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Comment by dudifordMann | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure if that is the right mind set:

"So around the time a lot of people have kids? ...you need to make a LOT of money to pay for daycare ... you might as well just stay home."

The "you" can be the other partner. Ensuring fair pay and opportunities for all qualified workers would encourage only a brief departure from a woman's career for maternity leave, allowing either partner to be the home support (as needed), instead of making the choice based on poor future earning opportunities vs their male peers.

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>"The 'you' can be the other partner."

Our culture's acceptance of stay-at-home dads has not neutralized in step with its acceptance of working women. As relationships link people into social units, social costs imposed on men can counter-intuitively harm women.

Do we know that that's the reason that more women are deciding to stay home? This looks like a big conclusion to draw when the data only _may_ correlate.

Where's the survey of double-income family moms working in tech where they specified the reason why they chose to stay at home?

There are a lot of reports coming out that look at numbers and say what may be the reason, but I've yet to see anyone go ask women the reasons why they left jobs in tech.

Oh, I've done this, let me tell you why:

1) People in tech are assholes to women. I don't think most of them realize they're doing it. Sending images of swimsuit models over slack or otherwise sexualizing your work environment is an awful idea, and you shouldn't do it even if you don't have women on your team. My partner gets asked out by coworkers regularly, even while pregnant.

2) No really, people in tech are assholes to women. I've heard women give presentations where people talk over them the whole time, and then critique them for not being prepared afterwords. Nah pal, you literally stopped her from presenting information. People do not take suggestions of women as seriously wrt technical problems.

3) Kids. State of paternity leave in the U.S...

4) Being pushed into management. Women are pushed into management at a disproportional rate -- while some see this as a success metric, it can also be seen as an extension of point 2.

5) HR problems. Using HR sucks when you're the only woman on the team. Having someone else call HR sucks when you're the only woman on the team because everyone assumes it was you.

6) Culture, combination of all of the above, lack of a critical mass of women to make actual change, etc.

I'm not at all saying that I don't believe you, but we're at the point where we need to leave anecdotes out of this and start gathering good data. As much as I've seen your examples, I've also seen all of the counter examples (except to point 3 because that's just how it is in the States).

I spent the first few years of my working-life in female-dominated industries/workplaces and almost the entirety of my tech career in female-dominated or equal workplaces. I've yet to work somewhere without pay-parity (actually the hedge fund I worked for paid women more). From my anecdotal perspective, the world out there is wonderful.

But I know that's not true. I have a strong filter against toxic work environments - I simply would never end up at a company like that.

I'm just asking for good data that can speak for itself. This is what our industry does.

Aside: frequent surveys/studies show that more than 50% of participants have engaged in an office romance, equally across genders. I've never done this, but it's a big stretch to say that asking out a coworker is asshole behavior at this point. It's much more about the how.

I didn't mention pay parity anywhere. The majority of pay disparity between men and women in the U.S. is due to job/field selection imo. The questions we have to ask are ones that determine why people choose certain fields, what social pressures are there, etc.

Which is why I agree that we need good data, but the best I can do is actually talking to women and seeing their problems, and they're remarkably similar.

That office romance bit might be different in a situation in which you have an equal number of male and female coworkers. But when you bring in a disparity of 5:1, asking out your coworkers, you're literally just having people being pestered all day.

And honestly, you're referring to a study that disseminates itself via an ad carousel with no methodology I can find. A survey of 2000 people with no published methodology is hardly reliable.

There's a reason you've never done it, and most women I talk to cringe at the idea.

These are startup problems. Larger mature tech companies (there are many of them) shouldn't be that hostile. I work at one with 1000+ employees and while it's not 50/50, I can't imagine it being that bad.

Also, I'm a black person. All of the horror stories they say about POC in tech, I have never experienced one. I've had individual jerks but, I haven't had things like the company passing me up or ever felt that I wasn't getting a promotion, ever.

So, mapping that to what they say about women, I would say it's unlikely to be as bad as they say. Now, that's completely and utterly subjective but, attitudes concerning your perceptions of how others treat you is subjective.

Most of these anecdotes are from women at big 4 companies.

Not to shit all over other peoples' career choices, but those and fresh startups are exactly the sort of places that hardly ever pass my shit-test for work environment.

The absolute best places to work, I've found, are in (non-tech or tangentially tech) businesses that have a solid tech team but aren't in the Tech Co Echochamber. Surveying my friends and colleagues seems to point to the same.

Want to be seriously valued and friends with everyone at work? Be the person that asks questions, sees their problems and then makes the magic happen. You're not going to do this at Google or Facebook and you're not going to do this at DeathMarchOnwardNextFundingRound-ly either.

Tech-bro shenanigans not flying in the "traditional" business world is a huge bonus.

> Also, I'm a black person. All of the horror stories they say about POC in tech, I have never experienced one. I've had individual jerks but, I haven't had things like the company passing me up or ever felt that I wasn't getting a promotion, ever.

One thing interesting about the company I worked at from 2012 to 2014 was that, despite it being an abusive startup with dysfunctional management, it was the single most ethnically-diverse place I've ever worked at, and I'd never heard about a single problem related to race there (while I'd heard a lot about the company's other problems). This was all despite the company being a tiny startup that never exceeded 15 full-time employees when I worked there (augmented by a handful of contractors and part-timers, so a little more than 15 on the payroll at a few points). To wit:

I'm Jewish, as were both of the co-founders. We had three Indian employees (though not at the same time). We had two black programmers, one of whom is also an albino and legally blind. Our lead content people were a woman of Cambodian descent and a guy of Iraqi descent who's an actual Assyrian Christian. We also had a few part-timers, including an Asian guy and a summer intern from Sicily (technically white, but I'd still say she's a minority because her accent stood out). WASPs were very much a minority at that company.

Also, I'm transgender, and so was one of our contractors, but that actually did cause issues (not with my employer, but with our landlord, who went out of their way to make life difficult for me because I'm trans).

> 4) Being pushed into management.

Do you have a source for that?

The dominant narrative I've heard is that women are passed over for promotions, not accelerated.

Probably depends on the kind of company.

At a small, technically-focused company where "manager" also means "tech lead", it's very unlikely that being disrespected is synonymous with "being pushed into management", but at a big, bureaucracy-heavy company that follows the Dilbert Principle where people perceived as incompetent are routinely kicked upstairs to get them out of the way, I can see that happening.

So when the same is done to males it is not being assholes for some reason?

You may have literally never looked because it's really easy to find those studies on google.

Ensuring fair pair wouldn't allow either partner to be the home support. Why? Because woman desire their partner to make more money than them.

Even if she makes the same salary as her peers she will statistically be married to a man who makes more money and so the economic pressure will be on her to be the stay at home partner.

Now to find women who want their husbands to stay at home looking after the kids while she works, good luck with that. And to be clear unless 50% of the coupled women out there commit to this you wont see any meaningful change in how society perceives stay at home dads, which currently is "lazy"

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