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Comment by jahewson | Hacker News Reader

It's actually more like 20% women in CS programs now, and it was 30% a decade ago. It would be stupid to attribute that 50% decline to changes at high school or below though, wouldn't it?

And what does any of this have to do with equal compensation? If 0.01% of CS graduates were women they should still receive the same pay as men do.

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I always use plumbing as an example. You never hear about that being not diverse enough. Look, I'm all for equal pay, but I didn't see those ladies in my classroom 10-15 years ago. Only after it became "cool" to be a nerd, seeing that there is money to be made being a nerd, and realizing that living in a major city can't be subsidized by whatever they chose to study, did they start hammering on about this.

Equal pay will be very difficult to enforce unless you make salaries public. I can assure you that among your peers there are plenty of differences in compensation.

> I always use plumbing as an example. You never hear about that being not diverse enough.

I suspect that people who work in tech, closely follow tech news, and spend their free time posting in tech-industey-centered forums often miss things like campaigns for diversity in skilled manual labor not because such campaigns don't exist, but because of where their attention is focussed.

http://news.sky.com/story/white-van-woman-held-back-by-sexis...

It's not fair to compare them, plumbing requires physical strength, whereas tech jobs don't. Women have anywhere from 40-60% of the strength men do, and men have especially greater hand strength than women https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physi... Given that you need really good hand strength to do plumbing, it's never something that will see sex diversity.

I worked in remodeling before and during college, including plumbing. It requires less physical strength than what you are implying.

The parent comment makes a good point. There are few (if any) calls for diversity in regards to "dirty" jobs.

Are you a male? You think it takes less physical strength because what's physically easy for a male would be harder for a female. Ever been asked to open a jar for your wife?

Yes, I'm male. No, I've never opened a jar for my wife. My wife actually has as much physical strength as I, perhaps more.

For what it's worth, there were 3 female crew members with which I worked at the remodeling company. None of them had issues turning a pipe wrench. It's seriously not as strenuous as you seem to think. Have you tried it?

Edit: I also feel like you are missing the point, which is that there is relatively little call for diversity outside of "more women in STEM".

> It would be stupid to attribute that 50% decline to changes at high school or below though, wouldn't it?

Why?

Because there have not been changes at high school. Meanwhile there have been huge and obvious changes in tech itself (mobile) and the way the tech industry is viewed in the media, which would be the obvious place to start looking for answers.

I agree that the institution that is high school has not significantly changed wrt this in the last decade, however there is plenty of room for the experience of being a high school to have changed in the last decade.

It's not anything near 20% from what I've seen. I've worked at fairly random companies and went to a pretty large school and women are consistently outnumbered at least 10-1 everywhere.

Even at Google and Facebook a lot of their female employees are just tangentially related to development. The core dev teams are probably 95% male just like everywhere else.

How about someone do a name-gender scan on GitHub to check???

What you are seeing is inter-profession gender segregation. When a minority enters a profession, they tend to go into sub groups where they can be majority in a local context.

Its similar to male teachers. Teaching has similar to tech a about 80-20 gender split, but you don't find 20% of say English teachers to be male if you did a random poll. Instead men go into typical male teacher roles such as physical activity (sport), after school activity (sport again), and math. They still went to teaching school, have a title thats recognized as teacher, so statistics will still give a 20-80 ratio.

So the 20% women in CS is there, you just have to figure out what sub-group in CS which is designed as typical female CS.

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