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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy how people are in denial of the reality for women breaking into male dominated fields. The "lived-experience" gap is real. In college in CS there was maybe 1-2 other women in my classes, in Maths there were none. Working in ops I have been the only woman on my team at every job I've ever had. Tooting my own horn a little I've been consistently a top if not the top performer and have the recs to show it. And yet every time I go for a job I'm fighting for them to "take a chance on me." It's so god damn frustrating how surprised they are that I'm a professional. I have to bust my ass to get back to my senior title that some guy just gets hired on with.

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You're mistaking prevalence for bias.

There's always going to be more men interested in this field than women, which means you'll see more men in class and more men in industry (read Damore's essay for why).

However, that doesn't mean that at an individual level there is bias against women. In practice, in most tech companies, there is significant bias towards hiring and promoting women.

As difficult as it may have been to achieve the career outcomes you desire, it is significantly more difficult for a individual man with the same skillset to achieve the same outcomes without that preferential treatment.

I think you don't realise this because men are more prevalent. The majority of promotions may go to men, but that's simply because there are more men in this field, not because at an individual level they are each receiving preferential treatment over you.

> As difficult as it may have been to achieve the career outcomes you desire, it is significantly more difficult for a individual man with the same skillset to achieve the same outcomes without that preferential treatment.

As a man in this field, I can pretty concretely say I have never experienced the problems getting hired or getting promoted she just described.

That’s a great anecdote for you, however it doesn’t change the fact that for an average 20 year old, it will be substantially easier in this industry to be hired and promoted as a woman than as a man.

The only reason people think differently is because they see more men than women, and mistake that prevalence for bias.

> for an average 20 year old, it will be substantially easier in this industry to be hired and promoted as a woman than as a man.

You keep making claims like this, but never with data. Got any? Because I only ever see this backed by anecdotes.

Tech companies keep trialing blind hiring, then abandoning it, because it results in fewer women being hired rather than more.

Women-only recruiting events exist.

Companies incentivise managers to hire and promote women over men. I’ve seen companies use KPIs/quotas, and companies where you are allowed more headcount if you hire majority women.

So, unsupported assertions and anecdotes it is then.

I've been told directly by HR that "your next hire better be a woman", and not in a joking way.

So, anecdatum, yes, but until studies come out like the one posted then nobody is allowed to even express these anecdotes.

BTW that experience was not a fun one as it really harmed my self-image, I really felt like I was less valuable as a person and made me quite bitter for a while, I will admit that right-wing rhetoric became very comforting, luckily I was not seduced but I can understand how people could be.

That sucks, it shouldn't have happened. Assuming it happened as presented rather than being a critical look at your hiring practices it's pretty clearly discriminatory.

> nobody is allowed to even express these anecdotes

I mean, you just did and don't appear to be that concerned about someone linking it back to you.

I find the whole "we aren't allowed to talk about this" thing a bit of an ironic response here, because if you take a look at this thread it started with a woman sharing her experiences from her career, with them being brushed off as anecdotal, and obviously, she's privileged, and it's men who are disadvantaged now.

It looks to me like she got the exact same pushback the male anecdote did. Is she also "not allowed to express her anecdotes"?

I don't care because I am very intentional about the fact that I present myself as transparently as possible, it is certainly not comfortable to do so, and there is a very large part of my mind that is set on the notion that someone will put me on a list of nazi's or try to get me fired or something because I dissented against the mainstream ideology.

Please don't mistake the courage to speak up as being easy, because it's really not, it's deeply uncomfortable and a quite scary.

It's fair to liken my experiences to others, I don't think that anyone shouldn't be permitted to share anecdotes. However the major differing factor here is that there are intentional support networks along with a social understanding that we should be sympathetic to the anecdotes of women. Unintentionally that forces out the anecdotes of men. Perhaps because unscrupulous men use them as bad faith attacks to drown out conversations that women needed to have in the past- however given than there were 8 workshops explicitly for women in gaming last year in my building and 2 for any other kind of gaming (meaning women were permitted to attend 100% of the workshops and I was permitted to attend 20%), they definitely have a space to express their anecdotes.

If anyone is drowning them out, it's a fringe minority.

You claim that, but I've seen research that shows that even when a company actively tries to hire more women, they still subconsciously give men preferential treatment, simply because they look the part.

Blind hiring studies tend to disprove that, at least in the tech industry.

When you remove all indicators of gender companies hire fewer women, which means knowing that a candidate is a woman results in higher likelihood to hire than not knowing gender.

If this is the case why aren’t we seeing large influxes of women into software? If it’s substantially easier I’d expect us to see people taking advantage of that.

it is not the case :) you are trying to apply common sense with people commenting on this thread that have none

Common sense can be wrong. I doubt that most people pick their college major based on what will be the easiest, and those that are inclined to pick the easy route probably aren't going to pick computer science, which is extremely competitive these days.

I also doubt that any female computer science mentors are going to tell everyone that it's an easy job where being female gives you significant tailwinds, whether or not that's true.

Fact is, it's highly competitive. 18% of CS graduates are female. Even assuming that they are twice as likely to be promoted as their male counterparts, if only 10 of every 100 engineers are promoted each year, that means 4 promoted female engineers against 14 non-promotions. So much more likely that a prospective mentor will tell you that it's a hard job than tell you about their easy promotion, even assuming a strong tailwind.

Software engineering does not help Instagram posts, but does help hacking video games, for example.

Really? When I was in university in the 1990s, Math had more women than men.

Women were rarer in CS, but still more common than female software developers I've encountered in my working life. All of the ones I've worked with were excellent.

That's crazy about math I can't even picture it. Wild how it's swung completely the other direction in -25 years which is what, two generations? I would love to know the history of how maths even growing became such a strongly "boy" subject.

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