The power of role models

>"Because if you're in a culture that is so infused with this belief that men are just better at this and they fit in better, a lot can shake your confidence." (Margolis, ibid) //

Hang on though, the main premise of the piece was that women were most dominant in the field and excelled [beyond the men?].

From personal experience I don't buy the narrative of computers being chosen to be "boys toys" as a move to exclude women, instead it strikes me boys chose computers, instead say of other things - like a social life. But that's maybe because the [apparent] anecdata they have contradicts my own experience, that my mother bought our computer, that it was in a common room and that my sister completely ignored it. At primary school (UK, 1980s) all the kids were given equal time on the BBC microcomputer during lessons, but it was primarily the boys who chose to stay in at break times and after school to use it. At high-school I was inspired by our IT teacher [female] as were others but AFAIR 90% of those staying to use the computers outside directed lessons were still boys.

That link actual goes as far as promoting the idea that boys were given computers and girls were physically restrained from accessing them [based on an anecdote]; to me that sounds like a misconstrual of the situation where boys asked for computers as gifts and so had them in their bedrooms - I can only assume that happened for some girls too.

If I'm wrong then nonetheless I don't think you can argue any similar narrative now, for the Western working and middle classes at least - if you have access to a smart-phone or a school/library computer you have all you need to excel at computer science; that surely eliminates any element of exclusion by sex from the field.

[+] In this connected digital world where no-one knows online if you're even human [woof!] the premise of male suppression in the proposed narrative would be defeated and a massive up-tick would be expected, but instead the graph shows a fall [in percentages] as the web has grown.

In short I don't buy that the ratio of the sexes in computing and tech is skewed by a global male conspiracy to suppress women as a realistic explanation.

[Aside, do you know of the study that they refer to in your citation, the results and anecdotes are mentioned but without citation?]

tl;dr see [+]

The subject of insecurity does come up:

> Throughout college, men and women succeeded equally in the classroom. However, we observed that women started to doubt their problem-solving abilities more than men. [...skipping long illustrating quote]. Women were also much more likely to look to others—teaching assistants, professors, and advisors—to affirm, and reaffirm, their confidence. Men did talk about doubting themselves, but they did not necessarily seek reassurance from others. We found that this search for positive cues carried over into expectations for feedback from supervisors in internships and jobs."

However, it is not at all the only phenomenon at play. More discouraging is the gendered treatment they receive from professors and, more importantly, colleagues.

> For many women engineering students, however, their first encounter with collaboration is to be treated in gender stereotypical ways, mostly by their peers. While some initially described working in teams positively, many more reported negative experiences. When working with male classmates, for example, they often spoke of being relegated to doing routine managerial and secretarial jobs, and of being excluded from the “real” engineering work. Kimberly wrote, “Two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came back in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop.”

> There were also descriptions of being treated differently by professors. Rachel described when her team (the only all-girl team) won second place in a design competition: “Our professor wanted to get a picture of our prototype and us. We picked up our prototype and were all smiling and looking all professional; then he said: ‘You guys look like professional catalog models; this picture could go in a catalog and you could sell big time.’”

> Men, on the other hand, described mandatory group design projects as exciting turning points, where theory and practice come together. “I made a pretty big stroke of progress last week,” one student wrote in his semi-monthly diary, “I ended up proving the professor wrong on something she had done last year, which actually helped us find better results (well, also more correct results)… It’s really a blast working on something like that.”

Anyway, there are more quotes available, if you want to look at it yourself.

Note also that there is one other factor they address that isn't related to sexism in the field (but perhaps to broader sexist acculturation in society) - women are more likely to want to work somewhere that is "contributing to society". Part of what's going on here is that it's not considered quite as socially acceptable for women to be ambitious for ambition's sake, at least not in the way that it is for men. But I don't think that's something that the engineering culture enforces, I think that's something that's internalized.

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

I imagine that is part of it.

Trivialization of women's issues is a different monster.

For sure men are unhappy with their companies. Otherwise nobody would ever switch jobs.

Also it should be considered that women have more career options than men. Since they spread out over more professions (including fulltime mum), it is to be expected that they are not 50% of people in all professions.

As I've asserted a few comments over, there's an ample body of detailed, firsthand observation available to men who are sincerely interested in the problem. It's also possible for us to talk to women who work in the field and listen as they describe their experiences. The existing gender imbalance, routine discrimination in hiring and promotion, rampant harassment, and profoundly toxic social dynamics are all recurring themes.

I don't seem to meet a lot of women who feel that there is a dearth of evidence about any of this.

Meanwhile: This embarrassing trainwreck of a thread, ad infinitum.

I am not doing Curtis' thesis justice; you'd have to see the ( freely available, SFAIK ) film. He doesn't just paint environmentalism with this brush. I found the idea bracing; I saw myself in it.

Where exactly? Because frankly, that seems to be highly unlikely.

I suspect that having not just role models like yourself, but them also being commonplace can more easily dispel beliefs that your room for growth is limited by gender, ethnicity, etc. Obviously, if your field is already dominated by people like you, this is not a problem that you have to deal with in the first place.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing...

I have just seen this concept of a role model bandied about before, and that is something that I have never experienced in my own life in computing. In the article, Rob mentions how in the field of astronomy, the women he has talked to consider role models to be important. But he never mentions any people he would consider role models to himself in computing.

So I was just curious if anyone else here had any role models in computing (man or woman), and if so would they mind sharing a little anecdote about that experience. I've often heard talk of the importance of role models, and I felt like I was kind of "missing out" for not having one. So I thought, how about I start a little side discussion on the role that role models in computing had had on others lives and careers on here.

I am NOT trying to imply any of these things: "Women shouldn't need role models because I didn't have one" "Role models are unimportant" "Women should accept men as role models" "Women are liars"

or any other such derogatory statements.

Why the rush to assume malice?

What does that even mean, to "prefer computers over people"? I think there are very few people (in tech or any other field) who would prefer to be a hermit and spend all of their time on their interest of choice. You can be interested in technology for its own sake without seeking social isolation. The idea that programmers should be modern day monks that have no families and spend their days programming and in quiet contemplation is completely ridiculous. Sure, there are some lone wolves out there who are successful on their own, but most programmers will have to work/communicate with other programmers, managers, stakeholders, customers, lawyers, and/or domain experts at some point in their lives, and having the social skills to navigate such situations can enable you to create interesting technology.

> That means having things that normal people care about (role models, respectability, etc), and not having things they can't stand ("RTFM" culture, socially-incompetent single coworkers, the "nerd" label, etc). Even if those things aren't all that important to us, and only serve to increase the amount of economic competition we face.

Who is this "us" and "we" you speak of? I have to work with my coworkers, so all other things equal I prefer it when they are socially competent.

I think you are reinforcing a very harmful stereotype, where you have to be a computer-obsessed social pariah to have a successful career in tech. Perhaps you should reflect on those beliefs, and whether they are based on objective facts or perhaps something you tell yourself to avoid feeling inadequate about your interpersonal skills.

So to take your list of people for example, someone like John Carmack. What I was looking for was what specific exploits were you talking about and why they were so inspirational to you. Maybe it was his work creating the Doom and Quake games, or his bootstrap work building id software from scratch, or his contributions to free software by releasing his engines under gpl, or his quakeworld talks, or his work with rocketry, or his new work with VR, or his general overall attitude about life, programming and everything.

I mean there had to be something special about him for you to want to be like him, and that seems like something that would be worth telling a little story about.

Right, this is what I like to call the Google Fallacy. If you have a team that represents all genders, races, etc etc but they are all recent graduates of the same handful of CS programmes, then where does the diversity of opinions actually come from? This is why Google keeps making products and abandoning them when they fail to gain traction, or produce public disgust like Glass. To be actually diverse companies must move beyond the tickybox culture of just looking at gender and colour and look at actual lived experiences.

The whole ecosystem is hugely weighted toward men making decisions.

We need some sort of exit poll data for people leaving the tech industry if that exists. We've seen the data for women giving up after receiving fewer rejections than men, but to my knowledge any accusations of toxicity are purely anecdotal.

I'd be very interested to see some evidence of this. How many women leave, at what stage in their career path do they leave, where do they go after they've left, and how do you know that their unfair treatment is responsible?

I strongly suspect that you don't like quotas, or intentional correction of a massive gender disparity in hiring, and so on, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong about the limits of the Civil Rights Act with regards to hiring.

Hiring more women after realizing "we have a huge gender disparity problem" seems to me (not a lawyer) the sort of thing a company's employment lawyers would be happy to defend in court. If there are any real counterexamples, yeah, that'd be interesting to read about.

Good point though - neither of them tried to self-learn in high school.

There are a number of papers (and I'm very afraid I'm on my phone right now, so I can't cite them. I am sorry for that) which show that things like severe gender imbalance are not self-correcting systems in the case of extreme bias -- you have to push them back closer to 50/50, but then the system will remain balanced.

This makes (to me) intuitive sense -- current staff / managers will tend to employ, and promote, people "like them", creating a self-perpetuating system.

Non-diverse environments are unmeritocratic. They drive away half of the talent.

If half of the good talent is unwelcome, and leaves, then the environment by definition isn't as good or meritocratic as it could be.

Coming from a country at the boundary between east and west, poor and developed, civilisation and 3rd world, I find it fascinating how there is less diversity of thought at Google (where people come from all over the place, have all the colors and sexual orientations) then a random group of old people in some fundamentalist rural area in my home country.

Focusing on diversity makes your company MORE competent, not less.

You don't even have to be as extreme as your example (nobody could work in the conditions that you mentioned).

Things like blind resume screening have been shown to significantly reduce hiring bias, and more companies should be doing it.

Also, the biggest discrimination problems in tech aren't even direct hiring discrimination problems. One big reason why companies are not very diverse is that companies tell their employees "refer your friends!" and then they are surprised when the white men only refer other white men.

Making efforts to specifically reach out to women, and making sure they apply to your company (without lowering any bars or anything), work very well in increasing diversity.

Yes, if you define "merit" as including particular genes in your DNA, then you can get away with Pike's attitude and still claim to be merit-based.

But hello, reality check, Pike is advocating for something that is not only immoral but also explicitly illegal. The law says that people should be assessed on their skill at the job and not selected due to their gender. Like, whether they write good code or not. The industry has a lot of different ways of measuring merit that are gender neutral - Pike is saying ignore those ways and promote bad coders over good, "just because" they're women.

I'm extremely shy in certain situations (for instance, I hate introducing myself to people at parties, bars, etc.), but if I'm in a meeting for a group I'm involved with, I will absolutely say as much as I'm allowed to say.

Do you think there are benefits to being shy in such a context?

I think this was chosen to contrast it to an alternative method of diversity where many women are included but they are not as important. His thesis is not to optimize for "numbers of bodies" equal representation, but equal representation of influence.

I think it's going to be difficult to compose an argument for how computer science could be intrinsically better suited to men in a way that didn't also apply to other popular hard-science fields.

To expand on the idea: in meritocracy, networking would matter much less then it matters in tech. Meritocracy would not see "culture fit" as so important as tech have it. Ability to work with others would matter, but there would be no beer test and crap like that. In meritocracy, your ability to socialize after work would matter less. Ability to organize own work would matter more then ability to sit there 80 hour a week being ineffective.

I also think meritocracy would lead to less fads nobody criticize until they are out of fashion at which point everyone criticizes.

So yeah, I stand by tech is not meritocratic and if it stopped being so self-confident about it, it could move closer to that ideal.

Of course I don't know you, but that might have more to do with your self esteem, or lack thereof, than anything else. Some people's reaction would be pleasure at their accomplishment.

This seems slightly absurd. Tech is one of the few jobs which people move into after taking it up as a hobby, and for which doing it as a hobby is almost seen as a requirement. This is not generally what happens for doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, teachers or surveyors. Other jobs for which this applies are generally very poorly paid for the vast majority e.g. actor, footballer, musician, etc. Although many people do go into IT because they have no specific interests, moreso admin roles at big companies, which tend to be have a higher proportion of women than programming roles at startups.

And the explanation would need to be simple, because it competes with another explanation, which is that computer technology is systemically biased against women, the way every other profession was before those professions took explicit steps to correct disparity.

It's harsh, but if we want a meritocracy, it's the right thing to do.

For example, after some members of the team have interviewed a potential candidate for hire, we get together to discuss our observations on him/her. We were choosing between two people and the female, IMO, wrote much cleaner code. The team decided to go with the guy because "he fit the culture better".

What this meant was he and 2 of the other interviewers talked about League of Legends for 10 minutes and he wore a "hilarious" graphic t-shirt.

At this point, the only way to be wholly convinced that tech doesn't discriminate against women (and some people of color) is to willfully ignore the huge array of evidence, and to assume that every woman who has spoken out about their experience is lying. I'm unwilling to ignore the evidence or to assume that a bunch of women I admire are lying (for what reason, I can't imagine, because the women who speak out face being doxxed, harassed for years, and otherwise making their life miserable with the only goal being to make things a little more fair in the future for other women).

For example, before orchestras started doing blind auditions, there were far fewer women than men. After, the proportions are much closer to equal. Sports is a related example- there are clearly plenty of women interested in athletics, despite society pushing them out in the past. The article itself compares computing to astronomy- I find it unlikely that the differences between the two are wide enough to result in the difference we see demographics.

So at this point, it seems to me the burden of proof falls on the idea that women aren't discriminated against. Time and again society has tried to explain away a disparity by attributing it to intrinsic differences of biology, or whatever, and time and again that has proven false.

Since I do not have firsthand experience with being a woman, my information comes from talking to women computer scientists and engineers from my school CS program and my workplace, and listening to their firsthand experiences dealing with sexism in the industry. Their opinions are diverse, but generally are in support for more empowerment of women/minorities in the workplace, so I generally support their agenda. Personally, I enjoy working in a more diverse workplace, anyway (long explanation for another day).

In Soviet Russia during the Cold War, I believe boys and girls were both encouraged to study math and sciences, which resulted in a fairly even gender representation in the career, and neither gender was better than the other on average. Food for thought.

How would you feel if you applied for a job and it was given to someone else because they were a woman?

Probably not much different than women feel every day when passed over for a job they're similarly or better qualified for by a man. It sucks to lose an opportunity that you wanted, but the industry will be healthier for it.

Would this practice applied in aggregate not chase off even more talented people?

Our industry chases off, or under-utilizes by not promoting to their level of greatest impact, talented women every day. Evening that imbalance out is not unfair to men.

At the level of phone screens and first interviews, there should be many potentially acceptable candidates. If there aren't it's indicative of a flaw at the very top of the funnel (ie, the opening needs to be better publicized, or the org. may have a public image problem).

It's very believable that intelligence and height correlate, but the question then becomes "Do we overweight height in decision making, relative to its predictive power for success/intelligence?" If height very weakly predicts increased intelligence and we weight it strongly, that's still far from optimal decision making.

The correlation with intelligence isn't even necessary to ask that question. Hiring taller people also has upside in that other people (eg, your customers!) are biased toward them as well. However, and I admit this is conjecture, I still suspect allowing your own biases to influence decision making is a net negative.

I'm sorry, that's not how it works. You don't get to keep a giant population down and then just extract the occasional diamonds and ignore the rest. You need to pull the entire thing if you want those diamonds to be created.

> they shouldn't simply be put into these positions by virtue of the "minority" (quoted for lack of a better word) traits ALONE

Why do people always state this as if it's the only possible reality? You go from "on minority basis ALONE" to "incredibly competent" in one fell swoop.

I seriously hope you don't have people in your organization that are so incompetent that the only reason you could think of promoting them is because they're in an underprivileged group. Because otherwise, your statement doesn't make any sense. It's like you are already signing up for a reality where members of underprivileged group cannot possibly be the kinds of members you'd very much want to have.

That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is that among the group of cool people that you have in your organization, maybe notice the women sometimes. And don't expect them to be "incredibly competent". Just competent enough. The same way you treat everyone else.

This is why, not coincidentally, criticisms of affirmative action in tech that point at the relative lack of interest in e.g. teachers or garbagemen fall flat. Those positions and communities don't broker power.

Society is obviously and inarguably more than the collection of individuals. As soon as a contract is made and adjudicated, this becomes clear.

Aram, I and many others appreciate your technical contributions. Your strong feelings on this topic are misguided and, in their consequence, malicious.