This is not a fair summary of the argument. There's nothing "simple" about the pipeline problem, and what 'grey tribe' folks object to is not the rather generic claim that "the industry is sexist" (since there are in fact plenty of problematic practices in the tech industry that may adversely impact women) but the rather more specific argument that discrimination in hiring practices/educational admissions/etc. is to blame for the imbalance. Clearly, there's quite a bit of evidence against that proposed mechanism.
I'm not entirely sure how much effort I want to put into trying to convince people who obviously don't want to be convinced, but here goes, since my above comment has been received well enough.
The industry is sexist. That's the answer. No more, and no less than other industries. This is very very very very very basic intersectionism. I can get a little deeper on this but someone well-versed in this can get a lot deeper.
Industry leaders do not want to listen to these experts. Because it threatens them. I'm lucky enough to work for a company big enough to realize they need to take it seriously. There's employee resource groups and the leadership talks about it, not in every town hall, but in enough of them. But Silicon Valley is run by a tribe of mavericks. They call it a pipeline problem when it's really a willingness problem. If they took it seriously they'd already have a solution. They don't, because sexism.
If it's not more sexist than other industries, then that can't be the reason why there are fewer women.
They call it a pipeline problem when it's really a willingness problem. If they took it seriously they'd already have a solution.
Please enlighten us with the solution that will produce an equal ratio of men and women when 80% of CS graduates are men.
> Please enlighten us with the solution that will produce an equal ratio of men and women when 80% of CS graduates are men.
It's very simple. Exceedingly simple. So simple you'll wish you'd have thought of it, and if you think hard about it after I explain it you'll see your own sexism in why you didn't.
Here it is. The solution is to drop the ridiculous credentialism that's infected the field. You do not need a CS degree to contribute usefully and advance a career in this field. You can have a CS degree and still be largely useless compared to someone without. I do not have a CS degree. I do not have ANY degree. Yet I make more money than many of my peers in my job market. Guess which race and gender I am, no prizes for getting it right the first time.
Systemized racism and sexism are why companies won't usefully invest in the careers of minorities, and why they invested in mine even without the proper 'stuff'. It's elitism, pure and simple. Go ahead and come up with all your reasons. Those reasons support and continue elitism. They're excuses.
And that's my last reply on this topic, I hope more HNers start picking up the torch. Because talking about this shit to people who aren't really interested in the topic more than they just want it to go away makes me unreasonably mad and that's no way to contribute usefully to the discussion.
Someone in this thread asked how it's not a pipeline problem if 80% of graduating CS students are male, and your response is to just stop caring about CS degrees. But how does that make sense unless you think that there is an equally disproportionate ratio of uncredentialed yet qualified women programmers? And frankly the rhetorical techniques you're using here feel dishonest, implying that if I don't accept your argument then either I didn't think hard enough about it or I'm sexist. Or the "this is my last reply on this topic". If people have genuine questions why not answer them?
And after seeing this kind of discourse so many times there is such a sense of relief when someone is willing to say "let's look at the truth even if it's an inconvenient one" because to come up with a good solution you have to start with what's actually true right? For a lot of people that's what SSC represents and that's why they feel so strongly about defending it.
Basically comes down to personal computer games marketed to boys in the 80s.
> Advertisers sold games to boys because boys were the ones buying them
https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...
So there we have it. Girls didn't have access to computers so they were less skilled when coming to college, and the intro courses prioritized prior coding skills, and they didn't have them, lost confidence, abandoned industry.
So its actually rationale explanation, and really not sexism (shock!).
What did girls do while boys were gaming? If a girl had a brother in a household with a computer, why didn't they use it? Was it sexist parents / gender stereotyping?
If women want to code, all they have to do is...code. It really doesn't make sense to blame men here.
I'd be curious how many people subscribe to both intersectionalism and rationalism, I suspect it's very hard to do.
I recently read an interesting take on this from Philip Telock in Superforecasting (unrelated book): Belief systems are like jenga blocks, we arrive at conclusions from myriad assumptions all stacked upon each other. It's hard to change core beliefs once they're tied to a bunch of other downstream beliefs (like blocks lower in the tower), especially if those blocks involve group identity.
All this to say I suspect this thread will consist of people talking past one another because everyone's belief frameworks are very different, and language means slightly different things. E.g. the word "sexist" could refer to either the behaviors, both explicit or implicit (micro-aggressions), or the entire system as measured by outcome, depending on who you ask.
Though neither of those two frameworks are precisely core to my being, I do like reason and rationality a lot, and it also makes sense to me how there can exist intersections of attributes that all add up to a person being more or less oppressed versus privileged.
But what you said here is exactly what irks the 'rationalist' community. Giving "sexism" as the root reason fo something is a terrible position to start from if you actually want to fix it. For those that have seen and experienced sexism in the industry it is blatantly obvious but for all others we need something to help them understand.
The areas I would point to are:
why do women drop out of the industry at greater rates than men?
what causes women to be attracted to CS? Is it something different than what attracts men?
It IS a pipeline problem right now, how do we try and remove barriers and make it a more welcoming place for the women who are interested?
All of these can be investigated and addressed. "Sexism" can not be unless we want to wait generations for our social culture to evolve, but by then something will certainly replace sexism.
However: I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between systemic sexism and actual sexism.
The tech industry suffers from systemic sexism. That doesn't mean that HR departments and senior leadership are all staffed with cartoon villains eagerly waiting for the opportunity to sexually harass a subordinate or assault someone at an office party (aka, plain vanilla sexism), although I think we can all name a couple companies that, it turns out, fit this mold pretty well. It doesn't even mean that senior leadership is full of misogynists who will systematically underpay women and undervalue their contributions and talk over them in meetings (again, it does happen, it's just not the main issue here).
Rather, it means that the entire structure of the industry is one that yields unequal outcomes. There are a lot of different factors here: Things like policies on working from home or flexible hours, expectations about overtime or vacations, the practical impact of the dreaded "culture fit" evaluation or implicit assumptions about what a good engineer "looks like". But also, absolutely, the "pipeline" problem.
My company - like yours, I assume - is eager to hire diverse candidates, but we can't hire candidates that don't exist, and our demand, alone, isn't going to fill up high school, boot camps, or college classes with the missing candidates. But when the graduating classes are overwhelmingly male, your junior devs will be too. And so will the intermediates, seniors, tech leads, principle engineers, etc. And when everyone is mostly male, it becomes self-reinforcing. When everyone at the table discussing policies is male (or even all but 1-2), it's very hard to figure out whether a policy seems sensible to you because you've got twenty years in the industry and know what works for successful teams, or because you're a guy, and knows what works for successful teams of men.
> They call it a pipeline problem when it's really a willingness problem. If they took it seriously they'd already have a solution.
I think you're seriously underselling the scope of the issue. Taking it seriously and being willing to solve it does zip point nothing. We cannot hire engineers that opted to a different career path and are not only not really qualified to apply now but also aren't even applying because they have no interest in tech and haven't even considered it as an option.
In a later comment you say:
> The solution is to drop the ridiculous credentialism that's infected the field. You do not need a CS degree to contribute usefully and advance a career in this field.
Sure, absolutely, one of our better recent hires we made is a woman who took a break from her (non-tech) career after having kids, decided she wanted to give tech a try, attended a bootcamp, and then applied to us. We hired her, she's been great. Which is fine; really that's the bare minimum any tech company should do.
...but systemic sexism is still a thing. One company (or fifty) being eager to solve it doesn't actually do anything. Hiring one good engineer with a non-traditional background is fine, but we're trying to double the size of the engineering team this year, and if we hired every woman who applied without a CS degree in the last year that would go exactly 0% of the way to meeting our hiring goals, because they're not applying.
Your condescending "oh, the solution is so simple, you people just aren't thinking of it because you don't care" is nonsense. The issue isn't that 100% of companies are sexist and won't hire women and/or women from non-traditional backgrounds, the issue is systemic sexism which means the (very large) number of companies that are not sexist and are eager to hire those women cannot do so.
In short: You seem to think that talking about the pipeline problem is way of minimising or avoiding grappling with the hard problems. I think your attempts to minimise the pipeline problem is a way of you avoiding the hard problems. :)
It seems to me that your move to the Blue Tribe could have less to do with the "toxicity" of the Grey Tribe and more to do with your eagerness to hurl unfounded moral accusations at those who hold positions you disagree with. That is quite the popular pastime within the Blue Tribe (even if some of its members may themselves be disgusted by it).
What's potentially toxic about this "opinion" is that, until it cites evidence, it entirely confuses what is social science and what is armchair philosophy.
One can either state: "Study X suggests that the gender gap is roughly due to Y% of A and Z% of B", or they can say "Anecdotally speaking, I have experienced the following, which suggests to me that $REASON may be at play here".
When one carelessly mixes the two together, they drape an assertion in the unearned aesthetics of quantitative reasoning. Which, in my experience, is sadly where a lot of these rationalist arguments end up.
I still disagree, but my reply above was a bad argument.
The OP linked https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-..., but https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge... would be the later / more rigorous one.
> "This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there."
There were class action lawsuits that required law firms, law schools, medical schools, and hospitals to accept women doctors and lawyers. After sexism was recognized as a problem law schools used affirmative action to admit gender-balanced classes and law firms hired equal numbers of men and women.
STEM subjects didn't have these interventions so it's unsurprising that sexism is more of an issue than in other fields.
My point was at the meta level that we should be using facts and evidence when we talk about this rather than saying “we just know we are right.” as the original commenter did.
Worth noting though that your theory doesn’t actually have enough explanatory power to explain the interesting part of the data; one of the points in Grant’s original article (which Scott is arguing against) was this juicy graph: https://media-exp1.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E12AQGEJuKqIh95Ng/a...
Note that female participation in CS increases along with other fields in the 70s, then something happens in 84/85 and participation plummets. Your theory would support a graph where CS never tracked with those other fields. But this is as clear an exogenous event as you are going to see in social science data.
What happened in 84? Maybe there is an explanation in the affirmative action caseload? I didn’t look at that dimension but your theory (fleshed out with data) might shed some light on that. (Also note that this graph looks worse than it really is; total CS enrollment also plummeted in 84 due to a recession and so there is a confounding effect there.)
Again, this is why data is so important in these discussions. The reality is way more complex than the “we know we are right” crowd appreciate; if you get this wrong then you won’t be able to fix the problem (or even identify the real problem).
If you are interested in this area then I would recommend reading the book Why Aren't More Women in Science?. It has 15 essays by experts debating the issue.
rayiner, a HN lawyer, also has some good posts that discuss affirmative action in law (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21775576) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875443).
> when you don't want to be a part of the people calling themselves the good guys
Everyone calls themselves the "good guys". How haven't you noticed that yet? People with different opinions than you aren't mustache-twirling cartoon villains, contemplating the evil things they'll do today. Identifying with a group who thinks of themselves as "the good guys" gives zero evidence that your opinions are any more correct than those of other groups.
> The New York Times does not have to explain this to its audience. They already know. All they really have to do is list the cavalcade of toxicity that the community produced and everybody who has been in the Blue Tribe for years will know the score, and people like me who were actually a part of it and drifted away from the Grey Tribe to join the Blue Tribe are nodding their heads.
This is just an appeal to popularity [1], not a factual argument. At least the "grey tribe" – as far as it can be considered a consistent group at all – tries to find proper arguments for its positions, and isn't content with their version of "all my friend agree with me, so I must be right".
We all live in one bubble or another. We'd do well to keep that in mind.
This is Cade Metz deliberately stating positions in an inflammatory way and getting you to fall for it. Reading the article you see the careful position of trying to tease out correlation from causation.
I don’t know what your past/experience is, but I was a geek way before IT industry was even a thing. And I can guarantee you, they 100% were not interested in joining. They being everyone (including 99% of men), not just women, of course. Everybody could do geeky stuff. Instead, boys were playing sports (computer games weren’t yet a thing), and girls were doing ... who knows what, we (boys) weren’t interested in them back then.
In addition, there was a lot of discouragement from all sides - parents, peers, teachers, bullies - this was of course before CS was big money, and honestly I suspect if things turned out differently (programming wasn’t paid well), noone would even notice the sex imbalance (like they don’t for truckers).
Kathleen Booth invented assembly language. In 1947.
1. From Clive Thompson's "Coders" chapter 2.
2. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
You can replace Grey Tribe with any tribal affiliation which short-circuits your critical thinking and leads to agreeing to whatever your in-group believes.
Blind obedience to any tribe is toxic.
In a lot of cases the response should be “I’m not sure, I’m not educated on this topic so I can’t offer an opinion”
In other words, this little place called "the Internet"?
Seriously, what you're describing applies to all gatherings of humans since the dawn of civilization.
Why is there never outrage the other way around with fields dominated by women, e.g., psychology?
They're also deeply underrepresented in college, and the gap between men and women going to college is growing. Among young people, especially in cities, women actually out earn men.
Figuring out who's "better off" seems to be entirely dependent on what ruler you're using to measure "better", and which subgroup you're using to do the measurement.
The less simple response is that cis white men haven't been systematically kept from participating in the full economy, unlike women and people of color until about a generation ago. Systemic sexism and racism were built up over centuries and have not been evacuated from society yet. When engaging in discussion about it it's impossible to look at the entire scope and walk away with concrete actions to reduce its impact, which is why productive discussion needs to hone in on specific issues or else we get in meaningless argument over semantics like "#women < #men == sexist" when it should be obvious that something is wrong there
(If I mis-understood what you're referring to please correct me).
Do you have any support for that claim, because AFAIK your claim has as much substance as saying that they're simply not interested, which is not much.
> The New York Times does not have to explain this to its audience. They already know.
And Trump doesn't have to explain to his followers how the election was stolen, they know it was. That's how dogmatic ideologies work.
The claim that women aren't interested in tech isn't toxic sexism, it's obvious everyday common sense everywhere except the most extreme "blue" communities in America. All you have to do to know this is spend time around women in a social context and try to talk to them about technology. The vast majority will happily admit they don't care, don't want to care and are much happier when someone else is dealing with technology for them. This is true of girls who are 8 and grandparents of 80. None of this is any more radical a statement than saying men are less interesting in clothes and handbags than women.
Contrarian logic sucks. Rationalism isn't all it's cracked up to be. It sucks all the life out of the air for minorities.
Logic isn't racist. People are racist.
> The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.
This is exactly the sort of thing you manage to convince yourself of when you don't want to be a part of the people calling themselves the good guys, but also don't want to throw in with the sorts of people comfortable with being called the bad guys. Everybody in the Blue Tribe is going to precisely see the toxic nature of this statement. Women aren't interested in joining because of the sexist nature of the industries. Reversing the order of the causation is making excuses for sexism and is itself sexist.
The New York Times does not have to explain this to its audience. They already know. All they really have to do is list the cavalcade of toxicity that the community produced and everybody who has been in the Blue Tribe for years will know the score, and people like me who were actually a part of it and drifted away from the Grey Tribe to join the Blue Tribe are nodding their heads.
Now, this is Hacker News, this community is very close to the SSC one, so I know a lot of people aren't going to take this well. But the Grey Tribe really isn't a nice place to be, and the sooner you can realize this, the sooner you can find actual political heft in the world.
Contrarian logic sucks. Rationalism isn't all it's cracked up to be. It sucks all the life out of the air for minorities. When you state a contrarian opinion like it's fact, like it should be considered because you're the one saying it, and the reason you're stating it is none other than you don't like all those nasty SJWs, you're denying the lived experience of all the people out there who spent their lives being one of those oppressed minorities. All of those girls who hide their gender from their gaming pals. All those Black Americans who discover that the tech landscape doesn't reward knowledge and talent as much as it does the right race and skin color.
It may be a little better in the tech industry than it might be, say, in the construction industry, but to pretend these things don't exist or aren't as important as what your mind sees as bigger is, well, toxic. And it's the cornerstone of the Grey Tribe mindset.