Ways to improve gender equity in the tech sector

The first proposed "solution" merely promotes participation rates as a measure of gender equity, and the 2nd proposal "Provide female entrepreneurs with..." just adds another form of inequity. Only the 4th proposal seems truly gender neutral and constructive.

I don't care what your personal politics on gender equality are - if you're making your employees work sixty-hour weeks you're functionally identical to Pat Buchanan.

One of the biggest ones is to make sure that you actually clearly communicate what you want out of an employee. If you expect someone to be doing more work than someone else, but they have the same title.. you may want different titles. Or clear (and public!) pay grades that signify seniority if you don't want MTS1 MTS2 MTS3 MTS4 MTS5 MTS++ style titles.

Companies, especially small ones, that skirt performance review policies as either unimportant or "too formal" can lead to a lot of incidental/accidental discrimination that goes unnoticed until it's too late.

Constructing the necessary exercises and evaluations is a lot more work than traditional interviewing, especially if you also want to avoid the "silly puzzle questions that only prove you read the same book" syndrome, but it is possible and would avoid most kinds of bias.

Your job postings are quite rightly designed to filter out people that lack the skills you are after. However they also serve as an unwitting barrier.

One thing I have seen that is successful is actively going out and recruiting people who are different from you. Universities are a great source of untapped talent. More importantly they haven't been beaten down by classism/sexism/*ism.

Being surrounded by people who look, act and sound like you is a boring boring life.

Realize that framing your daughters behavior by giving her babies, princesses, dolls, makeup, clothes and similar to play with, while your boy gets the newest action games, puzzles, balls, competitive and brain engaging fun, will definitely influence her future career choices.

When you take your daughter to look at some princess movies, or some toy story thingy, while you watch star wars and star trek with your son, long into the night, think of what kind of framing is done.

Of course, even if you try to keep all the options open. Someone from her school might make your daughter do "girls only" activities. Or maybe she'll be forbidden from accessing the Star Wars room at Legoland because she's a girl. Whole world is against your little girl becoming like a man. She needs babies so she knows she has to be a mother. She needs kitchen games so she knows she has to cook. She needs to play with dolls, to groom them, to dress them, so that she eventually does the same for herself. She needs to be pretty, and by pretty we mean makeup.

If someone is naive enough to believe that boys and girls have innately different interests, then so be it.

But girls ain't "gurls" because they don't like technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule

That kind of setup is not uncommon. I have been asked to work in windowless rooms, which I rejected. I have worked in ugly industrial areas and ugly buildings. I have worked in the basement that wasn't officially suitable for human use (only legal for storage).

After 6 hours, my eyes hurt from the strain of looking at HTML and Javascript all day, trying to find tiny mistakes in the source code. But I have at least 2 more hours to go. Human interaction is minimal - yes there are meetings, but that is not the same as human interaction that for example a doctor sees.

Sure, jobs at Google or Facebook might be fancy. But even at big companies (including Google) I have seen those big open plan offices. They just had more colorful toys lying around at Google. And most devs won't work for Facebook or Google.

Why do I put up with it? Because I need the money to feed my family, and I can not easily switch to another profession. This is probably controversial and will give me downvotes, but most women don't need to work to feed their family - their husbands do that. So they are not forced to put up with smelly, crowded, windowless rooms for years and years on end. And women can easily switch profession, too: they can simply become mothers, which 40% choose to do (become fulltime moms, that is - more women become mothers of course).

I enjoy programming for my own projects, but most dev jobs I did for money were gruesome.

Note that this gruesomeness affects women and men in the same way. There are no offensive Star Wars posters or other Geeky things lining the walls. The environments just tend to be less comfy, because devs only stare into their computers anyway.

The notion always seems to be that the women who shy away from tech end up leading "wasted", brainless lives as housewives. Not so. They become doctors, or journalists, or liberal arts people (and btw., housewive and spending time with your kids is not all that bad either).

I understand if companies want to lure women into tech, because it gives them a greater talent pool and lower wages (because of greater supply). But it is not an issue of equality.

We MUST to do something about this! People of a certain gender cannot prefer some activities over others!

This is ridiculous.

If you cross reference the countries by religion and their rating on gender equality, you will notice the most religious countries are some of the most inequal.(http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2014/ran..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations#...) This doesnt mean both are related of course, but if you think beliefs about moral affect behavior you would expect to see this type of correlation.

Im prepared to get downvoted for my opinion on the detriments of religion here so have at me :)

EDIT: If you downvote please say why? Id like to see good counter argument.