Reading the comments on articles like this on hacker news always make me deeply uncomfortable to be a woman in tech.
I know it's hard to believe, but women don't usually get sent to coding summer camp as teenagers. Our parents don't usually encourage us to take AP computer science, and our best friends aren't in CS and don't refer us for sweet internships at Microsoft and Google.
If you're a woman in this industry, it's GENERALLY because it is something that you very much care about and want to do.
It's not some feminist conspiracy that women are being promoted, it's just that the women who go into tech are usually already pretty gritty people. You're comparing a very driven and passionate subset of women to a very general subset of men.
"I know it's hard to believe, but women don't usually get sent to coding summer camp as teenagers. Our parents don't usually encourage us to take AP computer science, and our best friends aren't in CS and don't refer us for sweet internships at Microsoft and Google."
Is it hard to believe most men don't do those things, too? Some do, sure. And of people that do these things, historically more have probably been men than women (don't have the stats, but it sounds reasonable). But how many men do you think do those things, vs those that don't? Some anecdata: I didn't do any of those. Of all the engineers I can think of, male and female, very very few went to coding summer camps or took AP computer science. Few had best friends in CS in university, but sure, more did this than AP computer science or coding summer camp. And few had sweet internships at tech companies.
>"It's already too late," Paul Graham, founder of the tech entrepreneur boot camp Y Combinator, said last month in a controversial interview. "What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that."
>Ericson's analysis of the data shows that in 2013, 18 percent of the students who took the [AP computer science] exam were women.
Who makes high school students' schedules? Parents and teachers, at least in the US.
So let's put aside anecdotes and reactionary attitudes and just look at the facts.
Happy to look at the facts. That more men than women take coding summer camps, AP CS, have friends who are CS major, or get referrals to top companies sound believable. Presenting evidence in the form of cold hard believable statistics would be nice. I don't see any, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, because I believe those claims anyway (though the AP CS stats of recent times might be different - what parent doesn't want their child to program? And women tend to get better grades than men and perform better in school settings, so more women might be in AP CS classes in recent years).
Again, men don't usually do the things you're claiming, either. You're claiming it with the language "women don't usually" because usually means more often than not - over half. But I'm open to changing my mind with stats. I'm happy to look at any you provide.
Do you have stats on most men being sent to coding summer camp as teenagers?
Most men having parents that encourage them to take AP computer science?
Most men having best friends who are in CS?
Most men who refer them for sweet internships at Microsoft and Google?
Men usually don't do those things either. Just because more of the people that do those things are men than women, does not mean men, in general, do those things. That's my point.
Here's the thing. Your point is not incorrect. The language she originally used wasn't totally 100% bulletproof. Things people say rarely are.
But your argument distracts from the fact that the phenomenon she described is very real. Women face challenges at every turn as they try to get into tech. One of those challenges is people like you who want to nitpick everything they say.
Why are you arguing with her? What is the point of it? Can't you accept that the general argument that women struggle to exist in the tech industry is real?
You're like a global warming denier fixating over some discrepancy in the data. You're not wrong, it's just beside the point. We need to be arguing over how to fix our gender issues, not whether they exist. And one of those ways, without a doubt, is getting more women to take the AP CS exam and go to programming summer programs.
Just because you're factually correct (which I'm not conceding here, but it shouldn't matter) doesn't mean your point has any merit.
In a weird sort of coincidence, I was recently talking to all of my couple friends at a large party. Of the 5 couples there, only 1 person had any desire to see their child(ren) go into programming. That particular child was a boy.
So there's some more anecdata, but basically I've never heard a non-programmer parent say they want their child to go into programming. It's always been something along the lines of "I want my child to do the same thing I do" or "I want my child to be a doctor/lawyer/engineer"
No one claimed "most men _______." The claim is that your average woman who is employed in this sector faced more adversity than your average man who is employed in this sector. Therefore, you'd expect the average woman employed to have more grit than the average man employed, since the women with less determination were filtered by various filters that don't exist for men.
You could argue that it's not a filter against women but a magnet towards men, but that doesn't actually change the crux of the argument. There is clearly something that causes only 18% of AP CS exams being taken by women.
OP claimed most "most men _______." She made other claims as well, which I didn't respond to. She claimed "most men ________" when she implied most men experience code summer camps, parental encouragement to take AP CS classes, etc. She said "women don't usually get sent to coding summer camp as teenagers. Our parents don't usually encourage us to take AP computer science, and our best friends aren't in CS and don't refer us for sweet internships at Microsoft and Google."
Usually means "under normal conditions; generally." Generally means more often than not, meaning over half / most.
I did NOT, you are misquoting me. I claimed (and cited) that OF the people who take AP CS and have the other resources I mentioned, most are men. That is all I claimed and you are all over this thread misinterpreting this.
You can check my original comment's edit history. I've changed nothing about what I said and I stand by it 100%.
Maybe you didn't intend to make the claim, but it's a claim you made. I quoted you extensively and characterized your words fairly and in context. Please point out anywhere where that isn't the case. If you claimed that OF the people who take AP CS, most are men, I would do nothing but agree with you. That is the case. You did not make that claim - you instead claimed, via implication, that MOST men do take AP CS (or go to summer coding camps, etc).
>Maybe you didn't intend to make the claim, but it's a claim you made ... You did not make that claim
You sound like a bad politician here. All I said is that GIRLS don't take AP CS and do not go to coding summer camp. The people who are doing these things are boys.
You have terrible reading comprehension and your pedantic citations of dictionaries and incorrect use of set theory belong on /r/iamverysmart
You have terrible reading comprehension and your pedantic citations of dictionaries and incorrect use of set theory belong on /r/iamverysmart
Ad hominems aren't appropriate on HN. It might be better if you took a breather at this point:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
And under what logical system does "women generally don't do ____" imply that "men generally do ____?"
At most, it implies that "more men than women generally do ______," which is totally true. Even that implication would be a bit of a leap were it not for parent's later explicit clarifications on the point.
I want to talk to you about two groups - tall people and short people. Usually, short people can't reach items that are on very high shelves.
Above, did I imply something about tall people's abilities to reach items on very high shelves? I didn't claim anything about tall people specifically. But I think I did make a claim about their abilities here, by implication, given the context. It's natural to infer the claim - this is just part of how people communicate. The claim is strongly implied - tall people can reach items on very high shelves.
I believe OP's clarified claim (of people in AP CS classes, most are men; of people at summer coding camps, most are men; etc), rather than OP's initial claim (most men take AP CS classes; etc). The clarified claim seems accurate. The initial claim is clearly inaccurate - and OP "stand[s] by it 100%".
English is an ambiguous language interpreted by flawed humans.
It feels like we're dancing around the issue. There's no reason for this line of thought to have continued like it has. "My side" should have made a polite comment, and when rebuffed, thought "they don't think it's a problem," and moved on. "Your side" should have thought "a slight rephrase could increase clarity and address their concerns." Instead we're just pointlessly banging our heads against a wall.
As is, both sides of this argument are actually pretty stupid. Mine included.
Haha, the most valuable lesson I got from my linguistics class was that language is obscenely difficult to generate and understand – even without "mistakes," understanding can suffer. It's worth stepping back and re-establishing common ground or giving people the benefit of the doubt.
However, the implication of saying that something "usually" doesn't happen to women, is that it usually happens to men. These were very specific benefits that do not usually happen to anyone. The statement is just as invalid as a privilege denyer saying "poor white people have less privilege than rich black people", except they were made for "your side" rather than "the enemy's side".
> Who makes high school students' schedules? Parents and teachers, at least in the US.
As you were blasting "anecdotes", please note that this isn't even anecdote, just blind assertion, so: "Citation needed". In my experience, high school students largely decide their own schedules according to their interests and abilities.
Or interests/passions are in fact highly dependent upon social factors, such as sexism.
How many men do you know who are ballet dancers? Do you think that's because there's actually something present in the DNA of little girls that's not present in the DNA of little boys that makes them interested in ballet?
Or could it be because if you're a little girl who dances it's cute/pretty and if you're a boy it's because you're gay/weak?
This is the problem. If men hold a monopoly on powerful or lucrative roles in society, that monopoly will reign through the establishment of gender-dichotomous "interests and passions." Of course gender doesn't play any intrinsic role in whether you're into ballet. Nor does it play any intrinsic role in whether you're into computer science.
> Do you think that's because there's actually something present in the DNA of little girls that's not present in the DNA of little boys that makes them interested in ballet?
Yes, probably related to the production of testosterone or a similar mechanism.
It's hardly surprising in a sexually dimorphic species.
Perhaps I don't know enough about ballet, but my understanding was that it is physically demanding in ways that favor female physiology over male physiology (e.g. requires more flexibility). Not to say that the cultural aspect isn't there, but rather that the cultural aspect may be influenced by biological differences.
How about any other form of dance? Or fashion design? Or theatre? Gymnastics? So on and so forth.
Of course there are biological differences that surface in all of these things. The question is whether these differences by themselves account for the disparities. Of course the answer is no.
In professional ballet, men make up approximately 50% of the population. But of course there are physiological difference that change competencies.
Applying this to interests, however, implies that there is a neurological difference that makes women worse at computer science. There is not methodologically sound data to back this up.
The students. AP comp sci at my high school was an elective that people took. The people who didn't take it chose whatever elective they were interested in (water basket weaving, guitar, etc.).
And what motivated the people to choose AP comp sci? This is just an anecdote but almost everyone in my AP comp sci class was into gaming/nerdy hobbies/internet forums/etc.
As someone who teaches females in middle school HTML/CSS this is very accurate. While the vast majority of them enjoy the course, when I survey them if they would continue learning to code they respond no more often than not.
Social stigma plays a large role at that age; this is also when they start thinking about boys and having self expression (clothes, music, books). It's _nerdy_ to be interested in computers. The know-it-all also becomes the outcast. That's the geek or loser. There's nothing more important than social status. It's really unfortunate.
If you mean "decide" as in force them to take it, then yes I would be surprised. In my experience, even the high achieving parents didn't force them to take specific classes. They put pressure on their kids (both genders equally, tiger mom does not care about gender roles) to take STEM AP classes in general instead of specific ones. Those students decide which STEM AP classes to take (except for Calc which parents stressed more).
This was before knowledge of comp sci salaries have gone mainstream (before 2012), although it's still a relevant, anecdotal reflection on the backgrounds of current software engineers.
My AP comp sci class was actually composed of non-high achieving people. AP comp sci was the only AP class many of the students took. The high achieving students didn't take AP comp sci for whatever reason.
I think AP comp sci was actually considered lower status/prestige compared to the sciences Physics/Chem/Bio among the high achieving students.
> Ericson's analysis of the data shows that in 2013, 18 percent of the students who took the [AP computer science] exam were women.
I did a master's degree in computer science at the University of Texas at Arlington about 10 years ago. When I was there, I was one of only two white people (male or female) in the entire program, and one of only about five that weren't Indian citizens on special student visas. So Indian citizens, while making up a minuscule portion of the US population, represented 95+% of the CS student population at an American university.
So, which is it? Did UT Arlington commit a massive conspiracy to discriminate against white men? Or is it just that the people who were most interested and most inclined happened to be the ones that ended up there?
I appreciate your comment, and I second your point about the education and social structure being different for girls/women. In my experience, it can be difficult for folks to understand just how different it can be - whether by gender, race, or lower socioeconomic status - which is completely fair. There are always exceptions to generalizations, which makes making progress in these arguments difficult.
For those who still believe it's a feminist conspiracy, I encourage you to read this brief report (with links to an excellent full report) with hard numbers on the experience of women in STEM: https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-5-biases-pushing-women-out-of-st...
And if you think you're above bias, or that it doesn't exist against women, please challenge yourself with the unconscious bias test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Stats are available after the test. I am a woman with a PhD in a STEM field, and guess what - I have biases against my own sex.
Seriously, why do you need to post this? This is the sort of thing that makes it hard to be a woman in tech. Everyone is constantly nitpicking everything you say.
How is that a serious contribution to the discussion? The authors Hall, Phillips and Williams don't for a second reflect on their own confirmation bias.
feminist conspiracy
The authors Hall, Phillips and Williams are self-described feminists.
Shocking that the only people actually researching this are feminists!
The other side of the coin is represented by neuroscientists trying to prove that the ladybrain is inferior at mathematics or evolutionary psychologists trying to assert that evolution has made women excel at caregiving and men at being hyperlogical.
What you do is called "whataboutism" [1] as
the scientific value (or otherwise) of evolutionary psychology doesn't affect the lack of methodological self-awareness of Hall, Phillips and Williams, in particular the complete absence of reflection on their own confirmation bias.
the only people actually researching this
They are not the only people researching this, but in the current political climate, any alternative research is unlikely to get funded.
I just mentioned entire fields that are funded doing research that suggests the alternative. What you're doing is selectively ignoring the implications of cross-disciplinary research.
There are enough camps/programs targeted at young girls, that's not the problem.
There is no institutional conspiracy to suppress women, the problem is strictly cultural:
NONE of my daughter's female friends in high school thought it was cool to take on any of the math/physics/programming classes. They were all interested in environment, film/acting, fashion, literature...
This self-selection came predominantly from mass-media/pop-culture, and also, to some extent, from their mothers, none of whom works in tech (we are talking a wealthy suburb in the northeast US here). They never encouraged their daughters to go into tech. The fathers did, but not too convincingly, either.
> NONE of my daughter's female friends in high school thought it was cool to take on any of the math/physics/programming classes.
Neither did any of the men. Not when I was in school, and not now. Being nerdy is not cool, whether you're a boy or a girl. In fact, you're more likely to get beaten up for it as a boy than as a girl.
> NONE of my daughter's female friends in high school thought it was cool to take on any of the math/physics/programming classes. They were all interested in environment, film/acting, fashion, literature (my daughter got interested into life sciences)
Popular culture in the US massively lionizes professional sports, and shames younger people who are into programming and other non-social hobbies like nobody's business.
In my opinion, if "women in tech" programs put half of their resources into solving these problems, they'd be hugely more successful. Unfortunately, that involves taking on fields other than professional programming (like television, media, and such), which they are either not ready or equipped to do.
Not all men in tech are frilly little fancy boys/AP turbogeeks. I'm a high school dropout who rose from the bottom by saving up manual labor wages to attend a community college for two years, then managed to attend my state school for two years thanks to a transfer scholarship and pell grants. I finished the school's cs and math bachelors programs in their entirety in two years by overloading every semester and ruthless scheduling, while also working part-time. That said I support women in tech greatly. My wife is rapidly outpacing men of similar or greater experience levels in her current position because she simply works longer hours, does tons of off-hours self-healing, and focuses on what really matters to the team rather than working on pet projects of little importance. I.e. she is working both harder and smarter. The men in these comments sections need to deadlift
I never said anything about "all" or "most" men. I have no idea why everyone is replying as if I did. Everything I said is super general and is backed up with data.
Good for you for pulling it together. Seriously. I went the service industry to community college route myself.
>I know it's hard to believe, but women don't usually get sent to coding summer camp as teenagers. Our parents don't usually encourage us to take AP computer science, and our best friends aren't in CS and don't refer us for sweet internships at Microsoft and Google.
My original use of "usually". I was talking about women with the "usually", not men. It is a FACT that 82% of the people taking AP computer science are boys. I am arguing that some of this discrepancy is because parents and society nurture this talents in boys, including boys that don't have a lot of natural ability. Which is fine! We need programmers, even mediocre programmers. I am saying nothing against the men who seized these opportunities, nor against the parents who encouraged them.
Yes, that was part of your original use of "usually." The way you used it in context implied the opposite group experiences the list of things the other group usually doesn't. You communicated that while most women don't do x, y, and z, most men do x, y, and z. My claim is they don't. Yes - of those that do x, y, and z, most are men - but most men still do not do x, y, and z. What percentage of people take AP CS? Most men do not take AP CS (very few men take AP CS in the U.S. or world). Realize the experience you described as common among men isn't most men's experience, and not most people's experience in general. Even if most of the people who had it were men.
Usually can only be used in a comparison, one cannot apply that to just one group independently because the assumption here is that there is out group normal. Correct me if I am wrong, I am not a native English speaker.
>I know it's hard to believe, but women don't usually get sent to coding summer camp as teenagers. Our parents don't usually encourage us to take AP computer science, and our best friends aren't in CS and don't refer us for sweet internships at Microsoft and Google.
The implication is that this must be true for men; otherwise this is a complete non-sequitur.
"I know it's hard to believe, but women don't usually get sent to coding summer camp as teenagers. Our parents don't usually encourage us to take AP computer science, and our best friends aren't in CS and don't refer us for sweet internships at Microsoft and Google."
I never mentioned men, but since you decided to make it a point, her generalization is that women are being denied these things. Given that there are two genders, I'll leave it as an exercise as to which one she's referring to when she lists these activities.
Or that they simply don't participate in these things? Nowhere did she say someone stops women from doing those things, just that women don't do them nearly as often as men (which is true).
>Or that they simply don't participate in these things?
one half is not given the opportunity and other half is not participating out of their own will. So what's the point of talking about this at all if no one is doing it at all. Unless your assuption is girls need extra help while boys just get it on their own. Benevolent sexism?
I remember I made the same argument about women in chess (those already playing competitively should be better on average than men because it's harder to get into chess when you are a woman so only the most talented/driven ones make it). I was called sexist in that discussion though as chess is way more meritocratic than corporate career so the implications are that it's likely biological afterall.
>>It's not some feminist conspiracy that women are being promoted
You have to admit though that "diversity" is mentioned a lot and striving for "diversity" in fact makes it easier for women to get into management position. I am not saying it's the only factor but it is one impossible to deny.
You have to admit though that "diversity" is mentioned a lot and striving for "diversity" in fact makes it easier for women to get into management position. I am not saying it's the only factor but it is one impossible to deny.
My ex husband was career army. While in the military, he double majored in CS and history. He was a socially awkward nerd. He rose though the ranks quickly. He once admitted that while excelled at the technical stuff, the fact that he was married to me was a big part of why he was a decent manager once he got promoted to the military equivalent of mid level manager.
There have been studies that indicate women think of "morality" different from men -- that their idea of morality is more about caring about people. Perhaps the same traits -- caring about others -- that help make women good mothers also help make them good managers. The paternal role is typically different from the maternal one.
My point was that: "we strive for diversity" = discimination against men. Your story is interesting but I don't see how it relates to my point. If women are naturally better managers they would in fact make it more often to managerial positions - I am all for that (as I think genders are different and men are naturally better at some things and women are better at other things and fighting this is not a good idea) but if that's the case we should get rid of all diversity planning and "striving to have more women" as that's tipping the odds even more.
If women are naturally better managers they would in fact make it more often to managerial positions
Not necessarily. You can be really talented and completely overlooked due to discrimination/bias/prejudice. There is plenty of evidence that people expect leaders to be tall, have deep voices, broad shoulders, etc -- ie look and sound like a man. They have studied this.
Others here are suggesting that women get promoted faster in IT because only the best and most dedicated stay. If you are already good and also happen to have traits that are beneficial when assigned managerial tasks, then that could go hand-in-hand.
They may be approaching diversity efforts all wrong. I suspect they are and I do my best to advocate for another path. However, most men who criticize this stuff do not genuinely seem to be interested in a better path forward. They seem to be interested in coming up with some justification for "we should keep advantaging men the way we do now -- that works for me! -- and stop trying to do anything to dismantle the very real barriers women face."
All this focus on women and minorities obscures the issue.
White males can have problems fitting in, too. Being born into a low social class is probably more damning to your future than any external quality you might have.
We need to accept that being inclusive isn't about focusing on a single group - that's singling people out again - but realize that people are being left out of whatever good thing we have as a society for any number of reasons.
Understand this, and just be more accepting of people in general.
Often issues are made into gender/race issues because it drives readership and clicks. It's depressing as we miss the root cause and create more alienation and conflict between people.
e.g. "Women don't ask" - a book with concepts on salary negotiation vital to many men I know.
That said, historically there was clear gender/race discrimination. There is today in pockets, just as there is reverse discrimination.
There is a low supply of female engineers, but rather than addressing the problem organizations implement various forms of affirmative action. Trying to fix discrimination with more discrimination.
My partner is in tech. My organization has a network to support women in their careers which my female coworkers view as outright anti-male discrimination.
Unfortunately, the bell curve doesn't support these policies. We have both worked with women who would have not held their position as men.
It's quite frustrating, as we now have capable women forging ahead while less competent women are riding the wave of feminism and tarnishing their reputations.
I'm curious. Have you not suffered this, or at least heard of it?
We can't make progress on this if we all continue to willfully ignore the flaws in our arguments.
However, the only thing we really know for sure, and for which there is a mountain of evidence, is that women as a group face significantly greater challenges in this industry than men do. That may filter for various traits in women such as greater levels of grit, but I'm going to wait until this particular survey is corroborated by further study before I buy into the idea that women and men in our industry are significantly differentiated by something like personal drive. I can believe it, but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion based on this evidence alone.
Excellent observation, and lets not forget it's not valid only in tech. Let's not forget that every boy is encouraged (some would say indoctrinated) from early age to learn the art of cooking, and to spend the evenings preparing dinner (let alone the long-standing sexist attitude - sadly still espoused by many - that men belong in the kitchen). With such an early start it's no wonder that men dominate the field and that only 6 women have managed to earn the prized 3 michelin stars.
>I know it's hard to believe, but women don't usually get sent to coding summer camp as teenagers. Our parents don't usually encourage us to take AP computer science,
Males aren't either. The difference in participation is caused by men engaging in nerdy hobbies more than women (trawling BB boards, playing online video games, etc.). Why this happens, no one really knows.
> It's not some feminist conspiracy that women are being promoted, it's just that the women who go into tech are usually already pretty gritty people.
Interesting that when men statistically seem to have an advantage in any area, it's a "problem" that "needs to be corrected", but if women start to statistically dominate, it's clearly because "women are just better".
It's not that they're better. It's that a woman in tech has to work twice as hard to get the same recognition as men. After working twice as hard, you tend to overshoot and end up becoming way better than the men.
Mediocre women in tech just aren't allowed, whereas mediocre men are accepted. Try to read the article she linked.
As a women in tech. I'd like citations too. Because I'm not clear what article you are referring too,and the ones I've read in this thread and the medium article are exceptionally weak.
Poor or even worse bullshit articles and poor citations just make the backlash worse, and even harder to get accepted without having to prove I'm at the least a mythical 2x-5x developer.
Due to the backfire effect[1], no amount of citation convinces the disbelievers. Those who want to believe find the articles by themselves. Those who don't experience backfire effect.
But, here you go, let's try showing you a survey and a study amongst the top Google hits for "women have to work harder for the same recognition" and see what you think:
That's not what I'm really asking for. I live that reality most days. So I believe it fully.
When I discuss these and sometimes any issue really with engineers or scientists, I try to find technical research papers with null hypothesizes and methodology.
My point being for technical people like engineers, you aren't convincing a lot of people with light fluffy pieces without links to hard data, in fact you get them even more entrenched in their current way of thinking because they think you don't have real scientific evidence.
I've found in personal experience, technical people are far more open minded then the general population, but they tolerate far less bullshit.
I have found that people, even technical people, will question any study you send their way if they don't already agree to it. They'll say the sample isn't big enough, that the statistics are flawed, or they'll cite contrary studies.
I don't understand what you're looking for. I don't have juicy information you don't have, so I imagine if there is something out there that you searched and couldn't find, I don't think I'll succeed in finding it either.
I guess that means all that remains is intolerable bullshit?
If we're making generalizations here, then women generally don't like hunching over a computer monitor in isolation for 6+ hours every day. Much like how men generally don't like to put on makeup and act in plays.
The fact that there are way too many IT people from poor immigrant backgrounds (no opportunities for anything you mention) discredits your first point.
> it's GENERALLY because it is something that you very much care about and want to do.
Given that there is a higher demand for IT jobs than supply makes this impossible. You just have to be good at it.
Since when are there "way too many" IT people from poor immigrant backgrounds? As far as I can tell, programmers are more likely to be from the educated middle class.
Probably referring to asians(including indians). Outside of silicon valley, you see a lot of asian developers whose families came from poor immigrant families.
My experience with Indian programmers is that they tend to come from the Indian middle class. Middle class in India may be poorer than in the US, but they're still well educated.
indian middle class == american poor. More true in 80-90's when the current crop grew up. Also, its kind of funny to be called 'middle class' in the third poorest country in the world.
I suppose I could think of a number of explanations for this observed effect.
1. Selection- because so much of IT is hostile to women, the only ones who become senior in the field are the very good ones.
2. Affirmative action- companies promoting women regardless of merit to seem progressive.
3. Some sort of inate or socialized advantage– the "women are better at people stuff" philosophy. If this is the case, then you'd expect more women to be in management.
4. Methodological flaws in the survey. I can't find any detailed discussion of their process, but phrases like "Of the senior developers who responded to the survey" seem to imply there could easily be significant selection bias.
Feel free to take your pick based on what you already believe. Personally, I'm going to wait for more data before forming any solid conclusions based on this.
You can take a look at [1] and the data there to see that 1 is the culprit, but only a piece of it. Women are pushed into less technical roles throughout their careers. Women with the same technical qualifications are significantly more likely to be managers than in a senior technical position.
Because your suggestion is similar to suggesting that black men in the south with PhDs just chose to be school teachers after the Civil Rights Act. Women themselves say that they feel pushed by their managers to go into management [1]. By winnowing everything down to personal choice and preference we remove any impetus to look into the root causes of disparity.
EDIT: the same link is in my parent comment -- going back to your previous comment: "reading helps".
I had a cursory look, stopped when the old tired tropes about percent of population vs. percent in tech were pulled out. Then I looked at the URL: "gender.stanford.edu/...". Then I looked at the root of that URL, http://gender.stanford.edu/:
"The Clayman Institute for Gender Research"
Pray tell how this is not gender studies?
From the site: "Founded in 1974, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University creates knowledge and seeks to implement change to promote gender equality."
Regarding selection, a lot of these selection decisions are made before people have any experience with actual real world IT.
A mother who thinks that programming isn't something for her girls in high school does damage that no amount of work at making things friendlier later on can repair.
I think it's counterproductive to associate selection exclusively or even strongly with IT culture specifically. It lets wider culture off the hook.
It's not a premise at all- I'm basing nothing on it. I'm not even claiming it's true. I'm just saying that it is one of several possible explanations for the available data.
This immediately made me think of Paul Graham's article "A Way to Detect Bias". He talks about how a hiring bias (against women in this case) results in those who are hired being above average in skill.
Just one hypothesis on this data, but that would help explain why those women who are hired then get promoted faster - because they are actually outperforming their peers.
In order to even survive, the average woman has to be at the very top of their game, or else theyd be gone because it isn't worth it to put up with all the BS that they have to.
The big elephant in the room is pregnancy and children.
I've thought about having children, and leaving my career very intensely, but pushed it back after seeing the related costs.
Beware that this is almost certainly subject to Campbell's law, and trying to actually rate organizational bias by hire-to-promotion rates will result in companies gaming the metric without fixing the problem.
I know the reason, because I have seen it in action.
Simply put, few women work in technical IT, but end up in management, business analysis, etc. And management has a faster and higher career path to elevated positions, while techs will top out at "senior engineer/developer" after about 5 years, and will be still stuck there after 20 unless they basically give up their passion and become a manager.
Of course, there are far fewer management positions than tech roles, as the are far fewer women working in tech generally.
It's interesting that there is a huge emphasis on the gender disparity, especially in tech, without also bringing race into the equation. When I first read the article and headline, I first thought to myself: "Are we talking about predominantly white women? Black women? Hispanic women? Asian women?"
For example, I know that Asians are generally 'over-represented' in tech yet if you look stats which compare professionals by ethnicity (https://d.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline...), Asians (both male and female) get promoted at a lower rate than white men and women (https://c.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline...). And we could look at specific company's like Intel, Yahoo, and LinkedIn to find similar patterns, namely white people have a much higher likelihood to achieve higher executive positions compared to Asians (even when controlling for difference in company demographic composition).
It would interesting to see that data broken up by age of immigration to the country. I've worked with a large number of incredibly intelligent Asians who immigrated here in theirs 20's-40's. And they are all too smart and hard working for their positions, and it seems like the primary reason they've been held back is because of things like visa issues, lack of fluency, lack of a college/highschool/family network to draw upon, and less cultural understanding which inhibits bonding. This has meant that many of them are 1-2 promotions behind where I think they would be if they had immigrated here in middle school.
Following the logic of most mental gymnasts here, the best IT companies should be women-only companies by now. People seem automatically to turn off their brains when discussing anything that might oppose the orthodoxy of affirmative action. This is a case where a bias that first appeared in academia (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-...) and is now bleeding to corporate life.
If men or any other subgroup are not rising through the ranks as fast, that is a clear discrimination and it is a problem, not an 'achievement'. It's this kind of ill-logic that brings pro-women policies in a bad light.
Because there are less women in tech, the best companies should be all women? That logic makes no sense. If only the best women are hired, while average men also get hired, that means there's discrimination against women, while the few women that do stay in the industry will tend to be of above average ability, and therefore rise faster.
As long as the vast majority of programmers are men, it's ludicrous to complain that men are being discriminated against. There are dozens of studies showing that men have it way easier in a multitude of ways. But it's good that there are more visible women in tech, and hopefully that will lead to even out the balance in the future.
>>As long as the vast majority of programmers are men, it's ludicrous to complain that men are being discriminated against
Let me stop you here. This is a flawed argument. It's very possible that men gravitate to a certain field more than women but there is discrimination against men in that field (for example if companies think it's good PR to have more women at top positions). I am not arguing if that actually happens or not here. I am just pointing out that your argument is logically flawed.
I can even give you an example of discrimination against majority group: it's beneficial to be tall white man in many Asian countries. You get more respect and bring prestige to the company. Tall white men are not majority but still they are favored and their Asian counterparts are discriminated against.
Surely it makes sense, like everything else in these comments! If societal bias filters only high-performing women into tech, then the company that managed to snatch all the females would surely have an advantage versus all the rest. But let's not stop there with this rabbit hole: if indeed hiring bias is the cause that women rise faster in tech, and we want women to reach the highest echelons of tech industries, then logic dictates that we should keep discriminating with equal vigor, or else women will stop rising the ranks, leaving the goal unfinished. Oh, and by the way we could apply this wise reasoning to any kind of group that is disadvantaged in tech, say, the blind, the latinos, the blacks, those under 6 years old etc. They should all be rising higher in the ranks, so that soon all senior positions are filled by minority groups, leaving the "averages" in the lower ranks. simple logic.
If a company is more eager to hire women, they'd probably end up hiring more average women, and the difference between men and women would go away. Also, there are still plenty of above average men. The smartest company would hire the best men and women, not hire just women, on the assumption that women are better than men, because that assumption would end up defeating itself.
Though if a company only hire people who already established themselves at other companies, and hire them blindly, only knowing their gender and nothing about their performance, I suppose hiring women would be the better bet.
There's a common misconception, that technical excellence is a primary skill for managing a team of programmers. It's not the primary skill but a secondary one. The primary skill is managing people. One still needs to have technical competence -- far beyond just being able to code. However, the focus shouldn't be on dazzling displays of technical esoterica. The focus should be on balancing a tangle of conflicting cost/benefits and communication with the team -- logistics and tactics, not fisticuffs.
You can be a great manager with solidly average technical skills, so long as you can find a resource to advise you. (Dunning-Krueger trap: You may not know enough to understand if you truly understand the advice.) A team managed by such will usually outperform an average manager with great technical skills.
Alexander the Great would probably have conquered more of the world, if he had personally fought less.
Proposed causes of Alexander's death included alcoholic liver disease, fever, and strychnine poisoning, but little data support those versions.[15] According to the University of Maryland School of Medicine report of 1998, Alexander probably died of typhoid fever[16] (which, along with malaria, was common in ancient Babylon[17]). In the week before Alexander's death, historical accounts mention chills, sweats, exhaustion and high fever, typical symptoms of infectious diseases, including typhoid fever.
Also true, but I was saying that he probably could have performed even better through war, if he hadn't been as injured as he was at the end of his campaigns.
His decreased health at the end of his life was largely due to wounds from fighting. He probably would have been able to carry on his campaign longer, and would have made better decisions at the end of it, if his health were better.
> Alexander the Great would probably have conquered more of the world, if he had personally fought less.
I doubt it. It's much easier to inspire people when you are in the trenches (wrong era of warfare) with them. It's not a conincicidence that many of the greatest generals in history (napoleon, Hannibal, Alexander) were known for being in the thick of the action.
As a man, I've noticed the "women promotion difference" very importantly in companies I've been employed in: Since 2006, it's mostly women who are promoted, with configurations like my last job where both my team lead and the manager were women.
On the other hand, I've left those companies because I could notice there was no career path for me, and created my own. I identify to a generation of men who've been sacrified for women equality. I'm all for equality, as long as everyone has equal chances, which we currently don't have. I'm very happy that we now start having studies supporting that men are less promoted than women today in some context (a minima in Luxembourg, France and Australia for what I'm concerned).
It's now time we study across all countries the mean-time-to-promotion, and it's time we include talks in conferences about the difficulties of men.
And it's time we stop having differentiated education and career paths for women. Today, women are equal in the mind if most men, and have a large swathes of explicit advantages granted by laws.
As a man, I'm embarrassed that this is the top comment on HN. This talk about "a generation of men being sacrificed" is absurd. Men still dominate the IT industry at all levels. To say that we're being sacrificed en masse is hyperbolic to say the least. It reminds me of the way that the Trump campaign makes its points about the state of the world.
Furthermore, so many men in tech are quick to explain away statistics about women/minorities being hired less by saying, "There's no bias! It's because they're not as skilled!" But when stats show that women advance faster, the story flips, and suddenly it's, "This proves bias! There's no way it's due to skill!"
It's not a hard argument to make that women (and many other underrepresented people) are subjected to a stricter filter in the tech world, playing with a deck socially and structurally stacked against them. It's no surprise at all that people who can find success despite playing on a harder difficulty level will be among the most capable. An article like this is actually heartening, as it indicates that achievement and ability are internally recognized.
And now I've broken one of my cardinal rules (don't engage with social flamewar threads on HN), but you're exactly right - many of these comments are too embarrasing to let pass.
The whole equality story was, at the beginning, "If there's more men passing one stage (IQ tests, high school diploma or promotion), then it's biased against women.
Then suddenly when women are promoted more often than men, your story becomes "Women are just smarter than men, it's normal". Can't you just have a little compassion for men who didn't have the skills and deserve to be pushed and taught a little bit? And the prejudice about "men are stupid" is repeated in many innocent settings:
- Everyone can cite 10 qualities of women, especially smartness [1].
- You can't quote any quality attributed to men. There's none, no quality attributed to men in any newspaper, in any document, in any culture. "What about muscles?" The thing about muscles is, women reckon we have strength because it would be hard to deny it and it helps construct the idea that we're violent. But muscles also help build the image of men being stupid, and it doesn't give us a skill.
This prejudice does have real-world effects:
- Men are twice more likely to be homeless or to fail their studies,
- Men are 30 times more likely to land in prison.
THIRTY times! But somehow, women succeed to capture all the work we do for equality.
The fact you're unconscious about male difficulties shows how much work there's left to do about male equality. The progress we've made for women about equality of chances and freedom of pursuing good jobs, we now need to make it for men too. Since you're talking about politics, the fact that the only way to "vote for men equality" is to vote for Trump is a horrible abomination: I want equality, I'm keen to vote for a woman, but if that means that she'll do even more to accentuate the "privileged path" for women and accentuate messages breeding hate between women and men, then you're asking a voter to make... a dangerous choice.
[1] Qualities that are generally attributed to women: "Women are better at multitasking" – where scientific studies are much more gray-area than that; "Women are better at communication" – where in fact it's males who are handicapped about communication and who deserve some equality budget for "education to communication" and "education to feelings"; "Women are better at tastes and decoration" which harms the participation of many interested men in decoration topics; "Women are more mature, earlier" when in fact this maturity is judged on a biased set of responsabilities; "Women are better at raising children" which creates unprecedented disadvantages for men who want the custody of their child, and finally, "Women are better at school" when in fact it's teacher bias which gives them better marks ( http://www.bbc.com/news/education-32302022 ) – As you can see I'm very well documented on every quality which is theoretically attributed to women and where, in fact, it's just that many papers are unfairly condescending towards men.
Edit: your comment has been edited extensively, so I'm responding to whatever it was at the point in time I started typing.
---
To put this very dispassionately, filtering more aggressively reduces both total count and false positives (if the filter shares any correlation with success). The population subjected to the stricter filter will have a higher percentage of people who are deserving of promotion.
This would be true even if we limited our entire workforce to ivy league white men and then applied an additional filter to a random subset of them. If the filter correlates, the subset will outperform. I don't mean to say this is the only thing impacting who works where and how successful they are, but it is certainly present.
You're responding to an argument that I didn't make. The global population statements about which gender is "smarter" are your own.
Regarding Trump (I'm pretty sure I didn't bring this up, either), his recent exhibit of repeatedly mentioning that he was being shortchanged on time during the debate while actually having (negligibly) more time to speak (~40min vs ~39min) is a perfect illustration of the “prejudice” you're describing. When used to a privileged position, equality feels like bias.
> You're responding to an argument that I didn't make.
You're correct, I answered to both parents in one comment, and found it useful to put my comment under yours because you had a very common objection, although I forgot to address it.
Concerning the "filter" story, how do you know girls just aren't just less interested in programming? Example that may be the norm: I've tried many times to get my god-daughter interested in computers, but the computer/tablet/phone/electricity/mechanics/woodworks/Mythbusters thingy really doesn't raise any interest or even bare curiosity. She just does it because she loves spending time with me, but remembers nothing.
If there were a genetic or social construct that made that fewer girls identify with programming, then it would kill the argument that "due to filtering, women are better" and reinforce the argument that "Women are promoted, not because they're better, but because companies are required to promote women".
And in fact, studies have demonstrated that fewer girls are interested in programming because of society.
> And in fact, studies have demonstrated that fewer girls are interested in programming because of society.
I agree! But why? And when? And is it just girls? The filter I'm talking about extends far beyond and is applied far earlier than the job interview, or the application to college, or which classes someone takes in high school. The paths laid out for all of us have varying degrees of difficulty, and shape how we grow.
Speaking as a white male from California who grew up with a computer in the house, in many ways my own career in tech is the path of least resistance. Sure, I've worked hard and chose to invest myself in these skills and this career, but the impediments to doing so were much, much less significant than the social and structural biases that people with other backgrounds run into at every. single. step.
Simply recognizing that I got to shoot for the hoop from a few feet closer than the rest of the population has given me a great respect for those who made the same shot from farther out. It's not that an individual like myself (like you?) with an advantaged position couldn't overcome the same challenges, we simply have not been tested in the same ways. I don't mean to speak for you as an individual, only that over a large enough group you're going to see a lot more people make it who got to take the easier shot.
I think our fundamental disagreement is that you're saying people like me (perhaps us?) don't actually get that easier shot. And that I simply do not believe, because of my experience in and observation of this industry, and because of the near-endless supply of evidence to the same. [citation needed: plenty in this thread, and every thread like it]
No, that's not our disagreement. Our disagreement is that if fewer women want to get into programming, then they're not being discriminated against. They are free and just didn't choose programming.
It could be a social construct of genders where male babies are exposed to other things than female babies, it wouldn't matter. The girl (e.g. my god-daughter) who likes chemistry goes into chemistry and is not being "discriminated against because she didn't go into programming". And your argument is in the same family that says there should be 50% women in programming because there's 50% females at birth.
You're also focussed on demonstrating that men get an easier shot. But if women who want to do programming can do it with no more barriers than men, then no-one is being discriminated against. And in fact, today, if a girl takes programming, she'll have a better career than men, because we promote women. There are countless stories that "women are harassed in IT", but they are all anecdotal and match with the global story told to girls since birth: "You're a victim, and you should spend your whole life finding occurrences where you can prove that you're a victim". It's not a tin-hat stuff I've invented, it's what, for example, the brand Always teaches to little girls with the #LikeAGirl video.
To come back to stories about girls being harassed: Is there a scientific experiement that we could do to prove that women really have a harder time than men, when we include sexual harassment of course, but also include when a weak male like me have been victims of some alpha manager, and include stories of men being fired because a woman doesn't like them (And I have live examples such as: Douglas Crockford, the PyCon conference story, the GitHub ceos, the GitHub's white males who've been fired, and two colleagues from my Australian company)?
All in all, I see women promoted all the time, I see women receiving a warm welcome in every team, I see many males being extra carful about including women, I see many downvotes and condemnation when someone posts a sexist remark on HN, I see corporate help to ensure women are untouchable and promoted: Not to paint the real world with rainbows, but I won't just buy into a story of a few women saying "You can't learn programming when you're a girl".
I also receive 20-50 upvotes when I remind people that women need to work too, so the feeling that women are too unfairly advantaged before they're really competent seems to be a common resentment across the community. Just try to think about what we'd do if we wanted peace. We certainly wouldn't try to accentuate victimization so much, and wouldn't try to have different paths for men and women (hard lonely work with no help for men who'll stay programmers, little programming but a lots of socializing and girls-in-web groups for women who'll become managers). And we certainly wouldn't have the following video, which is both dishonest towards men and an incitation to hate for female viewers:
Unity, peace and solidarity is something we build together, unless it's not unity, peace or solidarity that we want. And women certainly aren't currently working for that.
Only recruiters can confirm but the filter for women, at least to get interviews, is often times lower than for men.
Companies can't legally discriminate against men, but they can (and many do) post up at women engineer conferences and give interviews out like candy to people from that conference. They're discriminating based on where they source the resume from. The source just happens to be made up of all females. That's what Grace Hopper is for.
I generally agree, but what I can't explain is: if it really is because they are better because of this stricter filter, I would expect the stricter filter to apply to the promotion process too.
So, why isn't it?
Edit: maybe it's a sign of things getting "better". Women already working are on average better at what they do, and as people become more aware of the problem it's easier for them to become promoted because the filter isn't as strict when compared to X years ago.
I thought a similar thing when I read this. Somewhat sad, but my first thought was that the second we near parity with the discrepancy between wage and representation between genders in IT/Engineering you'll see claims of "reverse" sexism. Then I read the discussion here.
Oh c'mon. Instead of being embarrassed at least try to understand the point. It's a fact that women are preferred for promotion in many places just because they are women because of affrimative action often called "striving for diversity". It's also a fact many men feel they are discriminated against in such settings.
It doesn't mean there aren't problems and discrimination against women but you act like his point is not valid and not even worth acknowledging. You just feel "embarrassed". You should feel that way but not because of the comment but because your attitude.
I understood tajen's point very well. He has provided a few personal anecdotes, and from there he extrapolates that an entire generation of men has been "sacrificed". He then goes on to claim that "women are equal in the minds of most men."
This, despite the fact that, per the very article we're discussing, 94% of senior devs are men, 92% of IT managers are men, and 93% of the heads of IT are men. This, despite the fact that studies continue to show that simply changing the name on a resume from a man's to a woman's has significant negative effects.
None of tajen's ridiculous assertions are supported by any evidence whatsoever. It's hyperbolic unsubstantiated fear-mongering in an attempt to minimize another group's problems while magnifying his own. He has to resort to such tactics, otherwise women's problems will be treated with greater urgency than men's (as they should be). I was embarrassed to see these comments at the top of HN, and I'm happy that people have since come to their senses and downvoted them to where they belong.
> This, despite the fact that, per the very article we're discussing, 94% of senior devs are men, 92% of IT managers are men, and 93% of the heads of IT are men.
Yep. It's not incompatible. Maybe most women don't want to spend their life in front of a computer. Maybe, as Margeritte Yourcenar used to mention, being a head of IT is a shit life and women are more clever than men in not trying to get so high. Maybe if you start with an all-male community and overpromote women, then 10 years is still not enough to become head of IT. Those numbers are little proof of discrimination. We need to know the mean-time-to-promotion.
> This, despite the fact that studies continue to show that simply changing the name on a resume from a man's to a woman's has significant negative effects.
This is a much more serious offense, and straight illegal in any developed economy (I hope). But if I had to hire a woman in my company, I'd be very afraid that hiring a woman leads to an (unwarranted) harassment accusation against the CEO like it so often did (GitHub and so many others, I'm looking at you), so I'd probably weigh whether it's worth sticking with a discrimination lawsuit risk. I'd probaboy still hire the woman, though, for ethics. But I would probably keep her in a separate room from me, just to dodge sexual harassment claims. What a f'cked world we live in. Can't even have a normal behaviour with women.
> None of taken's ridiculous assertions are supported by any evidence whatsoever.
Thank you for the insult, which tells a lot about the soundness of your personality. My evidence is:
- Around me, I see women be promoted, it's a pretty strong fact,
- OP's study says women are promoted faster than men, so it corroborates my supposedly "magnified own problems" (If men aren't allowed to have problems, wtf),
- There are laws that require companies to promote women as much as men and to reach quotas of managers.
- ...along with the dozen other comments with factual references and links I've posted today.
My position is very well documented because of people like you, and you're welcome if you want to discuss facts. On the other hand, if a rational reasoning triggers so much of your emotions, then it means you're associating my position with macho personalities like Trump, fascists or racists, and that means you're making a generalization about me. Did you know that generalizations trump the acurate perception? I'm much more in favour of women's rights than you think – I just can't stand the men-disparaging that we repeat over and over.
> Yep. It's not incompatible. Maybe most women don't want to spend their life in front of a computer. Maybe, as Margeritte Yourcenar used to mention, being a head of IT is a shit life and women are more clever than men in not trying to get so high.
Maybe women want to be at the bottom of the workplace totem poll? Are you seriously going to begin your hypothesizing there? Every single racist from the past said, "I've met plenty of coloreds and they're happy being slaves/segregated/living in ghettos!" It is absolutely ridiculous to begin there while discrimination is still looming large.
> Maybe if you start with an all-male community and overpromote women, then 10 years is still not enough to become head of IT. Those numbers are little proof of discrimination. We need to know the mean-time-to-promotion.
I never claimed these numbers alone are proof of discrimination. The discrimination has been proven in other ways, and these numbers simply highlight how effective it's been.
> Thank you for the insult, which tells a lot about the soundness of your personality. My evidence is:
Readers, note that I attacked his evidence, and his response is to attack my personality.
> - Around me, I see women be promoted, it's a pretty strong fact,
Strong fact? Your anecdotal evidence is worth zero. Around me I see <1% Trump voters. Doesn't change the fact that he has 43% of the nation's vote.
> - OP's study says women are promoted faster than men, so it corroborates my supposedly "magnified own problems" (If men aren't allowed to have problems, wtf),
Numerous people in this thread (and elsewhere, e.g. pg) have produced competing hypotheses for why women might be getting promoted faster. If you want to bury your head in the sand and ignore their reasoning, I suppose I can't stop you. It makes you look sexist, though, and it's why I and many others were embarrassed to see your comment.
> My position is very well documented because of people like you, and you're welcome if you want to discuss facts. On the other hand, if a rational reasoning triggers so much of your emotions, then it means you're associating my position with macho personalities like Trump, fascists or racists, and that means you're making a generalization about me. Did you know that generalizations trump the acurate perception? I'm much more in favour of women's rights than you think – I just can't stand the men-disparaging that we repeat over and over.
Rational reasoning? I'm not the one who needs to resort to ridiculous hyperboles to make my point. You speak of a generation of men being sacrificed, but there's no solid evidence to show that we're doing worse than women (quite the opposite). You speak of sexism being dead, but evidence shows women are still discriminated against in the workplace. You've completely failed to defend either of the claims I attacked.
I don't hate you, I don't hate myself, I don't hate men, and I don't hate women. I see plenty of great qualities in men (strong, assertive, spatially and mathematically intelligent, logical, emotionally stable, sexually expressive, loyal, etc), but to be honest, I would prefer to be treated as an individual than to be stereotyped and labeled in such ways.
It sucks that you've had it so rough. I don't doubt that the women in your particular life may have had unfair advantages in many ways. That's frustrating. I might be pissed, too. I also have a friend with an ex-wife who controls his kid, and it's infuriating. But cheer up. You have plenty to live for, and the world's not as bad as it may seem.
Specifically, we're better than allowing anecdotes to masquerade as data, even when we feel vague discomfort coming from the general direction of the issue being discussed.
As a man, I am embarrassed that you can't see the point he was making.
It's not that "Wimmin' are takin' our jerbs!", he was just pointing out that promoting women because they have a vagina is just as bad as promoting someone because they have a penis or white skin.
#1: I don't believe the genders are the same in every way but genitals. There are lots of other physiological and psychological differences, so I've never bought the argument that every industry should have a perfect 50-50 representation. It wouldn't be surprising to me if there was some intrinsic advantage (either environmental or biological) women had over men as managers.
#2: In a system in which women are discriminated against, it takes extra grit for women to push through, get hired, and do the work anyway. These are women who really want it very badly. The cream of the crop. Therefore it's not surprising to see them perform better than their male peers on average.
#3: In a system in which women have historically been discriminated against, there will be lots of men with jobs they don't deserve. When women begin to enter the workforce in greater numbers, these men will be the first to lose their jobs to rising women.
I could go on. There are plenty of reasons why women might be getting promoted faster. One should not immediately jump to the conclusion that it's solely due to affirmative action quotas with no evidence to back that up. The world is more complex than that.
I don't think favoritism is responsible for all of men's achievements or actions? I don't see how that's even relevant?
You were suggesting in the top comment that women are being given jobs because they are women (rather than men), and that that is unjust. I don't see the difference between that statement and the idea that women are "taking" (i.e., unjustly acquiring) jobs (which would otherwise have been men's.)
So you have a problem with saying "we should hire more women," but you don't have a problem with women being given jobs because they are women? I am literally just confused. Do you think women are being given jobs that should have gone to men in a fair world or not?
> with configurations like my last job where both my team lead and the manager were women.
I guess you have to get used to such "configurations", given that in a fully equal world having both a female team lead and manager is entirely possible. Or how does this confirm your claim that women are unfairly promoted more frequently?
The reason for quicker promotions is probably a skewed distribution of personalities, as also mentioned further below. Men of all personalities are more likely to start science and engineering degrees because they are nurtured into it by society anyway. Women have to be the kind of person that does not care about such biases, and develops and follows interests.
I my former company, it was simple: people who sucked at technical stuff were promoted to managerial positions, hoping that they would show some qualities there, and making sure they would at least not any more harm the projects they were part of.
Therefore we had between 0% and 5% women in technical teams, and 75% in management.
At what point to we say enough promotions based on gender and race? When all of the worlds companies are 51% men, 51% minority? Serious question: Put yourselves in the shoes of a CEO. What's the proper proportion of men to women, whites to minorities? Does anyone make this calculus? When does it ever end?
In Sweden, when 60% of college students were women, they stopped affirmative action because it would benefit men, and women sued for discrimination when affirmative action worked against them. [1]
There's no point at which feminists stop looking out for women at the expense of men.
Yes, this is how it should be done. Actually, if I ran a company, I would go further. There would be no affirmative action or quota nonsense. Best person for the job, that is all. I care only about ability, work ethic, and whether they are a fit for the team/company. Anyone whose resume was being forwarded would have the name and any other gender/age/race info removed by HR before sending. And for anyone who came in for an interview but we passed on I would require the written, documented reason just to have for record-keeping. That way, HR could periodically go in and retroactively analyze to see if there was any sort of bias (intentional or not) or other funny business going on.
That's how you maximize your productivity and efficiency and, by extension, profit. It also motivates people because they know they are much closer to a true meritocracy.
That's what 95% of the companies in the world already do, because they're struggling to find qualified talent (at their price point - because not every company is SV-rich).
Only the companies with enough profit margins can afford to concern themselves with this inclusion/empowerment drivel, because they can hire "fluff" employees to boost their diversity or whatever other metrics they want to use to make them feel good about themselves.
If we take your premise as true, it seems like you'd still be wrong. Anyone who doesn't want to get "yelled" at is going to want to do that calculus (conference organizers, the aforementioned CEO, etc).
Fair enough on calling me out for that; I was aware it wasn't technically correct when I said it but thought it got my point across well enough in the absence of a better way to phrase it.
My point was that even if the model you described in that sentence part is broadly correct, the "nobody" part is inconsistent with the rest of the model because at some level people respondent to public opinion must care about the those "yelling:.
I'll counter your anecdotal evidence with my own anecdotal evidence, which is that I've observed either the opposite or no difference in the companies I've worked for (I'm a man in IT in NYC). Either way, anecdotal, so shrug. But "a generation of men who've been sacrificed" is definitely something I've never seen signs of in the IT industry.
TL;DR: genital integrity (no circumcision), no draft, parental rights, privileged in courts. Differs by country, of course (e.g. in some EU countries, men have to work longer to retire).
Even when women and men have equal retirements' age - the average life expectancy is 10 years longer for women. That means mandatory retirement fund is indirect wealth transfer from men to women. Unequal retirements' age just makes it even more unfair.
It's sad that blatantly obvious differences between genders are fought when they are bad for women (STEM employement, rape, home violence) and ignored when they are bad for man (suicide rate, life expectancy, rights after divorce).
I doubt we will ever see positive discrimination for male patients in hospitals for example, even if it could decrease the life expectancy gap :)
I am not arguing your point but it should be about life expectancy once productive age is reached not life expectancy overall. Maybe there are other factors which causes many young men to die but it evens out once productive age is reached (pure speculation but I feel it's an important distinction for the point to be valid).
Your statement makes no sense on a purely logical level. Most of the issues we're talking about "should be the default, and" advantage" in the context we're discussing it means "area that one is better off in". GP's point was that having your genital integrity legally protected is not a right that is extended to men.
I think tomp is pointing out that doing something equivalent to circumcision to a female baby would be illegal. Rightly so, in my opinion. I strongly believe that male circumcision should be illegal as well.
If all rapists realized today that they shouldn't rape, and stopped doing it, then no more rape.
Now the only way to even start down a path like that is to start letting people know "don't rape". She's too drunk to walk straight? Don't. She says no? Don't. etc...
Opposing male circumcision doesn't require complaining about how females are privileged. Educate people on why they don't really need to chop up their babies penis.
Right, because 500k women in the U.S. who have undergone actual genital mutilation, not a surgery with tangible benefits, are non-existent.
There has not been a draft in 50 years.
Privilege in courts has been shown to be bullshit time and time again. Men who attempt to receive custody of their children actually get them more than 50% of the time.
Re: 1 and 2, parent was asking for laws. Also, there's no tangible benefits to circumcision in the US (if that's what you were implying). Re: 3, women also receive shorter sentences for same crimes (although the article doesn't mention it, and that's not an explicit legal disadvantage).
1. is extremely ridiculous
- reduced risk of cancer
- reduced risk of STIs
- no difference in sensitivity
I'm at work and don't feel like googling in depth circumcision articles, but "genital integrity" is a ridiculous minimization of the issues faced by women who have actually had their genitals mutilated. If anyone wants to dig up the citations for me, I'd appreciate it. But, this isn't a circumjerk article, so this is as far down the chain as I'll go.
You're misremembering your studies -- women who are sentenced to prison (for felonies) receive roughly the same prison sentences as men. They are however, significantly less likely to be sentenced. But, they are also significantly less likely to commit violent crimes, which you have to take into account in your analysis.
"Starr's research incorporates disparities found at those earlier stages, and finds that "more disparity is introduced at each phase of the justice process.""
"After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, "men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do," and "[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted." "
The study you linked is titled "Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging and Its Sentencing Consequences", says so right at the top, you just have to read it. It is not the study talked about in the press-release I linked to. It is referenced in said press-release as the "previous study" that found racial disparities, which were found to be 6 times smaller than the gender disparities found in the study that the press release is about.
You're right, sorry, I was hasty in reading the linked materials.
Here is another contradictory study [1], along with a link to an ABA article explaining why some differences in sentencing should not only be expected, but potentially encouraged [2].
- In France, organizations which support only women, by statute (see last link). In USA, "Girlz In Web" and all similar ventures.
- In France, aid and support that is only dedicated to women (excluding child-bearing support, which is deserved), where there's no mirror support for male problems.
I'm French, so unfortunately I'll quote the French law. On the upside this law was an election promise of the current government (left-wing, socialist), so you're really reading the outcome of a current debate: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFT...
- First, let's note overall that there's no law that reserves something to men. It would be illegal. Obviously.
- Let's also drop that women have a 10% longer life. It means their retirement is 6 years longer than men's average of 18 years.
- Point #5 says "Fight against the poverty of women". What about the poverty of men? There are twice more homeless men than women. There are 30 times more men in prison than women. I see what they mean when they think about the poverty of women, but men need specific help that's attached to their gender. Failing their education and dealing drugs falls in that bucket.
- Point #8 says "Equality of women headcount in politics". It's great, I like it, I'm all for equality of women in all areas including politics. But what about sectors where men are less frequent? One argument I often hear about women equality is "We're also fighting for a men, look at male nurse for example", where, in fact, those laws about "equality" don't fight for the equality of men in the nurse area.
- Point #10 says "Make studies known about the social construction of gendered roles." One very actual gendered construct is that, as a woman, you'll get much more help. First because you naturally inspire kindness and solidarity, thanks to your body, gender and image. Second because there are big budgets allocated to women equality (e.g. benefits for creating a company[1], organizations that support you while you create your company[2]). And last, the social construct of genders is built upon years of communicating to women that they need help, and the government especially participates to this when they have http://femmes.gouv.fr but don't have http://hommes.gouv.fr .
All in all, this law only cares about equality when women are impacted. If it were for men, you would see sections like "Fighting against the men-related prejudices", "Fighting for male dropouts", "Fighting for dad custody", "Fighting against street violence" (which mostly impacts men), "Fighting for kids who don't like football" (as a gay man, I can tell you it's really tough to feel abandoned when all your schoolmates play ball in so many occasions).
Anyway, I don't feel like we're trying to close the gap: We're rather generating more hate both ways by increasing the care about one gender and not the other [3]. If you want peace, don't tease the losers.
"I'm all for equality, as long as everyone has equal chances, which we currently don't have."
Yes clearly overall women have much lower chances to rise to the top. You are complaining that a tiny section of the pipeline from birth to CEO potentially favours women while obviously the vast majority of parts of the pipeline favour men. Cumulatively they do so heavily.
What you experienced is a tiny fraction of what women experienced to get to the point where you felt blocked.
Women are promoted preferentially in large companies with HR departments that enforce affirmative action policies and produce reports detailing compliance with national goals for minority participation.
That leads men to leave such companies and start their own businesses. Small companies are often more agile and innovative and far more likely to make founders and skilled employees rich.
So the programs to promote women (and underrepresented minorities) that are intended to achieve equality just promote even more unfair advantages for men. It's a common pattern: even the best designed policies need to be constantly expanded so that unfair advantages for men can be mitigated.
But no one can say that the proliferation of small innovative companies is bad for society. New innovative ideas make all our lives better, and some of that is owed to big corporate HR departments encouraging more entrepreneurship by limiting promotion opportunities for men.
I have worked in and around startups for my entire career and never once met a founder who told me that they had left their previous job because women were being promoted at it. Never even once. And I've collaborated with some politically colorful founders.
Someone, I'm sure, will rebut this comment with an example of a successful founder who started their company due to oppressive affirmative action policies. But you worded your comment as if this was some kind of obvious industry norm. It is not; you should reword.
> some kind of obvious industry norm. It is not; you should reword.
OP's study about women being promoted 25% faster than men just means it's an industry norm to promote women.
At least nowadays. I'd like to attract your attention that the world is changing, I'm happy with more equality at my workplace, and women were obviously oppressed in workplaces I've been to 10 years ago. Just, at least, not today in UK anyway.
Like much repression, we are not conscious to it. When it's not validated to us by a larger movement in terms we can perceive, it's easy to convince ourselves it's not happening and it's actually a problem with ourselves. Just as the contemporary feminist movement is making excellent and impressive strides to wake us up to the reality of how men have been extraordinarily repressing women, studies like this are the first beams of light pointing out that which we could never previously put words to.
Also, you mention your experience is focused in the startup world, which differs from the employment scene at large.
> I'm all for equality, as long as everyone has equal chances, which we currently don't have.
But that will keep a status quo if one group is starting out as a serious minority. That's the whole point of equality movements: you have to adjust upwards for a bit, until it's actually equal. Then you can go back to being fair.
EDIT: This thread is blowing up, so I want to clarify my comment: I'm talking about affirmative action, and I think it's a good idea in the case of women in tech, presently.
Equal chances would also mean an equal chance to get hired if you actually apply. So why do you need extra adjustment beyond that? Simple turnover should approach an equilibrium eventually.
Unfortunately, there are also many examples that white men have a huge advantage in the hiring process solely because they're white men. This is easily shown by sending companies the same résumé with different names that signify gender or race.
Actually your links (assuming replicability of the studies etc) just support the claim that "names that conform to the majority culture do better". They do not support your first sentence at all. It is perfectly possible for non-white people to have white names. Your implication that companies demonstrating preference for cultural/class conformity and familiarity is somehow unexpected or "unfortunate" doesn't follow.
Yes, that's the claim they support, but the "majority culture" that the names signify is "white and male" specifically. You seem to be saying that since people can be given any name there's no way to infer race and gender from a given name, which is ridiculous: of course there's a correlation between a name, race and gender.
Look at the top 1000 names from 1995, the next birth year that will be graduating from college en masse. "Jessica" is the top name for girls, while it doesn't even appear in the top 1000 for boys. http://www.babynames.it/top100/1/year-1995.html
Yes exactly, there is nothing "unfortunate" about the implications of those studies. Also thanks for taking the time to statistically prove "Jessica" is a girl's name for some reason.
My original point was that in addition to gender and race, names signal cultural affiliation. Many Asian immigrants to the West adopt Western first names in order to signal Western cultural affiliation. I would hypothesize they get more resume responses. This plays into gender as well. I might be comfortable with "Jessica" as my accountant but less so with "Envy" or "Desiree" or whatever. The preferences being expressed are not based solely on gender/race as in your conclusion, but rather likelihood to adhere to various cultural norms, some pertaining to direct job-related productivity, and others pertaining to general socialization and fitting in. I see no problem with Western companies expressing preference for Western cultural norms anymore than Chinese companies doing the same (respectively) in China.
Another interpretation of the study is simply that the companies historically have had more success with whitemale name hires and are simply using the cheapest predictive signal available to maximize hiring ROI. This is unfair to good hires with off-culture names, but I'm not sure what a fix is.
If it makes you feel better I would presume white males are discriminated against in non-Western societies but I have no hard evidence for that, except for maybe South Africa where it's explicit law.
> I see no problem with Western companies expressing preference for Western cultural norms anymore than Chinese companies doing the same (respectively) in China.
Sooooo "female culture" isn't a part of Western cultural norms? Or Black culture? Asian culture? These are all peoples that have been here for hundreds of years. The culture they share is certainly different from that of their home country. When do they get to call their culture "Western?" When white people say it's okay?
You don't want to cop to it, but all you're doing is making excuses for white men to discriminate against others. It's not okay.
I agree, but I don't think it's any more unfortunate than not having a Chinese name in China, Indian name in India, etc. Humans are inherently risk averse, and cultural conformity is an upshot of that. To penalize or otherwise persecute "white males" for having and participating in a culture seems unjust.
To be clear: you are saying that it is not unjust to penalize women and people of color for no reason other than the fact that they're not white men, but it is unjust to penalize white men to compensate for that.
I dont know what you think culture is, but to me culture is just how people generally behave in a particular area, so yes white men generally try to behave in a way that benefits them. Is this wrong?
That's only going to fix the first step in the hiring process. The larger issue this shows is that people are biased to believe that women and people of color are less qualified for STEM jobs.
1. Fixing the first step is important and necessary.
2. Exposure at the next level will normalize the idea that women and non-whites should be given serious consideration in hiring.
> The study of more than 4,000 UK IT professionals, published to mark International Women’s Day, reveals women typically reach management level three years faster than men (in nine rather than 12 years) and they are appointed CTO/CIO two and a half years faster (in 13 versus 15.5 years for men).
> However, the survey also reveals a colossal gap between the numbers of men and women working in top IT roles. Of the senior developers who responded to the survey, only 6% were women; with IT managers the figure was 8%, and of those heading up IT only 7% were female.
These statistics are weird together. How can this be?
Speculation: There is a bias against average/underperforming women relative to men entering and staying in tech. This means that the women who do stay in are from the upper end of the distribution. It's as if you took a normal distribution (as skill often is distributed) and truncated some segment of the lower half. This would explain why there are much fewer women reaching managerial positions but why the ones that do reach it do so very quickly.
Is there any data on how qualified and performant female engineers are relative to male engineers who occupy the same position? A result that would support this hypothesis would be something like women in the same position as men in tech have beefier academic credentials or more awards.
That's one explanation that fits a narrative. (and ignores the fact there are far fewer women who even attempt to enter the tech industry).
The gender gap in tech starts with children, is seen in STEM enrollment rates and continues in the job market where a multitude of diversity initiatives exist to promote underrepresented groups in tech.
So, an alternative speculation for the abnormally high promotion rate for women is there are fewer women interested in IT in the first place and companies are scrambling to compete for women because it makes them look better (via diversity initiatives).
There is a great documentary examining actual science on the subject and interviewing both scientific researchers and social scientists on opposite sides of the issue:
Should we attempt to combat the gender gap in the nursing industry with the same vigor that we are focused on tech? How about the gender gap we see with garbage workers or psychology?
>> This means that the women who do stay in are from the upper end of the distribution.
> Another explanation is there are fewer women interested in IT in the first place and companies are scrambling to compete for women because it makes them look better.
Those aren't even mutually exclusive explanations. It seems likely that both are true as the people that go into it despite the lack of interest from the rest of their cadre will be better candidates vs. borderline candidates.
I am mostly playing the devil's advocate. Both explanations may be true to a degree.
I believe it is misguided to shoehorn discrimination as the goto explanation for every statistical difference between groups of people. In this scenario the data literally implies the opposite conclusion yet danharaj was able to contrive an explanation that leaves women as the victim despite lliterally being promoted twice as fast. You can bet danharaj would still be arguing the same conclusion if the data had born out the opposite results.
To be fair there it's likely that there's a bit of victimization there as well if it's harder to go into one field vs. another due to social norms. You get it from both sides, too! "You're a man, why do you want to be a nurse??". Going back to tech, if you were a borderline woman candidate that wanted to get in it seems that you would statistically be less likely to follow that dream.
I like to step back and just say that it's not something that has to be fixed if a cadre of people appear to "collectively decide" based on individual decisions. It sucks that if you are in the cadre and have to fight the perception that you should(n't) be doing something. But I think (as I suspect you do as well) that saying that your individual decision should be different simply because you share an identifying trait with others is broken.
Ideas that men or women are some collective that needs to be pushed one way or another are difficult. You can generalize based on the apparent preferences of the group, but then judging an individual based on those preferences is where it starts to get troublesome.
Try being a male who wants to go into education for young children. I have a friend who went through the process as the only male member of his entire graduating class, and he says the level of suspicion he had to face from his professors and fellow students was overwhelming at times.
It was consistently implied that a young male would only want to teach young children for puerile reasons.
Even when he was given the benefit of the doubt, it'd only be to say "oh, so you'll take your education degree and enter administration?"
There is growing scientific evidence (discussed in the video) that men and women have preferential differences that are exhibited as early as we are capable of measuring them. (Toys chosen days after birth)
The differences in choice of profession are seen globally across all cultures and are in fact stronger in places like Scandinavia which are arguably world leaders in gender equality and provide women with the most choice.
When you see something that all cultures have in common it hints that it is not a cultural phenomena and that there is something biological going on.
I am speaking by and large here and paraphrasing the evidence laid out by researchers in the video. There are plenty of exceptional outliers which buck the trend and any individual's choice in profession doesn't imply that the group as a whole has a poor aptitude or are incapable of it. It simply states that they prefer to do something else.
Your explanation requires significant mental gymnastics to make your claim fit the data. If anything the data implies the opposite conclusion. If women were discriminated against in tech they would not be promoted at twice the rate.
Wouldn't you also blame discrimination had this study revealed women were promoted at half the rate of men?
Maybe women are, on average, treated worse at university and entry-level, so the majority that continue aren't a random distribution but predominately represent those more determined and aggressive.
Well yes, there could be such a bias at every stage in the development of an IT career and this would skew the skill/ambition distribution of female engineers towards the high end.
I know plenty of male engineers who, to put it nicely, are underperformers. All of the female engineers I know, and there are much fewer of them, are what I would call exceptional engineers. Because I know so many more male software engineers, I still know more exceptional male engineers than female. However anecdotes don't matter for scientific inference which is why I asked if anyone had such data.
I've had 2 examples around me where the woman was incompetent in programming and she was promoted because she was better with Excel spreadsheets. Plus the prejudice that men are supposed to be worse at communication than women, so managers promote women.
It's sad because it reinforces the mistake where women are allowed to be incompetent, whereas we should keep them in a programmer job until they gain skills, like young men do, instead of promoting them too quickly. As opposed to the article, I witnessed a mean-time-to-promotion to the job of Team Lead of 3 years for women instead of 7 years for males – but that could be because the article considers "management" as a higher job than Team Lead.
Women enter and the ones that enter raise faster than men. One can speculate whether there is a promotion bias or the ones that enter have an above average pioneering spirit but...
...it takes time and experience to raise to the top. And not that many women have 15+ years relevant tech experience.
The only mystery is why journalist not see that. In any case it is good to see some hard data at least on the engineering and first management level dispelling the myth that women are discriminated against.
Women in tech are more closely scrutinized out of the sheer virtual of being a novel demographic within a company.
Upon close scrutiny it is discovered that these women are actually amazing practitioners, because all the women who were on the wrong side of the bell curve dropped out under their close scrutiny experienced in high school or university.
Thus women are promoted faster.
It's survivor bias.
Most people have a 'spotlight effect' in that they believe they are noticed more than they really are, but for a woman in tech it might actually be true.
Please don't take this as flippant, it's a legitimate query. I keep seeing the call for "more women in technology", however I don't see a similar rally for say, "more men in early education". Most teachers in early to middle school tend to be females by a wide margin[0], men comprise less than 20%, yet I don't see people screaming there should be more men teaching in those roles? Why is that?
I've been reading HN for a few years now. The tone of the response to women in IT hasn't changed much. I kept believing that if I were good enough, smart enough, and if people liked me enough, I would get ahead.
Turns out, there's a real ceiling on where I can go. Not because I lack talent. I am very good with people. My last manager believed I would be a VP at the company someday. I maxed out at that fake "architect" role made for people that require more money but can't be promoted to management. This was a large F-50 type organization.
We found that the HR departments at very large companies definitely improve diversity up and down the ranks. But there is a blockade that eventually presents itself.
This blockade can probably be summed up mathematically: The first females to go up stream will always be white. As the number of females up the ranks increases, the less obligation white males feel to grant other minorities the same privilege. Eventually, it works out to where there will be a multitude of white women paving the way at VP level, and until they die off or retire, the blockade prevents advancement for anyone else.
I call it the "wall of white women" with a sub-wall of "white male architects" waiting for their chance. If the minority applicant is not blindingly obviously superior to the wall of white males just beneath the wall of white women, there's no chance.
Unfortunate. I find it kind of hilarious and enjoy watching it form at every single major corporation.
I'm a first gen korean-american woman (I guess after 30 its weird to call yourself a girl). I've definitely seen this situation too, it was a little depressing.
So I've been bouncing around startups,and even started contracting under my own c-corp to make connections and money. The respect difference has been unreal. I've had to toughen up significantly, you have to really learn to read bs and move on without emotion.
That's another option you can take, I'm personally enjoying it right now.
Thank you for responding! I like hearing solutions. Listening to my own whining is tiresome.
To your point, I left my large F-50 employer this summer and started at a smaller company. I am strongly considering contracting. Your response is encouraging.
Only because women and men are equal as human beings and should be treated accordingly it does not mean they are identical. Not so long ago everybody said that we need more women in [paste a well paid white collar job]. You wanted positive discrimination. Now you have it.
Ironically nobody wanted to have more women on construction sites, in the military service or as a surgeon...
This shouldn't be surprising to anyone given the stated goal by large companies of hiring more women, and the relatively small pool on which they are drawing from
Its use here means something like "contrary to the expectation that women face barriers in IT (as evidenced by lower numbers of women in the top positions in IT and in general), they rise through the ranks faster than men."
Well, I meant that being outnumbered easily can be an advantage - (ex. you're unique, noticeable etc.), that's why "despite being outnumbered" sounds really strange. "Despite facing barriers" - ok.
Not saying that those statistics can be heavily biased due to imbalanced classes - but other commenters already mentioned that multiple times.
No need to be defensive about it, it's basic math. If, say, 20% of CS grads are female, they're competing against 80% of CS grads for distinction. So it's surprising when, "despite the odds", they succeed faster.
Perhaps more importantly the article does not mention confirmation bias, which is surely at play here. (e.g. "average" women are being discouraged from CS degrees before they even start, so only superstars stick it through, so of course they move faster through the ranks after graduation.)
A similar example: in the UK about 20% of girls and 40% of boys study physics at A-level (the final school exam before university). Every year everybody seems surprised that the girls outperform the boys.
However, it is likely that the students who study physics are mostly the students with the greatest aptitude for the subject. If you split the students into any two arbitrary groups then the top fifth from one group are going to outperform the top two fifths from the other. This is unremarkable. Yet when the groups are boys and girls, people are surprised.
Anyway, I would be surprised if something similar isn't happening in CS. With so few women studying the subject, it's likely that those who do are fairly dedicated.
Following it through, those superstars' success will embolden others, incrementally lowering the "superstar" requirement. Only question is, will it happen fast enough?
Basically this. If you aren't a super star you'll be driven out of tech before you even graduate college. I've seen it happen to many women techies I know.
Unless you are awesome, it just isn't worth it to put up with the crap that they have to.
One explanation would be that women could be said to have a better instinct for power, and they recognize quickly that as a corporate survival strategy, power over people is more rewarding and sustainable than power over things. Feminism isn't about women becoming IT guys, it's about becoming bosses.
Sort of breaks with the victim narrative, but provides a more plausible story.
This is ridiculous. Not every woman I know wants to be a manager, and despite their proficiencies, they are seen as "more personable" and implicitly, less technical. Women being pushed into management and out of technical lead roles is a very well known phenomenon in the field, and people here pretending like this is "success" seem to be very happy to ignore that this fits very nicely with the status quo of sexism.
Aren't management positions better paid than technical ones almost anywhere though? I realize some progressive companies try to establish engineering path and managerial path but it's still not standard. I think thinking in terms: more likely to be a manager = more successful in corporate environment is not that far fetched.
Interesting. I've found the opposite, to be honest. Or, the ones I've met that work in big companies seem to be interested in just coding or doing technical work.
I can't speak to the norms of employment in therapy as I have no experience in that field whatsoever.
> nurses work insane hours
Healthcare in general has long hours. Nurses are paid hourly and most are protected by a union. Nurses are very well paid even after factoring in the long hours.
> many [nurses] are addicted to amphetamines and seriously injured by middle age
Citation needed.
> the ridiculously transparent OSHA violation that is every piece of hardcore pornography
I'm not sure what OSHA violation(s) you're referring to, but if there is a law being violated there is presumably video evidence of it, so it would be pretty easy for you to submit a complaint and get someone fined or arrested. Unless this is just a gross mischaracterization of an industry in which most people are more likely to drive around in a Bentley than anything else.
> I'm glad people like you will set me straight
Why do you need to take the decidedly negative tone of "people like you?" Tajen, whether you agree with him or not, is making points backed up with (anecdotal) evidence, and is doing so without resorting to hyperbole like you are.
> by letting me know that women being pushed into the more social and less technical role of manager is the harbinger of the fempocalypse
Yes, because more responsibility, more organization power, and more money is "being pushed." And see my note above re: hyperbole.
- Working at a man in construction/military/transportation gets you more respect when telling others what you do for a living than women that work in pornography/sex work.
- A number of injuries that happen as a result of pornography (e.g. rape) are not reported because they would negatively affect their further career in the industry.
- I doubt any of those stats include the work-related injuries of sex workers.
- Some of those industries have insulated themselves from women. E.g. the military hasn't really decided at it's core that they want to have women, even though they do a bunch of PR about it.
- It's also possible that men are more likely to take work-related risks. E.g. give in to the boss that demands your construction worksite will not comply with OSHA because it's 'too costly.'
The number of women in pornography/sex work is likely dwarfed by the number of construction workers.
I'll grant you there's much less official statistics on this, so the best I found is that there are 1 million prostitutes in the USA, but 6.6 million construction workers.
Due to that, numerically, there will be more deaths in construction work even if you are 6x more likely to die as a prostitute. Thus if construction is male dominated, and prostitution is female dominated... then you'll simply see more male deaths per year than female deaths.
Pornography was a poor choice of industry to make your point, considering that that female performers routinely make more money than their male counterparts.
Also, we're talking about IT. I'm not sure what it proves to cherry pick 3 industries where (you say) women are treated badly.
I could say the same thing about refuse collection, gardening and unskilled construction work. Oh look! Some predominantly male jobs also have low pay and poor conditions!
Female "performers" also are responsible for paying for the medical care, and in an industry in which there is frequent tearing of orifices, contraction of STIs, and long term injury which their male counterparts do not receive to the same degree (dudes are not getting gonorrhea in their eye), pay is significantly more comparable than you expect. Also, maybe you're completely unaware, the type of sex that women have in porn is much more dangerous to them than men. People who work in refuse collection, gardening, and unskilled construction work have legal protections that get exercised. The linked article does a very good in depth explanation of why "sex work" is not compatible with the standards we have for work in the US [1].
Firstly, it the openner is rather more focused on prostitution which is commonly illegal, rather than pornography which is legal.
To summarize, it maintains that due to the fact that you are handling bodily fluids during sex work, to get up to OSHA minimums you would need:
1. No oral sex
2. Gloves to be worn at all times
3. Masks and face shields must be worn at all times
4. Full-length aprons, and protective bodywear to be worn at all times
In the whole... the entire article is silly and real laws concerning sex-work would have to take into account to actually accomplish the act someone is going to have to take their clothes off.
Additionally, due to harassment laws concerning workplaces:
1. All clients of sex workers must no longer solicit because solicitation of sex is sexual harassment in the workplace
2. As an interesting converse to this, all sex workers must now accept all kinds of clients in order to not be seen as refusing service to a protected class
So the article proposes that solicitation should be illegal (it already is for prostitutes) and that even asking a pornographic actor or actress to perform a specific act should be illegal. Rather all pornography should happen naturally, without any direction at all.
Certainly an ... interesting ... article, but not a very useful one.
How you came to those conclusions is frankly beyond me -- the article argues that pornography is an exploitative industry that is inherently contrary to OSHA standards. The absurdities you're pointing out are the crux of the argument.
"Right, which is why fields that are predominantly women, like therapy, nursing, and pornography are so well paid and well treated."
Wow. Ok, first of all, nurses get paid a median salary of around 65-66k. The 2015 salary report I am staring at lists median salary for all occupations in the US at 48k. That would put nurses around 35% higher than the average. And I would like to add that it's a career that you can enter with a 2 or 4 year degree. I can't think of much else that virtually guarantees 65k after a few years with a 2 year degree.
I don't presume to know the inner workings of our health industry, but even if the nurses work insane hours, this is what they signed up for, right? Or are you saying they had no idea what they were getting into? The same goes for male nurses, doctors of either gender, etc. Everyone knows damn well up front what they are getting into. Doctor's know it will be grueling for a long time. They put up with it because of the compensation. Similarly, the nurses put up with it because, as I mentioned, they are 35% above average compared to the rest of society (that average is including men).
Also, porn? Really? That's an industry where women absolutely dominate earnings. I'm at work so I'm not about to risk trying to lookup any numbers, but they definitely get paid far higher than nearly all males except maybe the highest gay porn actors. And if you are going to whine about the mistreatment of women in the porn industry, save it for someone else. All performers get treated like crap in the porn industry, male and female alike. And if you are going to tell me that the women get treated worse...that might be true. But then again...they get compensated for it and they signed up for it knowing full well what was expected.
More importantly, though, is the implication your statement makes - as if women are forced into these positions and have no say over their lives and careers. I hope that's not what you are saying, is it? If so, it's total crap and you know it. That would be the equivalent of treating women like children and saying that they are so incapable of making their own decisions that we have to push them into what's appropriate for them.
I'm not too worried. I'm sure the feminists are going to condemn these companies and call for the resignations of the executives and stage protests over this blatant inequity. And the media will plaster this all over the news to spread awareness. And these companies will take heat from clients, end users, and advertisers, right?
I know it's hard to believe, but women don't usually get sent to coding summer camp as teenagers. Our parents don't usually encourage us to take AP computer science, and our best friends aren't in CS and don't refer us for sweet internships at Microsoft and Google.
If you're a woman in this industry, it's GENERALLY because it is something that you very much care about and want to do.
It's not some feminist conspiracy that women are being promoted, it's just that the women who go into tech are usually already pretty gritty people. You're comparing a very driven and passionate subset of women to a very general subset of men.
Here's a really great article I read once -- "I need terrible female engineers": https://medium.com/@amyngyn/i-need-terrible-female-engineers...