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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

It's worth remembering that the number of women in the tech industry tracks pretty well with the number of women in the tech industry training pipeline.

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There are a lot of men in the industry who come from an alternative training pipeline. Brash men without CS degrees (like me) have no problem applying to listings having "CS or equivalent" as a requirement.

And yet the net percentage of women tracks pretty well with that in the training pipeline. So perhaps that doesn't skew things as much as you might think.

I don't understand your (repeated) point. Are you defending the status quo? Are you claiming that nothing done in industry matters?

I'm saying that the gender gap manifests well before issues in industry can reasonably be expected to take their toll.

Which is not to say that there are not major problems in industry. Just that there are problems upstream of those.

EDIT: In other words, how you word a job posting definitely has an effect on who applies. It probably doesn't have a huge effect on the decision of a sixteen year old girl considering taking a computer course.

Got it. I read the story about applying to jobs with overbroad requirements more of a "glass ceiling" thing than a "glass wall" thing. Even if you've got a tech industry job, you might be less eager to try a lateral move.

Granted, though it's a compounding problem. Even if they get out of College they end up with that type of hurdle.

You think that may be contributing to the issue with women in the college pipeline at all?

Given that the gender gap is observable in high school, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the language in job postings doesn't affect the decisions of your average sixteen year old girl.

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