>You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case.

>it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women.

I cannot speak for Google and I haven't been following their recruitment efforts.

However, I will say I'm a little tired of this notion that such companies are aiming for 50%.

I know one company that has really ramped up hiring of minorities (mostly women, though). And everyone is criticizing them for targeting 50% when there is a problem in the supply.

Except they never said they were targeting 50%. Not once. What they did was look at their different grade levels' skills, and compared that to the number of women in the market who should qualify, and compared that to the proportion in the company.

Example: They found that 20% of PhDs in a relevant field that they hired from were women, whereas in the company only 10% of PhDs hired were women. So their recruitment efforts are to hit 20%.

Not 50%.

Any time someone says 50%, they are likely invoking a strawman.

Then perhaps this is a teaching moment for Google's PR team. As an outsider, and based on what I've heard and read on blog posts and hiring pages about affirmative action, a common method of meeting their goals is diversity quotas. Given the fact that men and women have a 50/50 balance, and given that many programs reach as close to perfect equality as they can, it seems obvious to me at least that they would be trying for a 50/50 distrobution between the sexes.

If this isn't actually the case, then their PR should make it known, because the implications of the current system do make it seem like minorities may be given precedence at the expense of white or asian men.

>Given the fact that men and women have a 50/50 balance, and given that many programs reach as close to perfect equality as they can, it seems obvious to me at least that they would be trying for a 50/50 distrobution between the sexes.

>If this isn't actually the case, then their PR should make it known, because the implications of the current system do make it seem like minorities may be given precedence at the expense of white or asian men.

You want them to go out of their way to clarify assumptions you are making about things they never claimed?

Yes. Based on the comments in this thread, it seems to be a commonly held (mis)interpretation, and it's a perception that mars the company. It's in everyone's best interest if it is clarified so that both the asian and white male employees and the minority employees don't feel they're being discriminated against based on their race or gender.

Many of the most outspoken proponents of diversity initiatives, in the public arena, insist that "50% women" is the only acceptable goal.

If Google doesn't agree, I would like for them to publicly state this.

that does not make sense every time. lets assume that 20% of CS graduates are women but you are searching to hire only top 30% overall. there is no garantee that the top 30% will have 20% woman it could be more or less.

And even if it is and everybody is looking to hire the top 30% then the poll of the best women candidates quickly dries, and you have a harder time every time to find them. So if your agenda is to have 20% of women, you will probably ultimatly have to adjust your criteria.

gender should not mather, if you hire only the best you should hire them it does not mather if they are women or man.

Gender shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it does.

There are many components to the problem, but one component is institutional bias in the hiring process itself. You assume that all candidates are given a fair shake by an impartial, unbiased set of criteria that should be ferreting out the best talent and making offers to only those people. But those supposedly impartial criteria are executed upon in interviews by fallible human beings with their own personal or institutional biases, not by impartial pattern-matching robots. Consequently, many talented female engineers are passed over for inferior male ones, not the other way around.

I have interviewed literally thousands of candidates in my tech management career, and not once have I seen an inferior female candidate picked over a superior male one because of a diversity initiative. I have, however, had to work with young male interviewers to train them to properly identify their own unconscious biases and to ensure that they are truly being as impartial as possible when interviewing candidates of any gender. And to the degree that that is impossible - well, that is why we still have diversity targets.

> train them to properly identify their own unconscious biases

> not once have I seen an inferior female candidate picked over a superior male one because of a diversity initiative

What if you have an unconscious bias and didn't notice that inferior female candidates are being hired?

It's unconscious, you might just view men as inferior to women and not even know about it.

Isn't that the majority of the evidence tho? What I keep hearing is that women are underrepresented because women are slightly more than 50% of the population but 10-20% of engineering jobs.

That implies that diversity initiatives are going to continue until we have slightly more than 50% representation. Which is not bad in and of itself, but it seems like the initiatives are not allowed to used research or data beyond less than 50% representation. It gets sinister and loaded with unintended consequences when the expected shortcut is just to implement quotas to teach that one metric.

> If less than 25% of CS graduates are female, which is currently the case, it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women.

If Google is anything like Redacted, that's the case. Redacted pays monthly bonuses to their international offices for each woman on the office's payroll. I have two friends working at Redacted in a relatively cheap region and they say the bonuses are as high as their junior-level salaries - they can afford to hire a second junior developer for each junior woman they have. Your guess what happens. An upside is that this poses no threat to male developers so they don't complain and just have a chuckle when their mandatory diversity training explains how the company's policy improves performance by "tapping into the pool of female talent formerly overlooked due to systemic discrimination".

> You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case.

You are assuming that women are choosing their college degrees in a vacuum. They don't. They ask: can I see myself doing this job? Is this a worthwhile investment? And when they cannot see themselves working in tech, because they see no-one like themselves in IT, they choose other fields.

> Unfortunately, our supply of women is governed by a mostly government run school system that doesn't exist in a world of supply and demand and likes to shift the blame for their ineptitude.

What specific mistakes can you point to? What particular solutions are within reach of the government? Because right now this just looks like shifting responsibility onto the state.

Absolutely right on this first point. I've always suspected my wife would have been a good programmer (she destroyed me on the logic games section of the LSAT, which imo correlates with engineering reasoning ability: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1198455392.shtml). But she never even considered it, partly because she didn't want to choose a field in which she'd be facing all the hurdles of being a minority.

I feel like "choosing to go into it" is maybe the wrong model. Like, as far as I can recall I didn't choose to go into programming, computers were just there and I could write programs for them.

Like, I didn't choose to go into software development and so learnt to code, I chose to go into software development because I could code.

Maybe it's different for "career programmers," if such a thing even exists.

I think a lot of it is what society expects of people. I don't think most people ever have a moment when they say "Let me sit down and think about all the things I can do with my life." A lot of people develop their loves and what they think is "cool" at a very young age, and a lot of that is influenced by what they absorb from their parents, teachers, TV, etc.

If you're like me, you probably thought of yourself as smart, and had a short list of "smart things that would be cool when I grow up." Astronaut, doctor, computers, stuff like that.

The movie War Games was honestly important to me and my career. I was small and kind of dorky but pretty smart (at least, that was what all the adults told me, I suspect even that is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy) but Matthew Broderick showed me how cool that could be. I could see myself in him. And, you know, there were TV shows and movies that made me want to be an astronaut too. I'm not saying War Games was some seminal moment in my life. But it was an influence, for sure.

And when I told people I wanted to do that, they never made a face. Or they suggested it on their own "What do you want to be when you grow up? Are you going to be a scientist?" You know what people say to my girl? "Are you going to be a nurse/ballerina/etc when you grow up?" We all pick up on this kind of thing at a young age, and it shapes our perceptions of where we fit.

Women choosing what fields they go into is shaped by their role-models. Do they see female programmers on TV? Do they know any family members that are programmers? That kind of thing. Fixing this has to start somewhere.

Is this inherently bad? That would imply that, for systemic reasons, girls are not "brought up" to enjoy computing. Is there harm in girls having different preferences, even if they are driven by the culture? Aren't most preferences driven by culture? You raise interesting points. I believe we should be motivating girls who show interest, but is there harm if no interest is shown?

> I believe we should be motivating girls who show interest, but is there harm if no interest is shown?

The question then becomes why interest isn't shown in the first place.

You could argue, as the "manifesto" writer did, that there's some kind of innate biological explanation. To me, that's a pretty extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary proof. It's true that there are some differences between the sexes. Women do a bit better on some mental tests than men and vice versa. But how much of that is biology and how much is upbringing? For instance, from an early age, studies show parents make girls say "please" more than they do for boys, and emphasize sharing. So do women fair better on some emotional tests because of some innate biology or because we've emphasized that kind of thing literally since they could talk? It's really really hard to tease these things apart. And it's so hard because those differences are tiny. If we assumed those differences really are 100% biological (again, a big assumption), it might explain why Computer Science would be 55% men, and 45% women. It wouldn't explain the huge disparity we see today.

So if the reason women don't show interest isn't biological, what is it? A further complicating factor to the whole discussion is we're talking about why women aren't in computer science now. It hasn't always been this way. Historically, the field of computing had lots of women. A lot of women went from "human computers" who did math by hand to programming the early mainframes (the movie Hidden Figures shows a time at NASA when this was happening). While a gender gap has always existed, it used to be a lot smaller. Women made up about 1/3 of people with CS degrees in the late 70s and early 80s. But as the STEM gender gap has been closing everywhere else, it's actually gotten wider in CS, and only CS. Why? The "it's biology and girl brains are different" argument can't account for that. Biology didn't change.

What did change was society. Movies like Weird Science and War Games (my favorite) came out. The "cool hacker" entered Pop culture, and the stereotype they settled on was a boy. Girls were a lot less likely to have computers in the home as well. This is an interesting article (http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...) that talks about how early home computers were marketed as a toy to buy for boys.

It's like we as a society decided that computers fell into the "boy stuff" category with GI Joe and baseball, not the "girl stuff" category like Barbie and softball.

I think it all adds up to a pretty convincing argument that biology has nothing (or very, very little) to do with it.

>You could argue, as the "manifesto" writer did, that there's some kind of innate biological explanation. To me, that's a pretty extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary proof.

I don't understand why people think this is such an extraordinary claim. It would be extraordinary if the sexes were exactly equal. There are very obvious and enormous differences between men and women in numerous areas. Why would we expect them to come out exactly equal?

But if you want stronger evidence, try this: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

>Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d= 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender-egalitarian societies than in gender-inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.

The point about differences in personality was brought up in the Google memo and perhaps explains your "please" thing. But look at the "interest in people vs interest in things" statistic. A d value of 1.18 is enormous. That means 93% of men are more "thing oriented" than the average women. And that's assuming there is no noise in the measurement, likely the true value is even higher!

There's also this later on in the document:

>When Del Giudice computed the Mahalanobis D for gender differences in Big Five traits, based on a published data set, he found that although the mean d for gender differences in individual Big Five traits was 0.27 (conventionally considered to be ‘small’), the Mahalanobis D was in contrast 0.84, suggesting a relatively large mean separation of men and women in the multivariate ‘space’ of personality

The problem is two-fold. First, how do you distinguish how much of those results are innate from how much are the result of how we socialize girls? Second, how do you get from "men are more thing oriented" to "men prefer programming."

To give an example: In the U.S., teaching is consider a woman's profession, because it involves "nurturing." But in India, teaching is a man's profession, because it involves training the next generation workforce to participate in the economy. Even if you suppose women are more "nurturing" innately, that doesn't explain any particular demographic distribution among, say, teachers.

Another example is the fact that 60% of accountants are women. Accounting is not only about "things" rather than people, but it's often about completely abstract "things" (e.g. accrued tax credits). Women also are more "agreeable." But within, for example, the legal profession, the cooperative practice of transactional law has a lower representation of women than the conflict-oriented area of litigation.

Within STEM: over 40% of math majors are women, but only about 20% of CS majors. In other words, "social" and "people-oriented" women evidently prefer a field where people work almost completely alone on completely abstract concepts. Meanwhile, Pinterest's engineering team is almost all men.

The point isn't whether biological differences exist. The point is whether the evidence for biological differences explains what we observe in reality. And it really doesn't (not without egregious handwaving, anyway).

>First, how do you distinguish how much of those results are innate from how much are the result of how we socialize girls?

There have been a number of experiments trying to remove all cultural influences from kids and see what toys they prefer. Despite their best efforts, boys still prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. Why should we expect the differences in interests to disappear with age?

Second, where do you get the statistic that 40% of math majors are women? Just a quick Google search and I found this: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/math-wom...

>In mathematics, just 15 percent of tenure-track positions are held by women, one of the lowest percentages among the sciences, along with computer science (18 percent), and engineering (14 percent)

They are even worse than computer science. This is about exactly what I would expect. (The article of course blames sexism. Since they can't consider any other explanation. But they don't present any evidence to support that.)

Even if the differences aren't perfectly predictive of real world outcomes, so what? I'm not claiming they are. All I'm saying is we shouldn't expect the distribution of interest to be a perfect 50:50 split between men and women. If the personality differences between men and women are as significant as these studies show, it would be very surprising if every profession had a perfect gender ratio.

Computer programming in particular is extremely interest driven. Programmers like programming and do it in their free time. Most of them taught themselves to do it before they studied it formally. As opposed to your other examples like accounting. How many people do accounting in their free time just for fun?

This is one of those situations where you have to exercise your logical reasoning skills. Why the hell would there be an innate gendered preference for a toy that represents something that's existed for only about a hundred years? Indeed, a 2013 study shows that both girls and boys prefer dolls at 5 months: http://www.sciencealert.com/boys-prefer-dolls-to-trucks.

And even if there was a gender difference in terms of preferring trucks to dolls, what would that really be measuring? Again, a five month old couldn't possibly have an association between trucks and building things. You could just as easily be measuring the degree to which infants have an affinity for faces. You can't get from that to a preference for/against CS without a whole lot of handwaving. Which is ultimately the big problem. You're pointing to biological differences and saying that must explain observed occupational differences, without providing any theory of causation. It's an argument that doesn't just have little explanatory power, what explanatory power it does have is based on gendered characterizations. (E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated).

As to math preferences, you're comparing tenure track professors, while I was referring to undergraduate degree holders (hence "math majors"). Women earn over 40% of math/stat undergraduate degrees: https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor....

I agree with all your points here and I'd like to especially expand on this:

> (E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated).

If women don't go into CS because society as a whole views it as a thing-oriented discipline and women are more people-oriented than thing-oriented, this opens up the possibility of reframing CS to be more people-oriented, changing its perception in society, thus causing more women to become interested in CS.

The memo had this to say on that topic:

We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).

Which actually sounds pretty reasonable to me.

While that 2013 study [1] did show that both boys and girls prefer faces to objects at that age, the results seem to support boys having lesser face/object preference than girls. Unfortunately raw data wasn't provided so we can only rely on researcher's conclusions that the difference was not statistically significant for female faces/cars, but was for male faces/stoves, although eyeballing the graphs, the only one where error bars don't overlap is the Real face (female) / Real car. Anyway, every face/object pair has boys showing lesser face preference than girls. I really can't see how this can be cited as disproving innate gender preference differences - at best, it fails to _prove_ them, but still hints at their existence.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3766397/

>a 2013 study shows that both girls and boys prefer dolls at 5 months

Might as well just measure what toys they prefer when they come out of the womb. No shit a five month old has no idea what a truck or a doll is. But by the age of four they will definitely prefer trucks as expected.

>You're pointing to biological differences and saying that must explain observed occupational differences, without providing any theory of causation.

I did provide a theory (things vs people), but it's not really necessary. The original comment suggested that there were no personality or behavioral differences between men and women. This is a ridiculous claim. I have showed there are huge differences between the preferences of men and women.

Why would we expect two different groups with (statistically) different personalities and interests to make exactly the same career choices? I can't necessarily predict which factors are the most relevant, or which traits correlate with which careers and how strongly. Those are specifics. But I would be completely shocked if the correlation between mental and personality traits and career choice is absolutely zero. And if they aren't zero, that will necessarily imply a difference between the genders.

The alternative theory is that "it's all cultural". This theory also makes no specific predictions. No matter what outcome is observed, you can blame it on culture. You can invent a just-so story about how mathematicians are less sexist than programmers or something. It doesn't require or present any evidence. It isn't falsifiable. If one cultural factor is ruled out (e.g. discrimination), you can always make another and shove it in (e.g. "role models".)

If you show evidence that one cultural explanation can't possibly be correct, they just move onto another. E.g. showing that there are the same percentage of female tech workers as female computer science graduates. So they move onto blaming sexism in universities. So you show there are the same percentage of girls interested in computer science in high school. And then the theory moves onto blaming parents for discouraging girls from computers... or something. And I can't think of any possible experiment that could test that and prove it false. So they say "aha, gotcha! It was culture all along!" as if they've proved something.

>E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated

The link I posted sort of addressed this. In less egalitarian cultures it's possible differences are more cultural. E.g. Indians straight up discriminate against female teachers and don't even make it an option. Or Indian parents forcing their girls to learn computer science because they see it as a way out of poverty. But as cultures become more egalitarian, gender differences will become more determined by biology. The west generally gives children a lot more freedom to choose their career and doesn't discriminate by sex. So gender preference will become a lot more important in such a society.

This article [0] discusses and expands upon many of the questions you asked.

0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

> in India, teaching is a man's profession

Any citation on this? i have seen most teachers being female...

Not a hugely reliable source, but this article suggests that most teachers are women in urban areas:

http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-teachers-day-women-teac...

> To me, that's a pretty extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary proof.

The extraordinary claim here is that there are less women in tech due to sexism from men and we have yet to see the extraordinary evidence.

> So do women fair better on some emotional tests because of some innate biology or because we've emphasized that kind of thing literally since they could talk?

Evolution probably favoured caring mothers, you can observe this in animals as well.

> And it's so hard because those differences are tiny. If we assumed those differences really are 100% biological (again, a big assumption), it might explain why Computer Science would be 55% men, and 45% women. It wouldn't explain the huge disparity we see today.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0831_050831_...

"Chimps, Humans 96 Percent the Same, Gene Study Finds"

4% doesn't really explain why we are totally different form chimps. Not everything scales linear manner.

> Historically, the field of computing had lots of women.

That's both true and not, computing used to be radically different historically then it is right now.

> Why? The "it's biology and girl brains are different" argument can't account for that. Biology didn't change.

What if CS changed or what you do with your CS degree changed?

> that talks about how early home computers were marketed as a toy to buy for boys.

I can debunk that for you: look at countries where computers weren't marketed and have the still ratios.

> It's like we as a society decided that computers fell into the "boy stuff" category with GI Joe and baseball, not the "girl stuff" category like Barbie and softball.

So all companies ignored half of their potential market? It's possible, however, it's hard to explain though why would every single company would throw away half of their market.

> I think it all adds up to a pretty convincing argument that biology has nothing (or very, very little) to do with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Jurassic Park is one of THE seminal movies of the 90s and the female kid in the show saves the day because she "knows Unix". That was pretty cool. Though it was only a small role, not the lead like in War Games.

> If you're like me, you probably thought of yourself as smart, and had a short list of "smart things that would be cool when I grow up." Astronaut, doctor, computers, stuff like that.

I think it was magazines. Which weren't gendered. I don't think I've seen any male programmers on TV, and I don't have family members who were programmers, and I was interested in computers before I knew that programming was a job.

As far as I can tell, computers were just innately interesting.

Well, there's gendered and then there's gendered.

Some things are explicitly gendered, like GI Joe or Barbie.

Some things are implicitly gendered, like Legos. There's nothing about then that makes them "for boys." But most stores put them in the boys aisle. Lego started making "girl sets" that are all pinky not too long ago just so they could go in the girl section.

As a kid, where were the magazines with computer stuff in the store? Were they next to Tigerbeat? Probably not. It's little stuff like that. That's not the whole story, of course. But what we find interesting is at least partly due to society.

The magazines were all together in a single magazine rack.

I'm not saying there's not gendered influences, I'm saying my personal life story doesn't have positive-reinforcing gendered elements that I can tell.

All sorts of social biases play into that too. Growing up, I "wanted" to be an engineer. After a mid-20s career change, I ended up as a lawyer. I love it, but not only did I never consider it as a kid, nothing ever prompted me to think about the possibility. Engineering is the societal default for a smart brown immigrant kid.

I'm already seeing this play out with my daughter. At four, she's highly gender normative, which means she wants to have pink everything and play with girls, not boys.[1] But she also loves puzzles, numbers, legos, and building things. That came to a head recently, because she ended up being the only girl in one of her science camps. At age four, she's already grappling with the tension between her gender identity and what kinds of activities society tells her are associated with her gender.

[1] One of my grievances about the Google Anti-Diversity Memo is it makes an erroneous assumption that just because children show some gendered preferences at a young age (e.g. trucks versus dolls), that somehow explains a gendered preference for/against programming as a career choice.

How can you tell the difference between your daughter being pushed by social convention towards gender normative activities, and your daughter's possible innate preferences leading her towards those activities? Likewise, how do you know the tension is not between her peers and society trying to make her girl-like versus her innate preferences towards science, building, etc, and instead between your expectations for your daughter and her innate preferences. In other words, isn't it as likely that your opinions are pushing her towards science as it is that society is pushing her towards girl-toys?

Diversity programs from big businesses have always seemed sick to me. Why does Google want more diversity? Ultimately, because they want to double the supply of engineers and reduce their hiring costs. The idea that I should subvert my daughter's innate interests, and encourage her to follow pursuits that are foreign to her, just so that Google can save money on employee salaries is perverse.

In my view, true diversity is valuing what makes people different. School teachers tend to be female and software developers tend to be male. "Diversity" shouldn't be taken to mean that 50% of developers should be female and 50% of school teachers male. That's not diverse, it's uniform. Instead, diversity should be recognizing that a school teacher isn't inferior to a software developer.

> How can you tell the difference between your daughter being pushed by social convention towards gender normative activities, and your daughter's possible innate preferences leading her towards those activities? Likewise, how do you know the tension is not between her peers and society trying to make her girl-like versus her innate preferences towards science, building, etc, and instead between your expectations for your daughter and her innate preferences. In other words, isn't it as likely that your opinions are pushing her towards science as it is that society is pushing her towards girl-toys?

The categorical error you make, like the author of the anti-diversity memo, is conflating gender identity with a specific set of "boy" versus "girl" activities. Just because children have strong gender identity does not mean that you can categorize any given activity as "girl-like" versus "boy-like." I.e. there is nothing to show that liking pink unicorns causes someone to have a preference against computer science.

As to our own daughter, I don't want her to be an engineer or a scientist. I want her to be a lawyer, like her mom and myself. I also hated school and don't place much emphasis on education. She's the one who wants to do puzzles and math worksheets and build legos.

Of course, that's anecdotal and doesn't prove anything. The real evidence, to me, is that this association between math/science and men differs dramatically between countries. In Bangladesh, more than 80% of teachers are men (overrepresented compared to the total labor force). And in India, half of science undergraduates are women: http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-sciences. It's really a different societal mindset about what professions are appropriate for women versus men. For example, I grew up hearing my Bangladeshi mother complain about how the teachers in U.S. schools are women, when men make better teachers.

Nobody grows up learning how to resect tumors or construct an appellate brief in their own home. It's only in computer science that we have the expectation that the "true" pipeline for talent in our field will start at age 11. It's great that some people can get comfortable programming early, but it's not reasonable to suggest that most of the people in our field will do so.

I chose to learn to code because I was 12 and wanted to make games. I suppose a lot of other developers today were introduced to coding via the prospect of game development, and video games were/are heavily marketed toward male customers. In fact, you start seeing women engineers dropping from software fields at an accelerated pace as consoles and arcades were becoming a cultural norm in the 80s.

Hell, I'd go a step farther: I don't even particularly like software development as a career, but I picked up programming early because I liked it as a hobby and needed to program & assemble computers & configure servers to do stuff I wanted to do and... it just became the path of least resistance to a decent-paying career. It's hard to turn away from it when you're just walking into places cold in high school and college and landing relatively high-paying jobs on the first try, but I definitely didn't choose it like sitting down and saying "I want to be a software developer, so I better learn programming now". FFS I did most of a Poli-Sci/IS degree my first attempt at college because actual classes about programming/computers seemed like an intolerably dull thing to do (I was proven right when I later picked up my CS degree—god was it boring).

So,

> Like, I didn't choose to go into software development and so learnt to code, I chose to go into software development because I could code.

Yep.

> You are assuming that women are choosing their college degrees in a vacuum. They don't. They ask: can I see myself doing this job? Is this a worthwhile investment? And when they cannot see themselves working in tech, because they see no-one like themselves in IT, they choose other fields

I have a hunch you graduated a relatively long time ago and do not socialize with people who are currently in school. People do not have to declare major for two first years in school. Outside those doing pre-med or pharmacy students do not need to take any hard science/math/cs classes ( the later in a lot of schools taught in math departments ) for years. Early juniors are the first ones who need to decide on a major and boy is CS low on that list ( why would one want to spend next two years cramming math, CS, and physics into the schedule class after class when one can take a few creative courses and graduate with liberal arts degree? ).

> What specific mistakes can you point to? What particular solutions are within reach of the government? Because right now it just looks like you're shifting responsibility onto the state.

Allowing Jack and Suzy to take $100k loans to for a degree in operating a coffee machine.

Echoing another user: I graduated within the past ten years.

Within a group of fields, you are correct. In the business school, the first two years were all the same. In engineering, though, CS classes started first semester freshman year. In the first two years of undergrad, the typical CS degree program had at least 6 courses: 2x intro, Discrete Math, Algo, Automata, and something else.

So perhaps if one had gone EE and decided they wanted CS, they would 'only' be a year back. Going from one college to another within Uni more than a year in, is almost starting over.

> eople do not have to declare major for two first years in school. Outside those doing pre-med or pharmacy students do not need to take any hard science/math/cs classes ( the later in a lot of schools taught in math departments ) for years. Early juniors are the first ones who need to decide on a major and boy is CS low on that list ( why would one want to spend next two years cramming math, CS, and physics into the schedule class after class when one can take a few creative courses and graduate with liberal arts degree? ).

This is very dependent on your school and program. At my school, the engineers selected their specialty at the end of, I believe, freshman year. My program was so rigorous with specific requirements that if I didn't start them during freshman year, I could not have graduated in 4 years. As it stood, I missed a semester due to illness and was set back an entire year because of it.

>Allowing Jack and Suzy to take $100k loans to for a degree in operating a coffee machine.

This right here is the problem fundamentally. The good thing is google seems to at least pretend to have an interest in changing things. They've tried running their own coding bootcamps for minorities and women.

If we really want to fix the problem of diversity in tech then what we really need is a systemic change in how learning as an adult is handled and viewed. I feel like most of my peers did not learn to program while they where at university but learned it while they where younger through google. Perhaps if we could find a way to provide the same socialization and critical thinking exercises that universities provide without the incredible administrative overhead we could make it easy for people to transition into difficult STEM fields. This would be a win for pretty much everyone except the bankers and school administrators.

This is very dependent on the program. At my university calc, discrete math, java, and data structures were all expected to be completed freshman year.

> Outside those doing pre-med or pharmacy students do not need to take any hard science/math/cs classes ( the later in a lot of schools taught in math departments ) for years.

This was not the case at my university at all.

Commenting on my own post:

It will be worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14965074

We are already starting to drop the admission standards to achieve equality of outcomes.

> You are assuming that women are choosing their college degrees in a vacuum. They don't. They ask: can I see myself doing this job? Is this a worthwhile investment? And when they cannot see themselves working in tech, because they see no-one like themselves in IT, they choose other fields.

If anyone, man or woman, decides to pursuit a given career because they can see others like them in the field, then really, I am grateful they don't. I want to work with people who deeply care about their choices. Who are dreamers. Who are willing to give a lot to fulfill their drive for knowledge. Who learns out of sheer curiosity of the world around them. Who can ask a meaningful questions. Who believe in what they do. Not with a sheep who chooses to follow other sheep.

If people want diversity at work, they should start with elementary school first. Do not assume any biological equality or lack of it up front but also do not ENFORCE any. Just give people equal rights to study and to make their own choices.

The questions that you're responding to aren't often conscious questions. People are incredibly malleable, and generally do what they can to "fit in." If computing had the same male-stigma as, say, nursing, I'm not sure I would have majored in CS. Subconscious effects are difficult to deal with, but real nevertheless.

I would have preferred 90% female classes or workplaces. My thinking is I would have a better chance to be hired if I could standout from the crowd.

The push to 50/50 would cause me great concern as I would lose my advantage. Do any women feel the same way with the situation now?

I think that is the core of the problem. People who need to see other people do something first don't have the burning desire.

I've countless interviews with vets. When a person becomes a vet they do it because they want to help animals or want money and to help but rarely because someone else did it before them who looks like them.

@wolco: "... don't have a burning desire" @feeping: "... computers were just there ... because I could code" @wst_: "... who deeply care about their choices"

I disagree with the above sentiments, despite those being excellent reasons or attitudes to choose a field/calling/career. It is not necessary for others to arrive at a path in the same way that other people do. It is entirely possible that the burning desire, inclination, and careful choice occur after being accepted into a program or after more exposure into a coding environment. It is also very likely that such desire, inclination, and choice are discouraged by not having relatable peers or role models. I would find it much harder to fit and grow into a role if from the very beginning I was expected to already have inclinations and reasons that are similar to my coworkers.

Why would you interview with vets ?

Asking because I (female) ended up being one without any desire and I am now working my way into CS.

Good point about women not choosing college degrees in a vacuum. Would the same logic explain why many more women than men attend college?

Yes, actually. A lot of professions that are dominated by women (currently at least) require some sort of bachelors degree e.g. nursing, lawyers. Or conversely: the jobs where you can have a good life without a college degree tend to be more male dominated (e.g. blue collar manufacturing).

Oh, those bastard mysoginistic blue collar male manufacturers, keeping the good manufacturing jobs away from females who are forced to settle with being lawyers.

Perhaps men find the trades to be a more viable option.

Ah, I see, so when males are underrepresented in a field it's because they have more viable options elsewhere, but when females are underrepresented, it's because they are being discriminated against.

It's also possible for there to be multiple bottlenecks in the pipeline where women and girls are dropping out - including elementary school, college, entry level, and experienced engineers. There seems to be evidence that there's an effect at each of these levels that causes women to switch to other fields.

If so, the existence of a problem at one stage in the pipeline is a poor excuse for failing to address a bottleneck at a later stage. Particularly when the actor in question is mostly involved in the later stages.

> The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. In the real world, farmers would begin switching to white onions and the supply would increase.

I think you've got it backwards. In the real world, supply is increased to meet demand. Farmers aren't going to grow more white onions just to see what happens. They've got to believe it's going to be a more profitable crop because it is in demand.

To extend your food analogy, it's like when Paul Prudhomme introduced blackened redfish at fine dining establishment Commander's Palace in the 1980's. Redfish went from being a "trash" fish to a species overfished to the point of near extinction. Importantly, nothing changed about the redfish itself. What changed was a new emphasis on using it in a dish.

Similarly, lobster went from being a peasant or prisoner food to a delicacy when railways and canning helped extend the demand beyond the northeast US.

What if a big part of solving the pipeline problem is simply for companies to demand more diverse candidates because leadership finally start to recognize the research that suggests that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many metrics? I think this has to be the case because no one is getting into an employment pipeline that ends with what is perceived to be a hostile working environment.

> What if a big part of solving the pipeline problem is simply for companies to demand more diverse candidates because leadership finally start to recognize the research that suggests that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many metrics?

Last I read, the Economist said there is an advantage to diversity when attempting to be creative, but in other scenarios the advantage goes to the homogeneous team.

https://www.economist.com/news/business/21692865-making-most...

I think it was that article I read, can't tell because I'm over my article limit.

Does "early bias" theory include the leaky pipe line model? Ie: University students that fail a exam will switch program at a higher rate if their gender is a minority. In polls, they are also more likely to question their decision in career choice and have more self doubt about their ability to finish the program. The data that I have seen on this is that it is gender neutral, ie that the doubt caused by being a local minority is similar for both men and women.

To make up numbers, if a student has 3 times a high risk of switching a program after a failed exam, the chance that they will graduates will be significant lower. Having a gender segregated education fixes this, but as soon the graduate enters the work market the same phenomenon happen after a failed interview unless they only seek work which is also gender segregated.

Might be worth remembering that companies like Google have significant links with education systems, so they can address their hiring not just at the "who is applying" stage. Also, regarding "lowering the bar" - remember there is a lot more to building a SWE team than finding people who can do the best whiteboard coding challenges. Coding skills can be improved, diversity of backgrounds is also a team strength and one that can't be taught. So, one would hope that by forcing hiring diversity now, companies 1) force the white dude monoculture to break down, encouraging 2) more women to see SWE as an appealing opportunity, making 3) their future hiring pipeline and hiring committees sufficiently diverse that they don't need to force numbers.

Also worth remembering that women CS grads entering the field used to be climbing at the same rate as lawyers and other similar fields, then something changed in the mid-1980s and while the other fields progressed ever-nearer 50%, CS numbers took a nosedive. I don't have good research into exactly why that happened, but I'm guessing women didn't say "oh we're doing 32bit computers now? Nah you keep this one bros" ;)

My guess is that software became known as a "wild" career around the same time. I think the boom-bust cycles and gold Rush mentality are the main contributors to women leaving the profession.

How do we fix this? I don't think the silicon valley startup will ever appeal to women. Live in a closet for three years for a 10% chance to make a million dollars. Those odds only attract people with an appetite for risk. Mostly, unsurprisingly, young men. The problem with that is that silicon valley represents the field.

To get more women we need to change the image of the profession. I'm of the opinion that females just don't want to do software development and that decision is made really young.

Anecdotal, but I know plenty of guys that tinkered with PC's as young as 10 years old, and zero women that did so. It's seen as a boy thing, like cars.

The thing that always got me as a kid was that as a boy, if you showed any signs of a technical aptitude in STEM and your parents found out, they'd practically have your life planned out right then and there, you'd get lots of "Oh, you can be an engineer then", or "you could become a scientist", but girls showing aptitude in STEM would basically get "Oh that's nice, tell me if you need anything". Girls seemed to have the same if not better grades on average, but girls in the advanced classes never seemed to have been pushed in the same way.

That's my memory of it anyway, boys got pushed to go into STEM the second they showed any aptitude, girls were just sort of expected to keep it up.

In other words, pigeonholing them into careers? Girls get to "be whatever you want to, darling". Boys have to make sure they bring home a paycheck and support their family. Why?

Because someone has to raise the kids, and mothers _usually_ but not always take on that role voluntarily. Especially since infants are biologically tied to their mother for food.

My wife is more educated than I, with a masters degree. But she wanted to stay home, work part time, and not have our kids raised by a third party.

The traditional family structure for Homo sapiens has strong biological and environmental roots, which in turn caused "societal traditions". Changing that in a few generations seems quite unlikely.

Sure, so why can't we accept that then, if that's the case?

>To get more women we need to change the image of the profession. I'm of the opinion that females just don't want to do software development and that decision is made really young.

I think the change we need to make is less about the profession and more about the people in the profession. We need to make it a field that seems open to women. Currently it isn't. I don't have a daughter, but I'd be very hesitant to suggest to her to go into the SW field.

BTW, my sister tinkered with PCs as a kid. It is interesting that she went on to get a degree in statistics and me in computer science. She works in policy now, and me in CS -- despite the fact that both of us had very similar achievement paths through HS. To this day she is better at most maths than I am, but most people seem to assume I'm better (at least when it comes up).

One of the great lessons I've learned in life is that you can't change other people. Indeed in this case it seems like the "old boys club" in software development is the result of the gender balance not the cause. I can't think of a single male dominated profession that isn't seen in that light.

If we're serious about fixing the ratio it needs to be done with policy and young, well before students graduate highschool.

This was my initial thought as well but I remembered listening to this podcast and I think it touches on this idea and expands on it. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episo...

One of the examples in the podcast expands on the viewpoint that computers are for men and that idea is ingrained even to the level of the family, so computers are kept in the sons bedroom so incidentally the daughter had less access to it.

Its not suggested by guidance counselors to females when looking to select electives in junior high school.

So if they are seen as a male hobby or interest, at a time when what your peers think is so important, girls are less likely to want to venture into that area and be outside the norm.

I don't think people necessarily understand which career they choose. When girl wants to become ballerinas it is presumably because they have some idea that it is glamorous, not that it entails working hard under strict discipline for many years. They figure that out later.

What happened in the 80s was likely because computers went from being for business to being a hobby with the home computer [0]. I would imagine that because men dominated technical professions at the time most computers were bought by men, which then shared their interests with their sons [1]. Programmers like John Carmack and Linus Torvalds is born around 1970 and would be teenagers when home computers became available [2]. Games went from adventure quests and puzzles to shooters like quake and duke nukem. Social settings like mailing lists became more important to learn programming through open source. So the cycle continues.

Of course just like girl, boys probably didn't know what the profession actually meant. They wanted to be programmers because of things like video games, but ended up making business systems.

How do you fix it? Many CS programs are antiquated and changing the curriculum to software engineering doesn't seem to help much to attract a broader group of people. If the large companies are serious about this, they should do what the banks did and train smart people with more generic backgrounds.

[0]

1977 Atari 2600

1977 Apple II

1981 Sinclair ZX81

1981 BBC Micro

1982 Commodore 64

1983 WarGames (movie)

1983 Nintendo Entertainment System

1985 Amiga

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers

[1]

"When I was 5 or 6, my parents got me a Commodore 64."

"My dad left his old Atari (2600 Junior, I think) in my room and I found basic on there towards the end of grade school."

"1982-83 (grammar to high school age): My parents bought a word processor in the 80's that you could also program."

"In 1982 my Dad brought home a Sirius microcomputer for his work."

"My dad brought home a 386 IBM-PC so he could learn AutoCAD."

"I got started with BASICA on a Tandy 1000. My dad had a newer computer at the time but he certainly wouldn't let me use it."

"I'm not sure if this counts; the birth of my hacking started on my dad's lap, doing amateur radio."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015879

[2]

"It was his maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had the greatest influence on the young Linus. In the mid-1970s, Toerngvist bought one of the first personal computers, a Commodore Vic 20."

http://www.linfo.org/linus.html

As a boy, and a "nerd", I grew up on the VIC20 and C64 from grades 4 to 9 in the 80s, later to become one of the "Amiga generation" I guess. My friends were other boys who liked to tinker / obsess with computers. We weren't amongst the cool crowd then, but it didn't matter (too much). Number of girls I met who ever tinkered with one? None. It just didn't happen. (Asterisk: This was true for a sample size of one Norwegian school; YMMV.)

We would have loved it if anyone did, alas that wasn't the case. I'm glad things have changed and you're no longer an outcast if you're a geeky kid; I feel that I paid a big personal price for being that way inclined, but later on there was a payoff in that it was easy to get into programming as a career, when the Internet started happening in the mid late 90s.

If my next kid is a girl, she'll have no shortage of computer science ahead of her. My son's already way deep. :)

> I know plenty of guys that tinkered with PC's as young as 10 years old, and zero women that did so. It's seen as a boy thing, like cars.

The interesting thing, to me, is that you can't look at those 10-year-olds in isolation. My experience mirrors yours and, yet, if you look back further, I'll bet you find that those 10-year-old tinkerers almost all have some history with Legos or other such construction toy that, very early, started building the guess-fail-iterate problem solving model that I believe is so important to computer aptitude.

One of the side effects to being "good with computers" is that you end up getting asked to do a lot of tech support. Over the years, I've seen so many people who are so afraid of doing something wrong that they can't figure out how to do what they want despite being otherwise intelligent enough. They don't realize what's perfectly summed up here: https://xkcd.com/627/

Some of the most important and least controversial efforts to address gender diversity in tech are the people trying to make better toys for young girls. As I've heard it stated, we have a shortage of engineers, not a shortage of princesses and our toy aisles should reflect that.

> Some of the most important and least controversial efforts to address gender diversity in tech are the people trying to make better toys for young girls. As I've heard it stated, we have a shortage of engineers, not a shortage of princesses and our toy aisles should reflect that.

This SMBC comic sums up the issue perfectly: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883

On a side note, I've also noticed that the bulk of my female classmates in college and the bulk of my female coworkers since then have been either Indian or Chinese. It might be worth exploring why Indian and Chinese women are more willing to work in tech than western women.

I have noticed the same. In these cultures it's more acceptable to be interested in such things. Probably because financial success is more important in such countries, gender stereotypes be damned.

Still, it proves that a better gender ratio is definitely possible in the US as well

> Probably because financial success is more important in such countries, gender stereotypes be damned

I don't know that you can say that financial success is more important in those countries, but I think you can say that tech is a more viable path to that financial success in those countries since careers like finance, law and medicine (the stereotypical high-paid professions in the US) mean working in their own country rather than coming to the US. If you're primarily motivated by money, as an American, there are surer paths to getting it than writing code. But as a foreigner that wants to work in the US (and therefore make more money), writing code is one of the best ways to do that.

Its because they have less options for financial security in their family.

If you dont believe me ask them yourself, but make a clear distinction between immigrant and first gen.

There's a pretty convincing argument that the drop in apparent interest in computing from girls was caused by computers and computer games being marketed squarely at boys:

https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...

The arguments that there are fundamental differences between men and women doesn't seem to prevent much higher proportions of female programmers in India, or Romania, or China.

As Adam Grant says, while there are some (small) differences between men and women, they're "not biologically determined"

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/differences-between-men-women...

> The arguments that there are fundamental differences between men and women doesn't seem to prevent much higher proportions of female programmers in India, or Romania, or China.

Suppose that the much higher proportions of female programmers in poorer countries might be because their choice is more limited; there is way more incentive in a poor country to want to land a fairly secure and well paid job, because you risk starving if you don't.

Going for a liberal arts degree (or similar) in India, Romania or China would then be discouraged.

Conversely, in the West, people are more free to pursue whatever profession they may like, because they most likely won't starve if they do.

I'm not saying that this would be the only explanation for the gender gap, but I do think the explanation involves many more factors than 'computer games in the 80s'.

I personally think it's naïve to dismiss inherent biological preferences entirely, especially since there are many studies that corroborate that they _do exist_.

Uh huh, there are potential other explanations, yes. Are they evidenced? Not to my knowledge.

> I personally think it's naïve to dismiss inherent biological preferences entirely...

"naïve", huh...

So, Adam Grant is one of the world's foremost experts in this area. Did you read his fully-sourced article, linked from my parent post, that refutes this exact "biological" point?

From the studies I've read it seems clear that there are biological differences between males and females. This was not fashionable to claim 20 or so years ago, but I suspect the dismissal was mostly based in politics, and the current trend in psychology is starting to acknowledge this.

The problem is that many people seem to forget that the difference applies to averages, and therefore mean very little on an individual level.

In other words, it's not far fetched to assume that a part of the gender gap in STEM/CS is because of biology, since an average trend would influence said gap. Conversely, it's incorrect to claim that a specific woman is more ill-suited doing STEM/CS than a man, just because she's a woman.

Also, I didn't go through all the references, but Adam Grant (at least indirectly) cites the 1995 study by Steele & Aronson which has been proved to be of shoddy quality. Like everyone else who denies any possibility of biology influencing how people think, he seems to have a political axe to grind. I therefore consider his opinions somewhat unreliable.

Do you have any better studies to cite for what you're saying? Because if you don't you shouldn't be saying what you're saying.

Regarding cognitive differences between men and women having a biological component: https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...

Regarding the quality and replicability of stereotype threat studies, that came in vogue after the seminal Steele & Aronson 1995 paper:

https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/tag/does-stereotype-t...

https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/hidden-fig...

https://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/12/30/is-stereotype-threat...

You might also want to read this fully-sourced response to Grant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge... (and also Grant's response to that response in the comments).

Yep, I think they fairly strongly agree that biological differences are not huge and that interest (which can be strongly swayed by culture) is that main contributing factor in the studies the memo cited.

I think Scott Alexander makes one rather poor argument towards the end of his debate with Grant.

> I agree this is surprising. But let’s also not claim it supports the sexism theory, unless you think people in computer science became more sexist between 1980 and today for some reason.

Attitudes change precisely that quickly. Look at the massive change in attitudes towards homosexuality.

Then look at the way computers were marketed directly at boys in exactly that period https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...

> I think Scott Alexander makes one rather poor argument towards the end of his debate with Grant.

The way I read it, Grant claims that the decline can't have a biological explanation, Scott agrees but counter-claims that it does not necessarily follow the reason must be sexism then, and then goes on to provide a plausible non-sexism explanation. Are you reading it differently?

Regarding the article you referenced, I'm not sure I understand how it supports the sexism theory either. Up to about '83 women CS share rapidly and steadily increased (indicating decreasing sexism, I presume?), then Apple started marketing to boys, video games producers started marketing to boys, and because of that sexism within the industry immediately and dramatically increased? Or is it "sexism increased, and that caused Apple and video game producers to market to boys"? What's the narrative here?

More object-level, or nitpicking, if you will - the Apple ad they referenced didn't actually market "to boys" - nobody would buy an Apple II for a boy in 1985, it was too expensive, around $5K in today's money. The ad merely used a boy as the lead character, and no, mischievously pressing a button on the girl's keyboard does not constitute "teasing girls' computer skills".

Back in the 80s, the computers (Vic20s/C64s) sold themselves to my group of friends in grades 4-8; we were not subject to any marketing in Norway. Games were not the primary motivator, BASIC programming was.

Alas, I knew no girls who were into this even the slightest.

Sure. I can't speak to what influenced you or friends, or the girls you knew... just that it's not a worldwide phenomenon, and is restricted to CS rather than other STEM fields... so seems to fit. There may be no way to ever know for sure.

Bill Gates happend, solidifying the nerd image.

> You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case.

Or it implies that the bias has a more profound origin than simply hiring practices

(the funnel tapers earlier in the process)

But not as early as conception, that would be too early. /s /s

I agree mostly. But there may also be a cyclical effect where women don't go into CS because they don't see women working in tech. In which case Google shouldn't necessarily have a legal obligation to hire more women, but there may be a moral argument or even a long-term self-interest argument (i.e. increase supply of good engineers) for it.

If women get paid more for the same qualifications because the supply of women is lower and the demand is higher, then market forces will eventually make sure education at all levels gets fixed. There are many ways to solve the same problem. Fixing a government run school directly sounds like one of the harder ways to go about it.

> If women get paid more for the same qualifications

Isn't that kind of the definition of the gender discrimination most companies are trying to avoid?

Women are getting paid measurably less, even by Google at the moment. There are a few decades of underpaid women's salaries to make up for before we can call it even.

People are not onions. People learn. Even if companies will lower the bar on entry for women they will be just forced to educate their employees more on the job. For people just out of school it might seem strange but jobs are where you get most of you useful education.

Is it additional burden on the companies? Sure. But we are fine with taxing companies and placing on them the burden of workers protections and environmental protection. This is just another protection. Protection against reinforcing inequality. I'm not saying it's good but additional education for less educated and more equality in society doesn't seem bad if the only cost is money from the richest corporations especially the ones that get most of their money from advertising which nowaydays is less about informing customer about your product existance and all about everything else.

> I'm a proponent for an "early bias" theory

Or maybe women just enjoy doing different kind of things than men.

I agree with most of what you say. Except blaming "a mostly government run school system". I came out OK from a poorly rated public system in California.

Please stop blaming the school system and our government. Our society puts so much emphasis on women looking a certain way; the way they should socialize; they need to be pretty, cheerleaders and subordinate ... Little girls aren't supposed to be nerdy and engineers. That's what society tells them in the movies they watch, the songs they hear and reinforced at home ... Let's get Jane some dolls. We'll give John a lego set. That's the "problem"

a) i agree that it's a problem for the whole society not just the corporates. it starts by far earlier as you said

b) your argument is that 50% is currently not possible

most companies are <20% in tech positions and <20-30% for management

a few years ago even <10% [2]

[1] https://pxlnv.com/blog/diversity-of-tech-companies-by-the-nu... [2] https://unreasonable.is/silicon-valley-more-female-engineers...

Yup. 50% is possible if you reject 3-4 men for every woman you hire for a programmer position.

I don't think the percentages in management really matter because you tend to get promoted from lower rungs. Management % probably reflects the programmer hires 5-10 years ago.

We really need to look at the percentage of female applicants. In the ~1000 applications I've seen directly from indeed etc, less than 20% we're female. I didn't count, but it seemed closer to 10%. It's so bad that for some job listings I remember not receiving a single female application for 20+ males.

Is it possible that women switch jobs less frequently than men? Or that they're drawn to different types of companies (e.g. established companies that they expect to have real HR departments and harassment policies, rather than startups that may be exciting but they perceive as presenting a higher risk of being a hostile environment)?

They are drawn to different types of industries less volatile and demanding. They also start fewer companies.

So choices in life means much more than we want to admit.

Of course women are being affected early on just as men but then the discussion should be about that rather than putting the guilt on companies who are just trying to make a business.

i meant that the goal atm is not 50% but to get above the 20%

"The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. "

I agree with your point but economist will say that increasing the demand will be a better technique. Supply side will take care of itself. Affirmative actions are usually intended to create an artificial spike in demand for the purpose of greater good. How effective they are is a different matter altogether.