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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

I think the general perception is that women often get turned off not by the work, but by the male-dominated environments. This can be due to subtle issues and sometimes due to non-subtle issues. You want to go out of your way to make it a friendly environment in those cases. Basically, do you want women to have the same shitty experience when they were breaking through various male-dominated fields in the past (e.g. medicine, law, business, etc) or do you want to be a welcoming host? It seems like as a profession we're still in the shitty part of the spectrum based on the horror stories I hear from my female friends in tech.

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The issue is the same in reverse. I've heard horrible anecdotes by male friends in female dominated industries such as teaching, nursing, etc. Why is the same societal push not happening in those industries? I never said we shouldn't strive to be welcoming and to cultivate a friendly environment for all, just that the intentional push for more of any specific demographic seems strange to me. Shitty people are going to exist everywhere regardless. A twitter campaign shouting about the injustices of the industry and pushing for more women in technology isn't going to change that. The people that need to hear the message being conveyed there aren't going to listen, and the people who are listening don't need to hear the message because they likely aren't already shitty people.

While there may not be similar pushes in other industries, there is no reason to dismiss the efforts to encourage participation in software based on a lack of effort in other fields.

Implicit and explicit biases exist everywhere. My wife is in teaching, and would love to move into administration some day. The problem with that? Despite women being the dominant sex in the actual teaching position, men continue to fill administrative (i.e. principals, deans, etc.) roles at far higher rates than women. Why are men filling leadership positions more than women, when they have less experience and participation in the field overall?

I guess my rant/point is, each field will have their own unique battles with inequality and/or lack of participation from various demographics. We can't compare apples to oranges.

My point is that societally we should allow anyone to enter any field they desire with minimal barriers halting their progress so long as they are able to do the work - but we shouldn't try to force it just because we feel like there should be more women or more of whomever. Just because there is a disparity in the demographic make-up of a field doesn't automatically mean that's it's root cause is some negative bias or discrimination. Maybe more men fill administrative roles because more men pursue educations in business administration and leadership whereas a teacher can be an excellent educator, but a not so excellent administrator if they have no relevant experience. Does your wife have any experience in administration or any credentials that would show her to be qualified for the job? If not, maybe that's her issue - not sexism. That's like asking why do great software engineers sometimes never rise to staff/management positions - because they're good at writing software, not managing people and organizations. Is this bad? Why? Because administrative roles are generally better paid and more prestigious and more women should have that opportunity? Why not encourage more women to get into masonry or welding? Where's that movement? Has it maybe not happened because those aren't well-paying, desirable jobs for most people? Do more men occupy those industries because of the nature of the work or because of some insidious rampant sexism? I'd be inclined to say the former. If this were actually about equality, it would be happening all across the labor market and not just in a certain subset of high-paying fields.

Some of these disparities can be traced back to social conditioning and discrimination, but its also in large part just due to inherit differences in the interest and abilities between genders. It's been proven time and time again that the genders are often fundamentally different in terms of abilities and innate interest. Neither gender is better than the other, but we are different and denying that does more harm than good.

(Rereading, I'm not actually sure we disagree, but the tone of the parent post seems to be that I can't change things because people won't change, ...?)

I'm in tech, I work on fixing tech.

> the intentional push for more of any specific demographic seems strange to me I believe the skewed demographics is a reflection of actions and pressures I don't agree with. I think there is pretty-open discrimination and steering of qualified candidates away from the field. (Read the news, sadly.) I'm morally against that. The demographics are an imperfect measure of our progress, but in my opinion it's a useful indicator.

> Shitty people are going to exist everywhere regardless Yeah, and in my workplace I'm against shitty behavior.

Without speaking to whether this is true or not, the parent's argument seems to me to be a kind of "whataboutism".

I don't choose to spend my time working to improve the work environment in other fields, not because I don't care but because I can't do everything.

I'm unsure what you're trying to express in this reply. It seems we do agree in general viewpoint, just perhaps we have different ways of expressing that view. Discrimination definitely happens, but I have yet to see one example of "pretty open discrimination" that hasn't resulted in an all out PR disaster for the org involved ,your "Read the news" statement supports that. If discrimination were a common occurrence it wouldn't be news worthy. If anything it seems that discrimination is beginning to become more frequent in the other direction, where certain demographics who are less qualified are hired over other, more competent, candidates simply for the sake of "diversity". Not to say that's very common either, both are IME exceedingly rare. Glad that you're against shitty behavior, I am as well. Most people are. That doesn't have much to do with my comment though.

My close friend interned at a small embedded devices company and was the only woman besides a part time HR employee. People made comments about the HR employee when she wasn't around.

Is this "pretty open discrimination"? It certainly doesn't make the cut for news. But yes it's very uncomfortable to be the only woman in that situation, people wok look at you for approval for their comments.

People talk about other people all the time - regardless of gender. I would guarantee they talked about male employees as well but your friend likely didn't mentally catalogue those discussions because they weren't relevant to her. Confirmation bias is very real. Maybe this one specific anecdote you're providing really was an example of rampant discrimination - I don't know - either way it certainly isn't indicative of the entirety of the industry. I could share many anecdotes of my own that I could interpret as people discriminating against me specifically - but I doubt that's the case. Instead it's people just being people. This is another issue, I think that these movement often make women and minorities attribute "normal" negative behavior to be explicitly driven by discrimination or x-ism rather than it just being par for the course.

No, discrimination and x-ism is not neccesary to make an environment that women don't want to work at, only sufficient.

People being regular-shitty, combined with context, like making comments about the appearance and intelligence of the only other woman in the office, can create an inhospitable environment that forces women out. Companies that wish to hire and retain women should proactively create a hospitable environment or situations like above will occur.

The bigger thing is that it seems like you don't see return on investment into creating these better environments. Do you feel that diversity initiatives are wholly unnecessary or just poorly designed/targeted?

As I've said multiple times in this comment section - I'm all for creating an accepting and inclusive environment. Diversity initiatives aren't that. I think that explicit diversity initiatives are indicative of a bad work center that can't attract or keep their desired talent without explicitly targeting specific groups. I don't think that these diversity initiatives do anything to really affect change in an organizations culture and are PR stunts to make people feel good. At worst, they're harmful to everyone - including minorities. At best, they're a waste of time and resources. If your organization has actively promoted a toxic culture from it's inception and just now wishes to change things then it has a lot more work to do than a "diversity initiative".

Regardless, my original stance was more aimed at the societal push of "get x demographic into tech". I'm not going to retype my thoughts on that - go read the other comments of mine in this comments section to get a clearer picture.

The “news” can be considered an iceberg situation. What you see regarding discrimination are just the salacious ones that capture headlines. There’s so much day-to-day discrimination and sexism that doesn’t hit the papers. Consider that it took almost a decade if not more before we started hearing problems with Google execs which is one of the most likely companies where such problems are to grab headlines (executives being invoked being the salacious bit to grab headlines).

Are you sure the current campaigns aren't effective? The demographics are indeed changing. I know causation correlation blah blah, but we're just speculating in this thread, supplying no data anyway.

I'm sure they're effective to some degree in terms of recruitment numbers. What I was alluding to in that comment was that the current campaigns likely won't dramatically reduce the number of "horror stories" we hear - which is the crux of the entire issue. The people that are the antagonist in those horror stories tend not to change their way's based on social media movements. Whereas, the people who are interacting with and encouraging those movements would likely never find themselves in the antagonist shoes anyway. It's a very small subset of the population that would actually see those movements and decide to change as a result, and that's better than none, but it's certainly not what I think most people supporting those movements wish to see as a result.

Edit: grammar

> The demographics are indeed changing.

The gender ratio isn't changing though. If anything it is becoming worse, it was decades ago that less women went into software engineering today.

The only thin that changed is that now every company tries to put their women software engineers front and center, in their marketing material, to go speak at conferences etc. So it looks like there are more women, but there aren't. Tech companies also tries to improve these statistics by bundling non programmers into this category, like product and project managers.

This page suggests otherwise (although the effect is slight): https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/ Do you have other data?

That page suggests the number of women got lower, yes. The data points with 5 year gaps:

> 2008 Male: 72.33% Female: 27.67%

> 2013 Male: 73.44% Female: 26.56%

> 2018 Male: 73.82%. Female: 26.18%

The year by year numbers are too noisy to really mean much. 2018 being 0.3% percentage points higher than 2016 doesn't say much.

Anyway, the main point is that the gender ratio isn't really improving. At best you can say that it has stagnated, rather than getting worse as it did a decade ago.

The gender ratio is changing for the worse. In 1984, women made up something like 37% of CS students. Now it's under 20%.

Reference: https://jaxenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/women-in-com...

Interesting. Thanks for the data. I wonder how that effects jobs.

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