Silicon Valley's women have spoken. Now what?
bbc.com
bbc.com
I disagree with this. Diversity shouldn't be required to keep people from being sexist, and forced diversity would only work to spread disdain towards women in the field.
On top of this, an emphasis on diversity implies the differences between the genders are purely cultural, which is just false. There are legitimate physical[1] and psychological[2] differences between the sexes which lead to differences in career preferences. If we want to improve this culture, we need to learn how to do it within an environment with more men than women.
The cynical side of me thinks this push for diversity is merely a method being attempted to increase the labor pool and lower leverage among tech workers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
edit: To those upvoting or downvoting to responses in this thread, please comment explaining your reasoning. This is an emotional topic, and only through logical argument will the conversation move forward.
I can't imagine why people think the technology industry has a problem.
Women for example, dominate the tax preparation industry. I have no idea why, but I'm reasonably certain that it's not just discrimination.
What physical and psychological differences cause more men than women to go into tech? Do you really think that it's something like that rather than pervasive social problems in the industry that make it hostile to women as described in the article and many others? This isn't a hypothetical question I'd love to hear your response :)
Women are perfectly innately physically and psychologically capable of doing the work in tech I and my male coworkers do. The reason for lack of parity is elsewhere and is definitely not benign.
Where is the big push to bring men into these fields?
Presumably equality there isn't as exciting to people because teacher pay is garbage for everybody, whereas in tech it looks like women are being locked out of one of our most lucrative industries.
Women aren't being kept out. They keep themselves out. There is a social stigma in the United States against going into technical fields in the first place amongst women.
India, for example, has no stigma of women working in tech. It is no coincidence that the vast majority of woman I have worked with have all been from other countries. They earn good salaries and are strong contributors on the teams I've been on.
There were exactly 2 females in my Computer Science program in college. Eventually there was just one who graduated with us.
No amount of blog posts or news articles about diversity at companies will fix that. The problem is WAY earlier than that. You aren't going to be able to magically find a plethora of adult female engineers if they simply aren't enrolling in the programs in the first place.
I wrote that there is a social stigma against women, in the United States, against going into technical fields. If you want to view that as "society keeping them out", then fine.
But women aren't being kept out in any overt way. Women would have been accepted just as anyone else in my Computer Science university program. These would be women who hadn't even gotten started on the career paths.
If they are being kept-out, then why are the foreign women that I work with, who don't share the same sense of social stigma, able to have such productive careers? Are they immune from the bad treatment?
There is a similar social stigma against men being nurses, but I wouldn't claim that men are being "kept out of nursing." It is just looked at slightly oddly by some and this leads to less male nurses. Why is there not more noise about this imbalance?
The whole problem is that all of the discussion around the issue of women in tech seems to focus on the problem way too late in the "pipeline". It is trying to address the symptoms after the damage is already done.
Trying to focus on hiring more women, as a goal unto itself, seems wrong to me. The problem isn't hiring more women. That leads to people hiring under-qualified women simply because they are women. The problem is that the supply is crazy low because <20% of Computer Science graduates are women in the United States.
So, if you want to fix this imbalance then fix the stigma. Perhaps have a marketing campaign that makes it seem less socially damning to be a girl hacker while they are an adolescent.
Teaching and nursing are already low paying, or unionized, and so there is no significant benefit to increasing the labour supply. At least not commensurable with the cost of pushing that message.
You are making the claim of whether the physical and psychological differences should have much of an effect, so the burden of proof is on you.
And as much as you may personally love the tech industry, it’s perfectly reasonable that some women don’t.
Arguably it’s a smarter choice to go into dentistry than tech.
I think this is because when social freedom is maximized, biological differences are more able to fully express themselves. Conversely, in countries that are less free, men and women may be compelled to take on jobs they don't really want in order to survive.
Men and women have obvious biological differences that have evolved over millions of years.
Women as mothers have evolved compassion and emotional bonding to maximize the survival of their infants, which explains the stereotypical nursing, administrative, and care taking roles.
Men have evolved as hunters and warriors, where emotion is secondary to rationality, and at worse a hindrance in the brutality of war.
Since technical roles are largely divorced from emotion, masculine rather than feminine traits are better suited at a biological and psychological level.
I think we should absolutely strive for gender equality in a legal and social sense, but then we shouldn't be surprised if women aren't rabid about sitting at computers all day.
It's not even internally consistent. Why is programming more like "hunting" than "gathering?" Hunting is all about intense bouts of focus for short durations. Good programmers, in contrast, need to be able to focus on details for sustained periods of time. And isn't a big part of programming focused on communicating and working in groups, something women are supposedly better suited to doing?
IQ distributions don't explain that at all. It is vastly more complicated than that.
IQ correlates almost perfectly (~ r = .95) with income at an ecological/epidemiological level (again, not at an individual level). The average IQ among the homeless is around 80. It may not be the only factor, but it's part of the story.
I am something of a subject matter expert in homelessness and I just wrote this a few minutes ago:
http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/07/ge...
Putting it here for the benefit of other people. I don't expect anything I say to sway you.
And no, anecdotes, cherry picking, conspiracy theories, and ad hominem attacks don't sway me.
The original test that some Frenchman was asked to create was not intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness of children of indeterminate age. In the era in question, city kids in France tended to have birth certificates and to also have plenty of familiarity with things involved in school readiness. Their ages could have been used to determine school readiness.
The problem was the rural children of that era often lacked birth certificates and also lacked experience with things like pre-school. They had more trouble fitting in at school already due to coming from a different background than the city kids.
This test then became the inspiration for IQ tests.
Feynman supposedly did not have a very high IQ. Some IQ test he took placed his IQ around 129, iirc. Yet he was widely regarded as a genius.
When I was actively involved in an organization that concerned itself with gifted education, I very often said that "tests are merely a tool." I have heard too many stories of young gifted kids who could not answer a question on a test because it was a multiple answer question and their rich understanding of the world meant that none of the answers fit.
A good example is "Who discovered America?" An average kid may know to correctly spit back the answer "Columbus" because we memorize that in school. A bright kid may answer such a question with something like "Well, it wasn't called America until x date after Amerigo Vespucci came here and before Columbus, the Vikings had settlements here and Columbus thought he discovered India, not a new continent...(blather on some more)...um, what was the question?"
Bright kids can be very hard to properly test. IQ tests are useful tools for trained professionals, but often don't stand well on their own. Furthermore, the last I was keeping up with such info, they were having trouble finding a new test with a high ceiling. The one test previously known to have a high ceiling was getting rather out of date and nothing new was being developed. It was a very serious problem and some professionals were resorting to using the out of date test as the least worst option available.
Most tests ceiling out around 130 or 145. So if you score anywhere near that, you can generally assume that is a minimum IQ. It is quite hard to find accurate tests for IQs above that IQ range and that only goes out 2 or 3 standard deviations above the norm.
I am homeless. I was one of the top 3 students of my graduating high school class and I have had a class on homeless and public policy from SFSU. My IQ is absolutely not 80.
In 5.5 years on the street, I have run into a lot of homeless people. They often do have mental health issues, but they aren't typically mentally retarded, which is your assertion. Homelessness tends to grow out of serious personal problems, such as mental health issues, medical issues and other special needs.
In my 5.5 years as a homeless person, I do very often run into people who are mentally retarded. They are typically in a group that shows up at whatever library or public park I am frequenting and they apparently come from some kind of group home.
There may be mentally retarded people on the street. But I have zero reason to believe that it is the norm or that it explains homelessness.
Can you call it "freely choosing" when they're treated badly when pursuing male-dominated fields and treated well when pursuing female-dominated fields?
People don't like swimming upstream, for the most part. What they would choose "freely" and what they choose in the real world are often very different.
B. They enter even uni or high school CS and physics courses at a fast lesser rate. Is that because of interest or because they make assumptions about being discriminated against 10 years down the line?
Sorry, not persuaded.
The source concludes:
> The relatively small numbers of women in math-intensive careers result from many factors, one of which seems primary and should be accorded the greatest weight. Sex differences in mathematical and spatial ability, although substantial, appear unable to explain most of the shortage. Nor can the shortage be attributed to current discrimination, although historic discrepancies may be explained in such terms. The primary factor in women's underrepresentation is choices both freely made and constrained by biology and society. Women choose at a young age not to pursue math-intensive careers; few adolescent girls express desires to be engineers or physicists, preferring instead to be medical doctors, veterinarians, biologists, psychologists, and lawyers. Females make this choice despite earning higher math and science grades than males throughout schooling. Although women earn a large portion of baccalaureate degrees in all fields of science, including mathematics, disproportionately fewer enter graduate school in these fields, preferring biology, social sciences, law, medicine, and the humanities—even when they possess math ability comparable to males. Of those who enter graduate school in math-intensive fields, more women than men drop out or change fields, and of those who complete doctorates, fewer women apply for tenure-track positions. (...)
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997703/#!po=37...
First, I am not saying men cannot have feminine traits and women cannot have masculine traits on the individual level. Of course there will be exceptions, and those individuals deserve respect. But on average, I think biology is the dominating factor determining those traits due to mammalian evolution.
To address your points, I see accounting as administrative, akin to housekeeping, a supportive role of keeping the house in order.
Programming is more about problem solving, entering unknown territories, and has more risk involved.
And it doesn't sound like you've ever been hunting. It's a slog, where you're out in the woods for hours or days at a time, constantly paying attention to minute details to track animals. Finally there's an aha moment where you go in for the kill. Seems similar to programming to me.
Running up to the 80s, computers were a huge fad with promises of making big money. As such many were attracted, until some people realized it wasn't satisfying for them. My mother got a CS degree and quit IBM after realizing she hated being inside all day writing networking code. She's an extremely intelligent woman and I'm proud of that, but also grateful that she stayed home to raise me and my siblings.
And I never made any claims about women being better at communicating or working in groups. My claim is jobs that have similarities to mothering are more likely to attract women.
I'm not dismissing biological differences between men and women. I'm wondering how you're getting from "there are biological differences between men and women" to "biological differences explain explain why fewer women pursue engineering." There's a smoking crater where your causation argument should be.
> To address your points, I see accounting as administrative, akin to housekeeping, a supportive role of keeping the house in order. Programming is more about problem solving, entering unknown territories, and has more risk involved.
This is a superficial characterization (and also demonstrates an ignorance of what accountants do). In reality, the two jobs use basically the same skills: attention to detail, mathematical reasoning, and creativity within the very narrow frameworks of rules. Consider something like debugging code versus following money through a series of transactions. It's basically the same thing: keeping track of a lot of state in your head while going through various steps, each of which changes the set based on well-defined rules.
Anyway, I agree there's overlap in what accountants and programmers do like you described in your debugging example.
However, the main differentiating factors I pointed out were (1) more unknown territory (e.g. building things that don't exist yet) and (2) more risk involved in attempting the types of challenges programmers face (e.g. 50% of software projects fail). In contrast, accounting is a highly regulated field, more deterministic, and provides more job security. I'd say that puts it more in the middle of the spectrum between stereotypically female careers like nursing and stereotypically male careers like engineering.
[Citation needed].
> However, the main differentiating factors I pointed out were (1) more unknown territory (e.g. building things that don't exist yet) and (2) more risk involved in attempting the types of challenges programmers face (e.g. 50% of software projects fail). In contrast, accounting is a highly regulated field, more deterministic, and provides more job security. I'd say that puts it more in the middle of the spectrum between stereotypically female careers like nursing and stereotypically male careers like engineering.
This is again just handwaving. Most engineering, even computer science, is just keeping things running or making incremental improvements. I was an aerospace major, where the vast majority of jobs are in making 1-2% per decade incremental improvements in fuel efficiency. Very stable, great job security, not a lot of women! Likewise, most programming is CRUD apps or boring websites. (Sure you can point to SpaceX, but you can also point to accountants who work on teams that make billion dollar deals happen, or do forensic analysis of billion dollar disasters; both represent a tiny minority of their respective professions).
> The relatively small numbers of women in math-intensive careers result from many factors, one of which seems primary and should be accorded the greatest weight. Sex differences in mathematical and spatial ability, although substantial, appear unable to explain most of the shortage. Nor can the shortage be attributed to current discrimination, although historic discrepancies may be explained in such terms. The primary factor in women's underrepresentation is choices both freely made and constrained by biology and society.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997703/#!po=37...
The question is too narrow. Since the number of men and the number of women is about the same, an imbalance of them in any particular field implies that there must be an imbalance the other way somewhere else. Almost all inquiries into the male/female ratio on tech just look at tech. They need to look at where the women DO go, not just where they do not go.
One possibility from the items on the list of psychological differences given was empathy. That list said women tend to have more empathy than men. I'd expect that to, at least to some extent, make fields that require high empathy to have more women than men. In addition, higher empathy may make women more likely to choose fields in which they can help people, even if the job itself doesn't have any particular empathy requirement.
Another possibility is that girls mature faster than boys, both cognitively and emotionally. The brain undergoes some major reorganization between childhood and adulthood, and that starts in girls up to several years before it starts in boys. The slower emotional maturing in boys may mean that boys spend more time in that wonderful stage where your brain is developed enough to start really getting STEM subjects, but is still largely a child's brain that is still focused on what is fun now and doesn't care about preparing to be an adult. It's that stage that produces your classic STEM nerd.
The lack of any citation for the highlighted portion of that sentence speaks volumes. I'm trying to be charitable, but I find it pretty rich that you invoke the need for "logical argument" while your argument basically boils down to:
1) Biological differences 2) ??? 3) Profit ... err ... women self-select out of tech
Hacker News, your flagging algorithm is part of the problem.
For example Susan Fowler's "Five Things Tech Companies Can Do Better": https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/5/20/five-things-tech...