In the end, we would get 5 to 10 times as many talk submissions from men, accept nearly all of the talks by women (often turning down higher quality talks from men) trying to get diversity numbers and have a much higher cancellation rate form the women for various reasons, especially money. If we were lucky we would get 20-30% women speakers when all of that was done. I've also been told by some diversity activists that, in order to get women to speak and to get higher percentages of women as speakers etc., unlike most of the men, you need to pay for their travel etc., offer free tickets for women attendees, consider offering stipends for women who speak etc..
Others, organizing other conferences have shared similar experiences. It's one thing to fight against blatant sexism which I'm for, but this is turning into something else.
It’s very simple what it’s become: sexist against men.
This is what happens when you aim for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity.
I believe we’re in a Kantian second stage. We were sexist against women. Now, we’re sexist against men. The hopeful third step
Forward movement, progress, shouldn’t be defined as updating who we discriminate against.
Progress would be to stop discriminating. Optimizing for equality of outcome seems to be causing discrimination. That doesn’t look like progress to me.
It's difficult to have a factual debate around workplace discrimination because anyone who suggests that women are being favoured, is instantly attacked by social justice activists who rely more on moral outrage rather than facts or logic. A lot of the discussion on this thread today would not be something that people would say out loud near coworkers.
I brought up dynamic systems to point out that this isn't and won't be a three-step process of "the extreme, the other extreme, the golden middle". This phenomenon is continuous and oscillating; more than that, it can be dampened, stable or runaway, and which of those it is, depends on a lot of factors. If we manage to dampen it down, then we'll have made progress.
For those who slept through the philosophy class, what these stages are?
Hegel, when discussing his dialectic, ascribed it to Kant. Presumably to keep philosophy majors on their toes.
So, you're a boring white male who works in one of these industries. You're told constantly that you benefit from "white male privilege". Your experience, the statistics, clearly show this to be bullst.
What do you do? Do you trust anything that other authority figures tell you? Of course not. So you stop your kids getting vaccinated and vote for your country to leave the EU because it means 350 million a week more for your National Health Service..
This is the trap progressives - whose number I count myself in - must do better to avoid if they want to progress towards a fairer and better world.
It's inherently hard. After all, statistically 9 out of 10 will match your expectations, but you should embrace the outliers, help them understand, that they're perfectly okay, and capable of doing whatever they think they want, be it guns, C++, teacher, nurse, etc.
People throw this accusation around all the time, but it doesn't make much sense. Outcomes are the only holistic way to measure opportunity.
If you're seeing one group getting lesser outcomes, there are only two possibilities: Their opportunities are being artificially limited somewhere, or one of the groups is simply better than the other. So if you really believe this is a meaningful distinction to draw — that measuring outcomes can't tell us about opportunity — what you're really saying is, "The groups who haven't traditionally been in power are in that position because they are innately less capable."
The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
It's theoretically possible that women just generally suck at computers, but if that's someone's argument, I'd prefer they come out and actually make the argument instead of throwing around smokescreens about "equality of outcomes vs. equality of opportunity."
> Then again, it could just be that, feeling financially secure and on equal footing with men, some women will always choose to follow their passions, rather than whatever labor economists recommend. And those passions don’t always lie within science [or technology].
I had an ex-girlfriend who could code, but had no interest in doing that for a job. I'm currently married to a woman with 3 degrees, one of which is a PhD, and she also can code, but says she feels sorry for me, because it's my job.
If someone isn't interested in programming, they don't "suck" at it. They just don't do it.
This article is about a comprehensive review of salaries at Google that concluded that overall, women who achieved the same job levels as men were being paid more.
The opportunity vs. outcome question is applied to the question of representation. How many women should we expect to see at Google, across job levels, if the process for selecting and promoting people is fair?
This is weird. That's not how I read what leereeves wrote at all. Yet you repeatedly insist that's what he's saying. Are you perhaps projecting an opinion onto leereeves? Preferences can very much influence the outcomes of a training pipeline for a field. (I say this as someone who taught a class attended by Chic Tech students.) That's just common sense.
> When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.
men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.
Are you willing to walk up to his face and tell him that he "sucks" because he doesn't work as hard and doesn't have the same TC as I do?
To be frank, your posts are pretty denigrating to people who choose to have better work life balance. Not everyone sees their self worth in terms of dollars.
Outcome: The women working as programmers at FooSoft make on average 10% less than the men working there.
Possible reasons:
1. Lack of opportunity (e.g. people in power at FooSoft have bias against them makes it harder for them to have their contributions valued)
2. They just aren't as good as the men
3. They...have different interests in some way that apparently doesn't make them worse but does make them deserve to be paid less?
A quick search suggests that only 20% of programmers in general are female, but 30% of Google programmers are female. I'm not certain these numbers are accurate, but if they are, female programmers are over represented at Google.
That would mean Google hired a greater percentage of female programmers than male programmers. That is, if Google hired the top 0.1% of male programmers, they hired the top 0.15% of female programmers.
If we assume two groups have identical distribution of qualifications, the female programmers hired would have lower qualifications, as an obvious consequence of a hiring policy that favors women. That's not saying women are less qualified, it's saying that Google hires women who are less qualified because they want to hire more women than the 20% that sex-blind hiring would result in.
Going by the "logic" of outcomes being the "only holistic measure" this would indicate that Google is biased against male programmers within the context of the pool of available candidates. Yet if we change the scope of our consideration to that of the general population, Google would be biased against females.
Seems like the "only holistic measure" has some kind of issue with logical consistency. One has to be careful with how the population sample relates to the specific pipeline of available candidates. If one isn't careful, then the interpretation of the numbers might as well be fiction. You can't just stop at, "Does it match the general population? No? Then BIAS!"
That would be expecting Google to hire untrained people as programmers, which would be absurd.
If we compare with the general population, any bias found wouldn't be at Google, but in the school system, children's entertainment, parenting, or some other group that influences people long before they apply to Google.
The pool of programmers "In general" is not relevant for Google. They don't hire programmers in general, but are focused on a specific subset (usually from some big universities).
I think my hypothesis is simpler:
- Women are discriminated against in the industry as a whole
- Google actively discriminates in favor of women
It's discrimination both times.
When Google (and other top tech companies) actively discriminate in favor of women, that causes the appearance of discrimination elsewhere in the industry, because the top tech companies have taken more of the best female programmers and those who weren't hired by Google et al are, on average, worse than the men who weren't hired by Google et al.
And when I spoke about interests, I was discussing why few women choose to study computer science.
I would expect in 2019, that the industry as a whole discriminates in favor of women, but I'm just a layperson when it comes to that. Do you have citations?
- Google actively discriminates in favor of women
It's discrimination both times.
I agree.
This could even still be true at Google, though I don't have insight into whether or not it is. It seems at least plausible that Google has put systemic biases in place to balance out more diffuse bias among individual humans, but has done too thorough a job.
"Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data." http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...
[1] https://medium.com/@jsmp/orchestrating-false-beliefs-about-g...
Outcome: Women working as programmers at FooSoft comprise 10% less of the workforce than men working there.
Possible reasons
1. Hiring bias
2. Not as qualified
3. Less applicants due to disinterest in programming as a vocation
I'm sorry, but that's "not even wrong" as Pauli would say.
what you're really saying is, "The groups who haven't traditionally been in power are in that position because they are innately less capable."
Group cultures/subcultures can pass on knowledge, which can then provide advantages and then be transmitted to different groups. No racial or innate superiority or inferiority is needed for such an explanation. This is well corroborated by history. (See Thomas Sowell's Migrations And Cultures: A World View) An example of this is found in the German influences in Mexico, and the part of Monterrey one of my old hackerspace colleagues is from. He's quite proud of the progressive schooling he had and of the engineering culture there. (The story of German emigration has its stories of misfortune as well, including examples of German ethnic disadvantage as well.)
20th century hacker culture has its roots in the model railway building scene, which was largely a male space. There's nothing inherently male about model railway building or hacking itself, but there was something about the subculture which was. If we're to change this, then it shouldn't be done from the punitive and negative standpoint of blame, but from a positive view of transmission. No "inherent" or identitarian notions are needed at all.
Additionally, this is also affected by Simpson's paradox. Without conditioning on the correct causal effects, you may end up at exactly the opposite conclusion to the truth.
What I'm talking about is a kind of "grassroots" disparity of opportunity. It's not necessarily the same as a "systemic" disparity of opportunity. The former can often be available to people who are literally poorer than the poor. (As has been the case for Chinese immigrants at times.) Irish Traditional music contains another example of the former.
Often, disparities can be a mix of these two things.
I agree with everything you said here, but you're presenting it as a disagreement, so I'm a little bit confused
I'm glad you're feeling a little bit confused. Often, this can be a good sign!
The problem with how such disparities are talked about and acted upon, is that the complexity of the situation is often downplayed or drastically underestimated, then combined with a punitive attitude of blame and compensation. This isn't how these things are known to work. The best way to transmit cultural knowledge is through some form of competition. (Friendly and peaceful are best, of course.)
An old schoolmate of mine who was at Google before the James Damore thing happened, was saying stuff just afterwards like, maybe it's time that males got stuff taken away from them.
All I said was that if you look at a group getting much worse outcomes and declare that their opportunities were at least as good as the group getting better outcomes, it logically follows that the members of the group are simply not capable.
Sorry, but it doesn't follow logically. I've dated two women who can code, and who can outperform students I've taught in that, but who don't like doing it at all. Their employment outcomes as programmers would be nil, because that's not what they want to do. People keep explaining this to you, and yet you keep coming out with, "it logically follows that the members of the group are simply not capable." I got a group of two who are capable, but have an outcome of zero. Proof by example, your logical assertion is wrong. (No guff about anecdotes vs. data. You're the one who said, "it logically follows," and even a group of two is enough to refute "logic.")
Women do yoga. Men do martial arts. Which is "better"? Which is the "lesser outcome"? None. It's just a difference (in preferences and therefore outcome).
Gender roles aren't so cut and dry any more. Given that, maybe outcomes should be considered independent of gender?
Yes, but you also don't need millions. Any measures of pay inequality will be skewed by extreme outcomes (as the distribution is floored), so people who decide they earn enough and prioritize time/family over further career progress will appear in statistics as "inequality" (edit: even though it's actually good that our society is so wealthy and productive that some people can afford to do that).
It's even worse than that. According to the same statistics, a person who bought a ticket for their favourite band's performance last night is worse off than a day before, whereas their favourite band are better off. In fact, the statistics would show that inequality increased dramatically last night, the band was famous and there were 10k+ people giving away their money, whereas - let's say, five - random guys got "significantly richer" at the same time.
The value of the emotional uplifting and sense of life after the gig? Nah, not an asset to rely upon in "strict" statistics.
That said, I have come to see some pushes for diversity in tech as being extortionist. Some of the tactics used by some specific women who push for diversity in tech are blatantly self-serving like offering workplace diversity consulting but also naming and shaming corporations and individuals for lack of diversity.
If it seems like a literal boys club, maybe it's ok if organizers don't cajole women to attend, who don't seem to want to.
Maybe it's the result of individuals asynchronously but collaboratively acting to get the most for their class of people. Since there isn't a "council of women in technology" that meets bi-weekly to decide what each speaker should do for each conference, the women speakers act independently much of the time. To get the best for women they know they have to ask for stuff: fees, travel, tickets for other women. Men are not going to just give it to them. They try to do their level best there every time they get an invite. Every so often -- through casual conversation, meet-ups, online communities, articles in magazines, letters to the editor -- there is a chance to communicate about what worked and what didn't. There isn't an easy way for communication to happen about the net effect of speakers' actions for a particular conference when it's happening, or even afterward. There is a ratchet effect and in, addition, a general sense that "there is still more to be done" for women in technology. When the next conference rolls around, still more is attempted...
My daughter who is finishing the primary school has recently asked me if it's okay if she doesn't like math, but likes animals and babies.
Sounds like some pressure is being applied...
edit: thanks for pointing out that I misread which type of pressure is being applied.
What is taught in 4th-5th grade math? Fractions? Decimals? Multiplication and division of larger numbers (maybe the accursed "Long Division")?
These are not exactly the most exciting or interesting things to learn... If I was a parent of this child, I'd take it as a notice that they are falling behind, probably from lousy teaching and parenting. It's not going to get any better by ignoring the problem. They've got another 8+ years of school to go, they aren't even halfway done. You need to show them why they can find it interesting, the same way you would show a student who really loves math why reading/writing is important. Or why history matters... If you just assume a 10 year old can fully decide what their adult self likes/doesn't like and what they need to know, then you are failing as a parent.
I ask because I remember saying stuff like this before I had kids. I don't anymore. I've tried to learn not to judge others parenting but hey that's just me.
No one, at least that I've seen. Is saying men don't like babies and animals too. There is nothing wrong with that. To assume that you have to like something based on your gender is ignorant.
To assume that you can't like what is "stereotypical" liked by your gender is equally ignorant.
People have a massive amount of fluctuation in what they like and don't like, part of being a parent is about recognizing the individual that your kid is and not pressing what YOU want on them, but balancing that with what's best for them based on what you know that they don't.
I also know that as a parent, you're always failing. You just do your best to fail as little as possible.
Boys are statistically over prescribed ADD medication in schools because, studies show, teachers are more likely to write them up for being a distraction to class.
So, this thread says the daughter is being pushed to like math over animals, yet, you doubt that a son (there is no gender gap pre-high school in math, infact, females earn higher grades) is being pushed to study math over animals, recess, or babies.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32858/drugging-of-the...
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/women_and_m...
You are wrong in that my assertion about parenting and that the parent is the best fit to make that call.
Their claim of "If I was a parent of this child..." Is exactly the kind of stuff I'd spout before I had children. And in your comment you completely disregard this point I'm making.
So in a way, you aren't listening to my post very well, or giving me the benefit of the doubt. You don't address many of my points either, but dive right back into gender studies and ADD medication (over prescription of medication is a problem in our society in general).
Final thought.
>there is no gender gap pre-high school in math, infact, females earn higher grades
That is a gender gap, just not one where males are on top.
Edit: I'd also argue that trade schools are under-represented in our current education system, but that's kind of why I think it's up to the parent to make these calls rather than some person on the internet.
I think we're on the fluctuation - and the ways that we're taught in school. Anecdotally, I'm under the impression (based mostly on conversations with other now adults - and teachers) that "regular ed" likely wouldn't have unlocked the same passions that "gifted"/advanced classes opened in me.
To emphasize your note about failure, my education was so changed because I was allowed to fail (38% on a test in 3rd grade advanced math is a memory). Whether it's Mike Tyson, Wayne Gretzky, Lombari, Bruce Wayne, or parenting advice - if we take shots, we're going to fail, we're going to get punched in the face, but will we get back up, and most importantly, will our children, students do it again until they succeed their way.
[Though, after I type that, I remember the point of the OP, you don't have to like math, you often times don't even have to do it the prescribed way - but it's important to learn it, you'll one day apply the concepts -- even when dealing with babies or animals.]
It seems most of the doctors in the article would prefer no medication for ADD though.
It's not that boys will all like math either, but society makes sure they can't like animals and babies. Higher expectations of children (within reason) typically leads to higher achievement.
Maybe, rightly so? It doesn't matter if you like reading, you need to learn it. For a toddler in 2019, I think coding and some math is getting close to this level of importance.
My dad wanted to go into art school, but he went into engineering instead, got a visa and moved our entire family to the US. I wanted to go into journalism, but my sister kept telling me I needed to think about my future family, so I went into Computer Science (I'm also in my 30s with no family .. so, yea).
How about instead of telling women they should go for higher paying jobs, we tell men it's okay to go after your dreams. How about we find a way to support artists so they're not selling everything under iTunes/Google/Amazon at a 30% cut!
There is a much bigger problem here of people taking jobs they know they'll probably be unhappy with because they need the money. We are a factory pipeline of misery.
> We are a factory pipeline of misery.
yep, but even to address that, you need to learn math, reading, and critical thinking.
and unfortunately our schools suck at all of them, and to change that you again need those.
(as a bit of an aside, I always wished at that time that people wouldn't push the issue. Bringing it to the forefront forced the topic, and one group of kids would "win" the argument at the expense of the other kids.)
I'm still available if she changes her mind one day!
I've seen this with people who are coders trying to force their kids to make websites (like they did when they were a kid). But guess what: maybe you did it because it was fun, but for her it's a chore because she didn't come up with the idea!
If she likes animals, show her science about animals. The math will come into play naturally. You could ask her about how many babies certain animals have each year. Let her find the problems that interest her, and show her that math is a tool that can solve those problems.
This describes basically every tech job I have ever had. Real life engineering woman here reporting in.
In 2014 I joined a series B startup as engineer #15 and was the only woman in the office other than the admin; food delivery dudes often brought things to my desk, assuming I must be the office mother. When I was late to work one day after being groped by a strange man on Caltrain, my supervisor questioned my commitment to meeting deadlines. When I moved on, they returned to being a 100% straight white male company.
In 2015, I was the first female engineering hire at the new office of a growing mid-size tech company. A second woman wasn't hired until we'd reached a headcount of about 20. Men, especially clients, often forgot my name. E.g. Janice vs Janet vs Jan (none of these my real name, but you get the idea. The point is that I wasn't important enough to these men to remember.)
Fast forward a few years. Now I am by far the most senior of four engineering ladies at the satellite campus of a household name tech company. Total headcount at this office is about 100 engineers.
I have never had a female manager.
For those keeping score, I have never worked anywhere with more than 5-10% female engineers. For my entire career, even as a noob, I have been the most senior female engineer I know.
I count myself lucky because I've never had to deal with anything resembling actual harassment. (It helps that I am not conventionally attractive). But there is a psychological burden of always feeling alone, always being the first or only, worrying that your actions will be taken to represent all people of your kind, and wondering if assholes in your midst think you've only got where you've gotten because you're a woman.
Your dismissive attitude toward women's supposed advantages is as common as it is damaging. Whatever unfair advantages you think your women colleagues have, unless you are black or latinx, it is unlikely you will ever experience the feelings of isolation and otherness that most women deal with throughout their tech careers.
Are you aware this kind of thing happens to everyone? Do you expect people to remember your name just because you're a woman? Or would you rather they remembered your name because you've accomplished something beyond the ordinary? I'm a black male, by the way.
I've worked with people for almost a year without remembering their name, because I'm awful with names. They were also very quiet and introverted, rarely said much and I suspect that had something to do it.
I recommend starting out by assuming she has knowledge and experiences you don't have access to and learning from it, rather than trying to explain away this new information.
Gaslighting is something that happens over a long period of time, with someone you know well and that you trust. The person you are defending is not going to be questioning their sanity or who they are as a person because of one HN post.
Asking someone to reconsider why they were treated a certain way by other people is not gaslighting. Calling someone a liar is not gaslighting. Countering someone's anecdotal evidence with your own is not gaslighting. Please stop trivializing the term, because it's a serious form of emotional and mental abuse, and you're downplaying its severity by tossing the word around like this.
I'm not blaming anyone, just trying to share another perspective. I personally think it's dangerous to think in black and white. I try to remain a healthy skeptic, and I'm welcome to new perspectives.
You could be experiencing this phenomenon for a handful of reasons, none of which being the reason you stated.
Are these two things mutually exclusive? Women could both have the advantages outlined by OP and feel more isolated.
Honestly I'm terrible at names and people only remember mine because it's ethnic. I wouldn't read too much in clients not remembering your name correctly. Humans are generally just bad at names and it might not have anything to do with their perception of you.
I have to ask though, why do you think you were often one of the few/only women/woman at these shops. Did they actively try to recruit women? Did you see women get interviewed but who just didn't make the cut? The last time I was at a shop where they made me go through resumes, I rarely even saw women in the application stack.
I worked with an amazingly talented woman who started back in the day at RealMedia writing C++ codecs. She told me about several cases of harassment or even things like asking her to wear a certain dress a manager liked when she was at trade shows/booths.
I also worked with an English woman at the same company several years my senior, who's been both a developer and product manager, and who says she hasn't experienced that type of harassment while in the tech sector.
I hate anecdotal stuff like this though, because it just doesn't build a big enough picture, which is why actual studies are insightful.
But going back to my question: do you think these shops were actively discriminating against women, passively (subconsciously) discriminating or there simply weren't enough women applicants (they do tend to get sucked up by the big players like Google/Facebook/etc.)
I want to say sorry, and I will, but I know it's not personally my fault and I know it won't make much of a difference to your circumstances now or in the future. But still, I'm sorry you've had this experience.
I have to be honest and say this, but I think what you've experienced is very much an American culture kind-of-thing. Every time I read a comment like this, besides making me sad and angry, it tends to always come from somewhere in America.
I'm sure something similar has happened and continues to happen here in Australia, but I've seen little of it. That being said, as I sit here now in a very large, well known company, my line of sight gives me a head count of about 30 men and 2 women. This makes me sad and angry, too.
I don't know what to do about this besides encouraging women to come into the industry and protecting them in a none condescending, white-knight, women-are-weak sort of way...
In a Chinese forum about knitting nonetheless
However a distinction must be made between the formal systems (extremely sexist favouring women), informal systems (potentially extremely sexist favouring men) and workplace environment (women are continuously sexually propositioned; pretty overwhelming evidence for that IMO).
Making the formal systems sexist is a stupid response to the informal systems being sexist. I wish that people would stop advocating that and instead work on the informal issue - if it isn't due to innate ability (a safe bet) then there must be something that can be done. The propositioning thing is a bit of a poser though, it is so pervasive that I suspect it points to deeper issues.
Also the anecdotal evidence is that if propositioning was successfully stamped out that would do crazy things to the fabric of how relationships get established. Might be a net good or bad.
As far as trying to address the... over-solicitation issue, I am trying to be constructive with this set of suggestions.
* Diversify corporate offices to promote mixing in to cities rather than within the company.
* Have strong work life balance allowing external socialization.
* Apply political and economic pressure on civic infrastructure to promote:
* * mass transit (more, better, cleaner, safer)
* * quantity and quality of housing (lower prices for all)
* * "livable" cities in general
Specific incentives for FAMILIES (not just women) could include additional career help and planning:
* Part time work, fully async, from 'home' (or a more local office sometimes) for moms/dads.
* Remote 'first' (only?) participation; meetings online, rather than by the water-cooler.
* Have a presence in a given region that is stable
* * with actual career paths in the area, allowing home-buying (rather than renting)(As a white, straight male,) I have absolutely no issue with a woman being offered a role over me as a tie-breaker or an epsilon-advantage. A company who would go significantly farther than that is one that I don’t want to work for anyway as they’re not interested in being competitive.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code:-why-aren...
I wish that all people would be open minded and just treat everyone equally by default no matter what they look like, what genitalia they have or their wealth level.
Save the exclusion for people who show themselves to be *s (i.e. who cause harm to others). So ban smokers / drinkers from your wedding not men.
The Irish[1] and Italians[2] have something to say about this. In the past, the US has not been all that kind to non-Protestants in general. In particular, there used to be a strong anti-Catholic sentiment, so much so that it was one of the original "cornerstones" of the KKK.
> What's wrong with a conference for women, how exactly is that different than a conference for engineers, or a store for pet owners?
I can choose whether or not to be an engineer or a pet owner. I can't choose whether or not to be a man or a woman (gender reassignment surgery notwithstanding).
Right, those minority groups have been discriminated against. I think I screwed up my point; I was trying to point out that women have also been discriminated against, and that a conference for women doesn't equate to reverse discrimination nor is it remotely equal in magnitude to what women have gone through. The same does go for other historically discriminated groups.
> I can choose whether or not to be an engineer or a pet owner. I can't choose whether or not to be a man or a woman
That is true, but you can also choose whether to attend a conference without affecting your life, unlike having a job. Being born a male doesn't mean a product designed for women is some kind of discrimination against men, right? Not having a choice still doesn't explain what is wrong with a conference for women. Jobs and conferences aren't the same things; conferences are not paying people and do not directly represent social mobility or opportunity. What specifically is wrong with an event designed for females, and how is it different from a product specifically designed for women (or men, or children, or Irish people...)?
There are conferences for men too, notably not being complained about here: http://elitemanconference.com/ https://bettermanconference.com/ http://www.menstuff.org/
Now, of course as we see from the stats, anecdotes and other hints, we're pretty far from a women dominated higj tech sector, but there is already polarization. There are already women run companies actively trying to hire only women. This is not constructive on the long run. Just as the X-gender-only conferences.
I'm of course interested in arguments that say otherwise, so if you have, please share them.
Yes there is already polarization, the global polarization that exists already is known and documented to be in favor of men, on average. There is still a pay gap in favor of men. You’re trying to argue there is reverse discrimination, but without any evidence. There are some affirmative actions for women. Do you consider affirmative actions for women to be discrimination?
If a cultural polarization occurred naturally without any intentional effort, meaning people exhibited and acted on biases without knowing it, and it was hurting a class of people, what would you do to fix it?
> There are already women run companies actively trying to hire only women. This is not constructive on the long run. Just as the X-gender-only conferences.
Those seem like two different things to me. Do you see the same difference I do between a job that pays you and a product you have to pay for? While it depends quite a bit on what conference we’re talking about, I don’t see a general problem with conference products made for women. I don’t believe that is automatically discriminatory or polarizing. If you do, I’d like to hear more about what you think is wrong with it. Tampons are made for women, and I don’t know any men that are mad about it or think is polarizing.
There is a reason that there are laws surrounding job discrimination and no laws surrounding conference discrimination. It’s because it is perfectly fine to sell products to a specific audience.
Jobs are required by law to not discriminate, though I’m sure there are some jobs that require a woman and not a man. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was legal and acceptable to hire a woman to teach Women’s Studies.
Personally, I’ll wait to be concerned about jobs reserved for women until women are the majority of the workforce and management structure at all companies on average. Right now, they’re not.
In France there is a dedicated system for engineering studies (Classes preparatoires + Grandes Ecoles).
You do 2 years of intensive Math and Physics (classe preparatoire), than pass a ranking exam, then go to the school of your choice provided you ranked high enough to get into this specific school.
Basically, the ratio was 1/3 women 2/3 men at the "classe preparatoire" stage, and overall it's the ratio for engineer when all specialties are mixed together.
But then you have disparities between fields, CS schools get between 10 to 15% of women while Chemistry is about 50%, other fields like Electronic, Civil Engineering, Applied Physics are roughly in the average of 30%. Only the schools to become a military officer have an higher disparity than CS (and the air branch is actually in the same area).
For those who can read French (or have the courage to decipher) the statistics are available here:
* http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/mp.html (math dominant)
* http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/pc.html (physic dominant)
* http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/psi.html (technic and mechanic dominant)
(Hint: CS == Informatique (often abbreviated to "Info")
What's the percentage female graduates in STEM fields? The 57% may not be representative for the fields which matter for engineers. Not saying the delta is big, I honestly don't know and am curious.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_318.30.a...
In 2017 there were 133,761 Bachelor's degrees conferred in Engineering, 20% of which were conferred to women.
Computers: 71,420 degrees, 19% women
Math: 24,073 degrees, 42% women
Physical sciences: 31,268 degrees, 40% women
But these numbers sure suggest that something is wrong with computer science departments.
Why? Why do men and women have to have the same preferences in what to study, in your opinion?
Does the fact that 78% of students in veterinary science are female "sure suggest" that something is wrong with veterinary science?
Since there are so many fields where women vastly outnumber men (and women significantly outnumber men overall in college) a corresponding skew in other fields is a necessary outcome: you simply run out of women to fill those seats, they are elsewhere.
Whereas we have pretty good evidence that by improving the signaling of ambient belonging for women we can significantly increase their interest in computer science: http://ilabs.uw.edu/sites/default/files/Cheryan_Meltzoff_Kim...
Few things with a biological mechanism are that easy to manipulate.
Is it that hard to believe that these deeply evolutionarily engrained practices have no effect on influencing how the different sexes value spending their time when we control for income gap disparity in choosing a profession w.r.t work life balance?
It takes a very specific type of person that enjoys staring intensely into a computer screen all day, lost in thought and confined in solitude while being unplugged from the human condition which can make you feel like a robot as the years progress.
Humans didn't evolve to sit in front of an artificial light source and forgo human interaction, regardless of gender or race.
Testosterone, causing male-female behavioral divergence in general. Excerpting from an email...
"The amount of eye-contact shown by infants at 12 months of age is inversely correlated with prenatal testosterone (Lutchmaya, Baron-Cohen & Raggett, submitted), and prenatal testosterone is higher in males than females." That study seems to be here: [1]. "The amount of eye contact varied quadratically with foetal testosterone level when data from both sexes was examined together, and when the data for the boys was examined alone."
(Why not for when the girls were examined alone? "This may be because there were only 30 girls in the sample, making the resulting model under-powered. A sample size of approximately 60 would be required to give the model a power of 0.8, assuming a similar effect size...")
There's another one about testosterone in girls [2]: "Here, we report that fetal testosterone measured from amniotic fluid relates positively to male-typical scores on a standardized questionnaire measure of sex-typical play in both boys and girls."
That study also references others that directly show cause-and-effect on other mammals: "For instance, in rodents and nonhuman primates, treating developing females with testosterone or other androgens increases male-typical play, whereas reducing androgens in developing males reduces it."
To me, the question isn't whether testosterone affects behavior, it's how much.
[1] http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2002_Lutch_eyeco...
The other answer is that practically every behavior is influenced by a combination of hormones, genes, and environment. Everything from athletic skills, obesity, teeth health, stress, sleep, diet, honesty, politics, and so on. To quote a profession, free will likely do not exist and is only the result of all the different biological systems interacting with each other, the environment, and random chance.
> Which specific biological mechanism are you hypothesizing is responsible?
Apparently the only alternative to there being something wrong with CS departments in particular is a specific biological mechanism? How so? And somehow there must also be a "cultural construction" of CS that is "inalterable". Why?
How about there are cultural mechanisms that have nothing to do with CS departments? Is that a possibility? For just one example, just about every study (and there are tons) shows that a dramatic split in preferences is already present in schoolchildren at an early age. How, in your opinion, do CS departments at universities get to shape those preferences?
Also, I don't understand your apparent belief that if something is biological, it therefore must be unalterable (and the inverse that if something is alterable, it must therefore not be biological). Culture can override almost anything. Survival for example is a strong instinct, yet societies impose death penalties and create armies sending people into battle where they are likely to be killed. So is reproduction, yet some societies impose(d) single child policies.
These are very extreme examples, where even the strongest biological imperatives are overrides by strong societal coercion. But it shows that it would be trivial for society to override all other cultural or biological effects by simply mandating that enrolment be 50:50, and enforcing that mandate without compromise. Easy peasy, but is it something we want?
I think what we want is to maximise freedom, personal agency and potential for fulfilment, not enforcement of specific gender distributions.
You may ask how this is relevant. Well, it turns out that female participation is STEM fields is inversely correlated to the freedom and gender equality of the society, not positively as the blank-slate theorists posit. This is called the (STEM) gender equality paradox.
https://researchtheheadlines.org/2018/04/20/the-stem-gender-...
So yes, there is a large cultural effect, but it goes in the opposite direction. The usual counter to this is that "even in western societies equality isn't 100%", but this is irrelevant, because this is not about absolute values, but about the sign of the change of the dependent variable. And that is a simple boolean: positively or negatively correlated.
And yes, I know that "correlation doesn't imply causation", but that's not the issue here: a claim for causation (cultural forces causes unequal representation) is fairly thoroughly debunked when not even the claimed correlation shows up, and even more throughly debunked when a negative correlation shows up.
So unless some new and very compelling evidence shows up, the idea that the surrounding culture/society causes unequal representation is simply wrong, never mind this odd idea that somehow it is the fault of CS departments.
So if you want freedom, you get unequal distributions. If you want equal distributions, you must curtail freedom.
Another alternative to "something wrong in CS departments" is "something very right" in other departments. Take early childhood education. The skew is very much the same as in CS, just the other direction. So let's assume you have 100 women and 100 men and just these two choices for degree. If 80 of the 100 women go into education, only 20 are left to go into CS. Simple arithmetic.
Is it so unthinkable that women choose education degrees because they want to? And not because "hey, I really wanted to go into CS, but the conditions in the CS department are so horrible that I will settle for early childhood education instead"? And is it so unthinkable to posit both cultural and, yes, biological mechanisms why women might be more into early childhood education than men? Mechanisms that come into play as you remove societal pressures to do otherwise?
In fact, it turns out that a "people vs. things" preference difference is one of the stronger findings in psychology. It is present in infants of a few months. It is present in infant monkeys. It is of course, statistical in nature with large overlaps. Again, how does whatever is wrong with CS departments affect the preferences of infants and monkeys?
As to the study. I am not sure what they were trying to show, but (a) I've never seen CS departments decorated like that (b) it was all hypothetical situations that seem to have little to no bearing on actual decision making and (c) if the decor of the classrooms is the deciding factor in your study and career choices, .... ?
Oh, here's another fun one. A difference in ability and preferences that also has some explanatory power. It goes like this:
1. Men who score high on the math part of the SATs (or similar exams) usually score well only on the math part. On the other hand, women who score high on the math part usually also score well on the verbal part.
2. Irrespective of gender, people who score well on both verbal and math scores prefer non-STEM fields of study.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201707...
So men tend to flock into STEM fields because they have no alternatives.
That "something" is almost certainly cultural, since there is little evidence that any group based genetic hypothesis has explanatory power, whereas cultural forces have clearly been shown to impact gender balance. e.g. the right to vote.
Why do you think so?
Regardless of what criteria you use to split human groups, you get non-equal distributions, because people are different.
To me, exact equal balance everywhere would be a much stronger indication that indeed something very fishy is going on.
> any group based genetic hypothesis
Really? All children are born to women, none to men. Obviously cultural forces.
Most women prefer men as mates. Most men prefer women as mates. Obviously cultural forces.
Little infants and even little infant monkeys show gendered toy preferences. Obviously cultural forces.
Women vastly prefer early childhood education as a degree. Obviously cultural forces.
Of course, while a majority of ballet dancers are women the people who run ballets are almost entirely male, which should give you some insight into what is wrong with ballet.
Indeed, if you want to feel better about tech I have never heard of a tech company where developers were openly expected to sleep with the person running the team to get a promotion, so we are beating the New York City ballet by a mile.
I know once-English majors with a similar story of a passion for what computing can reveal/create around a discipline that resulted in rich software careers. I am over a decade out of college, and in my personal experience passion for computing is more relevant than having a STEM background in software development. All this to say, I’m not sure % STEM focused is necessarily a reliable indicator of “future software engineer.”
And this is mostly on the ops side.
https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-science-technolog...
The section entitled "Few Women Are Earning Degrees in STEM, Except in the Life Sciences" states that 35% of STEM undergrads are female. For engineering and computer-related bachelor's programs, this drops to ~18%(!).
The data indicates that women are underrepresented in STEM field, but we can also argue that men are underrepresented in educational field. Why aren't there more women in fields like firefighters, oil rigs, dangerous jobs?
Fundamentally, men and women are different both biologically and psychologically. To generalize, men are more interested in things and engineering and women are more interested in people and relationship. But that doesn't mean their intelligences differ. Intelligence expresses itself in different ways.
If a little girl says to her parents that she likes math, it's not like her parents would say, "no, you can't like math, you should go play with your dolls, math is for boys".
We can't equalize outcomes, there's no way we can have 50/50 across every field. What we can do is to equalize opportunity and level the playing field. Accepting women or men for a job just for the same of equal representation at workforce instead of evaluate their abilities for the job is just plain irresponsible.
Employment prospects for scientists are absolutely dreadful (For someone spending years of training to acquire highly specialized, highly technical, highly difficult skills) compared to those of someone who can hack together a CRUD webapp.
> Women earned 57.3% of bachelor’s degrees in all fields in 2013 and 50.3% of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees.
Women earned 57.3% of bachelor’s degrees in all fields in 2013 and 50.3% of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees. However, women’s participation in science and engineering at the undergraduate level significantly differs by specific field of study. While women receive over half of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the biological sciences, they receive far fewer in the computer sciences (17.9%), engineering (19.3%), physical sciences (39%) and mathematics (43.1%).
More relevant points appear further down the page which illustrate what people talk about when they lament the underrepresentation of women in STEM:
Women make up half of the total U.S. college-educated workforce, but only 29% of the science and engineering workforce. Female scientists and engineers are concentrated in different occupations than are men, with relatively high shares of women in the social sciences (62%) and biological, agricultural, and environmental life sciences (48%) and relatively low shares in engineering (15%) and computer and mathematical sciences (25%).
For example:
35.2% of chemists are women;
11.1% of physicists and astronomers are women;
33.8% of environmental engineers are women;
22.7% of chemical engineers are women;
17.5% of civil, architectural, and sanitary engineers are women;
17.1% of industrial engineers are women;
10.7% of electrical or computer hardware engineers are women; and
7.9% of mechanical engineers are women.
For example, women are over-represented among social science and biology graduates. Perhaps we should add a quota to make social science and biology graduates 50% men, then women blocked from social science and biology degrees would go into computer science instead and balance things out.
There is also a leaky pipeline where women e.g. study math but then go into teaching, which doesn't count as working in STEM. If we had a quota of 50% men in teaching, this would help make the pipeline leak less gender-biased.
Of course some women end up becoming stay at home moms, so we also need a quota where 50% of stay at home parents must be dads. You probably need the government to enforce that.
But if we have enough quotas to ensure 50% men in female dominated fields, then by elimination, those men have to come from currently male dominated fields, and the women pushed out by quotas have to go into male dominated fields, so things should even out.
Of course, this could have, and does[0] happen in the Bay Area, too - in just the last year even.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/technology/uber-sexual-ha...
I think the "me too" thing proved the coastal elite were part of the problem.
Distributions and nuanced statements are the crux of this entire matter, yet in these discussions they're cast away in favor of simplistic narratives. If you draw the metric this way, "men" are paid more. If you draw the metric that way, "women" are paid more, surprise! This is already headed down the path to madness!
Generalizations using scalar metrics (or even slightly more advanced higher moments) can only inform - they simply cannot form a basis for prescriptive policies to reform! We generally see sexism/racism/xxism as wrong because they ignore individuals in favor of broken-ass group-based narratives. Yet over the past several years this collectivist thinking has re-sprouted in full force, sanctioned as acceptable because it's "helping" - yet it's still fundamentally broken!
Specifically, every company's basic incentive is to cheap out on every single employee as much as possible without having them leave. They are taking advantage of every person's individual reluctance to fully negotiate, essentially arbitraging their human-emotional holdups. Is it terribly surprising that there are going to be wide disparities between what different personalities (regardless of but also including gender) are paid?
What is the graduation rate of women in STEM fields? 57% is not the graduation rate in STEM fields, which makes it sound like you are cherry picking statistics. What fields are all the women graduating in?
Aside from Google, the pay gap still exists and women earn less than men. The WP article estimates 94 cents on the dollar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_S...
You're right that women are getting positive reinforcements, it's because (whether you agree with them or not) we have affirmative action programs for women. Affirmative actions always have and always will be debated to death, but the question you should be asking and answering before dismissing this issue is, if there's no affirmative action, how do you equalize opportunities for groups known to have been discriminated against? We already tried not having extra programs and not having extra awareness, and the result was lower pay. How would you correct this?
This sounds like an uneducated opinion. Sample size of 1: My department had maybe 1 female professor for every 10 male. The student ratio was pretty similar.
In your sample, you asked "your friends", which is a really biased sample. How did you meet them? Did you only meet them because they already had the high paying job? You aren't accounting for variables, and you are ignoring evidence.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
.... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female?
This is because we used to have a female CIO that set diversity targets that were mandatory for all levels, so in less than 10 years we went from 15-20% females to 55-60% females by rejecting male new hires and promoting females by the dozen.
No one is forcing them to NOT join a STEM field. Everyone is telling them to specifically join STEM and giving likely billions of dollars in support aiding the increase.
The only way to achieve an equal split with anything is to discriminate.
So, why is this downvoted?
Even the most educated are still capable of bias, and many here do not like the opinion that it is possible that women differ from men in any significant ways.
Don't take the down-votes too personally. As long as you are posting constructive feedback with some evidence to your hypothesizes they will be appreciated by many even if the vote count doesn't make it appear to be so.
I think it strange that a liberal audience would dispute the fact that there are differences between men and women, even significant differences.
All I can find is data from 2012[1], but <20% of engineering and computer science graduates are female. I help with interviews for the group I work in and just skimmed every job announcement (intern through senior level) to see the breakdown of who applied. In 5 years we had 81 people apply for jobs, which included only 3 women. Although I don't have access to any data, the previous job I had was similar: I estimate that I screened 30-40 candidates over 2 years and only one was female in that time.
Our job postings (and those of my previous employer) were generic descriptions of the work and benefits. Perhaps generic job descriptions are inherently hostile towards women?
[1] https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/girlsini...
Why am I not a teacher but instead a programmer?
Money. I feel, as a male, I need to be the "bread winner". Sure, that's something society has imposed on me — or perhaps I allowed to impose on me. But there you are.
If other men feel as I do, they may be drawn away from the notoriously underpaid field of education.
Too bad. If money were not in the equation, I am fairly sure I would have found more personal satisfaction from that career than the one I chose.
It could be that fewer women are entering engineering fields at the top of the funnel (after high school). So every woman who applies for a job in the field could be getting one while on the whole, women still making up a tiny proportion of the workforce in that field.
In any case even if every engineering class in college has women in the majority, and every one of them is getting a job that a man previously held, it will still take a generation for parity to become visible in the workplace.
In fact, that seems to be the problem: no amount of discrimination against men resolves that women simply are choosing careers in a different distribution to what men do, but the only policy lever that can really be utilized is discrimination at various stages of education or employment.
This has left people aiming for a fantasy, and using increasingly aggressive discrimination to try and carry it out, biology be damned.
Why is that, though?
Are women not encouraged to pursue technology careers? Or are they being encouraged to chose other careers instead?
Are they driven away from it by a toxic work place culture?
Or just the perception of tech as having toxic workplace cultures?
Are women moving into roles with more flexibility because they are expected to take on more domestic duties?
Or my hunch... Do women just feel less comfortable entering an industry with such an unbalanced gender ratio to begin with, and it becomes a self perpetuating cycle?
You say Biology be damned, but I don't think it's settled that biology is the main factor here.
And I'm not saying it is or it isn't. I'm saying we don't know.
I used to work at school. Not for a long time, but enough to make some observations. One of them: school kids are passionate. If they're interested in something, no amount of persuasion, toxicity or whatever else will distract them.
What I don’t understand is why so many people insist that this must be the explanation, as if the current state of things is definitely a level playing field (or biased toward women) and the fact that there are so many more men in the field must therefore be due to something innate.
We’re only a few decades out from a time when women couldn’t open a bank account without their husband’s permission, and when raping a woman was perfectly legal as long as you were married to her. I think we should give it a little more time and effort before we declare that everything is now fair and any remaining discrepancies must be biological.
I think that because it seems unlikely that we’ve managed to completely eliminate thousands of years’ worth of systemic sexism in such a short time. It’s highly improbable that, with so many things changing all the time, this just happens to be the moment when we’ve achieved a level playing field.
And to address the specific claim, why would being interested in people keep women away from computer jobs? It’s an intensely collaborative field. And why didn’t this keep women out of the field a few decades ago when women programmers were much more (relatively) numerous? If women are generally more interested in people and this drives sex disparities in different professions, why are there so few women in politics, the most people-heavy profession imaginable?
I think it's a good example, you (and GP) just missed the more interesting part: Nurses handle the patients on a more intimate level than doctors, and female nurses outnumber male nurses roughly 10:1 in the US.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-number-of-pr...
These people who insist the explanation comes down to preference are basing this on their own lived experience, on the women they've met and what their interests are. 18% just doesn't strike them as being out-of-the-ordinary.
The percentage of women who own a set of wrenches is even smaller. Should we assume that is also due to unjust influence?
Even if it were worth something, am I to believe that those people have never observed sexism? Regarding your bit about wrenches, have you never wandered into a toy store and seen the toy wrenches filed under “boys”?
Or, like another commented suggested, maybe something about STEM appeals to men disproportionately.
If I had to guess, it's probably a combination of multiple factors. STEM isn't for everyone. But at a young age, more men are encouraged to pursue it. The high salary of tech jobs might attract men more than women, if men face more pressure to make a lot of money. Now you have a male dominated industry. And that starts to self perpetuate. Young boys see role models and women don't. Women outnumbered in male dominated workplaces become subject to more harassment. STEM starts to become a "man" thing, and less women feel like pursuing the career, especially when there are so many other occupations that seem more interesting. I think that's a plausible explanation for how we got to where we are today.
But nobody knows for sure. My point is, biology shouldn't be the default answer whenever we see gender gaps.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
Quote:
The upshot of this research is neither especially feminist nor especially sad: It’s not that gender equality discourages girls from pursuing science. It’s that it allows them not to if they’re not interested.
To answer that I would compare it to a field like finance, where people are well paid and over worked. I think the money comes first, then the men, and with them the bro culture. So my hunch is that men will disproportionately do anything for a dollar. And no-one notices because they are busy wondering where the women are.
This this is a minority, that stance does not generalize to people on the left in general.
Because historically the trends of CS grads proves this is a false statement [1] so I'm curious where this statement comes from.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
Biology is not "preventing" women, it's directing their inclination. Women have a ton of opportunities, and it's just as likely that as CS blew up they decided they didn't want to and didn't need to take on the long hours and relative social isolation that professional engineering entails.
And making biological arguments without any sort of citation or statistical inference is illinformed. You haven't explained what exactly caused the trend reversal in the 80s other than an incredibly strained appeal to biology, which also mischaracterizes software engineering as a whole. Professional engineering is hardly a socially isolated career.
I've never heard of such a policy, or perhaps I'm misunderstanding your comment. Are you suggesting that companies should have policies that affect what the spouses/partners of employees do in terms of caring for children? Why would an employer have any right to say what their employee's spouses/partners do with their time? Or are you suggesting that employers should somehow provide compensation in this situation? I also don't understand how that would work (and I don't think the lack of such policies is specific to software firms).
1: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/amazon-parenta...
I've never heard of it before now, and I worked for years as a corporate lawyer. And my lack of awareness isn't because I'm a man, as you've implied — my wife has also never heard of such a policy (and she works outside tech). Both of us have heavily researched the leave policies in our respective fields, as we have used them on multiple occasions.
If there are a bunch of non-tech companies offering this policy, then perhaps that could lead to your conclusion that it's one of the reasons women choose other fields. But based on what has been described so far, it's equally likely that this is an incredibly rare policy that does pull people into or push people from the tech sector. If there are sectors where this is common, please enlighten us!
Visualize it like large numbers of people are creating characters for an RPG.
For the female version of the character generator, "mother" is a class with a shitload of XP bonuses and it's the only way to complete the "bear a child" quest. Not all of them are going to do it, many will multi-class, but they have very strong non-economic incentives to do so.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
If we were to assume that biology is the reason why women avoid certain fields, then this logic should hold true irrespective of the amount of gender equality a region might have. In fact we should assume that the two factors should compound: That is, if a region heavily discourages women from entering into STEM careers then that combined with their biological inclination to avoid said careers means we should see the numbers crater.
So given that this hypothesis does not hold to be true we can clearly show that it's not biology that's the case. It's far more complex than that and is the result of various social and economical factors. Reducing the entire argument into 'it's biology' does a disservice to examining social trends and is mentally rather lazy in my opinion, considering it can be easily used to explain everything.
Women’s interest in comp sci has experienced two booms and is otherwise somewhat stable.
So you're saying, to achieve parity, we need 80-90% of STEM grads to be female and only 10% men?
Or do you think we should bypass the job interview process for women entirely, until we get a 50-50 ratio in software engineering teams?
Shouldn't we apply this to nurses and teachers (for male equality) as well? That is, have more accelerated job and education programs for men?
I'm not sure if that's a good argument, because maybe male teachers and nurses are disadvantaged. I have no way to tell. Instead I think it's easier to agree that it's better for everyone when everything is merit-based, especially for outsiders who have a much harder time socially (because they're outsiders) than they do professionally (because businesses are usually more rational water cooler clubs, although neither are very rational overall). Not every woman wants to be a woman in tech, some people just want to be in tech.
Though even if they were, maybe they are making a premium because they aren't adding sexism to their workplaces and exposing their company to the legal liabilities you are.
Because that’s happening all over lately.
Edit: I’m using “me” as an example, I’m obviously not going to do that but I’m trying to make a point that others who speak against the majority opinion absolutely might and there are bad actors who are trying to manipulate that with intersecrionality of their own kind. Just like being against sexism is intersectional with anti racism, gun control, pro choice etc. when someone gets sucked into something seemingly innocuous as this, it’s very likely they’ll start believing a whole lot of similar ideas. That can be good or bad I suppose.
He said they're his friends and they agree with him. Why would you assume that he's lying about people he knows?
> Though even if they were, maybe they are making a premium because they aren't adding sexism to their workplaces and exposing their company to the legal liabilities you are.
By being paid more than their male counterparts while being less qualified for the job, they most definitely are adding sexism to the work place.
Below average AND woman.
No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying.
The actual discrimination against women comes in PhD programs, programs where their success is determined by 1 or 2 superiors (mostly men in advanced research programs), areas with primarily male coworkers, and creepy bosses. The area with most discrimination for women is in non major liberal cities. I went to the Midwest twice and saw more blatant sexism in the workforce than I have my entire life. 2 friends confided that they were asked to trade sexual favors for promotions albeit this was 20 years ago and that was the deciding factor for them moving to the Bay. These things are horrible and I can’t imagime the emotional trauma for that.
However, in the Bay Area and the majority of society the pendulum has swung way too far the other way. I don’t care if people think me sexist, these are my observations over my lifetime from both sides and unlesss convinced otherwise this is what I believe.