I'd agree with your observation about different realities, and I think it's woefully underappreciated. I think it only truly clicked with me once I entered a stable, long-term relationship with my now wife - which made me immersed in the daily minutiae of a woman's life, the stories, the perspectives, the concerns, the emotions. It's something that's hard to learn from just brief, casual interactions, no matter how open-minded one is.
Personally, I feel the issue of gender balance in tech is approached completely wrong from every direction. The goal should be to give opportunity for anyone who wants to join and excel in the field, and to let them feel comfortable and safe in it. But the topic became a battleground for interest groups that demand fixed ratios and discrimination in their own favor, and there's also the strong confounding factor of money - IT is currently one of the easiest, if not the easiest, way to make lots of money with little training and up-front investment, so the media spotlight is focused on tech (vs. other occupations).
There's also history to consider. Computing was a woman-dominated field until relatively recently in history, which strongly suggests that the root causes of the shift in male/female ratios in technical fields isn't biological (unless there was a massive biological upheaval in the human species in the past 50 years).
the root causes of the shift in male/female ratios in technical fields isn't biological
I agree with this, but I'd just note that the shift isn't as dramatic as you are making out.
Computing was a woman-dominated field until relatively recently in history
The field of computing started in the 1950s (generously). Worker proportions are difficult to estimate, but the maximum proportion of female computer science degrees was 37% in around 1987[1]. In 1986 The Atlantic noted that "[in the federal government] only seven percent of the employees in the top five CS [pay grade] ratings were women, while more than three quarters in the bottom grades were."[2]
Going by computer science degrees is the wrong metric because computer science as a unique discipline only arose as late as the '50s. Before that, the field's predecessor was the human computer, a field dominated by women for quite some time.
This is also unlikely to be due to some inherent biological differences and instead reverse prejudices; women were assumed to be more patient and reliable and were favored in both human computation and telegraph / switchboard work.
Before that, the field's predecessor was the human computer, a field dominated by women for quite some time.
Sure, this is true. But it's a pretty different job to programming.
This is also unlikely to be due to some inherent biological differences and instead reverse prejudices; women were assumed to be more patient and reliable and were favored in both human computation and telegraph / switchboard work.
Also typing pools, which is another job that has disappeared.
Well it's basically always possible to claim that society has some hidden variable, but I'll bite. As a woman, if you want children/family you need to secure at least a certain baseline of living quality and stability before the age of 35 and realistically much earlier. This alone dramatically changes the timeline and priorities of women.
I'm not even suggesting some "hidden variable"; there are plenty of obvious variables that stare us right in the face without even having to look all that hard. Doesn't take much imagination to come up with a few.
The cost of freezing eggs is pretty small compared to tech salaries though, so if women's instincts are telling them not to go into tech because they need to hurry up and have kids, those instincts are out of date wrt what modern medicine can do.
With what modern medicine can do, sorta, kinda, in the West, if you're wealthy enough. Freezing eggs is nowhere near standard practice (though with ever growing credentialism, it may well just become such), and having kids (really: starting a family) involves a lot of other things than just getting some sperm and an egg to occupy the same space at the same time.
(Also, really, modern tech is currently one of the most family-friendly profession out there, because of demand surplus. I think GP is talking about women living a different reality than men, not about women not wanting to go to tech strictly because of it.)
I think enough are due to societal environment that this is something we can work on, but not by arbitrarily saying things like "We want to hire more women in tech."
It's currently downvoted and has one not very nice reply. I guess it's far less of a shit show than it really "should" be, but this is kind of par for the course. People want to believe that sexism is some nebulous problem "out there" and it's not anything they, personally, are doing and if you try to point out what can be done differently in the here and now, well, people are offended and use that to justify doubling down on mistreating people who are already suffering from social exclusion based on gender, skin color, whatever.
I've had college classes in things like Social Psychology and Negotiation and Conflict Management. I'm a woman and I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and then I spent about two decades doing the full-time homemaker thing and wondering where the hell my life went wrong that I didn't get the two-career couple modern American dream that I had expected.
So I know a lot about the space. I've read a lot of books on women's issues and I spent a lot of time in therapy and so forth, but most people don't really want to hear what I have to say. It makes them uncomfortable.
Some points I have been trying to make on HN for years:
1. Most men will not genuinely engage me in a substantive and positive way that leads to some kind of professional development or professional opportunity. They either argue with me or they hit on me. Neither fosters the kind of professional connections I need.
Among other things, I need people to talk with me in earnest about my work. I need people to promote my work, which historically has just not been done. Only recently has anyone other than me apparently posted any of my writing to HN that wasn't basically mud slinging and gossip.
And I think I can't get that primarily because men basically are nice to women when they are looking for sex and that's pretty much it. And they actively avoid being too nice to any woman they aren't trying to sleep with for fear of it having some kind of negative outcome, such as an unintended affair or career-damaging gossip.
2. I need income and no one really wants to hear that. I was a homemaker for years and the things I'm good at combined with my gender cause people to feel that I am supposed to do nice things for them out of the goodness of my heart because I care like I'm their mother. I have a pretty good idea where that pattern comes from, but it's a broken mental model that harms the incomes and lives of a great many women. This shitty expectation that I should benefit others for free out of the goodness of my heart was hung on me even when I was literally homeless.
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Decades of trying to sort out my own problems and reading up on what happens with other women has me convinced that the lack of ability to seriously connect with men socially in a professional way is a huge barrier to professional development. I'm convinced that a lot of female-led startups fail because they don't get those small nudges about what needs to happen with the business or code base that men get from having a beer with buddies or whatever and discussing it casually. So pivots happen much later and involve much larger changes and it's deadly to a lot of businesses.
I've been on HN for over a decade. Only in recent weeks do I have contacts via HN with men who will talk with me via email about something other than personal bullshit. I've been exchanging emails with two different men met through HN about housing issues.
Two contacts is something I should have been able to come up with in the first year, not more than a decade later. Everyone else has basically either emailed me to bond personally while doing not a fucking thing to further my professional goals, was actively trying to victimize me because they were shitty people, or they were hitting on me or they were writing me basically out of pity as their good deed for the day and not because they really had anything meaningful to discuss with me in earnest.
I feel I've been endlessly patient with a truly appalling situation and it hardly budges and if I get frustrated and upset because I'm still dirt poor and still can't make my life work and my gender is a very large factor there, then I get amazingly shitty feedback like it's somehow my fault for being rude or something. So basically no matter how virtuous I am, it's never enough and there is always some shitty BS excuse to blame me for it.
This boils down to "People don't really want it to change." It doesn't directly negatively impact the men here that they are aware of, so not their problem that there is a woman in their midst who routinely can't afford enough food to eat every day.
I'm quite fed up and if I had some means to go postal and murder a bunch of people that in my mind are "at fault," I probably would at this point. I just have no means to somehow blow up HN and multiple people met through HN.
I no longer know what to do. Being patient, diplomatic, articulate, long-suffering and blah blah blah isn't solving it. At the rate I'm going, I might have a middle class income in another hundred years, assuming I live that long and it's mind boggling to me that people who routinely claim they are interested in addressing issues like sexism are amazingly content to continue to basically step over my body in the gutter and mutter to themselves "Not my problem."
So the world isn't likely to change because the world doesn't actually want to change. It would rather look for excuses and justifications than viable solutions.
>>>And I think I can't get that primarily because men basically are nice to women when they are looking for sex and that's pretty much it. And they actively avoid being too nice to any woman they aren't trying to sleep with for fear of it having some kind of negative outcome, such as an unintended affair or career-damaging gossip.
You're not wrong....but I'm in no way, shape, or form surprised by this gender dynamic. Although I think the "career-damaging gossip" is a fairly recent phenomenon. Enough men have had their lives destroyed by either awkward romantic attempts on their part or flat-out lies on a woman's part that guys have reacted in an entirely rational manner by simply avoiding females. The assumption is that there is NO professional benefit to the guy that is worth the risk.
My (totally unsolicited) ¥2 is you probably need to overcome that assumption very early in any conversation if you expect assistance.
>>>I just have no means to somehow blow up HN and multiple people met through HN.
Do some social engineering to reveal their physical locations. Then strap tannerite-based nailbombs to UAVs? As long as we are brainstorming here...
My (totally unsolicited) ¥2 is you probably need to overcome that assumption very early in any conversation if you expect assistance
I've been celibate for medical reasons for over 14 years. I've been a member in good standing here for over a decade. I've gone to great lengths to avoid trouble. So far that seems to benefit me just enough to not yet be banned and that's it.
And it really shouldn't be that way. And I don't feel any good would come out of digging into those details here and now.
Do some social engineering to reveal their physical locations. Then strap tannerite-based nailbombs to UAVs? As long as we are brainstorming here...
That's good for a chuckle, but the reality is I'm far too poor to do anything like that. I'm not exaggerating when I say I routinely don't have enough money for food.
If I could come up with the means to assassinate six or ten assholes across the globe from a distance, I probably would be wealthy enough to pay cash for the building I want and would, therefore, have no reason to be sitting around stewing and wishing a few assholes would choke to death on their next bowl of soup.
I would posit that men and women have different realities, thus different needs. This shapes interests.
It's not wholly unassailable, but needs to be approached differently than goals like "achieve x percentage of women in tech" are typically approached.