Why aren't there more women in tech?
techinasia.com
techinasia.com
Maybe I'll be enlightened? I don't know. Being completely honest I'm having a hard time getting past fact that the article was written by a woman who could instead get a tech job. My wife is a kernel programmer for goodness' sake. Perhaps I'm failing to see something obvious so it would be nice if someone could show me what's wrong with my line of thinking.
Very few empirical sources, and lots of political soap-boxing.
Why are there few women in tech? The intellectually honest will begin by pointing out that nobody really knows. From there, we can talk about what we think might be responsible, but if we're going to continue in the spirit of intellectual honesty, we must acknowledge that the gender gap in technology is part of a large and very robust phenomenon by which women prefer to work with people, and men prefer to work with things [1].
Granted, the people vs things dichotomy may well be the result of social conditioning, but it might also be indicative of an intrinsic difference. (At this point, intellectually-honest feminists who oppose essentialism must also admit that the latter is a political and sociological theory, and therefore has no bearing on whether or not there actually are fundamental differences between the sexes from a cognitive and biological standpoint.) Indeed, just as de facto gender differences can be fueled by social conditioning, so too can social asymmetries be fueled by biological factors.
While there certainly is evidence suggesting that the gender gap in technology is the result of systematic bias (or even discrimination), we must take care not to lose sight of effect sizes. I have not looked into this myself, but I would be extremely surprised if, say, the use of gendered pronouns had an effect size that even remotely resembled the people-vs-things effect. Social conditioning effects tend to be small compared to their biological counterparts (with notable exceptions).
So why are there fewer women in tech? Those claiming to have the answer are at worst intellectually dishonest, at best ill-informed, and in all probability pushing a very narrow interpretation of feminism.
My fellow feminists (in name only, sadly): disguising political ideology as science and abusing the connotations of the term "source" ultimately hurts your cause.
There aren't more women in tech because women didn't want to be in tech back in the 80's and early 90's when it was not a sexy field. Someone else started the party. Now they want in because it's cool.
To be fair, its not that "its cool now, so they want in the party", its actually that so many women just dont want in. I dont understand acting like the whole world needs to change because their are trends in peoples personal choices.
This is because feminism has become dominated by a very specific branch that renounces essentialism vehemently. Their a priori position is that there are no differences between men and women, other than those which are socially-constructed.
Of course, this is a sociological and political theory, whose followers often mistake for a scientific one.
1. entry level with zero career progression
2. agile-scrum micro management
3. task oriented, big picture is for business (grown ups)
4. pay is good, starts above other jobs but hits ceiling after 5y
5. introverts only (95% time is spent sitting inside your head)
6. working with code (inanimate matter) is less interesting than working with people,
7. most often you're surrounded by nerds who don't have a life
Surely the above isn't the case if you're in a successful company, but 90% people maintain legacy internal app in a big corpo.
Anyway, I like how this article has a lot of facts. I dislike many other things.
Diversity is great, it is an awesome thing to have, promote and embrace. But you can only do so much to force it. At some point, if females choose to stay out of tech, thats their choice. If they choose to get into tech thats great too. The fundamental idea of forcing society to change to have a higher proportion of women employed in "STEM" jobs is absurd.
Personally, I know quite a few women (a much higher proportion than men) who went through STEM programs in highschool only to go into bio or environmental Engineering. Guess what? There aren't all that many jobs in those fields compared to more traditional tech/generic engineering roles. Some of them left their respective fields within a year for that reason alone
I humbly encourage you to look at the sources they provide: http://www.nextgeneration.ie/sources-women-in-tech-project
I find an overwhelming proportion of secondary & tertiary sources, very few empirical sources whatsoever, and a large majority of political opinion pieces and mainstream media coverage of feminist politics.
I don't think this infographic is the fruit of intellectually-honest research.
Not caring about whether they hire males or females is exactly how is should be. It would be awesome if gender wasn't a factor at all..but I dont believe thats what you want.
What are these terrible problems in the workplace that only women are facing? At my first job out of school (tech job at a tech company), I sat to eat lunch with 2 females and 1 other male, all fresh out of school. We talked about salaries. Both men had negotiated for a high salary and used competing offers as leverage. Both females said they had other offers but didn't negotiate any of them. Sounds to me like a common case where the women SHOULD be paid less...simply because they didn't try
I suspect that this results in boys spending more time in that awkward stage where they would rather spend their time on activities that are done alone or, if done with others, do not require much social interaction.
Girls pass through that stage faster, and more of their time after gets devoted to dealing with their social groups and their positions in those groups.
It is that awkward stage that is prime time for really seriously getting into programming and many other STEM activities. Boys spend longer stuck there, so boys get a head start in STEM.
But those are different questions. It is not a safe assumption that the best practitioners in this field should be nerds who got started in their pre-teen years (that describes me, by the way). The overwhelming majority of pre-teen computer nerds don't do any software development work of significance. I was out of high school before I wrote my first significant program, which makes my head start not that much different from someone who starts programming in their CS courses at college.
Just to be clear, I did not intend to imply that spending more time in nerd mode might make boys better at programming (or any other STEM field) than girls. I was just looking at why boys might be more likely to go into such fields.
A lot (most?) kids have decided what general area they are going to major in by the time they arrive at college, and those kids are going to be a big factor in the demographics of the fields they go into.
1. gender stereotypes (from an early age) 2. lack of talent pool (STEM majors) 3. in-group favoritism (in hiring)
The first thing that jumps out at me is that (1) and (3) could cause (2). If it turned out that most of the gender imbalance in tech was related to (2), we'd still need to answer why (2) was happening.
It also seems like (2) and (3) should be fairly easy to study. If the number of women graduating with computer science degrees is about the same as the number of women going into tech jobs, then presumably (3) is not a big factor. (Though favoritism could factor into other aspects of the imbalance, like promotions.) Then the big question would be "Why are so few women graduating in computer science?" That could definitely be related to (1). But it's not obvious to me that a brogrammer/machismo culture in the profession would have a big effect on students in high school and college, before they've had much contact with the profession. (Though if there were more women in CS as freshmen, and that number dropped off as women did internships, that could point to professional culture problems after all.)
So the main question: Is the percentage of women in CS in college on par with the percentage of women in the CS workforce? Can someone more familiar with all the different ways to measure this please chime in?
If >90% of women in tech claim there are issues with women's involvement in tech, perhaps it's a good idea to consider the possibility that they may be right, instead of assuming they're all sour grapes artsy complainers who missed out on the money boat and are now complaining. Someone's posted an image of how all women sign up for gender studies courses, and no one signs up for CS etc. Yeah, you forgot something in that image. Add a bunch of dudes hanging around the CS stall, talking loudly about 'ts', making jokes about their bodies, etcetera etcetera etcetera. The portrayal is accurate, but it shows the symptoms, not the cause.
For those who claim to be objective Vulcans who won't agree with an issue 'just because it's politically correct to', look at it this way: assume for a moment, this issue is real. Compare it to a fever. Whereas others are saying the causes of the fever need to be looked at, you're arguing people get a lot of other diseases, and people get fever all the time, and looking at the causes is just going to waste your time from making cooler awesome apps. You cannot shut your eyes and ears to what women have to say, and argue they're just a bunch of complainers, which seems to be the general theme of comments in posts like these.
Admins: Posts such as these WILL start flame wars. I feel quite strongly about this issue, and so do a lot of people from the other side. If you want to save the community from flame wars, I suggest heavily penalizing these.
That's fine, but why can't the other side consider that they may be wrong?
The reason is actually simple: on the whole, the brand of feminism we're exposed to on the internet (that is, the west-coast, SanFran variety), is a very specific branch that vehemently opposes notions of essentialism. That is, their a priori hypothesis is that men and women are exactly alike, but are shaped from birth by social conditioning. As such, any observed discrepancy between men and women must necessarily be the result of sexism and mysoginy.
I don't deny the existence of social conditioning, nor it's problematic effects, but anti-essentialism is a political and sociological stance, not an empirical one.
I know your position comes from an honest desire to be compassionate and progressive, but it's entirely missing the point of those who are tired of the relentless proselytizing.
It's not about sour grapes; it's about the fact that this recent wave of political correctness is laden with highly political social theory, and is lowering the level of discourse. I'm sure you're a great person (really!), but your appeal to emotion is ultimately favoring a cause with which you (hopefully) don't agree.
Companies with women on the exec team get higher valuations -- perhaps that's because women are better at choosing winning companies? Or, since there are fewer exec-team-level women than there are men, they can be more choosy with their opportunities?
In no particular order:
- There's an overwhelming preference (across all academic and professional disciplines) for women to prefer working with people and for men to prefer working with things [1]
- Gender theory is a sociological and political theory that's often touted as being scientific. To be sure, it's contributed to science (e.g.: the idea that gender roles are socially-influenced), but the idea that men and women are equivalent outside of socially-constructed differences is (a) unsubstantiated (b) unfalsifiable (we can never fully remove social influence) (c) in contradiction with what cognitive neuroscience tells us about anatomy and physiology shape cognition.
Where gender theory has a role to play is in telling us how to structure our societies despite eventual differences between the sexes, but I really don't care for it's opinion on empirical questions.
On the whole, though, I feel like these ideas can be discussed, provided you mince your words and ignore the trolls.
>This is accurate, but it's looking at the symptoms, not the cause
You're claiming that gender studies is a response, rather than a cause. It takes some serious mental gymnastics to claim that a very politically active group is not exercising significant causal influence. It's their stated goal to "raise awareness", which implies heavy recruiting. It stands to reason that recruitment efforts will be more effective with man than with women, and the measures agree.
Regardless of whether or not gender studies departments are responsible for reducing female STEM majors, women prefer working with people rather than things (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883140), and this across all disciplines. Granted, this can be the result of social conditioning, but the point remains that the positive claim "gender gap = symptom" requires positive evidence.
>CS/Eng as a community is not caring and welcoming as Gender Studies would be
Now you're implicitly making a normative claim: "CS/Eng should be as welcoming as Gender Studies". The problem is that the highest priority of gender studies is to promote social justice and cohesion, so that's not a reasonable milestone for whether or not another field is just and cohesive enough. The implied argument here is that if engineers make social justice their number-one priority, then little engineering gets done.
Right. And the argument I'm making is that they are NOT mutually exclusive. A lot of people seem to be taking the road of logic implying that taking conscious actions in increasing women's participation in tech will not get engineering done. I am contesting the logic behind that.
>Regardless of whether or not gender studies departments are responsible for reducing female STEM majors, women prefer working with people rather than things
As someone else pointed out in the thread, the women participation in tech has actually gone down. Now, you can argue women have actually gotten MORE people friendlier, but then I'd go back to my original point: what was in tech that drove them away?
I'll restate my general position once more: this is not a liberal wishy-washy 'ooh lets make all equal' argument. Diversity in tech is diversity in thought process, diversity in approaches to solutions, more resistant to specific types of failures. Just like you wouldn't want monoculture forests or crops, you don't want mono-culture engineers. I'd go one step further: even IF hiring women costs you quite reasonably in terms of 'efficiency' originally (measured by LOC's I guess? How do y'all do that?), your returns will be much higher in terms of longer term gain.
EDIT: I'll bite my words a bit. Above is necessary only if you want to (or want to pretend to) care about the long-term future of your company and environment for your employees. If your strategy is to pump and dump, forget women in tech (they just are not the coding type--right-- don't even get the starTrekWarsRingsLords references?)