Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
From the dozens of applications that we got for the position, only about 5% were female. After interviewing them, they either declined the position, or weren't able to complete our take home challenge (nothing against these women, we have lots of guys fail it too!)
So, yeah, I'd love to have some females on our engineering team. Unfortunately it's really rare for us to have a female applicant, and those we have talked to thus far haven't made it onto the team.
Please, tech, do something to fix this. I would very much like to have women on our team, because I went to university with a lot of smart women in Engineering, and it kills me that now in industry we can't hire any!
If you're not in Berlin (which we are not) it's difficult to find female tech groups unless it's at a university.
I don't know how your organization does it, but the three worst companies I've worked in diversity-wise all recruited about the same way: Word of mouth and some weak outreach through the easiest channels ie craigslist and a careers page on their own poorly trafficked site.
If your organization does on-campus recruiting, Society of Women Engineers and Women in Computing have well organized chapters at most tech schools, and simply telling them about your recruitment events can have a huge positive impact.
I don't have much experience with this issue outside the academic world beyond its results at internships, but there might be similar options around for general recruitment.
http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give-cand...
From her blog post on general interviews and take-homes:
http://www.gayle.com/blog/2015/6/10/developer-interviews-are...
"Be fair to candidates. Balance the demand on their time with the utility you get from it. If you're giving a longer project, these should largely replace your interviews. Be aware that this means losing candidates who have other responsibilities."
(in the context of github and other outside contributions, but applicable in my opinion to take home exams as well): "You may really struggle with female developers here. They're more likely to have substantial family responsibilities (and thus can't do as much out of work)."
Take home test results were considerably worse for females too and they had over five days to complete a simple thirty minute exercise.
There might be responsibilities that get in the way but IMO if you can't find a slice of time to work on something that came up then I'll be really careful in considering you for a job.
Shit happens w/o planning and I'd rather have people I can count on.
I think this is one of the reasons Ms McDowell suggest doing the take home project later in the process, only once a candidate is promising, with a higher pass rate.
If you're using it simply to screen (i.e., if your pass rates are low), and the take home demands are substantial, you are likely wasting a huge amount of candidates time, in aggregate. This can legitimately harm a company's reputation among developers.
If somebody can't do this then they would not be a good fit to be in the on-call rotation where 1 out of every 5 or 6 weeks you could have alert emails and phone calls ringing on your phone at 3am. Sorry, but five to six nines statistical uptime over one year demand it.
The episode that turned me badly against take home tests involved a two-phase approach. Both were handled through a recruiter. The first was about a one hour set of questions (what does this code do, implement this class, explain dependency injection, that short of thing). That went well, so they then moved to a homework project they advised to spend no more than 5-7 hours on.
I did this, sent it back in and... crickets chirping. I called the recruiter (in house) every week or so to follow up. In about a month I got the standard "we've decided not to pursue your application further at this time.
I honestly have no idea if anyone even looked at it. I certainly never talked to a developer.
I can see how a 30 minute exercise could be a good thing, in that it could save everyone some time. Even then, though, I see it as a red flag if a company wants too much of my time before I talk to a developer in the recruiting process.
Keep in mind also, there's a huge difference between being available to work on something that comes up in a job, and shaking free 5-7 hours for a take home test that a company only might even bother looking at!
You could start by not talking about women like this. It makes you sound like a Ferengi.
The article instead asks a novel question and leaves solutions open. How do tasks get divided among peer groups? It seems like people who are vulnerable to peer pressure (girls in engineering, in the examples here) are likely to get booted out of tasks they enjoy and relegated to routine chores instead. It's a testable hypothesis, it opens a new perspective, and if proven true it lends itself to very reasonable remedies for both employers (e.g. formalize the task assignment process) and the affected engineers (watch out and prepare to stand up to it if needed).
On the other side, usually when a manager wants to get rid of someone, they just give them the crap work. It doesn't matter if they are a man or woman. It's part of the process of showing "we don't like you, so start looking for a job."
Have you found you've needed to work harder to get noticed and promoted as compared to your male counterparts?
As a man, I've certainly observed that among my female co-workers, but that's as an outsider looking in.
Overall I would agree it's a higher up-hill climb for women, but I think getting the crap work means you're generally a less valued employee (most likely some strong correlation there between being a woman, but not causation IMHO).
I guess I just don't find any of the insights in this article particular compelling or new. We do have a gender problem, but I don't think bs studies like this lend any credibility to the issue.
If you can't spend the effort to get any kind of reasonable sample, your work doesn't carry any weight.
Just because sociologists do it, doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do.
From her perspective no other women could signal that all the other women left, or all other women interviewing noticed something bad that she missed.
The only people that would willingly go for that are those with autism spectrum disorders and we all know that autism hits men more often. There some people that would go for that unwillingly (i.e., grudgingly) in a calculated bet to sacrifice their health for the sake of better career and better life later on, but those are also more likely to be men. Most women want to have children and they know that sacrificing your health affects the health of the children regardless of how good your career has gotten.
>It’s not a pipeline issue
Aren't women half the population? That still sounds like a pipeline issue.
>There was this one case where, in our design class, two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop.
This individual could have been more vocal about their disdain for the more "menial" tasks. Perhaps even taking a leadership role in the project. This requires an assertive attitude. Assertiveness generally is a masculine trait which can explain more than this article.
Which means you can't solve it there. You're not going to reduce the number of bad acts to 10% of the general-population level because the good methods of inhibiting bad acts are going to be widely deployed. You can't use them to get a relative advantage.
Probably the only way to fix it is over-representation at the start of the pipeline. Make it so that 75% of high school seniors applying to CS programs are female so that by the time a third of them drop out the gender balance is right, and in ten or fifteen years that will no longer be necessary because then the gender balance at the end of the pipeline is fixed and the female dropout rate goes down.
Your approach is a more aggressive form of affirmative action.
You have to change the culture in middle and high schools so that lots more little girls want to be hackers.
I know a very talented woman with more experience and talent than her teammates who constantly deals with the interesting work being given to men instead of her. In meetings men look to the other men for opinions instead of her, even when she's leading the meeting. Partly it's because corporate environments prefer bluster to quieter expertise but the answer shouldn't be to tell women to be bigger blowhards than the men in order to get to do interesting stuff.
No intention of conflating "beta" with introvert. They aren't the same but I'm sure you get my point.
If so, I think the same argument could be made for introverts vs extroverts regardless of sex. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
This often seems like a better dimension on which to analyze these "gender in the workplace" issues. That is, these issues arise more often due to the typical characteristics and behaviors that members of each gender display and engage in, rather than something essential about gender in and of itself.
Blowhards versus... well.. what's the opposite of a blowhard? "Introvert" doesn't seem quite right.
My point is that gender issues are often actually personality type issues.
"Speak up!"
It not infrequently reduces to physical posturing. And volume escalation. I kid you not.
(Not to mention, that these loud and aggressive types often make particularly open-space workplaces much greater challenges to the concentration of... this quiet, effective type (me), for one.)
Why does engineering increasingly suck in the U.S. (excluding some of the Silicon Valley et al. "gifted" enclaves)? Because type-A assholes have taken over U.S. management. And they shit all over anyone who isn't like them and isn't the bully they are.
Next up: Do they succeed on the international scene? Or do different cultures shut them down? Does e.g. a Shenzhen -- where I just got my latest and greatest fitness tracker for $23 -- manage to give them a big "fuck you" while combining extant tech into new and compelling products?
Ha... is there yet a "Godwin/Poe/Betteridge/etc's Law" equivalent for how quickly HN threads converge towards Trump?
I've come to learn it's a much more complicated problem than I initially thought.
perhaps women are less likely to be blowhards due to something essential about being a woman. on the other hand it may be that the qualities encouraged and discouraged in women are the components in being a blowhard. and that assumes women are less likely to be blowhards, and that blowhards are more likely to succeed, which isn't necessarily clear. maybe gender disparities exist simply because women are treated differently than men, and reframing the cause to "typical characteristics and behaviors that members of each gender display and engage in" is just shuffling around gender essentialism.
Interesting statement but what's the justification for that and what precisely is the action to be taken?
People who aren't willing to stand up for themselves will be dominated by those who are, regardless of gender. The biggest "blowhard" (to use your term) wins, at work, at school, at home, and at every other social interaction. That's basic social dynamics.
Note that the article implicitly acknowledges this: “'In situations like this, [Coffman] suggests, 'you need to be your own best advocate and aggressively seek out the most interesting and challenging projects. If your male peers try to task you with menial work, you can tell them 'no'. They're your peers, not your bosses.'”
I also think, however, that the overall point here was totally valid - you are your own best advocate, and you can't trust other people to hand you interesting work. Being handed menial, boring tasks is much more likely.
Lucky for her, I guess, that she is usually the only one of her level of expertise at a company because no one else can typically do the work she is capable of.
That is quite the assumption. What if we consider the possibility that they were initially given assignments equally? Then, because some pushed back more than others, they ended up getting better assignments the next time around (and the next, and the next).
I try and ignore all that and just create variety based on whatever the last project was. So if someone just got off a 7 month project, they'll be doing small tasks for a while. If someone had to create 25 boring reports last month, they get to do use some new technology. It doesn't matter who it was.
Perhaps the bell curve is slightly towards the male side in terms of baseline, but I'd argue that the majority is conditioning.
For men: understand that others should have fun, understand that women are more likely to be more passive and overcompensate for it.
For women: let others know that brushing you off is not okay. Many do it without realizing it and most do it for both other men and women.
http://m.wox.sagepub.com/content/43/2/178
The thing that really bugs me isn't that they read undergrad students' diaries, it's that they didn't quantify their findings in a way which could be represented in the abstract, which probably means they weren't quantified well at all. As such we're left with scare quotes (like the diary bits in the article) and the researchers' impression of their findings.
This isn't an unfixable limitation -- one wonders, how much room is there for algorithmic natural language processing in the data analysis here?
Engineering is about developing skills, and all technical skills have a relatively early inflection point of diminishing marginal returns on effort.
Engineering has a high barrier to entry, and women who are in engineering are necessarily in the 80th percentile of intelligence, so let's say they are smart. Smart people have a different apprehension of risk than less smart people.
Roles that involve management, finance, and relationships, have infinite upside, where the benefits of roles that involve skills tend to have a fairly well defined peak.
A woman who is ambitious enough to pass the high bar for engineering is probably smart enough to recognize that for an equal investment of time and effort, if she switches to management or a non-technical role, she can achieve a management role with greater perceived stability, a multiple of salary, bonuses and eventually equity.
Depending on her motivation in regard to having children, a job that requires skill maintenance requires much more effort if she is caring for a child, but _with the same limited upside_. The divided commitment means she has to work some coefficient of effort harder toward the same result. Can she? Of course, but why would she?
Some women are content with this, but I think women avoid STEM work because, decades as a code monkey is not the most productive use of their time. If boring aspies and loud talkers chased women out of jobs, they wouldn't have stuck with "traditional" jobs that include handling rooms full of 40 screaming children, caring for violent drug addicts, serving drunks, etc. Outside academia, women aren't delicate flower petal snowflakes.
The more plausible explanation is that if it were worth it to them, they would do it. For some reason, engineering is still not worth it, and the answer is likely more uncomfortable for men than it would be for women.
You mention kids, but that's basically a concern in any field in the US, because FMLA requirements are a joke. Plus many men in engineering (where parental leave is often much longer than FMLA requirements) take long paternity leave, and many women choose not to have children anyway.
So what exactly is it about engineering that makes it the smart move for women to leave the field but not men? Or what is it about women that makes them recognize that it's the smart move when men don't see it?
I'm not saying that your assertion is strictly wrong, but I am saying it's not interesting. If women are leaving engineering because of entrenched sexism, that might well be the "smart move" for them. But this isn't a useful insight because the underlying problem remains the entrenched sexism.
Men in engineering on average aren't as smart as they think they are, and given the perceived barriers, mostly it is exceptionally smart women go into engineering.
The underlying problem is that engineering is lower status work than its participants believe it is. Women in it recognize this and switch to roles that provide the benefits of equivalent or greater status for an equivalent or lesser amount of effort.
Sexism does sound more interesting, but reality tends to be less dramatic.
Perhaps more to the point, this argument only holds up if women who leave engineering go into more prestigious/higher status fields. Is there any evidence of that?
Figuring out hard to see sources of bias and discrimination make them easier to address. For my part, I'll try to consider fair distribution of both boring and fun tasks in groups when breaking down work.
Failure should result out of poor leadership in the end. On my team I don't care for your gender, your race, your culture or your social image. I only care that you can get the job done. If I know you can, then I'll give it to you. If I think it allows for time to learn, then I'll give it to the ones who need to grow. If you think you aren't given a chance, then speak up and I'll give you a shot at something. Poor leaders will deny those opportunities.
But I believe that there is more good leadership as opposed to poor leadership in our industry, and that articles like this create misguided issues.
Also, it is too easy for anyone to go and find another job; especially if they have talent. A full on exit means something else, something these articles haven't shown yet. For example, my last experience with this type of issue was with a coworker, a gay black male, who decided to quit in the middle of a project he was leading. He was falling way behind and presenting demos with bugs & poor functionality. All would've been fine and understandable if it weren't for the developer misleading the boss and stating that the project was on track and doing well. After continuous failure our boss eventually gave him extensions but was obviously was not happy about it. The boss began to put pressure on and keep a watchful eye over new commits. The senior ultimately chose not to continue and quit. On his way out he complained of bullying and not being appreciated. He declared that he was a senoir and should've been included in more decision making and that other senior developers were treated with higher favoritism because they got "cooler projects" and he did not. He was partly right, but only because he had not shown that he could get the work done, and rather shown quite the opposite. He had never proven his skills when given the chance. He faltered at all chances and yet still had some type of delusional self-entitlement. He left and his project was delivered 2 months late even after his poor code-base was heavily refactored by the next lead. I recently chatted him to ask how he was doing and he stated that his experience on our team and with our boss was so negative that he hasn't looked for a new job yet, and is even considering a career change. I agreed that he should do what is good for him, but only because I consciously knew he is in no place to be a senior developer in this industry (but he will never tell you that, and neither will any journalist trying to make a story out of it).
I took so many fewer days off than the team average that I tended to get assigned the most vital work.
If your group comprises only 20% of something, then it is always going to be an issue.
The problem with the gender gap is that it will never go away. Prejudice against a race, ethic group, or religion is a mistake. People are generally people and we have more in common than we don't.
And as time goes on, I think you will see this type of prejudice disappear.
However, men and women and their differences will be around forever. There are clearly differences in how we think, act, behave and look. It's up for debate how much of this is cultural and how much is biological.
So, I don't see this going away, maybe ever.
Is there only 13% female engineers because men are sexist and treat them poorly? Or is it because men like math, science and engineering more than women?
I was a high school math teacher. I did everything I could do encourage my strong female students to go into a STEM field. They were some of my strongest students, they worked hard, they were ambitious, but they just didn't want to do it. I have no idea why, but they didn't want to study any more math than they had to.
On the opposite end, I had a few male students who weren't great (not even as good as a lot of the female students), yet they went on to study in a STEM field. Why? Because they really wanted to do it. They were drawn to it.
This is all anecdotal, but there is something there when I saw the same issue play out in several of my classes. I even brought it up with my female math teachers and they saw the same problem. Girls just aren't interested in studying math and science in college at the same rate as boys.
"Because they wanted/didn't want to do it" isn't where the trail of inquiry ends, btw.
Absolutely this. I think a lot of educators today understand that they should encourage diverse students, but they still exhibit a variation on the old "X hours of homework isn't that bad" where they ignore that their class isn't your whole academic life.
Socrates may be a fantastic ally himself, but it's very likely some of his students' other teachers aren't, so it's completely reasonable for them to fall out of STEM "despite the support."
Doctors? Depends on the field. Pediatrics, gynecology, and a few other fields are female-dominated while surgeons (especially neurosurgeons), orthopedics, and a few other fields are male-dominated. [1]
With roughly 20/80 F/M ratios those fields fair about as poorly as the programming field.
[0] http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/uncategorized/201...
[1] http://www.journalacs.org/article/S1072-7515(13)01215-5/abst...
E:
Better choice of adverb: well -> poorly
That's a relative term. The legal profession is about 50-50 in school and at the associate (1-10 years experience) level. While the partner ranks are still heavily male, about a third of new partners are women.[1] As are a third of federal appellate judges. 20% of Fortune 500 General Counsel/CLOs are women.
There is a lot of (justified) hand-wringing in the legal profession about how much work is left to do. But at every stage, the representation of women is much higher than in engineering.
>...there were 47,563 law firms serving the U.S. in the year 2000 according to the American Bar Foundation.
(Google result for "how many law firms are in the US")
Associates is the major exception.
If I may over-generalized, men have a tendency to find the math itself, the technology itself, solving the puzzle itself, to be rewarding. Women find it more rewarding to see the impact/result of their work.
There is also a difference in how they view competition/challenges. I've seen this with girls in robotics. A robot competition is more likely to get the boys excited. Reframing the task as a "challenge", ie: "Can you make a robot to solve this problem?" with the challenge being more open-ended and the result being an objective demonstration instead of a head-to-head run-off is much more motivating.
So I think it is worth looking at what intrinsic rewards girls find motivating, and connecting those possibilities back into the technology is important.
Maybe people are right on this one. But I doubt it.
Racial differences are extraordinarily superficial and hard to define. Gender differences by comparison are massive and very real.
Again, there is a very real debate on how much is culture and how much is biological.
But, it's not ALL culture. The fact is girls and boys are different and will continue to be different.
We don't know if their interest level in math/science is biology or culture.
If I had to guess, it would be both. I think we can do more to get more female engineers for sure, but forcing people to do something they don't want to do is just as wrong.
They've said that women were un-interested or ill suited to be doctors. They are now quite well represented (and might actually become a majority).
Maybe are right about women being un-interested or ill suited to be programmers. But I doubt it.
This is what Google told me it was. http://study.com/directory/category/Physical_Sciences.html
It shows the growth trend as typically being positive for all fields, while computer science is the negative outlier.
Around 2005-2006 when I hadn't changed majors to computer science yet and was student teaching middle school, there were still things being said to girls like 'its just more natural for boys' from older teachers.
It just didn't let them build the resilience up to work through the 'hard' aspects of math.
But, really, I have seen the exact opposite. Girls are actively encouraged to participate in math and science from a very early age in a lot of our schools.
I don't have any numbers on hand, but there seems to a drastic change in middle school where girls stop being interested in math and science. So by the time they get to high school, it seems like the fight for their interest is already over.
This is just my experience from being in education for several years.
Then, after spending 4+ years in college studying surface friction losses or CRDT applications without tombstones, and n+ years in industry trying to debug someone else's too-clever binary-flag-in-ruby code, a large number of them (the ones who dreamed of sexist careers like fashion designer, models, teachers, or most sexist of them all mothers) realize they really don't enjoy this work, there was never any "painful injustice" that needed their "sacrifice" to right, and that they've just been tricked by the popular political agenda. And, after effectively wasting a decade of their lives chasing careers that means nothing to them, they quit and actually go follow their dreams (instead of someone else's).
I upvoted the article as well, for similar reasons.
I loved building software. Like nearly everyone here on HN, I put up with the drudgery of debugging race conditions in other peoples' code in return for the opportunity to work on the fun parts. Why should we credit an argument that presupposes that women wouldn't feel the same way? In particular, why should we credit that argument over the article's argument: that women leave the profession in greater numbers because men give them more of the drudgery and less of the fun stuff?
At least not with the data points that I have. 1) Former boss, who is now managing over 100 people at Intel. Smart engineer and totally into the technology. I loved working for her. 2) Former female employees and coworkers that are every bit as much into the technology and every bit as capable as male engineers. 3) Friend and female no-nonsense CEO of startup who has had to fight jack-asses like you for her entire career and would very quickly plant her boot up your ass for talking that way. 4) My own daughter, headed off to MIT this fall, who is very capable of doing the bench work and has been instructed in no uncertain terms that if some lab partner displays your attitude and says something like: "Let me do the measurements and you can just write them down for me, sweetheart." that she is to grab the multi-meter probes and poke the bastard's eyes out.
Wake up and grow up, dude. The world has changed.
The nature of people has not.
So... on average you believe men just like engineering more than women?
Because of... what... genetics or something?
Actually, no. It was not an acceptable answer to justify segregation.
If that is what you're saying, then what makes it different now?
For one thing, rather than engaging with what I actually said, you inaccurately framed it as an accusation of misogyny.
What other ways do you see your comment as a good example of what I was saying?
How do you see the other comments in the thread as examples?
In what ways do you see your comment as a good example of what I was saying?
How do you see the other comments in the thread as examples?
Are you really disappointed about that dataset of three... or were you just racing to proactively get this comment in before the thread starts, and someone else beats you to it?
Secondly, females complaining about 'creepiness' is a difficult problem to quantify or solve, as females find attention from unattractive males 'creepy' regardless of their actual intentions.
I do not agree with your dismissiveness of female complaints about "creepiness". Solving "creepiness" is a hard problem, but not because women are bad at distinguishing between creepy guys and normal guys who happen to be unattractive. If you repeatedly hit on someone and fail to pick up on the social cues that say your advances are unwanted, you are a creepy person, regardless of whether you are unattractive or not. It is not reasonable to disregard the discomfort this causes the recipient of the unwanted attention. It is also not reasonable that the recipient should have to be blunt, abrasive, or combative to make the unwanted attention stop.
I can only comment from personal experience, but many of my female friends will call ANY interaction with an unattractive male 'creepy', regardless of how polite or nonthreatening that person has been. An ugly male will warn them that their car tires are low, or that they dropped something, or ask them about their volunteer organization (that they are promoting via a t-shirt), and these women will either give a quick response and leave, or give no response and actually physically flee the scene. Afterwards, they will ALWAYS say "some creepy guy tried to tell me that my tires were flat", or "some creeper was trying to find out where I worked. Is he going to be stalking me in my parking lot?" And I will have been there, observed the same individual, and say "what's wrong with you? He was just trying to help you out", etc.
I realize that the above is just anecdotal evidence, and that the normal/typical behavior of women could be completely different in most/all other situations, but can I really help that my observations shape my worldview?
Certainly, there are interactions that get labelled as "creepy" when they really shouldn't. But there are also plenty of legitimately creepy people making others uncomfortable at work.