My company has desperately tried to hire female candidates into our engineering team, which is currently all male.
From the dozens of applications that we got for the position, only about 5% were female. After interviewing them, they either declined the position, or weren't able to complete our take home challenge (nothing against these women, we have lots of guys fail it too!)
So, yeah, I'd love to have some females on our engineering team. Unfortunately it's really rare for us to have a female applicant, and those we have talked to thus far haven't made it onto the team.
Please, tech, do something to fix this. I would very much like to have women on our team, because I went to university with a lot of smart women in Engineering, and it kills me that now in industry we can't hire any!
"Be fair to candidates. Balance the demand on their time with the utility you get from it. If you're giving a longer project, these should largely replace your interviews. Be aware that this means losing candidates who have other responsibilities."
(in the context of github and other outside contributions, but applicable in my opinion to take home exams as well):
"You may really struggle with female developers here. They're more likely to have substantial family responsibilities (and thus can't do as much out of work)."
Same experience as OP here both on number of applicants and number of qualified female applicants.
Take home test results were considerably worse for females too and they had over five days to complete a simple thirty minute exercise.
There might be responsibilities that get in the way but IMO if you can't find a slice of time to work on something that came up then I'll be really careful in considering you for a job.
Shit happens w/o planning and I'd rather have people I can count on.
30 minutes sounds less objectionable than what I've experienced.
The episode that turned me badly against take home tests involved a two-phase approach. Both were handled through a recruiter. The first was about a one hour set of questions (what does this code do, implement this class, explain dependency injection, that short of thing). That went well, so they then moved to a homework project they advised to spend no more than 5-7 hours on.
I did this, sent it back in and... crickets chirping. I called the recruiter (in house) every week or so to follow up. In about a month I got the standard "we've decided not to pursue your application further at this time.
I honestly have no idea if anyone even looked at it. I certainly never talked to a developer.
I can see how a 30 minute exercise could be a good thing, in that it could save everyone some time. Even then, though, I see it as a red flag if a company wants too much of my time before I talk to a developer in the recruiting process.
Keep in mind also, there's a huge difference between being available to work on something that comes up in a job, and shaking free 5-7 hours for a take home test that a company only might even bother looking at!
ISP network engineering/operational support software team here: People need to be able to find two hours of time (over a 5-6 day period) to complete a small take home project. When they do it and how they do it is up to them.
If somebody can't do this then they would not be a good fit to be in the on-call rotation where 1 out of every 5 or 6 weeks you could have alert emails and phone calls ringing on your phone at 3am. Sorry, but five to six nines statistical uptime over one year demand it.
It may be that the candidate doesn't want to waste time. There's a big difference between putting in some time on weekends and evenings for an important work issue that arises, vs doing some homework assignment that might not even get looked at.
I think this is one of the reasons Ms McDowell suggest doing the take home project later in the process, only once a candidate is promising, with a higher pass rate.
If you're using it simply to screen (i.e., if your pass rates are low), and the take home demands are substantial, you are likely wasting a huge amount of candidates time, in aggregate. This can legitimately harm a company's reputation among developers.
I don't know how your organization does it, but the three worst companies I've worked in diversity-wise all recruited about the same way: Word of mouth and some weak outreach through the easiest channels ie craigslist and a careers page on their own poorly trafficked site.
If your organization does on-campus recruiting, Society of Women Engineers and Women in Computing have well organized chapters at most tech schools, and simply telling them about your recruitment events can have a huge positive impact.
I don't have much experience with this issue outside the academic world beyond its results at internships, but there might be similar options around for general recruitment.
I don't know where you are but there are bound to be multiple woman-focused tech groups in your area. I'd encourage you to reach out specifically to those groups. A lot of times when companies can't find candidates who aren't the same as the rest of the company it's because they only use the same networks and resources that got the other employees in the first place.
You can't expect people to just apply. It's not a very good way to do hiring, regardless of diversity issues. You have to go out and find people. Go out and participate in your community. Find the people who are doing good work. And then make them an offer. Just waiting for people to come take your test is going to get you what you've always gotten.
This is a very interesting article because it avoids the usual pitfalls of demography-based arguments. ("Group G is underrepresented in activity A. Therefore we should completely overhaul A with policy P, which appears to be pro-G. If you have any concerns about P it can only mean you're an anti-G bigot.")
The article instead asks a novel question and leaves solutions open. How do tasks get divided among peer groups? It seems like people who are vulnerable to peer pressure (girls in engineering, in the examples here) are likely to get booted out of tasks they enjoy and relegated to routine chores instead. It's a testable hypothesis, it opens a new perspective, and if proven true it lends itself to very reasonable remedies for both employers (e.g. formalize the task assignment process) and the affected engineers (watch out and prepare to stand up to it if needed).
I'm not sure this is actually a gender problem. I'm a woman, who has worked in big tech. Having done 12+ years, I've seen that you need to work on the right projects to get noticed and promoted.
On the other side, usually when a manager wants to get rid of someone, they just give them the crap work. It doesn't matter if they are a man or woman. It's part of the process of showing "we don't like you, so start looking for a job."
For sure. Although I think again, it's mostly about people in the big companies fighting over each other for what management has allocated for raises and promotions. I've seen men duke it out as well.
Overall I would agree it's a higher up-hill climb for women, but I think getting the crap work means you're generally a less valued employee (most likely some strong correlation there between being a woman, but not causation IMHO).
It's a very common methodology and it's hard to do sociological studies any other way really. They can't follow subjects around with cameras or something without creating a fake environment.
You're maybe non familiar with qualitative research methods? A study like this can be used to discover the kinds of challenges that women face in engineering work environments. It would be a mistake to try to make quantitative claims about these results, but no one is doing that here.
I'm familiar, I just don't find the study itself to be that compelling. We have two cherry-picked journal entries. The first one we have absolutely not context, and to be honest, sounds overly dramatic: 'the guys in their group came in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop'. In the second instance, we have someone complaining about being an intern and not getting interesting opportunities-- how original. To be fair, I'm sure her co-workers were probably creepy and that quite frankly is unacceptable.
I guess I just don't find any of the insights in this article particular compelling or new. We do have a gender problem, but I don't think bs studies like this lend any credibility to the issue.
Yes, specific suggestion about qualitative changes to college curricula, based on qualitative results of a study. That seems reasonable to me. Once these changes are enacted, of course, they can be subject to quantitative study.
Which population? It's at least four engineering schools and a defense contractor. It would be extremely odd if the problem only covered those specific "populations" and didn't extend any further.
Not an excuse a study being garbage. Many fields with studies based on people are flooded with absolute crap based on researching undergrads. This is no different.
If you can't spend the effort to get any kind of reasonable sample, your work doesn't carry any weight.
I am sharing this experience from my job during 2008. We tried to hire our first female engineer. She cleared all the interviews. We gave her a tour of our company and showed her future work location. At the end, she listed down few reasons and declined to join. I don't remember all the reasons she mentioned. Would you like to know what I remember? As I cannot forget this one. She said one of the reasons she can't join is - there is no other female. I wish someone told her - "you start from somewhere".
May be I missed mentioning this. For whatever reason, we never had a female engineer in that company. Either too few applied or whoever applied did not made it to job offer.
You want to know why women are trying to exit tech? -- read today's dilbert cartoon (Jun 17). In it Dilbert proudly proclaims that he does not take vacations and anyone that takes vacations is a loser with a bad career. This kind of shit is being constantly pushed on engineering employees.
The only people that would willingly go for that are those with autism spectrum disorders and we all know that autism hits men more often. There some people that would go for that unwillingly (i.e., grudgingly) in a calculated bet to sacrifice their health for the sake of better career and better life later on, but those are also more likely to be men. Most women want to have children and they know that sacrificing your health affects the health of the children regardless of how good your career has gotten.
Not necessarily. It could be the experience of the 20% that leads to a whittling to 13% influences women to never enter the pipeline in the first place, which means the root problem isn't the pipeline but what lies at the end of it.
After half a decade in college you have women in their mid-twenties(optimum time for birth) finding themselves desiring children. Many individuals meet their S/O in college. It has been this way for many years. This many not account for the nearly 40% gap however it cannot be disregarded.
>There was this one case where, in our design class, two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop.
This individual could have been more vocal about their disdain for the more "menial" tasks. Perhaps even taking a leadership role in the project. This requires an assertive attitude. Assertiveness generally is a masculine trait which can explain more than this article.
The problem is it's self-reinforcing. When you have a gender imbalance of something like 10:1, everything bad that happens in the 1:1 case now happens ten times as often even if all the men behave exactly the same. A bad experience that would have occurred to 3.5% of women then occurs to 35%, assuming exactly identical behavior. And worse than that if the bad actors become more aggressive for lack of prospects.
Which means you can't solve it there. You're not going to reduce the number of bad acts to 10% of the general-population level because the good methods of inhibiting bad acts are going to be widely deployed. You can't use them to get a relative advantage.
Probably the only way to fix it is over-representation at the start of the pipeline. Make it so that 75% of high school seniors applying to CS programs are female so that by the time a third of them drop out the gender balance is right, and in ten or fifteen years that will no longer be necessary because then the gender balance at the end of the pipeline is fixed and the female dropout rate goes down.
In your first paragraph you're essentially describing the Matthew Effect. It's one of the strongest arguments against laissez-faire libertarian approaches to unfair/unnatural inequalities.
Your approach is a more aggressive form of affirmative action.
Affirmative action can't work. It isn't that kind of problem. There is no percentage of qualified female applicants you can accept that will put 10 women in 50 seats.
You have to change the culture in middle and high schools so that lots more little girls want to be hackers.
This study doesn't seem to be attempting to address the issue of a lack of women 'entering' engineering fields.. but the lack of women 'staying' in engineering fields long term.
I think using the word 'fun' in this title is demeaning and misleading. Women aren't looking for fun, they're looking for meaningful, interesting work and are being denied it. (Obviously not all women, etc. etc.)
I know a very talented woman with more experience and talent than her teammates who constantly deals with the interesting work being given to men instead of her. In meetings men look to the other men for opinions instead of her, even when she's leading the meeting. Partly it's because corporate environments prefer bluster to quieter expertise but the answer shouldn't be to tell women to be bigger blowhards than the men in order to get to do interesting stuff.
I don't think it's demeaning and misleading. Professionals--men and women--generally consider "meaningful, interesting work" to be the "fun" part of their jobs.
> Partly it's because corporate environments prefer bluster to quieter expertise but the answer shouldn't be to tell women to be bigger blowhards than the men in order to get to do interesting stuff.
This often seems like a better dimension on which to analyze these "gender in the workplace" issues. That is, these issues arise more often due to the typical characteristics and behaviors that members of each gender display and engage in, rather than something essential about gender in and of itself.
Blowhards versus... well.. what's the opposite of a blowhard? "Introvert" doesn't seem quite right.
My point is that gender issues are often actually personality type issues.
It also affects quieter, sometimes more effective men.
"Speak up!"
It not infrequently reduces to physical posturing. And volume escalation. I kid you not.
(Not to mention, that these loud and aggressive types often make particularly open-space workplaces much greater challenges to the concentration of... this quiet, effective type (me), for one.)
Why does engineering increasingly suck in the U.S. (excluding some of the Silicon Valley et al. "gifted" enclaves)? Because type-A assholes have taken over U.S. management. And they shit all over anyone who isn't like them and isn't the bully they are.
Next up: Do they succeed on the international scene? Or do different cultures shut them down? Does e.g. a Shenzhen -- where I just got my latest and greatest fitness tracker for $23 -- manage to give them a big "fuck you" while combining extant tech into new and compelling products?
Part of the difficulty women face with these problems is that there definitely are multiple different strands of issues all wrapped up in this. But it's important to realize that just because there could be some explanation for one strand (bias against quieter people), doesn't mean that some people don't face one of the other strands (sexism). Dismissing a woman's problems could be due to sexism because another explanation exists is one of the most crazy-making parts of this mess.
I've come to learn it's a much more complicated problem than I initially thought.
Well part of the problem is that social norms are different for the genders. The kinds of behaviors that often allow men to dominate corporate environments are not effective/seen more negatively when adopted by women.
a personality isn't some spontaneously emerging, fixed thing. it's affected by its environment. certain qualities are encouraged, and others discouraged.
perhaps women are less likely to be blowhards due to something essential about being a woman. on the other hand it may be that the qualities encouraged and discouraged in women are the components in being a blowhard. and that assumes women are less likely to be blowhards, and that blowhards are more likely to succeed, which isn't necessarily clear. maybe gender disparities exist simply because women are treated differently than men, and reframing the cause to "typical characteristics and behaviors that members of each gender display and engage in" is just shuffling around gender essentialism.
As an introvert myself, I agree that there is a bias against quieter people but I think these are issues that some people _also_ face, not that it's one issue instead of the other.
Sure, but when you have a culture that punishes women for not being quiet by labeling them as aggressive, b*tchy, etc (after all, a certain presidential candidate often demeans his female opponent for "yelling" and so forth, despite that behaviour being perfectly acceptable in a man), you have now sown the seeds for gender bias.
>the answer shouldn't be to tell women to be bigger blowhards than the men in order to get to do interesting stuff
Interesting statement but what's the justification for that and what precisely is the action to be taken?
People who aren't willing to stand up for themselves will be dominated by those who are, regardless of gender. The biggest "blowhard" (to use your term) wins, at work, at school, at home, and at every other social interaction. That's basic social dynamics.
Note that the article implicitly acknowledges this: “'In situations like this, [Coffman] suggests, 'you need to be your own best advocate and aggressively seek out the most interesting and challenging projects. If your male peers try to task you with menial work, you can tell them 'no'. They're your peers, not your bosses.'”
I agree that the use of "fun" here is a little demeaning.
I also think, however, that the overall point here was totally valid - you are your own best advocate, and you can't trust other people to hand you interesting work. Being handed menial, boring tasks is much more likely.
My wife, PhD in engineering, finds interesting and challenging work fun.
Lucky for her, I guess, that she is usually the only one of her level of expertise at a company because no one else can typically do the work she is capable of.
I've long thought that the best way to get more women into engineering is for parents of young girls to realize that they need to buy their daughters more engineering labs and electronic kits and fewer dolls.
That wouldn't explain why men were assigned different jobs than women. ...sexist infrastructure was in place that kept female interns shuffling papers while their oftentimes less experienced male counterparts had legitimate “engineering” assignments.
Assuming the premise is valid, it would explain the differences. Everyone has to do crap work for time to time. I try and spread it around as evenly as possible to my team (which is a mix of men and women). But if one group is seemingly alright with that work and another group is loudly asking for better work and complaining -- it's easy to see how that would factor in.
I try and ignore all that and just create variety based on whatever the last project was. So if someone just got off a 7 month project, they'll be doing small tasks for a while. If someone had to create 25 boring reports last month, they get to do use some new technology. It doesn't matter who it was.
If the women have to push back because the men got better assignments to begin with, that means the sexist behavior already happened. Women shouldn't have to play damage control constantly.
> If the women have to push back because the men got better assignments to begin with
That is quite the assumption. What if we consider the possibility that they were initially given assignments equally? Then, because some pushed back more than others, they ended up getting better assignments the next time around (and the next, and the next).
So maybe the difference is in the behavior (learned). As the example suggests, men try to do what they do aggressively while women are not so aggressive.
For men: understand that others should have fun, understand that women are more likely to be more passive and overcompensate for it.
For women: let others know that brushing you off is not okay. Many do it without realizing it and most do it for both other men and women.
The thing that really bugs me isn't that they read undergrad students' diaries, it's that they didn't quantify their findings in a way which could be represented in the abstract, which probably means they weren't quantified well at all. As such we're left with scare quotes (like the diary bits in the article) and the researchers' impression of their findings.
This isn't an unfixable limitation -- one wonders, how much room is there for algorithmic natural language processing in the data analysis here?
Before reaching for explanations to reinforce hackneyed oppression tropes, there might be a more economic reason women leave engineering and STEM fields in general.
Engineering is about developing skills, and all technical skills have a relatively early inflection point of diminishing marginal returns on effort.
Engineering has a high barrier to entry, and women who are in engineering are necessarily in the 80th percentile of intelligence, so let's say they are smart. Smart people have a different apprehension of risk than less smart people.
Roles that involve management, finance, and relationships, have infinite upside, where the benefits of roles that involve skills tend to have a fairly well defined peak.
A woman who is ambitious enough to pass the high bar for engineering is probably smart enough to recognize that for an equal investment of time and effort, if she switches to management or a non-technical role, she can achieve a management role with greater perceived stability, a multiple of salary, bonuses and eventually equity.
Depending on her motivation in regard to having children, a job that requires skill maintenance requires much more effort if she is caring for a child, but _with the same limited upside_. The divided commitment means she has to work some coefficient of effort harder toward the same result. Can she? Of course, but why would she?
Some women are content with this, but I think women avoid STEM work because, decades as a code monkey is not the most productive use of their time. If boring aspies and loud talkers chased women out of jobs, they wouldn't have stuck with "traditional" jobs that include handling rooms full of 40 screaming children, caring for violent drug addicts, serving drunks, etc. Outside academia, women aren't delicate flower petal snowflakes.
The more plausible explanation is that if it were worth it to them, they would do it. For some reason, engineering is still not worth it, and the answer is likely more uncomfortable for men than it would be for women.
I've seen this argument before and it makes no sense. You're basically arguing that smart women recognize that engineering is a bad deal. Why do smart men not recognize the same?
You mention kids, but that's basically a concern in any field in the US, because FMLA requirements are a joke. Plus many men in engineering (where parental leave is often much longer than FMLA requirements) take long paternity leave, and many women choose not to have children anyway.
So what exactly is it about engineering that makes it the smart move for women to leave the field but not men? Or what is it about women that makes them recognize that it's the smart move when men don't see it?
I'm not saying that your assertion is strictly wrong, but I am saying it's not interesting. If women are leaving engineering because of entrenched sexism, that might well be the "smart move" for them. But this isn't a useful insight because the underlying problem remains the entrenched sexism.
If engineering were lower status work than a lot of people think it is, it would provide a more viable explanation than the effect of a conspiracy.
Men in engineering on average aren't as smart as they think they are, and given the perceived barriers, mostly it is exceptionally smart women go into engineering.
The underlying problem is that engineering is lower status work than its participants believe it is. Women in it recognize this and switch to roles that provide the benefits of equivalent or greater status for an equivalent or lesser amount of effort.
Sexism does sound more interesting, but reality tends to be less dramatic.
I'm pretty sure it's sexist (but maybe in the other direction?) to claim that men are in general too stupid to realize that they should leave engineering. "Perceived barriers" also indicate some sort of sexism is at play here. (The alternative that women are just imagining these barriers seems far-fetched and equally sexist.)
Perhaps more to the point, this argument only holds up if women who leave engineering go into more prestigious/higher status fields. Is there any evidence of that?
Is it also possible that the men are usually being more aggressive towards getting more interesting work?
After all, in their example the girls could've just told the guys no and came to an agreement instead of just accepting their lot.
The problem with that is that once you do it a few times, you get a reputation as a "bitch". Assertive men are seen as a "leaders", assertive women are seen as "bitches".
As a leader you get criticized. When we're assertive, men are called assholes and women bitches. I think the difference is men tend not to care what they think and believe they're right, regardless. This is useful in that it lets you press on despite the adversity, but detrimental if there really is an issue. It's good that women listen better and are more aware than men of peoples' feedback, it makes them a different kind of leader. Perhaps we need corporate cultures that value listening more. We all have our strengths.
I might be over-simplifying, but isn't this the crux of the whole "lean-in" approach? Being more assertive in the workplace definitely helps you get more interesting and meaningful work.
I appreciate insights and research like this. It seems clear to me that these issues are complex, multi-faceted, and often subtle. If they were obvious single issues they would be much easier to address.
Figuring out hard to see sources of bias and discrimination make them easier to address. For my part, I'll try to consider fair distribution of both boring and fun tasks in groups when breaking down work.
Failure should result out of poor leadership in the end. On my team I don't care for your gender, your race, your culture or your social image. I only care that you can get the job done. If I know you can, then I'll give it to you. If I think it allows for time to learn, then I'll give it to the ones who need to grow. If you think you aren't given a chance, then speak up and I'll give you a shot at something. Poor leaders will deny those opportunities.
But I believe that there is more good leadership as opposed to poor leadership in our industry, and that articles like this create misguided issues.
Also, it is too easy for anyone to go and find another job; especially if they have talent. A full on exit means something else, something these articles haven't shown yet. For example, my last experience with this type of issue was with a coworker, a gay black male, who decided to quit in the middle of a project he was leading. He was falling way behind and presenting demos with bugs & poor functionality. All would've been fine and understandable if it weren't for the developer misleading the boss and stating that the project was on track and doing well. After continuous failure our boss eventually gave him extensions but was obviously was not happy about it. The boss began to put pressure on and keep a watchful eye over new commits. The senior ultimately chose not to continue and quit. On his way out he complained of bullying and not being appreciated. He declared that he was a senoir and should've been included in more decision making and that other senior developers were treated with higher favoritism because they got "cooler projects" and he did not. He was partly right, but only because he had not shown that he could get the work done, and rather shown quite the opposite. He had never proven his skills when given the chance. He faltered at all chances and yet still had some type of delusional self-entitlement. He left and his project was delivered 2 months late even after his poor code-base was heavily refactored by the next lead. I recently chatted him to ask how he was doing and he stated that his experience on our team and with our boss was so negative that he hasn't looked for a new job yet, and is even considering a career change. I agreed that he should do what is good for him, but only because I consciously knew he is in no place to be a senior developer in this industry (but he will never tell you that, and neither will any journalist trying to make a story out of it).
As someone who has had the statistically rare opportunity to be the only man on a software engineering team I can see this explanation reflects my experience.
I took so many fewer days off than the team average that I tended to get assigned the most vital work.
I think whenever you are a "minority" in anything you run the risk of being felt left out.
If your group comprises only 20% of something, then it is always going to be an issue.
The problem with the gender gap is that it will never go away. Prejudice against a race, ethic group, or religion is a mistake. People are generally people and we have more in common than we don't.
And as time goes on, I think you will see this type of prejudice disappear.
However, men and women and their differences will be around forever. There are clearly differences in how we think, act, behave and look. It's up for debate how much of this is cultural and how much is biological.
So, I don't see this going away, maybe ever.
Is there only 13% female engineers because men are sexist and treat them poorly? Or is it because men like math, science and engineering more than women?
I was a high school math teacher. I did everything I could do encourage my strong female students to go into a STEM field. They were some of my strongest students, they worked hard, they were ambitious, but they just didn't want to do it. I have no idea why, but they didn't want to study any more math than they had to.
On the opposite end, I had a few male students who weren't great (not even as good as a lot of the female students), yet they went on to study in a STEM field. Why? Because they really wanted to do it. They were drawn to it.
This is all anecdotal, but there is something there when I saw the same issue play out in several of my classes. I even brought it up with my female math teachers and they saw the same problem. Girls just aren't interested in studying math and science in college at the same rate as boys.
What is interesting about this hypothesis is that it does not require men to be especially sexist or treat women poorly. Men only have to be a bit more assertive, or better able to build coalitions among their colleagues, for this effect to occur. These factors, plus the general observation that women tend to score significantly higher than men on the Big 5 trait of Agreeableness, make this thesis plausible. I look forward to seeing it tested further. This study appears to focus on female engineers who have already passed at least some filters for aptitude/interest in engineering, so one would expect any possible effects of biological sex differences/average population differences to be less important to the results.
Even if it were true that women just aren't interested in math and science, that's a different issue. Even if somehow our DNA mandated the situation that only 13% of engineers were women, there's no reason for those 13% to put up with the bullshit they're subjected to. So if you start with 13% women through some natural process, then a lot of those women have to put up with the issues the article mentions, wouldn't a lot of the them leave the industry and lower the percentage further? I think that's a big part of what's happening.
Finally! Someone had to say it. These sorts of situations (low percentage of women engineers) are not issues; they're just facts, and most likely caused by, generally enough, the way that women and men think/act/desire. It's not a problem, it's just a fact of life that people, oddly enough, are having a hard time accepting.
In my observation, the differences are in what is found intrinsically rewarding.
If I may over-generalized, men have a tendency to find the math itself, the technology itself, solving the puzzle itself, to be rewarding. Women find it more rewarding to see the impact/result of their work.
There is also a difference in how they view competition/challenges. I've seen this with girls in robotics. A robot competition is more likely to get the boys excited. Reframing the task as a "challenge", ie: "Can you make a robot to solve this problem?" with the challenge being more open-ended and the result being an objective demonstration instead of a head-to-head run-off is much more motivating.
So I think it is worth looking at what intrinsic rewards girls find motivating, and connecting those possibilities back into the technology is important.
People have said exactly what you are saying about every single underrepresented minority in almost any field of human endeavor. Almost every single time history has proven them wrong.
Maybe people are right on this one. But I doubt it.
Yeah, that's true, but my point was that gender differences are much more real on an individual level than differences between races.
Racial differences are extraordinarily superficial and hard to define. Gender differences by comparison are massive and very real.
Again, there is a very real debate on how much is culture and how much is biological.
But, it's not ALL culture. The fact is girls and boys are different and will continue to be different.
We don't know if their interest level in math/science is biology or culture.
If I had to guess, it would be both. I think we can do more to get more female engineers for sure, but forcing people to do something they don't want to do is just as wrong.
You bring up an excellent point that historically underrepresented minorities have gotten a bad deal. I wonder what kind of criteria could be used to decide if this case was similar.
I see a big issue is that you were encouraging STEM activity at the high school level, there was likely a multitude of years where those same girls were pushed in other directions. I believe it has to start earlier and not as a forced thing but as an acceptable and encouraged and praised choice.
That goes against the intent of the parents though. If a parent wants a child to go into some other non-STEM field, I don't see how anyone has the right to go against that by brainwashing kids into doing something else.
I agree and did not intend to say that there should be any force.
Around 2005-2006 when I hadn't changed majors to computer science yet and was student teaching middle school, there were still things being said to girls like 'its just more natural for boys' from older teachers.
It just didn't let them build the resilience up to work through the 'hard' aspects of math.
I thought about that after I wrote my comment. I only had them for one year in high school, so it's possible that they were subjected to years of other conditioning.
But, really, I have seen the exact opposite. Girls are actively encouraged to participate in math and science from a very early age in a lot of our schools.
I don't have any numbers on hand, but there seems to a drastic change in middle school where girls stop being interested in math and science. So by the time they get to high school, it seems like the fight for their interest is already over.
This is just my experience from being in education for several years.
>"Because they wanted/didn't want to do it" isn't where the trail of inquiry ends, btw.
Absolutely this. I think a lot of educators today understand that they should encourage diverse students, but they still exhibit a variation on the old "X hours of homework isn't that bad" where they ignore that their class isn't your whole academic life.
Socrates may be a fantastic ally himself, but it's very likely some of his students' other teachers aren't, so it's completely reasonable for them to fall out of STEM "despite the support."
Lawyers? Male dominated field, especially higher paying/partner fields. [0]
Doctors? Depends on the field. Pediatrics, gynecology, and a few other fields are female-dominated while surgeons (especially neurosurgeons), orthopedics, and a few other fields are male-dominated. [1]
With roughly 20/80 F/M ratios those fields fair about as poorly as the programming field.
> Lawyers? Male dominated field, especially higher paying/partner fields. [0]
That's a relative term. The legal profession is about 50-50 in school and at the associate (1-10 years experience) level. While the partner ranks are still heavily male, about a third of new partners are women.[1] As are a third of federal appellate judges. 20% of Fortune 500 General Counsel/CLOs are women.
There is a lot of (justified) hand-wringing in the legal profession about how much work is left to do. But at every stage, the representation of women is much higher than in engineering.
There is a difference between "DF Alliance firms" and "firms nationwide". I'm not sure there is data on new partners for more than that sub-sect of diversity-focused firms and 121 firms is nothing. I'm in charge of running more firm websites than that...a supermajority of them male or male dominated.
>...there were 47,563 law firms serving the U.S. in the year 2000 according to the American Bar Foundation.
(Google result for "how many law firms are in the US")
That's a fair point, but the study's sample includes the largest firms in the country, which employ a disproportionate share of private practice lawyers.
Or it could be that tons of girls get sold into taking up the tech field at a young and impressionable age by presidential speeches, books telling them to "lean in", and articles like this that hint there is some conspiracy of men out there actively working to damage women and they are needed to right the wrong.
Then, after spending 4+ years in college studying surface friction losses or CRDT applications without tombstones, and n+ years in industry trying to debug someone else's too-clever binary-flag-in-ruby code, a large number of them (the ones who dreamed of sexist careers like fashion designer, models, teachers, or most sexist of them all mothers) realize they really don't enjoy this work, there was never any "painful injustice" that needed their "sacrifice" to right, and that they've just been tricked by the popular political agenda. And, after effectively wasting a decade of their lives chasing careers that means nothing to them, they quit and actually go follow their dreams (instead of someone else's).
At least not with the data points that I have. 1) Former boss, who is now managing over 100 people at Intel. Smart engineer and totally into the technology. I loved working for her. 2) Former female employees and coworkers that are every bit as much into the technology and every bit as capable as male engineers. 3) Friend and female no-nonsense CEO of startup who has had to fight jack-asses like you for her entire career and would very quickly plant her boot up your ass for talking that way. 4) My own daughter, headed off to MIT this fall, who is very capable of doing the bench work and has been instructed in no uncertain terms that if some lab partner displays your attitude and says something like: "Let me do the measurements and you can just write them down for me, sweetheart." that she is to grab the multi-meter probes and poke the bastard's eyes out.
What is the case to be made along those lines--a case based on evidence and not rank speculation?
I loved building software. Like nearly everyone here on HN, I put up with the drudgery of debugging race conditions in other peoples' code in return for the opportunity to work on the fun parts. Why should we credit an argument that presupposes that women wouldn't feel the same way? In particular, why should we credit that argument over the article's argument: that women leave the profession in greater numbers because men give them more of the drudgery and less of the fun stuff?
Then, after spending 4+ years in college studying surface friction losses or CRDT applications without tombstones, and n+ years in industry trying to debug someone else's too-clever binary-flag-in-ruby code, a large number of them ... realize they really don't enjoy this work
So... on average you believe men just like engineering more than women?
It was a perfectly acceptable answer to justify segregation, too... using "genetics" as a basis for justifying social bias is a very dangerous road to go down unless you're certain you're on extremely firm ground.
I believe the other commenter was saying that at the time people believed it was an acceptable answer, just as now you're saying it's a plausible explanation for this problem.
Yes, I understood he was referencing "at the time", that's why I included the word _was_. My point still stands. Although many people did accept it, it WAS not an acceptable answer, and IS still not an acceptable answer to justify segregation.
So wait, do you reject the possibility that this situation couldn't be the exact same as the one in the past? It seems like you're saying, "Yes, genetics was not an acceptable answer then, but it is now."
If that is what you're saying, then what makes it different now?
At the time of your comment, there were only three other comments in this thread. Two that were mildly dismissive, and one discussing "rape culture".
Are you really disappointed about that dataset of three... or were you just racing to proactively get this comment in before the thread starts, and someone else beats you to it?
The comments on any HN thread about barriers to gender equity in software engineering illustrate the barriers to gender equity in software engineering.
The first comments are by the people who have already made up their mind on the matter and didn't have to take time to think about or digest the article, if they even bothered to read it.
I just heard another first hand account of a female computer science masters candidate dropping out shortly before completion due to sexual harassment from her supervisor and no support on the matter from the University. Interesting that the study focuses on the "fun" aspect while the journals themselves highlight unwanted advances and "creepiness" from males. There are many factors keeping women out of computer science, but rape culture seems to me to be the most serious and under-addressed one.
Unless your first hand account involves an actual rape, please leave the term 'rape culture' to situations involving actual rape. The linked story certainly didn't invoke any mentions of rapes occurring - why dilute a real problem with unrelated 'creepiness'?
Secondly, females complaining about 'creepiness' is a difficult problem to quantify or solve, as females find attention from unattractive males 'creepy' regardless of their actual intentions.
I agree that the term "rape culture" is unhelpful. It's an extreme term that alienates people. When you equate undesired behavior to rape, you both trivialize rape and cause people engaging in the undesired behavior to disregard anything of substance you might say. When you call someone a rapist, they aren't going to listen to you when you try to explain why hitting on a 21-year-old coworker is inappropriate.
I do not agree with your dismissiveness of female complaints about "creepiness". Solving "creepiness" is a hard problem, but not because women are bad at distinguishing between creepy guys and normal guys who happen to be unattractive. If you repeatedly hit on someone and fail to pick up on the social cues that say your advances are unwanted, you are a creepy person, regardless of whether you are unattractive or not. It is not reasonable to disregard the discomfort this causes the recipient of the unwanted attention. It is also not reasonable that the recipient should have to be blunt, abrasive, or combative to make the unwanted attention stop.
I completely agree that repeated attempts to ask out a woman who is clearly not interested in you can come across as creepy, and I'm not really insinuating that it's not a problem. People that do that will earn their association with that term.
I can only comment from personal experience, but many of my female friends will call ANY interaction with an unattractive male 'creepy', regardless of how polite or nonthreatening that person has been. An ugly male will warn them that their car tires are low, or that they dropped something, or ask them about their volunteer organization (that they are promoting via a t-shirt), and these women will either give a quick response and leave, or give no response and actually physically flee the scene. Afterwards, they will ALWAYS say "some creepy guy tried to tell me that my tires were flat", or "some creeper was trying to find out where I worked. Is he going to be stalking me in my parking lot?" And I will have been there, observed the same individual, and say "what's wrong with you? He was just trying to help you out", etc.
I realize that the above is just anecdotal evidence, and that the normal/typical behavior of women could be completely different in most/all other situations, but can I really help that my observations shape my worldview?
Well, there are two things to consider here. First, as you called out, your friends' behavior is anecdotal and may not be representative. Second, there is a big difference between work colleagues and strangers. If someone at work does something like complement my shoes, I'm much less likely to see that as weird/creepy than if a stranger does it.
Certainly, there are interactions that get labelled as "creepy" when they really shouldn't. But there are also plenty of legitimately creepy people making others uncomfortable at work.
If that was the only diary entry that mentioned creepiness or anything close to sexual harassment, then what they "focus on" makes total sense. Their quoting that passage at most suggests that those two problems are flips sides of the same coin.
From the dozens of applications that we got for the position, only about 5% were female. After interviewing them, they either declined the position, or weren't able to complete our take home challenge (nothing against these women, we have lots of guys fail it too!)
So, yeah, I'd love to have some females on our engineering team. Unfortunately it's really rare for us to have a female applicant, and those we have talked to thus far haven't made it onto the team.
Please, tech, do something to fix this. I would very much like to have women on our team, because I went to university with a lot of smart women in Engineering, and it kills me that now in industry we can't hire any!