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Please don't take HN threads on ideological flamewar tangents. They're always the same and always degrade the discussion in the same way.

The OP is a fine article by a specific person about specific experiences and it deserves specific responses. If you don't want to engage with what's interesting about a particular article, please don't post in its thread.

"we don't have enough boys going into fashion, elementary school education, communications, nutrition, nursing, or human resources."

And, yet, look who are in leadership roles even in those female dominated industries. Somehow, the majority of the wealthy fashion designers are white men. Somehow, the majority of principals in elementary education are white men. The executives that nurses answer to? Once again, predominantly white men.

There's a useful discussion to be had about why more boys or girls don't go into certain fields...and, feminists have been having those conversations for many years (yes, talking about the boys, too, because it often comes down to the same core problem). And, it's too complicated to sum up with statistics about who goes into what industry. But, there are a variety of real problems that come from these imbalances and these inequalities, so it's useful to try to sort them out and figure out root causes, without simplifying it down to gender essentialist arguments (i.e. that "women go into caregiver fields because women like that sort of thing" and "boys are big and tough and like machines so they go into STEM fields and shoot guns").

Finally, to pretend our industry is not overtly hostile to women is to ignore thousands of women who have told their stories of being made to feel unwelcome, disrespected, and even harassed and abused, because of their gender, when working in technical fields.

I can't say for other nations, but the yearly statistics collected by the Swedish government is showing that the leadership roles in female dominated industries have switched over to be female dominated, where healthcare and education are currently at 80%+ female CEO/president and increasing. About 20% of the industry has a leadership that is female dominated of around 70%, 25% is balanced with 50/50, and the rest 55% is male dominated.

Inequality in gender distribution seems to only get more extreme each year here and female industries tops the lists with several that has a over 90% female to male distrubution. The very top of the list is a profession with 99.94% female to male ratio, and the whole male group of the profession could fit in a single mini-buss. This is in my view the primary reason why no feminist politician in Sweden ever brings up this yearly statistics, as the facts doesn't support the narrative being presented.

The changes as reported last report was minor changes in the top list of male dominated profession with about 2 percent increase in females to males, but in the female dominated professions the change goes the opposite direction with ever higher female to male ratio. Some professions like psychology is reporting that at university level it is about 95% female to male ratio, and if nothing is changed soon there won't be any male therapists once the last 20% that currently work reach the age of 65.

As someone sooner or later always want links: http://www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/ (you have to build you own query and compare it to previous years).

> Somehow, the majority of principals in elementary education are white men.

No, they aren't.

From http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013313.pdf

"The percentage of public school principals who were female was 52 percent overall, 64 percent in primary schools..."

Take a look at this [1] article, especially the first chart.

True, a slight majority of principals are women, but it's much more illustrative to look at the career progression. Those selected to be moved up the career ladder are clearly primarily men.

1 - http://www.womenonbusiness.com/men-women-the-glass-escalator...

Cool. That's improved remarkably in the past couple of decades. Every principal I ever had was a white male, and the balance for most of the history of our public education system was way off.

Of course...I wonder how it looks when you go even further up the executive chain in public education?

Nonetheless, it is not our topic of discussion here. Tech is remarkably unbalanced, and we've been told countless times by countless women why it is remarkably unbalanced (or at least a big enough part of the reason for us to want to do something about it).

Edit: Also, you know nothing of my political beliefs, and my political beliefs have no bearing on what women have said about their experience in tech fields.

Its a little disingenuous to shift the goalposts about female/male principals to going up the executive chain.

What's really clear, is things are changing quickly, and perhaps we all need to reevaluate our beliefs and bias with current research.

It is disingenuous to continually change the subject from the gender imbalance in tech, particularly when we're talking about an article by someone who has first hand experience about why that imbalance has developed.

> And, yet, look who are in leadership roles even in those female dominated industries. Somehow, the majority of the wealthy fashion designers are white men. Somehow, the majority of principals in elementary education are white men. The executives that nurses answer to? Once again, predominantly white men.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_escalator#Glass_escalato...

When I lay out the two options: men are scaring women away from technology || most women identify more with a plethora of other subjects. Well, the first makes for a good drama, but the latter is obvious.

It wasn't so obvious in the 80s, when plenty of women were getting CS degrees and working in software. All I have is anecdata because I'm too lazy too look up hard numbers, but these days it seems a large number of the women I run into in software at large companies and small are doing PM work or are on a test team, and not nearly as many as developers. Could be that as more PM/test positions opened up (positions that were not nearly as common 30 years ago), women gravitated toward those positions. Or, as is commonly thought, as more workplaces turned into extended college parties, the women got driven off. Hell, it turns me off. Call me old-fashioned, but I'd like to just get my work done.

Pretty sure this has more to do with the college major gender split. Women account for less than 20% of CS and Engineering degree graduates [1]. Since these days most companies recruit early career hires out of those majors specifically (no one wants to train from scratch), it leads to massive gender weighting in full time developer positions.

[1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...

You seem to be taking a pure statistical approach yet ignoring OPs specific complaints with tech workplace . I don't see her saying that more women should be programmers . Rather that they are treated with a level of condescension even in cases of extreme cred/achievements . At least that's what I got out of reading it

>You seem to be taking a pure statistical approach yet ignoring OPs specific complaints with tech workplace

That's what smart people do: ignore anecdotes, look at actual data.

Not only that, but where is the fight for gender parity in coal mining or logging?

I'm not saying that gender parity in tech is not a worthy goal. Just pointing out that there are a lot of fields with skewed gender parity that there's not a push for equality in.

> Just pointing out that there are a lot of fields with skewed gender parity that there's not a push for equality in.

So? Other than to attempt to muddy the conversation, what benefit is there to mentioning it? Unless everyone at once gets up to right the world, no one should?

>Other than to attempt to muddy the conversation

Thank you for your charitable interpretation of my statement. I look forward to you having an open mind when entering a discussion of gender equality in the future./s

Unsarcastically, I think it's disingenuous that you would presume to know the intent of my statement and therefore can project whatever intent you wish into it.

>what benefit is there to mentioning it?

The point of mentioning it is that there are some fields that there is a push for gender parity into and others that are not. If we want gender parity in some fields but not others then we need to understand what makes the fields where parity is sought different from fields where parity is not sought. Perhaps we can learn something about these fields that would make achieving gender equality easier.

> Unless everyone at once gets up to right the world, no one should?

Again, this is what happens when you assume intent and project malice into that intent.

> The point of mentioning it is that there are some fields that there is a push for gender parity into and others that are not

I think the main point of the article isn't gender parity, but equal treatment in the workplace. The focus of the article wasn't about increasing women participation in tech, but stopping gender discrimination in the workplace.

It's not an appropriate comparison. Mining and logging are extremely dangerous, hard physical labor.

Computer programming is at the complete opposite end of the safety spectrum, the biggest health risks being RSI from typing and other chronic issues from prolonged sitting, and there are effective countermeasures against both of these risks. There is no valid reason why more women should not be able to do it.

>Mining and logging are extremely dangerous, hard physical labor.

Okay, and? There are pushes for parity (or at least more inclusion) of women and men in firefighting, policing, and combat roles in the military, all of which are extremely dangerous, hard, physical labor.

The issue here is that technology is one of the few fields where the fight for the parity in gender is focused. I don't have a problem with that, gender equality is a good thing. Understanding why technology is a focus and different from mining and logging might help us understand and discover ways to bring about that gender parity.

>There are pushes for parity (or at least more inclusion) of women and men in firefighting, policing, and combat roles in the military, all of which are extremely dangerous, hard, physical labor.

There are pushes for relaxing restrictions on women attempting to make a statement by forcing their way into said extremely dangerous, hard, physical labor roles without stopping to consider the real-world repercussions of said relaxed restrictions.

FTFY

Some people are drawn to activities which are dangerous, hard, and/or physical, whether those activities are intended for fun or profit. Why do you imagine that none of these people would ever be women?

Not only that, but where is the fight for gender parity in coal mining or logging?

How do you know that there isn't a fight for parity in those industries? I wouldn't have the first clue, because I don't give a rat's ass. What I do care about, and can influence, is what goes on in the industry in which I work.

A weak effort at derailing the conversation. I'll give it a "2.5".

Your answer to a legitimate question;

>I don't give a rats ass about it. I don't have much influence in it. I can't know for certain if X exists or not.

I assume you don't vote either, for the same reasons you listed.

You will have a difficult time squaring a pure preference theory away with the implosion in the number of female computer science graduates over the past three decades. Whatever the cause is, it wasn't there in the 1980s (or at least not nearly as pronounced).

I'll also note that there are plenty of other options that have been discussed and that may be turn out to be one of the root causes, not just the two you are considering.

For most of that three decades it was actually more of a lack of explosion rather than an implosion. From the early '70s through the mid '80s, both men and women were growing in undergraduate CS degrees, with the women growing quite a bit faster.

Then they both fell dramatically through the mid '90s. Women dropped in half, and men dropped by about 36%.

Then men exploded, and by the mid '00s were about 60% above their mid '80s peak, whereas the women were only back to about the same as their mid '80s peak.

Then they both declined, and again the women's decline was more. Men fell about 25%, and women fell about 50%, by the end of the '00s.

It's that explosion of men from the mid '90s through the mid '00s that is the biggest contributor to the percentage of undergraduate CS degrees that go to females dropping in half from its mid '80s peak.

I've not heard any good theories on why there was such a surge of men coming to CS from the mid '90s through the mid '00s.

For master's degrees, the situation is quite different. From the early '70s through the mid '00s, both men and women rose slowly and steadily, with the women rising faster until the mid '80s when they then rose at about the same rate. This resulted in the percentage of master's degrees going to women rising steadily to around 32%. Then there was a slight decline for both men and women, with the women declining slightly more.

For PhDs, there was no decline. Both men and women rose from the early '70s through the end of the '00s (when my data ends), with the women rising faster so the percent of PhDs going to women in CS rose steadily from about 7% to about 22%.

Data if you want to play around with the numbers: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp

>I'll also note that there are plenty of other options that have been discussed and that may be turn out to be one of the root causes, not just the two you are considering.

I completely agree and was just using one possibility to illustrate my point that this topic seems to be crippled by this "Yes tech!" "No tech!" paradigm. Did you have any specific alternatives you were thinking of? Also if you know of any articles on the subject I'd love to read them. I think one possibility is that gender roles have gotten worse over time. In the 70s and 80s we had a lot of women joining the work force as families switched from single income to dual income households. I wonder if the result of things "settling" in the decades that passed was a more pronounced reflection of social values (gender roles) in the work force.

> Did you have any specific alternatives you were thinking of?

There are several.

For example, it is known that gender bias in groups has a tendency to not only perpetuate itself, but to also reduce participation by the minority gender (even without any hostile action by the majority; it seemingly suffices often to simply feel like an outsider).

Second, the power of stereotypes is strong, even where they are wrong. For example, in Liechtenstein's 1968 referendum on women's suffrage, even nearly half the women wanted to deny themselves the vote [1]. A bad case of Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps, but indicative of how powerful established stereotypes can be. In the early 1980s, working with computers was still often considered to be something more like a secretarial job.

Third, computer science started to pay more and grant higher status, making it more attractive to men (especially in a society where men are still predominantly the breadwinners and women responsible for childcare [2]).

And that's just off the top of my head.

I have no idea what the actual causes are (I am fairly convinced that there are several of them, working in tandem). What I do know is that gender roles are shaped pretty much from birth, so I'm extremely skeptical of a theory that attributes this to preference alone (preference may well play a role, but it's so very difficult to tease out the difference between nature and nurture when it comes to these things).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liechtenstein_referendums,_196...

[2] Ironically, IT jobs are often more likely to allow for working from home, making it easier to reconcile a career with childcare.

Yours is a subject that deserves discussion, but not everyone is qualified to give such broad perspectives. The author clearly has a strong history as a woman in STEM, so I don't think it's fair to discount her story outright.

Men and women do face a lot of differing challenges in various industries, and for every anecdotal story of strife there's another anecdotal story of success. The best we can do is look at the statistics, recognize trends, and try to address them as best we can. Clearly there are certain aspects of tech as an industry that aren't entirely conducive to female participation.

Women may be equally qualified, do better in school, etc. but that doesn't mean they don't face challenges that don't deserve our consideration.

The main difference is that in the examples you mention there is a significant disparity in remuneration when compared to software engineering.

If there are societal reasons which encourage women to pursue industries other than STEM, these then effect the participation rate in high-earning industries creating income inequality.

This is why this matters.

The difference is that men don't face barriers to entering and progressing within woman dominated industries or positions. Their skills, motivations, competence, etc are called into question because of their gender. They don't face sexism or harassment in the workplace. They aren't passed up for promotion or pay raise that go to their less qualified colleagues of the opposite gender. When your peers start telling you there's a problem in the industry, don't try to derail the conversation by bringing up other industries or saying that women just are choosing to join other industries.

I'll take the bait: tell that to my father who is a nurse. He has fought blatant sexism and discrimination his entire career. And I wont speak to the taunting I endured for having a father who did "woman work."

"Meet the Parents" was light on the view of men who work as nurses...

Sexism and discrimination are hurtful regardless of the industry or the dominant gender of that industry. Unfortunately as humans we are better at finding ways to highlight differences than working together collectively.

And, unfortunately, we in the software industry are no better at overcoming our latent human biases than any other industry.

This is incorrect. I recently read an article (unfortunately, it's in Czech) about a father who decided to take parental leave, and what sexism he faced from the other mothers. It wasn't so blatant but he felt more like a stranger.

This is just blatantly false.