Sounds like affirmative action is drastically needed. Hire some men to increase diversity in the workforce. It's especially important to ensure men are equally represented in the more senior roles at level 2 and above...right?
Yet Google news finds more than 600 articles with titles such as:
- Male teacher drought may hurt boys
- How do we recruit boys into female-dominated professions?
- Our schools are failing boys, which is bad news for Britain
- Most schools would love to have more male teachers to serve as role models for boys, but not many volunteer. (first line of article, not headline)
etc...
https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&biw=1324&bih=1190&tbm=n...
The higher salaries for the male teachers this very article is about may actually be a sign for Google's attempts to improve the gender ratio.
I have no knowledge of how these salaries are set. It's possible they're decided individually, because these jobs are rather different than most others at Google.
In that case, I could imagine the people in charge of the daycare facilities trying to attract more men and (possibly without much active thought) making higher offers to them.
Those two phrasings call for completely different action.
Now we're moving the goalpost.
But anyway, I doubt your impression.
["women in it" discrimination] get 1.2 million hits on google, while ["women in it" culture] gets 37.5 million hits.
Note that "changing culture" means nothing else but "making the job more attractive for women", or "women don't want to work in IT".
Here's the first headline I get on Google News for ["women in IT"]: "Why We Should Encourage More Women to Work in IT"
That's awfully close to the "How do we recruit boys[..]" I cited above.
It's simply not worth the harassment and suffering to attempt to be involved in child education if you're a male.
Agreed. I am male as well and while my school did not have many male teachers, I definitely benefited from the few male teachers that did exist.
> We should probably pay teachers more to encourage more high performers of both genders. I suspect paying better would attract more men as well.
At the (public) schools I went to, teacher pay was solely determined by credentials and seniority. Anecdotally, men seem to be more attracted to positions where compensation is determined through performance and risk. If that's true, perhaps changing teacher pay to be more reflective of performance would increase the number of men.
1.) Did it because they found the work extremely meaningful 2.) Were already used to living in poverty and accepted that it would continue as a professional. 3.) Knew that any future family/kids would be dependent on having a spouse that earned more than them.
I've talked to some men who considered that path, but a few told me they wouldn't pursue it because they'll need to be the breadwinner if they want a family some day, and they can't do that comfortably (without a second job) on a teacher's paycheck.
Sorta makes sense though, the men who are most talented and interested in working with children are also most likely to want children of their own. And unfortunately societal pressures do still tell men that they are responsible for providing economically, and that doing so is critical to being attractive as a partner. Hopefully that will change going forward. I know far more partnerships where a woman makes more money among my peer group than my parents know among theirs.
Speaking seriously, if you want to normalise women in roles where they aren't you need to normalise men in roles were they aren't either.
If more men go in to teaching, there are more roles for women to take up, or speaking in the inverse - if you exclude men from roles (such as teaching) they need to find jobs elsewhere, and thats usually in positions where men are the majority.
To be fair, they are at almost exactly the national pre-K average there.
> Speaking seriously, if you want to normalise women in roles where they aren't you need to normalise men in roles were they aren't either.
OTOH, given finite demand in each field, getting more women into high-paying professions that currently are disproportionately male should naturally result in more men in low-paying professions that are currently disproportionately female as a natural consequence.
And Google's representation of women in software engineering roles is also around the industry average.
To your second point, it's not either or. You can both better incentivize women in tech and men in teaching.
Sure. And both scenarios need industry-wide efforts to increase gender equality. But Google is basically an irrelevant factor in the pre-K teaching industry, and a giant one in the software industry.
> To your second point, it's not either or.
Societally, sure. In the case of particular firms, their ability to impact different fields with the same expenditure of resources is highly dependent on their position in the various fields.
Is it the case in Silicon Valley that many of the executives are women?
If the teacher is a woman, ah shucks how cute.
If the teacher is a man, he's a perv.
No sane male would take a teaching job in today's climate.
A pipeline problem caused by unfair assumptions about someone's suitability for a career based on their sex.
Weird, that feels so familiar...
The pipeline issue is caused, in every industry and not just tech, by either a mismatch of people's preferences and the working conditions of a job, or by the way the working conditions of a job are structured. As an example of a change over time that flips gender indifferences, men dominated Veterinarian roles while it was about livestock and birthing cows, but women now dominate (80%+) when it has become much more about cute little suburban pugs and kittens.
Damore's memo - which I'm gonna assume everyone knows - made the generally accepted statement that women prefer people over things AND he offered a (rarely discussed) solution: a larger emphasis on peer programming.
I think that sounds, in theory, like a very reasonable approach to the pipleline problem. If the standard mental model for programming changed from the Richard Hendrix sitting all alone in a dark, locked room belting out the code for Pied Piper "middle out" encryption in techo blaring headphones, to peer coding with human interaction at its core, that would be far more attractive to those with a people vs things preference.
The fact that technical classes in programming are typically electives in high school, and not just mandatory science classes is a big part of it. Guys are more likely to self-select into those classes and take those classes with other guys (in part because video games are a great pathway to programming), and guidance counselors and parents are more likely to steer them towards it over girls as well. This ends up making it so that by the time college starts, many of the guys in intro programming classes have experience and set an unrealistic bar for total noobs who don't. Add in the fact that it's easy for a woman to feel singled out in a class like that, and it's no wonder they don't pick it up in college either. I was one of two women in a class of 50ish for CS 101, and even though I had prior experience, I felt pressured to over-assert myself so that guys would stop coming over every opportunity to offer "help". They weren't being jerks, but they were typical 18 year old dudes who wanted to show off and get my attention, and I just wasn't there for that. I'm not exaggerating though when I say it was typical for the other girl (who was a noob) to have 4-5 guys around her for any assignment seeing how they could "help" while noob guys were pretty much ignored. Harvey Mudd has an excellent program that addresses this directly, I definitely recommed reading up on it: http://beta.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-harvey-mudd-tec...
The single biggest factor that was common among women I know who switched into CS later (but did not initially consider it a major) was that their parents and school never exposed them to it as a career. Both are very rational and logical people, one was doing bio, and another was doing chemical engineering. Neither of them had ever taken a class about comp sci, or even really talked to a programmer before college. One never even had a game console because ultra-religious parents disapproved (though they gave her brother one). When I talked to them more about what I did day-to-day with programming, and how it was very creative and fulfilling for me (plus $$), they gave it a try and ended up switching majors and becoming software engineers. Obviously there are women I talked to who didn't switch, but those two are exactly the kind of people who might have missed out on a great tech career due only to gender socialization differences which seem mild at first glance. I strongly believe mandatory CS classes at the high school level would do a huge part in making sure minds like theirs have the chance to get on board sooner.