Re:Please Stop Asking Me to Speak About Women in Technology
by rayiner on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @08:31PM
(#7881220)
The industry made it a priority. Academia took the lead by admitting gender-balanced classes, and industry supported such measures by recruiting gender-balanced teams and putting pressure on schools to give them qualified candidates of both genders. Eventually, at least at the entry levels, the status quo being self-perpetuating without proactive measures.
There is an important wrinkle, which is that law and medical programs tend to admit students based on objective measures, and employers in those fields hire based on grades and test scores. Women tend to do better than men in terms of grades, and perform competitively with men in the relevant range of logical/mathematical tests. E.g. even in the 98-99th percentile range of the SAT Math, the representation is 40% women. Tech employers, however, hire based on measures that have a large social component. If you give a big bump to those who were programming computers as a teenager or fit well with the "culture" of your company (staffed mostly by 20-something men), then it becomes much harder to find "qualified" women.
There is an important wrinkle, which is that law and medical programs tend to admit students based on objective measures, and employers in those fields hire based on grades and test scores. Women tend to do better than men in terms of grades, and perform competitively with men in the relevant range of logical/mathematical tests. E.g. even in the 98-99th percentile range of the SAT Math, the representation is 40% women. Tech employers, however, hire based on measures that have a large social component. If you give a big bump to those who were programming computers as a teenager or fit well with the "culture" of your company (staffed mostly by 20-something men), then it becomes much harder to find "qualified" women.