When people go and talk to women who started out in the tech pipeline but left, many say that the reasons they left are that they felt unwelcome in some way: they were harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc.

Too many women choose to leave not because they didn't like the work, but because they didn't like all the bullshit they were implicitly asked to put up with, in order to do the work.

If very few women expressed these sentiments; if the tech workforce pipeline was a safe and fulfilling place for everyone, then at that point, I think it's fair to question whether 50/50 should be the goal. But we're not nearly at that point, and IMO it is counterproductive to talk like we are. For now, the numbers imbalance is a simple and obvious way to measure and talk about the cultural factors that exclude women (or certain ethnicities, or backgrounds) from equal participation in this industry.

One reason 50/50 makes a fine straw goal is that there is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry. It's not like the NFL, where well-understood human sexual dimorphism is relevant. Women were heavily involved in the early days of computing and built some of the early foundations of the field, like the first compiler.

I've heard this hypothesis a lot, but there's something that bothers me about it.

If you've ever been passionate about something, something that's hard and takes a lot of effort and practice to become good at, would you really let microaggressions stop you from doing that thing? I mean, being a programmer is not exactly a high status thing for white males either. If I tell people I'm a programmer, I generally am competing with the perception that I am socially awkward. People assume I'm like some Big Bang Theory character until I prove otherwise. I don't like that stereotype, but it never stopped me from learning to code, or even was a thought that crossed my mind.

Also, how many other industries are or have been actively hostile towards women and still have plenty of females in it? Show business is an obvious example.

I'm not saying that things can't or shouldn't be improved, but I feel like the argument that goes "well the nerds are making women uncomfortable" is just a cartoon with very little evidence other than anecdotes.

I think “microagressions” is a bit of an understatement. Also not sure that being stereotyped as “socially awkward” is comparable to experiencing or even just witnessing sexual harassment.

Women in tech report more mistreatment than in many other male-dominated industries. See: https://www.axios.com/tech-sexual-harassment-women-silicon-v...

All I see in that link is a VERY vague assertion that some women have received “unwanted physical contact”, which doesnt really mean anything without specifics. That could mean something creepy, or it could mean someone tapping them on the shoulder, or a saleswomans obnoxious insistence on high fiving all the time. And then some persons quoted opinion.

If someone touched me in any physical way at work I'd say it would be unwanted. It's pretty reasonable to not want other people to touch you, no matter the specific "kind" of touch it is.

Every now and then my boss gives me an overly-friendly shoulder pat. It really annoys me, I guess I'm a victim of physical harassment. Should I leave the industry over that?

What would you do if you had 8 bosses in a row all do the same thing?

It quite often means something creepy. You shouldn't assume that actual aggression aren't happening just because you have the privilege of not experiencing them.

In this survey the finding is exactly the opposite: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/17/ssc-survey-results-sex...

>If I tell people I'm a programmer, I generally am competing with the perception that I am socially awkward. People assume I'm like some Big Bang Theory character until I prove otherwise. I don't like that stereotype, but it never stopped me from learning to code, or even was a thought that crossed my mind.

People thinking you're socially awkward is different from people sexually harassing you at work.

If the issue was as simple as women being sexually harassed it might not be easy to fix but itd be straightforward. But all the evidence suggests its a very nuanced and complicated issue. I don’t think just caricaturing and oversimplifying the issue helps anything.

I think you did exactly that here and I agree that it is an unhelpful contribution

> If you've ever been passionate about something, something that's hard and takes a lot of effort and practice to become good at, would you really let microaggressions stop you from doing that thing?

> If you've ever been passionate about something, something that's hard and takes a lot of effort and practice to become good at, would you really let microaggressions stop you from doing that thing?

Yes, actually, people do this all the time. They find new things to be passionate about if being passionate about something is too painful.

> Yes, actually, people do this all the time.

I have trouble really imagining someone finding much success if they drop things they care about because the situation around them isnt ideal.

If you can just go find something new to be passionate about then you're not really passionate about it.

It may come as a shock to you but some people have multiple passions in life. Besides, your arguments reeks of the classic gamer 'women are not really into it' take

It may come as a shock to you but how many passions you have is not relevant to my argument.

And that second part of your post is really damn far fetched. I never even mentioned anything remotely related to gender.

the second part wasn't about what you said, but an example of how the claim "if a person gives up something, then they weren't passionate enough" is nonsense.

to give you a better example: since guido van rossum gave up leadership of python, does that mean that he wasn't passionate enough about it?

absolutely not. but how he was treated destroyed his passion, and he couldn't handle it any more and burned out. this is the argument above. women leave despite their passion they got more pain than they could handle. just like guido.

How did it destroy his passion? Did he quit all of CS entirely, including coding as a hobby, and took up shit like fishing instead? No? Then it didn't destroy his passion. He quit Python but Python isn't his passion. It's just a manifestation of it.

If you really love knitting then you're not gonna quit it altogether because you once had a shitty experience with a knitting group. You're just gonna find another knitting group or do it alone. But if you do quit, then you never were passionate about it. That's my point and that has nothing to do with female gamers or whatever juvenile bullshit GGP is currently interpreting into it.

How was Guido treated?

Your hypothesis regarding harassment or being made to feel unwelcome is reasonable and always needs to be explored. But it is not the only hypothesis, and other factors are probably also in play. I disagree that there "is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry" and I suppose the argument would then hang on the word "obvious".. are the other hypotheses obvious? Perhaps not to people who don't study evolutionary psychology.

There is evidence that more freedom and equality for everyone to be in any job they want leads to even less women choosing STEM careers (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...) That might be because of social issues you mention (harassment, under valued, talked over, underpaid, stalked, etc). It might also be a result of natural selection causing women and men to differentiate in useful ways wherein women were more attracted to nurturing roles, and men more attracted to technical challenges.

I don't think it's useful to pick one reasonable hypothesis and ignore other reasonable hypotheses. Let's explore all the useful ideas and recognize how little we actually know for sure.

I would want any analysis theorizing a difference rooted in biological dimorphism to work with sex as a multidimensional distribution, as that's what it is.

If you want to do one on gender, you would go in for self-reported gender, and have 3+ selection options (m/f/o).

If you're going to talk about natural selection resulting in career preference, you should talk sex, not gender.

I agree gender is irrelevant here. I'd even go so far as to agree that there may be more than two sex states on individual bases (multiple X or Y chromosomes, different levels of testosterone, hermaphordism, chimerism etc). But these are neither particularly common nor genetically transmissible and thus do not exert pressure on the nature of sexual dimorphism. Sex can be modelled quite accurately with a single binary bit even in individual cases, and entirely accurately for species in evolutionary terms. Distributions and multiple dimensions have not shown themselves to be useful. If you disagree I'd like to see references to the relevant research papers.

I don't mind recognizing any individuals uniqueness or their socially less-privileged situation for social or political purposes, but it shouldn't have any affect on the science of sexuality which should just reflect nature as it is.

Sexual dimorphism in animals can be dramatic. The male angler fish is a tiny parasite, the dramatically larger female does all the angling work. And we aren't seeing non-binary angler fishes. If none of the other species are coming up with non-binary specimens, why should we assume humans are any different?

> I agree gender is irrelevant here

Ah, if that's what you're getting from what I'm saying, then I don't think you getting what I'm saying.

If your theory is that biological factors drive differences in behavioral outcomes, then I'm saying you should measure those biological factors, and you should do so on a more detailed level than genitals. I'm not arguing that sexual dimorphism isn't a thing. I'm arguing that a simple m/f measurement of it is insufficient, particularly if you're trying to correlate it to behavioral outcomes. As for your science paper request, I'll just go with this, instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism_measures

If your theory is that gender (how society treats you) affects this, then measure /that/; which itself is more complicated than a simple binary. A masculine woman and a feminine man are treated very differently by society than a feminine woman and a masculine man. Although it's a lot more reasonable to go with a binary here, since basically all of society will put people into that binary, I'd definitely want some measure as to how well or poorly that category fits the person in question. It would make for a much more compelling case to see that the outcome isn't affected by that second measure.

> When people go and talk to women who started out in the tech pipeline but left, many say that the reasons they left are that they felt unwelcome in some way: they were harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc.

That "many" sounds anecdotal. Since we're doing that: In my experience woman don't go into tech because they enjoy other, more social, jobs more.

> One reason 50/50 makes a fine straw goal is that there is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry. It's not like the NFL, where well-understood human sexual dimorphism is relevant. Women were heavily involved in the early days of computing and built some of the early foundations of the field, like the first compiler.

There is an obvious reason. Autism-like traits are more prevalent in men.

> I think it's fair to question whether 50/50 should be the goal.

There's a very strong inverse correlation between a country's gender equality and female representation in STEM. I.e. countries like Algeria and the UAE have much higher female participation in tech than countries like Sweden and the Netherlands.

That doesn't necessarily mean that women in tech don't face discrimination or harassment. But it strongly suggests that discrimination isn't the primary driver of female under-representation in the industry.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

> But it strongly suggests that discrimination isn't the primary driver of female under-representation in the industry.

I don't see that it does. It's entirely possible that in less egalitarian countries, women are just less likely to leave tech on account of discrimination or harassment. I can think of several reasons why this might be the case:

- Women in poorer countries might be more likely to endure mistreatment for financial reasons.

- Women there might just be more accustomed to mistreatment.

- Tech might be less hostile to women relative to other fields in those countries. Eg. in Western countries, it's "normal" for women to become teachers, but somewhat less normal for women to become programmers. In more misogynistic countries, it's considered abnormal for women to be teachers or programmers, so there would be less to differentiate the options.

Maybe. It's possible. But it's not a finding in isolation. Another recent finding is that gender equal societies tend to have larger personality differences between men and women. I.e. women in Sweden tend to have much more different personalities and preferences than men in Sweden. Whereas in Saudi Arabia the two genders tend to be more similar.

Overall the general theme of these findings is that gender parity is not a good proxy for gender equality. Equality is a very important goal that we should strive for. But the reality is that increasing equality may paradoxically result in larger divergences among the genders in terms of behavior, life trajectories and modes of expression.

In my opinion if there is a tension between equality and parity, than gender equality is a much more important goal. And that's what we should be measuring, not parity metrics like representation percentages.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/gender-pe...

I think that in Algeria and the UAE if you have spent the amount of money it takes to get a STEM education you don't divert into a different field even if the conditions are difficult, in the developed world the calculations are quite different.

This is something I can attest to personally to a certain extent.

And what happens when people go and talk to men who started out in the tech pipeline but left? Don’t they say similarly negative things?

Yeah. I'm pretty sure being harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc. are universally true.

I've encountered at least two at every single one of the 15 or so jobs I've had prior to this one. Most of them weren't in tech and I'm a man. Having a shitty job isn't exclusive to being a female in tech.

Perhaps men and women in tech face different challenges, and the challenges that women face are unique to women and related to their sex/gender expression.

> Women were heavily involved in the early days of computing and built some of the early foundations of the field, like the first compiler.

Maybe because it was considered mostly a secretarial job and they did not have a lot of other opportunities. Once given the choice to get into more fulfilling careers they took it. It's only because there's money in what is thought as "easy white collar job" that some women try to do it. And it is only because coders cost a lot that there is a push to get more women doing it as a way to lower wages. Even if they don't want to.

> It's only because there's money in what is thought as "easy white collar job" that some women try to do it. And it is only because coders cost a lot that there is a push to get more women doing it as a way to lower wages. Even if they don't want to.

This is the kind of unsupported claim that makes these discussions unwelcome on hn.

Aside from harassed or stalked, the others apply just as much to men. Hate to break it to you. We have been trained by society to put up with it.

You can make anything true if you start your sentence with "aside".

Just to chime in, I also unknowingly got myself labeled sexist when the topic came up during a random lunch with "friends" (company provided lunch so it had random people from HR and recruiting).

Somehow or another the topic of whether going for 50/50 will "lower the bar". So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all. The more I said I am leaning towards that it will lower the bar, the more uncomfortable people around me looked.

I was too socially ignorant to realize we aren't talking about math problem here and that they don't want anything said that might weaken their cause, good faith argument or not.

After that I got no more women in my interview pipeline and a "talk" from my manager.

You can't use statistics without a model. The problem is that you have a shitty model and it's annoying when you keep parroting it like you're so logical. Your model as inferred from this comment is that there's some way to quantify the current applicants, and that applicants below a certain value are always rejected. The remaining applicants are "above the bar" and could be hired. The current "above the bar" group is not 50/50, therefore changing it means accepting people below the bar.

The problem is that none of your assumptions hold water. Technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin. Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates. Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance.

You can't brush this off as social ignorance, this is simply ignorance of the facts.

Yes! This is the kind of response I would like to have from my coworkers. Attack my models, my assumptions, my arguments. Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards.

Your presumption that I have some agenda and it wasn't social ignorance is a little offensive but whatever. "Ignorance of facts" should not be used as an insult but an opportunity to educate. The social fact that I am guilty of not knowing is that this a commonly parroted argument instead of the first logical model you come up with.

I do think you represented the argument I had at the time very well. The difference is that I used competitive programming as my example for something more controlled (plenty of stats going all the way back to high school level and on the internet no one knows if you're a man/woman/dog). Your counterargument that it isn't predictive is still valid.

Regardless, my current stance is that the question of "whether it lowers the bar or not" is not a relevant question to ask.

The only point I was trying to make with my story is that you can evoke very passionate attacks just for talking about the topic.

>Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards.

Why can't you criticize your own model, though? Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say?

Why isn't it the case that the bar is already lowered for straight, white men or people who otherwise fit tech stereotypes?

Or why does the value of diversity have to manifest in every individual? Maybe being in a diverse work force makes the cis, straight, white men and the company as a whole perform better.

And even if everything I'm saying is just flowery rhetoric with no rational basis, it's still a respectful way to view and treat other people, and your model that suggests women are generally inferior to men takes a big shit all over the aspiration of living in an inclusive, harmonious society.

> Why can't you criticize your own model, though?

I do but lunchtime only lasted so long before it imploded

> Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say?

If you're making "embarrassingly obvious deductions" you might be pattern matching me into your favorite straw man and not really deducing anything at all.

I never said women are inferior to men and it's not possible to logically deduce that from what I said. The only premise I assumed is that there are currently more men than women at the top (e.g., pipeline problem). You can even have the average women be way superior to men and still have the problem of hiring more women leading to lower standards, if the few top women are all happily employed elsewhere. I am not even saying this reflects reality, just that your logic sucks.

Why does everything have to be a dog whistle to fit people into hate groups? Some assholes like me are merely technical correctness assholes.

> ...pattern matching me into your favorite straw man...

So you were just trying to make a nuanced point about women's general engineering skills based on their biology and don't want to be lumped in with all those unsavory people who give lesser consideration to women engineers based on sexist beliefs about women. Noted.

>I never said women are inferior to men and it's not possible to logically deduce that from what I said.

Didn't you imply that hiring women would be 'lowering the bar'?

Are you so blinded by your pattern matching of what you think he’s saying that you can’t even read the second half of his post??

If there are significantly less women applying for software development jobs then statistically, assuming women are equally good software developers as men, aiming for 50/50 representation necessitates lowering the bar

This does not mean that it’s not a worthwhile pursuit to aim for equal representation

It’s an argument for working towards more women in STEM (we want bigger application pools!)

> Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say?

Not at all. Consider:

- You have a pool of 100 men to choose from

- You have a pool of 10 women to choose from.

- You need to hire 20 people.

So, you choose the top 10% of the men and 100% of the women in order to achieve gender parity.

There is no premise that men are inherently better, only that the talent pool is so much larger that you can more easily distill high quality candidates.

>There is no premise that men are inherently better...

Well, you explicitly contrived a premise that suggests women are excluded from hiring for some other reason. Why are you only choosing from 10 women? And did you not consider the point about the benefits of diversity not needing to manifest in every individual?

> Why are you only choosing from 10 women?

Because only 10 women applied. Meanwhile 100 men applied.

So then you say: "Your recruiting efforts need to target more women".

How? If you go to a college STEM fair to recruit, the same thing will happen. 10 men will stop by your booth for every 1 woman.

> Why can't you criticize your own model, though? Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better

Why couldn’t you criticize your own model of what you assumed the guy you were replying to was talking about?

He said nothing about women being inferior to men

The fact that you seem to think that challenging your own assumptions is so easy while at the same time being fully incapable of doing so is pretty damned rich

>He said nothing about women being inferior to men

No, he just clearly implied it.

"Anybody can create a cryptosystem that they themselves cannot break" -- it's easy to not see something wrong with what you're proposing for a variety of reason, this is why level-headed discussion is necessary and valuable. Nobody has the same background or viewpoint, and it's oftentimes harder to criticize others than it is to criticize yourself.

But it's difficult. Nobody likes to confront people and tell them that their views on women's biology affecting their engineering skills are sexist. It also causes strife in the workplace.

What I suggest is to just be polite to your coworkers and let HR worry about the hiring process. Don't say anything to your coworkers that could suggest they are somehow inferior or have "bad" genetic traits. This seems like basic human civility that gets tossed out the window when someone has a right-wing view about a minority or women.

> Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better.

You are incorrect. Let's imagine a group of ten men and ten women: we want to hire four in total. Let's assume that we can reduce a potential employee's worth down to a single number from 1 to 10, in order to simplify the example. The men are rated [1, 2, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10]; the women are rated [3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10]. In this example the women are better on average (5.6) than the men (5.5) — but hiring the top four candidates results in hiring three men [9, 9 & 10] and one woman [10].

This is because while the mean woman is better than the mean man, the standard deviation of skills is more widely distributed across men than women in the example: more men are excellent, but also more men are terrible (in the example, the lowest three candidates are men!).

If we're going to contrive an instance that will result in a gender gap then why not just say we hire only 3 people? That would be a perfectly contrived example that would illustrate what you're trying to say.

Beyond your contrivances, I take issue with you suggesting that employees can (or should) be rated on a linear scale. Companies have very specific needs and maybe a candidate who is a "2" on your scale is a "10" at fulfilling what the company needs.

I'll say again too that the value of diversity doesn't need to manifest itself in every individual.

> Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates.

[citation needed]

If this is just inferred based on that observation about judges and meal breaks, then keep in mind that this is just a factoid, and a one that fails the sniff test. C.f. http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges.

Regardless of the model, how can optimizing two metrics ever yield an improvement in the first compared to just optimizing it alone?

Or is the idea that, because the old model sucks, we need to optimize this intermediary metric (diversity) in the interests of the ultimate goal of raising-the-bar?

It could work better because we are so bad at actually optimizing for the first variable that we would get better results by not optimizing for it.

This is the standard model used in education, military, and industry. Millions of people go through processes designed according to this model every year, and probably tens of thousands of scientific papers have been written in context of this model. Your complaints are mostly utterly false (eg. “technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin“ is in contrary of the established consensus in literature, and so is “ Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance“).

If this was indeed a shitty model, it would have been pointed out to grandparent when he brought it up, but since this model is commonly used and extremely useful, what he got instead was silencing and penalizing through anonymous back door channels.

You don't need statistical models to figure out that if you're desperate to hire certain people and there's very few of them in your hiring pipeline, you'll turn a blind eye towards certain interview mistakes where you would normally disqualify candidates.

You did not actually refute any of his claims or demonstrate in any way that his argument 'does not hold water'.

If you truly believe that 'interviewing is completely random' then I have some other, far deeper concerns you might want to address before we even remotely broach the subject of gender disparity.

Moreover - you're totally missing the point: it's not sexist to merely make the argument that 50/50 hiring can lower the bar. It's just intellectual rhetoric. Maybe it's good maybe it's bad, but it's not inherently sexist.

Ergo: if you don't agree with the PC, even if you make a reasonable argument (or even one that's very good) you're put out to pasture.

This is just one example of PC insane enforcement, there are many.

Which is why it's probably better to avoid such subjects because even intelligent people seem to have difficulty being tolerant, or even navigating the issues.

This parallels my experience. I have repeatedly feigned support for denying employment to white and Asian men to increase our proportional representation of demographics categorized as diverse. The company has set an outcome based goal to have 33% women in tech roles. When the industry is only 20-25% female, such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination. But no one who wants to succeed dares bring that up.

>But no one who wants to succeed dares bring that up.

Nor should they. The pursuit of equality has been replaced with a demand for equity and the talking heads espousing this demand have become sufficiently skilled at publicly shaming companies and individuals that leaders have decided that acquiescing and silently taking on the bill involved in prioritizing in-office demographic makeup over all else rather than ending up on Vox & co. and being publicly tainted forever.

On an individual level, it is career suicide to go against the corporate narrative supporting the above, particularly when you consider that the most ardent supporters of the narrative are empowered to also have some of the most significant impact on your career (HR).

> When the industry is only 20-25% female, such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination.

This type of discrimination has a name, it’s called “affirmative action”. This argument that fixing an imbalance is discrimination and therefore somehow worse seems to be really common but I think it’s a little misguided to say we shouldn’t use it, and here’s why.

The imbalance we have is an imbalance that was caused by cultural discrimination against women, and it’s a type of discrimination that is often unseen and is hard and time consuming to fix. (Not to mention, nobody actually knows how.)

The idea for affirmative action is to provide a counter-acting force to the already existing discrimination. Furthermore, the idea is to use this force gently and, most importantly, temporarily, until some balance is restored.

We already know what happens if we take no action at all: we get discrimination against women. The industry used to be a much higher percentage of women 40 years ago. Why has it declined? It’s obviously cultural because it used to be higher in the recent past, and just before that it was near zero and women weren’t allowed to vote. The numbers have been swinging all over the map in just 100 years, so it clearly has not settled from the perspective of history.

So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?

Why do you think it is discrimination and not just women not choosing that career?

Look at other previously male dominated positions like doctors and law where you now in Sweden have more women graduating those fields than men. Something changed there. I doubt software development has been more hostile and conservative than for example law.

The thing is that women are studying at university at a larger degree than men in Sweden but they are not selecting STEM fields, especially not computer science.

Maybe it will change with role models, culture and different initiatives but I suspect that most young women right now think it is a boring as fuck career (at least those I talk to).

It would be like someone asking me if I would like to study to teach kindergarten. Maybe I as a male have been conditioned not to see that as an option and maybe many more would choose that career if we were raised differently but for me it just sounds like something I would really really not like. I respect the work but for me taking care of tons of kids all day sounds incredibly boring and rough. The idea that there is discrimination (which there is and some men suffer from) is not near my mind.

Most women I talk to express similar thoughts about software development.

> Why do you think it is discrimination and not just women not choosing that career?

Why do you think those two things are mutually exclusive? What if women are choosing to leave computer science because it's somewhere between subtly discriminatory and outright hostile?

I'm sure it's cultural because: in the US women in CS was ~37%, today it's 18%. Why the huge swing? There have been times in recent history when many many more women chose computer science. In India, there have been years when the participation rate was above 50%. There are places on earth today where many many more women chose STEM.

So, it's obvious based on the data we already have that today's low participation rates by women in the US and Europe is not an intrinsic property of women, rates are neither fixed nor the natural state of things.

All the rest of what you said is that maybe it's attitudes, and sure, maybe it is. Maybe that's the problem?

I've spoken with women too, and anecdotally, most women say the exact same thing as most men when they say computer programming sounds super boring. Some women I know confirm that discrimination and hostile behavior exists and is alive and well, especially the higher you go in an organization.

I don't think the problem is that they are leaving computer science, it is that they are not choosing it.

Participation used to be higher but now it is less; despite women getting more agency, doing better at school and getting high education than men. If you look at the most equal and rich countries where women are doing as well or in some areas better than men you don't have many who chooses software development as a career.

It could be just that fewer women want to be software developers and that is all that there is. And that more choice and more opportunities just makes other career paths more alluring.

Of course there can still be sexism and discrimination in certain cases but it is also very possible that it does not affect the number of women in tech much at all.

Yes, "leaving computer science" means that participation rates are going down, that fewer women are choosing it now versus in the recent past. The phrase always meant women as a group are leaving, it never meant that lots of individual women were starting CS careers and then quitting.

> If you look at the most equal and rich countries where women are doing as well or in some areas better than men you don't have many who chooses software development as a career.

That is not true. Participation rates have been very high in some of the countries that are now low. Participation rates in some of those countries are currently high.

You're trying to suggest that women as a group don't want computer science, by their nature as women, but to make that claim you have to deny history and ignore facts.

> It could be just that fewer women want to be software developers and that is all that there is.

The numbers changed a lot, and there is a reason. What you're saying is you don't know the reason, and I agree with you.

> it is also very possible that it [discrimination] does not affect the number of women in tech much at all.

I think it's extremely, extremely unlikely. It's demonstrated that the choices are cultural and not intrinsic to gender. So, your job then is to show that cultural attitudes are not affected by cultural discrimination. You're setting yourself up for an impossible task.

>That is not true. Participation rates have been very high in some of the countries that are now low. Participation rates in some of those countries are currently high.

Yes, and my point is that when those women got more power, more choice, more money and more freedom they started to become less likely to choose software development and more likely to select other professions. Other professions that had historically been male dominated.

So it could be that if you are free to choose there are certain professions that will have a larger part male or female and that will amplify in a culture of freedom. You will choose what your friends choose.

For example I don't think that you would ever have 50% men/women that are interested in working in kindergarten. I think there is some biology in that and then it is amplified by most men not wanting it making it less likely for those that might want it to actually choose.

> when those women got more power, more choice, more money and more freedom they started to become less likely to choose software development

You're cherry-picking there, and incorrectly assigning causation to correlation. Before 1984 in the US, women's choice and power was increasing, and so what their participation in CS. In some other countries, women's participation rates in STEM have continued to increase as they integrate with the workforce. So you could use the very same argument you used to come to the opposite conclusion.

> You will choose what your friends choose.

Totally agree there! That may or may not have to do with discrimination, but you're right about that.

> I think there is some biology

This is the root of it. You've decided that women intrinsically don't want to do math or engineering.

There's data that shows otherwise, but it is indeed difficult to prove anything concrete. Nonetheless, we have strong indicators that today's ratios are not natural. And why would they have settled yet? It's barely been 3-4 generations since women were allowed to even vote. It's clearly still in flux, so suggesting that biology explains today's difference is obviously stretching.

Bottom line is I don't doubt preferences are at play, and what I'm saying is that biology can't explain the current preferences in the US or in Sweden either. Biology is not fluctuating on the 100 year time scale, and cultural norms are. Assuming that the known, documented sexism during the last century is fixed now and that cultural attitudes have settles and job choices reflect intrinsic gender differences... well it's my opinion, but looking at all the facts we do have, that seems so unlikely I believe it's impossible.

> The imbalance we have is an imbalance that was caused by cultural discrimination against women

This is a very bold assumption on your part. For one, representation of women in technology was actually higher when discrimination against women was more prevalent, during the 1970s and 80s. This inverse relationship between gender equality and representation of women in technology is reproduced today. Countries with less gender equality actually see higher rates of women in tech as compared to countries with more gender equality.

The notion that discriminating against men will somehow end discrimination against women is similarly naive. When discrimination in the workplace occurs, employees are aware of it. Putting women in a situation where the majority of their coworkers know that they are being held to a different standard is an exceedingly easy way to foster a toxic workplace.

> So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?

Rethink whether there's anything that needs to be fixed. We should see women as individuals capable of making their own career choices, instead of as objects to be herded into one field or another.

Why would it requiring discrimination be a problem?

Because employers in the US are legally prohibited from discriminating on the basis of sex and race. At least in theory, enforcement seems to be lax in Silicon Valley.

Also, it creates a situation where people are aware that non-diverse employees are held to a more selective standard. This can increase impostor syndrome among diverse employees who may feel that they would not have been employed if they weren't of a specific gender or ethnicity.

You're asking why race and gender discrimination might be a problem?

I am asking why using discrimination (favoring women) to reverse a discrimination trend is a problem. Not why discrimination in general is a problem, which it obviously is.

Thanks. I have two thoughts.

1. The position that it's OK to fight discrimination with more discrimination is very different from the idea that discrimination is inherently bad.

2. The theory that some gender differences in occupation choice are caused by discrimination is both controversial and unproven.

If the difference is mainly caused by the genders having different statistical distributions of interests, you're actually using discrimination to fight peoples career choices.

> If the difference is mainly caused by the genders having different statistical distributions of interests, you're actually using discrimination to fight peoples career choices.

Conversely, if genders don't have a different intrinsic, permanent distributions of interests, then not using some affirmative action to correct the situation amounts to preserving the status quo of known cultural discrimination.

The problem with what you said is that we already have data, the distributions of interest have changed dramatically over time recently, and they are currently different from country to country.

That's pretty clear, hard evidence that the gender differences in occupation choice we have today in the US (for example) are not intrinsic to the genders. So, what does that leave as possible causes?

At most, it's evidence that intrinsic interest is not the only factor in career choice.

The most fascinating fact here is that the more rich and gender equal societies become, career choices end up more "gender stereotypical"!

It's easy to interpret that as when you're rich enough to pick the career that actually interests you, rather than the career most likely to keep starvation at bay, people follow their interests more.

What evidence is there that there is any intrinsic difference in interest?

> the more rich and gender equal societies become, career choices end up more "gender stereotypical"!

What if gender stereotypical career choices is an indicator that our society is not gender equal, and that we're patting ourselves on the back prematurely?

BTW, not really true that there's a correlation between gender equality metrics and stereotypical career choices. To come to that conclusion, you have to ignore some periods of time and ignore some countries in the world.

There is a huge amount of evidence that women and men are different statistically. That is, anyone can have any interest or personality trait, but on average the genders have separate distributions.

This is very controversial among political activists, but established fact in the relevant sciences.

Pinker's "The Blank Slate" is a good introduction.

I think that response is dodging the question and being very hand-wavy.

I didn't ask if the distributions are different. They are different, that's a fact we know, and what many people believe is the problem.

The question is, what evidence is there that the differences are intrinsic? For that, there's very little evidence in favor and strong evidence against. Specifically, the differences in the distributions of preferences among women over time and country by country are larger than today's differences between men and women in the US. That's pretty solid evidence that the distributions are cultural and not intrinsic to gender.

If those distribution differences were constant over a long time, say a thousand years, and constant globally, then your argument might have a leg to stand on.

Those are quite obvious things to control for, and it's not a good bet that the collective of world scientists never thought of them.

The established way to classify people's personality traits is the "Big Five"/OCEAN model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Systematic gender differences show up across all cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...

If they’ve been controlled for, then point me to some data demonstrating it. If they have been controlled for, doesn’t the fact that some places in the world have greater than 50/50 female participation in STEM mean that the controlled data is nearly certain to show there is negligible or no intrinsic sex difference? It seems like you’re ignoring some of the data we actually do have in favor of belief.

Your second non-answer to my question is to point at the updated version of the Myers-Briggs test, right after saying ‘but, science’? Okay, what do personality tests have to do with cultural sex or race discrimination?

This only repeats your previous argument, it shows that cultural differences currently exist. Again, we already know that. It does not show that intrinsic sex differences exist. I recommend reading all of that article carefully before assuming it’s helping your argument in any way. The conclusion of the section you shared on gender differences says:

“It is important to recognize that individual differences in traits are relevant in a specific cultural context, and that the traits do not have their effects outside of that context.”

And Big Five is “established” as a personality test. Personality tests are pseudoscientific, even if Big 5 is ‘more scientific’ than Myers-Briggs.

“Like the Big 5 model, any personality or behavior assessment can’t know things you haven’t explicitly answered in the questionnaire, Stein says. Sometimes commercial personality tests ask odd questions—like, Do you identify with snakes? or How do you react to a certain color?—and try to draw inferences from your answers. Those kinds of conclusions venture into the pseudoscientific, Stein says.“

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-accurate-are-...

https://qz.com/1201773/we-took-the-worlds-most-scientific-pe...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#...

I've been on the net long enough to not fall for the "spend hours digging up raw science or I won't believe you" gambit. Those guys will never change their mind even if you do devote your weekend to doing research for them.

I gave you a Pinker book to read and a well footnoted Wikipedia article on the science. I've spent enough work trying to educate someone who gives all the signs of just not wanting to change their mind.

> Okay, what do personality tests have to do with cultural sex or race discrimination?

Nothing, and I never claimed it had.

> Personality tests are pseudoscientific

The big five is the established scientific fact of 2019. Denying science because it doesn't fit with your ideology doesn't put you in great company.

Why did you give me links to Big 5 then, what is your point? How does a personality test demonstrate intrinsic sex differences? It doesn’t, and your well documented source says so clearly and explicitly.

I’m sorry I made you angry, there’s some miscommunication going on here. I’m not convinced we’re talking about the same thing because you haven’t brought anything to this conversation that demonstrates there’s evidence of intrinsic sex differences when it comes to career choices, you’ve only pointed to known cultural differences.

I agree with you that there are cultural differences.

Rereading, I'm struck by this quote:

> If those distribution differences were constant over a long time, say a thousand years, and constant globally, then your argument might have a leg to stand on.

So your standard of proof here 1000 years of studies, until you can agree that there is a chance this could be true.

Obviously, nothing anyone can say convince someone with such firm beliefs.

I agree there is miscommunication. I've been as clear as I can be, and I don't think any amount of me restating things can reach you.

A thousand years was just an example of something that could make your argument above work, or at least not disprove it immediately. Your argument doesn’t currently work because gender preference distributions have been changing dramatically in the last hundred years, and they’re still changing. Recent history disproves the notion that current preferences, and the current discrepancies between the sexes, might be intrinsic.

I’m ignoring your ad hominem, but FWIW it weakens your argument because it demonstrates you didn’t understand mine. It has also become clear you didn’t fully understand my question. So, yes, you could keep restating that cultural differences exist or bringing up other irrelevant things like personality tests, and yes, that will continue to fail to show that intrinsic sex differences exist.

> The theory that some gender differences in occupation choice are caused by discrimination is both controversial and unproven.

Its certainly not controversial that _some_ of the discrepancy is caused by discrimination. It is very obviously true historically for many careers. Consider medicine, where women were relegated to nursing because they couldn't cut it as physicians. Today that idea seems absurd, and of the brightest people I met in medical school, there was a fairly even split of men / women. So far medicine was more challenging than the typical programming job I"ve held, which is at least partially relevant.

To be clear I am certainly not arguing that 50/50 is the natural distribution of men/women among programmers. I have no idea what it is. But I'll bet it is higher than 98/2, which is about the ratio in the last 4 programming jobs I've held.

Lastly, I have two young daughters now. Its been a bit shocking to me to see how early they are inundated with messaging steering them towards being pretty, dressing like a girl, etc. I have no doubt the lingering stereotypes and cultural pressure steers women into so called traditional roles from an early age.

My programming demographic experience has been 80/20, FWIW.

Yeah, the smartest women go into medicine and law instead of programming. I claim it's largely because they find working with people more interesting than working with machines.

Your daughters being interested in "traditionally female" things might just be because they're female, and that is who they genuinely are.

FWIW, in her debate with Steven Pinker, Elizabeth Spelke shreds the incorrect argument that females have more interest in people and males have more interest in things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hb3oe7-PJ8

Please think carefully about what happens if your claim turns out to be wrong. If males and females turn out to have equal interest in people and things, then your argument that you're spreading here is unintentionally a cultural gender based bias, in effect unconscious sexism.

> I claim it's largely because they find working with people more interesting than working with machines.

Well two in particular went into pathology and radiology, so its definitely not the social aspect (they don't regularly deal with patients). Also, what do you claim of the equal number of men who go into law and medicine?

> Your daughters being interested in "traditionally female" things might just be because they're female,

They aren't interested in much of anything yet -- they are 6 months and 2 years old.

Women are now a small but growing majority of both law and medical students:

https://www.enjuris.com/students/law-school-female-enrollmen... https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/12/19/women-a...

Breaking down the medical fields by gender distribution also follows expected patterns:

https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/specialty-profil...

I'm not saying these facts proves anything in particular, but they're good to be aware of.

Well, employment discrimination by gender is illegal in my country.

One org’s discrimination is another org’s curation, semantically-speaking. The subjectivity usually depends on which side of the dividing line the perceiver finds themselves.

It’s discrimination either way. The subjectivity is just about whether or not it is deserved. Some people think certain races or sexes deserve it, which is deplorable but technically subjective.

This isn’t about races or sexes deserving it, this is about fixing an existing imbalance that happened via cultural discrimination. The idea is to get closer to balance and then as soon as we’re closer, stop discriminating in either direction. When you call people trying to fix this deplorable, let’s just be clear, you’re judging negatively the people hoping to end cultural discrimination. If your proposed solution is to not do anything, we already know what will happen, because it already did: more cultural discrimination.

It’s not deplorable to try to end discrimination, it’s deplorable to discriminate on the bases of race and sex, even if you believe that you can fight racism and sexism by way of more racism and sexism. And it’s as ridiculous to think that this approach would reduce the amount of racism/sexism as it is to think that the only other option is to do nothing. The obvious alternative is to discourage racism and promote (real) equality. But even if you do nothing, it’s strictly better than promoting some twisted notion of “positive racism” if only because our society had already been trending away from racism from the start of the civil rights movement right up to the point when “positive racism” became fashionable some 8 years ago or so.

I can understand why some people think fighting discrimination with discrimination sounds bad, especially when you say it that way. But I very much disagree, and framing it that way is exactly that: it's a frame intended to make positive actions look bad. On the one had you have permanent negative cultural discrimination that is keeping some people down who don't deserve it, and on the other you have an attempt to counter that with positive, visible, out-in-the-open affirmative action that is boosting the group that's being discriminated against. (And only until they're no longer being discriminated.)

The symmetry you're trying to imply doesn't really exist. Victims of cultural discrimination in history have been killed, enslaved, raped, harassed, etc. There is no analogue to that for the receivers of affirmative action. It's frequently quite difficult to show who's being materially harmed by affirmative actions as a group. It's common to say that giving a job to a women or black person because of affirmative action is discrimination, but it's not always zero-sum, it doesn't always mean someone else lost the job. And you just can't forget that if someone did lose the job, they still, as a group, already had unfairly high numbers of that job.

Another problem with your judgement is that the whole idea with affirmative action is to favor whoever is the underdog and only until they no longer are, where cultural racism doesn't change sides.

> when “positive racism” became fashionable some 8 years ago or so.

This comment sounds like it doesn't know any history. Affirmative actions have been used globally for a very long time in repose to times & places when discrimination occurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

> The obvious alternative is to discourage racism and promote (real) equality.

Ah, so you do you do that? People have been trying that for a very long time. How well is it working? When has it worked better than affirmative actions?

To make a more subtle and deeper point about the irony of what you're saying, how do you actually "discourage" racism without in some way, shape or form giving preference to the downtrodden group? Isn't "discouraging" racism discriminatory against someone? If all discrimination is deplorable, is "discouraging" racism then deplorable because it's discriminatory against racists?

> But even if you do nothing, it's strictly better

Disagree. And note that proponents of actually fixing the problem would call doing nothing deplorable, because it in effect protects existing known discrimination by refusing to fix it.

> On the one had you have permanent negative cultural discrimination that is keeping some people down who don't deserve it, and on the other you have an attempt to counter that with visible positive visible/out-in-the-open affirmative action that is boosting the group that's being discriminated against.

The issue isn't positive vs negative discrimination or else the "fight racism with racism" camp wouldn't cry foul when positive discrimination is applied toward whites or men (in those rare cases when it actually is) nor would there be so much overt negative discrimination toward men and whites (the use of "white men" as a slur, the accusation that men are rapists and need to be trained not to rape, the propensity to blame all problems on whites/men, the existence of work groups and meetups that specifically exclude whites/men, etc). It's pretty clearly that there is some notion that certain genders/races are more deserving of both negative and positive discrimination than others.

> This comment sounds like it doesn't know any history. Affirmative actions have been used globally for a very long time in repose to times & places when discrimination occurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

The confusion is understandable; I should have used a different term. I coined "postive racism" to mean discrimination (specifically negative discrimination, per your definition) toward some group that is perceived to deserve it--those who advocate for the discrimination see it as righteous, hence 'positive'--for the sake of a somewhat familiar, concrete example, Antifa advocates for negative discrimination toward whites, men, etc. I should have used different words since "positive racism" sounds too similar to "positive discrimination" which already has an established meaning (and perhaps "positive racism" also already has an established meaning as well). I also used "discrimination" a lot when I technically meant what you're referring to as "negative discrimination"; in general, my post was ignoring affirmative action or "positive discrimination" because I don't understand it to be even remotely central to the broader national debate on race and social justice.

I would specifically not consider "affirmative action" to be a form of racism, although I think it's ill-considered and probably produces more racial tension, division, and strife than it alleviates. The specific reason I wouldn't consider it a form of racism is that I think racism implies animosity/hatred and not just discrimination. And while there probably are some who support affirmative action to antagonize whites, the overwhelming majority of proponents of AA over time have certainly been genuine in their intentions to reduce suffering.

> Ah, so you do you do that? People have been trying that for a very long time. How well is it working?

It's been working very well. Racism has been declining since the civil rights movement by all indicators. Equality of opportunity is at an all-time high in the history of the US, the West, and the whole world. You promote equality by promoting education, prosperity, and western/judeo-christian values. Chief among those values is individual liberty which naturally gives way to equality, and which is the antithesis to collectivist movements such as white supremacy, fascism/nationalism/national-socialism, communism, and so-called "anti-fascism" and "anti-racism" movements that are popular today.

> When has it worked better than affirmative actions?

I speculate (speculation is all we can do for this question) that it has always worked better (and far better) than affirmative action. As previously mentioned AA has probably not had a net positive impact even if it was well-intentioned.

> And note that proponents of actually fixing the problem would call doing nothing deplorable, because it in effect protects existing known discrimination by refusing to fix it.

Depends on how the problem is defined and one's values (hence the "subjectivity" in my original comment).

If the problem is "too much racism", then most people (including me) who are "proponents of fixing the problem" will naturally disagree with the idea that racism can solve the problem--racism is deplorable.

If the problem is "certain races and sexes deserve to be treated poorer than others" then of course racism will appear to be the solution. It's an inherently racist viewpoint, and people who espouse that viewpoint are (by definition) racists.

> I would specifically not consider "affirmative action" to be a form of racism [...] The specific reason I wouldn't consider it a form of racism is that I think racism implies animosity/hatred and not just discrimination. [...] the overwhelming majority of proponents of AA over time have certainly been genuine in their intentions to reduce suffering.

Agreed. Whatever differences of opinion we might have, this was well said, and I agree with you there.

The last part of your comment seems like it switches back to calling affirmative action racist implicitly though? Or, maybe I can't tell. I don't really understand the distinction you're making between positive discrimination and affirmative action.

I would totally agree that hateful discrimination is a bad thing, but from the top of the thread down, all we've been talking about is affirmative action, as far as I can tell, and nothing else. When @manfredo said "such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination", by "discrimination", he means affirmative action, right?

> You promote equality by promoting education, prosperity, and western/judeo-christian values.

Yes, true! And... this is exactly why some colleges have prioritized making sure they admit a few extra people from minority groups known to be suffering from discrimination, right?

> most people (including me) who are "proponents of fixing the problem" will naturally disagree with the idea that racism can solve the problem

Except nobody proposed racism as the solution in the animous/hateful sense. People proposed affirmative action as the solution.

> As previously mentioned AA has probably not had a net positive impact even if it was well-intentioned.

It sounds like you're hinting at the mismatch theory here and elsewhere... which is a common criticism, and it has been debated and studied at some length. Might be worth looking up some of the results.

Since AA has been used a lot, I'm not clear on why you're saying that racial tension and opportunity has improved dramatically, but that AA had nothing to do with it? Why are you sure that AA isn't the reason things are now better?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Mismatching

This article demonstrates some of the positive effects of AA, and also some of the negative effects of banning AA:

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/18/07/case-affirmative-a...

I guess if I have a single point it's that framing affirmative action as discrimination isn't clear thinking. It sounds like that's not what you're talking about, but this is what I jumped into the fray to say. The argument used above, not by you, is trying to suggest and imply there's a hypocrisy to taking any action to prevent cultural discrimination because the action is also discriminatory. That's true only in a technical sense, but is only FUD that confuses the issue. The goal is what's important, and the goal is equality of opportunity and removal of all animous/hateful behavior. Taking actions to meet that goal have worked in the past and will continue to.

Right. When the new executive is tasked with “cleaning up the misogyny problem at Uber” (as an example) it can only be be accomplished by discriminating against misogynists, by removing them and especially through not-hiring new ones.

I genuinely can’t tell if “misogyny” means “sexual harassment” or “men having mildly nonconforming political views” a la Damore. If the former, no one would object to said “cleanup”, so that’s pretty clearly not what we’re discussing.

It is indeed the former. No one [of high value to society] would object to the discrimination, but it is still a discrimination occurring if the outright harassers are rejected for the benefit of the whole organization.

I've once engaged in a similar discussion with a female colleague and it escalated into a shit-show with manager & HR being involved and colleague being in tears claiming I'm "sexist" despite my aggressive attempts to de-escalate and walk away from continuing the conversation. The HR did an investigation and came to a conclusion that I didn't do anything wrong, but strongly suggested not talking about anything like that in future. The colleague made a claim that she wouldn't be able to work with me in the same company and quit.

"aggressive attempts to de-escalate"

She initiated the conversation in the first place and I was trying to backpedal pretty much the whole time, but she just kept pushing.

I don't support or discourage your argument in this case. I'll just make a very important point that many young folks take (and my younger self took) a while to grasp…

There are a number of sensitive issues where stark logic and "inconvenient" facts are very much not appreciated. Best to avoid them in polite discussion.

Given that most social issues are not cut and dry, there is difficulty in finding the logical answer anyway. Rarely do we have all the facts available, even if a correct decision could be made with them. Rather we have mostly personal anecdotes which are not sufficient.

So the unpopular technical point of view is rarely worth giving, while also potentially a CLM (career limiting move).

For an example, see the results of RMS' recent pedantic take on the Epstein case.

> So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all.

This is one of the problems a lot of engineers have, and I make this mistake too more often than I want to admit.

Cultural discrimination isn't a math problem, and however you modeled it, your logic doesn't map well to history at all. When you double down on a math argument, what it sounds like to other people is that you're not open to the possibility that you made a logic or modeling mistake, that you've decided men are better than women, and that you're trying to confuse the argument with a technicality.

FWIW, there might be math problem with your suggestion that 50/50 would lower the bar. The ratio is not absolute, and this isn't zero sum. More women participating doesn't mean fewer men, it means more people. When there are more people, in general, the absolute number of excellent people goes up.

I don't know what you mean by "the bar". What does it mean to lower the bar? Are you talking about how hard it is to get a job, get promoted, be in the top 10%? I don't understand your argument.

No matter what math/logic you used, the layman translation of saying the bar goes down with inclusion of more women is that you believe women to be inferior. That may not be your intent, but that's what people are hearing you say.

>personally I don't see underrepresentation of women in tech as a problem that can be or should be 'solved'

I say the below not as an attempt to criticize you for this viewpoint, but as a way to try to explain why this viewpoint is often interpreted as sexist.

The question is why do you believe this? The possible explanations for why women are underrepresented in tech basically comes down to either nature or nurture. Either there is something in the way we as a society and industry educate, hire, manage, and promote women or there is something fundamentally different about women that prevents them from participating in this industry at the same rate as men. The former is fixable and you say this isn't fixable so we can assume this isn't your viewpoint. That would seem to mean your explanation relies on the idea that there is something fundamentally different about women that leads to them not going into tech. Do you see how that could easily be interpreted as sexist? It doesn't take much of a leap for people to hear the non-sexist "woman don't do this" as the sexist "women can't do this". You need to be able to articulate why you belong in that first camp or else everyone will just write you off as being in the second.

There's something fundamentally different about women that enables them to give birth to children. Humanity has been discussing the differences in behaviour between these two groups for literally millennia. Are we really going to just decide by fiat that there is zero possibility of a difference in inclination or ability that lends itself to women simply not wanting to be in this field as much as men?

You essentially have to practice some kind of biological denialism in order to believe this "problem" is entirely managerial in nature. Discussing biological differences between sexes should not be considered sexism.

what is more interesting to discuss is why the same fervour is not given to other jobs where an imbalance in gender exists (for example, registered nurses).

There's also more male electricians than female ones.

I feel that if females who would have made good engineers are turned away by discrimination or harassment, there's a good opportunity for a company to find hidden gems of an employee for lower cost than the equivalent male by making sure she is treated well. Then natural competition should balance out the cost difference over time.

For the record, there is absolutely a push to get more male nurses and there are orgs that try to get men into nursing.

How big is that push compared to the push mentioned in this thread? I have no numbers but my first guess is that it is smaller.

negligible. It's actually very simple. Programmers are big money makers for companies, specially good programmers. Programmers are mostly male, that means there is almost 50% of the population that s not even considering that career. How much easier will it be to hire new programmers if the hiring pool would almost double? There is no such problem in other areas. Not other "mostly male" or "mostly female" career is as effective for generating money for employers or is so hard to get good employees.

Yeah, you're right. People just have to accept that back when we were living in caves, women did the child-rearing, and men did the computer programming, and by now it's hard-wired into our nature. If you doubt this, it must be because you don't believe that men and women differ biologically at all.

Ah, the straw-person in its natural habitat.

I mean, if you don't think there were gender roles during the caveman days that had critical impact on our evolution and the formation of civilization, then so be it. Tactical nihilism is super cool, just disbelieve everything and reject all premises! We'll arrive at a perfect mathematical sphere of truth eventually, right?

> Do you see how that could easily be interpreted as sexist? It doesn't take much of a leap for people to hear the non-sexist "woman don't do this" as the sexist "women can't do this". You need to be able to articulate why you belong in that first camp or else everyone will just write you off as being in the second.

Here you've identified the actual problem, which is people hearing "don't do this" as "can't do this". I.e. people failing to apply their brains to a basic comprehension task. If we're to levy accusations of "-ism", then I'd call promoting this behavior as anti-intellectualism, or being pro-stupidity.

Or they are just trying to get ahead of the argument and shut it down before it gets really uncomfortable.

I don’t know how many times I have seen the “don’t do this” argument being propped up by a due to “can’t do this” argument.

If you let these things run it’s course then it always ends up at the genetics/skull. And it’s always by people who clearly have no idea about what they are talking about and can’t actually point to any biological differences that would cause it, other than child birth... So it ends with “must be biological” because reasons, so “don’t do anything”.

Seeing the same argument play out over and over, always ending at the same spot with no evidence is infuriating.

> Or they are just trying to get ahead of the argument and shut it down before it gets really uncomfortable.

That would make them not only anti-intellectual/pro-stupidity, but also assuming and acting in bad faith to shut down the discussion. A honest person would point out that the conversation makes them uncomfortable, and that they don't want to continue it.

> If you let these things run it’s course then it always ends up at the genetics/skull.

Except all the times it doesn't. Quite often, the conversation ends up being about voluntary preferences (people will e.g. point out that the weaker the economic pressures and the higher the freedom of choosing your own career, the more gender-segregated the job market becomes). Also, even if the discussion ends up at genetics, it's only ever a problem if one or both parties make the error of reasoning and passing judgements about individuals from population-level statistics.

> So it ends with “must be biological” because reasons, so “don’t do anything”.

It can be a valid and correct conclusion. If you starts by assuming something must be done, then there's no point in even having any discussion, because you've already made up your mind and seek justifications. It would be then best if you left the discussion to those who want to discover the truth about the issue.

> Seeing the same argument play out over and over, always ending at the same spot with no evidence is infuriating.

How can people tell, if they always shut the argument down beforehand with some underhanded maneuver like reading "don't do" and accusing the person of saying "can't do"?

Can’t say I have ever seen it play out any different, so I would assume that “quite often” to be exceptionally rare.

People can tell if they have seen it lots of times before they start to shut it down.

I would also argue that it makes them smart, not pro stupidity or anti intellectual. Let me try and use a tech analogy to explain it. Say you repeatedly see junior admins putting unsecured databases on the internet which subsequently get compromised. How many times do you need to see the beginnings of that event chain before you start intervening?

Also there is nothing intellectual about entertaining the same argument over and over. Or do you also think we should seriously consider the flat earth argument every time someone brings it up.

> People can tell if they have seen it lots of times before they start to shut it down.

Yeah, I can buy that. So now please scroll to the top of the thread and see the topic - the question why some people don't want to discuss politics at work. Exactly because of that - because it very predictably leads to nothing good.

But unlike the anti-intellectual position we're discussing in this corner of the thread, opposing political topics at work because of their inflammatory nature is a rational, consistent, and smart position. Nobody is telling a particular political position is wrong - just that work is not a right place for off-topic, highly emotional discussions. "Don't discuss politics at work" is the equivalent of "don't let junior admins manage public-facing databases with sensitive data without supervision".

And as for the anti-intellectuals, the reason they like to do the "don't do/don't want to" -> "can't do" substitution is because without it, if viewed calmly and rationally, they would reveal themselves to be similar to anti-vaxxers, in terms of pushing positions unsubstantiated by evidence but emotionally appealing.

In this particular case it’s not just politics that could be equally right either way. It’s politics where one of the options is wrong and science should be able to reveal which one.

And in that case challenging the popular opinion better come with actual scientific research, not lunch time napkin math pulled out of thin air.

>don't let junior admins manage public-facing databases with sensitive data without supervision

Poor Yorick will never live it down, will he?

> nature or nurture

This has been studied now, and the data points strongly towards nature. Country's with a higher level of gender equality have more gender disparity in fields such as STEM, not less. The country's that have done the most to alleviate the issues you've mentioned have the lowest percentage of women engineers.

It was the exact opposite of what everyone thought would happen. These results were so unexpected that we called it the Gender-equality paradox.

> It doesn't take much of a leap for people to hear the non-sexist "woman don't do this" as the sexist "women can't do this"

Have you considered that this assumed malice is creating a false sense of sexism in the industry and in turn driving women away from the industry?

"Either there is something in the way we as a society and industry educate, hire, manage, and promote women".

I would add raise and socialize as kids to the list, but to me that's clearly part of it.

The entire evolution of a person from baby to adult is moulded by society, which makes it pretty ridiculous when the enlightened techies want to solve the lack of women in tech by only "fixing" hiring and promoting. And management, if we're feeling generous.

That women have less interest in or capacity for STEM work is the most parsimonious explanation.

Women were barely allowed into workplaces in general within the last 50 years and are still fighting biases that have existed for millennia. Fixing the lack of women in tech is a multi-century process, not something that's just knocked out in as little as 15 years. We'd be lucky to start seeing the needle move in such a short amount of time.

Interestingly, the rates of women in tech were higher 50 years ago than they are today. Reduction in inequality between men and women has an inverse relationship with rates of women in engineering. The countries with large inequality between men and women like Indonesia and India have some of the highest rates of women on tech. Egalitarian countries like those in Scandinavia have the lowest rates. The idea that low rates of women in tech is a product of inequality and discrimination is hard to justify in practice.

My response to bluntfang, HN is rate limiting my office IP:

> Who's to say there's a reduction?

Anyone who studied gender relations over the last half century will say so, unambiguously, Trump notwithstanding. Women didn't have the right to abortion 50 years ago. They earned college degrees at half the rate of men (today, 3 women earn a degree for every 2 men). Workforce participation was much lower. Many states did not allow women to initiate divorces except under specific circumstances. Explicit denial of employment on the basis of sex was socially acceptable.

I'm willing to claim that women are better off today than they were in 1969 is a fact. I suppose "equality" is fundamentally subjective, and there might be people who genuinely believe that women getting the right to abortion, divorce, protection from discrimination, etc. somehow harmed them. But I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most women see such changes as beneficial.

I think those are interesting data points, but it's hard to take that data and clearly conclude there is a non-problem.

For one, 50 years ago in America, women were unintentionally at the frontline of computers perhaps because high numbers of women were the "computers" before machine computers were introduced. And when the machine computers were introduced, the departments of women "computers" got exposure to them perhaps because of a high overlap in the departmental "compute" functions.

Similarly if you look at high level women in computing from 50 years ago, they often got chances to apply their extraordinary skills because they happened across extraordinary opportunities - in some part because no-one else was above them for unique job, nor was there a formal role to hire for and choose between a woman or man. Another contributing factor might be the nature of war as well as the newness of the tech that created a temporary gender-blind vacuum.

> For one, 50 years ago in America, women were unintentionally at the frontline of computers perhaps because high numbers of women were the "computers" before machine computers were introduced. And when the machine computers were introduced, the departments of women "computers" got exposure to them perhaps because of a high overlap in the departmental "compute" functions.

The correlation between lower gender equality and higher rates of women in STEM is not just a pattern in US history. It also holds across different countries in the modern day [1]. The idea that this is just a coincidence that electronic computing happened to come into existence around the time that women started gaining more rights does not hold up.

> Similarly if you look at high level women in computing from 50 years ago, they often got chances to apply their extraordinary skills because they happened across extraordinary opportunities - in some part because no-one else was above them for unique job, nor was there a formal role to hire for and choose between a woman or man. Another contributing factor might be the nature of war as well as the newness of the tech that created a temporary gender-blind vacuum.

This, too, does not hold up to scrutiny. Women's share of computing jobs did not drop after the war was over. It continued to rise until the late 1970s or early 1980s depending on which estimate is used. Since the share of women in computing continued to increase several decades after WWII, the idea of a temporary gender-bind vacuum is not promising.

1. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/03/14/investigating-the-stem-...

> The idea that this is just a coincidence that electronic computing happened to come into existence around the time that women started gaining more rights does not hold up

This is a misstatement of my idea, which is that which is that greater numbers of women were higher in stem at the beginning because of a historical circumstance. The data you show in [1] is a snapshot of the modern day, and really says nothing about the historical circumstances.

> Since the share of women in computing continued to increase several decades after WWII, the idea of a temporary gender-bind vacuum is not promising.

You act as if there are no momemtum effects of the initial higher rate of women in computing technology. A baseline rate of women in the culture at the time would encourage more women to be in the industry, perhaps until other effects became stronger. That the numbers continued to rise, in my opinion, say nothing about my second proposition one way or other.

> This is a misstatement of my idea, which is that which is that greater numbers of women were higher in stem at the beginning because of a historical circumstance. The data you show in [1] is a snapshot of the modern day, and really says nothing about the historical circumstances.

For the third time, the inverse correlation between gender equality and women's participation in engineering and technology hold true both when viewed over time within individual countries and when comparing different countries at the same time. Look at the rates of women's participation in engineering and technology in the US and it peaks at in the 1970s and 80s and tapers off after that. It does indeed show a relationship between the historical circumstances of women and their career choices. And when the same circumstances exist today in other countries, the inverse relationship between gender equality and rates of women in STEM holds true as well.

> You act as if there are no momemtum effects of the initial higher rate of women in computing technology. A baseline rate of women in the culture at the time would encourage more women to be in the industry, perhaps until other effects became stronger. That the numbers continued to rise, in my opinion, say nothing about my second proposition one way or other.

The same trends are observed in countries that did not participate in WWII which makes this hypothesis that the war imparted some sort of momentum on women in computing questionable.

> For the third time, the inverse correlation between gender equality and women's participation in engineering and technology hold true both when viewed over time within individual countries and when comparing different countries at the same time.

For the second time, that's not what the data in your link shows. It shows a single data graph of the modern day state. It is an interesting conundrum - but I don't understand how it supports what you are saying about the historical state.

Other nations who didn't participate in WWII were largely further behind the industrialization curve. Not sure what that means for interpreting STEM data other than there wasn't as much STEM in those nations then.

> For the second time, that's not what the data in your link shows. It shows a single data graph of the modern day state. It is an interesting conundrum - but I don't understand how it supports what you are saying about the historical state.

Because you asked for evidence on geographic trends, and I provided it. If you insist that I demonstrate statistics that are widely known, I'll oblige:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-declinin...

> Other nations who didn't participate in WWII were largely further behind the industrialization curve

Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark (only fought for 9 hours, so it effectively didn't fight) are further behind in the industrialization curve? France, too, could be counted in this category, as their wartime contribution was largely paused from 1941 to 1945 besides partisan activity and French forces outside of mainland Europe.

The gender equality paradox is widely understood. What is motivating the instinctive dismissal of such a widely studied and known phenomenon?

Those are all fine points, but it doesn't entirely address this gender paradox issues of Engineers in developed countries.

Moreover, it doesn't address the underlying assumption that 'equality' actually has to imply 50/50 in every labour category.

I personally believe that anyone should be able to do anything, but that gender is so deeply ingrained into culture and society, that there'll never be 50/50 in most professions not matter what we do - and that we should consider accepting 'different strokes for different folks' - and that ironically 'diversity' means people will do different things. There can still be equality in the world even if people do different things, we might just have to look at things a little differently and make sure 'fairness' is applied from another angle.

In the 1920's, Lenin tried to abolish that utterly bourgeois institution of the 'family'. He banned 'weekends' and made Russia work on a 5 day work day. Everyone got one day off - but different days off were assigned to different workers. Husbands and wives would often be assigned different days off specifically so they'd never see each other, i.e. to wear down the coherence of the family. This is not some Netflix Dystopia - this was a reality for 10's of millions of people in a 20th century country.

It failed miserably because I think the hyper intellectual social egalitarian attitudes were at odds with the social reality of humanity. I believe much of our gender wars boil down to this as well: we have gender, it's never going away, and trying to kill it is absurd. It's ok, we can have real equality without having to wipe out gender - we just have to think a little bit about it.

> Reduction in inequality between men and women has an inverse relationship with rates of women in engineering. The countries with large inequality between men and women like Indonesia and India have some of the highest rates of women on tech. Egalitarian countries like those in Scandinavia have the lowest rates. The idea that low rates of women in tech is a product of inequality and discrimination is hard to justify in practice.

That sounds like a cherry-picked example. For example, Eastern Block (USSR and similar countries) had a lot more gender-equality than the Western Block (like US) and has way more women in STEM.

This does nothing to explain why 85% of women and 85% of men in Sweden work in gender segregated professions, with gender segregation getting worse for every year. It does nothing to explain why out of 5 professions with 99% or higher gender segregation, 3 is female dominated and 2 is male dominated. It also does not explain why the only university program that ended up single gender a few years ago was female dominated.

The gender paradox is also poorly explained through the narrative that historical gender roles is the cause of gender segregation today.

It might just be that with a social net that one can fall back onto, people pick the careers that they want instead of the careers that pay more?

Right, and what we’re seeing is that men and women enjoy different things.

> Fixing the lack of women in tech is a multi-century process

Why does tech take longer than other professional fields like medical and legal? Harvard law started admitting women in the 1950s. MIT started admitting women in the 1870s. Yet the gender balance in the legal field narrowed much more rapidly.

I don't see how this argument can coexist with the reality that during the same time, women have achieved equal numbers and majority status in many other lucrative careers in medicine and law etc.

Highly talented women are not having to work as nannies and school teachers because they're kept out of tech. They choose other high paying careers and do very well in them.

> barely allowed into workplaces in general within the last 50 years

Pardon? 50 years ago was 1969. Not discounting the fact that lower class women have always worked, the 60s saw a huge growth in Women's liberation, with the first woman to be a Fortune 500 CEO happening in the 1972.

To say Women were "barely allowed in the workplace" during the 60's, 70's 80's and 90's needs significant proof.

Why not just look it up? It took 10 seconds. https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/NEWSTATS/facts/women_lf.htm#Civ...

In 1969, the labor force participation rate of women was 37.8%, and today it’s 46.8%. That’s a big change, and you have to realize that this difference is also coming out of the men’s share; it’s a bigger change than it looks. Also the women’s share was much lower - only 29% - just 20 years before that in 1949. In 1920 it was 20%. And don’t forget 1920 was the first year that women were allowed to vote. So if you’re looking at the bigger point and don’t fixate on exact dates, the pattern is one of massive change in the last 100 years from almost nothing to now nearing 50%.

FWIW, while the comment you replied to maybe seemed to overstate the claim a little for recent years, your response here doesn’t look particularly good in this sensitive/divisive topic, if you’re actually worried about being unfairly labeled. For example, the fact that the first woman Fortune 500 CEO happened in the last 50 years, after 1969, really goes straight to the parent comment’s point, and constitutes extremely clear proof that in 1969 women were barely allowed in some parts of the workforce.

> In 1969, the labor force participation rate of women was 37.8%

I would not call 38% participation "barely" in the workforce. And the point of noting the first female Fortune 500 CEO in 1969 was to highlight that while it is a shame it took so long, women would have been in senior roles well before 1969 to make her promotion possible.

> the numbers have barely budged in more than 10 years

What are you talking about? The numbers have varied wildly in the last 50 years. In the US it was almost 40% women in CS in 1984. Now it’s 18%. Why? The numbers also vary wildly from country to country, and in India some years have seen greater than 50% women in CS. Why?

Cherry picking numbers to make it seem like it’s not changing and make it seem like today’s numbers are the natural order of things, when that’s very very far from the truth, is a way to ensure people who think will interpret your argument as sexist.

>To make it clear, we should definitely support everyone who is in tech, and make it an inclusive environment, but the continued push for 50/50 isn't going to happen so perhaps its not worth the huge money sink it is.

Not worth the huge money sink to whom? The companies involved? Because the ideologues of identity politics capitalizing on this "shame"-induced economy are making a fortune from it and while they continue to do so, you can expect more of the same.

It will stop of course when the bubble pops, lucrative front-end JS jobs requiring a 3 month "bootcamp" to get into disappear and every remaining IC is stack ranked based on that which is quantitative.