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Comment by notreallyserio | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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