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Comment by leoedin | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't really with panels. In mechanical engineering, only 10-15% of students are female. Assuming an equal distribution of students go on to become notable enough for panels, a panel with any more than 15% of members being female would be unrepresentative. My understanding is that 20 years ago that proportion was even lower. If a representative panel is made up of notable people who graduated 20 years ago, even fewer of them will be women.

I don't know what the statistics for computer science or programming are, but I'd imagine that they're not vastly different.

I think limited female representation is a big issue in a lot of fields (including technology), but in technology the real issue is that women aren't coming in at the bottom.

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I think it's probably okay to go over on the percentages for awhile to try to correct this.

You can't get women in at the bottom if their perception is this is for men only. That said, I think more in the top of the funnel is probably the most important step.

Why do you think that? The panels are going to suffer because they aren't accessing the best talent pool, and therefore everyone is going to be worse off.

If temporarily increasing the concentration of women panelists contributes towards permanently reducing discrimination, then it's a net gain for humanity, even if it's a net loss for panels in the short term.

And what makes you think that will be the case? Just because you have good intentions doesn't mean that your ideas will achieve those intentions.

I figured we were taking it as a given, since no one refuted it when it was implied in gte910h's post. I'll try to support the idea anyway.

There was a study performed on young students, concerning their perception of STEM fields. Most respondents indicated that "techie" people are all white males in lab coats, and that the respondent wouldn't fit in well with that group. (Sorry, I don't have a link to the study. But I know I saw it in the last 8-12 months)

If more women are publicly visible in tech fields, then young people's perception of techie people will swing away from "homogenous white male group" towards a heterogeneous group that is necessarily less discriminatory. This should cause a corresponding increase in enrollment by non-white non-males who would otherwise have been dissuaded from joining.

Not only that, but in the long run 50 males + 50 females will have a larger amount of talent than 50 males + 1 female. That's a direct plus for the communities.

If everyone waits for the rest of society to change, it never will. Note that I'm not saying any one proposed solution is the right one, but it is an important discussion.

To that same point, 50 males + 1 female with have a larger amount of talent than 45 males and 1 female. That's a direct negative for the community.

Just because you have good intentions does not mean that any random idea you put forth will achieve those good intentions.

That's exactly my point. A larger pool means more talent. So what's speaking against working towards women having an easier time becoming part of the community and exercising their talent?

Let's say for just a second that you've got a 4-person panel, and you've picked the 4 best panelists regardless of gender. They all end up being male (just by coincidence).

If you want to make the panel more inclusive, you don't yank someone out - you make the panel bigger. Add more diversity and the session can get better. (Granted, this only works up to a certain number of panelists - I've been on a 20-person panel, which was a joke.)

What makes you think that talented women have different viewpoints on technology than talented men? Do talented female chemists have different viewpoints on chemistry than talented male chemists?

Because technology isn't just about the software and hardware. Solutions involve three things: people, process, and technology. People from different genders, nationalities, cultures, backgrounds, you name it - they all have different inputs on the people angle of it, and that's why diversity helps panel discussions.

The whole point of panel discussions is to get multiple viewpoints on issues of opinion. If you want purely subjective technical answers, that's what single-presenter-sessions are for. Panels are for the merger of people, process, and technology, and for that, diversity rocks.

Yes. They have different life experiences, different use cases, even different cosmetic issues (for some women/most men). Technology is about helping us to live. I also think racial and national origin diversity is useful for the same reasons

Every single person has different life experiences, use cases, and cosmetic issues.

From my small amount of experience, I saw even less percentage of females in computer science. By the time I got to the upper level courses in Comp Sci at UMD, I usually had 1 female classmate. Sometimes 2, sometimes none. In my 3 years of working since graduation, I can count the number of female developers I've worked with on one hand. If I restrict the sample to American-born women, that number goes to 0. I'd be interested to see some breakdowns of technology gender ratios in various countries. If some of them have a better ratio, maybe we can start to understand why.

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