First of all, with a low female population there probably aren't enough proven and qualified women to fill the desired number of slots. This leads to imposter syndrome / worry about people thinking "she only has this position because of gender". It also leads to these women sometimes doing poorer jobs, just because there aren't enough qualified women in the company to fill those positions.
Secondly, you drain the lower rungs of the company from women. This leads to under-representation in the lower rungs. Meaning fewer women getting the training time one needs to properly move up the ladder. It also means a dearth of female perspective on the lower rungs. Hurting both diversity of views, and the culture. That second point makes the company less attractive to women trying to enter the company, which perpetuates the problem.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
None of these regions particularly care about "women in tech", and most of them are certifiably more patriarchal than any of the Western countries currently suffering from under-representation of women.
One can conclude from facts on the ground that neither gender equality nor pro-diversity movements correlate with desirable representation outcomes. Yet, those appear to be the only approaches attempted here in the West.
We're not serious about tackling the problem. We are, however, quite good at grifting off the problem with proposals we know don't work.
There's a plot of % women STEM graduates vs. a measure of opportunities for women. Algeria has the highest percentage of women STEM graduates on the chart. The Nordic countries have some of the lowest.
Could it be that women tend to care about stuff like a healthy work-life balance, and things like the 996.ICU working week can discourage them from applying? Whoops no, we've been told that's sexist wrongthink.
there are initiatives of promoting IT among women in Poland, afaik.
The drop in women's representation in computing corresponds to the elimination of overtly sexist policies in other fields. E.g. medical schools removed gender quotas (maximum not minimum quotas, sometimes as low as 10%). Mary Ann Wilkes initially wanted to be a lawyer, but changed to computing when she encountered explicit sexism in law firms. After the expansion of women's right, women in her position were able to pursue their original passions.
I doubt it boils down to any one cause, but I think it's crucial not to ignore women's agency in making career decisions.
Another thought: compared to other technical careers, programming careers are uncredentialed. No legal or even social prerequisites other than skill.
If you want to be a doctor, you must apply to college, be accepted to college, matriculate, graduate with a degree in sciences. Then you must take the MCAT, apply to medical schools, be accepted to a medical school, graduate, apply to a residency, complete the residency, and become board certified.
And then you are an entry level doctor, licensed to practice in a single state, with no job, no patients, no practice, and no insurance network contracts.
If any of those steps are sexist/racist, a woman or minority is less likely to make it past that step.
Programming doesn’t have as many gatekeepers. That’s good for people who have been kept out of things.
It wasn’t until later that obsessed nerds could teach ourselves from scratch at home.
However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us.
Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point.
I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement. So it's not surprising that female programmers tend (on average) to be better; they're more motivated, they really want this, and that's usually because they're good at it (if they weren't they'd have given up earlier).
As a male growing up in the 80ies and 90ies in Europe I must say this must be somewhere else.
If this was the case then there would be some merit to the idea of "male privilege".
From what I saw encouragement came in two forms:
- generally for everyone
- and in addition, specifically for girls
I.e. I've seen activities for "kids who code" or "girls who code" but never for "boys who code".
I also have some personal experience regarding encouragement: from I was a young boy and until I had almost finished my Bachelors degree I was more than once discouraged from IT and encouraged to get a "real job" so either I was very special or the idea that boys get "nothing but encouragement" is plain false
Did your BA in IT limit your access to good advice? Did it contradict the good advice you received?
I don’t see the conflict between a BA in IT and good advice.
Could you maybe ask the question again in a different way?
I wrote about being a boy and getting what I think is bad advice.
You comment "The most powerful type of privilege a person can have is access to good advice."
I wonder if you think that what I got is good advice.
(BTW: BSc, not BA :-)
I really hate this stereotype as growing up in 80s "liking computers" was this thing only "nerds" liked in my area. Getting called a nerd was not at all positive and a derogatory slur. I loved computers at my own (social) peril.
Now they're the ones posting the 70 cents on the dollar misinformation to their FB feed.
But in the 80s/ 90s picking up a Pascal or Delphi book was about the dumbest thing you do in social circle.
And of course they do! It's like saying a team comprised of footballers from the top division will beat a team comprised of footballers from the top two divisions.
The few women who go into tech or board rooms or whatever will typically be the women who are good at it, and they will typically outperform the larger cohort of (necessarily) more average men.
You don't need tales of struggle or diversity to explain this. Minority groups will tend to perform better.
Women are 55% of the population. Why aren't they 55% of tech workers? Why are only the 20% who are really good at it working in tech?
Saying "the minority are always going to be better" doesn't explain why. And the why is really important.
Pro tip: talk to women who would like to work in tech but aren't for an answer.
> Another factor affecting perception may be distribution of IQ ... Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men. That is a pattern that we see in the university setting, with men either being at the very top of the class or at the bottom.
I’m very skeptical about this. Firstly, the popular studies that purport to show bias against females are variously flawed (including using old data from other fields) but also because women have done very well in other fields at other times which were much more hostile to them (medicine and law, for example) than tech. Similarly, women do well in tech in countries that have much more gender inequality than we have in the West (indeed, there’s an inverse correlation between a country’s gender equality and its female representation in technology). All of this suggests that discrimination isn’t responsible for as much of the gender gap in tech as we suspect.
This is very much the case if promotions are done without considering gender diversity. This can be compensated for by considering gender diversity when looking at applicants. However, that compensation can overshoot. This is especially likely if, for internal promotions, a goal of diversity is set that is too high compared to the total number of women already in the company.
That specific overshoot, caused by having diversity goals that are too ambitious given the number of women in the company, is what my comment was about. I raised the issue because women have raised it to me. Specifically when discussing blanket boardroom diversity quotas that were being considered by politicians in the Netherlands. Such quotas are more likely to cause this specific scenario, because they are made without consideration for the fraction of women working in the company, or even industry.
What is the correct racial / gender / sex breakdown for a tech industry with no diversity problems?
I’m not sure how we can say we have a problem if we don’t know what the correct breakdowns are. We’re implementing all these solutions with no metric to measure success. That seems like a perfect system to create more discrimination.
Within the tech industry, the correct proportion of minorities should be representative of your hiring pool (which is why I think they ask you to self report), or maybe even proportionally to "all qualified potential candidates", not sure how you'd measure that out.
The problem is even within qualified potential candidates, many minorities are still under-represented. This is a societal problem outside of the tech industry, but one that leaks into it.
More opportunities for these minorities to get a leg up to enter the field would bring the proportions closer to normal, stuff like affirmative action for schools.
It's a tough answer and nobody wants anyone in the chain to take responsibility for lifting up those that have been put down, it's definitely a flawed approach but I'm glad to see businesses attempt it.
I think the solution is to realize that it's wrong to pick outcomes a priori, that we shouldn't trying to find the "correct proportion". Instead, focus on eliminating discrimination and biases in the hiring pipeline. Anonymize the gender and ethnicity of applicants. Use voice altering software to prevent the ability to discern between genders when interviewing. If the goal is to eliminate discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics, create a hiring process that isn't able to distinguish between these characteristics in the first place. Then, whatever proportion that results is the "correct proportion".
How do you know all your hiring pools should produce evenly like that? There’s a lot of factors (cultural, genetic) that need to be understood. It would be very strange for interest in any industry to be even across racial groups.
We should be a bit more exact. We do not have a underrepresentation problem in tech, but a misrepresentation problem.
There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries!
But those aren’t the “right” minorities, and it’s not politically expedient to point them out.
And I’m guessing you’re not one of the affected minorities. Otherwise you might see that “the system works for this subset of people so it must be working for everyone” is a flawed and untrue argument, at least in tech.
People pushing for more equal treatment of certain minorities didn’t happen out of the blue. There’s a long history of certain subgroups getting passed up during interviews, underpaid, getting passed up for promotions, etc. As an example an ex-colleague had a really hard time landing his first job in the industry. No one would call him back. He wondered whether his Hispanic sounding name was hurting his chances, so he anglicized it and tried again. He said it was like night and day. He found a job soon after. Perhaps you haven’t witnessed something like this first or second hand.
I think many companies are butchering their diversity recruiting efforts. They try to “fix” the issue with superficial and inefficient policies. But the problem they’re attempting to address is very real.
I interpreted their argument as "people who want to can get on in tech". Being non-discriminatory doesn't lead to representative demographics (unless everyone likes/wants the same things equally, which is clearly not true).
it's curious, right?
My Talon project is capable of voice controlling Visual Studio, both at the interface level and at the code insertion/editing level. It can use Dragon as a speech engine, or my own engine. It has an existing Visual Studio integration, and Talon makes it easy to write your own context specific app commands or integrations.
Here's some Visual Studio support for it:
- https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon/tree/master/apps/vi...
As well as vscode:
- https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon/tree/master/apps/vs...
Here are a couple of public GitHub issues about dictation support in vscode:
- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/40976
- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/117980#issuecomme...
I'm not saying that it's impossible, and I don't know what kind of difference something like braille would make. Idk, are there any blind programmers that you know of ? Surely there must be some programmers who have gone blind, I wonder if they just decide to switch careers idk.
It seems very niche, which is why I'm not surprised not to see mention of it in the docs?
Why did you see it as particularly curious that VS and Dragon weren't setup for interoperability?
Dictating plaintext and copy/pasting works for writing code, but navigating through VS menus and code files and e.g. running unit tests is still a nightmare. Maybe an accessible mouse would help.
It sounds niche, but Visual Studio is perhaps the most popular IDE, and Dragon is the only real option for voice access on PCs. Any programmer without use of her hands would need this. It suggests that none of the programmers on the Dragon team have really dogfooded their product, at least for accessibility.
What I find truly heinous though is the Chrome plugin. It has two stars and thousands of reviews, and either doesn't work at all or breaks minutes in. When it works it's great, but it almost never does.
Something like X-Keys L-Trac (Formerly CST2545-5w)
I've developed carpal tunnel, and to mitigate my problems I now use a mouse at work and trackball at home (strain different muscles). The clicking of the mouse bothered me for awhile, so for that I tried two mice. Right hand would control position and left hand would do the clicking. A foot pedal for the clicks would have been so much less awkward.
People with disabilities are the most neglected of any demographic because they are not easily exploited for political gain.
How do you get to your conclusion from your statement? Simply having some minority groups overrepresented doesn't mean that the industry is welcoming. It may mean its welcoming to those groups.
And people w/o formal education isn't really a minority group. Any more than PhDs in computer science is a minority group that is overrepresented in the tech industry.
> But those aren’t the “right” minorities, and it’s not politically expedient to point them out.
This isn't about political expedience, but its about understanding the context of the discussion. Either you're new to the US or simply are ignorant to the issues of the post.
They’re a minority / highly underrepresented in other highly paid professions (law, medicine, finance). That’s something that IMO makes tech a truly exceptional industry!
(Technically, women aren’t a “minority” either.)
We are all minority and majority at the same time for different groups. And that's ok.
Pointing out what groups _aren’t_ underrepresented is like saying “Yeah, we’ll, all lives matter” in response to “Black lives matter”.
Your parent was responding to this statement:
> We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt.
And their response - that tech is, in fact, diverse and meritocratic - is a fair response to that statement.
I think what OP meant by their statement is that there is a diversity problem _pertaining specifically to people of color_ in tech. Which is true.
I think we would all benefit by being a little generous with each other when trying to discuss these sensitive issues.
It's actually a great habit that helps facilitate polite discussions. It's called the principle of charity and unless I'm mistaken it's actually one of the rules of this site.
And the principle of charity or charitable interpretation requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation. It means that if a statement could be read in an irrational way or in a rational way, you choose the latter. So if for example I said "sheep are white" you could interpret that to be the obviously false claim that 100% of sheep are white with no exceptions, or as the much more reasonable statement that sheep are typically white, where the principle of charity would be assuming the second interpretation. It has nothing to do with bending over backwards to make a statement palatable.
The hacker news guideline you are thinking of is "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
In fact, it is exactly these kinds of attitudes that directly contribute to perpetuating the diversity problem in tech.
And if you think you "have to dance around [a] topic to be PC", then chances are, what you're struggling with is either internalized bias (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc)—or the fact that you're just a bigot yourself who's upset that their bigotry is no longer socially acceptable.
> Saying "We do have plenty of representation of some minorities" is not a refutation of "we have a diversity problem in tech".
Nobody is trying to refute anything. Your knee jerk reaction is to attack anyone who doesn't 100% agree with you. _You_ are turning a nuanced discussion into an argument.
> And if you think you "have to dance around [a] topic to be PC", then chances are, what you're struggling with is either internalized bias (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc)—or the fact that you're just a bigot yourself who's upset that their bigotry is no longer socially acceptable.
Again, there is no reason for you to go full offence here. You are deliberately choosing the least charitable interpretation in order to make me the enemy.
I was referring to OP's own statement:
> This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps
I was giving a reason why OP's comment was a little generalized.
I don't know if there's a name for this, but as a Russian immigrant this sentence reminds me of how in Russia, because everyone is generally white, people are stereotyped by region. E.g. there are specific stereotypes for Muscovites, people from Siberia, Ukrainians (it was the USSR at the time), etc.
The point being that dividing people into arbitrary groups is a fractal process. You can zoom in on a demographic and then subdivide it again and again on various criteria until you come up with a small group of people you can call a minority. But doing so says nothing about why a sizeable demographic like PoC (30% of US population or so) is underrepresented in tech. There are certainly PoC immigrants, "autists", and people without formal education. Why aren't more of them in our "meritocratic" industry?
There are, they’re called “Nigerians”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans
> In 2018, Nigerian-Americans had a median household income of $68,658 - higher than $61,937 for all overall U.S. households.
https://www.ft.com/content/ca39b445-442a-4845-a07c-0f5dae5f3...
> Similar Nigerian success is reflected in the UK, where many in a highly-educated diaspora work in financial services, IT, and the legal and medical professions.
Admittedly I couldn’t find information about their representation specifically in the US tech industry, so if you do, that would be a strong indicator that the tech industry is racist (which would go against my priors and therefore change my mind), but they’re overrepresented e.g. in medicine, so ... well... for the time being, I’ll keep my prior.
Is this true? My understanding is that PoC overall are overrepresented in tech, and certainly so in individual companies like Google. The attempt to elide minorities from a vast swathe of Asia containing a massive chunk of the world's population seems to fit your description of motivated-reasoning slicing-and-dicing description much more than the example you used. Hence the promotion of the term BIPOC, so that square achievement gap pegs can be forced into the round hole of "white supremacy" by brazenly ignoring immigrants from half the world's population to make due to their inconvenient success.
Or, zooming out, "me against my brothers. Me and my brothers against my cousins. Me and my brothers and my cousins against the stranger".
That's an odd way to write, "modern educations for gifted people so fancy that their brand comes from their status at the world's biggest corporations instead of universities, but have nothing in common with the experiences of a typical person who did not receive a formal education.
I've been trying to call this out for years, to no avail.
Trying to boost the diversity metric scores without actually working to remedy the underlying structural problems boils down to a very simple goal: "We need to poach the diverse talent from out competitors, while making sure they fail to poach ours."
I think a sizable chunk of the industry feels this way. But the incentives of PR are driven more by the baying of influential parts of the public than by rational consideration of and conversation about what's just.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the "metrics diversity" folks are definitely wrong. Just that the environment has long been one that responds to good-faith questions about the effectiveness of its approach with screeching instead of thoughtfulness.
I still remember, early in my career, when Google held a diversity-focused TGIF (internal all-hands). There were obvious, gaping holes between the approach and its stated goals, and I care about representation and especially about identity-driven discrimination, so I was chatting with teammates about it afterwards.
I pretty quickly picked up on the fact that everybody thoughtful that I knew considered diversity efforts to be little more than theatre, designed to appease the loud and dumb and corrupt, and that breaking the kayfabe in the name of actual social justice was professionally costly.
I don't hold quite as cynical a view as this (see a couple paras up), but the degree to which the process is widely considered to be a jobs program for useless HR people was really striking, and a formative moment in my professional life.
Anytime an organization treats one group of people differently it creates at least two problems: others in the organization resent the preferential treatment and more importantly the targeted group does not get proper credit for their accomplishments, since they and others feel like their accomplishments were due to the advantages conferred to them by the organization.
Odin?
It's a dangerous time when it's considered dangerous to express an opinion.
It may be less dangerous here and now than most places in history.
When people say how its dangerous to voice opinions nowadays, they aren't using medieval Europe as a reference point (where it was also very dangerous to voice unpopular opinions). The reference point people use is their own experiences online from ~10 years ago.
People used to be able to say whatever they wanted online, and now doing so is dangerous. You may think that is a good thing, but it is still unequivocally true that voicing unpopular opinions online is more dangerous than it used to be.
Making some snide remark about history is completely missing the point.
"Sex and gender are the same; they are immutable; and there are only two of them."
"Every child has a right to a mother and a father."
"An individual can't change his race."
"China is the world's worst human rights transgressor and currency manipulator."
I'm not sure how bringing up anti LGBT crowds typing things like "it's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve" 20 years ago shows there was no controversy on the internet 10 or 20 years ago.
If you are correct that typing things like that was not controversial, it sounds like identifying as gay or LGBT was indeed controversial, putting false the claim that the internet was a free speech utopia where you could type anything and nobody would care.
The immutability of gender was controversial in 1991, but okay.
This is because the online audience is much larger than it used to be. I could say something on usenet in 1994 and the reach was pretty limited.
To be clear, stating unpopular opinions has always been dangerous if the wrong people hear them. Now its just that they're much more likely to hear it online.
As far as I can tell, that is all gone now. People with unpopular opinions just get banned immediately. Sometimes it is the same exact people in the exact same communities who 20 years ago would have wanted to hear that unpopular opinion. I don't know if the cause is that they have been trolled one too many times, they just got older and changed, something in the culture, who knows. The big sort keeps getting bigger though.
Normal people joined the internet and they want normal people things.
The internet is almost like real life now. Communication has consequences in real life, as kindergartners find out.
By saying it, you both get to piss on the 'woke' (which I assume this person is not), plus, if you happen to say any of the quiet parts out loud, you are somewhat protected.
This depends on other factors. For example, are there high numbers of qualified underrepresented candidates that often get no job offers and are left to leave the industry? If so, this can help absorb those qualified candidates.
But if it is just simply shuffling the deck then I agree with your take.
I do have some doubts that there are high numbers of these cases, given how much overall excess demand there is for qualified candidates. It is surely possible and worthy of examination, though.
> Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me.
How about competing for underrepresented groups, then targeting resources to ensure their success? The industry has created an environment that either is or appears to be hostile to these underrepresented groups. Perhaps they should take responsibility to change that in meaningful ways. Meaningful ways means more than filling quotas.
Supporting pipeline programs (middle and high school education, summer programs, internship programs, bootcamps and other career-change programs, etc.) seems to be the obvious paths for companies to exert lasting positive influence on the industry and world.
Sure, there's some fringe backlash when some company supports a program that is targeted at underrepresented groups, but I think that's the way to create lasting change.
Unfortunately, it doesn't move the needle on D&I OKRs this quarter or next. Poaching from someone else is the fastest way to move a key result metric.
"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
It's not "fringe backlash". It's a recognition that success in the job market isn't determined by skill despite what's claimed but by quota. The companies partaking in these diversity and inclusion ventures however don't want to admit the full depths of their assessment regarding the "underrepresented" but still try to keep the PR benefits that come with it.
>>Unfortunately, it doesn't move the needle on hiring OKRs this quarter or next. Poaching from someone else is the fastest way to move a key result metric. "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
Yes. Because any sensible business would take the least risk needed to produce highest payoff. Showing proof of success at a major competitor is a great indicator of that and that also works wonders for employees in the form of massive pay raises.
I'm 100% supportive of these programs, while being opposed to quota-based hiring models.
These are fringe concerns?
Fuck me then I guess.
Just wondering though: Are we assuming that the youth are too stupid to notice what we're doing? Or are we assuming they already know the score well enough to bite their tongues when we deliberately foist more of their parents culture war into their faces?
Were you not exposed to hamfisted intervention programs growing up?
They say that you never notice the propaganda that works, and I think there are lots of programs that are just outright good that even a cynic can't cut down, but I remember lots of insulting messaging baked into "lets fix X" initiatives too.
“Girls who code” and similar programs don’t strike me as the 2020s version of the war on drugs, though.
This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps, but it seems like many policies which seek to boost individual company population ratios to be significantly higher than the comparable tech-industry ratios are prone to this problem.
Competing for talent and working hard to ensure that underrepresented group members have a fair shot? Should be standard practice and a baseline of ethical corporate and human behavior.
Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me.
We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt. That’s observable from the industry-wide figures. Moving an underrepresented group member from industry company A to industry company B doesn’t change that industry-wide measure at all, which should be obvious but seems to escape mention.