Comment by randunel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randunel | Hacker News Reader

I don't get one thing. If only 18% of the tech graduates are women, why do people (see wsj articles and random blogs) complain about companies "gender imbalance"[1] (not hiring 50% women and 50% men)? Wouldn't that be positive discrimination? As this article states, 18.2% of the graduates are women, but only 15% of the employees share the same gender, so the gap is 3.2%. Personally, I don't consider that 3.2% as being hugely discriminatory, but rather expected, see below.

The problem starts even before formal education. In the country I was raised in, young women get an education which can be summarized by "get a husband to take care of you, cook and have his children". As long as parents have this mentality, their girls get no incentive to continue with college or anything technical, because this path is unknowingly inhibited since childhood. Most developed countries rely heavily on imported workforce, so a lot of Yahoo's and Google's employees come from countries where the percentage of women graduating in tech is far less than the 18.2% of women graduating in the US.

Not necessarily. I'm not presenting this as fact, but merely as a a possible situation and counterexample to what you describe:

Your reasoning would hold if you could assume identical skill distributions between men and women graduates. However, it seems somewhere between possible and likely that women graduates are of higher average skill than the men graduating. With so many barriers and cultural impedances for a woman pursuing tech, it takes at least the same skill (to pass the classes) as their male classmates, plus enough extra competency to ward off the detractors and skeptics that men don't have to deal with.

Again, I'm not saying this is reality, I certainly don't have the statistics to back it up. But it fits my experiences pretty well, and I think your analysis probably is too simplistic to be useful.

And, in regards to your second point, about starting much earlier: I absolutely agree. The more the culture changes, the less this will be an issue.

As a possible countereffect -- not one I necessarily believe to be stronger, but one to consider -- is that women might be weaker due to the culture they're coming from. Plenty of males have been encouraged to play with computers from the age of 8 or 10, and so will have large amounts of [at least some kind of] experience coming in to the workforce. Women are far less likely to have had this experience. Additionally, males (who will have more male friends) will quite possibly have plenty of coder friends whom they have learned from. Females statistically will have less, and have less exposure this way.

i.e. the culture not only makes it harder for women to get through learning compsci, but they'll also have less exposure to it in the process. This could potentially make them weaker candidates.

I don't know to what degree that actually happens.

If women are discouraged from pursuing STEM, then the women who do graduate are expected to be a higher caliber of persistence, and perhaps other measures of ability, than the average male graduate. If the bottom half of women are culled before graduation, whike men are not so culled, then the women who do graduate would be comparable to top half of male graduates.

That's a good point. Criticizing top tech companies is more marketable as journalism than doing deeper cultural analysis -- so you aren't going to see the women doing the deeper cultural analysis as often (though I would argue that this article does just that). You should read up on what feminists are writing lately.

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