as their job) when there are men who are shitty programmers making 50% more and in a social position that gives them license to condescend to these women?
In either case, agreed that changing the popular mythos is absolutely a prerequisite to resolving the inequity.
I don't think software-development is unique in that respect though, humans tend to want to take a messy reality and make simpler stories with fewer and simpler characters.
On the other hand, programming and tech in general is already gendered in peoples minds. By people I here mean parents, children themselves, teachers and so on and so forth. Parents will refer to technical clubs as boy clubs (even if some girls participate) or mock boys doing dancing (that one surprised me), grandma will be visibly ashamed and kids themselves will argue about those activities being for boys/girls.
Kinda like with lego friends - too much pink to the point of being annoying, but the fact is that average grandpa is going to buy that toy to a girl where he would not any other lego cause even those gender neutral are clearly for boys in his mind.
And dancing boys will probably care more about the reaction of girls their age than about ashamed grandmothers.
Yes, girls want things that belong to girls. But grandma won't buy boy lego even of kid wants it and ask for it. And definitely not randomly for birthsday or something.
I must admit I also have mixed feelings about the disapproval of boys doing girlish things. The adults doing so might actually save the boys from embarrassment later on.
You might see that as proving your point, but there are different expectations from society to men than to women. The assumption that expectations should be equal is just that, an assumption, because there are differences (wombs, physical strength). So men can not simply opt out without issues, and neither can women. The expectation that men should literally do the heavy lifting makes sense, for example.
Question: How do we end civil wars?
Answer: Murder all the grandmothers.
Explanation: In the majority of civil wars, men comprise the bulk of causualties, thus leaving females as the only link between generations. Consequently, it is the grandmothers that teach younger generations to hate and perpetuate violence as retribution from that which was visited upon themselves and their family.
It's stuck with me ever since, and I think it's a good point for thinking about cultural evolution. Even if a new generation were a blank slate and completely compassionate on issue du jour, how is that affected by the historical impulses of those older from previous generations and thoughts?
Is it? The implication is that tech is worse than other professions in this regard. But it has never been compared to other industries full of young people.
Color me skeptical but I don't believe that a field full of introverted immigrants with language barriers would have a bigger harassment issue than the business/sales/administration fields that are full of extroverted Americans and frat boys.
My experience is that the diversity in nationality in the tech field has made it difficult for in-groups to form. Whereas in-groups form more rapidly in fields where people come from more similar backgrounds (fields with higher American %). When not part of an in-group, people engage in less risky behavior.
Introversion is no guard against sexism, and I'd argue, it might actually make some facets of it worse. I don't think introversion in specific is bad, but the way it manifests in tech in this male-dominated industry often results in a lack of experience and understanding in how to work with women, and sets them up as very heavily other-ed.
Only in tech have I seen such a need for inclusiveness to be so stressed and pushed for - education, smaller businesses, and similar, it has been a much more natural thing.
There's a hell of a lot more challenges that women face in tech than outright harassment. Unintentional sidelining, the bar for proof being much higher, general unwarranted skepticism in their abilities, etc.
> There's a hell of a lot more challenges that women face in tech than outright harassment. Unintentional sidelining, the bar for proof being much higher, general unwarranted skepticism in their abilities, etc.
These are very bold claims of sexism. No one can really comment until they're somewhat proven.
My comment was mainly about a "bro" environment and harassment which is more tangible.
The only real bits which are solely relevant to women in the whole thing DO revolve around sexual harassment, which leads me to believe that an enforced policy of "don't harass people" would go a long way.
We're not perfect yet. There are stupid men through the industry who sexually harass women. There are stupid men and women who have internal biases against women. There aren't enough women studying tech in the colleges to provide a truly diverse workforce in tech.
These are all problems which need to be addressed, but they will not be positively addressed by shaming people: comments like "the male-dominated tech community is so bad with these issues", "men might be silently stewing over their existence", and "It is a cowardly oblique swipe at these sort of organizations" don't advance the conversation, they attempt to shame people into agreeing with you.
WRT Girls Who Code; it is not small nor local anymore. It's nationwide and well represented in tech company volunteer activities, so I've found. At least for women; they frown on male volunteers in my experience.
It seems to be kind of implied by the approach (why ask only women), which is exactly what annoys people because it is such a sweeping accusation.
I wonder in discussions like this, how many people who bemoan the masculine tech culture consider themselves to be part of the problem? Do you consider yourself part of the problem and too masculine? Or do you think it is only the other men who are to blame?
In what way did I misrepresent that? It is the only one of your claims that I referred to.
Btw just because an account is young it is not automatically a troll account. Watch your ageism.
How is it cowardly? They have publically stated business shouldn't support "MinorityCodingClub".
It's brave in this environment to go against this status quo.
Cowardice is using words like cowardice because you disagree, it's a weasel word use to undermine people, not arguments.
> which sounds an awful lot like Girls Who Code,
This is a classic kara collecting, stating the obvious like it's not obvious.
We all know what they mean because that's exactly they are implying.
This comment is why this issue will never more forward, it's all emotive fud.
Would you say there is obviously something wrong with the plumbing industry that keeps women away? Or is it just that the smell of shit is too unpleasant? Likewise, some aspects of tech could simply be unpleasant to women, and there are reasons why men are more likely to put up with unpleasant work (like the need to feed a family). I have personally experienced a lot of unpleasant aspects of the tech industry (let's just say the movie "Office Space" is not far off the mark), unrelated to gender.
Mind you, I am not claiming nothing is wrong (although personally I consider it unlikely), just that it is not obvious, because there are other explanations for the gender ratio that don't involve "wrongness".
I work with a lot of women. They're not anything near a majority, but the org I'm in is big enough that there are plenty to speak with. They almost universally have many bad experiences and stories to tell that are specifically due to their gender.
By no means am I saying this is unique to tech, but I do believe it's worse. Even if it isn't, acting as if we've reached gender equality and it isn't common for women to face issues specifically due to their gender in tech, is so off base I recommend you take the time to actual speak with women and listen to them. Over the more than decade I've been in the industry, the amount of women I've spoken to who have said they haven't experienced sexism is easily a single digit percentage.
When I was in school, there was also nobody being encouraged to pick up Computer Science. Boys were into computers despite the disdain by society, peers and parents. On a scale of 1 to 10, how attractive did being into computers make you to girls in High School?
Also, much is being made of the performance of girls in High School Maths, but let'S be honest, Maths at school often is not really Maths, it is calculating stuff. So it is perhaps not the ultimate measure.
Also, significantly more women than men study Medicine or Biology - somehow they don't seem to count as STEM? Why not? Given the choice between Medicine or Computer Science, I am not even convinced that Computer Science is the better choice in the long run. My stance has always been that women are too smart to choose CS - they shun the long hours in front of a screen in a windowless basement, devoid of daylight and human contact.
I'm pretty sure it has something to do with women being pursued by men at that age and generally having better things to do than sit in front of a computer screen throughout their teenage years.
Then, by the time they have to pick a university program, they feel so far behind the computer nerds that they don't feel they can compete or succeed in tech. That and they don't want to be lumped in with the socially awkward nerds that they associate with tech by that point.
Just my hypothesis, of course.
At the college level, I think that the social gap gets even worse. Women can get into frat parties where they don't know anyone, though they don't even have to because they are much more likely to be invited in the first place. Bouncers at bars/clubs will let them skip the line and overlook them during ID check.
Women are better paid in the services industry which gives them bank roll to sustain their partying lifestyle, although this isn't even needed because they can get people to pay for their cover/food/drinks.
All these privileges drive them away from looking up buffer overflow errors on Stackoverflow late at night.
Perhaps there are not that many unattractive young women, so their number is not sufficient to increase female participation in tech by a significant amount.
For tech, males become more introverted.
At that age, introverted boys stay at home, play video games, post on bulletin boards (back in the old days), program, read, etc.
That is how many boys get into tech. They played video games, became immersed in internet forums and tech culture and trolled the internets.
Why do teen boys spend less time socializing and more time on the internet and video games?
That is the main question we could attempt to answer to find the root cause.
Also, it doesn't seem as if getting hired is the problem for women in tech, the problem is that there are not enough applicants.
And there also studies showing bias against men. For example the one where they made women conduct phone interviews with male voices and vice versa, and the women did slightly worse when they were given the male voices. There was another one were women were twice as likely to be hired for tech jobs than men.
I'm too lazy to look them up, but I find it interesting that only the "poor women" studies are being mentioned, and the others are quickly forgotten.
Edit: OK, I googled https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/women-twice-as-likely-to...
https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...
I sincerely doubt that the 43.75% of professions that is male dominated is purely caused by genetic aspect, nor the other 43.75% of profession that is female dominated. What I have heard it seems more like it is a combination of the flip of a coin and culture, through the question is then if culture simply adapted to segregation or if it caused it.
There are some jobs that can not easily be done part time or don't allow for flexible schedules. For example, as a truck driver driving to Turkey for three days to pick up tomatoes, you can not simply go home after 8 hours to put your children to sleep. Surgeons have a similar issue: you can not leave and go home in the middle of a brain surgery, and you can not predict how long a surgery will take.
Also, women can often simply opt out of unpleasant jobs, by not returning after the baby break. Men have no such option. Women often don't need to earn s much money, either, as they can expect their husband to be the main breadwinner of the family. So they can opt for jobs with lower pay, but higher life satisfaction.
Most of it boils down to children and family. Feminists of course think that it is just a cultural norm that makes mothers take over most of the responsibility for the kids. In my opinion, it is completely different: women get the first pick because they invest more into bringing children into the world - so they get to decide if they want to stay home with the kids or go to work, and most simply prefer to stay home with their kids. Because, surprising perhaps to feminists, spending time with one's own children is not all that horrible after all. Basically, the womb is a really good bargaining chip.
It is also a pretty modern discussion, with all the office jobs that seem equally suited for men and women because they require no physical effort. In former times, the bulk of the work was impossible to do for pregnant women (who should avoid heavy lifting), so the question didn't even arise.
I can't say I see a clear pattern where physical strength is directly correlated to extreme gender segregation. The extremest male dominated profession is tile floor constructor (ie primarily bathrooms). Second was mechanic and third is tinsmith. The extremest female profession is indeed midwife, but it is then followed by dentist nurse, followed by pediatric nurse, followed by secretary in hospitals, followed by district nurse, followed by therapists, followed surgeon nurse, and we are still at 90%+ professions. After this comes a bunch of specific education and social security professions.
The common theme I would say is that female dominated professions are focused on social environments where a person can feel that they have a real impact on others in their local area, while male dominated professions is focused on profession where a person work mostly separated and alone, and where the work don't general cause a major impact in someones life. In return for not having those social benefit and status, they generally also have higher pay.
Tile floor constructor and dentist nurse, with both way over 99% gender segregation, are quite strong data point. You don't need massive strength to lay down tiles in a bathroom, nor is dentist nurse a very "children" focused profession. Why do those two profession so extremely repel each opposite gender?
Looking at the male jobs in your list (the bottom of the list?), it seems to me there are a lot of them with high physical risk. For example fire fighter, or wood worker (? "forest face mask" - not sure what that is supposed to be, but if it is woodworker, that is the job with the highest lethality). Concrete worker sounds quite physical. There was an article about grip strength on HN which mentioned mechanics might have become weaker because of automated tools, so that seems to have involved some physical strain at least historically. Plumbing might actually be rather strenuous, too?
Anyway, I don't claim to have all the answers, just theories. Physical strength would of course not apply to all job segregation, I mentioned other factors in my previous post.
People's mileage may vary, but I would be very reluctant to paint "spending time with one's children" as some kind of easy option. I returned to full-time work at the earliest opportunity and with a sigh of relief. Many other child carers (of both genders) would love to do the same.
Not quite sure why the difficulty of scheduling brain surgery or truck driving around children is apposite either. No particular reason (beyond ingrained expectations) why a woman can't do the surgery and her partner keep predictable hours and handle the children.
Taking care of kids is strenuous, of course - the constant attention you mentioned, and also the sleep deprivation. But you can still watch a kid while sleep deprived, but you can not code sleep deprived (at least I can't - YMMV).
As I said, (imo) women get to choose who takes care of the kids and who does the job with unpredictable hours to feed the family. Or ultimately in a way both parents get to choose, because they choose who they marry. But many women choose already when they decide on their profession. As a man, you can not really speculate on finding a spouse that is fine with you being the stay at home parent. Nevertheless, such cases exist - they are just rarer, which is exactly what the numbers show.
Women take care of children, typically, and their shit does not smell like roses. So you need a new hypothesis.
Ok, I wish somebody would study that and find the reasons. The baby argument doesn't hold, though, because it makes a huge difference if it is your own baby.
Better comparison would perhaps be care of the elderly, which involves cleaning up shit but also has a social component.
Or specifically for weight lifting, consider this recent case of a transgender woman winning an international weight lifting title by a significant margin: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/03/22...
I doubt that the women/girls who choose to compete in weight lifting hold back because of cultural norms. That would be a silly sport - basically it would be a competition about who cares the least about cultural norms. In any case, there should be several women who don't care about cultural norms (what about the raging feminists who reject the norms, for example).
That is where the problem lies. When a 6 year old girl tells her parents she wants to become a weight lifter, her parents will say "how about ballet instead?". When a 12 year old girl tells her class mates she is a weight lifter all her friends will laugh at her.
The cultural norms prevent girls to participate. If they are strong-willed and decide to pursue weight lifting despite all of this, they would have a good chance to become very good because of their determination.
Also, I googled and a lot of the best female weight lifters look Chinese. I have a suspicion that they might be recruited by the Chinese system at early age and pushed for the glory of China, at the expense of their health. So cultural norms wouldn't be the issue here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/sports/tennis/tenniss-top...
I'm sorry, but companies have always focused on making money. Saying that the way to handle this very specific problem is to focus on making money is an appeal to brush the problem aside completely.
The top comment, for good measure, even obliquely swipes at active events taken by small local groups to tackle the issue, such as Girls Who Code, because men might be silently stewing over their existence...[1]
I am opting for a top level comment here because my frustration is less with the comment itself than that the community as a whole has voted this comment to the top.
[1] Before I get kneejerk responses that the comment didn't specify the group, let me belabor the point that the context of this discussion is SPECIFICALLY women's difficulties working within the masculine tech culture, so MinorityCodingClub trivially translates to WomenCodingClub, which sounds an awful lot like Girls Who Code, which has been gaining prominence of late. It is a cowardly oblique swipe at these sort of organizations. It's a cop out not to name the organization that you have a problem with explicitly, an attempt to lash out at such organizations while maintaining the comfortable position of plausible deniability. Everyone gets it though. So I won't countenance "shocked and appalled" denials that organizations like Girls Who Code were the target of the swipe.